Rob Loach .Net

I'd like to send a thank you to all who were involved with this year's Drupalcon. It was the first Drupalcon I have attended, and will most definitely not be the last.

The sessions were amazing and I learned a lot at every one I attended. The birds of a feather talks were very productive and fun. The thing I liked most out of the whole conference though, was meeting everyone. I had an amazing time, and can't wait for the next one.

Thanks a lot, Drupalcon, and I'm looking forward to meeting you again. Here are some pictures from the conference...

This is a list of sessions I'll be attending at Drupalcon tomorrow:

Site Building: Drupal Multimedia

This session will show you how to bridge the gap between Drupal and multimedia. Drupal is cutting edge. Though support for multimedia out of the box is currently spotty, with a few contributed modules and some minor expertise, it can be used to create anything from a classy personal photo gallery to a hip music & video blog to a mega-corporate gaming and multimedia heaven.

Community and Core: GHOP (Google Highly Open Participation)

GHOP, which stands for Google Highly Open Participation, is a contest
which attempts to get high school students involved in open source
organizations such as Drupal. From November 2007 to February 2008, many 13-18 year olds did amazing work for Drupal, and many of them are
planning on being long-term members of the Drupal community. This
session will cover what GHOP students did for Drupal, and how their
becoming part of the community will strengthen Drupal. This session
will be a mix of presentations led by both GHOP admins and students,
and there will be a panel discussion about the GHOP experience.

Mareting and Business: Making a Career out of Open Source

Open Source software overview, the two license types, selling a solution, embedding, and sell services.

Community and Core: OpenID and Identify in Drupal

This session is about identity management in Drupal focused primarily
on the role of OpenID. With the release of Drupal 6 and the inclusion
of OpenID support in core, it’s time to look forward on the future of
digital identity, and how Drupal can best grow and expand to
accommodate the changes.

A number of other sesions on Monday sound very interesting, but sadly I can't be in two places at once!

Next week, more than 800 people will gather in Boston and talk about Drupal for four full days. This annual event is known as Drupalcon, and it will be the first one I'll be attending.

The sessions will cover how large organizations are involved with the open source project (like Google and IBM), how it can benefit any company (Profitable Web Development Process), where authentication systems are going today (OpenID and Identity), getting the speed you need (Performance Tuning), developing through automated testing (SimpleTest), how Flash can benefit from a backend system (Drupal and Flash/Flex), building AJAXy user interfaces (Drupal 6 AHAH), ensuring secure websites (Security), usability analysis (Administrator/User Friendliness), and much more.

I depart on Sunday afternoon from Toronto, and will be there Sunday night. I'll be wearing my Drupal Camp Toronto shirt, so I should be relatively easy to spot. I am looking forward to seeing you all in Boston!