There is a big party happening at DrupalCon Chicago, and I can't wait.

On March 24th, we're celebrating Drupal's 25th Anniversary with a gala from 7–10 pm CT. It's a separate ticketed event, not included in your DrupalCon registration.

Some of Drupal's earliest contributors are coming back for this, including a few who haven't attended DrupalCon in years. That alone makes it special.

If you've been part of Drupal's story, whether for decades or just a few months, I'd love for you to be there. It's shaping up to become a memorable night.

The dress code is "Drupal Fancy". That means anything from gowns and black tie, to your favorite Drupal t-shirt. If you've ever wanted an excuse to dress up for a Drupal event, this is it!

Tickets are $125, with a limited number of $25 tickets underwritten by sponsors so cost isn't a barrier. All tickets must be purchased in advance. They won't be available at the door. Registration closes March 18th, so grab your tickets soon.

Organizations can reserve a table for their team. Even better, invite a few contributors to join you. It's a great way to give back to the people who helped build what your business runs on.

For questions or sponsorship opportunities, please reach out to Tiffany Farriss, who is serving as Gala Chair and part of the team coordinating the celebration.

Know someone who should be there? Share this with them.

What matters most is that you're there. I can't wait to celebrate together in Chicago.

Symfony is a reusable set of standalone, decoupled and cohesive PHP components that solve common web development problems. As most of you know, we have incorporated Symfony components into Drupal 8. We are enhancing our strong architecture, with another strong architecture. It is a big initiative that we have been working on for many months.

Given the importance of Symfony for Drupal, it is great to see our two communities collaborate. Events like Symfony Live London are an ideal place for that to happen. I look forward to seeing you there!

The Core Conversations track is a place for people actively working on Drupal or Drupal.org to meet and plan the future of Drupal. Each session is either two 15 minute or one 30 minute presentation, followed by 30 minutes of discussion.

I know a lot of you contribute to Drupal or want to start contributing. If so, Core Conversations are a unique opportunity to present in front of key Drupal contributors, and to make the case for why we need to do more of A or B (e.g. authoring experience improvements, API overhauls, etc.). We need UX conversations, performance conversations, feature conversations, etc. Please share your ideas with the world through Drupal core.

If you have ideas for Drupal core, and you are attending DrupalCon, I suggest that you submit a proposal as soon as possible. The deadline is February 1st so don't wait too long. To get your ideas flowing, here are our conversations from Drupalcon London and Drupal Chicago.

To help facilitate holding these discussions on more of an international scale, I'd like to experiment with doing monthly, informal chats. In terms of format, I'd like to choose a general topic of discussion, then hold an hour-long phone call that all could dial into (with IRC for back-channel discussions and questions) where I can give an update on major Drupal happenings and allow plenty of time for Q&A from the community on the topic for the month. A moderator will help with voicing/unvoicing people during the Q&A section, and the chats would be recorded and put up for download for those who couldn't make it.

If this idea sounds interesting to you, please join me for the first Drupal Fireside Chat on Friday, December 16 at 10 am Eastern US time (registration recommended so click 'register'). The topic I'd like to focus on for the first session is the Drupal Core Development Process, including sub-topics like a general status update on what is happening with Drupal 8, what role Drupal 8 initiatives and initiative owners have in the development of Drupal 8, and what process changes have been put in place to help improve Drupal 8's development process over Drupal 7's.

Feel free to post additional questions/topic ideas here, and hope to see you on Friday!

Instead of giving a morning keynote, I will be interviewed by Josh Koenig after we've been both been drinking for a while. I'm very excited about the interview format and having it in the evening. The traditional keynote presentation format works well for making statements, but DrupalCamps inspire often a different mood. I expect the interview format will fit this ambiance by being more probing and personal than a straightforward keynote could be.

We still haven't decided on the questions... and that is where you come in. If you were in Josh's positions, what would you ask me? What topics should we discuss together? Just suggest your questions in the comments of this post. Josh will pick both the most popular and the most interesting ones and see where they go.

I look forward to seeing many of you at BADCamp next week!

We love Varnish at Acquia. It's one of the ingredients that makes Acquia Dev Cloud and Acquia Managed Cloud so fast.

This Thursday, the Varnish team will celebrate the release of Varnish 3.0 with parties around the world, much as the Drupal community celebrated the release of Drupal 7.

Because we love Varnish, Acquia is organizing and sponsoring two Varnish release parties. One is in Boston, at the Cambridge Brewing Company from 6:30 to 8:30pm; a second is in Portland at the Lucky Labrador Brewing Company starting at 6:00pm. Both are on Thursday, June 16th. See the Varnish 3.0 party page for parties at locations near you.

It's a great opportunity to meet fellow web geeks and have some good (free!) beer. I'll be at the Boston party, and look forward to seeing the local Varnish users!

Further details are on Varnish's web site. See you this Thursday!

Registration is now open for this free-as-in-beer event. It takes place from Friday, February 4 to Sunday, February 6 in parallel with FOSDEM. On that Friday there will be a code sprint. On Saturday and Sunday at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), you can enjoy two days of presentations and workshops on everything that is happening and exciting in the Drupal world.

A large part of the program is defined by the attendees so you are encouraged to propose sessions. So, register and submit your ideas for sessions. Even if you don't present a session, you'll enjoy yourself and learn more about getting the most from Drupal. Plus, you'll be able to see where DrupalCon got started.

At the Drupal developer room you can meet fellow Drupal developers, listen to great talks and discuss Drupal. We'll have the Drupal developer room on Sunday, February 7th form 09:00h until 17:00h. The organizers are still looking for Drupal speakers; let us know in the FOSDEM 2010 group on drupal.org if you want to give a presentation.

Hope to see you at FOSDEM 2010!

On a somewhat related note, we have some intern positions open at Acquia to give people the opportunity to come and learn about Drupal – students from MIT, Harvard or other universities interested in an internship at Acquia should certainly attend and approach me about it.