Invitations
Speaking at MIT
I will be speaking at MIT on Monday, October 26 at 5pm in the Stata Center in Cambridge. I plan to talk about the state of Drupal, Drupal 7 and Open Source development in general. After the presentation, there will be some time for social networking. The event is free so you're all invited to attend!
On a somewhat related note, we have some intern positions open at Acquia to give people the opportunity to come and learn about Drupal -- students from MIT, Harvard or other universities interested in an internship at Acquia should certainly attend and approach me about it.
FrOSCon
This weekend, I will be giving the keynote presentation at FrOSCon in Sankt Augustin Germany, near Bonn. There will be a dedicated Drupal developer room there on both Saturday and Sunday (August 22 and 23). FrOSCon is a relatively new, but rapidly growing conference covering open source technologies of all kinds. This is the fourth year that Drupal has been involved and it has become one of the most important Drupal events to attend every year in Germany.
On Saturday we'll we having a Drupal 7 code sprint, coordinated via IRC (#drupal at FreeNode) and Twitter so that local and remote developers can cooperate in real time. Angie Byron, my Drupal 7 co-maintainer, will be with us the whole time live on IRC from Canada. She is pulling an all-nighter for us, so let's make sure to get some hot patch action! Anyone whose time zone is remotely compatible is invited to join us – the sprint will run roughly from 10:00h to 18:00h European Central Summer Time (6 hours ahead of US Eastern).
On Sunday, there will be several Drupal presentations in the developer room as well as lots of chances to meet other Drupalistas, get support, install Drupal on your machine and so on. There is a planning wiki for the Drupal side of the event at: http://groups.drupal.org/node/24601. My keynote presentation will be at 12:45h on Sunday "The Secrets of Building and Participating in Open Source Communities."
Keynote abstract:
Everyone knows that the most successful open source projects and vendors benefit from a thriving community. But how exactly is this done? In this session, Drupal project lead and Acquia co-founder and CTO Dries Buytaert will share his secrets for building and participating in a thriving open source community, including its commercial ecosystem. He'll describe the mindset, mechanisms, and practices that are essential for a thriving project and community.
Hope to see you there!
Drupal schedule for FOSDEM 2009
Next weekend on Sunday, February 8, we'll have a Drupal day at FOSDEM, Europe's biggest Free and Open Source software conference.
FOSDEM is a free and non-commercial event organized by the community, for the community. Its goal is to provide Free and Open Source developers a place to meet. The Drupal project was granted a developer room at FOSDEM to do exactly that: to brainstorm, to discuss and to share about Drupal.
Jo Wouters and batigolix, the Drupal devroom schedule wrestlers, made the schedule for the Drupal developer room available on the FOSDEM website this week. As you can see in the summary below, it is packed with interested talks. Everyone is invited to stop by and to take part!
On Saturday evening, there will be a social event in cafe De Monk for all the Drupalistas that are in town.
| Time | Presentation |
|---|---|
| 09:15-09:30 | Welcome to the Drupal devroom |
| 09:30-10:15 | What's new in Drupal 7 (Dries Buytaert) |
| 10:15-11:00 | Improving Drupal's page loading performance (Wim Leers) |
| 11:00-11:45 | Building a community website using Drupal (Niels van Mourik, et al) |
| 11:45-12:30 | Drupal multi-site for fun and profit (Emma Jane Hogbin) |
| 13:00-14:00 | Hacker-proof your code: Drupal security for developers (Neil Drumm) |
| 14:00-14:45 | Moving content from staging to live server (Roel de Meester) |
| 14:45-15:30 | Drupal showcase: Uit in Vlaanderen / Cultural Activities in Flanders (Davy Van Den Bremt, et al.) |
| 15:30-16:15 | Automated web translation workflow for multilingual Drupal sites (Stany van Gelder) |
| 16:15-17:00 | Taxonomy: Drupal's powerful classification system (Bart Feenstra) |
DrupalCamp Köln
On January 17-18, I'll be in Germany to attend DrupalCamp Köln (aka DrupalCamp Cologne) and hang out with the German Drupal community. DrupalCamp Köln is organized by Thomas Narres, Daniel Niehaus, Jürgen Brocke, Torsten Zenk, Florian Latzel, and others in the Köln/Bonn users group.
The venue is sponsored by GFU, a leading German IT training organization. Other sponsors include Host Europe, the Kölner Internet Union, O'Reilly, Packt Publishing, APress, Martinsfeld and Acquia.
With so many good presentation proposals, it's hard to point out just a few. An incomplete list of sessions include SEO, fields in core, Acquia, SimpleTest, Ubercart, performance optimization, installation profiles, Solr, module writing, theming and many more.
This is the first ever Drupal-specific camp (or Drupal un-conference) that Germany has ever seen, and so far a little more than 150 people have signed up. The organizers are expecting to max out the venue with around 180 participants. Prominent German Drupalistas attending and/or presenting include: Konstantin Käfer, Hagen Graf, Daniel Juling, Ben Birkenhagen, Gerhard Killesreiter, and plenty of other great contributors. International Drupalistas coming include: Morten (King of Denmark), Mikkel Høgh (Denmark), Florian Loretan (USA / Switzerland), Roel Demeester (Belgium), Jo Wouters (Belgium), Damien Tournoud (France), Joeri Poesen (Belgium), and many more.
Three people from Acquia will be present; Robert Douglass, Jeffrey McGuire (aka Jam) and myself. I'll do a keynote on Drupal. Robert plans to demonstrate the latest ApacheSolr improvements and will give a first glance at Acquia's hosted search solution. Robert and I will also be holding an Acquia Q&A session, and Jam will be ready to help with your Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 upgrade problems, pesky Views 1 to Views 2 conversions and hosting a moderated discussion on Upgrade as a Barrier, and how to move adoption forward.
Two other things you shouldn't miss are the Drupal.org upgrade and redesign hackathon -- your chance to get your hands dirty with the big Drupal.org redesign project -- and the Ubercart workshop that takes place on January 19 and 20, right after Drupalcamp Köln. The Ubercart workshop is organized by Commerce Guys and AF83.
FOSDEM 2009: call for speakers
Mark your agendas because the Drupal project got a developer room at FOSDEM on Sunday, February 8, 2009. FOSDEM, which stands for Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting, is a yearly free and non-commercial event for the open source community, held in Brussels (Belgium). With more than 3,000 attendees coming from all over the world, FOSDEM is the biggest open source event in Europe.
Our goal is to use the developer room to meet, discuss, and talk about Drupal. Right now, we're looking for speakers so let us know in the FOSDEM 2009 group if you want to give a presentation. Or, if you want me to present about a specific topic, you can let me know in the comments of this post. I'm always looking for good ideas. Hope to see you at FOSDEM 2009!
DrupalCon Szeged
Good news! The next Drupal conference (DrupalCon) will take place in Szeged, Hungary from August 27-30. If you want to learn more about Drupal, or if you want to capture and absorb the passion and enthusiasm behind the Drupal project, this is the place to be.
DrupalCon Szeged will bring together hundreds of Drupal users and developers from all around the world. Whether you are a Drupal professional or an enthusiastic user coming to find out more, you're invited to join us in Szeged. Mark your calendars!
This will be the first Drupal conference in Central Europe, and I'm excited by that. There are a lot of Drupal people in Central Europe, probably more so than in Western Europe, and this is a great way to reach out them. Plus, I've been to Hungary twice and liked it very much.
Public PhD defense
In exactly two weeks, I have my public PhD defense.
Title
Profiling Techniques for Performance Analysis and Optimization of Java Applications
Abstract
As Java applications become more complex and as virtualization becomes more important, we need to investigate profiling techniques that combine information captured at different layers of the execution stack. We present three novel profiling techniques. The central attribute of these contributions is that they link information gathered at different levels of the execution stack, and that this information is used to gather more complete profiles. By collecting information at the micro-processor level, we have profile information that is more accurate, faster to obtain, or that was otherwise not available. We show that these advances in profiling techniques lead to better understanding of program behavior and faster executing Java applications.
Logistics
The presentation is free to attend for all, but RSVP by e-mail or in the comments. It starts at 16:00h on Thursday, January 24th, and will take place at the Jozef Plateauzaal (Jozef Plateaustraat 22, 9000 Gent).
