Drupal confessions

Proposed session type: panel/open mic

Sessions at Drupal South tend towards the positive and the evangelistic.
I'll be working with Si Hobbs @sime to bring this together.
And there are others in the Aus/NZ community that have expressed interest in such a session.

Newbies can come away from a conference with a sense that drupal is somehow magical, and certain features and modules can be enabled and configured with the click of a button.

Experienced Drupal users know that there are common gotchas. They've made their own mistakes.

There would be great value in a casual session, with an emphasis on casual, where people have the opportunity to express their honest experiences, let their guard down, a great chance for everyone to learn from other people's mistakes, and to give new developers (and even experienced ones) a chance to see that even the most experienced developers make mistakes. And often these are common mistakes.

I'm envisioning this as being suitable as one of the last sessions for the conference, where everyone is ready to start winding down, and relax with a bit of fun, a completion and culmination of the previous events of the conference, prior to the final keynote. A chance for people to chill, enjoy themselves, and feedback some of their successes and their failures too.

I'll bring together some experienced volunteers for the panel chairs, so they can share their stories, and encourage the audience to come up with some examples of their own, and also ask questions that will inevitably come to mind.

A few quotes from slack to highlight this are:

> ""probably one of mine" #drupalconfessions"

> I feel like I owe a “sorry” gift basket to every client I’ve given paragraphs to for building a landing page lol

> I’ve learnt the hard way (or my clients have) but recently i feel like i’m
> doing the right amount of stuff with it in the right amount of reuse

> ... drupal is awesome ...
> But.. well at least in my experience.. I can come out of a talk, or reading a blog about new features being elated.
> and then when I go to use it reality sets back in..

> i love this idea! it could be an open mic

> also trying to figure out what is 'the shittiest thing' i've ever done...... ahh memories

> you've probably prevented me from doing a lot of the potential 'worst thing'
> it took me several years to accept that some people build sites without HTML filtering

> there are some things in Drupal you only learn the hard way, or from someone else who learnt the hard way

> the first Drupal site I built had a custom theme and module with the same machine name
> I had module hooks in the theme and had no idea that the fact it worked was a miracle

> What about 'why is drush hanging there'.. oh damn, xdebug.