No convention is complete without a giveaway bag of knick-knacks and propaganda handed to you at the door. DrupalCon Paris 2009 is no exception, with a custom printed cloth bag with a good selection of Drupally kit.

This year’s bag includes:

1. Cloth carrier bag with DrupalCon Paris 2009 logo
2. Aluminium drinks bottle
3. Pamphlets from convention sponsors
4. DrupalCon frisbee
5. Tin of mints
6. Plastic pen
7. Conference schedule and floorplan
8. Tokens for meals and refreshments

They say that, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch”, but judging by the refreshment tokens in the DrupalCon goodie bag, they would be wrong.

The presence of beer tokens in the selection not only shows the great community spirit of the Drupal community and the conference organisers, but proves that Drupal is free as in Open Source and free as in beer.

From time to time, work creeps up on you and sucks every last drop of knowledge and energy from you as you push from project to deadline to client to deliverable. A lonesome geek can get stale quickly, so its important to find some inspiration from the development community as often as you can manage.

Conferences are a great source of information and provide plenty of opportunities to pick up tips from the pros and rub shoulders with your contemporaries. But while looking for the perfect solution to your technical problems, its easy to neglect the basics and end up having a day that feels increasingly hassled.

Here’s five tips to help you along, the next time you attend a conference:

1. Always show up with business cards. Lets face it, you might be the business when it comes to technical delivery, but if you introduce yourself at a conference without a card, you’re forgotten by the time your new friend turns their head. Always bring cards and always follow up with an email to the cards you’ve taken from people. Its also a good idea to jot a reminder on the back of the card you’ve received as a reminder about the conversation you’ve opened with.
2. Don’t show up with a full bag/rucksack/briefcase. Conferences are great for goodies, and you’ll be handed plenty of clobber throughout the day. If your bag is full to bursting when you arrive, you’re going to end up weighed down and avoiding some of the best freebies later in the day.
3. Know which talks you’re attending when you arrive. Or at least have a short list. Otherwise you risk missing the stuff that is pivotal to you.
4. Leave gaps in your day for schmoozing. Let’s face it, you could probably learn everything you’ll see in a presentation from the web. Leave a little time to chat with people, seek out some opportunities, or even see a little bit of the host city of the conference.
5. Slack off, with purpose. If decorum allows it, attend sessions you are only moderately interested in and work you your laptop during the session. Keep one ear open for valuable gems of information and get things done at the same time.

Its been a big day at DrupalCon Paris 2009 and all the delegates are slowly trickling out of the venue, seeking restaurants and bars to refuel themselves for tomorrow’s geekery. The die hards are being asked to leave some of the coding rooms, as they finish patches and code sprints for the core Drupal functionality.

Excellent presentations were delivered all around with a great mix of content for front-end, back-end, newcomers, die-hards and those with a real business emphasis. There are a number of the usual suspects from the key consultancies like 4 Kitchens and Lullabot, as well as a solid offering of commercial enterprises who are leveraging Drupal in the Enterprise.

The team from Economist.com carry a rock-star reputation here at DrupalCon, being held as a flagship adopter in almost every presentation. The use of Drupal, and Agile practices, from such a highly respected and technically savvy organisation has legitimised Drupal as an Enterprise-ready technology. The presentation by the Economist.com team itself was a brilliant case study on how to effect significant change in a commercial organisation while delivering real business value at the same time. The site will be one to watch as the Drupal migration continues through the latter half of 2009.

Lullabot consultant, Jeff Eaton gave an entertaining and candid presentation about the need for an Architectural focus when delivering Drupal sites. He turned the microscope inward at points, challenging the community to bring more clarity and direction to the work that we all do, through examining the goals and objectives of the work we do on Drupal itself.

David Strauss, of 4 Kitchens, gave a comprehensive look at the performance improvements that Drupal 7 has to offer and highlighted the other technologies that can lend a hand. For those of us working on Enterprise sites, it was a roll call of applications that we should or already are using to keep our Drupal sites running under pressure.

Today’s quotes:

If you can only find one solution to a problem, you’re doing it wrong. There should always be additional ways to do things, even if they’re bad solutions.

Silos are good if they are planned and allow people to specialise. But are BAD if they emerge on their own.

Offloading page cache duties to a pre-drupal infrastructure layer is ideal

Its day two of DrupalCon Paris 2009, and it is a beautiful day in Paris as the sun rises on this years geekfest at the Cite Universite. The delegates seem slow to get started while the sessions kick off. The free caffeine on tap should wake up the crew as the Drupal information starts to flow.

Regular visitors to omphe.com will notice that we’ve undergone a major overhaul of the site. All of the professional information pertaining to freelance web design and development has been shelved and will soon be updated on the parent site: www.clockworkrobot.co.uk. Similarly, expect to see the photo content finding a new home on faulls.com in the near future.

Omphe.com is undergoing this big change just prior to the Clockwork Robot team attends DrupalCon 2009 in Paris. The convention promises to provide plenty of information and inspiration around the Drupal content management system and this new site will start its life by acting as a journal of the event itself.

In coming months, watch for updates to news and tutorials here at omphe.com to support the web development community.