Wow, what a week. Lots of people, lots of ideas and even some good work done to boot. Unfortunately I ended up missing half of DrupalCon due to catching a flu bug late on Saturday night that kept me away from Boston until Tuesday and left me pretty much wiped out for the rest of the week. Luckily my presentation on Contributing to Drupal was scheduled for Thursday and I got myself together enough to carry forward with it. It was a fun session with good questions from the attendees and it felt like a good jumping point for the code/docs sprint which followed on Friday. The session was recorded if anyone wants to give it a look, but AFAIK it isn’t uploaded yet. I’ll post the link once it gets there. I also stood up and introduced myself as an association member for the Drupal Association panel later that day.
I only managed to attend one session during the whole thing, which was Steven Peck’s (sepeck) Documentation talk. I have already watched the video of Dries’ keynote and plan to work my way through videos of the sessions I missed over the coming weeks. I even ended up missing the Dojo BoF because it wound up being scheduled for the same time as my presentation. 🙁 The rest of the time that I was actually there was spent catching up with old friends and making sure I finally met in person the people on my “I need to meet them or I will cry” list (Dmitri Gaskin – dmitrig01, Joel Farris – senpai, Brenda Boggs – brenda003, Adam Light – aclight.)
Honestly the highlight of the Con for me was the sprint on Friday. Finally a good opportunity to sit down with people and get some work done! I had added some info about a docs sprint to run with the code sprint hoping to get some folks to help with a mountain of docs work and I was pretty damned excited at the turn out for that and the amount of work we got done. We got a whole bunch of people signed up for the docs team and managed to trim a few pages off the Documentation issue queue while also tackling some long-standing issues. There were great ideas and initiative put forth by a lot of people and I just have to say that pretty much the docs team was kicking some serious ass! So I want to say a BIG thanks to everyone that came out, even if it was short, because I was really inspired by everyone. One bigger working issue that came out of the day was a discussion that started with how to reorganize the CVS/managing a project info which turned into a bigger picture of walking new contributors through all the bits and pieces and nuances of the larger Drupal community machinery. We got a good start but the discussion is still rolling in the Documentation mailing list, so feel free to join in and help us refine. (Thanks to Mike Booth (mechfish) for writing all that stuff up too!) Another cool outcome from Friday is the addition of the #drupal-docs IRC channel on FreeNode. There was a tiny snafu with someone already having the channel but chx took care of us and now it is there for us to use as needed. Feel free to drop in to talk shop or use it for working group meetings (please make sure you post any “meeting” kind of things to the docs mail list.)
So those are the highlights of DrupalCon Boston for me and I’m looking forward to continuing the good stuff that came out of it. w00t!
RockTreeSky 