I flew into the San Francisco area to attend the 2007 OSCMS Summit, hosted by Yahoo! at their Sunnyvale campus. I originally got started using Drupal in 2002 when the creator, Dries Buytaert, contacted me regarding the scalability problems I was experiencing trying to run KernelTrap on PHP-Nuke. I quickly became a fan of the code base and the developer community. Over the years I've been an active developer myself, and now even make a living writing and maintaining Drupal code. It's been exciting to watch what started as a humble open source project develop into vibrant and rapidly growing community.

After the conference I was one of five speakers at the Performance and Scalability Workshop which raised $5,800 for the Drupal Association. It was an honor to speak along with Drupal creator Dries Buytaert and other Drupal luminaries such as Matt Westgate and James Walker.

While in California I stayed with my old high school buddy, Leif, and his wife, Erika. It was great to get a chance to catch up over various fires in their backyard in Berkeley. They're expecting their first child in August, so I'll have to be sure to make my way back to the area in the fall.

State of Drupal

During the conference, Drupal founder Dries Buytaert gave a talk titled, "The State of Drupal". In spite of being the leader of an amazingly successful and rapidly growing project, Dries remains very modest and likable. He's soft spoken yet very intelligent, his talks always sprinkled with humor. In this slide he is noting that things are evolving so quickly he's often out of touch with all that's going on in Drupal-land, noting that he recently learned that the Prime Minister of Nigeria now has a Drupal blog.

Performance and Scalability

After the Drupalcon I was one of the speakers at Lullabot's Performance and Scalability Seminar. It was attended by nearly 100 people, and raised $5,800 for the Drupal Association.

Dries Buytaert

Drupal founder Dries Buytaert during the Performance and Scalability workshop.

Leif and Oliver

The night before I left California, Leif and Erika had a barbecue in their back yard with lots of good food (including some Alaskan salmon), good drink, and several good games of bocce. One of Leif's college buddies, Oliver, also attended the Drupalcon and the Performance and Scalability workshop.