Day two started bright and early, and included the phenomenon that I once again made it in on time. This time I braved the cold and a very light sprinkle that didn’t qualify as rain and frankly didn’t even qualify as mist — in fact it really only qualified as a mildly chilly wetness — and headed down to the Tim Horton’s that I’d spotted the night before. It was actually a couple of blocks out of my way, on the other side of where the con met up, but it was not particularly far out of my way.

The first session involved poor Walker getting up and talking about the File API. He got up there and gave a great talk on why what we have is only quasi-functional, what some of the problems are and what needs to be done. It was very nicely done, inspirational, and of course received absolutely nothing resembling volunteers to actually help him do it. Walker is basically the File API Guy, even though it’s pretty clear he doesn’t actually want to be. It’s not a thankless task — people will thank him a lot — but I don’t think it’s going to be a particularly rewarding task.

Next up was an engaging chat about the Relationship API, led by Allie. This one was in a smaller room and ended up feeling kind of like a cozy chat session which had a great deal of back and forth about what people expect out of a system. Relationships are, of course, a difficult concept because there is a trade-off between simplicity of implementation, simplicity of interface, and the power the API enables. Gotta have some kind of balance between all of them. Also, there are several extant relationship modules now and it’s not entirely clear which are going where and how, but there’s a lot of things going on in the arena. I was somewhat distracted during this because my interest in such a beast is actually relatively peripheral.

After this there was a nice group lunch at my very own restaurant (it was named Earl’s) with CivicSpace. While I won’t share the contents of the conversation, I will share that it was very clear that management wanted every floor employee to be a Hot Chick wearing black. One of the girls actually resembled Paris Hilton, but more attractive. The food was all right, but not as insanely wonderful as the lamb shanks I’d scored for lunch the day before.

After lunch I caught about half of jjeff’s AJAX presentation where he talked a bit about his module that helps provide Prototype/Scriptaculous support. Unfortunately, I missed the beginning so I didn’t really get to absorb a lot of information, beyond the knowledge that the module doesn’t do a lot by himself, but simply adds support for an external widget library. It did interest me in AJAX somewhat, as the Views UI is a UI that could clearly use improvement via AJAX, and now I have to actually start researching it.

After that I participated in the User Experience session run by Kieran, and I got to show off a little bit of the work I’ve been doing on the administration module. We got some clear decisions on what needs to happen, and this weekend I need to write up the results, get some further information from Kieran, and get a front page post on drupal.org to get people to participate in a short feedback session about the best way to re-organization the administration pages. A good next step that didn’t get discussed should include some real work theming the various administration pages that might benefit from simple rearrangement.

After this, my time was my own, and is somewhat of a blur to me. I recall wandering around searching for dinner at a place that would seat our crowd of a dozen that shrank to 9 by the time we got things sorted out. I recall eating a very tasty ‘cedar plank salmon’ that merely needed a little salt. I’m not sure what the point of the cedar plank was, as it didn’t seem to really affect the flavor, but as a schtick I’ve seen a lot sillier.

This was then followed by a bug fix session that included as many as twenty geeks with laptops sitting around a bunch of tables that were aligned end-to-end. Moshe played issue queue daddy and apparently close to twenty bugs were fixed and patches committed that night. For myself I set one to “won’t fix” and reviewed one patch and set it ready to commit, then spent a couple of hours helping Robert Douglass play with the Views API so that it could support the relativity module for a project he was working on. Interesting stuff — it also uncovered a bug very deep in the module that was quite difficult to diagnose.

I got back to the hotel somewhere between 1:30 and 2am, and crashed out.