Mick’s Miscellaneous Meanderings

Over the weekend, co-worker and good friend, Katie, finished her monster of a thesis (like 100+ page thesis) that she’s been working hard on forever and will be officially graduating with her masters degree this spring. So I decided to “decorate” her office in celebration…to the tune of almost 200 balloons…piled waist deep.

Then I sent an email to the entire first floor apologizing for when she has to pop them all to get to her desk.

So CONGRATULATIONS Katie. Hope you’re still speaking to me.

Just returned from DrupalCon D.C. – a conference for web developers held in Washington D.C. – basically a geek fest of 1400 web developers from around the world. It was a beautiful thing!

We attended 3 intense days of sessions related to developing web sites using a content management system called Drupal. I’ve used Drupal for several websites over the past couple years and consider myself an intermediate developer and themer. The conference allowed me to fill some gaps in my Drupal education and determine areas I need to concentrate on to become an advanced Drupal developer and hopefully (someday) an expert. And most important, it’s given me my niche back.

I’ve got decent web developer skills – HTML, CSS, SEO, standards compliance, accessibility, yada, yada, yada. Big deal. So do half of the 6th graders nowadays. I also have decent ASP development chops (a coding language…sort of). Unfortunately, Microsoft pulled the plug on ASP a while ago. So my advanced ASP skills suddenly became worthless except for maintaining old sites. Lovely. All that hard work down the drain. So, I’ve been floundering, bouncing back and forth between PHP and .NET (languages used instead of ASP), not really settling on either. Meanwhile, I’d been messing around with various content management systems, and liking WordPress for simpler sites and Drupal for more complex sites but figured this was just to use in the interim until I got a better handle on .net. Surely there was no serious future for a Drupal developer. Wrong!

Drupal has exploded in the past year or so. It’s a solid piece of software and the community is strong. I’m confident in Drupal’s future and that it’s the perfect area to invest my time and energy to continue my web dev career. I’ve found my niche again!!!

Off to read a Drupal book….