Drupal

What do you want from me?

Submitted by Larry on 24 May 2010 - 12:59am

One Con down, one more to go. DrupalCon Copenhagen is already taking session proposals. Yoinks!

I've spoken at several DrupalCons by now. It's always an interesting question deciding what to submit for a session, knowing that only some will get picked but not knowing if I'm going to end up doing just one session I wasn't really interested in or 4 that I have to prepare (yoinks!). So this time I'm going to do something different. I'm going to ask you.

#Reality check

Submitted by Larry on 12 May 2010 - 10:56pm

I admit it, I'm on Twitter. I have been for a little over a year. I have a fairly low opinion of it in general, but I am still on it and make random comments to people from time to time.

Earlier today, one of the people I follow tweeted that his young (under 5, I believe) daughter had just done something stupid. Nothing illegal or immoral, just the sort of embarrassing and sometimes destructive stupidity that young children tend to get into. And he then tweeted it.

Which means that his under age daughter's actions are now part of the permanent archive of the US government.

Moving on

Submitted by Larry on 1 April 2010 - 12:21am

It's been five years since I had a major life change. Five years since I finished grad school, found Drupal, and joined the team at Palantir.net, all within a few months of each other. I've learned far more in the past five years than in the seven before it in college and graduate school, both technically and socially. Having a real job will do that to you.

But, it has been five years and it's time for me to move on before I get too settled and lose all forward momentum in my career.

How's your OOP?

Once again, I am slated to present general Object-Oriented techniques at DrupalCon. It's an important topic; sadly a large number of Drupalers don't really "get" OO programming, but Drupal 7 is starting to make heavy use of OO. There are also an enormous number of places in Drupal where a more Object-Oriented approach would make the code vastly cleaner, simpler, and faster, if only more people thought to approach it from that standpoint.

Of course, the question is how to target such a session. I don't want to talk over people's heads, but I also don't want to waste your time with "this is a mouse"-level material.

So, I put the question out to you, future DrupalCon SF attendees. What level of technical detail would be most useful to you?

Conference season is upon me!

Submitted by Larry on 17 March 2010 - 11:51pm

Ah, the spring. So many things happen in the spring. Snow melts. Flowers bloom. The Easter Bunny sells cheap chocolate. People set their clocks ahead in an attempt to confuse their pets. It is also the start of conference season in the northern hemisphere, which means flying about the country talking about Drupal. This year is especially busy, with 10 presentations in 4 cities so far. (Possibly more to come.)

Here's where you'll be able to stalk Crell in the coming weeks:

Experts vs. opinions

Submitted by Larry on 24 January 2010 - 4:40pm

For those who don't know him, Aaron Seigo is one of the leading KDE developers and community leaders. (KDE doesn't have a "lead developer" position, just as Drupal does not, but my understanding is if you merge Earl Miles and Angie Byon you sort of have Aaron's role within the KDE community.) He also blogs far more than is probably healthy, but his posts, while long, tend to be very spot-on.

His latest article is one that is of particular interest to the Drupal community, I believe, because as a large, minimally-structured, Open Source development community we face many of the same challenges that other such projects do, such as KDE. In particular, the challenge of who to listen to.

Where do we go from here?

Submitted by Larry on 30 October 2009 - 1:19am

The "smallcore" debate has heated up again of late, with all its various tendrils. However, I still see a lot of the same misunderstands that I've been seeing for weeks. That can only mean one thing. Time for me to write something. :-)

I do not consider myself a "smallcore" advocate, for one very simple reason: It's horribly misleading. Allow me to repeat what I already said there:

The goals of the "smallcore" movement can be obtained without removing one single module from Drupal core.

Instead, I look at the question of Drupal's future direction from a simple architectural perspective: Is Drupal going to be an additive system, or a subtractive system?

DrupalCon Paris: Drupal grows up

Submitted by Larry on 16 September 2009 - 11:51pm

DrupalCon Paris 2009 is now in the past. As usual there was last minute chaos, lots of people running around behind the scenes going insane, people hugging friends they see once every six months, presentations ranging from super-technical to light and fluffy, general geekery, and of course copious amounts of beer. (This time we didn't drink out any of the bars, but then it is Paris.)

But there was something else, too, that I saw as an undercurrent of much of the conference: Maturity. Not the "acting like boring, responsible adults instead of having fun in Paris" kind of maturity (may that never happen), but the "thinking about more than just being code ninjas" kind of maturity. Drupal, as a whole, is growing up.