DrupalCon Singapore 2024 Recap

2024 is done and dusted and while 2025 will be a busy and exciting year, I’d like to take the time to look back at 2024.

Don’t worry, this won’t be a long read about the 25 events I attended and spoke at last year. Instead I’d like to talk about DrupalCon Singapore, which was one of the last events I attended before the Christmas break.

Here’s a video where my colleague Ceinthia and I do a recap of the event:

What is DrupalCon?

DrupalCon is a conference that is organized by the Drupal Association in various parts of the world. As the name suggests, it’s a conference about Drupal, the well-known open source content management system.

The Drupal community is pretty big and these events are usually well-attended with delegates from all over the world. 

These events are about learning, about networking, and about contributing to the project. The formal sessions, the sidetrack activities, and the contribution sprints facilitate this and make DrupalCons worth attending.

Revamping DrupalCon in the APAC region

Typically, there’s a DrupalCon in the US, and one in Europe each year. Occasionally, DrupalCons get organized outside of the EU and the US:

• DrupalCon Sydney was organized in 2013
• DrupalCon Bogota took place in 2015
• DrupalCon happened in 2016

But on December 9th 2024, another Asian DrupalCon was organized in Singapore, 8 years after the Mumbai event. And of course, we were there to sponsor, to exhibit, and to present.

You can imagine that having an event like this in Singapore, is a major boost for the Drupal community in the APAC region, resulting in a lot of Indians, Australians, and South East Asians traveling to Singapore to participate.

We heard about it and we decided to get involved

As a Technical Evangelist I engage with various communities, and I speak at conferences and meetups where I meet the people from those communities.

When I was in Singapore earlier this year, speaking at a local meetup, my colleague Ceinthia and I had a chat with Solihin Jinata. Solihin Jinata, who goes by “SJ”, is a local community leader and he informed Ceinthia about an upcoming DrupalCon in Singapore later that year.

We were excited to hear about that and immediately decided to get involved as a sponsor. As it turns out, we were the very first sponsor of DrupalCon Singapore. During the open address of the conference, the organizers mentioned this and thanked us for that.

But let’s rewind back a bit.

You have to come prepared

While it is very interesting to engage with developers and other members of a particular tech community, you have to come with a plan. Creating awareness is part of that plan, but there’s so much more.

As a sponsor, we were allowed to exhibit and have a stand in the expo area of the venue. This allowed us to get the right exposure and get us in touch with the audience. But there’s no universal one-size-fits all message: it all depends on who you’re talking to, and what their role in their organization is.

To meet those expectations, you have to send the right people to the event, and have a good balance between technical people and colleagues who operate more on the business side.

Ceinthia is responsible for the APAC region, and our goal is to support her. On the one hand this means helping her achieve her commercial goals. But on the other hand it’s about helping her help the local community.

Our colleague Faira was also there to help, she’s based in Singapore, and Audun, who is based in Tokyo and who is technical, was flown in as the “local” tech resource.

There was also a speaking slot assigned to us, as part of the sponsor package, so they also flew me in to speak, and to assist with conversations at the booth.

We made sure we had a suitable offer for the attendees. This special offer consisted of a stripped down version of Varnish Enterprise, with select features that were specifically tailored to improve the performance of Drupal, and to make managing a reverse caching proxy like Varnish a lot easier and a lot more flexible.

We managed to price this offer very competitively, ensuring we reach a mid-market audience that otherwise wouldn’t qualify for Varnish Enterprise. This is part of our ongoing strategy to productize a commercial version of Varnish, and fill the large gap between Varnish Cache, which is open source, and Varnish Enterprise which is aimed at larger organizations.

I can’t elaborate much on that right now, but announcements will follow. Stay tuned!

The last part of the plan was to produce a video in which we talked about our involvement at DrupalCon, and the special offer we had for delegates of the conference. This video was then shown to the audience during the opening address.

The Agency Leaders Dinner

The day before the conference, the so-called “Agency Leaders Dinner” was organized. It’s a semi-formal dinner, organized by the Drupal Association to bring sponsors and agencies together.

The event was hosted by Michael Richardson, who is the Chair of DrupalCon Singapore. He talked about the state of DrupalCon, about what the association is doing. He invited Tim Doyle, the CEO of the Drupal Association to further elaborate on this.

And of course, the guest of honor was Dries Buytaert, creator of Drupal, CTO of Acquia, and fellow Belgian. He talked about some of the exciting things that are happening in the Drupal world, and of course Drupal CMS, which will be launched on January 15th.

The dinner was held at a restaurant called Moxie, in Singapore.

The food was wonderful, but the company was even better. The room was rather small and it was packed with interesting people. There were tons of networking opportunities, we noticed that the majority of the attendees were Australian and Indian.

We spent a lot of time talking to members of the Drupal Association, to Drupal agencies from the APAC area, and even some competitors. It was a very nice precursor to the actual conference, and it gave us the ability to get a sense of who’s who.

Ceinthia even did a small speech, which gave us some good exposure in a room with a highly qualified audience.

Conference Day

The first day of DrupalCon Singapore started off really early: as an exhibitor we have the chance to set up our stand before the actual delegates arrive. This meant being onsite at 7 o’clock.

Thanks to our colleague Justyna, who is one of our dedicated event managers, the stand was shipped to Singapore, along with a bunch of swag. Don’t underestimate the power of swag: people love the free goodies and they are excellent conversation starters.

Notebooks and pens are very basic and boring, but a lot of people still need them at conferences to take notes during the sessions. 

But there’s no doubt that our socks were extremely popular. Someone told me that “socks are the new t-shirts”, and they are absolutely right!

We also brought a couple of copies of my book, and handed them out to people who were really interested. And while I’m happy to do it, I always get slightly embarrassed when people ask me to sign it. But I guess that’s the way it goes.

All these engagement opportunities allowed us to get a better understanding of the challenges that organizations face when trying to improve performance and scalability through caching.

The interesting thing about Drupal events, and that also applies to Magento events, is that people know who we are. They have heard about the open source project, they potentially use it, but in a lot of cases they are not familiar with Varnish Software's offering.

That’s why these sponsorships are so useful: we managed to show the audience who we are and what we’re about. We can give them a comprehensive overview of features that we offer that aren’t available in the open source version, and we can show them how this adds value to their organization.

The Dries note

Most of the added value for us came from engagements at the booth, and the talk I presented. For the audience it was primarily about the talks, of course.

I already talked about the opening address, and our video that was shown, but I also want to refer to the keynote. Well, at DrupalCon events they call it the “Dries note”, because Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, is the one presenting it. It’s a tradition.

In this edition of the Dries note, Dries talked about the much anticipated launch of Drupal CMS. We all know that Drupal is a Content Management System (CMS), but it always required a level of development to fully integrate Drupal for clients.

Compared to its open source competitor WordPress, Drupal is much more advanced, has a way better code base, but it pales in comparison with the ease of use of WordPress.

A while ago, the Starshot initiative was started to close the gap in terms of ease of use. Starshot focused on bundling modules into recipes, and offered them as easy to use features. The UI was also overhauled to make this happen.

The initiative has now turned into an actual product, which is called Drupal CMS. While this was not a new announcement, it was the focus of the keynote.

A variety of features were presented, and pre-recorded demos were shown. Based on what I’ve seen, I already know that 2025 is going to be a big year for Drupal.

Will it be enough to overtake WordPress? Of course not! But you have to start somewhere.

Not our first rodeo

While we make it seem like this is the start of something new, we have been supporting the Drupal community for a long time, be it more behind the scenes.

Varnish has been used by Drupal for ages. Most of the big Drupal agencies and Drupal hosting platforms have used Varnish in some way, shape or form, since the very start.

If you look at the Drupal documentation, Varnish is mentioned. The documentation even links to a tutorial I wrote about how to properly configure Varnish in a Drupal context.

We have been involved for a very long time, and we even sponsored DrupalCon Chicago back in 2011.

It’s not my first rodeo either. DrupalCon Singapore is my 7th DrupalCon. I spoke at DrupalCon Vienna in 2016, Drupal Europe in Darmstadt in 2017, and I have spoken at a couple of DrupalCamp events in Belgium.

So for me, it was fun to be back at an event that I’ve been attending since 2012. And besides talking to Drupal developers from all over the APAC region, I also was able to present our story on stage.

What’s next?

I referred to the productization of Varnish earlier. We’ll double down on that and ensure that we have a product that is easy to use, and that can be easily tailored to the needs of Drupal users, at an affordable price.

For a lot of developers, understanding VCL is a big hurdle. We do provide an official VCL template for Drupal, but when customizations are required, users are forced to learn VCL. 

Our goal is to hide some of these complexities underneath a user-friendly interface that focuses on features, and easily allows users to customize the behavior of their Varnish cache without losing the Drupal-specific behavior.

In terms of events, we will sponsor Drupal Mountain Camp in Switzerland, where I’ll speak. I’ve also been invited to Drupal Dev Days in Belgium to speak about Varnish and Drupal. And finally, we’re also looking at DrupalCon Vienna, which is the big one in Europe, later this year.

The next big thing in Drupal is of course the launch of Drupal CMS on January 15th. Launch parties are being organized worldwide. In Singapore it’s SJ who is organizing the local launch party. I’m sure Ceinthia will attend.

Conclusion

Drupal is alive and well, its community is still vibrant, and the new Drupal CMS will make Drupal more relevant than ever in the world of content management systems.

We were very happy to have attended DrupalCon Singapore 2024, and we look forward to even more engagement with the community going forward.