Drupalcon Szeged : The final judgement

First things first, I got some distraction of the holiday period so bit late for this posting but even after some days, Drupal is still active in my head!

So let's take a look back and see what started the second day. For sure a good breakfast, that was what they were thinking I suppose when they invented the testing party! If you saw the table in front that was what you would think! Loads of chocolate and pancakes were standing ready for use IF you helped writing tests. And that is what people did, and ofcourse, also what we did!

As a new Drupal developer I never wrote these kinds of tests before and I must say it's brilliantly easy to write. With the guidance of an more experienced test-writer (flobruit). The result is a patch for the drupal_http_request basic auth. So thanks to everybody for making such a huge amount of patches/tests and eating all that chocolate. If somebody got Krimson's chocolate please tell us if you liked it ;-)

Followed by Building the drupal community around the world, who, why, where and when? it was a pleasant intermezzo. This session has been brought very structured and really wanted to let you know which are the topics that needs alot of preparation and caution!
In a crash course these topics should not be forgotten : Money (indirect or direct sponsors,...), the venue (crew, building,...), wifi, schwag, promotion (use what you see yourself, blogpost, forums, ...!) and many more! Thanks Joeri, Kristof and Jacob for bringing this forward and I'm looking forward to see loads of Drupal community meetings!

The Caching and Performance improvements session was a weebit too technical for me but don't underestimate the force of caching and performance from inside the server is what I remembered. If you would like to know more about it contact killes or search drupal.org.

Staying in the same room, the session about Front End Performance - How to make your website blazingly fast! was amazing. It showed me a number of useful tools and tips! Going from 'render your page as early as possible' to the anatomy of a webpage it got me a good inside look into the structure and building. Impressive techniques combined with human language is the style I like to listen too, well done!

After some 'resting' period Day 3 and 4 were quickly there. Going from very detailed jQuery sessions to user testing and getting the hang of the 'Neologism project' it all passed by very quickly. I must say I learned alot in the jQuery session about what is possible with these techniques. I already used jQuery alot but was not aware of the big possibilities and good integration into Drupal. One thing though for one of the speakers in the jQuery sessions: David Eads, if you're reading this.. Sorry again for your wet pants ;-)

The Neologism project was for me a big hit. I had never seen somebody so motivated to really change something in how we do things in the webprocess so Stéphane Corlosquet, well done! Please if you are interested in RDF, semantic web and more, check the Drupal and semantic web neologism project

Finally in the learning process I joined some meetings for building the Drupal BE/NL community website and in the codesprint I participated in the Usability team to create ideas on how to make Drupal 7 more usable and to stimulate people to work on the usabilty as well instead of only functions! Want to know more or help? Check the usability group Keep an eye open for these projects soon!

Ofcourse I didn't mention one part yet, the evenings are one of the more important events that make Drupalcon so unique! Time for some brainresting, to summarize the evenings : continue with eating and drinking with the Drupal community.. You guys are the opposite of what the clichés are telling ;-)

Oh and PS: I switched fully from standard Vista to Ubuntu.. So such conventions really have alot of power as you can see! Continue with this path. There is a bright future ahead for Drupal and the Drupalcons!

See you next Drupalcon!

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