Category: Development

Day 3 was pretty cool. I walked over to the West Egg Cafe for an early breakfast. Got blueberry and granola pancakes which they called crunchberry pancakes. They were massive and very good.

The Keynote Speaker was very entertaining. It was usability expert Jared Spool. He gave a good presentation, and had much of the room laughing at times.

Workbench: Managing Content Management

About the Workbench module. This modules seems great and will be a perfect fit for atlantic.edu to manage users and the content publishing process. This is a very exciting module and I look forward to using it.

Drupal Commerce: Setting up Shop on Drupal 7

This was an excellent presentation. It’s great to see just how much hard work goes into module development. I’m going to have to seriously consider whether or not to go with this one right away or not. Great job.

Drupal 7 Theming Basics

Wasn’t a big fan of this one. There were a lot of errors on the slides, it seemed a bit hurried.

Building awesome user interfaces with Drupal 7’s Form, AJAX, and Theme systems

I was just plain old burned out at this point. There was some cool stuff demonstrated, but I thought it was a bit too much for me to follow at times.

Night Exploration

I walked over to the massive Apple Store then stopped by Giordano’s to get some dinner. I went with the Italian beef sandwich not the deep dish pizza. I then walked in some other random stores for warmth, stopping in the Giaradelli store for a yummy peanut butter something sundae. It was great.

I then stopped in the Disney store to see if they had Thanos. They didn’t, but oh well I continued to explore more of Michigan Ave. The shopping is really weird to me, Floors are kinda small, but many many stories tall. I know it makes sense given the buildings here, but it still seemed rather strange to me.

On my way back to the hotel I let some bum sucker me into a shoe shine. Yep, that’s right I got my sneakers which should of been thrown out 4 months ago shined. I feel so dirty and scammed right now, but just didn’t have it in me to say no. I’m really getting exhausted from this whole adventure.

Overall the sessions were pretty solid on day 1.

Introduction to Module Development

This session was great. Even though I’ve made modules and gone through dozens of tutorials on how to do so, having someone right there go over the process was perfect. The speaker did an excellent job of describing the steps and tips along the way.

Notable highlights include the dpm() function as well as debug_backtace(). His explanation of how to get variables  from a page was huge. I was stumped on drilling down several arrays and objects, but now I think I’ve gotten it.

Rockin’ HTML5 with Drupal

This session was packed, with people sitting on the floor and outside the doors. It really shows just how much interest there is in html5 right now. The htnl 5 Tools Module is one that I will have to give a look at. I’ve been studying up on html5 a bit recently, so not much of the session was new to me. But it was well presented and they did give out stickers.

Crafting App Interfaces with jQuery

The presenter was hilarious. That alone made the session pretty solid. The material covered seemed a bit too advanced for the audience at times and didn’t tie into Drupal quite enough as I had hoped it would. Overall it was ok, and I will be checking out .live() in jQuery.

Views for Hackers

I’m sorry, but this session wasn’t at all what I was expecting it to be. The presenter was without a doubt brilliant, but I was hoping for more examples of what could be done with Views compared to it’s history and how it actually works.

Field Museum

The conference booked the Field Museum for it’s opening night party. The place was amazing inside and out. It reminded me very much of Night  at the Museum, and maybe even was where it was filmed, probably should look that up when I get a sec.

The exhibits were great, and at times I felt like I had the entire museum to myself. I’ve posted many photos on Flickr. Having woken up at 2:30 that morning and flown in, I was pretty hungry and tired. So I destroyed the yummy buffet. And when I say destroyed that is not an understatement. Numerous attendees passing by did inquire if I hadn’t eaten in days from my behavior. Plus the food was pretty good too!

The big exhibit was Sue, the largest, most complete and preserved Tyrannasaurus rex in the world. She was most impressive indeed

Woke up at 2:30 this morning to catch an early flight into Chicago to attend DrupalCon. Driving to Philadelphia International Airport was a cinch. Being the only fool up that early on the road does make for easy travel. I did see a man vomiting outside of his car on the ride over. That was rather interesting.

I did get a little lost looking for parking at the airport. I kinda drive out of the whole place then had to get back in. Luckily a really nice guy working for Southwest helped me out. The plane took off on time and we even got there 10 minutes early!

On the ride I sat next to Paul, who described himself as a Chatty Cathy. He was a rather talkative fellow, but it did make the time pass rather quickly. It turns out he owns a software company and is looking to hire a front-end developer. So we had much to discuss, and we did eventually agree on how much he should pay his future hire.

I arrived at the Sheraton just in time to catch the opening keynote. So I pretty much had perfect timing today. The opening keynote was pretty solid, but it seemed like they were pushing the Kool-Aid a bit too much at times. The numerous videos and blasting of a song Proud (or something like that) id get old rather fast.

I just ate lunch from a box. It wasn’t that bad. I happened to be sitting next to Jeremy Keith, who happens to of written one of my favorite books of the past few years. He was a really friendly guy, it was really nice to meet someone who really taught me a lot about how I script today in person.

My phone just rang and my room is ready, so I’m going to get my key drop my stuff off then catch the next session. I’ll post more after my sessions.