I had a great time this weekend at DrupalCamp Austin, 2009. DrupalCamp was a "Barcamp" styled meetup with a strong emphases on Drupal. At the camp I was introduced to Drush. Drush is the Drupal Shell and provides tools for managing your Drupal projects with shell scripts. I can see great use for Drush at the office to help quickly create new Drupal sites in a standardized fashion. It can also be used to run maintenance scripts.

Other topics included Panels 3, Drupal SEO, and JQuery UI being added to Drupal 7 core. The improvements to Panels in Panels 3 are significant. The prevailing wisdom at the conference was that Panels 3 will replace blocks for most cases.

During the keynote talk, they performed a basic DISC personality assessment on everyone at the camp. The test performed was way over simplified (two questions) and the results over generalized. It was interesting seeing how people reacted to the test. One result that was curious is while about 75% of the attendees consider themselves to be introverts, the conference had their happy hour at a karaoke bar. That did not seem well thought out. Then again, several of us stayed their until 2 in the morning.

Overall, the camp was fun. I met a lot of good people. And I hope to go to another camp soon.

Last year I had an excellent time at Barcamp NOLA. This year's Barcamp NOLA 2 was twice as large and more than twice as fun. Many thanks to all to the good people of New Orleans for making me feel at home. @cSchultz, @tritico, @NewJess, @LizMoney, @ev3rywh3re, @hartmyst, @CallMeAlva, @plainprogrammer (And many more who's twitter accounts I don't know)

Although they had four rooms open for panels, somehow, every session I was interested in was held in the main room. I attended panels on:

• Unit Testing
• Design patterns you can learn from a professional kitchen
• The history of SMS
  -- The average American sends 347 text messages a month yet only make 243 phone calls a month.
• Design patterns for mobile devices
• Four apps that turn the iPhone camera into a point and shoot replacement
  -- Night Camera, iFlash Ready, Photo Jen, and Autostitch
• Bringing social networking skills to realestate agents
• Application and Network secuity
  -- I need to check out Burp Suite, OWASP, WebGoat, Paros, and, cain oxid.it

I gave a talk on Cloud Computing and how it can be used by startups.  The talk went well.  At the end of the talk, I was pleased Chris asked me to demo PriceChirp for the group as a real world example of a project running in the cloud.

I spent today at BarcampHouston3. I had a fantastic time. It was the best Barcamp yet.

I enjoyed the panels on Mobile technologies (David Herrold), Public Relations (Ed Schipul), Creative Thinking (Kelsey Ruger), and Using Flickr Professionally (TheFuzzball). Houston is full of talented, intelligent, and motivated people.

I can't wait until the next barcamp.

My photos of Barcamp Houston 3 are on flickr.

Barcamp NOLA was small, yet full of unbridled enthusiasm and the spirit of adventure. All told, around 45 people participated in the two days of festivities.

Brian kicked off barcamp with a talk on ways to securely merge our online identities. Among the other panels, David talked about the best practices for mobile content. A venture capitalist talked about how to get money. Gerard gave a Wordpress install demo, and I talked about SEO practices. The first day ended with a round table talk about how to promote a technology culture in New Orleans. These people have great ideas!

About half of the barcamp team returned on Sunday for "hack" day. The group split in to two groups. One working on jazzing up Bayou Boogaloo's site and the other started the creation of the PayTron site.

Voodoo Ventures shined with their hospitality by providing excellent facilities, breakfast, a cajun lunch, and plenty of beer.

Here's a video Chris put together of the event.

Barcamp Texas did not really get started until 1:15. Minor irritation, since the night before their website had said 10:00. Anyhow, once it got going, I had a fantastic time!

The day was kicked off by Tom Brown, a college classmate who I have not seen in years, talking about Open Source Currency. I also listened to talks on installing Drupal, web security, podcasting, and how to analyze a site for CSS and SEO. On Sunday, I was convinced to give a talk on SEO.

I spent most of my time next door in the Creative Space. Here I met Silona, the person responsible for getting Maker Faire to come to Austin. I helped her attempt to get her video cam to work with iMovie for an hour before she decided to use the cam in her laptop and sit in peoples laps as she conducted her interviews. I also spent several hours with the Hush Labs folks trading system related information. This alone was worth the price of admission.

The beer flowed all night. At some point, Erica convinced me I should travel to Austin to attend the Maker Faire Town Hall the next evening. When I went to my hotel room at Midnight, the party was still going strong.

Barcamp Texas was a great event and I hope they are willing to hold another one soon.

UPDATE - Tom sent this link to videos of barcamp texas on youtube.

Barcamp Houston was great fun. It was a excellent way to be introduced to the vast technical community of Houston.

Shortly after arriving at barcamp, I met Ed Schipul when he asked if anyone would be interested in giving an SEO talk with him. Afterwards we sat in the back of the room creating a slide show out of each of our works while taking in all the talks. Our co-presented SEO talk was the last talk of the day after which we had to be chased out of the building as the campers continued to engage us with excellent questions well after our talk.

The rest of the day was an enjoyable blur. I will definitely continue to engage the Houston technical community and I'm looking forward to the next barcamp.

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