Happy Pixels

Just today I had a last-minute opportunity to change my travel plans to make a one-week stop in Boston on my way to Germany and participate in the Fields in Core coding sprint hosted by Acquia.

After multiple iterations, the Intro to SimpleTest session has gotten pretty good at teaching people how to write a test, but one of the questions that were often asked during the testing sprint that followed the session was: what do I need to test? I submitted this presentation again for DrupalCon DC as there are still a lot of developers out there who want to get familiar with automated testing, and this time we need to be able to make a better job at responding to the question "what are we testing?"

It seems that the last DrupalCon in Szeged just happened, and the next one is already open for registration! If you haven't bought your tickets, you can buy them on the DrupalCon website. There is a limited amount of cheaper tickets (I got mine for $125!), so hurry up before they get more expensive. It also seems that the conference sites get better and better; registering was painless and browsing the different sections was incredibly intuitive.

The second edition of the BADCamp (Bay Area Drupal Camp) that took place in Berkeley this week-end seems to have been a success in many aspects. Even if the number of registered attendees was higher than last year, the event felt comparable in size. However, we got to attract a few more Drupal celebrities such as Earl Miles and Charlie Negyesi (who was surprised to see me on this part of the globe). The number of presentations proposed was also twice as big, which forced the organisers to only accept the most demanded ones and resulted in a higher quality average.

OpenExpo is an open source conference taking place twice a year in different locations in Switzerland. The second 2008 edition is taking place in Wintherthur in canton Zurich, and my visit from yesterday left me with some thoughts that I wanted to share here.

As you may have noticed, I redesigned the theme of my blog. It's still based on the same idea, but I started everything from scratch again so that I could do it right. The Happy Pixels theme is now a proper Garland sub-theme, and the base image for the color module integration is much cleaner, with more subtle effects.

A color-enabled Garland sub-theme that I built for this site and released to the drupal community. Design and base image generation was done using inkscape.

Kudos to Development Seed and Matthew Slater for making the first Drupal User Group meeting happen in Geneva!

The meeting took place in a little café near the train station, and the relative quietness of the location was definitely a plus; no need to scream to hear each other. Eric and Bonnie from Development Seed also brought their experience organizing this kind of meetings in Washington DC, and their proposed structure made networking with the right people a lot easier.

As it was announced during the closing session at DrupalCon, there are a lot of local Drupal events going on in the coming months, so it is no surprise that wherever I go I happen to find them on my way. I'm currently staying at my girlfriend's parent's house in Munich for a few days, so I got to attend the DUG meet-up in the GAST im Gasteig, a cool and innovative lounge-restaurant.

My first contact with the website JazzForYou.de happened when the owner and jazz guitarist Gunter 'Ruit' Kraus was recommended to me as a teacher for the two months I was to spend in Heidelberg. Despite a decent first impression, a 1997-esque structure and some too common faults very quickly popped up, so after meeting with Gunter for the first time it didn't take long before we agreed on a site redesign.