How to make a swede understand a clever dane

Druplicon copenhagen salutes you

So 2 days til im gonna be on a plane back to wonderfull paris, yesterday @mrdruplicon came by my apartment - yup in life person, how cool is that!
Then we had to attack my beer collection, so the mighty Mikkeller IPA collection I had, is now gone, but hey its not everyday a big ass blue onion comes by. + With druplicon haves Swedish friends. Afterwards we went down to the local bar, and afaik druplicon got lucky! - yup the chicks in copenhagen digs openSource!

It was a pleasure to hook up with the swedes from nodeOne, and a pretty awesome way to connect between out borders - i really wanted to jump on the bus with them and go down to germany, and further to holland and then paris, but ill wait a couple of days. The new library website for copenhagen & Aarhus, is getting in to the final round - so its a bit busy at the moment, and I have a session in paris, and by the look of the size of the room im gonna have the session in... I should be nervous.

Somebody vs. Somebody else

Besides of getting a drink (hey thats what we do here in cph)  I had a good talk with druplicon, and the geeks from nodeone, about some of the classical frictions in the development of websites.
just to name a few we have:

"Evil Project managers vs. the Heroic webgeeks" -
I got the domain projektledersvin.dk - loosly translated to projectmanagerpig)

The "webgeeks vs. the dumbass client"
if youre my client - well then offcourse its way different ;) - client somehow never understand our brilliance, or what a feature creep is etc.

Offcourse the traditional drupal thingie: Programmer vs. Designer.
The last couple of days that have xploded -especially on twitter - well that stuff just happens, its not the first time and surely not gonna be the last.

The thing is that it seems to me that we (devs & designers) dont speak the same language:
The Nerds speak in code, klingon, mySQL, php etc and haves a hot affair with the terminal, and some even seems to have a pride in being behind the monitor 24-7

The Designers speaks in colors, "feelings" (yup there sensitive), fonts, leading and have other clothes than confrence tshirts...

Some designers unfortunately dont have the right amount of knowledge of the front end (html, js, css etc) which offcourse can make it even harder (but those should not imho have the sence to get a developer to help em out - or call the rockstars: The themers ;)

Languages?

Back to the swedes that is folowing druplicon down to paris...
When I speak with Swedes (danish & swedish isnt the same -its releated) if I speak in my normal tempo, they will not understand anything of what im saying (or just dont care) but if I slow down a bit and change some of the words, to a more swedish sounding, then the chance the swedes are understanding me a hell of a lot higher.
This is offcourse not a thing a proud dane will be happy to do (if the swedes just would learn to understand a real language...)  If I wanna get my point into the heads of "jönson" Im Betting ya that my chance of succes is a whole lot higher if im lovering my own self rightfulness demand on language and make some compromise.

The same thing can be said about the designer vs. develop in the drupal community.
We speak 2 different languages, so by doing some some compromises along the way, were gonna have a way better cms than the asskicking Drupal6 we have now.

I know some nerdy devs are plain assholes when communicating  - im still pissed of by the answer I once got:
"Well if we didnt make drupal you woudnt even have a site to design" But idiots are found everywhere - so dear devs i dont wanna hold that against ya ;)

frontend Revolution starts day1 (tuesday) 16:00!

Next week theres a Drupalcon in paris, and there we will take the work further that was started in DC/DC - aka the theming revolution (yes i know that theming & design are not the same) and this time we have our very own track, so those on the visual end of the drupal world, will not feel alienated :)

To start it off were gonna make a little meetup for the Frontend people, so if youre in paris on tuesday, come by the venue at 16.00 and well try to gather all the people "who likes pretty shit"

wow that was a long rant...