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South by Southwest Interactive starts this Friday in Austin, Texas. The largest tech conference in the world wouldn’t be complete without Drupal, which is why we’ve assembled a guide to all things Drupal at this year’s SXSW.

If there’s a session, party, or workshop that you think should be included, let us know and we’ll add it to the list. In the meantime, here’s all the best Drupal things at SXSW this year.

Did you know that DrupalCon isn’t just for developers? The community survey we conducted at the end of 2014 turned up some interesting facts, including the fascinating statistic that only about half of DrupalCon attendees self-identify as developers. With project managers, C-level executives, and Drupal sales and marketing experts in attendance, DrupalCon is a great place to meet a wide array of passionate Drupal users and advocates.

So, who goes to DrupalCon? Check out the infographic below for a more complete picture of who attends the biggest Drupal conference on earth.

The Drupal Association is thrilled to announce the addition of four new staff members. As part of our goal to increase Drupal adoption and provide the community with strong support and advocacy, the organization has been growing at a rapid rate over the past year. Now, we’re welcoming four new staff members into the fold. Please help us say hello to Elise, Lucia, Rachel, and Tim!

Elise Horvath, Operations Team, Operations Coordinator

Now that we’ve seen real representatives of our Drupal.org user personas, you may be thinking, “these personas are pretty cool, but I’m not sure how they affect me."

Beyond just the obvious applications towards redesigning Drupal.org, any member of our community can use the Drupal.org personas to build better Drupal training programs, tutorials, and Drupal events.

Chris Luckhardt is a familiar face in the North American Drupal scene. An active member of the Toronto Drupal community and a frequent attender of camps, meet-ups, conventions, and more, Chris is a Drupal master in many ways, and an expert in others.

“I’m a Drupal specialist and I do photography on the side,” Chris says of himself. “I tend to do a lot of everything, which is why I call myself a specialist — because I specialize in different elements of Drupal. My favorite areas of Drupal are site building, dev-ops, and front-end development, and I do a lot of agile and scrum project management."

Kate Marshalkina (kalabro) has been using Drupal for three and a half years. A web developer by trade, Kate was approached by a friend who wanted her to do Drupal work with him. After doing some research on the system, Kate agreed.

“It’s quite difficult to learn Drupal without paid work because it requires a lot of time and experience to learn the Drupal way of doing things,” Kate said. “I had joined a security startup, and a security company obviously cares about security on the web. So we decided to use Drupal because it’s a safe, well known open source system. I learned a lot while I was working on my tasks, but I spent a lot of my free time to learn Drupal. Once I started learning, I couldn’t stop— I’d previously worked with other content management with less documentation and information and then I started learning Drupal and... because of the community, and all of the learning resources and videos that are available, I was hooked."

Chris Ohmstede is based out of Los Angeles, California. An experienced programmer, Chris is new to Drupal but already identifies as a skilled persona. Several months ago, Chris discovered Drupal as he was looking for solutions to build a website for hosting a program he wrote.

"I spent a number of years in the banking industry, and in that industry banks are constantly making connections to everything. I was always running in to problems when things couldn’t connect— it was always an issue trying to figure out what was actually going on. Over the years, I wrote a bunch of applets here and there to figure out what the problems were, and my program whycanticonnect is a conglomeration of those applets that work across operating systems, mobile— I’ve got cloud services approaching me about it, too.

In April of 2014, the Japanese Drupal community gathered in Kyoto for their first ever DrupalCamp. Individuals came from other countries to attend the conference, and that was how Keiko Kanda was first introduced to the project.

“I think it might be a bit unusual to get involved the way I did,” Keiko said. “My cousin who lives in Sydney, Australia, married an Australian man. He came to Japan to attend the DrupalCamp in Kyoto and he asked me to accompany him… though some people were presenting in English, he was concerned that he might need a translator.”

“I knew almost nothing about Drupal, even though he had introduced me to what he was working on at that time. But I thought, I would be glad if I could help him out. So I went to the DrupalCamp in Kyoto and it turned out to be a very interesting experience for me.”

Bronwen Buswell is a newcomer to Drupal. Based out of Colorado Springs, Colorado, Bronwen works as a Conference and Communications Coordinator at a nonprofit called PEAK Parent Center, which is dedicated to supporting the families of children with disabilities. While Bronwen’s role isn’t technical, she needs to use her company’s website as part of getting her work done.

“We’re federally designated by the US Department of Education, so we try to be a total one-stop shop information and referral center,” Bronwen said. “Families can call us about any situation related to their child, and we will either refer them to the right agency or provide what they need. We’re focused on helping families navigate the education and special education systems, and we serve families with children ages birth through 26, with all sorts of disabilities, including autism, down syndrome, learning disabilities, and so on."

At the Drupal Association, we’re focused on making Drupal better for everyone. You may have heard that we are working to make the Drupal.org experience better for all of our visitors, but we’re not going to stop there. We also want to make DrupalCon a more valuable and inclusive experience for everyone.