Busy Drupal weekend with a training day and a camp

First let's talk about Drupal Global Training Day.

At the Amsterdam DrupalCon we had a great meeting with Johanna Bergmann from the Drupal Association about how Cheppers could be more involved in the global Drupal stream and how the DA could help with that. This is where we first talked about organizing a DGTD.

The Drupal Global Training Day is an initiative of the Drupal Association, and on Nov 14-15th it was organized for the 4th time, all previous events took place in this year, 2014. This project is supervised and supported by the DA, but mainly it is a locally organized event for those who are interested in Drupal and have the opportunity to attend a half or full day of Drupal training, held by local professionals and mentors. These events are usually free to attend, or have a very low cost thus are perfect for a company or a team of Drupal-lovers to contribute back to Drupal. You can find all the cities and companies involved in the DGTD events in all around the Globe here.

So we were in Amsterdam, talking with Johanna about the problem 'How to involve more developers into Drupal?', and when she mentioned the idea of the training day, we immediately decided to host the next one. The DGTD was never organized in Hungary before. The timing was extremely great as November 15th-16th (the following Saturday and Sunday after the training day) were the days of the last larger Hungarian Drupal event of this year, the Drupal Weekend Budapest.

All we needed to do is to organize. We put together a subscription form, and soon it turned out that our office is too small for the interest! So we needed to relocate the training, which is not as easy as it sounds, we had to find a place which could host more than 40 people who need coffee, food and internetz. (Personal remark: I think internet is the hardest part in organizing any kind of IT event, it can never be good enough.)

The training also needed good teachers who knew Drupal, so we teamed up with István 'pp' Palócz and János Kuszing. Both of them are known in the local community and have a great experience in teaching Drupal, so we were very happy that they were interested in the training of a new generation. As we expected more than 40 people to the training day, we also needed helping hands. Three Cheppers developers were excited to join the event as mentors, Feri, Tibi and Attila proved to be good help when it came to Drupal mentoring.

You can reach the topics on GitHub (in Hungarian).

We were really content as the workshop room was full, more than 40 people came to learn about Drupal. Our event was even mentioned in the Drupal Association’s summary!

We would like to thank everyone for their support, this was a really great event and we'll work on other trainings in the future!

And then came Drupal Weekend Budapest 2014 on Nov 15th-16th.

In every year we have two larger Drupal events in Hungary, Drupalaton in August and a Drupal Weekend in mid November. As I was involved in organizing Drupal events this year, I offered my help to organize the weekend as well. DW is sort of a DrupalCamp, but this is for locals only - all events are in Hungarian from local experts for 100-150 Drupalists. We had quite a large number of session proposals to choose from, and I think the program was very interesting for newcomers and experienced coders as well.

Gergely was one of the panelists in a session about how to build a Drupal career. The sessions were in Hungarian, the speakers talked about e.g. Drupal 8 theming, Headless Drupal, Agile development and also a lot of great technical presentations and showcase... I also gave my very first presentation in front of a Drupal crowd as I presented the newly founded Hungarian Drupal Association. We had more than 140 attendees during the two days and the follow-up shows that it was again a great event, despite the fact that there was no wifi available at the whole venue :) If you speak Hungarian, you can watch all videos of the sessions here. The images are here.

So, with the Weekend this year of Drupal events is ended, now we have time to prepare for the next big gig!