I'm back from DrupalCon Copenhagen and I thought it's time for a more or less short summary of what happened.

My blog has been silent for too long, it's time for some updates!

Drupal

I am currently on position 15 of the top contributors for Drupal 7. That means that 81 of my patches were commited (which also means that I have written a lot more since many patches usually require multiple iterations until they are good enough). Because of that, I was mentioned in Dries Keynote presentation at DrupalCon SF and some other blogs (german only):

More than a year ago, I needed a module which allows users to send private messages for a newly created Drupal 6 website. So I stumbled over Privatemsg. However, back then, it was an early development release which missed many features, had some bugs and so on. So I decided to help improving it.

7 weeks ago and probably hundreds of patches later (but still no stable release!), litwol made me a co-maintainer of the module which allowed me to commit patches myself.

Yesterday was our last full day in Calgary and we went a bit sightseeing as we hadn't seen much of Calgary so far. First, we went up to the Calgary Tower where you have a nice view over Calgary in all directions. The tower is 191m high and we were able to use two tickets that belong to our Bed & Breakfast, so we saved the 13$ admission.

Later, we visited SAIT, the competitor village to check how their rooms are and how their condition was after the party-night :)

We have the gold medal in Web Design, well done Fabian. Read more about his impressions on his blog (german).

Additional, we do have other 6 gold medals (Offset Printing, Metal Roofing, Stonemasonry, Painting and Decoration, Carpentry and Fashion Technology (best of nation!)), 2 silver (Plastering, Mechanical Engineering Design CAD), bronce (Polymechanics, Electrical Installations, Joinery, IT PC/Network Support and Construction Metal Works) and 16 (2 teams) Medaillons of Excellence!

During the last two days, we could watch how the tasks and projects from the various competitors slowly (and sometimes amazingly fast) came to a finish. It was really interesting but especially today was very exhausting as I wanted to see as much as possible.

It went pretty well for Fabian on the third and fourth day, he had enough time to finish everything. However, it's really hard to compare the different websites as I have seen only bits and pieces of them during the short presentation.

The second day was quite long, we were in the Stampede Park from around 10am to 7pm and walked around most of the time. It seems to me that visiting is actually more exhausting than competing, atleast physically and in my trade :)

It is getting more and more interesting, you can now actually see something in most trades even though it is hard to say which competitors are doing better than others.

It started to get windy the first time and it is now quite a bit colder than the weeks before but that is actually quite nice.

We walked around the competition site the whole day, there wasn't much to see in most of the trades as they have just begun to work on their stuff but it was still interesting. It seems that most of the swiss competitors had a good start, including my successor.

We are now quite tired and are relaxing a bit in our room before we will look for something to eat.

Yesterday, we arrived in Calgary where I first had to buy a USB extension cable for my successor, as his keyboard cable was too short :) After that and bringing our stuff into our Bed & Breakfast, we had to return our car.

We stayed for a full day in Banff to rest a bit before we go back to Calgary where we will return our car and the competition starts. We have tickes for the opening ceremony, wohooo! :). Still looking for tickets to the closing cerenomy, though...

Apart from taking the Banff Gondola to the Sulphur mountain, a bit shopping and taking a bath in our hotel, we haven't done much, but it was really nice to relax a bit after these busy days we had so far.