Drupal Boston - First Day, First Impressions

I meant to post this last night but the wifi sucks at the hotel (Royal Sonesta) and I gave up. Here's a recap of my day yesterday, first impressions, general thoughts. Not a whole lot of info on the sessions because I missed a lot of them attempting to get some work done.

This is my first Drupalcon and I've been really looking forward to it for months. So far, I'm mostly star struck. There are a lot of people I know of and recognize from the Drupal community, people I've chatted with on IRC, co-workers I'm meeting for the first time. It's a bit overwhelming, but pretty fun.

My first session of the day was the Usability one which is something I am interested in with Drupal 7. I've been doing some of my own usability testing and hope to publish those results soon. Some interesting tidbits I got away from that session:

• Content in Drupal is really, really confusing. None of the participants seemed to get it.
• Taxonomy was not confusing and people understood what it was. Go figure.
• People use the "Welcome to Drupal...!" screen as navigation, and get really confused when it disappears. This is something I would have never thought about.
• It's really hilarious to see the quotes of people thrust into the world of Drupal administration. Unfortunately I forgot to write any of the quotes down (but I'm sure there's some transcripts or video).

So that was good. After that was Dries' keynote and it was amazing to see the number of people really here. I am a little sad, to be honest, that I wasn't able to go to a Drupalcon where there were a lot less people. I feel a bit lost in the crowd and am looking forward to some smaller gatherings.

I missed everything after that. Oh, I did make DrupalChix which I just happened to look at the BoF board in time. I think if there were more notice, more women would've made it. Some interesting things about that:

• There were 17 women there, wow! And I know there was a lot more here at Drupalcon.
• There was, of course, also a Sprout. Bean joined us later, too.
• There were women from all sorts of backgrounds, freelance developers, designers, those working for "Drupal shops", those who didn't know much about Drupal.
• merlinofchaos' wife rocks.

So, yeah. It's been a blast, although pretty exhausting, too. Some other thoughts, in no particular order.

• When you get beer into Drupallers, things get really interesting.
• Free coffee goes fast.
• Having Drupalcon in a freezing city kind of sucks.
• People are a lot different in person than in real life. People who are curt online I have found friendly in person, people I have talked w/ online have blown me off in person.
• We need more Drupal paraphernalia.
• It's hard to talk to the "cool kids" because they are always swarmed by crowds of people. I managed to talk to a few briefly, though.
• I forgot to charge my camera and couldn't take any pictures. :(

If you're at Drupalcon and reading this, come say hi! I'm friendly, just a bit shy when the number of people is in the thousands.