Preparing for DrupalCon 2010
If it seems that my blog has been on the quiet side the last couple of weeks, it’s because I’ve been devoting quite a bit of time to preparing for DrupalCon 2010. I will be there for the main conference (April 19 – April 21), and I will hopefully make up for my relative silence with a flurry of interesting news and information from the conference next week. It looks to be a great conference with lots of interesting sessions. I haven’t yet decided on all the sessions I will attend, but I have decided on a few:
Monday
- The Bird’s Nest: Behind the Scenes of Twitter: I still have trouble getting my head around the scale of Twitter, so I’m interested in what Matt Cheney (Chapter Three) has to say.
- The State of Drupal: There is sure to be interesting news in the keynote address from the original creator of Drupal, Dries Buytaert.
- Drupal 7 and Microsoft SQL Server: Damien Touroud (Commerce Guys), Bernardo Zamora (Microsoft), and Ashay Chaudhary (Microsoft) will talk about Microsoft’s investments in PHP interoperability and how this relates to Drupal.
Tuesday
- Boost your Drupal site with SEO (BOF session): Mark Brown (Microsoft) will talk about how you can use the SEO Toolkit to help with search engine optimization.
- Deep Dive on Drupal and the Microsoft Platform Session: A look at the technical details on running Drupal on the Microsoft Web Platform. (Note: This session is not on the conference schedule. It will be held on Tuesday from 11:00 to 12:00 in the East Mezzanine Room 236-238)
- Open Source in the Cloud Era: Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media) will talk about “the platform wars that are about to erupt on the net”. This should be interesting.
- The Future of MySQL: Forks, Patches, and Decisions: Nayrayan Newton (Tag 1 Consulting) will talk about the current state of MySQL, where it’s headed, and how this relates to Drupal.
Wednesday
- Harnessing Drupal for Your Next Web Project: Drew Gorton (Gorton Studios), Michael Caccavano (Treehouse Agency), Bill Fitzgerald (FunkyMonkey), and Eric Gundersen (Development Seed) will look at overcoming challenges that face organizations that want to make the jump to Drupal.
- Open Source in Government: “David H. Cole, from the New Media Team at the Whitehouse, will introduce the session by talking about the decision to move Whitehouse.gov to Drupal and their future plans to use Drupal and open source to foster citizen engagement. Other panelists will discuss their experiences working with Drupal and open source in government.”
- Databases: The Next Generation: Larry Garfield (Palantir.net) will cover the new database API in Drupal 7 and how to leverage it in your own code.
I will attend other sessions (not sure which ones yet) and I’ll be at the Microsoft booth (please stop by to say hi). I’m looking forward to meeting people and having fun. Look for my reports from the conference here next week. I will also tweet news as it happens – follow me @brian_swan. (And to follow all conference news on Twitter, search on #drupalcon.)
Thanks.
-Brian
(Edit: Added two sessions.)