Who: 60+ Spanish drupalistas from a very diverse group of Drupal companies with presence in Spain, including Bluespark.
What: a one day, Spanish language, developer oriented, Drupal event.
Where: at University of Valencia's newest engineering school, just meters from the Mediterranean sea in one of the most touristic places of Spain.
When: as of 2011, "Drupalday" is held annually, and last week I attended the second edition.
Recently, there has been a fair amount of moving and shaking going on with respect to Drupal development companies, both real and imagined (link below). In the real—and incredibly awesome—category, Bluespark is happy to announce that Drupal development and semantic web consultancy Istos.com is becoming Bluespark's exclusive contractor and partner in southern Europe, and that the founder of the company, Dr. Ronald Ashri, is joining the Bluespark team as our Technical Director.
The success of a project — any project — begins with the right mindset. Without the right understanding of the world around us, we are limited in what we can accomplish. But with the right mindset, we can accomplish great things. The key to Bluespark's success on project after project starts with the right mindset as embodied by a core set of design principles: a core set of values that we use to approach every project.
Last week I asked the question "Do you want a PM day at Drupalcon?" and a lot of you answered via twitter, email and comments -- thanks for your feedback!
The over all result of this very informal, very small poll was a 50-50 split between "Yes, we want a PM day that would be GREAT!" and, "I think more sessions would make me happy".
While I admit that this June's Reasons to be Creative Conference, conveniently located 10 minutes away from me in NYC, is more up my alley, I'm glad that I made the trip to Denver earlier this month for DrupalCon 2012. Even though, as a designer and creative director, I didn't find some of the DrupalCon sessions to be that relevant to my work, I did enjoy the sessions I attended and had a great time in Denver.
Having been to several Drupal events, I've noticed they all have a few things in common:
The content is usually excellent and educational.
The largest group there is typically developers, and they influence the content.
Because of the first 2 points, there is typically little to no project management (PM) discussion, this last con in Denver having only 1 session for instance.
As a Project Manager on the Drupal 8 (D8) Initiative, I see a lot of people getting involved, and they typically fall into one of two categories:
1) Ninjas
They want to help and are highly skilled in the ways of Drupal. They know how to avoid the untimely demise of baby kittens, can advise about important decisions, and most importantly, code solutions that are crucial to advancing projects. Because of all that, they are also in very high demand and many have limited time for non-paying gigs like contributing/volunteering for D8.
Last week I attended Commerce Guys' "DRUPAL COMMERCE DEVELOPER TRAINING" in Paris, a three day developer oriented intensive and extensive training session about the Drupal Commerce set of modules.
For the last 6 months or so I've been a volunteer project manager for the Drupal 8 core development process. I've been helping (as much as time allows), with the regular calls held bi-weekly to go over progress and with fleshing out some details on initiatives. One of my goals is to bring transparency on the calls for the community. I realize an update is overdue, and it will be coming soon. In the mean time, I wanted to share some of my perspective with you.
A quick follow-up to the last blog post to mention that the first stable release of Nodewords in two years, v6.x-1.13, has finally been released. A huge thank you is due to the few people who helped to test it over the holidays, without whom this release would not have been quite as stable.
Update: Thanks to Dave Reid for the shout-out in DrupalEasy podcast #71.
