DrupalCon SF has been an amazing experience so far: reconnecting with people I've known for years, meeting people in person for the first time, hearing interesting things from some of the great presentations, and getting a huge amount done. Quick update on a few items of possible interest:

• Tuesday, 4/20, 5:30pm-6:30pm in room 308, I'll be on a panel discussion: The exodus: leading Drupal out of CVS. The move from CVS to Git was the first thing Dries mentioned in his keynote about hot new developments in the State of Drupal. If you're wondering what it all means, come hear myself, Angela Byron (webchick), Damien Tournoud (DamZ) and Sam Boyer (sdboyer) explain what's happening, why, and how you can help.
• Wednesday, 4/21, 8:30am-9:30am (ouch!) in room 307, I'll be hosting a panel discussion on Drupal Distributions on drupal.org (which happens to be the second hot topic that Dries mentioned in his keynote). Chad Philips and I will talk about the system that 3281d Consulting built to package distributions on drupal.org, and you'll hear some perspectives on the potential of Drupal distributions from Jeff Miccolis (jmiccolis) from Development Seed and Kevin Reynen from the Open Media Foundation.
• Wednesday, 4/21, 3:00pm-4:00pm in room 304, I'll be on a panel about Best practices in contrib development and support with Dave Reid, Randy Fay (rfay), Greg Knaddison (greggles) and Jennifer Hodgdon (jhodgdon).
• Wednesday, 4/21, 4:15pm-5:15pm in room 270 I'm hosting a BoF on "Drupal for Revolutionary Change", discussing some of the websites I've built for organizations passionate about changing the world for the better, including a daily newspaper site, an Ubercart-based bookstore, a conference site, a workers memorial fund (which I founded when my uncle was crushed to death at work after managers refused to replace faulty safety equipment he had been organizing meetings about for months), and more. If you'd like to live in a world based on the principles of Open Source and the GPL, let's talk about how to make it happen!
• Thursday, 4/22, all day: I'll be at the code sprint, working on the Update manager in Drupal 7 core, writing tests for drupal.org (especially Project tests and Project issue tests), and planning the CVS to Git migration for drupal.org
• Friday, 4/23, 10:00pm-1:00am, the Brazilian Samba band I play in, Grupo Samba Rio, will be doing a gig at Il Pirata at 2007 16th St (at Potrero) in San Francisco. Samba, pagode, dancing, and tons of fun. If you're still in town, you won't want to miss it. ;)

I'm a bit shocked by the news from Dries's keynote that I'm the 14th most active contributor to Drupal 7 core -- since I've had so many things going on I feel like I've barely accomplished much core development for the last year. Maybe I'm getting more done for core than I realize, or perhaps I just have impossibly high standards for what I expect to be able to do. Either way, it's nice to be appreciated for what I contribute back to Drupal and I'm very grateful for that.

Thanks to the amazing team organizing DrupalCon, to everyone who's come to the Bay Area (my home) to make this conference as incredible as it is, and to everyone who keeps making Drupal better and better. And my heart goes out to everyone who was stranded by volcanic ash and couldn't get here. We miss you all!

Cheers,
-Derek (dww)