walkah: conference

I'm looking forward to hanging out at Mesh 2008 the next couple days. I've had to miss it for various reasons the first two years, so I can't wait to see what all the buzz is about! Watching the talk on twitter today about MeshU has gone well and things are off to a great start.

As usual, I'll be the one decked out in Lullabot gear talking about Drupal. Hope to see you there :)

A few of us Lullabots flew directly from DrupalCon Boston to Austin for SXSW Interactive. It was actually my first trip down to Austin (sadly), and despite some general road weariness, I had a rockin' good time. Personal highlights included:

Worst. Website. Ever.: Aside from being a who's who of the internet famous, it was an awesome format, completely hilarious and really well presented. I'm inspired to bring it to a future DrupalCon :-)

A Critical Look At OpenID: It was nice to watch other OpenID experts field the same questions I tend to - and give similar answers. Mostly, I hit this panel because I hadn't yet met David or Simon. We had lunch together after... I should really get myself out to more identity events. IIW 2008?

CMS Roundup: Obviously, I went to support fellow 'bot, Jeff Eaton, but was blown away by the packed audience (for a 10am session) and the overwhelming Drupal love!

Otherwise, it was great to hang out with friends like Colin and Andy, seeing TorCamp friends everywhere, and meeting a whackload of new people. Looking forward to next year already!

With almost a week gone by since I left Boston, it's high time to do a quick recap of DrupalCon Boston 2008. Despite spending most of the week battling a nasty stomach flu, making two trips to the Apple Store in Cambridge, and being without my laptop (which suffered a failed keyboard and trackpad), I had a great time and want to offer my congrats to the organizing team for a solid event!

Although I took part in 6 sessions, I only presented one of them on my own: OpenID and Identity in Drupal. I was pleased with how the session went - packed room with lots of great feedback and discussion. For those interested, check out the slides on slideshare.

Otherwise, it was really great to see all the old faces and meet some new ones. For anyone who missed it, the Acquia party was a blast (Orbit rocks!). Looking forward to the next!

In my usual you-heard-it-here-first-fashion, I'd like to be the last to announce the upcoming OSCMS Summit 2007 happening March 22-23rd in Sunnyvale, CA. This is actually the 2nd (annual?) event. While the conference last year was a success, it was *very* heavily Drupal-based. I'm actually hoping to see a bit more involvement from the other communities this year, and it's looking like that may well happen.

I'd also like to point out a couple of events that you should attend. The first is a session I have proposed on OpenID called: OpenID : In Drupal core and your CMS too. While I'll mostly be covering the implementation for Drupal, I think it has significant relevance for all content management systems. Now that Microsoft and AOL are behind OpenID, the project is definitely gaining momentum, but the more content management systems that support OpenID the better for the long term success of the protocol as a dominant force in the Identity 2.0 space. So, vote for the session, and come on out :)

The other event is actually not part of the conference itself, but Dries and I are teaming up with the Lullabots and Civicspace to present what should be a very informative session on Drupal Performance and Scalability. It's not a free event, but highly worth it for anyone running a large Drupal installation, and all the proceeds will go back to the Drupal project.

Get yourself signed up and see you there!

Yesterday marked the end of the Vancouver PHP conference, which was a lot of fun and went quite well (I thought). I led two sessions : one on OpenID (with Johnny Bufu from SXIP). For those who don't know, I've been working a lot lately on getting OpenID support into Drupal - and it was nice to demo some of that work. I also covered how to use JanRain's PHP Library to OpenID-enable your PHP app (check out the slides here).

I also led a session on beginning Drupal module development. Those of you who attended the DrupalCon in Brussels may remember this as the infamous pants talk - always a crowd pleaser ;)

Thanks a lot to the organizers and sponsors from Vancouver PHP, I had a great time. Oh, and a special thank to Shane from ActiveState - part of the speaker shwag package was a license to Komodo IDE. I've heard good things about the latest Komodo, can't wait to check it out.

I've been meaning to post about this for a while, but in a couple weeks I'm headed back to Vancouver to present at the Vancouver PHP Conference, February 12th and 13th. I'll actually be giving two talks (back to back even): the first will be a joint presentation with SXIP on OpenID going through background and explanation and also looking at PHP code for openid (maybe even some drupal code ;). The second presentation - just me, sorry - will be an introduction to drupal development. Not to give anything away, but there may just be pants involved.

I should also note that fellow bryght guy and drupal ninja, Steven Wittens, will be presenting. But, if that's not enough, there will also be some other PHP developers you may have heard of giving talks like Rasmus, Derick Rethans and more - check the schedule for the complete list. Now, go register.

A week ago today I was just wrapping up at seneca's free software and open source symposium. My talk, "Why Drupal can kick your CMS' ass", was a lot of fun and well received. Overall, I thought the event was really well done, and I look forward to taking part again next year!

For those who missed it and/or are interested: the slides from my talk are available here and video is available here. Enjoy!