FOSDEM

This past year, I've been happily presenting at FOSDEM (which "is probably the most developer-oriented Free and Opensource conference" and is taking place in Brussels, Belgium each year). I've had a great session on new things in Drupal 6 and it was even videotaped.

FOSDEM is again coming to Brussels in 2009, and the dates are Saturday 7 and Sunday 8 February 2009. The 2008 Drupal group is now renamed for 2009, so FOSDEM-interested parties can congregate in there for this next year as well. The event itself ran on a Drupal website, and keeps running for the upcoming year as well. It would be great to set up a Drupal developer room again there in 2009!

I have only been able to provide a short recap of FOSDEM 2008 so far, due in part to Dries' request not to publish materials from his part of our talk before DrupalCon Boston. There was video available of all the other FOSDEM Drupal presentations already, thanks to Luc Van Braekel, but he was unable to arrive in time for our presentation. Now that DrupalCon Boston is over and Dries published the video of his presentation there, I asked the Krimson guys, and Bruno De Bondt in particular, who made a recording of our presentation, to make the video available. He made the recording available on Google Video:

I also exported the slides I built into a convenient PDF form (2.2 MB). This format does not include the demo videos I made (in playable format), and is somewhat modified in title and attribution, since it does not include Dries' slides, but otherwise matches the slides I presented (even including some extra notes). For Dries' content, it is better to look at the State of Drupal video and slides.

Again, thanks to Jo, Roel and Joeri for putting resources in to organize this event!

I just arrived back home yesterday, and could happily report that this year's FOSDEM was a great experience for me. I have last been there three years ago, at the first Drupal conference (which was at FOSDEM and also in Antwerp in a hotel basement). Lots of stuff changed. FOSDEM grew much bigger, there was a huge interest in sessions going on the Drupal room, as well as other rooms I visited to check out some sessions. Some topics were not as well covered as I expected them, like the Mozilla Prism session going about what's planned, and completely without any working demo. That was not much more then what we already knew.

Staying with the Krimson guys turned out to be the best I could do. They were not only welcoming, having perfect coffee and great wines at home, we got along very well. Jo and Heidi also helped me out a great deal to medicate the flu I seemingly got on Saturday. (I sincerely hope I did not pass on that to any of them). Looking forward to meet up with you in Boston again!

I made a few photos myself, which still need to be processed (not before DrupalCon Boston I think) and our session slides (and video as far as I have heard) is also coming up later.

(Photo by Kris Buytaert).

Just one week before DrupalCon Boston, some well known faces from the Drupal community will gather in Brussels, to host a Drupal Developer Room as part of the FOSDEM conference.

On February 24, Sunday, the developer room offers a great program with well known names. Talks include "What's new in Drupal 6" by Dries and myself, Drupal theming, usability and integration with web services and the ApacheSolr project, the Asset module, Drupal and MySQL high availability, just to name a few.

FOSDEM offers a great program otherwise as well, with Andrei Zmievski talking about Unicoding in PHP 6, Mark Finkle talking about Mozilla Prism (desktop web apps!) and Rogan Dawes talking about OWASP WebScarab-NG (HTTPS interception), just to name a few of my picks.

Let's meet there!