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.
First of all I’d like to thank everyone who took the time to come out to the BoF. In case you missed it, we had a fabulous turn out of almost 40 people! Below is part one of our discussion because so much information was collected, we need two posts to capture it all.
But first, a quick, shameless, plug of my previous blog post... I’m looking for YOUR help to get more PM content at Drupalcon.
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".
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.
Our holiday gift to all Drupal 6 developers is the first stable release of the much maligned Nodewords module in almost three years: v6.x-1.13-rc1 v6.x-1.13-rc2 v6.x-1.13.
