Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending Drupal Camp Asheville 2017 ('twas my fourth year in a row : ). I absolutely love this event and encourage you to consider putting it on your list of Drupal events to hit next year. The Asheville area is a beautiful (and delicious) place to spend the weekend, but the bigger draw for me is the people involved:

(Check out all the pictures in the album on Flickr.)

Drupal Camp Asheville is always well organized (seriously, it's in the best of the best small conferences for venue, amenities, and content) and attended by a solid blend of seasoned Drupal users / contributors and newcomers. I live only an hour away, so I get to interact with my Drupal friends from Blue Oak Interactive, New Valley Media, and Kanopi on occasion, but then on Camp weekend I also get to see a regular mix of folks from Mediacurrent, Code Journeymen, Lullabot, Palantir, FFW, CivicActions, end users like NOAA, and more.

This year we got to hear from Adam Bergstein as the keynote speaker. Unfortunately, that "we" didn't include me at first, as I managed to roll up right after Adam spoke ... but his keynote is on YouTube already thanks to Kevin Thull! I encourage you to give it a listen to hear how Adam's experience learning to work against his own "winning strategy" as a developer (that of a honey badger ; ) helped him gain empathy for his fellow team members and find purpose in collaborative problem solving to make the world a better place.

I gave a presentation of Drupal Commerce 2.x focusing on how we've improved the out of the box experience since Commerce 1.x. This was fun to deliver, because we really have added quite a bit more functionality along with a better customer experience in the core of Commerce 2.x itself. These improvements continued all the way up to our first release candidate tagged earlier this month, which included new promotions, coupons, and payment capabilities.

Many folks were surprised by how far along Commerce 2.x is, but now that Bojan has decompressed from the RC1 sprint, I expect we'll start to share more about the new goodies on the Drupal Commerce blog. (If you're so inclined, you can subscribe to our newsletter to get bi-weekly news / updates as well.)

Lastly, I loved just hanging out and catching up with friends at the venue and at the afterparty. I played several rounds of a very fun competitive card game in development by Ken Rickard (follow him to find out when his Kickstarter launches!). I also enjoyed several rounds of pool with other Drupallers in the evening and closed out the night with cocktails at Imperial Life, one of my favorite cocktail bars in Asheville. I treasure these kinds of social interactions with people I otherwise only see as usernames and Twitter handles online.

Can't wait to do it again next year!