DrupalCon through the eyes of a Project Manager
Jessica Denkelaar
Drupal developer 24.10.2022In September Ramsalt traveled to Prague to attend DrupalCon 2022. Since we are a fully remote company these events are important. Not just to see each other in person, but also to learn more about Drupal and its current technical state. It’s educational, inspirational, but also a good team building experience. This year it was Nina’s first time at DrupalCon. Nina is one of our project managers who is young, eager and willing to learn more about the technical aspects of Drupal so she can use the knowledge to improve her day-to-day project management routines. Since DrupalCon is mostly attended by developers we wanted to interview Nina about how she experienced her first DrupalCon as a project manager.
Hi Nina, it was your first time at DrupalCon. How did you experience it?
I expected a full on developer conference, but I was really surprised at how many non-technical sessions they offered. I imagined it to be nerds developing together but it really surprised me with the diversity of topics and people. For me as a PM there were a lot of interesting talks, presentations and workshops.
You are a project manager; were there enough sessions for you and if so, what sessions did you like the most?
There was a good mix of talks I could attend as a project manager. I already have some technical understanding and also want to learn more about sitebuilding, configurations, testing, modules and WYSIWYG editors. Sometimes I needed to zoom out a bit on the technical sessions because it got too much into coding details.
Which sessions did you like the most?
I really liked the keynote from the Estonian leader about the next big things for digital societies and the one about facing client conflicts in digital projects. As for the technical sessions I liked the one about long-term maintenance of Drupal websites and the session where they talked about the importance of test automations. The maintaining Drupal session gave me a real inside on field and entity strategies and how to work with permissions and views. Which can be really helpful when having conceptual meetings with clients in the early stages of a project. As for the test automation session it was great to discover the automation possibilities, because testing is such a huge part of the PM work and can be crucial for delivering good quality sites.
Another super interesting talk was “Mind the last 20%!!!”. Which was about how to handle the last 20% of a project, which is usually the most critical phase. They had a lot of good recommendations and best practices on how to allocate project resources.
How did you like the community at DrupalCon and were you able to network on DrupalCon?
I really liked the diversity of the people reaching from developers, hosting companies, CEOs, PMs to other Drupal agencies. I did make valuable connections and had interesting talks with other IT agencies about similar problems they are facing.
Would you recommend other project managers to attend DrupalCon?
Yes! Not only because you are stepping out of your comfort zone but attending technical sessions will benefit the skillset of every project manager. It is important that we, to some extent, have technical knowledge and can support developers with technical decisions and sometimes question solution approaches.
These are the sessions that Nina is recommending to see if you didn’t had time to check it out on DrupalCon (you can only watch the sessions if you attended DrupalCon or bought a streaming ticket):