Luke McCormick's Detailed Report on BADCamp 2024

For over 15 years, the Bay Area Drupal Camp has brought together thousands from the worldwide Drupal community, including users, developers, marketers, and content specialists. BADCamp is also said to be the world's largest free Drupal event. The 2024 edition of the camp was successfully held on October 24 and 25 in Oakland, California.

The participants learned, shared and cherished the warmth of the Drupal community and took home a handful of good memories. As one of the organizers, Luke McCormick was also at the camp even before it officially started. Along with the organizing tasks, Luke also had to present a session there. If you missed the camp, here is a report by Luke McCormick that will help you feel the pulse of the magnificent event.

The Night Before

At 6 PM on Wednesday, October 23, I arrived at Oakstop with some of the other organizers of BADCamp. After 6 months of preparations, it was time for the show! As the communications director, I had been sending out email blasts and posting to our social media accounts for months, but was it enough? Were enough people going to show up? We skipped the previous year. Would we retain our audience? This was the first time we had presented at camp at this particular location. Would it work? It seemed like it would, but I couldn't be sure until I saw everything in place.

Fortunately, my worries were allayed when I arrived. The other organizers seemed relaxed and confident, and looking around, I could see that everything seemed to be set up for the event. There were lots of chairs and tables, although most of them were in the wrong room—rather than complain, we just moved the chairs to where they needed to be. We cleaned up a little bit and were ready to go the next morning when we found out how many people were actually going to be there.

I arrived at Oakstop the next day with Kristen Pol, our keynote speaker. After some quick introductions, we went to look at the room where the keynote session was going to take place, just 45 minutes away. People were still setting up the televisions and projectors, and in particular, recording expert Bob McDonald was busy setting up the facilities needed to record all of the sessions. Our first experience with the recording technology was going to be the keynote session—probably the most important session of the camp—so it had to work perfectly out of the gate. Fortunately, Bob is a total pro and didn't seem to be at all nervous. 45 minutes later, after a series of introductions, Kristen launched into her talk, Bricks to Bits: How LEGO's reinvention can inspire Drupal's digital transformation, which was well-received by the packed house.

After Kristen finished, the hard part of the show (for me) began—choosing which sessions to attend! We had three rooms running all at once, but I could only be in one place at a time. I elected to stay in the same room to see Tim Lehnen, the CTO of the Drupal Association, present his session, "The Drupal Association Presents: The Next Decade of Drupal."

Though I was disappointed that I wasn't going to get to see my friend Seth Hill's presentation on Mercury Editor (Mercury Editor: Easy to Use, Drag and Drop Content Editing for Drupal)—I would have to catch it on video later.

Wow, that decision was tough for me! It was only going to get harder because, after that, there would be three sessions to choose from at any time. I chose to go upstairs to see JD Leonard present "Cooking with Drupal 11 Recipes for Membership Organizations," complete with many witty cooking metaphors.

And then it was time for lunch. I headed out with a group of people to XOLO, a Mexican restaurant nearby, where I had a delicious pozole.

After lunch, it was immediately back to sessions. Fellow organizer Eric Guerin, presented Simplifying Website Workflows with Tugboat

…after which I went to "From Managed Hosting to Cloud Freedom: Three Ways to Migrate your Sites to AWS or Digital Ocean," presented by Sal Lakhani, who I've been working with on the Drupal Forge project.

Then I went to see my good friend Irina Zacks present an update on the Drupal7 EOL project, called "Drupal 7 EOL: What are options for site owners in October 2024?" (I've also been contributing to, although my contributions pale compared to the work that Irina has put into it. As usual, it was interesting. I've seen Irina present on it a number of times, but it's never the same. There's always more material and it's always evolving.

After that, it was time for the biggest part of my day—it was time for me to present my session! I've been working on a project called Simplify Drupal in which I've been exploring ways to manage Drupal projects to make them easier to maintain. I've intentionally been looking for unusual and original options rather than seeking to compile current best practices. I knew that at least some of the ideas were interesting, and I thought my slides would be interesting. I was hoping that people would take it in the lighthearted way I intended it and not get offended.

As it turned out, I didn't really need to be nervous. The audience was respectful and engaged. I was quite happy. I got a few interesting comments and suggestions during the session, but it turns out I got my best feedback afterwards, both on the feedback cards that I distributed and in conversations over the course of the next few days with fellow attendees. I'm going to be giving the talk again at NEDCamp in Providence, Rhode Island, in a few weeks, and the feedback I got from the first presentation will be very valuable in helping me get across my ideas more effectively and usefully.

My session was in the last slot of the day. It felt great because by now, we organizers knew that BADCamp 2024 was a big success. It was time for the party! After quickly helping to tidy things up a little bit at the venue, I headed over to the BADCamp party, which was happening at Oakland United in Jack London Square. I found a happy group of post-show Drupalists snacking on pizza and other edibles and enjoying the delicious house-brewed beers. I had a chance to catch up with Drupal friends—some of whom I had talked with at BADCamp already, but a few who I hadn't known were there, and I was very happy to see them. As I have many times in the past, I was amazed at how warm and durable friendships in the Drupal world are. These are more than just colleagues, they're my friends, or maybe even family.

The next day was Summit Day! I started out at the Backdrop Summit, having been fairly heavily involved in the Backdrop Project for the last 10 years—since it started. I was happy to see Seth presenting the work that Aten (where he works) is doing with Backdrop.

I snuck off briefly to see Rick Hawkins' presentation Fields of dreams: Customizing fields to better support your content and then hurried back to the backdrop Summit!

Once again, it was time for lunch, just a block from Oak Stop. Tim Lehnen, Sal Lakhani, and I found a delicious tiny Thai restaurant with an almost-food truck vibe. At least, that's what Tim says, and he's from Portland, where they practically live on food trucks!

Returning to the venue, it was time for the day's final activities. For me, that meant the Drupal CMS (Starshot) Summit, which was not only interesting in its own right but a requirement since I was the organizer! Fortunately for me, I had brought in heavyweight reinforcements. Kristen, our keynote speaker, who is on the Drupal Starshot Council and Tim, the aforementioned Drupal Association CTO, were there to do the heavy lifting, ably assisted by JD Leonard (upon whom I loaded many responsibilities) and André Angelantoni. For the most part, I only need to take notes and suggest good times to take breaks. Oh, I also ran off and got the whiteboard and some markers.

Click on the slider button on either side to see all the images. (C) Luke McCormick

And then we were done! I helped some with cleaning up some participant videos, which you may have seen elsewhere. Then, I met with the organizers, and we had a quiet after-party at one of our houses. 

I can't wait to do it again next year!