Last week's trip to Boston was a first for me in many ways: first open source conference, first time in Boston, first time meeting Drupalers outside Vancouver, first time meeting a whole bunch of other women coders; plus other, perhaps less significant, firsts (first time playing Rock Band, first time seeing my colleagues at 6 in the morning, first time I ever heard of Boston, Georgia... more on that anon...).

All in all, the experience did not disappoint. Sure, there was a low point when I felt totally overwhelmed by a sense of how little I knew compared to many of the people around me, especially when some of those people were less than half my age, but that's surely a common experience for noobs at such events. Besides, it's helpful to get some perspective on where one's level of knowledge fits in in the context of the broader community, and if there wasn't so much room for progress in that regard then Drupal wouldn't be half the exciting challenge that it is. So, some highlights for me, in no particular order:

• John Resig's talk on jQuery: having recently presented on jQuery to the Vancouver League of Drupalers, it was great to attend a presentation by the framework's creator, explaining the improvements that have been made since the version that ships with Drupal 5 and whetting my appetite for the jQuery UI plugin version 1.5
• Coder Module: now I have no excuse to put off creating a 6.x release of Quick Tabs. This module, as presented by its maintainer Doug Green, will tell me exactly what I need to do, well - apart from all the new features I need to add...
• Admin-friendly modules: some excellent advice from Joel Farris of Achieve Internet on small but important improvements that can be made to contrib modules to ensure a better admin user experience.
• Dries's keynote: again, there's nothing like hearing it straight from the horse's mouth. Dries discussed the huge improvements inherent in Drupal 6 and the exciting directions that Drupal will take towards a killer D7 release and beyond.
• DrupalChix: Angie Byron aka webchick organised a birds of a feather session for us Drupal women to get together and introduce ourselves, explain our backgrounds and discuss all things Drupal
• Great peeps: I'm not the first one to say such a thing - the Drupal community is a really friendly bunch of fantastic people and it was great to finally put faces to names and make connections with other Drupalers from all over the world.

This last point is perhaps the most important since it's the human side of open source development, the "meat" as Chris DiBona of Google put it so effectively in his keynote presentation, that makes it so successful and motivates people to keep on giving back as they keep on learning more. As a follow-up to the DrupalChix BoF, Angie has set up a new DrupalChix group on g.d.o which will certainly help me in following Jacob Redding's advice: "Boston DrupalCon is over, Stay Involved!"

Finally, the biggest laugh of the trip: finding out the reason for the discrepancy between Djun's AccuWeather forecast of warm weather and the shockingly cold temperature that greeted us on arrival in Boson, making us all wish we had packed extra sweaters. Yes, you guessed it - Boston, Georgia. Where the temperature is a balmy 23°C in early March.

Photo Credit: puregin