Summertime is the time for camping - but in this case camping involves geeking out and stretching your brain indoors on sunny summer weekends for the good of code. With many of our Cascadian neighbours holding camps in the recent past, I figured a compendium would be appropriate.

My personal Drupal quest took an ill-fated turn with a laborious wait at the border aboard public conveyance. Fortunately for on bus wi-fi and a Nokia N78 I'm testing (thanks to mobile guru Roland Tanglao), I could grouse about the delay via Twitter and check in on other #dcs08 chatter via Twemes.

I finally arrived downtown Seattle in time for the event wrapping up in West Seattle. The good news was I wouldn't miss the after-session beer camp at Pike Street - so I replenished with some Thai curry and luscious iced coffee and trundled with my backpack over to the brewpub.

Over a couple of pitchers, i caught up with the CivicActions and North Studios crew (who were both a big part of DCV's great vibe) and checked in with the other Vancouverites - my co-worker Audrey and Ryan from the ImageX clan - who had wisely rolled down the day before.

After enjoying grog with Drupal pirates, I ended up on more hi-jinks and urban exploration with photographer and developer Matt Freedman and Avi from Victoria but will save documentation of our exploits for another channel (videos: Dead band at Fremont Solstice Parade party, Critical Mass Ride in Seattle, Checking in from Seattle).

Anyhow, this post is to tell you about the camps, the sessions, and all that ... and offer congrats to the intrepid organizers of Drupal Camps in Portland, Alberta, and Seattle and pass along some useful recap resources (and help pre-announce Drupal Camp Victoria) ~ so let's get at it:

[Update: All systems restored, status upgraded to normal]

Raincity Studios' Vancouver team is working decentralized today as much of Vancouver's downtown core is still without power since an underground utility explosion yesterday (July 14th) afternoon near Richards and Pender/Dunsmuir St.

Despite the diligent efforts of the utility workers, power remains out at the office so the team are working from cafes and homes until restored.

As such, your calls may go unanswered but we are available to assist you via email or other contact methods.

This outage has no effect on web servers or other services so we anticipate no problems beyond larger than usual coffee bills.

Here's more:
Electrical Fire Knocks out Power Downtown Vancouver on Now Public

BC Hydro (utility company)

Power Outage Causes Chaos Downtown in the Vancouver Sun

Vancouver peaceful as blackout continues in the National Post

Power, traffic disrupted in downtown Vancouver via CTV.ca

The third annual Open Source CMS Award has been launched yesterday! So if you have tried some content management systems and have a preference, like... let's say Drupal for example... remember to go HERE and to vote for you favorite (drupal) CMS.

In an effort to improve our QA and debugging processes, Raincity Studios considered using unit testing. This topic is getting a lot of attention right now from the community and I must tell I am as much interested; I did not need more of an excuse to dig a bit more into it.

What is Unit Testing?

The basic principle of Unit Testing is to build scripts to check that code meets specific feature details. Generally speaking, unit tests are used to check the behavior of a particular function under specific conditions or circumstances. This could be for example checking that a function is correctly sorting integers with the biggest values at the end of the list.

Since the very one to benefit from these tests is the programmer himself, it usually make sense that he is in charge of implementing the Unit Tests. These will simply assert, or not, that the code works as expected.

Overview

Raincity Studios (RCS) is a full service web agency, strategically creating and hosting online communities for businesses, organizations and publishers, including Drupal content management system deployments, graphic design, consultation, traffic-building, information architecture design, custom development, plus a retinue of related services.