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Notwithstanding the fact that WordPress can go get trampled by an elephant stampede, I suppose it’s time to update my recently-dead blog again. If you haven’t heard yet, there’s a group of geeks meeting in Szeged, Hungary for their annual celebration of the existence of Drupal. I’m one of them.

Drupalcon introductions and first lectures

Ignoring the fact that some of us wasted half of our day only to get to the actual scene, we will immediately jumo into the fray with a quick overview of today’s happenings. It all started with Dries Buytaert giving a lecture about how Drupal is awesome and what can be done with it, followed by a quick batch of lectures to give the people a quick glimpse into the fancy framework.

Atleast so they say… The trains that brought me on the site were fast enough for me to actually miss the whole introduction ceremony, but fear not – most keynotes and slides should be available on the dedicated site as soon as someone receives several strongly worded reasons to actually do so.

Rasmus Lerdorf, one of the PHP pioneers, also had an intriguing session where he compared various aspects of some popular frameworks and ran some sample benchmarks and optimizations on a couple of drupal components. This is actually pretty interesting, beyond the scope of this rant, so a run-down post on this field should be expected somewhere in the distant future on my blog.

Life, the Universe and The Rest of the day

The day went on, more people kept arriving (including us), and the lectures got into full motion. Considering I can’t be at 4-5 places at once, I really hope that the recordings of the more interesting events, especially David Strauss’s Database optimization lecture, which got subtly swapped from Friday to today.

Other than that, I was surprised to find open and functional Wi-Fi spots all over the city, even in places where you’d least expect it, including underground and in the middle of a park the size of an average football field (take whichever football game you’d like, it’s still the same masochism).

The introduction party in the evening was a total blast — the whole community got into a nice bar next to the main city plaza and we spent what seemed to be the bigger part of the night chatting, bouncing off ideas and networking in general.

It’s really late, how about I blog again tomorrow

To sum it up, Drupalcon 2008 had a grand start and is on its way to be an unforgettable event for a lot of newcomers. Tomorrow’s highlights include unit test workshops, optimization tips, lectures about front-end caching, etc.

Stay tuned and don’t forget to comment and document the code you were supposed to write while reading this article at work.

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