The Splash Award

About the Splash Award

For years, the Splash Awards—which honor the best Drupal projects—have been an indispensable event for the Dutch Drupal community. Since 2017, the Splash Award has finally been presented in Germany as well.

My first Splash Award:

At the tender age of forty, I had the opportunity to experience my first open-source project. I’d like to tell you about it:

In Hamburg, we set off early at 7 a.m. and then embarked on an 850-kilometer drive to Munich with six people and a booth.

In addition to little tattoo sessions in the car—where we all united as the “Dinosaur Crew” with matching tattoos—we carved a path through the traffic on German highways in our van. Before the trip, everyone got to pick two songs, which we tried to sing along to at the top of our lungs. 

Before we knew it—four stops, three burgers, and a few songs later—we arrived in Munich just in time for the Splash Award.

Excited about the three nominations we’d been told about beforehand, we reached the Burda headquarters on Arabellastraße in Munich. However, since we didn’t want to start our day in Bavaria without a Leberkäs sandwich, we made a quick stop at the local bakery, where we were able to introduce Shibin, our colleague from India, to the Bavarian tradition of the Leberkäs sandwich.

Feeling energized and eagerly anticipating winning an award, we made our way to the room in the publishing house that had been specially prepared for the Splash Award. I followed my colleagues, who are apparently quite well-known in the community and spent the first 20 minutes shaking hands, hugging one another, and reminiscing about the good old days.

Ta-daaa.

Mel Kelly takes the stage. An Irishman who has made Munich his home and who, among other things, founded the Munich Comedy Club, is our host today. The event has charm—the charm of a pleasant awards show held not in a sports arena but rather in an intimate setting.

For me, having attended almost excessively grand productions at Adobe and SAP in recent years, this was a pleasant and much more personal experience.

Factorial received three nominations. The DZ-4 website in the “Enterprise” category, the “Schlagerplanet” website in the “Publishing/Media” category, and our information page for “More than scleroderma” for our client Boehringer Ingelheim in the “Healthcare” category all made it to the podium.

At the awards ceremony that followed, we unfortunately won only one award, but it must be said that the competition was strong and their projects were well executed.

That was my first Splash Award.

My Conclusion

I met some really nice people here at the Splash Award and got a sense of the setting for tomorrow’s upcoming Drupal BarCamp. I’ll be back.