During the weekend preceding Drupalcon Austin, I spent two days closeted with the core developers of Community Media Drupal. I had been aware of the Open Media project, which left off with Drupal 6. The developers that wanted to move to Drupal 7 reworked the project to address a number of limitations, but the project has struggled to clear the last blocking issues to create a release. Stefan Wray wrote up a nice report about our meeting although the stuff I did went under the radar. I had created a patch to fix a problem with the Feeds Cablecast module (and, for my efforts, was made a maintainer and learned how to commit a patch and roll a release). I also found and fixed a persistent bug with the menu display on Safari. I learned a lot and helped move the Amherst Media site forward quite a bit.
Drupalcon has been somewhat less fun/interesting. As an academic, I feel rather out of place. I've been using Drupal for a very long time -- 8 years anyway. But the open source community has evolved a lot. Where it used to be people creating software to "scratch an itch", it's now completely dominated by business people trying to productize everything. And much of it is hype about Drupal 8. Drupal 8 will be Wonderful. Drupal 8 will be Powerful. Drupal 8 will be Restful! Drupal 8 will cure cancer! You should marry Drupal 8 and have its children! It's all kinda creepy.
I've never really liked conferences — even academic ones where I sort of fit in. But I've suddenly realized why: it's because they're not all about me. Maybe someday someone will do a conference that is about me -- with sessions singing my praises and studying my works in awed and reverential tones. I might enjoy that.
- Steven D. Brewer's blog
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