Community

The Vancouver Planetarium. Photo by Qole Pejorian.

chx and I gathered last week in Vancouver’s West End for a two-person performance sprint during the final code slush days, allowing us to finish several key improvements to Drupal’s database layer. Right afterward, many more people joined us for another sprint to port key modules to Drupal 7. People worked in-person, voluntarily over IRC, and involuntarily over IRC (lost passport).

I can say — without reservation — that our work was successful. We kicked off the weekend with Drupal 6 versions of Coder and Views. (Though there had been a touch of prior work on the Views port to Drupal 7’s new database layer.)

Photo by Franco Folini on Flickr (CC-Attribution-ShareAlike)

Despite being held on a Saturday, more than 15 dedicated Drupalers showed up for Day 4 of the San Francisco Drupal.org redesign sprint. Here’s what was achieved.

Web Chef Aaron Stanush “mugs” for the camera. Get it?

Drupal themer extraordinaire Morten.dk, currently ranked #7 on Google for “king of Denmark”, has been bugging us for a Don’t Mess with Texas mug. Well, “bugging” may not be the right word. “Profanely demanding” is more appropriate.

Finding one was surprisingly difficult. While (lesser) cities like Dallas and Houston are lined with shops hawking rattlesnake heads and scorpions encased in plastic, there doesn’t seem to be much demand for Texas memorabilia in Austin.

Except at the airport, where you can find your name stamped on a fake Texas license plate or worn chunk of fencepost.

So, after scoring the great city of Austin for tacky crap, we proudly present Morten.dk’s Don’t Mess with Texas mug:

Morten.dk’s Don’t Mess with Texas mug

Congratulations to David Strauss, Four Kitchens co-founder and Drupal scalability guru, who was elected yesterday as a Permanent Member of the Drupal Association.

David’s goals as a member focus largely on improvements to infrastructure, community-building, and reaching out to other open-source projects. Details can be found in his his application:

What are the primary goals you would like to work on?

I would like to advance the infrastructure for development and sprints by working with the community to drive development and deployment of next-generation (read: not CVS) tools, both for issue tracking and version control. I would like to participate in discussions surrounding the membership software for Drupal Association membership, including CiviCRM (the current tool) and alternatives. I would like to work with major free culture and free software organizations to establish partnerships.

Mid-October marked my one-year anniversary with Four Kitchens and, consequently, the same anniversary of being an open-source software contributor. Because my career up to that point had been limited to proprietary software development, I had intended to write a one-year retrospective on the experience. But, as often happens, one gets busy, and now October, November, and half of December have passed. So without further ado, my self-indulgent retrospective on moving to open source development (complete with pontifications).