Come to think of it, I almost decided not to go to the RAI in the morning! All the official sessions are over since thursday and yesterday there was only ‘codesprinting’ left. This is where you can help contributing to the Drupal community in an informal setting with other Drupal users.

Since I’d never taken part before I was wondering what I could possibly add, next to the most imposing names always circulating on drupal.org, that were also present at DrupalCon. But when I heard all my colleagues were going also (except for our hardworking guards left at the office) I couldn’t let them down of course and stay behind. 

De last few days were (visually) exhausting and it cost me great effort to step out of bed and pack myself together to get started.

In the RAI they were buzzing already! When I tried spotting someone I’d know, I was helped by the so-called ‘Mentors’ (which Marc and Bart were also part of!) and they were trying to give me helping hand.

The new Drupal 8-beta release was freshly installed and intact, waiting for me on my laptop, to be tackled. And since I had nothing else to do I thought: ‘let me try some exercises to find out how it works’.

The first thing that immediately struck me was that I sometimes could and sometimes could not navigate to the homepage. I found that noteworthy and it also felt inconsistent. Each time I was intuitively hovering in the upper left corner of my screen trying to find a home link.

Well let me see what was causing the problem? I found out that when you opened a new tab and surfed directly to an admin page the home link didn’t show up.

Strange! Would this already have been discussed? I could hardly imagine I would be the first one to complain. Quick: let’s see if the ‘issue cue’ could clarify. No! It wasn’t mentioned before!

And so, after only five minutes of work, I found a job that kept me busy all day. Marc explained to me how I should handle this and introduced me to the right people. First I had to create an issue, I had to define the problem, and suggest a solution. It wasn’t real rocket science by the way: it only cost me three lines of code, but to get them reviewed and accepted by the right maintainers was a whole other story… well let me spare you, I won’t go into detail. The good news is: at the end of the day I stood there, shining happily ever after, next to my colleague Daniël, and suddenly we were just ‘Core Contributors’! Everyone was applauding, we were filmed and a live commit of the patches we created was done by ‘Webchick’.

Also Patrick, my other colleague had discovered a bug en managed to get this reviewed, fixed and committed the same day.

So only one day of codesprinting on DrupalCon had passed, but Triquanta gained three new Core contributors: Well done!

And I haven’t yet mentioned the important work that has been done by Jur (on Facet API) and my colleague Elibert who discovered a bug in CKEditor.

As I said before: this DrupalCon was the best ever. For example, I enjoyed so much the visit to photomuseum FOAM where Drupalists could get in for free on Wednesday night, during the ‘cultural evening’ which I also helped organizing. And the musical event subsequently in café the Prael, where Peter en Jur gave a great concert was every bit as successful. Thursday night I was invited by the Drupal association to have dinner with the other volunteers and afterwards I took part in a very funny group to answer the most hilarious questions at the big Trivia night in café Panama.

Next year DrupalCon will be held in Barcelona. Whilst everyone wants to go there, this might turn into a huge battle! At least I know where to focus: I will, if necessary use my newly acquired status as a Drupal contributor to win this game!

• Drupal-planet