On Saturday, April 17th, the weekend before DrupalCon San Francisco, I'm helping to organize the very first Drupal core developer summit. The goal of the Drupal core developer summit is to talk about ways we can improve Drupal core, and the core development processes, all while having a good time socializing with fellow core developers. Meeting in person for a full day and having more focused time to brainstorm about just core, should be really valuable. We can come up with plans to get Drupal 7 released, and we can get initial alignment on Drupal 8.
To make it lively and fun, we'll do a series of 10 minute lightning talks. In addition to the lightning talks, we'll have a number of meatier discussions and breakout sessions in smaller groups. The lightning talks will take the format: "How to make X more awesome?" where X can be anything in Drupal core. The idea behind the lightning talks is to educate core contributors about problems that need to be fixed, to present foundations for solutions, and to bootstrap collaboration. The original plan was to have 16 lightning talks, but based on feedback, I'm now leaning towards more breakout sessions and fewer lightning talks. On Sunday, the day after the Drupal core developer summit, there will be a code lounge where longer breakout sessions can be held too. Suggestions welcome as we can still made adjustments. Read on to learn more about how to attend.
The event is open to all, but ... in order to attend, you must be prepared to do a 10 minute lightning talk. To secure a ticket to the Drupal core developer summit, you have to submit a 4 slide presentation. We expect one background slide to provide context or to talk about the history of the problem, one slide with a clear problem statement, and a couple of slides to propose a solution. You can focus on big things (i.e. How to help migrate Drupal.org from CVS to Git) or smaller issue-level things (i.e. Why drupal_get_schema() is slow and how to make it faster). Everyone who submitted slides ahead of time can attend. All slides will be shared publicly, but not everyone will have to present as we'll only have time for a limited number of lightning talks. Some talks will be hand-picked because they are important or particularly intriguing, other talks will be randomly selected the day of the event. Don't worry -- if you don't want to present, we won't force you.
So far more than 50 people submitted a presentation, but we're happy to host more people. The original deadline to submit your short presentations is extended until April 15th so there is still time to submit your presentations.
Comments
Changes?
I can't say I'm pleased with this change. I did put in the effort not only to put together slides but keep them to just 4 (which is harder than letting it be "whatever length it ends up being") and to submit slides on time. Now it looks like we're trying to get even more people competing for an even fewer number of slots to actually make use of that work.
I really do not understand why we are extending the deadline or reducing the number of slots open for the very thing required for the "entry ticket". However, the confirmation email when I submitted my slides said we'd have ample time to prepare. 2-3 days is not ample time. I'd say we'd need to know by at the latest the 7th (1.5 weeks), which is still cutting it close. As is, I will have no time to prepare at all as I'll be at another conference from the 14th-16th already.
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Larry Garfield
http://www.garfieldtech.com/
Thinking Functionally in PHP: https://leanpub.com/thinking-functionally-in-php
entry ticket
As I understand, the "entry ticket" being slides is just indicative of a summary of stuff you've been thinking of about the code, the development and release process, etc. An issue URL would have been requested just like that, but issues are often harder to read up on then great summary slides :) In fact, as Dries communicated before, he hopes the slides will end up as one or more issues in the queue.
While I've not been involved with any changes made to the format of the day, I think number of slots were thought to be too much to focus everyone on the same stuff, and people requested to reduce the number of slots, so more time can be spent on discussing stuff in smaller teams. At least that is what I read from comments at http://buytaert.net/drupal-core-developer-summit-at-drupalcon-sf
I do fully agree that the deadline timing is too close to the event, although I do not expect to be selected to speak.
I really wish people can just attend without slide submissions
There is interest in the community to learn more (technically) about Drupal's core. I think we could have hundreds of attendees there to absorb all these lightning talks and then build on that during the week of the conference. I have a gut feeling there are more than 50 people who are wanna-be-core contributors.
The slides will be available online, but will the summit be video recorded?
LA Drupal
Published since 2007
not education
I think the goal of this summit is not to have a core developer education day, where people are educated of how things are done, but rather to have discussions on how things can be done better. Also, I'd imagine the dominance of small breakout team discussions rather then big crowd sessions, so videotaping is not much of a possibility IMHO. Let's imagine 10 groups maybe discussing various things for 3-4 hours each, looking through 40 hours of videos of people discussing API details or process specifics does not sound like a good way to ignite getting involved in core development, does it?
Disclaimer: I'm not involved in the organization, but deduce these from the differentiation of the summit from the code sprint and the scheduled sessions and BoFs.
Education is good!
I'm with Chris Charlton on this one. When I looked at the description of the Developer Summit on the conference website it said nothing about slide submission being required for entry (it still doesn't). It seems that little bit of info was left for the submission page. Based on what I read, my colleague (cnwani) and I made hotel reservations and bought plane tickets which would allow us to attend.
I actually wanted to submit slides anyway, but didn't think I'd have time to put something together. Cnwani, on the other hand, was mainly coming to observe. He's new to Drupal, but we're getting heavily involved in Drupal development at our institution, so we both thought the Core Developer Summit would be an excellent opportunity to see where Drupal is at and where it's headed.
Now Cnwani is away on his honeymoon and I'm in the unfortunate position of scrambling to make slides for both of us. Is me submitting slides on his behalf cheating? Sure it is! But there's no way I'm going to tell a struggling non-profit that they just wasted money sending us for an extra day of conference that we weren't allowed to participate in, or even observe.
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Jeremy Stoller
Senior Graphic Artist
California Science Center
Different snafu
The web site not being clear about the presentation requirements is a big issue. However, there is value to having an "experienced people only" summit , as many problems are much easier dealt with in person than hashed out in IRC. The following 4 days will be education-heavy. Having one or two days focused on allowing current "insiders" to try and solve thorny problems is useful. Not advertising it as such 6 months ago when people started buying plane tickets was a mistake.
The other issue is jerking around those people that it is aimed at. Changing the due date, changing how and when sessions will be selected, etc. is a great way to alienate the very people you want to come to this sort of event. And making it too big only undermines the purpose, as with too many people you can't actually hash out anything. (I don't know what "too big" is in this context, but there is an upper bound beyond which it becomes less useful.)
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Larry Garfield
http://www.garfieldtech.com/
Thinking Functionally in PHP: https://leanpub.com/thinking-functionally-in-php
Slides have been a requirement since February
Hi Jeremy,
The detailed description for the core developer summit was posted on November 14, 2009 a full five months before the event. The prior description included this phrase
The current description of the event, posted on February 24th, 2009 clearly indicates the need for slides to be submitted.
Dries also posted about this requirement on February 17th, 2010.
While the checkbox during registration did not indicate this, the subsequent blog post and link to the description on the site did.
Kieran
Kieran Lal
Publicity
I don't read buytaert.net regularly. I found out of the requirement about three days before it was due via word of mouth at a Drupal meetup. Although I'm a non-conformist who doesn't use twitter and such it still wasn't obvious that I should have been reading a particular blog or paying attention to one node on a site for updates.
The description of the event
The description of the event only indicated that people were invited to submit a presentation. Not that one was required. I read this as an optional way to participate. The fact such a submission was required was only listed on a separate page with instructions on how to submit a presentation. But only people already planning to submit would have any reason to navigate to this page. As for the blog post, you cannot expect people to have read that. We aren't all reading every Drupal blog all the time. And the people who wouldn't qualify for attending this event are the least likely people to have seen this post.
While I see the value in getting experienced Drupal developers in a room together, I don't see a downside to letting people new to Drupal observe, if not participate. I also see the value in having a few people around who haven't "drunk the Koolaid" yet, so to speak. It keeps the rest of us grounded. Besides, anyone who would willingly register for an all day developer's summit must be dedicated and have a vested interest in Drupal's well being.
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Jeremy Stoller
Senior Graphic Artist
California Science Center
Fear not,
I will make drawings! :)
all is saved!
all is saved!
Your presentation was one of
Your presentation was one of my favorites. The drawings were wonderful.
Large Robot
http://www.largerobot.com
This is something new
So I think it's up to us (the contributors) to make it a fun and useful event.
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Work: BioRAFT