A feast of Drupalish delights was enjoyed in Berkeley, California at the weekend. I was lucky enough to attend - for me it had the added bonuses of getting to see the beautiful Berkeley campus for the first time, enjoying warm Californian weather when it's already quite cold in Vancouver, and spending some balmy evenings hanging out in San Francisco, a city I've been crazy about since a 3 month stint working here when I was 20.

Anyway, back to Drupalcamp itself. Day One began with breakfast courtesy of the wonderful Chapter Three peeps, which included delicious vegan donuts and great coffee. Then the event kicked off with Tao Starbow welcoming us all and handing over to Earl Miles for his keynote talk on what he has learned about user experience issues over the past few years (and with his work on Panels, and especially on Views, he has learned a LOT). I then attended a session by Adam Kalsey of WorkHabit on building APIs for your modules. One of the main points he kept drumming home to us was that if we developers don't document our modules, we ...basically... suck. It was an excellent session and since there had been so much talk about the importance of documentation for Drupal, I asked Adam afterwards if he wouldn't mind adding the main content of his presentation to the Programming Best Practices page I initiated in the handbook with senpai and aj045 a couple of months back - he said he'd be delighted to :-)

Lunchtime saw a bunch of us heading across the campus to get to Telegraph Avenue for a delicious Indian meal and some lively Drupal discussions and then I attended four sessions in a row but they were such high quality that I wouldn't have missed a single one of them. There was Tao Starbow's talk about AJAX and JSON, a subject that is of course dear to my own heart. Then Matt Cheney of Chapter Three presented a talk on Panels 2 that was full of eye-openers for me - it's a module I've been making heavy use of in a current project, not having had much experience with it prior to that, so I was intrigued by some of the tips and tricks this seasoned Panels user had to share. After that, Adam Kalsey presented on Drupal performance tuning, covering issues from module bloat to database indexes to code efficiency to the use of CDNs to opcode caching and server tuning. And more besides! Awesome stuff. And as if that wasn't enough awesomeness for one day it finished off with a talk by Earl Miles about the Views 2 UI, and being - like most Drupalers - a very big fan of Views, this was a rare treat.

By that stage it was time for evening refreshments and most of us headed to nearby Jupiter for some free beers on Sun (thanks, Sun!) and had a fine time indeed.

Sunday got off to a later start (thankfully ;-) and had fewer sessions but again those that I attended all held many points of interest for me. Neil Drumm gave a session on data imports using Jobqueue and Import Manager modules, which I am definitely going to look into in the very near future. The one and only chx presented on the Form API and amused us with anecdotes of how he has tried to get the html standard for forms changed by the w3c so that they're not so ridiculously hard to work with on the server-side. And Scott Mattoon of Sun presented on Drupal efficiency and some of the tools they provide developers with to monitor this - something else I will definitely be looking into very soon, thanks to the DVDs they provided of OpenSolaris and NetBeans.

As with most Drupal events I've attended thus far, the best part of it was getting to meet so many other drupalers - putting faces to d.o handles, as it were. In particular, it was wonderful to finally meet Dmitri Gaskin in person after we had missed out on co-presenting in Szeged together when his school commitments prevented him from attending. And also I finally got to meet Marco Carbone of Advomatic, whose Slot Machine module for advanced content scheduling I had done some work on earlier this year.

BADcamp 08 was a most excellent event - a huge thank you to all the organisers and presenters for making it such a valuable experience!