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...).

So, by the time most people read this blog post, the Raincity Studios crew will be winging their way towards Boston from Vancouver. We've got lots of first time Drupalcon attendees, and I'm really excited at introducing everyone to the team.

Adrian is the South African Drupal core contributor we all know and love. We didn't manage to have him visit us in Canada first, so we'll have to make do with spending some quality time together in Boston. He's pumped up on Hostmaster juice.

Audrey is a long time member of the local Vancouver PHP Users Group community and has been on database import / export duty on all of our major projects. We've been relying on her so heavily that she hasn't had time to contribute an extended user theme module that lets users pick themes for their blogs, as well as some book review stuff that will probably extend the Userpoints module.

Djun has been diving into the RDF stuff I blogged about recently, and pouring out some CoCKTaiL goodness.

Katherine just finished her first user group presentation on jQuery as well as having committed her first contribute module, Quicktabs.

Steve doesn't quite know whether he's a designer or a developer, and along the way he's an awesome themer as well. Oh, right, and then his most recent post on the command line goodness that is drush, and how to run it locally with MAMP. There was something about iPhones as well.

Robert Scales, Raincity Studios CEO, will of course be along to do the majority of the business heavy lifting, as well as talk about some of our current experiences opening an office and trying to kickstart a Drupal ecosystem in Shanghai. Then it's off to SXSW for him and the other half of the RCS team.

Along with the RCS team, we've got other Vancouver Drupal folks along like Ariane K from Raised Eyebrow and Scott and Ianiv from the NowPublic team (the rest of whom are congregating from all over the world).

Coming along from China is newly-elected Drupal Association Board Member Jacob Redding. It's been great to chat with him here in Vancouver about everything from training to worldwide event coordination at the grass roots level.

Lastly, a special special awesome thanks to Corinn: she organized our butts from here to Boston and even managed to sweet talk the hotel to run daily shuttle service back and forth to the conference center. There look to be over 30 rooms booked at the Courtyard Marriot. w00t! After hours party time...er...I mean, serious coding!...at the Marriot.

Well, that's about it. No sleep 'til Boston, and my cab to the airport picks me up in about 20 minutes. Looking forward to seeing everyone there!

Drupalcon is sneaking up around the corner and as I count down the calendar days until the event I'm actually trying to think of what to expect when I arrive. This will be my first Drupalcon as well as my first time flying on a plane since I was 2.

I'll be traveling alongside some of my fellow peers here at Raincity Studios and I'm sure they'll keep Raincity's youngest in good hands ;).

I'm quite thrilled to be able to participate and hopefully converse with some of the leading contributors from the Drupal project. I've been working with Drupal for about 7 or 8 months now and everyday I'm learning something new.

Due to the nature of me being a generalist, I'll hopefully be dabbling in quite a variety of sessions. Here are a couple that have perked my interest and hopefully yours as well.

The next North American Drupalcon is Drupalcon Boston 2008, coming up March 3rd to March 6th, in Boston. The new combined Raincity team will be attending, although I'll leave it up to later posts to talk about that.

I was asked by the chairs of the site building track to submit a proposal. After a little bit of thinking about what kind of hand waving I might do, I decided to submit my first proposal on Mapping Business Requirements to Drupal Modules - the Gap Fit Process. This is essentially the very first part of any consulting engagement that we go through with clients. What are the requirements, and what modules, themes, and custom code can help match these requirements? I hope to make this a much more transparent process, and share best practices not only on what modules get chosen, but why they get chosen, and teach people how to do better module picking. 'Better' in this case meaning community supported and good quality code.

The second session I've submitted so far is a Birds of a Feather (BOF) session -- RDF and the Semantic Web in Drupal. The infamous Arto has been doing great stuff here, and when I made a post about my rediscovered love for RDF, I got several people contacting me mentioning that they were also doing a bunch of semantic work with Drupal. So, let's figure out where the intersection of Drupal and the Semantic Web is.

Interested in these topics? Sign up at the Drupalcon Boston site and vote for my sessions!