Drupal Global Training Days is an initiative by Drupal Association to help people welcome Drupal in their work and communities. It introduces Drupal to users who are beginning to use it to explore more of what it can do and the best practices to do those things. Scheduled every quarter, communities and organizations in different parts of the world put the event together for their region, arranging for the event space and requisites like screens, projectors, refreshments, etc… Speakers are brought in these events with topics designed to allow a beginner to take the leap into Drupal.

This quarter’s training days were scheduled for 14^th December in various locations, including Bangalore. Sessions were proposed and shortlisted by Bangalore’s Drupal community enthusiasts and the event was organized at KNS Technologies who kindly offered us the use of their office space and equipment. Their office, located in a south central part of Bangalore was easy to access and reach, especially for me. This is important as it is crazy to stay in spirits after an ordeal through Bangalore traffic.

The event’s official thread contains more information on the sessions. Yours truly (that’s me) gave a session on using Omega to build responsive themes with Drupal. This was my first speaking event in all my life (not counting ‘presentations’ and ‘speeches’ made in school competitions). I was quite nervous and it didn’t help that I was scheduled to go right after Jacob Singh’s excellent talk about Learning by Accident. I think, or at least I hope that I made it through fine. I am looking forward to more speaking events in the future and hopefully they will get smoother.

After lunch, Gokul NK of Azri Solutions took everyone through the world of semantics and RDF and how Drupal provides RDF by default. The demo was interesting and the use-case is compelling. Pavithra, my colleague from Blisstering Solutions, took everyone through a story of open-source development, community and ways to get involved with Drupal.

The event started sooner than scheduled, which was somehow a good thing, as it ended right on time. Not that it was not fun but overflowing events always mess up your day’s schedule and it was good that this ended on time giving me enough time for a late lunch and catch The Hobbit later that evening. All in all, this was a pretty awesome day. Thanks to Tanay and Tridz for making it all happen and KNS Technologies for the space.

Drupal, Omega Presentation

Photos