Our very own Drupal Dev Days in Szeged

In every year there are a lot of interesting Drupal-related meetups all around the world - Cons on two continents, Camps in one of each countries' cities and a lot more. The diversity of topics is the strength of these events- business, frontend and backend are also covered.

But! There is only one Drupal Developer Days per year, and usually it's all about code sprints, techie sessions and a lot of learning. This time it was organized in Szeged, Hungary, between the 23 - 30 March - 6 years after the famous Drupalcon in 2008! More than 340 Drupalers bought tickets in advance to the event, which is an awesome number!

Having such an interesting Drupal event in Hungary warmed our heart, because we as Brainsum found this the greatest opportunity to support the Drupal development as silver sponsors! It turned out absolutely great! From the company Péter, our CTO and Tomi, our software developer joined the sprints and had a lot of fun.

Our CTO, Péter receiving a beer from Julien Dubreuil, Customer Success Manager of Commerce Guys,
after a Commerce platform demo .

Besides sponsoring DDD, the event offered us a great chance to participate in the code sprints and meet the Drupal rockstars by travelling only 170 kms - what else could a Drupal deveoper dream about?
And finally because I (Zsófi, writing this blogpost now) had the chance to offer my time and dedication as a volunteer, being part of the core organizer team as responsible for the sponsors, which was pretty exciting, and I never experienced a Drupal event from this point of view.

The core organizer team: István Palócz, Márta Maczel, Gábor Hojtsy, Zsófi from Brainsum, Andrea Radó, Viktor Janurik and Péter Cseh (and the photographer's daughter, Bogi :)

As Drupal 8 is coming soon, there are a lot of things to do and work on, so when it was decided that the next Dev Days were gonna happen in Szeged, Hungary, we thought we could build the whole event around fixing issues for Drupal 8 and making it better on the go. When we started to marketing the event, soon we gained a lot of interest - not only because it was all about Drupal 8, but because people had a lot of fun in Szeged in 2008 at DrupalCon, and now they had the chance to come back to this beautiful, cosy city.

The event venue was IH Event Center, just two steps away from the hotel, where most of the Drupalers stayed, and this was the perfect combination. Originally in the schedule there were 3 full days of code sprints, from 9am to midnight, but when the venue had to close, a lot of the coders went to the hotel lobby and continued working on the issues. On Thursday the actual conference started with an opening keynote by Jam, Jeffrey A. McGuire about why Drupal 8 is so important to the whole community.

From an organizer perspective I can say that this was the best event someone could imagine - it went really smooth and the only thing we needed to take care of were those things that we originally expected. All the Drupalers had fun at the code sprints and the sessions during the day, and during the nights they had the chance to eat great food (Fishsoup 'Szeged' style was really popoular!), have some drinks with the others and go out to party!

Gábor Hojtsy, who was also part of the core organizer team showed some numbers in his closing session (before singing the Drupal Dev Days song with hurdy-gurdy and other instruments) and shared some of the results of the whole week.

Consumption in the venue:

• 240 liters of beer
• 1000 servings of coffee
• 120 kg of bananas
• 300 kg sweet snacks
• 480 liters of water
• 5500 sandwiches

But this is only the food. The real purpose of DDD was working on Drupal 8, so here are the numbers:

• 115 core commits, 706 files, 11k+,7k- lines
• 7 change records (ALL)
• 19 beta blocker/targets fixed
• 7 "hard problems" discussions

To summarize I think this was a really productive and awesome week. Thanks to all organizers, volunteers, sponsors and attendees for contributing! See you at the next Drupal event!

And to properly say goodbye, here's the DrupalFolk song!
Gábor Hojtsy singing, Kristof Van Tomme on hurdy-gurdy, Alexandru Badiu on the Marvin Drum, László Csécsy on flute and Péter Kohán on guitar!

So long and thanks for all the fish!