Drupalcon Szeged Rocked!

Drupalcon Szeged was absolutely fantastic! If you haven't been to a Drupalcon yet I would totally recommend it. One of the best things was I could finally put faces to the nicks who I've encountered over the past two years on IRC and drupal.org. There were also some really fantastic presentations - my only problem there were too many which I wanted to see! Thankfully, it was really well organised and all of the main presentations are now available to watch on http://szeged2008.drupalcon.org/program/sessions

I participated in two presentations at Drupalcon. There was a double session on jQuery: jQuery Basics and jQuery Advanced and I couldn't have asked for two better co-presenters, Katherine Bailey (Raincity Studios) and David Eads (Chicago Technology Cooperative). The sessions went really well and I reckon we had about 150 people attending each of them. We also got lots of positive feedback which made it all worth while.

I also did a presentation on the Code Review (aka Coder) module, and how to use it, with the lead maintainer Doug Green (Civic Actions). We showed off the new Coder feature where you can review patches and had a useful discussion on how this may be incorporated into http://testing.drupal.org and automated code reviews of patches.

Other highlights for me (other than not getting stage fright!), were participating in the Awesome Testing Party where I submitted my first core patch, seeing Barry Jaspan's (Acquia) presentation on Automatic Security Testing with Static and Dynamic Analysis and being able to finally get some feedback on my JS Coding Standards proposal. The feedback I received was really fantastic, so major thanks to quicksketch and pwolanin. Give me another couple of weeks and we'll have a comprehensive Drupal JS coding standards doc on drupal.org and checks on JS files in Coder.

My only regret is that I didn't see much of Szeged, nor did I have any time to go travelling around Hungary before or after the conference. I got to see the large fountain in Szeged, and the park, but I didn't even see the river!

However the conference was absolutely amazing. Everything went really well and major kudos to Gábor Hojtsy and Kristof Van Tomme for organising such a terrific event!