Quick notes on sessions I attended

Building APIs that Rock
By: Jeff Eaton
Links: Slides, Video
Talked about the importance of making it easier for other modules to use your code (not just users through the Web interface); showed an example of using hooks for ultimate flexibility. Key takeaway: Try building your module as an API, then layer a user interface on top of it (ex: Views). Also, puppets!

Keynote: The State of Drupal
By: Dries Buytaert
Links:  Video , Text Outline
Drupal community, code growing exponentially. Next steps: Connecting data

Totally Rocking Your Development Environment
By:  Sacha Chua
Links:  Video, Installation Profile
I had a lot of fun learning from people’s tips, too!

Handling Asynchronous Data with Drupal
By: Josh Koenig
Links:  Video, PDF Presentation
Key takeaway: Use Drupal.behaviors to attach contextualized Javascript code. Also, you can write data to files in order to make polling more efficient.

Advanced Theming Techniques
By: Trevor Twining
Links: Video, Slideshow
Most of the presentation was about how to define subthemes and extend something like Zen.

Business Analytics with Views
By: Irakli Nadareishvili
Links: Video, Slideshow
Ooh, pretty charts. Key takeaway: look into charts and views_charts modules for integration with Google Charts and other charting engines

Boosting Our Raw Capacity to Provide Drupal Training
By: Sean Effel
Links: Training Models, Notes from Audience
See my notes at https://sachachua.com/blog/2009/03/05/drupalcon-day-1-notes-and-links-from-march-4-2009/ . Key takeaway: Core training has lots of common ground, but then need to customize training for skill level / needs; group clinics/workshops handy

Building Infrastructure You Can Scale, Monitor and Maintain
By: David Strauss
Links: Video
Great slide breaking down flow of traffic to rough percentages. Key point: adding more components is easy (content delivery network, reverse proxy, etc.), but adding more than one component (ex: multiple database servers) is harder. Coherency issues, replication issues, etc. Try to minimize dynamic pages.

When Efficiency and Manageability Matter, Drupal at Scale,
By: Scott Mattoon
Links: Slideshow, Video
Left this session after a short while, as it seemed to be mostly about Sun tools.

Powering Collaboration in a Distributed Enterprise
By: Dan Karran
Links: Video

Interesting demo of a featureful Drupal site used on the intranet. Check out their auto-saved drafts.

Drupal Patterns: Managing and Automating Site Configurations
By: Chris Bryant
Links: Slideshow, Video
Patterns allow you to bring in groups of functionality. Interesting: can publish and share patterns. No support for change management yet.

Staging and Deployment – A Panel Discussion
By: Greg Dunlap
Links: Video
Deploy and db_scripts look interesting. Also, I promised to upload my .install file snippets…

Why I Hate Drupal
By: James Walker
Links: Video
Good stuff. Interesting contrast to kumbaya keynote: contrast of Drupal’s growth with Sharepoint, WordPress, and Joomla.

Advanced Drupal Security
By: Neil Drumm
Links: Video
Went through key parts of Drupal security handbook. My takeaway: use session_save_session(FALSE); when changing global $user;

Selling Drupal Services
By: Neil Giarratana
Links: Video, Slideshow
Lots of tips about the business side of it. Key takeaway: RFP process is inefficient; try partnering up with agencies instead, so you can build on relationships

Project Management For Fun and Profit
By: Crystal Williams
Links: Video
Not much new here if you’ve managed or worked on projects before

How do Drupal, Joomla! and WordPress Stack Up?
By: Amy Stephen
Links: Video
Didn’t go into an in-depth technical comparison / benchmarking

Token: The Little API That Could
By: Greg Knaddison
Links: Video
Walked through how Token module works, how to implement your own tokens

Sessions I wish I also attended

JQuery, Dmitri Gaskin Links: Video
Drupal and the Geospatial Web, Jeff Miccolis Links: Video, Notes from Audience
Optimizing your LAMP stack for Drupal, Eric Mandel Links: None
Learning jQuery UI, Richard Worth Links: Video
SEO & Drupal: Search Engine Optimization Tips, Tricks and Best Practices, Gregory Heller Links: PDF Slideshow, Video
Building advanced social networks at a large US University, Kyle Mathews Links: Slideshow, Video
Building a Frankenstein monster and how to maintain it, mortendk Links: Video
Front End Performance – Make Your Website Lightning Fast, Konstantin Käfer Links: Video
Communicating Data Online: Data Visualizations and Open Data, Eric Gundersen Links: Video
Project Flow and Tracker: From business objects and user stories to test-driven Drupal based website application, Victor Kane Links: PDF within page
Scaling Drupal using Amazon Web Services (AWS), Frank Febrarro Links: Video , Slideshow
Drupal Process Management, Drew Gorton Links: Video
The Business of Open Source, Liza Kindred Links: Video
Quality Assurance and the Drupal Development Process, Fen Labalme Links: Video, Slideshow
Inside Drupal Caching: From Static Variables to Memcache, John VanDyk Links: Video

Note: Thanks to Ana Macatiag for all these handy links! =)