When your alarm goes off at 5:30am to go to a conference, part of you wants to skip and go back to bed. When it also means you’ve got to drive 2 1/2 hours in below zero conditions, there is even more inertia to just bail. I’m really happy I fought those primal urges and made it to Drupal Camp Western Mass yesterday, because it was pretty awesome.

Over the course of the day, given the 5 tracks that were being run, I could always find a really good talk. At one point it meant walking out of a bad talk, but I landed somewhere good eventually. I learned quite a bit more about some of the core of drupal, and hit up some of the more design oriented talks, which has given me a new reading list. There were 300 attendees there yesterday, which is a heck of showing for such grass roots organized conference far from a big city. It was also nice to be at a tech conference that wasn’t just a bunch of male geeks. At least a third of the audience was female.

I’ve got about 8 pages of notes, and a new bag of tricks to approach some of the more complex things we’d like to do for the Poughkeepsie Farm Project. I hope they run it again next year, as it’s definitely worth the drive and the time.