drupalconszeged2008

Coming to Drupalcon normally kills my blogging and Ubercart supporting... but I suppose I'm living across multiple blogs right now and doing face to face support which is much preferred to the forums. The first two days here have been great, with plenty of meet-ups with folks from the forums and elsewhere. I've reconnected with old faces, toured the city of Szeged (which is fairly small, but I still managed to lose Christina), and enjoyed a couple nights of partying out on the town with the rest of the Drupal crowd.

It's wonderful once again and such a pleasure to hang out with people from all over the world. Language can be a little tricky, but apparently I'm not the only one. As I was sitting here typing, another Drupaller trying to find his way around approached me and asked, "Do you speak English?" Very nice.

Anyways... time to finalize session slides and get back to mingling.

(Oh! I almost forgot! In a morning session, I was able to work w/ another Drupaller to submit a patch to the Drupal core... which earned me free chocolate for my wife. )

Well... the big news of the day is that we're in Budapest, Hungary! Woohoo! I flew out with my wife and the other Ubercart folks for Drupalcon Szeged yesterday and arrived safely this afternoon (local time) in Budapest. Unfortunately, everyone else's luggage did not arrive safely... my distrust of baggage handling is justified. I politely offered to share...

We're still excited about the upcoming Drupalcon, though, and are looking forward to hooking up with other Drupallers while we're in Budapest. If you're around, feel free to drop me a line.

As I posted before, I'm super excited about the upcoming Drupalcon in Hungary. I've never been further east than Barcelona, and I never imagined I'd get to spend my first anniversary with Christina in Budapest... I'm definitely up for any sightseeing recommendations for our time there. The Uberdevs have set some goals for Ubercart at Drupalcon, and one of them is to present and share as much information and knowledge as possible. To that end, we've proposed two sessions and a BoF that I hope folks will find useful (and vote for accordingly). I'll be doing my Introducing Ubercart session for the third time running, presenting attendees with a brief overview of Ubercart, a look at some advanced feature configuration, and an update on Drupal 6 development (with an eager eye toward the future). Lyle and I are also planning to present A Hands-On Guide to Module Development aimed at beginner and intermediate developers. We're looking to walk through our module development "best practices" that go beyond coding and security standards into the things we've done wrong and are starting to do right when it comes to structuring/writing code and using Drupal and contributed module APIs. Code samples will be provided... check out the description for more info on the format. Lastly, we've scheduled a BoF to talk about Ubercart in Drupal 6. We're looking to brief folks on where things stand and where we hope to be in the coming months. Hopefully there will be some good brainstorming and collaboration to make Ubercart's core more solid, consistent, and easy to work with on Drupal 6 and beyond. We're eager to share and to learn, and we're looking forward to a good time once again.

Ahh, for once in my life I've registered early for an event. I spent a couple hours over the last few days nailing down the details of an Ubercart excursion to Drupalcon Szeged and am happy to report that the new company credit card works just fine. Registration on the Drupalcon website is quite an experience. It took me a few minutes to orient myself to the whole process (lots of pages to flip through), but once I got it down I was able to register myself and the other Ubercart devs for the event at the awesome discounted rate. Not only that, I got us rooms in a hostel a few blocks away from the venue (no 2 mile hike a la Boston ) and easy travel between Budapest and Szeged at the same time. The organizers were even able to accommodate the trouble I'm causing by bringing my wife along who needs a shuttle bus ticket but won't be attending the conference. Of course the best part... Christina will be joining me again, and we'll celebrate our first anniversary in Budapest before shuttling down to hang out in Drupaltown. We're totally excited, and I can't wait to see the folks I know and the new people I'll meet in Szeged.