walkah: barcelona

430+ attendees. 5 sessions. 4 days. One hell of a time.

I have to say, I might be addicted. The post-drupal conference mixture of utter exhaustion (plus jetlag) and renewed energy and excitement is a feeling that I've really grown to look forward to twice a year. This is one great community full of great people. i love you all!

My personal highlights:

• Having my son, Andrew, along- definitely mitigated some of the usual homesickness and was hopefully an experience he'll cherish as long as I do.
• My socks! I love 'em - and they made chx jealous :)
• Seeing Dries, Gabor, Bert, Adrian, and all the other non-north american drupal folks that I feel like I never get to see enough of
• Hanging out with the amazing team from Lullabot: you're rockstars, each and every one.
• A great venue and superb planning - hats off to Robert Garrigos and crew!
• All the amazing energy behind image/file handling, OOP and other awesome stuff to come in Drupal 7

As promised, I gave 3 presentations... all of which went well (I thought):

• OpenID: it's in core... now what?. Another variation on my OpenID theme. Boris wanted more discussion on directions - but we're still educating, IMO. We'll get there, Boris, promise! (slides | pdf)
• Image handling in core... for real this time.: Possibly my favourite session. Lots of good energy and good discussion - and already some subsequent action. I'll definitely be posting more on this topic! (slides | pdf)
• Drupal and SimpleXML: This session was fun, and better received than I'd expected. I'm not the only one excited by PHP5! (slides | pdf)

In addition to those three, I also took part in a couple of panels: the live podcast was a lot of fun - go check it out!

I was also on the Drupal Association panel. This was interesting - it was clear that as a young organization - we still have a lot to learn and a lot to do. I was sympathetic to the concerns raised, but there has been a lot of discussion amongst association members since the panel and hopefully we'll see some positive changes forthcoming.

*phew* ok, that's enough for now... although I've left out a bunch. Jetlag calls... g'night planet drupal!

I haven't quite made it to "my bags are packed and I'm ready to go", but I'm only a load of laundry away. Tonight I'm flying off to Spain (for the first time ever!) to take part in the biggest Drupal Conference yet! Boy we've sure come a long way since a handful of us met in a basement in Antwerp just 2.5 years ago...

As usual, I'll be pretty busy. The following sessions should be interesting ;) :

• OpenID: it's in core... now what? This is going to be sort of a continuation to the talk I gave at the Yahoo OSCMS. I hope to cover a few main things : first, there's still a lot of confusion about what OpenID really is (or more so what it isn't). Hopefully, I can answer some of that. I'll also be outlining where I'd like to take the code moving forward, as well as new technologies in the OpenID community that we - the Drupal community - should keep our eyes on.
• Image handling in core... for real this time. It wouldn't be a Drupal conference if I didn't, right? I have not spent as much time as I'd like lately with image/media stuff in Drupal - but a lot of really great people have. I'm hoping to gather as many of said people as possible, survey the landscape of "image*" modules and devise (or at least share my thoughts on) a plan for making Drupal better with images out of the box.
• Drupal and SimpleXML. This will be a brand new talk, but one I'm excited about. The move to php5 brings lots of advantages for developers, but the one I'm most excited about is the option to ditch all of our old expat-based parsing code in Drupal. As someone who enjoys writing a lot of 'web-services' type code, consuming and producing XML documents in a simple and efficient fashion is exciting.

I'll also be sitting on the Drupal Association panel and hope to rock out on the Live podcast (those are always fun). It should be a busy week! :)

I'm super excited to see all the awesome people in the community - especially some of the new fathers. But, I'm *really* excited to be bringing my son Andrew with me. I love getting to travel as part of the Drupal community and am so excited to get to share a new adventure with my favourite guy on the planet.

Back to packing...