Technical

March 9^th, 2011 started with Clay Shirky's keynote. Clay studies the effect of the Internet on society and the economy, and his talk was by far the best keynote of the conference. The main point I got out of this is that you can't always solve a novel problem by using an existing mindset.

I was fortunate that NCBI and A-tek sent me to DrupalCon Chicago, the annual three-day gathering of Drupal developers. I aim to distill the talks I went to each day, starting with Day 1, March 8th, 2011.

I'm really enjoying Test-Driven-Development (TDD), combined with automated UI Tests for my Web apps. I love the confidence it gives me to code and be relatively certain I haven't broken anything which was previously tested...

I've been at Zivtech's 2-day Drupal module development. The first day, I picked up a few great tips, such as modules and techniques. Here's what I got out of the second day:

I attended Zivtech's Drupal Module Development two-day training class, May 27, and 28th in NYC.

I'm glad that I had been developing Drupal module development at work for a few months previous to this class, or I would have been quite lost.

Of course, as I expected, I am picking up a few things.

I learned PHP years ago, as my first programming language. At the time I liked it, that is before I learned JavaScript and Python at my current job. Now I am back to PHP again because I've started writing Drupal modules.

My impressions are not great. Disclaimer: this is not a criticism of Drupal; I understand why Drupal is written in PHP, not Python (and of course not JavaScript). PHP:

We go to synagogue pretty much every Shabbat, so that's something that's really part of our lives. Today my wife took the J-man to visit a new pre-school. The class was talking about countries participating in the Winter Olympics. Most of the kids were falling asleep.