Just got back from AAAE in LA and I'm still wired. Some of that is post-conference adrenaline. Some of it is probably the espresso.

We set up a Hounder booth, I brought my coffee kit, and for a few days I got to brew shots and talk about airport websites. That's a weirder Venn diagram than it sounds. I used to do coffee professionally — competitions, green buying, traveling to origin — before I ended up running Drupal migrations for a living. A trade show espresso bar is basically the only time those two worlds touch.

Why we were there

Hounder does airports. We migrated LAWA's three sites — lawa.org, flylax.com, and flyvny.com — plus the employee portal off Sitecore and onto Drupal 10 on Acquia. Around 11,745 pages of content, zero downtime at the DNS cutover. (If you've never sweated a DNS cutover at that scale, congratulations, and also you don't get to be smug about it.)

We also run marketing and social for Ontario International. So when AAAE rolled into LA, it felt like the right room.

The coffee bar

Booth gimmicks are usually stress balls, branded pens, or the M&M bowl that gets demolished by 3 PM. I respect the format. I just don't have anything to add to it. Coffee I can actually do.

So I made pour overs to order. One guy came back four times over the course of the conference. Twice for the coffee, twice because we'd started a conversation the day before about flight status APIs and he wanted to keep arguing about it. I'll take either.

Josh on the future of airport websites

Our co-founder Josh Northcott gave a talk on where airport websites are going, and I'm biased but I thought it was the best session I caught. His argument, more or less: airport sites have been static brochures forever, and that doesn't match how people actually use them. What you want on your phone in the cell phone lot is live flight info, accurate bag status, parking, ground transportation, accessibility details. Not the glossy hero image of the terminal.

We're doing this in practice right now on the LAX redesign. A lot of that work is custom integrations and APIs pulling real airport data into the front end. PDFs of the terminal map are out. Your actual gate, your actual bag, your actual security wait — those are in.

The LAWA site already pointed this direction. There are custom APIs running on the existing build for baggage tracking, flight status, and traffic. LAX is the next gear up, and honestly it's the most fun project I've been on in a while.

The people

I met Jason Kidd, which was very cool. The conversations I'll actually carry home, though, are the ones at the booth. Airport directors, comms folks, IT leads from all over the country. A lot of them are wrestling with stuff I'd recognize from our LAWA work: a CMS that should've been retired three years ago, accessibility deadlines closing in, multi-site governance that no one has a clean answer to, real-time data trapped in one system that refuses to show up in another.

Running an airport website is genuinely hard. The audience is huge and varied, the content changes by the hour, and almost every interesting feature involves talking to a system that wasn't built to be talked to. You can't really get a sense of all that over email. You can get it over an espresso.

Coming home

Got home with a lighter coffee kit and a longer list of airports I want to work with. If we talked at the booth, thanks for stopping by. If we didn't, drop us a line. And if you just want to argue about espresso ratios, I'm in for that too.

Already looking forward to next year.