Introductions!

I am Karen and I think Drupal is the Best Thing Ever. I manage small sites, and some revolve around a community while others simply take advantage of Drupal's content management. It would be great to do this for profit because it would allow me more time to do what I like: tinker with Drupal!

I am a Software Architect and Object Oriented (web) application developer, fascinated at this stage of my career with Web Application projects.
A refugee from C++ and then Enterprise Java, I love Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and have developed project using it, but notice something is happening recently:
I am working out of my home office now, and am heavily involved in three ongoing projects (as architect and developer); I heavily evangelized and recommended Drupal in all of them, and was able to get Drupal accepted as the framework in all of them.
So Drupal is becoming my (web) application of choice (voting with my legs and not with my aesthetic purist inclinations).
So I have extensive experience in modern J2EE frameworks like Spring, and wrote a year ago about how Drupal is a pure MVC (model view controller) platform out of the box (http://drupal.org/node/38191#comment-69995), but my knowledge of Drupal is limited to the experience I am gaining plus a lot of reading (the IBM series, the handbooks, ...).
I have extensive experience in process engineering, agile programming, etc., and do mentoring for quality assurance too; but am pretty much still an advanced user when it comes to writing modules and writing themes.
So the thought of a free-wheeling "theory/practice study group" where apprentices can rub elbows with experts, and experts can be apprentices to apprentices on many things also (not sure I care for your clearly defined two-tier expert/apprentice approach) and experts in many related fields can freely come and play a role as apprentice, is very appealing.
So I would like to "sign up" as apprentice, and bring whatever expertise may be needed in the group... with the aim first of all of getting up to speed in Drupal, and also of replicating this networking experience down here in Buenos Aires with the newly formed Buenos Aires Drupal Users Group (http://groups.drupal.org/buenos-aires-dug) we are organizing.
So, where do we start? I would suggest a practical project, like how to create such-and-such a site with CCK and Views and Panels, and then extending Panels, extending CCK and Views also, or some such.
The idea also, for me, would be to do projects which help us in our current work, but in such a way as to "give back to the community" insights, knowledge and tools.

Victor Kane
http://awebfactory.com.ar

My name is Gus Austin. I'm a musician, self-taught web designer/developer, and relative newbie to Drupal.

I've been working on what I'm calling a hyperlocal music community. Sort of a mashup between public broadcasting network (NPR, BBC) and a hyperlocal citizen-journalism/media site (Lawrence.com, Texas Gigs). Specific content aside, I'm hoping my efforts, in open collaboration with other like minded folks, can lead to the creation of a multimedia rich, newspaper/alt-weekly style and other music/arts-centric install profiles and distributions.

In addition to tools and services, I'm very interested in producing content and enabling platforms that will raise goodwill, funds, attention and brand awareness for the Drupal community. I look forward to open discussions and future collaborations with folks in this group. I've got a lot to learn - (hopefully) a lot to give back.

Gus Austin
Director of Chaos and Confusion
PepperAlley Productions
What am I trying to do with Drupal?

hi everyone, this group sounds fantastic!

i suppose most would consider me a Drupal "master", though i still know barely anything about some parts of Drupal, and many parts of web design, CSS, JS, AJAX, etc, etc. i don't think the "master" vs. "apprentice" distinction is a single bit, it's a whole multi-dimensional spectrum.

that said, my strengths are that i maintain a bunch of the contrib modules that run on drupal.org infrastructure (project, project issue tracking, cvs-integration, signup (here on groups.d.o), etc). i've also contributed a lot of patches to core, and am among the 2 most clueful people about CVS around Drupal these days. i designed and wrote the new release system and before that, the CVS repository access control system for drupal.org.

i've been working for the Condor project for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Computer Science Department for about 12 years now, though i've been living in Oakland, CA for the last 5 years.

when i'm not hacking code, i study and perform a lot of music. i direct Bateria Lucha, a brazilian percussion ensemble here in the bay area (my first drupal site and the reason i got started in this whole mess!), i study north indian classical music at the Ali Akbar College of Music (with maestro Ali Akbar Khan), and i do a lot of other musical projects, too.

i'm also a revolutionary socialist, and have been working on a project to convert the website for SocialistWorker.org, a newspaper i help write for and distribute, into a drupal site.

so, between my day job, my band, and my political leanings, there are ALL sorts of drupal things i'm interested in: software development, revision control, event management, location stuff, news publication, multi-media stuff, you name it. ;)

i've been hacking drupal code for just under a year now. i taught myself php, SQL, and the Drupal API in that time (with some help from other drupal developers, and i still make heavy use of the docs[1]). it's really not that bad, once you get into it. ;) the quality of drupal core, and the abilities of the core development community is really fantastic. i was totally hooked -- it's been such a joy to surround myself with a whole new set of clueful people to learn from, new problems to solve, and interesting code to work on.

i'm also thrilled about this group, and really hope to help train some aspiring drupal ninjas to also become project* ninjas! ;)

thanks,
-derek (dww)

[1] my handy reference:
http://drupal.org/handbook
http://api.drupal.org
http://us2.php.net/manual/en
http://dev.mysql.com/doc
http://www.postgresql.org/docs

hi all

for my day job, i work with mobile stuff - building wap, sms, video streaming, realtime billing systems and blah blah for telcos.
I've done alot of php over the years, and i'm a bit of a postgresql ninja - mysql i haven't used much.

I've contribed a few postgresql table defs to various modules on drupal.

i'm keen to help out more, but not sure where.

Hey All

I'm Jason, currently living in Sydney, with the privilege to be pretty much under control how I spend my time, and pondering how to start my own business to escape the dependencies I currently am subdued to. I've done some freelance work as developer and IT consultant, but nothing worthwhile to sustain a business.

My first contact with web technologies was at Uni in 96, where I also completed an HTML course (based on v3.01). Busy studying Physics, Mathematics, Philosophy, and some other stuff, I didn't have much time for the web, besides the occasional surfing. Then in 2001 for the first time in my life, I could connect to the net from home (previously this was financially too difficult to realize), and have since been learning a variety of web technologies in self study, experimenting a lot with existing web applications (mainly CMS and ERP), to learn programing in Perl, PHP and Python (looked at Ruby, but decided to stick with the 3P's, mainly due to hosting availability).

For my latest private project (a site for my family), I have decided to use Drupal, as it's the best base solution to start from. And hence I'm planning to develop a "Family History Research Assistant And Data Display" module, as I'm not happy with existing solutions and standards (GedCom/-View), it lacking any sense of data accuracy variability (think Charles and his "son" Henry). Additionally I believe in the value of individuals biographical stories, and tying them to traditional family tree data, which I hope to achieve with the above mentioned project. Once stable I hope to develop a XUL based client.

I like to share my experience, knowledge, and ideas (fantasies?) with other people interested and motivated to learn new skills, just as much as I like to expand and build upon the little I know. A dojo seems like the ideal place for this to occur, as the general forum is too "unfocused".

I was wondering if we should have "Belts", for example tanifa would have a "postgresql-belt", so that new dojo members don't have to wade through masses of posts to single out the talents they want to learn from. Just an idea folks.

Anticipating a fruitful co-operation with fellow Drupalers, wondering what other people are expecting form this group and hope to achieve....

Bright Regards

JasonMR
(Student of Lifestyle-Design - Real ID)

Hi, I'm Lyle.

My company decided that it needed to update it's osCommerce website to something more maintainer friendly, so now we're writing an ecommerce suite for Drupal. We felt that the ecommerce module didn't do things in just the way we wanted them, so we have to create something that would, which we lovingly call the Übercart. As an added bonus, we're going to let the general public be able to make it whatever they want as well. I've only been working with Drupal for a few months, but I've learned a lot through reading the source code and extending both node and taxonomy to fit my needs.

I'd like to be able to share some of the things I've learned and get back some wisdom in the process.

Übercart -- One cart to rule them all.

I'm Keith, and I'm very happy to see this group form, as well excited about its' promise for giving back to the Drupal community.

I've been lurking around d.o for some time now, have been subscribed to the various mailing lists and hanging out on occasion in #Drupal. I've been in both the political realms and in full-time IT positions for twenty years now, and have been amazed at how much the two--politics and information technology--have begun to overlap and interact. Drupal is right in the middle of those overlapping circles, and I'm a big, big fan.

In other news, after reading the various advice in the Contributor handbooks encouraging one to start small, I made a few small changes to a minor patch (#85979) to core yesterday, for the first time, and had the pleasure of seeing it committed by Dries. No mess no fuss. Things went so smoothly I picked another innocuous issue out and made another incredibly simple patch for that (#105388) -- although this one probably shouldn't make it into 5.0 due a string freeze. Since it was at least as much about making sure that I could form working patches as suggesting some minor rewording of various form element descriptions, I'm happy regardless.

In fact, I'm anxious to do more to pay back the Drupal community for a great product, and hope that this group will help create the skills necessary to do that more effectively.

@joshk: thanks for creating the Dojo!

--ks

Drupal Dojo is an interesting idea. Can definitely relate to the idea that #drupal can be a little overwhelming.

Will be watching the goings-on here with much interest. Cheers.

Hello,

My name is Ryan. I live in a small town in Colorado where I build websites, fix computers, train people and start businesses. I jumped into the fire a little early at 15 when I started a business with a couple of fellow schoolmates in high school. In order to fill a gap and prove myself useful I became the "web guy" (kid more like) and built several websites for our business and also for local businesses and organizations. Along with the status of web guy I also spent a lot of my time handling tech support for a small shareware product, designing the gui for said product, building computers, fixing computers, telling my business partners to shower, and not going to school.

When my two business partners moved on to other things I got a job with a small web design company and was quickly thrown deeper into the fire. To fill gaps in the business I started specializing in Flash (somewhat of a bad word these days) and worked on some good-sized Flash projects over the next few years.

Now grown up a bit (22) and the captain of my own Drupal tugboat, I spend my time flitting from one aspect of a project to another as I am all alone and the only person I know that has ever worked with Drupal: oh the joys of a small town. I am also in the process of starting a couple of businesses with a friend which we hope to launch this March. It is proving amazingly difficult to convince him to use Drupal... Some sort of unspoken resistance to things that don't cost money.

I really feel like my biggest mistake of the last year of Drupal work was to disregard the online community somewhat because "I didn't have time." This group looks great.

My favorite things in work right now: drupal, gtd, my new macbook pro.

Oh, and I am newly engaged to be married.

Hi all,

My name is Craig. I live in New York City, where I just finished an MA in anthropology. Now, while I'm deciding what to do next, I work as an editor and tutor and amateur web designer.

I've been using Drupal for probably two years now, and though I've become reasonably good at the sort of sloppy hacking that amateurs do in order to get things "just so," I'd like to gain a deeper working knowledge of the system. My strength (if I can call it that) when working with Drupal is probably design-layer stuff. My weakness is that I know just a little PHP and MySQL, and not very much about how Drupal works overall.

Right now, I use Drupal for one site, publicculture.org, which is a journal I work for as an editor. When 5.0 is released, I'll be using that to build redstem.org, which is going to be an online resource hub for radical educators run by my partner Dina.

I'm looking forward to learning with all of you...

I'm Dave from Calgary AB. I got into Drupal a few years ago when I installed CivicSpace for my Provincial Green Party. My skills are mostly in the areas of implementation and customization. I've also just begun to start a full time Drupal Development business called CommunIT.ca.

I'm looking forward to learning from you Drupal masters.

dave hansen-lange

Hello everyone,
I'm Corey, from Louisiana. I'm a somewhat recent graduate with a BS in Computer Science. I've been doing PHP/MySQL development for the past 3 years and toying with Drupal for the past 2.

I want to get into Drupal module development, because I have a few ideas for useful modules. I have large chunks of time being freed in my schedule, so I may begin submitting more patches for contrib modules to learn how things work.

This group looks useful, and hopefully we can all benefit from it.

Hi, all. I'm Mike.

I've been developing software for 20+ years, mainly focused on PC platforms and Microsoft Windows, but have always tinkered with other things (like unix/linux, apache, etc.) (This is my way of saying that I was never a platform zealot - tools is tools - best one for the job, etc.) I've moved in and out of consulting over the years, and I'm now a full-time consultant. I guess I'd categorize myself as a Drupal intermediate developer, but a master Windows/Win32/UI developer :D

Over the last several years, I've been doing more web-based development, starting with hand-rolled server and client code, moving on to using various CMS systems, and have been working with Drupal exclusively over the last year.

I've rolled out several sites using Drupal, and (naturally!) I have been working on custom modules for my sites - some of which I think may be useful to the community at large. So, I'm working on getting these hosted on drupal.org's CVS repository.

My new, Drupal-based site serves as a web presence for my company, and as a way to give back to the Drupal community. It has a number of Drupal-related posts and modules available, and I've assumed a maintainer role for the orphaned directory module.

I'm looking forward working with Drupal and the Drupal community.

Cheers!

Hello to all and thanks Josh for the great idea and starting this group. I am originally from China and now is a Electrical Engineer working in Greater Boston area. I came across Drupal about 2 years ago and have been using it on and off, mostly on my own blog. Along the way, I learned some PHP/MySQL/Drupal-API by reading docs and hacking contrib modules (just to make them work on my site). I consider myself still at beginner's level, that I can make some simple hacks but know little, if at all, about how stuffs work under the hood.

One major motivate/goal for me to join this group is get to be a 'master' of drupal programming and help more Chinese drupalers, as well as giving back to the whole drupal community. A friend of mine (who introduced me to Drupal in the first place) and I are maintainers of drupalchina.org, a Chinese website introducing/promoting drupal. We started it about a year ago, and now have nearly 1500 registered users. Drupal is still relatively new in China, and is not comaparable to Joomla/Xoops in terms of sheer number of users. However, we have seen more and more interests in Drupal and people switching from other CMS. For the past year, we mainly worked on translating drupal handbooks and localization. Now I see more and more advanced questions as to how to customize and write their own modules. Often times, I had to point them to drupal.org for help, which is the ultimate great source if your English is fluent. I wish I know more about drupal development to help them out. So that's basically why I am here...Maybe we will also mimic this dojo group on drupalchina.org at some point :)

Personally, I also have a couple projects that I'd like to work on. One is to customize userpoints (maybe also karma) module to fit our needs on drupalchina.org. The other project is a simple inventory-tracking / status-checking module for use at work.

Hope we start soon, cheers!

-dami

This is good stuff. I will try to help. In case you need an introduction, I am the guy who wears a Druplicon T-shirt in the gym so that its smile encourages him forward.

I'm Chris from Minnesota, though I'm not a native so don't read that as menaSOtah. I've been a "computer guy" for the last 13 years, but a programmer for only the last 3-4. I came across drupal because I was looking for a solid codebase to build my friend's social website on and want to learn something that was already "mature". Drupal fit the bill. I've built 4 sites on top of drupal by now.

My current projects have taught me a lot about XQuery, XSLT and other XML based languages. I'm hoping to learn a lot more about Drupal through this effort. I haven't heard much about when the meetings will take place. I'm hoping they aren't during work hours. If so I will have to withdraw my application.

Howdy everyone,

My name is Sam Tresler. Oh, about two years ago I decided that the career I had, had to go. Sat down and thought that this whole internet thing might not be a passing fad and I should learn something about that. Got an idea for a site and burnt through two developers who couldn't implement it. Said to my self, 'Self, how would you do this if you were going to try.' I promptly crashed and burned several times trying to roll my own php/mysql e-commerce site.

About that time my old college buddy, josh_k, said, "You should look into drupal - its good sh*t". So now I have treslerdesigns.com and about 10-15 clients or so. I'm waaaayyyyyy behind schedule with most of them - still don't quite have time estimates down. I've learned a fair smattering of php/Mysql, flash, CSS, javascript, and a bunch of other things as I've learned drupal; I like to call it "Drupal born and raised".

I'm here because its time I jumped up to the next level. I can hack my way around this CMS with the best of them, but now its time to really start looking under the hood and start doing things the right way^TM.

I learned about drupal when trying to set up a school group website a couple of years ago. I wanted a program that would make it as easy to design a site as designing my high school newspaper had been with quarkxpress. I thought dreamweaver might do that but quickly discovered that it only made things marginally easier. Finally I happened on drupal which was the closest thing I could find to a program that would let someone with no computer experience set up and customize a site. But drupal was also frustrating. Despite all the functionality there was always one last constraint that you couldn't get around. It seemed as though it was so close to being that miracle program that lets you make a site just the way you want it and yet a tantalizing gap remained. I gave up on my hopes that I would be able to find something perfect that wouldn't require me to learn how to do programming. I started teaching myself the tools necessary to use drupal and have so far gotten through the basic tutorials on making modules and using javascript with a decent level of mastery. I would like very much to gain real confidence with the system through this group and very much hope that I suit your needs. One thing I am quite interested in is the development of the wiki module. Mediawiki has a clean canvas appeal that is similar to what I loved about quarkxpress (in a different context). Adding that feel to drupal will bring two great worlds together.

I feel kinda out of place in the midst of all these intelligent, technical people who have signed up. I have no interesting achievements like everyone else. I am still wondering how I can be of any help at all.

Hi there...

Albert Wong here... well... I programmed a bunch in C way back in the late 80s when I was in high school / college... but took a break from it for about 20 years...

With Drupal... for 1 year... almost exactly to this day... so... I'm really just an apprentice... still finding my way around php/mysql... mostly just hacking... Have done some non-drupal sites for hire... but I'm using drupal a site for I really care about... here... www.ithou.org ... a kind of on-line spiritual retreat center.

Anyhow, recently, I've been pretty bogged down a bit by figuring out how to sysadmin my FreeBSD dedicated server... runaway httpd processes... etc... which is kind of a bummer, since it's be a lot more fun to be building new modules in drupal. :-)

Thanks for setting this up.

A little more about me is here: www.ithou.org/user/2

Peace and love,
Albert

www.ithou.org

Hi im André.
Im working with PHP/MySQL since 5 years now and i came to drupal through testing a bunch of CMS like Mambo, Typo, Contenido, ezPublish, etc. Nowadays Im studying computer science at the University Bonn although im currently in Valencia for two semesters abroad. Im following the development of Drupal closely and would like to step into module development very soon. This group is a great idea, thanks.

André

Well, I've been a web/database developer (intranets, mostly) for a couple years now. Then about a year ago I decided to Drupal full time. I've done several projects since then, am the (dis)organizer of the Denver Drupal User Group near my home in the Baker Neighborhood and am employed as a Drupal developer at pingVision.

Beyond that, I'm basically biding my time as a consultant until I find that magic web services loophole so I can retire to a Colorado Mountain Town and Argentina, brew beer, and travel.

And yes, this post contains links to basically all of my personal Drupal sites. Customers are...customers or are not yet announced...

My advice: I picked up maintainership of the pathauto module a little while ago and have learned a bit as a result of that. I also built the Microsummary module from the ground up - not the most useful module, but a fun one and one that will probably see growing importance. That's one tip that I have to people is to either create/maiintain a module or pick one that you really like and then work with the maintainer of that module to find the source of bugs and to do the "create, test, reroll patches" cycle until things get fixed. Acting as a reviewer for a maintainer makes their life easier and will make you 1) a better Drupaler 2) more sympathetic to module maintainers 3) a valued member of the community.

As to the dojo I consider myself to be both a learner and a teacher - aren't we all (even you, John.Barner - give yourself 5 days of learning and you'll start teaching others) :)

--
Knaddison Family | mmm Beta Burritos

Frankly, I'm not much of a programmer/computer guy at all. I'm an international affairs major with a website (???)...just because I can, I suppose. Frankly, I "drupal" because I really don't know that much--but I don't let that deter me. The feeling of finally solving one of the hundreds of puzzles I encounter when I want to make something happen is almost addictive, and I'm getting more confident with each passing day as to what I can do.

So, I just want to learn some cool tricks.

My site (I love 5.0)

Just for a little background, I've been a using drupal for several years, I'm the webmaster for www.thedirt.org, www.portlandpeakoil.org/discussion, a large intranet site and a few more coming online fairly shortly.

I've been a system administrator and DBA (Oracle & MySQL), though I'm much more on the administration side then the data side of things. As of yet I haven't done much coding or large scale data modeling and I happen to have a specific project that doesn't appear to be doable with any of the existing modules. I know there are modules for http authentication and another for LDAP, but near as I can tell they don't play well with each other and my client hates pop-up boxes. I have the PHP code that does the same thing for media wiki and I figured I would compare and contrast with the existing authentication modules and stumble around for a while.

So diving into creating my first module and joining the drupal dojo seemed like a good combo.

cheers,

Jeremyaa

Hi Everyone,

My name is Jason and I'm a Drupaholic. I'm a Computer Science graduate student at the University of Guelph in Ontario Canada. I'm from Brampton Ontario, but I live in Guelph when I'm doing my school thing. I started using Drupal in September 2005 when I was given the job of maintaining the department Website. My fascination and obsession with Drupal only increased with time. As I continued to learn more about Drupal, I became the guy that would bring up Drupal in every social gathering. I've read Dodge's book on Drupal cover to cover and I'm currently reading the Drupal articles from IBM DeveloperWorks.

I was given the honour of redoing the department website and this time I want to do it right. So this will be the "project" that I will be contributing to this Dojo group.

I work as a web developer part time, and take photos when I see something pretty. Sometimes when I'm bored, I work on my masters thesis and write research papers.

Many tech companies coughIBMcough look fondly at anyone who gets involved in open source projects. I want Drupal to be the open source project that I can get involved in. Hopefully I can learn enough about Drupal to start giving back to the community in a more concrete fashion. Maybe even land a job working with the OS-CMS that I love :)

Hi all,

My name is Wim, I live in Hasselt, Belgium, my native tongue is Dutch, am in my first year at the University of Hasselt, have been developing the DriverPacks.net project (which got open sourced recently) and have thrown myself in the amazing world that is called drupal.org.

So why Drupal? There's a large active developer communit, many modules available, good documentation, and because I know you can build virtually anything using Drupal.

I'm currently building an improved website for the DriverPacks.net project, and have already come a LONG way in about 2 almost full days of getting to know Drupal. I really can't believe how easy it was to set up for example a manual system with wiki-like editing abilities (using the book, modr8 and autosave (this one was labeled as not yet ready for production use I believe, but I haven't had a single problem with it) modules). Currently I'm thinking about making the Boost module compatible with Drupal 5, so I can have file-based caching to offload the server and of course to get to know some basic Drupal module building.
I'm still looking what I should do with the current forum and bugtracker, perhaps I will try to import it all and use the forum, project and project_issue modules.

Aside from this particular project, I'd like to become a 'website architect' and also hope to turn that into my profession. Some people don't like to keep on learning new things during their lifetime, but that's just what attracts me about the web: it's always changing!
And thus, I'd like to become a 'Drupal Master'! We'll see where that will lead us.

So if there's still a spot, I'd definitely like to become a Drupal apprentice!

Hi,

My name is Tien Doan and I have been working on computers forever (got my CS degree 20 yrs ago, gosh, i'm such an old dog). I found Drupal about a year and a half ago when I was looking to build a social website for our temple. That led me to Nuke, postnuke, phpwebsite, mambo, then finally Drupal. Since then I have built quite a few small site gratis. In my current job, I've been toying with java portals and CMS offerings (liferay, exo, a