The Drupal brand of geek is to me a tasteful breed -- a nice mashup of programmers, designers, and administrators -- and those for whom these interests/skills overlap.

I've never been able to relate extremely well with the hardcore Linux kernel hackers. Folks with that incredible sort of domain-specific brilliance definitely abound in the Drupal community, but, (I may piss off said hackers to say,) the Drupal folks tend to have their heads more in this world.

I've been considering similarities lately between the Linux and Drupal movements -- ex., both lacking on the user experience end, but robust and flexible, and championed by an incredibly loyal and hardworking community -- but I think the slight difference in flavor of geek might have something to do with the difference in who tends to use these tools.

With a huge user-base of (non-geek) community/socially-minded organizations, many Drupal developers exhibit those same interests and pursuits, and are well-minded, [I-might-go-as-far-as] integral persons.

Swarming around with 1,299 of those folks today was truly great. A few companies making their living off Drupal (including REALNEO's host, Bryght/RainCity) station booths in the mill-about area, but the conference primarily revolves around the hour/half-hour sessions stacked through the day, spread over six rooms, (see the schedule). Planning out my schedule has been painful, having to choose just one of often four topics I'm intrigued to hear about.

I've posted notes from all-but-one session that I attended on the Drupal Cleveland site I'm making:

• Building APIs that Rock
• State of Drupal Keynote
• Totally Rocking Your Drupal Development Environment
• Drupal Module Development Kickstart
• OpenID, Drupal and the Open Web
• Optimizing your LAMP stack for Drupal

Many of the presenters are likely providing their own [neater~completer] notes, and these are probably not extremely germane topics to many here, but my notes will help me remember, and hopefully give anyone interested an idea of what's going down, and perhaps some insights/insides.

Thanks much again to all of REALNEO for your support, and another special thank-you to those who helped fund my trip!

I'm really looking forward to three more info-packed days...