In the past five years I have attended 4 DrupalCons and from each one I taken away exactly one life-altering concept/tool/idea that has made that conference worth the price of admission. Common to all of these concepts/tools/ideas was the fact that I could start using them immediately; that they bettered my personal workflow; that they bettered my teams workflow; and that I had to share them with everyone I knew who could spell D-R-U-P-A-L as soon as I got back.

In that spirit, I will give an overview of each of these life-altering concepts/tools/ideas and explain how you can start using them - thus altering your life - immediately.

• Drush (Boston) - This command line Drupal tool is easy to use once you get to know it and even if you just use its most basic functionality it will save you hours days of work.
• Features (San Francisco) - Have you ever tried to remember all those settings you changed in development when it's time to launch something on production ... forgetaboutit! By using features to put all your configuration settings in code you make deployments easier, you make rollbacks easier and you avoid conflicts with your team.
• Render API (Chicago) - At its simplest, the renderAPI give you, the developer full control over what data gets passed to the theming layer along with all the data needed to present it. And it does so in such a way that themers still have full control over the final output.
• Display Suite (London) - Since learning about this module, I haven't had to theme a single view. Display Suite finally fulfills the dream of giving your site admins and themers full control over how nodes (and other entities) will display even in different contexts.

View the slides from this presentation.