Invitations
Core Conversations at DrupalCon Denver
Like at previous DrupalCon's, I'm co-organizing a Core Conversations track at DrupalCon Denver.
The Core Conversations track is a place for people actively working on Drupal or Drupal.org to meet and plan the future of Drupal. Each session is either two 15 minute or one 30 minute presentation, followed by 30 minutes of discussion.
I know a lot of you contribute to Drupal or want to start contributing. If so, Core Conversations are a unique opportunity to present in front of key Drupal contributors, and to make the case for why we need to do more of A or B (e.g. authoring experience improvements, API overhauls, etc.). We need UX conversations, performance conversations, feature conversations, etc. Please share your ideas with the world through Drupal core.
If you have ideas for Drupal core, and you are attending DrupalCon, I suggest that you submit a proposal as soon as possible. The deadline is February 1st so don't wait too long. To get your ideas flowing, here are our conversations from Drupalcon London and Drupal Chicago.
Drupal fireside chat #1: core development process
It's no secret that I travel around the world, evangelizing Drupal to new audiences and connecting with local communities, as well as contributors, from all over the world. In 2011 alone, I traveled more than 400,000 km (250,000 miles) and talked to thousands of Drupal people. Every day, I answer questions that many in the larger community would benefit from knowing as well.
To help facilitate holding these discussions on more of an international scale, I’d like to experiment with doing monthly, informal chats. In terms of format, I’d like to choose a general topic of discussion, then hold an hour-long phone call that all could dial into (with IRC for back-channel discussions and questions) where I can give an update on major Drupal happenings and allow plenty of time for Q&A from the community on the topic for the month. A moderator will help with voicing/unvoicing people during the Q&A section, and the chats would be recorded and put up for download for those who couldn’t make it.
If this idea sounds interesting to you, please join me for the first Drupal Fireside Chat on Friday, December 16 at 10 am Eastern US time (registration recommended so click 'register'). The topic I’d like to focus on for the first session is the Drupal Core Development Process, including sub-topics like a general status update on what is happening with Drupal 8, what role Drupal 8 initiatives and initiative owners have in the development of Drupal 8, and what process changes have been put in place to help improve Drupal 8's development process over Drupal 7's.
Feel free to post additional questions/topic ideas here, and hope to see you on Friday!
Questions for my BADCamp keynote interview?
Did you know there is a DrupalCamp that is bigger than most past DrupalCons? It's the Bay Area Drupal Camp, or BADCamp which is expected to draw over 1,400 people this year for three days of trainings, summits, sprints, sessions, BOFs and parties all across Berkeley this weekend.
Instead of giving a morning keynote, I will be interviewed by Josh Koenig after we've been both been drinking for a while. I'm very excited about the interview format and having it in the evening. The traditional keynote presentation format works well for making statements, but DrupalCamps inspire often a different mood. I expect the interview format will fit this ambiance by being more probing and personal than a straightforward keynote could be.
We still haven't decided on the questions... and that is where you come in. If you were in Josh's positions, what would you ask me? What topics should we discuss together? Just suggest your questions in the comments of this post. Josh will pick both the most popular and the most interesting ones and see where they go.
I look forward to seeing many of you at BADCamp next week!
Party with Varnish
Anyone who runs a high-availability Drupal site knows about Varnish, the open-source HTTP reverse-proxy server. Varnish intercepts requests before they hit the web server and delivers relevant information that it finds in its cache, resulting in lower loads and radically faster pages.
We love Varnish at Acquia. It's one of the ingredients that makes Acquia Dev Cloud and Acquia Managed Cloud so fast.
This Thursday, the Varnish team will celebrate the release of Varnish 3.0 with parties around the world, much as the Drupal community celebrated the release of Drupal 7.
Because we love Varnish, Acquia is organizing and sponsoring two Varnish release parties. One is in Boston, at the Cambridge Brewing Company from 6:30 to 8:30pm; a second is in Portland at the Lucky Labrador Brewing Company starting at 6:00pm. Both are on Thursday, June 16th. See the Varnish 3.0 party page for parties at locations near you.
It's a great opportunity to meet fellow web geeks and have some good (free!) beer. I'll be at the Boston party, and look forward to seeing the local Varnish users!
Further details are on Varnish's web site. See you this Thursday!
Drupal Developer Days Brussels 2011: call for speakers
We co-located the very first DrupalCon in 2005 with FOSDEM, now Europe's largest open source developers meeting. The first DrupalCon was an instrumental moment in the history of Drupal that has set the tone for all other DrupalCons and DrupalCamps. Ever since, co-locating a Drupal event with FOSDEM has been near and dear to my heart. In keeping with this good habit (e.g. 2008, 2009, 2010), I want to call upon the Drupal community to consider speaking at the Drupal Developer Days in Brussels.
Registration is now open for this free-as-in-beer event. It takes place from Friday, February 4 to Sunday, February 6 in parallel with FOSDEM. On that Friday there will be a code sprint. On Saturday and Sunday at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), you can enjoy two days of presentations and workshops on everything that is happening and exciting in the Drupal world.
A large part of the program is defined by the attendees so you are encouraged to propose sessions. So, register and submit your ideas for sessions. Even if you don't present a session, you'll enjoy yourself and learn more about getting the most from Drupal. Plus, you'll be able to see where DrupalCon got started.
FOSDEM 2010: call for speakers
Like the years before, Drupal was granted a developer room at FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting. FOSDEM is a yearly event for the open source community that attracts more than 3,000 developers from all around the world. It's good fun.
At the Drupal developer room you can meet fellow Drupal developers, listen to great talks and discuss Drupal. We'll have the Drupal developer room on Sunday, February 7th form 09:00h until 17:00h. The organizers are still looking for Drupal speakers; let us know in the FOSDEM 2010 group on drupal.org if you want to give a presentation.
Hope to see you at FOSDEM 2010!
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.
