Kalamuna @ BADCamp

Kalamuna was proud to have been a Contrib sponsor of this year's Bay Area Drupal Camp (BADCamp), the largest free Drupal camp in the world. Hosted at UC Berkeley, BADCamp gives over a thousand attendees the opportunity to network with fellow Drupalistas and to learn more about the platform's past, present, and future.

Before the weekend sessions and promotional activity began, BADCamp offered free trainings and eight summits for a variety of specified groups including those for Drupal business owners, Core developers, UI/UX specialists, and non-profit staff. We're always looking to improve our internal processes, and so we decided to attend the business summit to see what we could learn from the leaders in the industry.

• Glenn Hilton of ImageX Media gave a very insightful presentation about recruiting and retaining talented developers. One practice that stood out was having a DEV day where staff can work on whatever they want that will advance the organization. It's an uncanny idea, but we liked it very much.
• Ben Finklea of Volacci spoke about the importance of narrowing down the brand, and how the little things matter a lot more than you'd think! "How does the way the janitor collects the trash impact the client's view of your business?"
• Jeff Walpole of Phase2 Technology went over techniques to scale and sustain a Drupal webshop. His top-down view of products and services in the tech industry outlined attractive and obtainable pathways to success, and important notes for implementation.

So needless to say there were quite a few heavy hitters in the room! The summit was validating in that we felt our practices were already inline with much of what these successful larger businesses are doing.

The weekend booth was a lot of fun! We gave our multi-colored BADCamp 2012 postcards out to attendees, and rocked a dynamic slideshow showing off our products and services. We also took names of a large number of developers interested in our super fast local development stack Kalabox, which integrates seamlessly with Pantheon. (Ask us about Kalabox!).

When we weren't manning the booth, we were able to spend some time at a few of the free sessions as well. Matt Cheney gave a presentation on Panopoly, and even mentioned Kalamuna as developers of the News App; David Needham and Eric Casequin spoke about the power of panels and outlined how to make new layouts in code. John Albin Wilkins, maintainer of the Zen theme, explained how the theme layer works in Drupal 7, and spoke about the power of Twig in Drupal 8; and Karsten Frohwein spoke about XHProf, which is an open-source tool that the helps PHP developers profile their code in order to speed up their websites.

BADCamp is a community-oriented event which includes trivia night and a big Saturday night party for attendees. More than an opportunity for lead-generation, the whole weekend is a great way to get to know and talk with some of the key people who made Drupal and its advancement possible. We had a really fun time and we were excited to be a part of it, and we'll definitely be back for more next year!