DrupalCamp Atlanta

Posted on September 21, 2009 by agentrickard

Alright, so the first (annual?) DrupalCamp Atlanta is over and done. A success all around, and most (if not all) of the credit goes to the Atlanta Drupal Users Group and especially Dave Terry and the team at Mediacurrent. Great venue, free food and some surprise guests from out of town.

Addison Berry came down as the keynote speaker. It was fun for me to finally see her talk, since she is traveling on a Knight Drupal Initiative grant. Her mission is to improve Drupal's documentation, but her message is that everyone is part of the Drupal community and can add value to the product and the process of sustaining Drupal.

Josh Brauer came from out West to represent Acquia and discuss Gardens and Drupal 7. Jakob Perry [japerry] even came from Seattle to see what we were up to. There was also a large group of folks from Nashville, including Jamie Meredith.

Ben Finklea from Volacci came from Austain to discuss SEO, marketing strategies and Drupal. His talk, "I have seen the future of marketing and it is Drupal blue," reinforced some lessons about site architecture, content and (believe it or not) honesty in marketing that made for a good refresher, and a break from a day of code-speak.

The best talk I went to all day, actually, was by my former co-worker (I quit, not him), Cameron Guill. Cameron is the MySQL DBA at Morris Digital Works and is responsible for keeping large sites like SavannahNow and Jacksonville.com running smoothly. He discussed the use of Squid and Squirm as a front-side cache; the advantages (and limitations) of running Drupal with memcached; a whole boatload of MySQL performance tunes; the importance of performance monitoring and query logging; and, well, a bunch of stuff that went right over my head. If I had to summarize his advice, it would be: make sure you write to memory instead of to disk, whenever and wherever possible. Disk swap can cripple your site. Oh, and if you aren't running a dedicated database server (and don't have a real DBA) you're kidding yourself if you try to scale Drupal.

I presented on Domain Access, and how it might change your Drupal life. And the talk was well-received, though I could have used another 20 minutes for questions.

In all, a very successful day of Drupaling. The rain dampened spirits a bit (and I think kept us from hitting our 250 attendee capacity). But it was worth getting up early and making the (sometimes harrowing) drive through the rain to get there and back. Next time, I'm staying the night so I can go to the afterparty.