Another awesome DrupalCon!

It’s over. My second DrupalCon. DrupalCon Szeged 2008. I’m posting 2 weeks after date because I had another awesome vacation 2 days after the DrupalCon, to the south of France (in Brandonnet), with friends of the table tennis club.

And it was AWESOME. I met so many new people. I had lots of interesting conversations. Had lots of fun. Saw a different way of life.

I met people I’d been talking to for so long via IRC:

• Kris ‘EclipseGc’ Vanderwater (U. S. A.)
• Kristof ‘swentel’ De Jaeger (Belgium)
• Roy ‘yoroy’ Scholten (The Netherlands)
• Sam ‘sdboyer’ Boyer (U. S. A.)
• Nathaniel ‘catch’ Catchpole (U. K.)
• Charlie ‘cwgordon7’ gordon (U. S. A.)
• Peter ‘pwolanin’ Wolanin (U. S. A.)
• … and so many more. I also got to meet clients of mine, mostly people who sponsored features for my Hierarchical Select module: Kris Vanderwater, Hans Rossel and Michael ‘mzenner’ Zenner.

The venue was beautiful, modern and clean. The organization was nearly flawless. Only on the first day there was a problem with the internet. Kristof van Tomme and Gábor Hojtsy did an excellent job!

Best presentations

1. David Strauss — Indexes and denormalization: keys to scaling sites with massive content
   I already knew about database normalization, the use of indexes, relational algebra and so on, thanks to the Introduction to database technology course I took at the University of Hasselt. Nevertheless, his explanations were clear and concise, his diagrams surprisingly eye-opening. The explanation really supports the raison d’existence of his DNA module. Excellent presenter.
2. Rasmus Lerdorf — Simple is Hard
   Rasmus took a long time to get to the point sometimes. But it worked. His talk was about PHP’s history, but mainly about PHP’s performance. The funny thing is that we all use PHP in a way it’s not meant to be used; it’s only designed to be a templating language, nothing more. Yahoo!, where Rasmus works, has all functionality written in C/C++. (I actually prefer C++/Qt over PHP/Drupal any time. Strong typing for the win. But that’s another discussion.) In his tests, Drupal’s include architecture was pretty good, but performance bad. He did not turn on page caching though, after which Drupal’s performance was good.
3. Stéphane Corlosquet: Drupal and the Semantic Web: the Neologism project
   The first half of the presentation covered the concepts behind the semantic web (and RDF), the second half explained what the Neologism and RDF CCK modules are about.
   I’m going to try to convince my professors to allow me to do my bachelor thesis on this subject — more about that later.
4. Lenz Grimmer & Jakub Suchy — High availability solutions for MySQL: An Overview and practical demo
   This presentation was more accessible than the first half of the title suggests, thanks to the last 2 words. The demo was pretty cool: they Jakob Suchy brought 2 servers plus the additional required hardware and did a live demo of a failover. A rare opportunity to actually see the dynamic failover do its magic!

The experience

I was sharing my room with Sam Boyer and also hung out a lot with Nate ‘quicksketch’ Haug, Roy Scholten and the guys from Krimson. I often ended up being surrounded by Dutch people, and picked up some cool Dutch expressions (there’s a difference between Flemish and Dutch) — which made me realize how much I miss languages.
At the university, I only get math, abstract stuff and programming, no languages. I especially miss French and would love to learn Spanish and/or Italian. But, where to find the time?

I tasted the local food: I was absolutely fond of the Sulky Chicken that you could get in the restaurant close to the bridge; the goulash soup that Nik Le Page recommended though, was pretty bad.

yoroy is really an awesome guy. As Sam put it: he “lives in the moment”. When he saw something he liked, he would get out his Moleskine notebook and start drawing. You could ask him any music question and he’d know about it. And I think a trained eye would even be able to tell he’s an artist because he’s always observing.
Another interesting guy I ran into is Alex Dergachev. He’s a Romanian guy who migrated to New York when he was a teenager and is now living in Canada. He always has a different opinion. While I disagreed on many points, he makes solid arguments; he’s got a different perspective on things, including things Drupal. If he’d start spending time on contributing to Drupal, we should see interesting things coming from him.

The last night, I had 5 half liters. That’s WAY more than I’m used to, so I was a little beyond tipsy. Nevertheless fun :) Because Nick Veenhof and I waited for swentel (both Krimsoners), I missed it, but apparently Morten led a Drupal mob, yes, you read that right; a Drupal mob of 150 Drupal people to another bar when this one closed (did I mention us Drupal folks managed to close three bars because they couldn’t handle us?), which I didn’t enter at all because 8 or so Drupalers ended up having an interesting discussion — of which I don’t remember any details thanks to the aforementioned amount of beer — outside of that bar. I do remember seeing Larry dancing though — hard to forget I guess :)

On the train back, Larry Garfield, Sam Boyer and I shared a wagon with a Hungarian woman and Roel Guldemond. Roel and I got talking and turned out to have a really really interesting conversation. He used to be a teacher at a college, just like my dad. And also similar to my dad, he tried to innovate, but was held back by the layer above him in the employee hierarchy. Which explains his aversion for enterprises, much like mine. It can’t work in a natural way. It always results in frustration and abuse.

Budapest

Larry and I staid in Budapest for 2 more days. We went to see some of the (apparently) most interesting places, mostly thanks to the sight seeing bus (of which there seem to be 3 companies, two of which both have the same red and yellow buses, and one with pink buses, each one labeled “Barbie bus”…). The most interesting thing? A dog in a cage that was embedded in a store’s counter, with a “DANGER” sticker on the front. Really! If you don’t believe me, check out the picture below.

Overall, Budapest sucks because it’s so incredibly ugly and badly maintained. Although that seems to be changing.

The last day, we went to the Széchenyi thermal bath together with Kris Vanderwater and his wife. By the way, it’d be a crime not to go to one of the thermal baths when you’re visiting Budapest. While in the wonderfully relaxing 34ºC bath, Eric Gundersen and Bonnie Bogle of Development Seed ran into us. We all went to dinner together to a nice small place, then went to a very nice café (called the “Biker’s Café” if I remember correctly) for drinks and Ken Rickard joined us afterwards, together with his wife and his wife’s Hungarian study friend.

The next day, Larry left for Vienna on the hydrofoil and I departed homewards, only to be in Belgium for one day and leave for France.

Awesome times :)