2011 Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit

6 hours drive away – the Red Rocket web team, Sean, Caroline and I made it down to Portland for the 2011 Pacific Drupal Summit.

It’s an event we look forward to every year. Last year, I met Sean at the 2010 Pacific Drupal Summit. Funny how it worked that Sean ended up working with Red Rocket. Overall, it’s just great to get out in the community, make new friends, and stay on top of things.

This year, we were thrilled to have Caroline join us. The three drupal musketeers, set out to Portland, on Friday morning. This is the day where we tried to squeeze all the sightseeing in - Woodburn outlet, Voodoo Donuts, and midnight French dinner. We went to bed at 2AM, exhausted, but bumped for the next day.

My big takeaways from the summit, lots of drupal business tips on forecasting, estimating, staffing and after launch protocols. Very glad to have heard strong women like @Susan_Rust @msamye and speak.

Lots of useful PM and accounting tools – Expensify https://www.expensify.com/, Freshbooks http://www.freshbooks.com/, Manymoon https://manymoon.com/, Redmine http://www.redmine.org/.

On theming and design – SASS http://sass-lang.com/ was very interesting, a programming approach to CSS. Would be interesting to try on the next project.

Other interesting modules to look into,
http://drupal.org/project/leaflet
http://drupal.org/project/beautytips
http://drupal.org/project/security_review
http://drupal.org/project/migrate
http://drupal.org/project/cdn

Our other Portland trip highlights include

• Powell’s Books
• REI
• Portland Apple Store
• Portland University Farmer’s Market

Special thanks to the organizers of the awesome Saturday after party. Great eats, premium open bar (SAKE?!? thank you!!!!), and many awesome people.

Until next year! We will be back.