DrupalCon

I will be presenting together with Konstantin Käfer on Front End Performance. To be more exact, he will be talking about Front End Performance in general, and I will be talking about a subdomain of that: CDN integration.
Our sessions were merged because they overlapped to some extent — so now there’s just one supercharged session instead! It’s scheduled for Thursday (3 September), at 9 AM, in the La Reserre (translated: coal-shed) room.

In specific, I will be talking about the work I’ve been doing as part of my bachelor thesis. Integrating Drupal with a CDN was quite painful previously, but by using the CDN integration module, you can choose for either:

After 15.5 hours of travelling (1.5 hours on the train, 8.5 hours of flying, 20 minutes of bus, 30 minutes in the metro and the rest spent waiting or walking), I arrived at the Harrington Hotel in Washington D.C. Immediately afterwards, I left for the pre-con registration, at which already about 400 people registered themselves.

Volunteering

The next day I got up at 6:08 AM since I couldn’t sleep due to the heat in the hotel room and because I was volunteering at the DrupalCon registration booth. With about 10 volunteers, we registered about 800 people in 2 hours (registering consists of giving them their lanyard, personalized name card, swag bag and redirecting them to the t-shirt booth). It worked pretty efficiently :)

Thanks, Drupal community! {#thank-you-bonnie}

I’d like to thank Bonnie Bogle once more for her Herculean organizing efforts. And of course a thank you to all attendees whom all partially paid for my travel expenses and Drupalcon ticket (I won a scholarship). I hope you’ll all benefit from my work in the end!

I’ve got so much exciting good news that I don’t even know where to begin!

I was asked to review a Drupal book, was chosen to speak at FOSDEM, my bachelor thesis proposal will be published as part of a technical communications book, I turned 21 and was selected for a DrupalCon DC sponsorship! If only all of this happened while I wasn’t in the middle of my exam period…

Reviewing a Drupal book

Packt Publishing contacted me on January 7, asking if I was interested in reviewing Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions. It’ll be my first book review, but I’ve always had eye for detail, consistency and clarity in books (I have yet to see the first U.S. college text book that is well written), so I hope it’ll be of use to somebody :)
You can expect the review towards the end of February. What interests me is that it’s targeted at business owners instead of developers, so I’ll do a practical test with my dad, who’s not technically adept.

It’s over. My second DrupalCon. DrupalCon Szeged 2008. I’m posting 2 weeks after date because I had another awesome vacation 2 days after the DrupalCon, to the south of France (in Brandonnet), with friends of the table tennis club.

And it was AWESOME. I met so many new people. I had lots of interesting conversations. Had lots of fun. Saw a different way of life.

I met people I’d been talking to for so long via IRC:

This morning we (I’m sharing a room with Larry Garfield, remember?) took the tram at the Sant Marti de l’Erm stop, which is 5 minutes walking from our hotel, grabbed breakfast on our way there, took the T2 tram and got off at Fontsanta - Fátjo (which is only 2 stops further). Total tram travelling time: 35 minutes, of which 15 minutes of waiting for the tram. Hurray!

When we arrived, there was a very short line (5 people or so). You get a bag with the official logo and on the inside you can find a DrupalCon sticker, a MySQL 6 reference card, a weird-yet-cool key fob from CivicActions with the imprint “Changing the World One Node at a Time” and of course a DrupalCon t-shirt and lanyard .
Next we moved on to the “laptop room”, where everybody would do geeky Drupal or non-Drupal stuff on their laptops. It kind of also was the Meet & Greet room. Larry pointed me to Earl Miles (merlinofchaos) when he walked by, so him I’ve met too already.

At about 10:35, the welcome message began. Bert Boerland gave an introductory talk, during which the mic already started to have problems. Then it was Dries who gave a short overview of the evolution of DrupalCons (the first being held for 26 people), or rather the explosive growth. And finally Robert Garrigos, the main organizer of the event finished off. See the first attached picture.

Last night we had the Pre-DrupalCon Social near La Rambla. For me, it were a lot of new faces (it’s my first DrupalCon after all). Among them were the most infamous Drupal developers: eaton, webchick, jeff (well, all Lullabots really), chx, Heine and so on. Geeky stuff, good times! After some cosy chatting, we got to dinner. But apparently the venue, Muebles Ciudad, only offer Japanese food. So it was a shot in the dark for me, and the first time ever I had to eat with sticks. I finished much later than the rest, but at least I managed to eat something :P. I don’t think I’ll eat it again any time soon though. French fries … hmmmmm.