Drupalday Valencia 2012 review

Who: 60+ Spanish drupalistas from a very diverse group of Drupal companies with presence in Spain, including Bluespark. What: a one day, Spanish language, developer oriented, Drupal event. Where: at University of Valencia's newest engineering school, just meters from the Mediterranean sea in one of the most touristic places of Spain. When: as of 2011, "Drupalday" is held annually, and last week I attended the second edition. Why: Drupalistas in Spain lacked a regular developer oriented event outside of the big international conferences like Drupalcon and the more conference-like Drupalcamp (yes, it is not a real camp here). This was the list of sessions and workshops:

• Plugins y handlers for Views - Jacinto Capote
• Simpletest workshop - Juan Pablo Novillo y Ricardo Sanz
• Development agile methodologies - Emma López
• Display Suite - Luis Ortiz
• Varnish workshop - Pedro González
• Twittalicious: Product development with Drupal - Rubén Teijeiro
• Selenium workshop - Óscar Calvo
• Rules - Mateu Aguiló
• Migrate workshop - Javier Carranza
• Features - Ramon Vilar

The Varnish workshop was particularly crowded. The discussion centered around the different approaches for the handling of cookies. Pedro Gonzales showed us some nice tricks on this one, like detecting hot-linking, avoiding via varnish compressing already compressed files like jpg and targz without touching apache's config. And an interesting hint for those into virtual machines for local development: Vagrant Another interesting one was the Migrate workshop by Javier Carranza. Somehow I've missed the recent drupalcon sessions about Migrate and it has clearly evolved a lot since the last time I had worked with it. So this was very useful as I have a big migration project underway here at Bluespark. Emma Lopez's session was the only non-drupal oriented session where she presented the most recent trends in agile project management methodologies and quality assurance. Things like Kamban and Cucumber were new to me but they look promising. Since the sessions were in two different rooms I could not attend all of them but this is a summary of the stuff I was most involved in. Of course we later had a group dinner and went to explore some of the local bars… and then this conversation about performance and client horror stories sparked in the middle of the street with a lot of illegal street vendors trying to sell us beer… crazy geeky night :-) There is a Flickr group with pictures of the event.