Wim Leers Freelance Drupal Developer

This morning we (I'm sharing a room with Larry Garfield, remember?) took the tram at the Sant Marti de l'Erm stop, which is 5 minutes walking from our hotel, grabbed breakfast on our way there, took the T2 tram and got off at Fontsanta - Fátjo (which is only 2 stops further). Total tram travelling time: 35 minutes, of which 15 minutes of waiting for the tram. Huray!

When we arrived, there was a very short line (5 people or so). You get a bag with the official logo and on the inside you can find a DrupalCon sticker, a MySQL 6 reference card, a weird-yet-cool key fob from CivicActions with the imprint "Changing the World One Node at a Time" and of course a DrupalCon t-shirt and lanyard .
Next we moved on to the "laptop room", where everybody would do geeky Drupal or non-Drupal stuff on their laptops. It kind of also was the Meet & Greet room. Larry pointed me to Earl Miles (merlinofchaos) when he walked by, so him I've met too already.

At about 10:35, the welcome message began. Bert Boerland gave an introductory talk, during which the mic already started to have problems. Then it was Dries who gave a short overview of the evolution of DrupalCons (the first being held for 26 people), or rather the explosive growth. And finally Robert Garrigos, the main organizer of the event finished off.

At 11 AM, the first session began: Site review: New York Observer, by Barry Jaspan and Moshe Weitzman. Especially the live previewing future editions seemed an interesting issue to me.

Then it was noon and Konstantin "kkaefer" Käfer's turn to present. His presentation -- Advanced JavaScript development -- was pretty straightforward in the first half for anybody who has ever worked with jQuery. But the second part was indeed more advanced, it was about currying.
You can find the slides on his website.

At 1PM, it was lunch time. There were free sandwhiches and drinks. Well done, DrupalCon organizers!

After lunch, at 2 PM, there was Jeff Eaton's FAPI 3 talk (FormAPI 3: The Adventure Continues). He alternated between fairly long (yet extremely simple) code examples and lolcatz. That's right. Lolcatz. I didn't snap any pictures of that, but I'm sure they'll be somewhere on the net.

One hour later, Ken "agentrickard" Rickard's session began, "Using Drupal with external data sources", in which he showed off his nicely implemented lazy instantiation. His integration with the Yahoo! API was particularly nice. He has a reference site for his session, where you can find back everything.

The last session I went to, was James "walkah" walker's talk: "Image handling in core ... for real this time.". He gave an overview of what modules exist, why they aren't a final solution and made suggestions how we could Do It Right. Then a discussion took off, with various point of views, but the consensus was that we should do the architecture first, make sure any way of user interaction was still possible and don't worry about image as a node/file/separate entity/cck field/whatever yet, because that would be just part of one layer.

Then the first of DrupalCon had come to an end. No wait, did it? Hah, not at all! chx managed to convince a bunch of people to go to a Drupal core debugging session. So we did. In a small café called Virreina at la Plaça de la Virreina (duh), where there was free (yet buggy) wireless internet, we geeked out, as you can see on the picture below.

That's all for today folks, because eaton's "Future of the nodes" session is beginning...

Last night we had the Pre-DrupalCon Social near La Rambla. For me, it were a lot of new faces (it's my first DrupalCon after all). Among them were the most infamous Drupal developers: eaton, webchick, jeff (well, all Lullabots really), chx, Heine and so on. Geeky stuff, good times!
After some cosy chatting, we got to dinner. But apparently the venue, Muebles Ciudad, only offer Japanese food. So it was a shot in the dark for me, and the first time ever I had to eat with sticks. I finished much later than the rest, but at least I managed to eat something :P. I don't think I'll eat it again any time soon though. French fries ... hmmmmm.

At about 10 PM we returned back to the hotel, because Larry "Crell" Garfield, my roommate, still had to finish the code examples for his Drupal and PHP 5 presentation of today. Since chx will also be talking in that presentation, he joined us, so they could go through the presentation -- and to show off his brand new Simpletest Automator module of course :). It's a really powerful tool that will hopefully make unit testing in Drupal a common thing.