In the last week of October, enthusiasts from the Drupal Community from around the world met — continue reading
In the last week of October, enthusiasts from the Drupal Community from around the world met in Amsterdam, Netherlands, to attend DrupalCon Europe. The conference is an open-source, community-driven event that gathers more than 1,500 of the top digital minds using Drupal for collaboration, knowledge sharing, friendship, and moving the project forward. The purpose of the event is to share expertise, create solutions, build relationships and shape the future.
The team from Open Social was ecstatic to be taking part in the conference. Over four days, the team gave talks and presentations, hosted a booth, attended community events and even won the ‘Social/Community’ category at the International Splash Awards.
From a services company to Open Social
Taco Potze, the CEO of Open Social, gave a knowledgeable talk titled ‘Lessons from 3 years Open Social moving from services to a product company.’ In a candid tell-all, Taco talked about the things that went well, and the things that did not go well in the journey to move a 20 people Drupal agency from a service company (bill by the hour) to a product SaaS company (bill per product, per month) called Open Social.
“When moving to SaaS, you have to learn to say no to clients to retain focus”.
He gave details about funding your product, building a product, how to do marketing, sales and business development and how to grow internationally.
If you are thinking about building a product on Drupal or building a SaaS company, this session was for you.
Did you miss Taco’s talk?
The link to the video recording is here.
RAI Amsterdam – The conference booth
The Open Social booth was bustling throughout the conference. Lots of people stopped by to find out about how Open Social is a great online community solution. We shared how there is a better way to connect your members, volunteers, employees, and customers. It was great to hear people’s positive experiences using Open Social and also hear feedback about what community members were looking for in the next release.
We handed out our signature flower pots (please send us a tweet @OpenSocialHQ of your sunflower in bloom!)
Alexander Varwijk | Multilingualism makes better programmers
Alexander’s talk was full of enthusiastic attendees. One of Drupal 8’s leading goals was to “get off the island.” There have been considerable strides in adopting PHP standards and including other libraries to replace custom-built solutions. However, in the day-to-day life of a Drupal developer, we only touch one or two programming languages. Alexander’s talk continued the journey of leaving the island by showing interesting developments of other programming languages and how we can use what they’ve come up with within our use of PHP and Javascript.
Some examples of interesting habits and features in other languages that we could add to our toolkit: Rust’s strict type checking and the mindset that it enforces; The Ruby community’s drive to create cheap short functions (instead of lengthy if-statements); Javascript’s use of functional programming that will soon be easier in PHP.
Overall, Alexander’s main message: Take a look outside of your comfort zone, but whatever you do be consistent and use common sense!
Did you miss Alexanders talk?
You can find the link to the slides here or watch the video below.
The Open Social Summit
Open Social hosted a summit as apart of the contribution day program. Three expert speakers came and shared their stories and insights about using Open Social. The Summit was a great success and new connections were made and fascinating lessons learned.
Contributing to Open Social and Drupal
Would you like to get involved as well? For Open Social, our Open Social Documentation Guide is the best place to start. If you want a starting point for helping to grow Drupal, you can find out more on the ‘Ways to get involved‘-page on Drupal.org.
