Off to Barcelona

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...