Unlocking Value, Together: Meet Us At DrupalCon Seattle

Axelerant is going to DrupalCon Seattle. Between the 8-12th of April, the Drupal community will get together in Seattle for a slightly different DrupalCon experience, this time with a new focus on content-rich opportunities, bringing in diverse speakers, and greater exchange of information. 

Here’s a look ahead at what Axelerant is doing at the event—who we are speaking to, and what we’re most looking forward to.

We love being part of the Drupal community.

At Axelerant, we want to make a difference through the work we do every day in Open Source. And for us, Drupal is the best place for us to do that. The Drupal community is known for being close knit, helpful, and passionate.

It's also one of the largest OSS communities in the world, with over 1,000,000 Drupal developers, designers, strategists, coordinators, and sponsors coming together to collaborate from around the world. This makes it a very interesting place for us to be.

And at Axelerant, we eat, sleep and breathe Drupal:

We should take the opportunity to connect. Let's meet at DrupalCon.

We are closely involved in community initiatives and deeply committed to its growth. We want to do everything we can to get our people involved, so that they can have their own inspirational community experiences and define their own journey forward.

Because we know the power of working together, in synergy. Read about what we did at the last three DrupalCamps we attended as well as the recent Agency Leaders Dinner in London.

With our Drupal expertise and the technical prowess of our team members, we’re hoping to make agency partnerships better.

For us, Seattle means seeing new friends and old.

It’s been clear for a while that Drupal agencies can’t continue to flourish indefinitely by themselves. To truly progress, agencies must collaborate, create opportunities and learn from each other. Seattle is an opportunity for us all to come together towards a shared purpose and to make meaningful connections.

DrupalCon offers the perfect blend of diverse voices, unique experiences and tons of energy for us to be able to discover new perspectives and unlock interesting opportunities. With people coming together from all around the world for the year’s largest Drupal event, this is the perfect setting for us to connect, share experiences, and learn from each other.

Here’s what we’re doing there.

From our team, Hussain Abbas will be there—volunteering, speaking, and meeting community members. “I hope to learn what the current trends are and what best practices we have gathered collectively as a community and as an industry," he says. "In turn, I am hoping to convey the challenges we face and what we do about it."

Why is this important to us? Because we can't thrive in isolation. 

Shweta Sharma is presenting a session on Advanced Automated Visual Testing, helping with a training course, and meeting community members.

“I am hoping to learn more about QA practices within Drupal agencies. I will be talking about our success stories, some case studies around QA and test automation with Drupal projects, and discussing non-code community contributions.”

Shweta believes it’s vitally important to emphasize that QA is part of the development team. Hearing about current trends, challenges faced or even discussions about D9 will help teams plan better for the future.

Both the Drupal community and customers reap the benefits of shared knowledge.

Piyush Poddar will be there as well, attending the Acquia Partner Summit, the Decoupled Summit, the DrupalCon Agency Track, judging Splash Awards nominations, and helping to fill in seats for our Agency Leaders Dinner.

Piyush hopes to learn how Drupal powered digital platforms are evolving across multiple industries. “I’m particularly interested in decoupled use cases, conversational interfaces and Acquia stack based solutions from the perspective of validation and staying updated,” he says.

“I'm also looking forward to sharing how we've helped our clients deliver global projects of varying complexities via integrated delivery partnerships this last year,” he adds.

DrupalCon offers us all a unique opportunity, and we hope to make the most of it. 

DrupalCon is one of the largest and most awaited gatherings of our community. It's a once-in-a-year opportunity to learn, share and network with amazing people during these five days. "Customers can learn about the future of Drupal and the Open Web in general, and also interact with suppliers and thought leaders in this space and plot their own digital roadmap," says Piyush. 

Finally, Michael Cannon is going to Seattle to have fun, make people smile, and elevate his relationships with those that he meets.

He'll also be attending the Agency Leadership track, sitting in on Pantheon and Acquia partner learnings, buffing up his marketing skills via some training, hosting the Agency Leaders dinner, capturing key group photos and 30-minute time lapses of various locations throughout the conference on behalf of the Drupal Association photo team team.

"I hope to teach people to be calm, smile, and enjoy what they're doing and bring them recognition for the effort that they contribute to the community. Further, let people know that they're not the only ones out there doing what they're doing and can share the burdens," he says.

People are at the heart of everything we do.

"Even when we're systems based, somebody made it possible and it only gets better when people work together towards a mutual vision," says Michael. 

And that, in a nutshell, is what DrupalCon Seattle is all about for us. 

If you’re there too, come meet us.

Michael will be hosting an Agency Leaders Dinner. The Agency Leaders community is a group of individuals brought together by Axelerant and others to share ideas and insights. Agency Leaders events are usually an informal evening of drinks, dinner and conversation with peers at other agencies. Conversations follow the Chatham House Rule.

We’ve hosted several of these in different locations, and through our experiences, we’ve found that coming together to talk about challenges generates real value for everyone. Closer relationships between agencies help us all find opportunities together as well as ways to move forward productively and powerfully into the future.

Date: Wednesday, April 10
Time: 6pm-8pm
Location: Musicquarium Lounge at The Triple Door
Contact: Michael Cannon michael+alseattle at axelerant.com

We look forward to seeing you there!

	Hosted by:
	Michael Cannon   Axelerant	Aimee Degnan   Hook 42	Michel Van Velde   One Shoe