A late note about DrupalCon Chicago

I was lucky to receive one of the partial scholarships to attend DrupalCon Chicago 2011. So, thanks for giving me the opportunity to be there!

As any drupalcon I had been part of, the way I feel inside it is just awesome. Actually take almost the whole Sheraton for a week was insane! Let me tell a little bit about my stay there.

People

Definitely the first point. Drupal community is the most friendly and hoping-to-collaborate people I have met in open source community, so meeting those people in real life is just better.

This time there was something special. The Great Git Migration finally was moved to production on Drupal.org on February 24th. I have been participating on the migration team, and I already knew some of them in person from before. But not all, so I have experienced again that great special feeling to meet in person for the first time people I have been interacting with almost every day since November or before.
Actually I was on the marriage of two of them inside the conference! Congratulations again Melissa and Michael!

I also met many people on casual conversations, meet many know developers again, I mean, a week of awesomeness.

Core conversations

I really enjoyed to be part of this track of the conference. It amazing to shared thoughts with people really involved in the project(aka the ones to make drupal happen).

It was really nice that the space was open for anyone who would like to participate.

Three presentations was around the deployment problem: Why our approach to the deployment problem is all wrong(by Greg Dunlap), Configuration Management in Drupal 8(by Howard Tyson) and Unifying Drupal configuration(by David Strauss ). Well, after a little time heyrocker was chosen as the first core initiative owner for this, so we will have a solution in core for this finally!

There was one presentation about core search, Core Drupal Search Architecture for D8, by Jennifer Hodgdon and Peter Wolanin. They definitely agree that a lot of work is needed to be done for drupal 8. Actually they also mentioned Search API, the contrib module created by Thomas in GSoC 2010. I was really interested in this since I am now maintaining Xapian integration, which implement both core search and Search API with Xapian. So, probably Search will be another Core initiative for Drupal 8, awesome news for me.

Leisa Reichelt and Randy Fay presented Redesigning the Issue Queue, a session that really inspire us about the future of our development communication hub, Drupal.org. Randy pointed some issues that will help in the short term, and Leisa help us to think in a long solution. Actually just after the session, she started the Prairie group, which is the right place to get involved.

Finally, Dries presented Drupal 8: How do we do that?, a summary session of the keynote, that tried to start the conversation about how the development of the Drupal 8 is going to be a little different. By the way, during the presentation Sam(sdboyer) help Dries in the creation of the 8.x branch: epic!

Sprints

One of the nicest things of drupalcons is that you can sprint, basically anywhere, anytime if you wave network and power.

This time was not so productive for me, but I actually made some progress on some issues, open 7.x branch on vote up/down, and enjoy a lot hacking with many friends in the same room on different days :-)

BoFs

This conversations are a pretty good space to know people with your same interests.

Like I mentioned after the core conversation about search, Jenniffer scheduled a BoF about it. I was trying to point how the current contrib Search API is doing a good job. But she also makes me realize that we can improve it a lot, and we end up suggesting to use CTools plugins all over there. Several more conclusions and suggestions/details can be found on the wiki Search module as API framework created for that propose. Actually I have also seen that Thomas has proposed a GSoC project to improve Search API contrib this year, so there will be news on this soon \o/

In the Google Summer of Code BOF, I finally decided to be a mentor for Drupal this year! Sumit did a really great job around drupalcon looking for mentors in the conference. Thanks Sumit!

There was also a Git Team Photo session, where all the migration team joined to talk about Git Phase 3, take a photo an attend eliza411 and halstead marriage :-)

I also scheduled a session Drupal contributions visualization, but it just did not work because I scheduled it at the same time that the Lullabot party was taking place. Anyway, it helps me to move the scripts I wrote to Drupal.org, now that we have sandboxes.

Sessions

I also attended some of the sessions, but instead of mentioning all of them, I will try to recommend(from those I attended) the ones that I like the most. Please note that following the links you will find the videos ;-)

• Dries keynote: Definitely a must see. It was great when he mention the new model Core development will be trying to use now that Git our version control system. Each major set of related features will be called initiatives, and instead of having one co-maintainer, each initiative will have its own "intitiative owner". That is a key decision to start embracing the distribute nature of Git, and will let us scale the development.
• Git Phase Next: The Promised Land : Angie, Melissa, Derek and Sam made a pretty good summary of what we have now on Drupal.org and mention some ideas that we will be implementing on Phase 3.

I also need to mention two of the sessions anarcat have mentioned in his post, because they are great:

• Aphorisms of API design: Crell talking about good practices on the architect level for making APIs.
• Show me the money: This is a continuation of the blog post Show me the money! wrote by Liza Kindred, about what are the prices out there that companies are using. This is always interesting, and make us question about the rates we use.

And if you have a user id on Drupal.org you probably want to see Angie and Greg's presentation Scaling the Drupal Community.

Thanks drupal community to be so great! I do not know if I would be able to attend DrupalCon London 2011 (I just feel guilty to ask for scholarship again :-p), so I hope to see you soon and keep the great work!