Conference Season - Fall 2012

That moment when you realize just how much awesome you have coming up that you're not sure you're going to survive it? Yeah, that.

It's nearly time for the second half of the year conference season, and it looks like my schedule is starting to fill up. I've three conferences and 5 speaking engagements in the coming weeks, so for those interested in Stalking Crell here's where you'll be able to find me:

Midwest Developers Summit: 26-28 July

A new event kicking off this year, MWDS is targeted specifically at Drupal developers, especially core developers. While there are a few sessions scheduled, the main focus is sprint time. For those not familiar with it, a "sprint" in Drupal-speak is "lock a bunch of people in a room for a few days and get stuff done!" I'll be presenting on the state of the Web Services and Context Symfony Core Initiative (WSCCI), but the main focus will be developing. I'm hoping that by the end of the weekend we can get a few patches in, especially this one that will allow modules to register services and events with the system. We're looking for more people to help with that and other issues, so if you want to help make Drupal 8 kick ass come on up to Madison. It's free, and there's free food!

And oh yeah, if we get enough people there I will finally get a real Twitter avatar.

Saturday includes DrupalCamp Wisconsin. That's a more normal every-level camp, but many of the summit folks (myself included) will just keep on sprinting for a third day.

DrupalCon Munich: 20-24 August

August sees me back to Europe for the second time this year, this time in Germany. There's nothing unusual about that, though. Over 2000 Drupalers will be in Germany in late August. Why? It's DrupalCon Munich, duh!

For those who don't know What DrupalCon is, DrupalCon is the Drupal community's semi-annual (correction, now tri-annual) mega-conference. We're expecting around 2000 people in Munich, from PHP developers to designers to front-end developers to project managers to just curious business people. (Please don't scare them off.) It's not just a Drupal conference, either, but a general web conference. I'm especially proud of the Coder track, where we have brought in such experts as Pierre Joye, Henri Bergus, and David Zuelke.

The conference organizers somehow managed to get me on stage once a day. Tuesday I'll be trying to convince people that Functional Programming in PHP is not only possible, but desirable. On Wednesday I'll be taking to the Core Conversations track to discuss the home-stretch plans for WSCCI. On Thursday I step out of the code track for a change and over to the Site Building track, where I'll be discussing the various and sundry ways to host multiple Drupal sites together.

If stalking me in meatspace isn't enough of an incentive for you, perhaps the keynote speakers will be of more interest to you. Drupal project lead Dries Buytaert, Symfony project lead Fabien Potencier, and Open Government / Open Data guru Anke Domscheit-Berg will all be headlining the show.

And of course there will, as always, be another sprint day on Friday to kick off the fall Drupal Development Season.

Symfony Live: 26-29 September

And of course with Fabien speaking at DrupalCon again, it's only polite to return the favor. Late September will see me giving an encore presentation at Symfony Live in San Francisco, on the combination of Symfony and Drupal and what it means for both projects. It will be similar to my talk from Symfony Live Paris, but updated of course. Registration is open now.

Given how significant Symfony2 is for Drupal 8, I'm hoping that we can have a sizeable Drupal turnout. Not only is it polite to return the favor, but it's a great opportunity to make connections with the people who wrote the system that Drupal 8 will be based on. That is, you can get a jump-start on understanding and using Drupal 8, or on helping to drive Drupal 8 to the finish line.

And, you guessed it, there's a hack day there, too. :-)

So that's three opportunities to see me speak and contribute to Drupal, in three different timezones, on two continents. Surely you can make it to one of them, right?

I'll see you there.