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On the Air With Palantir, Ep. 04: Everything You Need to Know About DrupalCon New Orleans

DrupalCon is just a few weeks away in New Orleans, so this time around our Account Manager Allison Manley is joined by our CEO and Founder George DeMet, Drupal veteran and PHP guru Larry "Crell" Garfield, and Senior Front-End Developer Lauren Byrwa. They share thoughts about the conference generally, what they're excited about specifically, and what they're expected from the Driesnote, among other topics.

DrupalCon is just a few weeks away in New Orleans, so this time around our Account Manager Allison Manley is joined by our CEO and Founder George DeMet, Drupal veteran and PHP guru Larry "Crell" Garfield, and Senior Front-End Developer Lauren Byrwa. They share thoughts about the conference generally, what they're excited about specifically, and what they're expected from the Driesnote, among other topics.

DrupalCon is just a few weeks away in New Orleans, so this time around our Account Manager Allison Manley is joined by our CEO and Founder George DeMet, Drupal veteran and PHP guru Larry "Crell" Garfield, and Senior Front-End Developer Lauren Byrwa. They share thoughts about the conference generally, what they're excited about specifically, and what they're expected from the Driesnote, among other topics.

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Transcript

Allison Manley [AM]: Hi, and welcome to On the Air with Palantir, a podcast by Palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to the business of web design and development. It’s April 2016, and this is episode #4.

 

I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager at Palantir, and today we are going to give a preview of what to expect from the upcoming DrupalCon in New Orleans which is taking place May 9th through the 13th. The website is drupalcon.org if you want to see more. I’m a newbie to DrupalCon — this will be my very first one — so I gathered a bunch of my seasoned colleagues here at Palantir who have attended in the past to get their thoughts on the upcoming conference.

I am here with three of my fabulous colleagues that are going to be attending DrupalCon with me. So I have Lauren Byrwa, who’s one of our senior front-end developers.

Lauren Byrwa [LB]: Hi!

AM: George DeMet, founder and CEO.

George DeMet [GD]: Hello.

AM: And Larry Garfield, Senior Architect and Community Lead. How are you?

Larry Garfield [LG]: Hello, world.

AM: So what we’re doing here is basically a preview of DrupalCon. DrupalCon is coming up in a couple of weeks, in New Orleans, which is very exciting. How many DrupalCons is this for

each of you?

LG: I think this will be #21.

AM: Out of how many? How many have there been?

LG: Maybe 25? I’m a staple at this point [laughs].

GD: It’s a good question. Not as many as you, Larry, but probably, if I had to guess, between 15 and 20.

LB: I’m actually only at #2 for Cons. So not a whole lot compared to these guys.

AM: I’m a complete newbie, so we’ll get to that later — what I can expect — but before we get to what most people or new people can expect from DrupalCon, or what DrupalCon is about — we know that Drupal was started by Dries Buytaert. Did I pronounce that right?

LG: Close enough for an American [laughs].

AM: What is the correct pronunciation, please?

LG: Well, I’m an American too. ‘Drees Boy-thart’ I think is closer, but don’t quote me on that. Dries, feel free to correct us.

AM: I’m sure he will later [laughs]. So what is DrupalCon about?

LG: DrupalCon is the summit of the community. It is the largest Drupal in-person event in the world by a very wide margin. It’s a place for the whole community of whatever stripe to gather and discuss, learn, teach, plan, work, play, drink, and several other things along the same lines. A lot of conferences are very developer-centric or very business-centric, or very whatever. DrupalCon is — these days, DrupalCon is a Web conference with a Drupal angle to it. There’s sessions for back-end developers, there’s sessions for front-end developers, there’s sessions for project managers, there’s sessions for content strategists, there’s sessions for business owners — whatever you do, if it involves Drupal or the Web in some way, there’s at least a couple of sessions that are worth going to for you.

GD: I would agree, and I would say that even if you don’t do Drupal or you’re not someone who’s really immersed in the technology or the community, it’s still a conference with really great value. You can get a lot out of it, and I think particularly for folks who are new to DrupalCon, it’s a really great way to get immediately connected with the community. And it’s often a very overwhelming way. We’re a very friendly and welcoming community, sometimes overly so.

LB: I would like to think of DrupalCon as our family reunion, for all Drupalers. We’re there to learn, we’re there to share, but mostly we’re there to collaborate. And that can happen in sessions, that can happen at happy hour,that can happen anywhere. But it’s a great way to get plugged into the community.

AM: So I am a newbie, as I said — this will be my first. So what should I expect from DrupalCon? Am I just going to walk in and be completely overwhelmed at first?

GD: Yes.

AM: [laughs].

LB: I think at my first DrupalCon — overwhelmed? Yes, definitely expect to be overwhelmed no matter what. But feel comfortable, feel welcomed. Everybody is excited for newcomers. Everyone is excited to get to know you, to hear your ideas. So stand up and talk, and listen, and ask questions. And go up to people that intimidate you, and tell them that you’re a huge fan and that you work with their tools every day and that you like what you saw in this blog post. And they’ll be flattered and want to know what you think and why or why not you agree or disagree. But talk to everybody. Talk to them on Twitter, talk to them in person, talk to them at bars — everything you can do to soak up as much information as possible. That’s always my number one.

LG: The main thing you should expect at DrupalCon is 3000 introverts playing extroverts, who really want to talk to you and teach you things because that’s what they do. And if you’re up for talking to people you’ve only heard of, or never heard of, and just learning from every person you run across, you’ll do just fine.

GD: And I think — so when we’re at our booth, every year without fail I’ll be standing there and someone will just kind of come up to me, and they’ll have The Look in their eyes. It’s very clear that this is their first time, they’re feeling very overwhelmed. And it’s really funny, this happens every time, they’ll make eye contact, come over to the booth, pull out their program guide, and be like, where do I go? And there’s so many different things you can do and places you can go and sessions you can experience, and it really is about — I think for folks who are going, it’s really taking a look at the sessions, figuring out ‘what do I want to get out of this event’, and focusing on that. And if you are getting overwhelmed, just find a friendly face, and they’ll more than likely be able to help you out and point you in the right direction – ‘oh yeah, I know the person doing that session, they’re awesome, go to that session if you want to learn about this, so-and-so is like the world’s expert on that’. All kinds of opportunities to just soak everything in, and learn what you can. It’s a really fun, really intense time.

AM: Great, I’m really looking forward to it. So every year Dries gives a keynote. And it’s fairly spectacular, I’ve seen a bunch of them on YouTube. They’re very involved. So what are you anticipating this year from the Driesnote, as he calls it?

LG: I have no idea what Dries is planning. I think the best keynote he’s given in recent years was in Amsterdam, where he was talking about actual practical changes to our process. That’s where he introduced the plan for putting credits on the site, which got implemented later. And I think that’s been a great thing to encourage contributions from companies and clients and commercial organizations, which we absolutely need.

I’d like to see something inward-looking. By that point Drupal 8.1 will have just come out, and that’ll be the first time we’ve done that type of release in, I think, ever in Drupal. So I suspect he’ll be talking about that and the implications of being able to evolve the system more smoothly than in the past. That’s my prediction, such as it is.

[this was cut from the original recording due to audio issues, but is left intact for the transcript]

GD: I’m hoping that Dries will take this opportunity to talk a little bit more about what the vision and future direction of Drupal is going to be, not just from a technical standpoint but really from an — answering the question, why does Drupal exist? What we’ve seen over the last few years, particularly as we’ve been through the Drupal 8 cycle, is that Drupal has changed and evolved tremendously. And at the same time the kinds of people that use Drupal, and the ways that they are using it, have changed tremendously. And I think that a lot of folks in the community have moved along with those shifts, but others might be feeling a little left behind, like they’re not really sure. Maybe if you’re somebody that’s joined Drupal at a point in the past, and you’ve had a particular motivation for doing so, the project and the community may be very different now. I think as we go through that change and that evolution, having a shared understanding and grounding in what our shared values are as a Drupal community and a project would be really cool to hear from Dries.

LB: I would say we’re actually at a place right now where we don’t entirely know what’s next for Drupal. We’re not waiting on D8 any more — there’s a whole slew of things out there. And so I agree that the future of Drupal is going to be a big topic. I think in addition to that, this is our good chance and this is Dries’ good chance to really press on contribution, and to recruit people.

A lot of our hardcore developers that helped build D8 are feeling a little burnt out. They too are celebrating the release, but in addition to that, they’re feeling a little burnt out after years and years of press to get it there. So I think contribution is going to be a really big topic this year — trying to figure out how to get people involved and how to get new blood in the system and new

ideas. To really push us towards that future, that’s going to be important.

AM: That’s a lot to cover in one keynote [laughs].

GD: The expectations are always incredibly high for these things. And it’s really often almost too much to ask, that one person will be able to cover this much in an hour or an hour and 15 minutes. One thing I’ve seen is that sometimes, when Dries delivers, he really delivers in a really great way. But I also know that it’s really hard to do that. So hopefully everything will click in place. I’m looking forward to it.

AM: Me too. So what are the big talking points in Drupal right now? Obviously I can assume Drupal 8. What else do you think will be the big things?

LB: A big focus of this year’s DrupalCon is actually a lot of the front-end frameworks and performance. Like we said earlier, it’s really kind of a dev conference with Drupal in the background. So we’re really trying to branch out as a community and accept some of the other new things going on in tech right now, and I know that’s going to be a big press this year.

LG: There’s a whole lot of sessions on the front-end frameworks, like Lauren was saying, and around the discussions around, should Drupal have a front-end framework baked into it, like Angular or Ember? Or should we do something along those lines with our own components? Or should we ignore all of that? Or should we, whatever? So there’s actually a new track for this con called Horizons that has — pie-in-the-sky ideas. That’s kind of the point of that track. So we actually have the project lead of Angular talking. We have the project lead of Ember talking.

And there’s a number of other sessions along similar lines. We’ve got a core conversation that was originally supposed to be a moderated fight between people who wanted a front-end framework and people who didn’t. I think it’s turned into — those people have already fought and have a plan now, and what’s that plan, but we’ll see. Definitely, the front end and JavaScript are big talking points.

Another core conversation, as Lauren was talking about, is burnout. We have two, maybe three, sessions on time management and burning yourself out and managing volunteers, and what happens when people leave Drupal and how can we learn from the people who have. People will always come and go from any project, but how do we do that in the most graceful fashion, so that it’s good for those people and good for the project. That’s another talk we have there. And then of course, continuing the ‘get off the island’ angle, we have a Symfony track, as we’ve had the last couple of years. We have a dedicated PHP track — that’s non-Drupal-specific PHP that

we actually collaborated with Php[architect] on. I was one of the track chairs for that. It’s the first time we’ve had it in North America — we’ve had it in Europe. And then the Horizons track includes a lot of big ideas outside of Drupal, so there’s a lot of, what new stuff outside of the Drupal experience should we be looking at and taking stuff from.

LB: In addition to what Larry was saying, there’s a new spotlight on mental health in the tech industry, and this is going to be a big issue. You’re starting to see real sessions on mental health and taking care of yourself as a developer. But I also think it’s going to be a hot-button issue for BOFs, and you’re going to see a lot of talking about it outside of sessions as well, and how to cope with this environment.

AM: OK, wait a minute. Can we define “BOF”?

LB: My apologies, it’s an acronym for “birds of a feather”. It’s a group talk where people of like-minded ideas or having the same interests get together and have a conversation about it, as opposed to somebody getting up and presenting about a topic. It’s a more casual and close way to discuss some of the issues that are popular.

GD: And so one of the other hats I wear in the Drupal community is serving on the Community Working Group. And I know that we’ve been talking internally about a lot of the challenges we’ve seen, experiencing burnout, and trying to improve — trying to provide more communication tools and resources, particularly for folks in the core development community. So I’m really happy to see an increased focus on that, not just at this DrupalCon but at the last couple of DrupalCons. I think we’re going to have more and more, hopefully more structured, programs and resources, so that people can contribute in a way that is sustainable in the long run.

The other kind of big topic or trend that I’m seeing is — I think there’s a little bit of a question or tension, that ties into a lot of the technical questions, about the extent to which Drupal is a product and Drupal is a software platform. If you think about it in terms of Legos, is it a big box of a whole bunch of Legos that you can put together in any kind of different shape or form to create whatever you want, or is it more kind of a Lego construction kit that’s got all the tools you need to build a truck or a boat or whatever. And the extent to which we move in one direction and make Drupal more of a polished product — does that undermine our ability to be incredibly flexible? And so there’s questions like, do we have a decoupled front end? How do we approach questions like content workflow and management and all that stuff, and how much is that prescribed by the system? These are all really important questions that we’re going to have to, as a community, come to some sort of agreement or consensus on as we move forward.

LG: As a side note, on the mental health front, our third keynote for Thursday is from Michael Schmid, a long-time Drupaler. He’s talking on brain health and mental health and so forth. It’s definitely an area worth the time it’s being given, which is considerable and as it should be.

AM: Great — I definitely want to get to some of the sessions that you’re excited about. So there are 13 tracks total in DrupalCon this year. Some of them are new, as you mentioned earlier, and they cover quite a range of topics. So there is something for everybody. I am not an engineer myself, but there is plenty for me to absorb at this conference [laughs], because the tracks are so varied. And I haven’t counted how many sessions there are in total, spread across those 13 tracks.

LG: I think it’s 131 or something like that.

AM: Wow. So there’s a lot of information being shared. So outside of the Palantir-led sessions, because we are leading three — which we’ll cover in a bit — which sessions are you most excited about, aside from the ones you’ve already mentioned?

LG: I’d say I’m most looking forward to the core conversations on burnout and on community management, and on how do we keep this process sustainable? Because the way we went about Drupal 8 is not sustainable. That level of work was necessary for the project, but that kind of surge mentality of, throw warm bodies at it and work extra hard to make sure it gets done, is not a good way of developing software, open source or not. I’m looking forward to the discussions that are already slated around, how do we not do that? How do we make Drupal successful, or more successful, and how do we make our people more successful while respecting the fact that people still have lives and limits, and people have families? We don’t want to inadvertently pressure people to sacrifice those. No one consciously likes to do that, but there’s unconscious pressure at a lot of times. So how do we counteract that in a healthy fashion? Topic-wise, that’s probably what I’m most looking forward to, probably followed by some of the front-end framework discussions.

LB: As a front-end developer, I’m interested in some of the config management in D8, some of the front-end frameworks, I’ll definitely be at those. But outside of that I’m also really looking

forward to the content strategy and UX things — D8 accessibility, content strategy and popular culture, some of these look really interesting. I know there’s also one on lessons from WordPress that I think is going to be really great as well. I think there’s a lot of great sessions regardless of what you’re specifically interested in.

GD: Unfortunately, one of the things about being someone in my position is that I don’t really get to go to sessions very much [laughs]. I actually have not looked too much at the program schedule yet.

AM: But you will, of course [laughs].

GD: I will, certainly. And I will pick out a few sessions and put them on my calendar and will intend to go to them, and then inevitably something else will pull me away and I’ll end up watching the recording after the fact.

AM: But luckily they are all recorded.

GD: They are all recorded. And they’ve gotten really good at making sure that the session recordings are up usually within a day or two of when they’re recorded, which is a very impressive logistical feat. So I’m really happy with that. And in addition to Michael Schmid, or Schnitzels — that’s his nickname — and his keynote, I’m very much looking forward to, and I hope I don’t destroy her name here or we can correct it in post-production, Sara Wachter-Boettcher, who’s doing a keynote on content and design. I’ve read a lot of her stuff and I’m really excited to hear what she’s going to have to say for the Drupal community. One of the great things over the past few years is that we’ve really started thinking more about design as a project, which is really important and really challenging for an open source project – to really come together and prioritize not just what the software does but how people interact with it.

LG: That’s something that we’ve been seeing not just in the visual design aspect. We have a session in the PHP track that I’m really looking forward to, called “Your API is a UI”. The idea is that code should be designed with the same kind of thought you put into user experience for someone pushing buttons — it also needs to go into how someone is writing code. And that’s something that the community is starting to get their head around in the last couple of years. So

I’m really excited for that session and others like it, that push that concept.

AM: Well, let’s talk about the ones that Palantir is leading. We have three. One is “PHP 7: The New New PHP”.

LG: I talk about new stuff [laughs]. This is a talk that I’ve given at a few PHP conferences – it’s not Drupal-specific at all, it’s in the PHP track. PHP 7 was released last fall, right after Drupal 8 was – its release date was actually pushed back because of Drupal, we kept finding bugs. But for the developers and sysadmins in the room, if you have not tried out PHP 7, you really need to. It’s got a ton of really nice new features which I talk about in the session, and it’s twice as fast. And I’m not just showing marketing numbers – there are companies that have said they’ve shut down half their servers by switching to PHP 7. It is dramatically faster. Drupal 8 requires PHP 5 or later, and I would say, within six months if you’re not running Drupal 8 on PHP 7 – you’re doing it wrong. You’re leaving money on the table, you’re hindering your own developers. So come to the session. I’ll tell you all the reasons why as a developer you really, really want to be using PHP 7 right now.

AM: Really, really!

LG: Really, really, really [laughs]!

AM: So your second session is “D8 Module Acceleration Program”.

LG: And this isn’t a normal track session, this is actually in the Business Showcase. It’s a panel that Acquia is putting together. Acquia, as some of our listeners know, has been funding a program called MAP — Module Acceleration Program — which is basically, hey, Drupal 8 is out, what about contrib, let’s put some actual money behind getting the major contrib modules up and running on Drupal 8. And Palantir has been partnered with them, as have a number of other

companies. Acquia has provided some funding, and Palantir is working at a reduced rate because we’re doing community work, essentially. My main work for the last few months has been the Workbench moderation module for Drupal 8, as well as the multi-version Workspace deploy suite which I’m collaborating on with some other developers at Pfizer. So the idea is there’s a panel of people who have been working as part of this program, saying, okay, what is it, why is it, what are the benefits of it, what does it mean for contributing to open source. Teaser: contributing to open source is a viable and important part of any business that’s using it, and it is a worthwhile investment. Now you can come to the session to hear the details of that.

AM: Cool. So the last session is George’s session, “Finding Your Purpose as a Drupal Agency”.

GD: Yes, so I’m going to be doing a session in the Business track. It’s a little bit, for those who might have seen the session I did for DrupalCon Barcelona last fall, it’s a little bit of a sequel to that session. Essentially what I’m going to be talking about are some of the challenges. Last year was a fairly challenging time for a lot of companies in the Drupal ecosystem. Everyone was kind of waiting for Drupal 8 to come out — a lot of folks were holding off on starting new projects because of that, and so I’m going to talk a little about that. I’m reaching out to some other folks, some other companies in the Drupal ecosystem, hoping to get them to share some of their perspectives as well.

But then I’ll be talking about how, particularly during challenging times but during any time in general, the value of defining your purpose as an agency — your vision, your values, and how those things really come together and enable you to really have kind of a focus for where you’re taking your company. And not just how you run your agency, but also why — which I think is a question that doesn’t get asked often enough. So I’m really looking forward to that. For people that might be interested, it’s not just for folks that run Drupal companies. If you are involved in or interested in any way about how companies are run, and even — I’m not going to be talking that much about Drupal in particular, so I think it will be really valuable for folks, obviously even non-technical. And one of the things I do with my talks is a lot of analogies, so I’ll probably have some pretty entertaining analogies for folks.

AM: Great. Well, as Lauren touched on, beyond the sessions DrupalCon is also about the social life, and the socializing, and the community around it. So what am I to expect as a newbie, going to my very first one, after the daily sessions are over?

LB: Expect to be overwhelmed. Expect to be bombarded. And expect a little debauchery. I think you’ll be entertained, to say the least, but everybody is very friendly, everybody wants to buy

you a drink and hear your thoughts. And everybody wants to argue. So be willing to defend your ideas, because it will come. And you might change your mind and you might change somebody else’s, but that’s the glory in all of it. And I’ve found a lot more meaning comes from the conversations outside of the sessions than sometimes during them. So I always encourage especially first-time Drupalers or first-time Con-goers, don’t stop after the sessions. Go to the after-stuff, even if you don’t drink, even if you just want to sit there and have water and talk to

people, or have a Coke. It doesn’t have to be about the drinking, and it’s a really great place to socialize and share ideas.

AM: I understand that in the past there’s been things like trivia night, or karaoke, or just meeting at ping-pong [laughs].

GD: Well, in fact there is a trivia night on Thursday, and we are sponsoring it, as we have for the last couple of DrupalCons. And for me at least, it’s one of the highlights of the whole event. The key is, try to find a table with people who have been around the community a little while. But the

questions can be all over the place, and sometimes they even give credit for having someone who’s at their first DrupalCon at your table.

AM: So what, you get something like frequent flier miles for your very first one? [laughs].

LG: It varies by year, but I think your team gets a bonus point for every person at your table who’s at their first DrupalCon. If it’s your first time at a DrupalCon, that makes you a valuable commodity, so show up anyway [laughs].

AM: I should wear a sign.

LG: And I think there’s actually a penalty if someone on your team is a core committer. So don’t

always go for the table with all of the lead developers because you get a penalty for having them on your team. I’m not a core committer so I have no penalty one way or another.

GD: The trivia night is on Thursday night, and I think a lot of folks may be tempted to leave early because Thursday is the last day of sessions, but definitely stick around for trivia night on

Thursday. And stick around for the sprints on Friday as well. Folks are generally fairly tired by that point, but sometimes being tired at that place really lets you focus [laughs] on getting cool stuff done. And it’s not just code, it’s all sorts of things. There’s documentation sprints, we’ll often do some community work as well — all sorts of things going on even after the sessions are over.

LB: Definitely, it’s an exhausting week and it’s a long one. But those sprints at the end, those make the difference, and that’s how you really get involved and how you really learn stuff. So don’t ever think that, oh, I’m not an engineer, or, I don’t know how to do this. Because if you

show up, we will find a job for you.

LG: There’s a number of people at sprints every year whose job is, it’s just part of sprints, to mentor people in getting started. Get your dev environment set up, figure out where to find issues to work on, figure out if you want to do code or documentation or usability testing or whatever else you’re going to do — whatever you’re interested in doing, there’s a use for it, and someone who can hold your hand along the way to get involved in it. So, yeah DrupalCon doesn’t end on Thursday, DrupalCon ends on Saturday.

AM: That’s a long conference. It is. Sunday to Saturday, pretty much.

LG: It is, but for all of that, it’s one of the cheapest conferences around for that length of time. It’s definitely worth the value of going.

AM: So then let’s delve into the exhibition space and the vendor space. What can attendees expect from going into the vendor room, besides being thrown a whole lot of swag? Pencils, buttons, tattoos, all sorts of things [laughs].

LB: So there’s the swag, which is always wonderful. And you will find some very cool and unique swag, depending on what booths you’re at. But what I think is funny, having worked a booth before, is you’ll see vendors kind of use it as bait. They’ll watch you walk by and they’ll

watch you want it but not want to talk to people, because, like Larry said earlier, we’re all introverts. We’re just pretending for the week. And so they’ll kind of bait you with it, and they’ll get you to talk. And they’ll start with something small and introductory, and you might find yourself connecting with people you didn’t expect.

LG: People are generally not too pushy about it, most of the time. But yeah, tech conferences are where introverts go to cosplay extroverts.

GD: So as somebody who’s been to a lot of different conferences, and seen a lot of different exhibition spaces and exhibit halls and vendor booths and all that stuff — I really love the DrupalCon exhibit hall because it’s a lot more down-to-earth. It’s a lot less sales-y than most other conferences out there. You definitely have folks who will put a little flair on their booth or have some wacky promotion or something like that, but it doesn’t feel forced as it does at many other kinds of conferences. You really can, as Lauren said, just go up to people and have a conversation. And most of the time they’ll be happy to talk to you and not just to convert the sale.

AM: So of course I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that we’re going to have a booth and we’re going to be luring people in with our swag as well [laughs].

LG: Come to our booth! Say hi! We’ve got swag!

AM: That’s right [laughs]. Come to our booth, there’s going to be about seven or eight of us this year, and we’re going to be booth number 222. Come visit! And the website for DrupalCon is…

LG: http://www.drupalcon.org . That will redirect you to what the actual URL is.

AM: Perfect.

LG: One final note. On Tuesday, you go to the pre-note. That’s not even a question. You go to the pre-note. Everyone goes to the pre-note.

GD: The pre-note is kind of a tradition that’s sprung up over the last five or six years or so. It’s the presentation that occurs before the keynote on Tuesday. And it’s generally put together by the same group of people. It’s intended for people who have never been to DrupalCon before, but it’s enjoyable by everyone, and they go to great lengths to make it incredibly enjoyable. So in the past, there was one that was all themed around Disney musicals — they’re very often tied into the culture of the location where DrupalCon is being held. Occasionally in the past we have even seen Larry up on stage [laughs] singing and dancing…

AM: And wearing inappropriate things [laughs].

LG: Those things were very appropriate given the character I was playing.

AM: Fair enough, fair enough [laughs].

LG: Without giving too much away — this year is more musical numbers, and I’m sure there will be shenanigans [laughs]. We’re still working on it as we speak, but expect shenanigans. You want to be at the pre-note. It’s worth waking up early for.

AM: Early? How early is it?

LG: It’s before the keynote on Tuesday, so it’s at 8 am. And it’s worth being up and at the conference center for.

AM: Good, I look forward to it. Thank you all for joining me. I’m looking forward to my first DrupalCon, thanks so much.

LB: Thanks for joining us, and you can find us at DrupalCon.

GD: Thank you. See you in New Orleans.

LG: See you in New Orleans. Let’s have some fun! And learn stuff [laughs].

AM: Thank you so much for listening. If you want to hear more episodes of On the Air with Palantir, make sure to subscribe on our website at palantir.net. There you can also read our blog and see our work! Each of these episodes is also available on iTunes. And of course you can also follow us on Twitter at @palantir. See you at DrupalCon New Orleans!

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