The whirlwind of 2008

Submitted by Larry on 31 December 2008 - 8:47pm

Oy, what a year it's been! Aside from the excitement of the election and the economy, it's been an exciting year for me in the professional realm. (Personal realm, if you don't already know then you shouldn't know. :-)) And of course, it's been a crazy crazy year for Palantir, too, but in a mostly good way.

Let's see, one new job, two new Drupal jobs, two conferences, one sprint, three camps, six new colleagues, two foreign countries, eight other US states, one book... and a partridge in a pear tree, probably. Oof!

I actually began the year in New Hampsire, on the tail end of last year's festivities (yes, I did remember how I ended up there), and hitched a ride back through Massachusetts to Connecticut for my flight home to kick off a new year at Palantir. (Two states.)

Two weeks in, of course, I somehow managed to get myself elected to the Drupal Association Board of Directors as "Director of Legal Affairs for the Drupal Project" (aka, copyright guy), just as I finally launched the site that got me into Drupal. Immediately afterward I was off to Wisconsin for DrupalCamp Milwaukee, which was a blast.

February saw the final deadline for GoPHP5 come and go with barely a whimper. So long, PHP 4, and thanks for all the fish! It also saw the Data AP Design Sprint, hosted at Palantir, where we tried to work out just how to solve the Data Problem(tm) in Drupal. A number of ideas came out of it, but sadly not much happened on that front until the recent Fields in Core sprint. Silly day job...

March of course saw DrupalCon Boston (another state), and all of its well-documented awesomeness. Immediately after, of course, was South By South West (which I didn't go to, but several other Palantiri did) followed by a trip down to St. Louis (yet another state) for a meeting with Palantir's longest-running Drupal client, Washington University College Arts & Sciences.

Over the course of that trip, Palantir also came to an important decision. We needed middle management. :-) The net result was Colleen and I moving up to team leads, and in hindsight I can say that was the second best decision Palantir's owners ever made. (The first being switching to Drupal in the first place, of course.) April also saw the release of "Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6" by David Mercer, the first book for which I was a technical editor.

With that settled, Palantir made the long trek to its new-and-improved offices, large enough to hold our growing team of Drupal talent. From Boston to Szeged we added Ken Rickard, Greg Dunlap, Matt Butcher, and when we can pull him away from school and Panels Sam Boyer to our programming team, and introduced Nate Striedinger to the theming team and Brad Nowak as full time project manager to keep track of our growing number of cool projects. And oh yeah, DrupalCon Szeged, where Palantir folk gave no less than 11 presentations and hosted multiple BoFs, making it, I think, the most prolific Drupal shop at the conference. (That still amazes me.)

And oh yeah, along the way there was that little patch for Drupal 7 called "Databases, the next Generation". Work still continues on that as I somehow managed to end up in MAINTAINERS.txt as Database maintainer.

After Szeged I forgot what my own bed looked like for a while as I went from Szeged to Budapest for a few days vacation with my roommate from Barcelona Wim Leers, then to Vienna where on three separate days I ran into three separate Drupalers from Szeged, from three different continents. I don't know how the Drupal community could get more awesome, do you?

I returned from Europe just in time to turn back around for another client trip to St. Louis, and from that turned right back around to fly down to Alabama to be a backup groomsman in a wedding. Ten airplanes in 3 weeks, 8 of them in one week. I was so ready to come home after that. :-)

The final major event of the year of course was the first DrupalCamp Chicago, which despite a shaky start ended up a success with over 150 people attending over two days. Will there be another one? You bet your hooks there will be. Stay tuned. ;-)

And oh yeah, along the way I also ended up in Iowa and Oklahoma. Don't ask. :-)

Wow what a year it's been. 2008 has really been a great year, if somewhat spastic at times. Lots of new experiences, new challenges, and new faces. Honestly I'm still adjusting to this whole "management" concept, but I will say it's been a lot easier having such a great team to work with, both on the programming team at Palantir and the rest of the management team. (And oh yeah, our themers rock, too!) And then of course there's the rest of my Drupal colleagues, who continue to amaze me.

So what's the resolution for 2009? If it ends up being "more of the same", well, that's hardly a bad thing.

Happy New Year!