Drupal Camp Seattle
My co-worker Boris surprises me with a link from his work weblog to my notes about the first day at Seattle's Drupal Camp, so I'll take that as a nudge to write a little about Thursday, the second day. For the first session I parachuted in to the first session for a sleeping-in Steve McKenzie—no worries Steve, I woke up an hour before getting there myself—to talk about modules. I prefaced my remarks with the modules I worked on: the Pirate module, a Flickr module which I'm abandoning because Flickr Hood has similar features (I've offered to help out with it), a little module, called Quotable, that converts all <q> tags to text with curly quotes (which I use to this day, inspired by Mark Pilgrim's article) and, of course, the On This Day Module (source code). I then tried to answer questions as best I could until Steve got there then jetted to the user room again, where I demonstrated podcasting in Drupal (I ended up just pointing to the long article I wrote for Bryght's support site as I didn't have anything prepared for the demo—which is okay, since I didn't expect to demo anything) and the powerful if sometimes complicated taxonomy system.
I misspoke by saying "vocabulary", "taxonomy" and "term" were Drupal words: they are terms borrowed by Drupal from library science and other fields that rely heavily on categorization. I still stand by, however, the idea that many users are confused by the terminology and, since many are used to systems with 'categories', such as Movable Type and WordPress, the way Drupal describes it and handles it internally can be daunting. (A brief aside: Just a Gwai Lo uses taxonomy terms in two ways: one which uses taxonomy terms to create what look like weblogs to the outside world and tags.) I expounded briefly on the disadvantages of tagging, or rather a perceived disadvantage, in that it tends to make a site's categorization look messy, especially if the site has a large community. I say 'perceived' because there is value in the mess, that site administrators and community members will find surprises in what people think something should be tagged as. Boris, who managed to survive explaining what the Drupal core modules do with his voice intact, spoke about another disadvantage about tagging, in that there lacks a standard way to separate tags. del.icio.us and Flickr separate with a space, Flickr allowing quotes but not del.icio.us, and Drupal sites throwing in commas as separators, meaning you can't have tags with commas in their name.
For the last session, Gregory Heller demonstrated CCK, Views, and Content Template. (Some people thought he was saying "content" when he was saying "contemp"; I noticed the night previous that the Drupal.org project's URL has it cleverly as "contemplate".) This bundle of modules make for a highly customizable site, far much more than is currently possible without writing your own content module.
(I started experimenting with CCK and views earlier in the week on a test site. Not really knowing that Gregory would cover it, I installed Content Template the night previous and, since the theme to his site was a little mangled to see the configuration page, I stepped in to show what it looked like when formatted properly. Since aggregator2 is busted, at least on 4.7 sites, I may just use CCK and views to benefit from strange new content types with strange new ways of displaying those content types. If I can get Amazon S3 to work for me, that's where my mundane SkyTrain videos will go, along with other 'static' files.)
Earlier in the day we ran into the Robots who are responsible for 43 Places among other sites, and then while at their office, wondered what they really thought of 43 Thongs, a parody of their 43 Things. They have a sense of humour about it—which comes as somewhat a relief seeing as how I used pretty much the exact same look—and reported being slightly disappointed that it wasn't about the uncomfortable underwear.
Over the course of those 3 days (which includes Tuesday evening, when I lost my Nokia 7610) I got to liking Seattle a bit more, after, on the second day, having walked down Pine towards the water, guessing correctly that if I was walking downhill I'd be in good shape for actually finding it. Though I don't regret leaving when I did—the resulting downtime spent at home and then with some friends I got on Friday made the decision feel right—if I'm in a similar situation I'll consider spending an extra day on my own to explore the city a bit, and maybe take in a major league sporting event like I thought I might when in Seattle.
While Gregory Heller was busy trying to fix the wifi situation at the Richard Hugo House, I parachuted in to describe what Drupal was (whatever you want it to be, was my answer) and answered a few how-to questions. It was a good start, since it got me talking and seemed to established me as somewhat of an expert in the platform. My joke of the day came at introduction time, where I said that people saw me as the public face of Bryght (which is partially true, I should have said I was one of the public faces of Bryght) and that when people email the support team they start of with "Hi Richard" instead of "Hi Bryght Support" (which it turns out is correct, I handle most of the queries). As with any event involving Web 2.0 types, there are photos, some at the unwieldy drupalcampseattle2006 tag on Flickr.
(There's probably a best-practice or etiquette we can establish where if the wifi is slow or spotty we agree to upload photos at the end of the day at our various places of rest instead of all rushing to be the first to document the event. This happened at Gnomedex last year, and though a smaller event, it seemed to overwhelm the resources.)
On the 'conferences for introverts' front, having tables set up in a square or rectangle where you are forced to introduce yourselves at the beginning of the event—and where you wear clothing with the logo of the company you represent—helps break the ice. Going only on my experience, I assert that introverts have difficulty talking about themselves because, partly, they think what they do isn't really all that interesting. When you go to something where what you do is 100% relevant to that event, then it's a little easier. A lot easier? I wish I had the same confidence talking to people about hobbies—such as they are, though that's what my weblog is for—as I do about work, though working for a startup where the ideas and people with them are as fun and interesting as the crew I'm here with, work often feels like fun, something I'd do if even if they didn't pay me.
Note that I'm not complaining that I get paid to do this.
Last year I was grumpy while attending Gnomedex: a combination of not enough sleep and not enough to eat in the morning combined with not very interactive sessions involving already-eminent people (or people from already-eminent companies) talking at us lecture-style. I hear this year will be different, but I'm not attending this time.
I'm in downtown Seattle now for Drupal Camp Seattle 2006, which has two tracks, one for introductory sessions and another for advanced hacking. Some of my Bryght colleagues are here too. I'm a little nervous about this as with any conference: I didn't do enough planning yet again, and I'm worried that I'm not going to get a lot out of it. Some friends with whom I've discussed this tell me it's not about what I get out of it or what others get out of it from me, but just to enjoy the experience of being in another city for a few days. I'm either paraphrasing badly or not remembering what they told me. Anyway, I wish I was better at this kind of thing, better able to enjoy meeting new people in an unknown environment.
Jen had a great comment a month or so ago about my situation that I'll try to keep in mind: “The only suggestion I have for the introvert is to just start speaking. If interrupting is the status quo, don't be afraid to do it yourself. It takes some practice and time to build confidence, but it does get easier. Just be sure to schedule some decompressing "alone time" shortly thereafter.”
