Wim Leers Freelance Drupal Developer

This weekend on Sunday, February 7, we'll have a full day of Drupal talks at the 10th edition of FOSDEM, Europe's biggest, free-est and open-est software conference.

FOSDEM, is a free and non-commercial event organized by the community, for the community. Its goal is to provide Free and Open Source developers a place to meet. The Drupal project was granted a developer room at FOSDEM to do exactly that: to share knowledge about Drupal.

The presentations schedule for the Drupal devroom features interesting speakers such as Robert Douglass, Károly Négyesi, Roel de Meester and Kristof van Tomme and even more interesting subjects as mobile device design, AHAH, eID and Views 3. Everyone is invited to attend the presentations.

I will be talking about page loading performance once again. My presentation will be similar to the one I gave at DrupalCon Paris 2009, but extended with the goals for CDN integration module 2.0 and a look forward of what I'll work on for my master thesis.
Last but most definitely not least, Joeri Poesen will show off the File Conveyor set-up he uses for a powerful integration with a CDN (which was written as part of my bachelor thesis).

I went to FOSDEM on Sunday. I got up at 6 AM but went to bed at 2 AM (because I still had to review my presentation) … so I only had 4 hours of sleep! I met up with Jo Vermeulen and Tim Dupont at 7 AM in Hasselt's station. Jo is a PhD student and Tim is a teaching assistant at Hasselt University.
I hesitated at first because both of them have teached me a course either this year or last year, so it'd be a bit weird. But getting to know people is virtually always more fun than pain, so what the heck, I traveled with them anyway!

The highlight of the day for me was of course the big challenge I had posed myself: my own presentation, "Improving Drupal's page loading performance", because it was my first ever! I was going to speak to 150 people, in English, after Dries!
Fortunately, I've managed to learn over the past few weeks how to control myself, that's why I had zero stress at my oral exams (one of which was graded by Jo, funny enough :P) so I should be able to do the same on stage! And it worked, I only was slightly nervous. And apparently it showed: many people congratulated me afterwards because it was interesting and apparently well-presented!
I still think I said "eh" too much and mispronounced too often, but it turns out it wasn't very noticeable. I'll try to improve upon those things next time.

I'm very glad that it went so well and thanks for all the positive feedback! I spent more than 2 full days preparing the presentation and it was definitely worth it :) It seems that my decision to not do a live demo but record a screen cast instead, was a wise one because Emma seems to be planning to do the same in the future.

If you'd like to find out about all the details of my talk and lots of extra information, then look at this page on my web site.

I've got so much exciting good news that I don't even know where to begin!

I was asked to review a Drupal book, was chosen to speak at FOSDEM, my bachelor thesis proposal will be published as part of a technical communications book, I turned 21 and was selected for a DrupalCon DC sponsorship! If only all of this happened while I wasn't in the middle of my exam period…