#dsi2009 day 1

This post would be a short one about my experiences with #dsi2009 day 1

A confession at the start itself, I am no web developer/programmer or have any of those skills sets. My motivation for attending the event was simply that its a FOSS event. With this as a background to start with let’s begin.

The talks started a bit late, around 11ish or so. The talks room had around a healthy 40-50 odd mix of students and professionals who were taking part. It was not full (to capacity) probably because it was a working day today for many people.

A little bit of background before I venture further. Drupal Sprint 2009 is organized by PLUG and Bhaskaracharya Pratishthana . Both of the institutes have had a long history with FOSS activities in Pune.

The tone of the day was started by Gaurav Pant a.k.a Dexter in his welcome message which started a bit late around 11 a.m. He started with putting the framework of Drupal as an open-source project, talked about how he had been able to buy a car due to open source web development and gave an overview of PLUG’s various activities.

Then Aradhana Sharma of Axelerant Technologies took over the dias with her presentation on customizing Drupal websites using RULES. This talk was followed by her colleague Gaurav Mishra from the same company who shared with us on Drupal theming via 960 grid system .

Around the same time the first talk concluded, the drupal sprint started in an adjoining room. Vivek Khurana or VK or hiddenharmony asked me to do a sort of critical review of the state of install documentation for Drupal 7. So as part of my contribution to a FOSS project, did a short review of the same ~ an hour or so and put it as a comment to the main bug ticket .

15-20 minutes into the sprint the lone workshop for the day Drupal for beginners started in the next room which was taken in the next room by Abhishek Nagar.

At around 13:30 people broke for lunch . At around 14:00 or few minutes afterwards by Prasad Shirgaonkar of Aadi Ventures . His talk I found pretty interesting as he talked on many relevant issues which most of the web developer face but are usually not shared within the web development environment. The whole IE6 experience which sucks and other things. His passion is making Marathi websites and has just launched Designs2Drupal . Simply put I liked his talk.

Then the next talk was about drupal apps integration with Drupal and couple of case studies, as I have never/not deployed or maintained or contributed any Drupal stuff cannot comment on criticize on these talks.

Take aways for the day :-

a. Not as much people as expected but still a healthy 100 odd people, tomorrow being saturday maybe some better crowd.

b. Some of the talks were perhaps technically superior but the social aspect – the presentation was what let them down. There were few shining examples but these were few and far between.

c. They were a fair share of women this time around, perhaps 20-25% , might be because web development doesn’t have that much barrier of entry as some other technologies, or they do not have to be as thick-skinned as in some of the other communities. I might be correct or not but that is/was my perception.

d. Did see few drupal screenshots, it seems they have been inspired with WordPress usability as they resemble . Even if it is superficially so it is a good thing for WordPress. I guess somebody said it best ‘imitation is the best form of flattery’ 🙂

e. Drupal’s documentation is really in tatters. Whoever are making money is not because its easy but because they are doing work inspite of it.

f. Addison Berry, the Drupal documentation lead is a sheer bundle of energy. It was nice to be able to interact with her and have some sort of idea of a potential roadmap those guys have.

That’s it for today. Let’s see what happens in dsi2009 tomorrow 🙂