On last Wednesday, I participated at the August Sevilla Drupal Group monthly meeting, talking about my experience contributing to Drupal.

We walked through how to contribute translations, the modules and themes contribution approval process, how to report issues, how to contribute a patch and how you could become involved in the on progress Drupal Initiatives. We also did a quick review on what we can expect of Drupal 8.

The slides I used are based on Webchick's "One Drupal 8 Slide Deck To Rule Them All". For the reference, they are available on Slideshare: Contributing to drupal from Christian Lopez

I saved on Del.icio.us too a collection of the links we looked at.

One year ago, a refactoring at the Gettext .po file parsing and generation started.

Finally, that issue has been fixed. I were working with Sutharsan, ClemensTolboom, GaborHojtsy and Attiks on this issue at the Drupal Developer Days sprint, and after the sprint we finally (well, mostly Gábor...) pushed forward to its completion.

The new design is something like this:

(Diagram by Gábor Hojtsy)

I'm very grateful for their help on being started on contributing to the D8MI Initiative, and hopefully I'll be working on more things into the D8MI sprint. Any help is welcome!

So third day of the Sprint, with Peter, Clemens and I working on Gettext. It would be the last day for Clemens, so we expected to do great advances :-)

Day started great, and I don't get stuck like previous days with obvious things. We kept with the refactoring and finally core/includes/gettext.inc could be removed. w00t!

Thanks to Gábor's explanation we understood what was expected for the batch API part of this, so we are able of advancing on that, but maybe on another issue context. This one became too big and splitting it could be of help. Peter wrote some more integration tests, and I finished fixing plurals handling and cleaning up some methods. Thanks Clemens for your patience, and hope that we can advance without you in the next days!

Ok, so I failed on Tuesday on updating the blog, but a quick summary.

Clemens and I kept working on the Gettext component on D8MI sandbox. I got a little lost and we had an Skype call in the morning were he explained me what he was expecting. We did some clean up and kept working on it. Some commits got into the sandbox, but lot of works still remaining. Fortunately, in the afternoon Attiks joined us, so more hands (and brain) on code!

Today, the D8MI sprint started. Met the assistants.

At 10 am, Gábor introduced the multilanguage architecture for Drupal 8. It's composed of four layers, with the locale module at the base, and on top of it the UI, the content translation and the config translation. He presented the people responsible of each so we know who we need to talk for anything, and how we could work on his D8MI sandbox. After this, the presentation round where everyone exposed the areas he was interested.

As planned, I started helping out Clemens with the Gettext .po file generation.  The morning has been quite frustrating. I catched up with the comments, and saw that it was not an easy thing. Clemens and Erik have most of the issue already working, but some problems appeared when I tried to test it, and Clemens helped out to find the causes. We updated the summary accordingly. After that, I headed with some errors because of inconsistent naming of classes and its references, an issue that was not happening on Clemens' Mac computer. Fixing this was my first commit to the sandbox :D 

After dinner, work started to happen smoothly. Clemens was working with plurals and we discussed how the responsability of formatting those should be out of the PoItem object, and with his change on this implementation the tests went back to green :-)

After some silly issues that I had generating a git patch, I started to feel more confident. While Clemens update the issue summary for showing up the change of scope it had through the comments, I started to think on how to refactor PoDatabaseWriter. This should continue tomorrow.

Gábor is reporting the progress at this document: D8MI sprint report. The global balance of the 1st day is only one commit to 8.x, but it seems that code will flow better on next days. By now, it's being an awesome experience working with these folks.

Today I landed in Barcelona. I'll be spending a full week trying to contribute to the D8MI. D8MI stands for Drupal 8 Multilanguage Initiative. In Drupal core development, most of it is grouped under different core initiatives, where there is one or more leads that organize the work on a particular area.

The D8MI is lead by Gabor Hojtsy, who set up a sprint this week at Barcelona for advancing on this, taking care of having a workplace and getting sponsorship for commodities so people can focus on work. Current focus is described at Multilingual focus issues.

I found that a sprint is a great way of getting involved, so I decided to spend my holidays here. It's also a great opportunity for visiting friends like @francisrivilla who hosts me these days.

Going back to the sprint, I'll try to write up my experience here every day. As a newbie, I expect to pair with someone more experienced on first days and on following days try to work on my own. Clemens Tolboom is not at the city, but he proposed starting with Make gettext .po generation its own abstracted functionality and offered to mentor online. Let's see how this evolves. Wish me luck!

Last week I assisted to SevillaTipo, a typography event for designers that took place at Sevilla, organized by my friends at Kitiplá. There were some conferences on Friday, and a full workshop on Saturday and Sunday. Sadly, I only could be at the conferences.

But... what the heck I was doing in a designers conf? Well, it's easy to explain. I work every day with these kind of creative people, and I have still some problems on communicating effectively with them. Being their guest, I have to shut my mouth and listen, and this is the only way of learning how they think or feel.

Conferences were pretty interesting. Javier Usabiaga and Marta Armada shared their thoughts on the current state of art in web typography, and how it has evolved from web safe fonts to newer technologies like Google Webfonts, and how typography is becoming more important on the www. They also introduced how they feel about the typography future in the mobile world.

After this one, Octavio Pardo introduced how a typography is conceived and how to design it. The new trends, the work behind a typography and his experience on this world. Looking at the passion distilled on his talk, I'm sure that the workshop was really great.

Best of all, it seems that this event has not been a solo in the Sevilla techie space. It has been the start of a designers community, and hope that more events like this one will follow.

Hello world! It has been so long that I decided to build a new blog... but it took too much time.

It is simple, but at least, it is online!

It could look very ambitious, but it is a multilanguage blog. What does that mean? That I try to post in English and Spanish. You can select the language you want to read it in the top right corner, and subscribe on the 'Syndicate' block.

I hope that I would perseverate on updating it :-)