San Francisco
FooCamp was mindblowing
It's not every day that you get to meet so many great people, or that you get to talk to Larry Page (co-founder Google). I feel overwhelmed, yet inspired, and I'm pleasantly surprised by how many people are using Drupal on this side of the planet. Thanks O'Reilly!
From left to right: Jeff Robbins (co-founder Lullabot + Drupal contributor + former rockstar), Larry Page (co-founder Google) and Evan Williams (co-founder Blogger.com, co-founder Odeo, co-founder Twitter).
Drupal and The Onion
For more than a year, The Onion, a fake news site, has been using Drupal. They have millions of visitors a day, and probably have one of the most popular Drupal sites in the world (not to mention one of the funniest Drupal sites in the world).
While that is a great testament for Drupal, no one really knew who built The Onion, and every once in a while that topic came up amongst us Drupal developers.
Well, not anymore! Yesterday, we gave them a surprise visit and stopped by their office in San Francisco. We met with Michael Greer, Director of Web Development, who promptly took us out for lunch. We ended up talking about performance and scalability over Greek food in the park.
So without further ado, one of the Drupal faces behind The Onion:
Michael Greer, Director of Web Technology at The Onion.
FooCamp
Tomorrow, I'm off to San Francisco to attend FooCamp, the annual invitation-only conference organized by Tim O'Reilly.
Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised when Tim O'Reilly invited me to FooCamp a couple months ago. I first met Tim little more than a year ago when we had a breakfast meeting in Sebastopol. We talked about Drupal and Open Source software, Tim connected me with various other people in the Open Source community, and after breakfast, we were invited to spend some time at the O'Reilly headquarters in Sebastopol.
And now FooCamp. I've never seen a line-up of people this impressive. Some of them include Larry Page (co-founder Google), Ray Ozzie (Chief Software Architect at Microsoft), Mitch Kapor (founder of Lotus and of the Electronic Frontier Foundation), Mitchel Baker (President of the Mozilla Corporation), Allison Randal (Perl Foundation), Guido van Rossum (founder of Python), Evan Williams (co-founder of Blogger.com, co-founder Twitter), Bram Cohen (creator of BitTorrent), Kevin Rose (creator of Digg), Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia), Caterina Fake (co-founder of Flickr), Chris Dibona (Open Source Manager at Google and one of my favorite geek-heroes), Michael Arrington (TechCrunch), Peter Norvig (Director of Research at Google) ... the list goes on and on.
Despite the incredibly interesting audience at FooCamp, the opportunities, the desire to evangelize Drupal, the quest for what to do after my PhD, and the many friends I have in San Francisco, I can't help but feel out of place already. Maybe this feeling stems from the fact that I have to leave my pregnant wife behind for a couple days, I don't know. One thing is for sure: life has been a chain of unexpected and often incredible events that keep taking me by surprise. I'm grateful for that. :)
Drupal meet-up at Zeitgeist
Liza Kindred (Lullabot) kissing the skull that marks the entrance of Zeitgeist, a biker bar that hosted the San Francisco Drupal meet-up. Not the most classy place for such meet-ups but I had a great time talking to the 40-50 Drupal people that showed up. Thanks for all the fun (and the Drupal feedback)!
Drupal meeting at Teh Space
Good food, beer and Powerbooks at the nightly Drupal meeting at Teh Space, a collaborative workspace in San Francisco. Attendees were Earl Miles, Jeff Robbins (Lullabot), Neil Drumm (Advomatic), Boris Mann (Bryght), Kieran Lal (CivicSpace) and myself. We talked about the install system, the Drupal administration pages and thinkered about Drupal's future.