DrupalCon 2016 Preview: 4 Reasons to Be Excited

Dmitrii Susloparov July 14, 2016

End of the summer is a special time for all the Drupal community members in EMEA, because we start preparing to the new DrupalCon that is coming in September. Do you remember the wonderful sunny time that we’ve spent in Barcelona last year?

Vardot to Represent the Middle East's Drupal Community at DrupalCon Barcelona 2015

This year we expect to see even more people, to attend even more sessions and to have even more fun. 2016 becomes a year to add to reasons to love Dublin another one - around 2500 members of the Drupal community from different countries will come to the capital of Ireland to learn, collaborate, and network.

We’re gonna see a huge spike

This DrupalCon will be the first European DrupalCon since the release of Drupal 8 - one of the longest project in the history of this CMS. According to Dries and his case study, 38% of the developers that didn’t switch to D8 yet are still just trying to learn it. DrupalCon seems to be the perfect place for removing the lack of knowledge and addressing your questions directly to the best industry experts and opinion leaders.

By the way, if you still didn’t migrate your site to Drupal 8, this article will convince you.

Record-breaking number of session submissions

Although the ability to meet and communicate with hundreds of colleagues is something that we all are very excited about, sessions remain the central part of DrupalCon. This year European Drupal community set a new record by submitting 621 topic proposals (which is probably related to the release of D8). The names of winners are not published yet, but we all can be sure that we will have a list of hot and extremely up-to-date topics and must-visit presentations. Yuuum!

The #DrupalCon Dublin call for papers ended with a record-breaking number of submissions! https://t.co/J0q395Vy47
— DrupalCon Dublin (@DrupalConEur) July 6, 2016

Tons of souvenirs

T-shirts, stickers, badges, green bags, paper planes, calendars, t-shirts again - if we’d capture all the giveaways and swag that will be brought from all over the globe to DrupalCon in Dublin, the picture could be even bigger than the one of the conference attendees that I’ve used in the beginning of this blog post. Today at Vardot we were checking souvenirs from Barcelona ’15 and had a big nostalgia about the last year’s event. However, the exhilaration about the upcoming conference is even bigger. We know you all are preparing a lot of interesting stuff, and we are very excited about it. And of course, we are preparing ours!

Giving back to the community

Open Source is an awesome way to benefit by giving more. Vardot always strives to support the Drupal project, Drupal Association, and DrupalCons through sponsorship. We believe that such investments make both the business and the community stronger, and we are really thankful to DrupalCon organizers that they use our support to make this event one of the most affordable tech conferences comparing to others and allow students to attend it with big discounts. Making the community bigger, more passionate, and more professional will make Drupal and our products stronger.

See you soon at DrupalCon!

We will be happy to see every one of you. Pass by our booth, participate in our activities and grab our souvenirs (we’ve prepared a lot this year). We are looking forward to meeting you!