DrupalCons are a great way to learn and connect, but they are especially great to meet various people leading Drupal's future direction. DrupalCon Europe in a couple weeks is no execption.

There is of course the Driesnote to get an update on where Drupal's progress is and get inspired about where its going. There is a dedicated question and answer session with project lead Dries Buytaert where you can inquire about topics not covered in the keynote.

The initiative leads provide a glimpse into their respective areas in the Drupal Initiative leaders keynote. This is a great way to get to know the leaders and learn more about their plans and where you could help.

Various initiatives have dedicated sessions: the Core Automatic Updates Initiative Update and the Configuration Management Initiative 2.0 session provides updates on the progress made and gives you a look forward. There is not one but two sessions about the new experimental Olivero frontend theme in Drupal 9.1.0: Designing for chaos: The design process behind Olivero and The Olivero theme: Genesis and Update on Drupal 9's Newest Theme.

A practically inevitable future milestone is Drupal 10. In The Drupal 10 initiative, here we go I will cover where we are in preparing Drupal 10, what you can expect and where you can be involved. On the way to Drupal 10 is our support for PHP 8. While not specifically about Drupal core's progress, the PHP 8: What's new and changing will showcase the new version of the programming language.

For the future of Drupal, the people leading and the technology being built is at least as interesting as the platform we are collaborating on. You might have heard that merge requests and issue branches became generally available on drupal.org yesterday (yes!). In Drupal.org Update - The latest collaboration tools to help you build Drupal (panel), you can learn more about the current state and future of the platform we use to build Drupal itself.

Also of wide interest is the effect of end of life Drupal versions: Jeremy Andrews and Mike Meyers will cover Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 end of life.

These were just the pre-planned sessions. The real involvement possibilities are at Birds of a Feather discussions where you can be directly involved with core discussions, see how hard problems are deconstructed and solved. Most BoF slots are still open for submission, but there will be various covering core's future. Also contribution events will happen all week where you can learn Drupal development and any other kind of Drupal contribution based on your interests. I expect contribution topic groups forming around Symfony 6 compatibility, removing jQuery UI components, CKEditor 5, the Claro admin theme and Olivero frontend themes and so on.

These are just the core focused sessions out of 119 sessions offered at the event in five tracks. Also there are even 4 in-depth workshops included with each ticket. Hope to see you there! Check out https://events.drupal.org/europe2020 for more information.

Photo credit Boris Baldinger from DrupalCon Amsterdam.