Things have been pretty quiet on the blog front lately, save the frequent Drupal related geekery. Flowcharts of the Forms API are definitely useful, but probably don’t really qualify as serious blogging.
I’ve been pretty busy over the past month or so, and one of the big reasons is that I’ve left my job as a .Net developer, and have joined the Lullabot Collective!
Over the past two years or so, I’ve gone from a curious CMS-shopper to a Drupal newb to a die-hard convert to a hacker to a contributor. I’ve been messing with CMS stuff for years (As Matt Westgate of Lullabot said in one of our early conversations, every developer writes a homebrew web CMS at some point in their lives), and Drupal pressed all the right buttons. I’ve become a part of the community and I can say that it’s a genuine pleasure to work with the code and the people.
Lullabot embodies a lot of the values I find great about the Drupal community. The assorted 'bots want to build great stuff in Drupal, and teach others how to do the same. It’s all about teaching people to fish. Today was my first day working full time with Lullabot after a variety of freelance projects and other interaction. They have a really amazing team of dedicated and knowledgable developers and it’s a blast being on board.
The flip side, of course, is that the awesome opportunity to pursue something I’m passionate about also means leaving behind the company I spent the last three years with. Leaving was uneventful – there were already some changes underway as my old employer started bringing new people on, and they had plenty of advanced warning to plan for my departure.
It was a small shop in a profitable niche market, though, and the development team was close knit. While it’ll be fine logistically, I’ll miss the guys. Heck, one of my best friends, Jeff Benson, shared an office with me. The convenience and flexibility of working from home is great, but I don’t want it to mean that I fall out of touch with a great friend. On Friday (my last day), all of us wandered over to Rock Bottom and spent a few hours reminiscing, having a few drinks, and jokingly apologizing for all of the ugly hacks we had to foist on each other at times.
So. New, exciting beginnings and cool new opportunities to build great CMS software. Cool people (Hello, Lullabots!) and cool projects! And, this Wednesday, lunch with a buddy I no longer share an office with. Life’s full of changes, and it’s an exciting time to be a code monkey.