Dries Buytaert

State of Drupal presentation (April 2010)

Two weeks ago at DrupalCon San Francisco I gave my traditional state of Drupal presentation. A total of 6000 people watched my keynote live; 3000 were present at DrupalCon, and another 3000 watched the live video stream. Nonetheless, a lot of people asked me for my slides. So in good tradition, you can download a copy of my slides (PDF, 48 MB) or you can watch a video recording of my keynote on archive.org.

Drupal core developer summit at DrupalCon SF

On Saturday, April 17th, before DrupalCon San Francisco, I'm helping to organize the very first Drupal core developer summit. The goal of the Drupal core developer summit is to talk about ways we can improve Drupal core, and the core development processes, all while having a good time socializing with fellow core developers.

To make it lively and fun, we'll do a series of 10 minute lightning talks. In between the lightning talks, we'll have a number of meatier discussions or breakout sessions. The lightning talks will be divided in two categories: the first 8 lightning talks will take the format: "Why X sucks and how to improve it" where X can be anything in Drupal core; the last 8 lightning talks will take the format "Wouldn't it be awesome if ...". The idea behind the lightning talks is to educate core contributors about problems that need to be fixed, to present foundations for solutions, and to bootstrap collaboration.

The event is open to all, but ... in order to attend, you must be prepared to do a 10 minute lightning talk. To secure a ticket to the Drupal core developer summit, you have to submit a 4 slide presentation by March 17th, 2010.

We expect one background slide to provide context or to talk about the history of the problem, one slide with a clear problem statement, and a couple of slides to propose a solution. You can focus on big things (i.e. How session management can be made more scalable) or smaller things (i.e. Why drupal_get_schema() is slow and how to make it faster). Everyone who submitted slides ahead of time will be invited to attend. All slides will be shared publicly, but not everyone will be invited to present as we'll only have time for 16 lightning talks. Some talks will be hand-picked because they are important or particularly intriguing, other talks will be randomly selected the day of the event.

This should be a lot of fun!

FooCamp

Last week was crazy. Six airplanes, three time zones, four different hotels, two rental cars, an Acquia Board meeting, two nights in a tent and ultimately, my mind blown at FooCamp.

FooCamp is the annual invitation-only conference organized by Tim O'Reilly. It is the mother of BarCamp, if you will. The people you get to meet at FooCamp are impressive, and the format (including the nightly campfires) really sets people up to talk, brainstorm and geek out. The result? A fire hose of new ideas and a lot of new friends. Thanks Tim!

Just like last year, I was pleasantly surprised by how many of the Foos are using Drupal, planning to use Drupal, or even evangelizing Drupal. More good stuff comin'!

More photos in my FooCamp gallery.

Gilbane

I'm in San Francisco this week to sing the Drupal gospel at the Gilbane conference. I take part in a panel discussion called Social Technologies for Ad Hoc Information Sharing. Also on the panel will be John Newton, co-founder and CTO of Alfresco, and Michael Wechner, president of Wyona.

Tomorrow evening, Chris Messina is organizing a Drupal and DiSo dinner to talk more about DiSo, a collection of tools to enable distributed social networking applications. Feel free to join us!

More details in the video blog below:

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! More photos in my FooCamp gallery.

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:

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. :)