Tomorrow and Saturday, I'm headed off to Drupalcamp Montréal, our first such event in the fair city.
Like all such "Open Spaces" events, we won't really know what the schedule is until tomorrow morning, but here are the sessions I'm planning on giving, in relative order of geekiness:
As of this writing, there are over 5,600 active issues in the Drupal core queue. About half of those are listed in the 2,650 active issues for Drupal 7. And the "patch queue for Drupal 7 -- those issues that have at least *some* code to fix them in various stages of completion -- clocks in at 1,040 issues.
These numbers are, quite frankly, staggering. Discouraging, even, some might say. With so many issues out there vying for attention, how are we to find those ones that are really important, such as killer new features, powerful API enhancements, and critical bug fixes? While Drupal 7's development cycle doesn't have an expiration date on it yet, we all know that day will come, and probably sooner than we'd ideally like. What can we do to make sure that important patches are raised to the surface and receive adequate developer and committer attention?
To succeed, we'll need to employ a two-pronged approach: taking out the trash, and digging up the treasure.
Here's another tip for those who are looking for more reviews of their patches and faster commits: describe what the heck your patch does! :)
A simple enough premise, and It sounds obvious, right? But you'd be surprised how few patches are accompanied by a good, solid list of changes.
I was recently named Geek of the Week by Maria "Ubergeeke" Webster of .51 - GeekSpace for Women.
I met Maria at OSCON this year, and she is hilarious, friendly, awesome, and possibly an even bigger geek than I am (I know, right? I didn't think it was possible either! ;)).
Her site highlights women geeks who are kicking ass, new technology trends, and all the crazy stuff she is doing. Might be of interest to some of the Drupalchix out there.
Thanks, Maria! :)
Patch authors are always looking for a strategies to help shorten the length of time it takes to go from creating a patch to seeing it reviewed to getting it committed. Here's a quick tip for any patches that involve a UI change: Submit a screen shot with your patch!
We've all been there. You sit down to write a "simple" patch. Maybe it upgrades a module to Drupal 6. Maybe it adds a small feature, or fixes a bug that's been annoying you for awhile.
The Drupalcon Szeged schedule just went up last week. It's jam-packed with interesting sessions ranging from low-level geeky goodness, to design and usability sessions, to Drupal business best practices. And the BoF schedule is filling up with tons of interesting stuff, too.
A list of the sessions I'm leading/partaking in follows the break. But first! I need your help!
I just saw this float past the stream in #drupal...
A couple weeks ago, Amber Gillies had asked if she could interview me about Google Summer of Code and my experiences in the Drupal project as part of the piece, Open source technology is hungry for new college grads. Yeah... just *try* to get me to shut up about how awesome GSoC and Drupal are. :D She did a very good job of turning my firehose of an e-mail into coherent sentences. ;)
Edit: Holy crap, this has been Slashdotted, too.
http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2008/07/and-winners-of-2008-google...
http://drupal.org/webchick-wins-best-contributor-open-source-awards
I have lots I'd like to say about this, but am a bit overwhelmed just at the moment. Suffice it to say, my sincerest thank you to everyone who nominated me for this award, and to O'Reilly, Google, and the Drupal community in general for being so unbelievably awesome.
Here's the presentation that Marianne Masculino and I did about how to contribute to both WordPress and Drupal:
It was really cool to see the overlap between how WordPress does stuff and how Drupal does stuff, and all the ways the communities are similar and how they're different in how they work. Also, Marianne was really awesome and nice. :)
Thanks to everyone who turned out to see it... It was great to meet you! :)
Also, I found a "live blogging" version of the session at http://www.sparkplugging.com/marketing/blogher-2008-open-source/.
