Professional

Back in September, I presented a session at DrupalCamp Atlanta on Ubercart, the premier e-commerce module package for Drupal.  Since then, a few people have asked me for the slides. I thought I should post them in a public place so that anyone can get them, so here they are!

• Slides from my Ubercart presentation (PDF)
• Video of my Ubercart presentation
• All videos from DrupalCamp Atlanta

Thanks to all of you who attended or watched the video. I am truly flattered.

The 2009 North American DrupalCon, a conference for Drupal enthusiasts like me, took place last week, March 4-7, in Washington, DC.  With 1,400 attendees, I am told that it was the biggest DrupalCon ever! It was my first DrupalCon, and I came away from it with a very full brain.  In this article, I'll cover some of the high points that I left with.

I attended my first Barcamp this weekend at the Georgia Tech Advanced Technology Development Center in Atlanta.  What is Barcamp, you ask?  It's an unconference, where the agenda is decided by the participants.  For this reason, all attendees are encouraged to participate by offering a presentation or demo, or at least participating in a discussion.  As a barcamp virgin, I wasn't ready to give a presentation this year, but next year I'll be better prepared.  I did my best to be engaged in the discussions, ask good questions, and get to know the many others from the Atlanta (and nearby) technology community.

For a free event, I was really impressed with the amenities.  The ATDC is a first-class facility, with plenty of conference rooms with whiteboards and projectors.  Also, our sponsors really took care of us, providing a barbecue dinner Friday, Flying Biscuit sandwiches for breakfast on Saturday, and pizza for lunch.  Also, there was free soda, coffee, and beer.  What more could you ask?  Nobody went away hungry.

The wide variety of people, in terms of expertise and lines of work, really made this a cool event, covering a wide array of topics.  Some of the sessions I attended included:

• Independent Consultants - Pricing your Services
• Genetic Algorithms (OK, I still don't really get what those are)
• Erlang overview and demo
• Starting a website: Framework (Rails, CakePHP, etc.) or CMS (Drupal, Wordpress, etc.)?
• How to generate buzz without being treated like a spammer
• "Push Protesting" - using Microformats to get your minority message out
• Yahoo Pipes demo (Sanjay Parekh's construction of startupgossip.com)
• COPPA - the Child Online Protection and Privacy Act, and how it affects your site
• BeagleBoard demo (what is that?  see http://beagleboard.org)
• Web Security resources and tools
• Twitter API
• Open Source roundtable

There were some off-the-wall sessions as well (which, perhaps unfortunately, I didn't attend):

• Freezing different types of food in liquid nitrogen
• "Alternative Funding" - (ahem - it was a poker game)
• Be your own beatbox (making beatbox sounds in a microphone)
• Be your own barista (making coffeehouse coffee in your own home)

Overall, Barcamp is worth attending for just about anyone with an interest in technology, even if it's just a passing interest.  You'll come away from it with a new appreciation for technology, the people involved in it, new things you may have never heard about, and a renewed excitement to learn more.

After months of neglect, I am finally writing a new post!  As I dove head-first into the world of web consulting, I got too busy to keep this site up-to-date.  But now I'm back--still busy, just better organized.

Kudos to consumer guru Clark Howard for discussing open source alternatives on his radio show.  He specifically mentions OpenOffice in his show notes.  He is correct that businesses and consumers can save lots of money by using free, open source alternatives to expensive commercial applications such as Microsoft Office.

This is just further evidence that open source software has entered the mainstream.

(Image courtesy of bnnrc.net,  under a creative commons license.)