Notes from DrupalCON San Francisco

Sun, 05/02/2010 - 07:38

I've been home from DrupalCON for over I week and it's taken a while to de-DrupalCon-ize and arrange my thoughts in somewhat relevant order. Not only was this conference overwhelming because of the awesome sessions but also because of the people - 3000 is a massive crowd! But one step at a time...

We arrived early on Sunday and by we I mean my entire team and my SO. While it was great to have the opportunity to show everyone what DrupalCONs are all about it also presented a unique challenge of having three newbies in tow. Being a newbie is tough - you don't know anyone, no one has ever heard of you and if you are introverted on top of that then the first two days are challenging. You also have no idea which sessions to attend and which session is "the one" that you must attend at all costs... My recommendation was to attend whichever seemed interesting since all the sessions will be available later on. Also try out at least one code sprint, learn to patch if you don't already and attend at least one DrupalCON party even if you don't drink. At this point I would like to that Jennifer for organizing an impromptu learn to patch BOF and teaching my fellow developers to patch;)
I swear before meeting Jennifer they were all like this:

while after returning from BOF their eyes were bright and they were ready to patch anything:

Ask not what Drupal can do for you -- ask what you can do for Drupal

We had three great keynotes this year - I'm not going to repeat everything that was mentioned (and you can go watch them if you want to). The message still remains the same - despite the growing population Drupal still maintains a community rather than a product.

However at the same time I'm afraid that the number of attendees for DrupalCON Chicago will be close to or over 6400 people (based on the increase % over the last two years). While previous DrupalCONs have been mostly about people who contribute in a visible manner by writing code, tests, documentation this eventually will result in non-contributors dominating the pool of people present which leads to a situation where there will be less developer specific sessions and more Drupal user sessions. I predict that in a few years DrupalCONs will either split in two or will embrace the model started at DrupalCON San Francisco where there are code sprints before and after the conference with possibly developer sessions at the same time.
My boss wrote his point of view on a similar topic but from a non-developers point of view. In any case there will be challenges ahead.

Dark Corners of FAPI

Out of the sessions I attended there's 3+1 on my list that were really close to my heart:

Every year try to to attend some sessions that introduce something new for me (Leveraging the Chaos tool suite for module development), a few that I'm already familiar with but could use a refresher (think Eaton's How Drupal Works: An Architect's Overview or Ken's Node Access in Drupal 7 or Greg's Drupal as a web services platform using the Services module) and then some to get my nerd on. The database session truly was the best one this year.

And being a translation project maintainer I never skip a session that includes anything relevant to multilingual Drupal so this year it was Parlez vous Internet? Ignore the rest of the world at your own risk. I will definitely look into icanlocalize.com services and i10n_update module which now works with localize.drupal.org. Having been around Drupl since 4.7 days we've accomplished a lot translation wise but it's still nowhere near understandale from an end user point of view.

Domain Access BOF

The best part of this year's DrupalCON was getting some DA users together to discuss DA roadmap for Drupal 7 and to over things that need to be fixed (labelled as API WTF) and possible improvements.