Coast to Coast: Day 3
Originally published at Durosia.com. You can comment here or there.
Was much more awake and alert today than I was yesterday... and I ended up with just as much useful info crammed into my brain.
I was also struck, yet again, by that vague feeling of being totally adrift.
There are people here who are genuinely passionate about Drupal and the work they do with it. Me? I see it as a very effective tool for accomplishing important tasks. If something considerably better came along, the only thing that would keep me using it would be force of habit.
So, I'm often not sure at all just how much I have to contribute to this vibrant community. Which, due to my own proclivities, makes me feel quite disconnected from the general surge of awesome that's going on here.
Maybe some day I'll figure it out... or really get fired up... or... something.
Until then, I'm taking a great amount of pleasure in learning more that can be done, hearing fantastic success stories about what has been done, and looking forward to implementing some new practices and habits when I get back to the office.
Today's plate of brain food included:
- Parlez Vous Internet? Ignore the Rest of the World at Your Own Risk (once again affirming that we did pretty darn good with our implementation of the i18n translation module, even with all the frustration we had)
- Views Demystified: Parts I and II (very basic stuff, but introduced me to a couple of new tricks/best practices and useful additions that will come in very handy)
- Open Source in the Cloud Era (the day's keynote speech by Tim O'Reilly that was kind of mind blowing. Yeah, he's the O'Reilly that publishes all those tech books.)
- Case Studies in Non Profits: The Jane Goodall Institute (talk about technology making a positive impact for people--a well done implementation of Drupal and the CiviCRM system of modules freed the staff from more tedious work and gave them the tools to get the word out more effectively. Very inspiring.)
- Building Drupal to be Easy to Maintain and Administer (again, best practices ideas that I try to stick to--but more importantly, more modules and little tweaks to make that easier!)
- Managing and Deploying Configuration with Exportable and the Features Module (I've seen this presented on a smaller scale by the Development Seed crew at the local DC Drupal Meetup, seeing it a few months more developed and clearly presented on a big screen... yeah, I'm going to have to try to change how I manage some things with my deployments)
My boss rolled into town this morning and the three of us had lunch, talked some business and whatnot. He reminded us that we can expense some food. (Which is what we did with the Chinese we had for dinner.) Didn't really see him after that--the man's a working machine and will be off shooting video out here for another client the rest of the week.
The night rolled up with a sponsored shindig/networking event at a local bar/poolhall. Here that feeling of being adrift struck full force as bars are so not my element to begin with... and neither are networking events... and I had no idea what I'd be offering up in conversation... and there wasn't much else going on (apparently missed the Karaoke at last night's event). Give me an actual activity to participate in and talk about and all's good. Throw me into a sea of people where I don't know my place and, if I don't have to be there, I'll just fade into the scenery as much as possible while I watch and listen.
And that's kind of what I did.
Thankfully, I got there while some of the tasty appetizers were still available. The calamari was tasty... and free... so it was worth it. :)