March 9th, 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 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:
If you read one of my former blog posts, Doing it with Drupal, you know that at NCBI I was experimenting with using Drupal to manage content, but not to serve it. This post will more fully describe this project in the hopes of receiving informatative comments and helping others who may be trying to achieve similar goals.
