DrupalCon San Francisco 2010 or why I love drupal community

The last days has been an incredible experience for me. Let's start at the beginning :-)

I had the luck that my application was one of the chosen to receive a scholarship for travelling to this year first DrupalCon, at San Francisco, California on USA. After dealing with visa stuff(thanks for the letter Cary Gordon!), which was really easier than for France, I was in a ten-hours flight to the Con!

Stephanie Canon was the person in charge to coordinate about the scholarship, and it was really easy, mainly because of her great work. Thanks for taking care of so many details!

So, what happened there?

Volunteering

I also register as a volunteer for the conference, and this time it was great! I mean, I could help a lot the day before the start moving/getting ready things, and in the first two days, mainly behind the registration table(I can not believe that we registered almost 3,000 people!), but this time I had lot of time to spend at the conference.

The sessions

There were a lot of sessions about a lot of topics in many rooms at the same time, and all of them were recorded with really good quality :-), so there is not any excuse to not watch them: they are all on original schedule posts at the official site(uploaded to archive.org and embed there)

Here is a mini-list of the sessions I recommend you(only sessions I was in, I still need to watch the other ones):

• The state of Drupal: the classic Dries session, a must watch.
• CVS exodus: some of my favourite drupal heroes together talking about the path to my favourite version control system, git; how we came to git and how can we help in the migration process. It could not be better. BTW: Derek played before the session, here what I could record.
• Accessibility in Drupal 6 and Drupal 7
• The State of Panels 3 and More of What You Love
• Aggregate and import with Feeds!
• Batch vs. Queue: an API Smackdown
• Leveraging the Chaos tool suite for module development
• How Drupal 7 Fields are changing the way you write modules
• Advanced Drush

Many productive sprints!

Everyday after the conference, and also one day before and after there was space to have sprints, they were called ChX coder lounge at conference days.

I tried to participate on them everyday, and it was great to share ideas with community, and it was also pretty productive! The main things I could do there were:

• Vote up/down documentation: finally, after procrastinating this too much, I found the time to do it!
• Version Control API introduction documentation: The real plan was to make a BoF session about it, but talking with Sam, the co-maintainer of the module, it seem that it's a better idea to make a little screencast about the presentation I made. So I'll be posting it in this blog and probably on an official channel :-p in the next days.
• Core bugs! Yep, we all can fix our beloved beast :-)
  • #776178 PHP 5.3 warning for command line install: this was an amazing casuality. I was lucky and Moshe was at my left on the table, and after hearing a problem about PHP 5.3 on drush, I tried to help. So, after realizing it was a core bug, and apparently at drupal install, I rolled a little patch to fix it, and I could not beleive it, he RTBC it, and then I was talking to chx about the solution. Magic happens :-) .. it was the quickest core patch I ever get in. The next day, DavidXXXX propose a better solution that I rerolled to include a rollback to my original patch(no more necesary), I mean it was a really tricky bug at Form API, and it was the first time I read drupal install, but anyway it was a _great_ experience, and it show me again that you always learn awesomeness at FLOSS development.
  • #237566 Automated JavaScript unit testing framework
  • #507502 Provide Locale support for jQuery UI
• Git migration planning: On the CVS exodus session, there was an invitation to join the real work behind migrating to git. The session started kind of ethereal, but suddenly all was working, we could communicate between us, and we all have now real assigments to do. Now, I'll do all I can to improve versioncontrol* modules to help.
• Close a lot of issues at vote up/down module with the help of Pratul(lut4rp) and Simon(lyricnz) and a big OMG on our faces when Greg deployed it to g.d.o!

Great time, we love community

I really appreciate to have had the opportunity to meet a lot of people from the community. Again a lot of new nick-face relations to my head.

Finally I could meet: Sam Boyer(sdboyer), one of my mentors at Google Summer of Code 2009; Derek Wright(dww), one of the Drupal Infrastructure members who, like he said, maintains the (necessary and awesome!) modules nobody want to maintain; Earl Miles(merlinofchaos) the creator of views and other modules you-always-need, who recently writes an awesome ctools integration patch for vote up/down; Damien Tournoud(DamZ), one of the top D7 contributors, and the maintainer of git.drupalfr.org; Randy Fay(rfay), a great core contributor who actually was some time in Peru; Andrew Berry(deviantintegral); Jeremy Andrews(Jeremy), a great FLOSS contributor whom I'm lucky to share the co-mantaining of xapian integration module; Benjamin Doherty(bangpound), Jeff Robbins(jjeff), HedgeMegde, Simon Roberts(lyricnz), Joshua Rogers(JoshuaRogers).

I also meet many people I already met before:
Angie Byron(webchick), the awesome omni-present D7 branch core co-maintainter; Moshe Weitzman(moshe), core contributor and the maintainer of modules like devel and og; Károly Négyesi(ChX), great core contributor and one of the people behind MongoDB integration for Drupal; Pratul Kalia(lut4rp), the co-mantainer of vote up/down; Antoine Beaupré(anarcat), one of the maintainers of aegir; Chach Sikes(chachasikes), to talk about the Rosa María(assoritam) interest about drupalchix; Lisa Rex(lisarex); Charlie Gordon(cwgordon7); Dmitri Gaskin(dmitrig01); Jim Caruso(jimcaruso) and many more!

I also met two Drupal Peru people: Fernando(develCuy) and Nancy(joyita)

Thanks for the opportunity to be at DrupalCon again!