The second annual SANDcamp (San Diego Drupal Camp http://sandcamp.org/) was January 23rd and 24th. The non-conference was a great success, with over 200 Drupalers in attendance. The new location at Balboa Park’s Hall of Champion was a dramatic improvement over last year and the organizing team http://sandcamp.org/information/event-organizers did an outstanding job. If you missed this year’s event, SANDcamp 2011 will be January 29th and 30th.

SANDCamp was this past weekend, and I had the pleasure of being able to present. The first half of the presentation was geared at improvements that can be utilized by small sites (app/db on the same server) to improve performance and increase capacity.

After years of outstanding BADCamps in the Bay Area the big dance is finally coming to the West Coast. Drupalcon SF will be held at the Moscone Center on April 19th through the 21st. If you have never been to a Drupalcon this is a perfect time to go. Hotel and airfare are very reasonable and the Moscone Center is a spectacular venue. This will be Achieve Internet's fifth Drupalcon and we are once again very proud to sponsor this fantastic gathering of Drupal minds.

This past week, I was chatting with my friend - and ex-boss - Chris Fuller (cfuller12) from Optaros about caching pages for authenticated users.  He'd been implementing authcache to cache pages for his latest deployment but was going to need to do some tweaking to get dynamic aspects of the page working for logged in users.  I've been busy writing proposals and keeping the Achieve-machine moving forward so the development challenge was a great reason to do something

The Achieve Internet team attended our third LA Drupal camp on Aug 8th and 9th.  Once again Chris Charlton and his team did an outstanding job with the event.  The location at UCI was not only convenient for the San Diego Achieve team, it really provided an outstanding venue for the event.

Recap of our adventures at the event.

With an attendance of 80 to 90 people, and participants from all over the United States and even Ecuador, the first SANDcamp (San Diego Drupal Camp) was a success.

Hurrah!  With a new president comes a variety of changes, and with this president in particular, I'm sure we're in for plenty. 

A few reports have already been written about the "Fields in Core" coding sprint that was held December 15th - 19th at the Acquia offices in Andover, Massachusetts. While some of them are more technical, I decided to try to give you a good idea of what we spent our time doing. For the more technical ones check the "field in core" group.

Install profiles rock, and you should know what they are and why they’re the future.

WTH is an Install Profile?

There’s a folder you probably have paid little attention to that is situated right at the top level of a drupal install (5 or 6): profiles. The standard Drupal profile is called “default” and comes with any Drupal installation. Every time you’ve installed Drupal 5 or Drupal 6 (which probably borders the 1000s if you’re like me), you’ve run through the default install profile.

NAMM (the International Music Products Association) launched their WannaPlayMusic.com site this week, coinciding with Music Week, May 5th through the 9th.