At the end of day one, I figured I'd give a little report on how DrupalconDC is going for me. I'm having a good time, and learning a lot. I went to three pretty intro talks (two of them were a bit too intro for me, but I got a few good tips) and one advanced panel.

• Themers Toolkit- I've only done a few themes, and modified a few, but I guess that was enough for this panel to be too beginner for me. But I did learn a few tricks I didn't know, so it was useful. It was a good talk.
• Totally Rocking Your Development Environment - also covered mostly stuff I knew, but I did learn a few tips (and also learned a little from my next door neighbor. It was a great talk by an incredibly enthusiastic speaker. I can't believe though, that she suggested using Makefiles for Drupal!
• Organic Groups - since I haven't personally implemented OG, I didn't know a lot about the innards, and how it really works. It was a great introduction, and I'm totally sold on it. He gave some sweet examples of it's use (like teamsugar.com) which is amazing, and made me totally rethink using Elgg.
• Advanced Theming Techniques -  A nice talk given by two folks from CivicActions, once of whom I'd worked with jointly on a client project. I learned a fair bit, and now have some good techniques to think about using as I start doing more serious theming (although, truthfully, I'd like to eventually be able to hand that off to folks who have a better visual sense than I.)

Dries' keynote was fun, and it was great to hear a bit about the history, and also the ideas about where Drupal is going. One thing he said in particular stood out: "Start thinking of the internet as one big machine." The idea is that as barriers to the movement of data come down, doing things that were never possible before become a lot more possible. And there is some really cool stuff coming in the future like OAuth, Job Queues, RDFa output, XMPP, and Activity logs. Really neat. I missed a couple of talks I'd wish I could have made, like the Drupal SEO talk, and Install Profiles. I was glad to see that there are a significant number of women here, and a number of women presenters, too. I hung out with Drupalchix for lunch, and met new folks, saw some colleagues, and generally have been having a good time. I'm very much looking forward to tomorrow.