Egressive - superior free and open source software solutions built on Linux and Drupal

Several of us at Egressive went to two excellent, inspiring conferences in Wellington last week (18-24 January): Linux.conf.au 2010 and DrupalSouth 2010.

DrupalSouth 2010

DrupalSouth rode in on the coattails of LCA which drew a number of Drupal community "rockstars" to New Zealand. The conference, attended by 100 Drupal developers and designers, sold out weeks earlier. During Saturday and Sunday there were two streams of presentations to both suit highly technical and more conceptual talks. Angela Byron, known to the Drupal community as "webchick", gave an inspiring and down-to-earth talk about the upcoming Drupal 7 release, on which she has put in huge amounts of time in her role at Lullabot, perhaps Drupal's premier training organisation in Canada whose staff boasts a number of leading lights in the Drupal community.

Three Egressive staff members gave presentations:

• Jonathan Hunt presented his Drupal application FixMyStreet, a website that allows (or will allow, when it's launched officially) concerned road users to report issues to their local council via the site or via their position-aware smart phone (e.g. Apple iPhone, Android phone, etc.). The website accepts photos and position readings and will automatically determine the right council to whom to send the notification.
• Kale Worsley presented his work on building Drupal-based web calculators, using the work Egressive has done for the NZ Transport Authority in collaboration with URS NZ.
• Dave Lane gave an update to his talk at the previous DrupalSouth (2008 at the Twisted Hop in Christchurch) on "Ned", Egressive's Drupal-based project management and time tracking application.

All the Egressive talks were well received, and it was great to have further discussion afterward with other attendees. All the talks at the conference were of a high calibre and the audience was engaged and interactive, showing us that the kiwi Drupal community is alive and kicking, with passion for the community visibly apparent.

Egressive was proud to help sponsor DrupalSouth 2010, and we'd like to give a big thanks to Bevan Rudge and Natasha who did the lion's share of organisation for the event which, from what I could see, ran flawlessly. I (Dave), for one, found the conference a real inspiration - I think the other attendees would share that sentiment. It was also a satisfying confirmation of our decision to focus our development energies on Drupal back in 2005. Bring on the next DrupalSouth!