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webchick's picture

I figured we could start this group with a "virtual" edition of the Drupalchix BoF at Drupalcon Boston. Go around the "circle," as it were, and introduce ourselves, both to get to know each other a bit, but also so that we're aware that there /are/ other women out there in the Drupal community. ;)

So let's do some introductions... who are you, where are you from, what do you do for a living, what's your background, how'd you get into this crazy Drupal stuff, what do you do with Drupal, and whatever other random facts you'd like to share?

I'll kick it off, I guess...

My name's Angie Byron. I'm originally from Rochester, Minnesota, United States but I now live in Montréal, Québec, Canada with my wife Marci (at least when I'm not trapped in Boston for 3 days due to stupid snow ;)). I work for Lullabot, where I help train new Drupal developers and also do consulting with big companies to help them get up to speed on Drupal quickly, and help them work /with/ the community, rather than alongside it.

I've been a "geek" for pretty much all my life, starting with a huge video game obsession when I was a kid, and blossoming into a fascination as a teenager with computers, technology, and the impact they can have on society as a whole. I have some background in a few different computing areas, including web development, databases, design, security, and hardware, but most of it I forget now because I've been involved with Drupal for so long. ;)

I got my start in Drupal as a Google Summer of Code student in 2005, and since then have sought out to help out in as many ways as possible. I do core development and patch reviews, I (badly) maintain a few modules and themes, I help out with documentation, I manage Drupal's involvement in programs like Google Summer of Code, and I'm a member of the Drupal Association. Basically, I'm completely, utterly obsessed with Drupal and it's my life mission to help get others as crazy about it as I am, because it's so much fun. :D

So how about the rest of you folks?

Comments

Hey DrupalChix0rs Well, I'm

Shiny's picture

Hey DrupalChix0rs

Well, I'm Brenda Wallace, and I live in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. I work for Catalyst IT, an open source obsessed company. Mostly it work with building things for telcos - and drupal makes sense to build admin apps with. It gives me a standardised layout to the code, so any of a half dozen drupal devs on my team can recognise how it works quickly.

I came across Drupal while searching for something to run my blog on. I used wordpress for some client's blogs; but the code, while it was well tested, just wasn't pretty to look at, or adaptable. I didn't have confidence in it.

I like Shiny gadgets (hence the nick). I took electronics/embedded software at university.

Yeah, i'm a complete geek. Not a gamer, but i have to code; it's like breathing. My first PC was a TRS80 (older than me) and I was writing BASIC apps from an early age, later C, Pascal, Delphi, Ladder Logic.... too many to list here. These days I'm a python or perl fan, but I'd pick drupal as the best cms for most jobs.

I wish i could spend all my time hacking on drupal. It's a great project, with a great community spirit. It's easy to just turn up and help the project. If you want to contribute to opensource, and don't know where to start, Drupal is a reall great place to start contributing.

Good Stuff!

AmyStephen's picture

Hey DrupalChix -

I'm also a geeky chick from just across the way at Joomla! and I think this is fabulous! I've been a part of IT for 25 years, for me, working with a bunch of geeky guys who sometimes have less than stellar interpersonal skills, is normal.

Angie is absolutely right, women are underrepresented in open source and improving those ratios will help our communities. As it turns out, we need everyone to participate in order to accomplish the work that needs to be done. Consider me a huge supporter of this effort and feel free to call on your neighbors from Joomla! if there are cool things we can do together and especially, if someone brings donuts to the office, or some such thing.

Keep up the great work here in Drupal.

~~ Amy Stephen ~~
http://OpenSourceCommunity.org

Yay.

brenda003's picture

Hey everyone! Thanks for all your hard work, webchick.

Anyway, I'm Brenda Boggs, from San Diego, CA. I've been working with Drupal for over 2 years now. I currently work for Advomatic as a developer. I got into Drupal a couple years ago when I was attempting to create various websites to supplement our income as I was a stay at home mom. I quickly launched site after site and started taking freelance work. It grew from there to freelancing full time, until I joined Advomatic last November. I love Drupal, the framework itself, the people, the community, it's great.

I've been into computers all my life - well, since I was around 12 and the days when Usenet ruled the world and MUDs were the game of choice. I got into various programming languages early on, and got into various web technologies in those earlier days as well. Open source has been a part of my life forever. I grew up using Unix and then Linux and it's always been very natural to use open source. Although I've participated in one form or another in other open source "communities", Drupal is the first community I've really been as involved in as I am, and I'm looking forward to becoming more involved. But anyway, I got out of doing any kind of programming for many many years because I, of course, discovered gaming. ;) I got back into web about.. 3-4 years ago and had to relearn everything.

So that's me. I have three daughters and am addicted to coffee.

Yay :-)

arianek's picture

Thanks so much for making this group Angie! I was just about to suggest a drupalchix IRC channel where we can chat and get support from each other, so this is fabulous! I had a great time meeting the other ladies at DrupalCon--we may be few, but we seem to be made of pure awesome! Can't wait till I get to see you all again!

Since everyone has been writing up little intros:

I started using Drupal just under 2 years ago for a personal site while I was studying for a grad degree in Health Geography, and really got sucked in a year and a half ago at the Seattle DrupalCamp, where Boris blew my mind with a session on Modules, and I was hooked. By the end of my degree, I was burnt out, and decided to try my hand at freelancing with a friend of mine, and a year ago somehow managed to get hired at a webdesign company, and the rest is history! It helped a lot living in Vancouver, where the community is very strong and there are a lot of great (and patient) people welcoming keen newbies into the Drupal world!

I began doing a lot of content entry and html/css theming, and progressed to doing all of the install and config for our sites... Now I am mainly responsible for the technical side of site builds and have stopped doing much theming since we hired someone new who is more experienced at it. I also do a lot of documentation for our clients, and am currently working towards contributing a bunch of client-oriented user manual material.

I just started learning PHP, and am working on understanding that side of theming, and hopefully in the not-too-distant future will be able to be more involved in development. I also have an interest in best-practices and doing the right way, so am very open to constructive criticism!

Thanks Angie!

katbailey's picture

Hi All,
thanks Angie for setting this up and for a great DrupalChix session in Boston. My name's Katherine Bailey and I'm originally from Dublin, Ireland. I first heard of Drupal last summer when I moved to Vancouver and entertained the notion of working for a company again (I had been freelancing for years) - I looked up web development jobs on craigslist and nearly all of them seemed to mention this thing called Drupal. I figured I'd better find out what it was; anyway a few weeks later I was working for Raincity Studios and work-wise it felt like I'd been born again.
I discovered my inner-geek pretty late in life. I studied marketing and languages at university and it took a few years of total disillusionment and general unhappiness for me to realise I was doing the wrong job. I started learning html while still in a marketing position and found I was more interested in what was going on behind the scenes. A short course in web development technologies and I was hooked.
I changed jobs and started working in something more suited to my new found interests but the disillusionment ran deeper than that and a year and half later I just quit and left for Mexico where I traveled around for 5 months. I was still pretty confused about what I wanted to do and even took a 6 month course in car mechanics (which was great fun!) and toyed with the idea of doing that for a living. But I had started doing some freelance web jobs and the money was definitely better than an apprentice's wage!
For the last two and half years before moving to Vancouver this is what I was doing back in Ireland (plus one day a week as a motorcycle mechanic on a voluntary basis) but my knowledge was lagging so far behind as regards anything web 2.0. Since joining Raincity I've been surrounded by amazing colleagues from whom I've learned an unbelievable amount. But by far the most important thing for me, which has been nothing short of a revelation, has been the open source aspect of it.
I am absolutely wild about Drupal, though I'm still only a part-time Drupaler (working 2 days a week still for a company back home, doing asp type stuff - yuck!) but hopefully not for long. I really want to get into it more and contribute more back.
YAY! for Drupal and YAY! for DrupalChix
Katherine

Hi DrupalChix

Lynn's picture

My name is Jody Hamilton and I am a freelance Drupal developer in Philadelphia. Previously I was a chemist and, for one year, taught high school math. I decided to go into web work in 2006 and interned with a great designer/developer who tossed me straight into the deep end with css, php, and mySQL. A few months into this immersion he asked me to build a site in Drupal and tell him what I thought of it and neither of us have looked back since. My experience with Drupal has been that if you are skilled with html, css, php, and mySQL that you can very quickly become successful with Drupal. I also really like the Drupal people. I've never really identified myself as being a geek, and I struggled with that somewhat when getting more involved with Drupal and coding, not understanding the broader definitions of the term which surely include me.

I really enjoyed meeting the other women at Druplacon. It was really amazing to hear some of your perspectives and see myself reflected in other people in such an uncanny way, similar to a family resemblance.

I've never faced any real obstacles to being a woman coder, and as a result I'm not sure if I fully understand the forces and trends that cause the gender imbalance. Maybe this is because I've spent most of my life in various male-dominated environments and am not intimidated by men. I guess that I find that women are in general more humble about what they know and can do, and have a greater need for encouragement and approval. I talked to a few women at Drupalcon who presented themselves very humbly, playing down their ability level, but with further conversation turned out to be secret Drupal masters. I think we can support one another's confidence levels and help men to better understand our perspectives.

Zivtech | Illuminating Technology

Nifty

JuliaKM's picture

Thanks so much for setting up this group!

My name's Julia Kulla-Mader. I'm originally from Los Angeles, California, but now live in Durham, North Carolina with my husband and dog. For the next few weeks, I work as a web developer at a web design and development company in Research Triangle Park, NC. After that, I am going to work full-time as a Drupal developer at an environmental nonprofit group. I can't wait to get to mess around with Drupal all-day, everyday!

I used to teach middle school math and recently finished grad school at UNC Chapel Hill. I have a master's in Information Science, which is sort of like a more practical version of computer science. I primarily studied user interface design and information architecture.

I first started using Drupal a little over a year ago when I convinced my boss to let me try to make a public policy site using Drupal. I've been hooked ever since.

I wasn't able to make it to DrupalCon, but am excited to get to virtually participate in Drupalchix. It's nice to know that there are other women developers around.

I'm Nikki Henninger from

nikkiana's picture

I'm Nikki Henninger from Manchester, New Hampshire. I've been working with Drupal for a little bit under two years now (I think it'll be 2 years in June if I remember right). I currently work as a themer for Advomatic.

I've been doing various web site related things since 1996. I started out as a middle schooler with a static personal website hosted on AOL, leeched off of various online friends who's parents were kind enough to buy them domains during high school, and bought my own domain when I started college in 2002. I started out running my blog on b2/cafelog then when it officially branched to WordPress, I switched. I ended up using Drupal somewhat serendipitously. Shortly after I graduated from college, one of the local newspapers (Concord Monitor) decided they were going to launch a blog project (http://www.blogsnh.com) and posted something on their main page about looking for bloggers. I responded, and in the process ended up asking technical questions about what they were going to be using (Drupal) and somehow managed to get a two week job to do some post launch configuration.

During my short time there, I managed to wander myself into #drupal, when I was really looking for #drupal-support (At the time there wasn't anything clear on drupal.org saying what room was for what... there might have been, but I couldn't find it at least) but fortunately, Morbus recognized me and sent me in the right direction (I had "met" Morbus previously when he had tried WordPress briefly).

After my two weeks, I took some time off, went and got married, and started looking for jobs.... after having absolutely no luck and feeling completely and utterly discouraged that everything web related in New Hampshire had a requirement of knowing ASP.NET, I whined on my blog and the next morning had an email in my inbox from Morbus saying that the company he was working for at the time was hiring and at least I'd done at least one thing with Drupal before.... that's better than nothing.

And that's how I got started. :)

At this point, I haven't done much in the way of contributing, but it's my plan to get much more involved this year, especially with writing documentation.

And oh yes.... I'm the one who knit the Drupal hat. ;)

A Drupal Hat - How Awesome is That?

lh's picture

Hello everyone,

waves to Angie, Amy and Brenda

I'm Leslie Hawthorn and I live with my fiance, Ben, in Los Altos Hills, which is close enough to San Francisco to just say "San Francisco" to those not familiar with Northern California. I don't write code - didn't enjoy it when I tried it - but I love to geek out on the meatspace side of things: how to achieve consensus, get useful things created and done, and all importantly to make people happy.

I'm a Program Manager for Google's Open Source Team, which means I get to make cool things like Google Summer of Code and Google Highly Open Participation happen with the help of awesome community members like you. Seeing more women participate in open source is a topic near and dear to my heart, and one I hope we can brainstorm about together since Drupal is clearly is leading the charge in this area.

Cheers,
LH, who wants to know if these Drupal hats can be made available in mass quantities over the internets

Stoked to be part of this

mrosas's picture

Hi all,

Loving this group and everything I've learned this past week at DrupalCon. I'm Margaret Rosas, founder and chief strategist of Quiddities -- a web agency in Santa Cruz, CA developing web applications for startups, non-profits and higher ed.

I started coding when the web started (makes me old in web years!). Listening to Chris DiBona speak this week, I remembered my own path to open source. I was in an IT department at a law firm and I had the singular reputation as "she hates Microsoft". But rather than being against MS, I truly was an advocate for Netscape. I have often thought it is because I like underdogs ... but I think it comes back to a simple fact -- open source builds better products.

After living and breathing Cold Fusion for 8 or more years I started to explore the world of php/mysql. This started a transition into open source CMS where I spent three years spinning out Joomla sites. I remember my search for an open source CMS where I explored Drupal at length but found the community daunting, on the dark side and not welcoming (2004ish). With that, I opted for Joomla and didn't look back until last year when my developers begged me to consider Drupal (oh the power of marketing). WOW -- am I glad I did. It has been a great choice for our business and our clients. We develop enterprise level sites with great complexity and really need the platform we have found in Drupal.

The biggest challenge I have had is that don't do any coding in Drupal. I had my third child last year and since then have moved into a purely client facing, strategy and project management role. I do love this role as it keeps me in the vision seat where I can blaze new trails. However, it makes me crazy when I don't understand the Drupal insides. In the past few months, our projects have exposed me to a better understanding and attending DrupalCon was a great boost. Looking forward to cracking this open more.

Take aways from DrupalCon:
* contribute to the Drupal community and make it more inviting to folks
* restructure my firm to be a supportive Drupal agency
* spread the love for Drupal and growing/mentoring capable developers and strategists

Upcoming for me in 2008:
* more drupal sites released -- which I will write case studies for to help spread the love
* I'm looking with a keen interest into developing our local NPR site and expanding the usability and accessibility of Drupal for community radio stations as a whole
* continue local geek-herding efforts (thanks for the term Leslie!) in Santa Cruz
* achieving work/life balance with my growing business, geek-herding and three children (two daughters (7 and 9) and a just walking baby boy)

I'm thrilled that DrupalChix will be here to support these endeavors!

Yey! Glad to see this

Jacine's picture

Yey! Glad to see this DrupalChix discussion continue… The BOF session was definitely one of the highlights of Drupalcon Boston for me. Thanks for putting it together Angie. It’s so nice to know that you ladies are there, and that you're all so smart.

My name is Jacine Rodriguez. I'm pretty new to Drupal, and all things web development. I used to be a Sales Analyst and held various other Administrative jobs, but never really liked the whole 9 to 5 thing, so in 2005 I decided to start my own e-commerce business. With little money to start up the business, I decided to develop the website myself. It took me forever, but ripping OsCommerce apart, stripping every last nested table, and fixing numerous bugs, was a great way for me to learn HTML, CSS and a good deal of PHP (even though OSC's code is atrocious). The business failed miserably, but I found a new love while making it.

I had tried Drupal (installing via Fantastico in cPanel) a while back, but couldn’t figure it out, so I didn’t give it much of a chance. A year later, a friend recommended Drupal to me and couldn't stop raving about the possibilities, so I decided to give it a real chance (It was 4.7 at the time). I haven't looked back since.

In September of 2007, I contributed my first Drupal theme called Sky. Shortly after, I was hired to work for Gravitek Labs, where I get to do Drupal theming and development on some really cool and challenging jobs. My goal is to continue working on cool Drupal sites, increase my participation in the community and contribute some more themes/modules, and hopefully some documentation.

I'm looking forward to seeing you ladies around :)

Hi Jacine! Gravitek does the

mndonx's picture

Hi Jacine! Gravitek does the LineRider website? My students LOVE that website -- and they are secretly learning a little about velocity while playing. Nice to meet you last week!

Hey Amanda :)

Jacine's picture

It was great meeting you too (Amanda is my sisters name too)!

Yes, we did the Line Rider site :) It's pretty addicting. Some of the tracks the people come up with are pretty amazing!

Another Intro

KarenS's picture

I missed the BOF in Boston but am glad to be a part of this group. I'm Karen Stevenson and I've been Drupalling (that is a verb isn't it?) for a couple years now. I spent 20+ years as a CPA, including nine years as a CFO of a regional nursing home chain. I was always the one who handled anything to do with technology, until I finally figured out that the technology was the part I really liked the best. My first computer was a TRS 80 with 48K (!!!) of memory, no hard drive, and a tape cassette player for storage. I have only ever taken one computer class, which was writing COBOL by hand, transferring it to punch cards, carrying the deck to the computer room, and waiting for a printout (rinsing and repeating over and over until the program worked.)

I quit my CFO job and went into business for myself; discovered the WWW in 1994 and taught myself HTML so I could build a web site; got caught up in the dot com craze in 1999 and 2000 where we did the tours of the VCs on Sand Hill Road trying to build a dot com business focusing on seniors; raised over a million dollars but got wiped out by the dot com bust where no one wanted to anything to do with anything dot com; went back to my web site and taught myself PHP so I could make changes to it; re-wrote the whole site, then started creating web sites for others; and finally came to Drupal looking for a good basic PHP framework to build on instead of re-inventing the wheel.

I wasn't so much worried about whether anyone would take me seriously as a woman, I was worried whether anyone would take me seriously when they found out I have children older than many open source programmers. I deliberately kept quiet about my background for a while to allow people to form their judgments about my work without any pre-conceptions. Although I still get some surprised looks and comments when they meet me for the first time, the Drupal community has been enormously supportive and great to work with.

In Drupal I maintain CCK, Date, and Calendar and my personal mission is to get fields and better date handling in core, and have a Drupal date/calendar system as good as Google's calendar.

Hi! This is Liza Kindred,

LizaK's picture

Hi! This is Liza Kindred, and I am the Business Director for Lullabot, a Drupal company that does high-level consultation and education (among other things). I missed the BoF at DrupalCon due to the stomach flu (ack!) but I am excited to be a part of this group.

I am not a technical person, and in fact, I came to Open Source by way of fashion and art. (No, seriously.) However, I have been working in over source - in a business capacity - for just over two years now. I love this work, and wish more women knew about the benefits of this world. (I am also a mother to an 8 year old daughter.)

I am writing this from SXSWi and after having spent the last two weeks (between this and DrupalCon) in the technology space - I have some thoughts and insights to share. :-)

Looking forward to getting to know all of you!

webslinger23's picture

Lee Vodra here. I work with Exaltation of Larks, a Drupal firm out of Boston with my husband, Christefano.

Have been working with Drupal for the last two years or so. (What happened two years ago to get so many people involved then?) I regret not being able to attend the BoF with my fellow Drupalistas. I'm very pleased that this group is forming and am looking forward to participating. This looks like it's going to be a vibrant group with lots of diverse talent! I also really like the idea of an IRC channel for Drupal Chix. Yaaay Angie!

suzi loves drupal

thinkinkless's picture

Hi Drupalchix,

Sad i missed the BOF but very happy to see so many of you here. I have been building websites professionally since '96, drupal sites for nearly 3 years. My first foray into "real" online community was Wise Women, back in the late 90's. I found the female-centric group to be muchmuch more valuable than any others I had been involved with before. We all kinda went the extra mile for each other and in general had better manners than the boys' groups ;-). Seeing drupal women rally here makes me happy. All that said I don't think I have felt gender bias professionally per se. I, like Jody have worked in male-dominated fields for so long I may not see it. I do have to admit to being guilty of underestimating and understating my abilities (as so many of us do), at least until someone questions it.

In terms of drupal work I am primarily a themer, currently 6 months into a consulting gig with Sony in NYC. I worked for Advomatic (hi nikkianna!) for about a year and half before Sony and was freelance before that. I have themed and implemented a big pile of sites over the last few years, done some dev and design work too.

I joined the docs team on Friday and hope it's not too late to make a new year's resolution to do more contributing. I find I did a lot more of that when drupal was a small part of what i did for a living - since becoming fulltime drupal that has (ironically) dropped to almost nil.

I look forward to seeing this group grow!

drupal is my BFF

chachasikes's picture

Yay! My favorite people from DrupalCon!! Thanks webchick for making this page! I learned about drupal about two years ago. I messed around with drupal quite a bit, but I had to do other work...and eventually I found a different job at the Science Museum of Minnesota, where we use drupal all day long. :) I made this site (dev & themes) Disease Detectives, in drupal this fall...and now I'm working on a larger site with many users - mostly educators, museum people, and nanoscientists.

Development is definitely where I want to point myself technically, and I currently I want find ways to work on projects that can help set humanity back on track.

One small thing I took away from drupalcon: patches!. It seems like sometimes there are a lot of things from 'real computer science' that I just don't know about and even though they are almost always really easy -- they sound like a whole lot of online research, and I really don't have a ton of people showing me how to do anything. (But hooray for IRC!) The drupalchix I met at drupalcon are all totally inspiring, and I see every reason to participate in the drupal/open source community. I have never been fond of 'just chatting online with strangers' -- so meeting drupalchix in real life was very helpful. Overall the whole drupal community seems so focused on giving back and helping out projects that really need it, it seems to make for good company.

Geekwise: I started with my dad's computer in 1983 when I was 8 (TI994a, with speech synthesizer). I was quite into it until age 12 when I learned that only the (one) gross boy did computers. But adolescence eventually ended...and I slowly found my way back to code. I did multimedia and flash, and then started working for museums making media based exhibits and websites. I got to program all kinds of weird custom projects. My favorite was making a catalog of human genes and genetic information which you can browse in flash, and do a really really simple dna match. Wrangling the genome and some other genetic databases was really not very pretty. BUT - I audited (for free!) a bioinformatics class at UC Berkeley (java and perl) - which really helped with the programming (I just emailed the professor and asked if I could go.) That genetics project was how I learned about mysql and php -- leading to my current infatuation with drupal!

Rock on drupalchix!!

Drupal girls are the best

mndonx's picture

Glad to meet a lot of you at the BOF and Drupalcon! I'm Amanda Luker & I work with Chach (see above) at the Science Museum of MN. I've been using Drupal for almost two years now (another one!), starting with Wild Music. I love that it's a platform for me to learn new things pretty much every day. My current projects include: http://atlas.arisebookstore.org (yay, mapping!), Idea Cooperative, and a slew of other small projects.

My favorite project right now is TC Open Circuit, a local knowledge-sharing network for people who work with technology. We had a Drupal Day, do low-cost workshops/skillshares, have informal gatherings to share what we are working on, and are generally nice people who will help you! It dovetails with my belief in using technology for good -- and using technology to improve community organizing (not bog it down.)

I also teach digital media at an afterschool program once a week -- hoping to get kids -- girls especially -- familiar with and excited about programming, design and production.

I don't know how I got into this stuff. I was in writing/editing after graduating college (where I barely used a computer to do more than write papers). Then I realized I liked print production and design, starting (and closing) a printing company. I got frustrated with both the permanence (can't fix mistakes) and temporal nature of print media (goes in the trash can). The fact that the web is constantly changing that is so exciting to me. AND, the fact that I could teach myself everything (with the help of geek friends) just by staying up super late and solving problems was a big factor.

Web people are patient, and derive great satisfaction from solving problems. For me, it has more to do with this than any gift for math or science.

I hope to be a theming expert someday -- being at Drupalcon made me realize I have a lot to learn, but I'm thrilled to find such a warm & open community for doing such.

Drupal girl from Egypt

manal's picture

Hi DrupChix,

My name is Manal Hassan, I was born and live in Cairo, Egypt. I have been using Drupal since 2004, but not contributing (bad bad Manal), may be out of being busy, lazy or lack of confidence, or a mix of all. But I hope this will change with your support.

I dont consider myself a geek when I'm among other geek boys, but definitely a geek among girls :-)

I started using GNU/Linux by 2001, and co-founded the Egyptian GNU/Linux User Group May 2004, the website was built on drupal 4.4 and this was my first Drupal theme. Of course I was the only girl for a long time (or at least the only girl who made an appearance in real meetings) and of course writing the meeting minutes was left to me ;-)

Started giving beginner GNU/Linux sessions, then worked for more than a year in a couple of ICT for development projects. Right now and since 2 years I'm a Drupal developer in OpenCraft an egyptian open source company.

I dont do a lot of coding, but Drupal(tm) is my new Lego(tm), I love building all sorts of websites with it. I also do the themeing part (this is how it started), and I'm into RTL support (which still needs a lot of improvements whether on the drupal side of things, or in browsers' support), I contributed 4 RTLed themes (but they are not committed under my name).

I run a drupal Blog with my husband Alaa, we also run a free hosting platform for egyptian blogs, bands, small NGOs and political groups (which got us in trouble) and the egyptian blogs aggregator .. drupal based of course.

Was responsible for the themes and training for an arabic blogging platorm for human rights activists (based on drupal), and I do a lot of Drupal freelancing.

So in short, Drupal is my daily job, my freelancing work, my community, political and volunteer contribution .. it runs in my blood

very happy to be among u :-)

http://www.manalaa.net

Hey chix!

ksenzee's picture

Manal, I remember reading about when Alaa was in prison. That was quite the story. I didn't know you were a Drupalchick! Very cool.

Angie, thanks a bunch for creating this group. I think I remember some talk after Barcelona about not creating a group for women on g.d.o because it might seem exclusive. I was kind of disappointed at the time. I'm very glad to see it come into existence. And I'm very very glad you're welcoming everybody to join.

I'm Katherine Senzee and I've been running a one-woman Drupal shop since January 2007, when my daughter was born. I was tired of the hour commute each way into DC and suddenly had better ways to spend my time than sitting on the train. So here I am. Mind you, I didn't intend for it to be a Drupal shop at first. I just knew when I went into business building websites that I needed to pick a CMS or framework to work within, and I took a look around and decided Drupal was the way to go.

I've done some development on a certain other open-source framework that shall remain nameless, and I am so much more comfortable in this community than I was over there. I think this is already a pretty welcoming place, and I hope I can contribute in some small way to making it even friendlier!

Drupal In Dot I L

lishevita's picture

My name is Lisha. I'm a California girl by birth and upbringing... Oakland/San Francisco/Berkeley. I've been a bit of a nomad since my teen years, though. I live in Israel these days and feel the roots growing through my feet into the earth beneath me.

I've been a geek for a long time. Lessee... two Timex-Sinclair 1000's when I was 8 (one for mom's house, one for dad's) sort of kicked me off. I started working the Web back in late 1993 while I was a college student and worked part time at Sybase when a coworker suggested I check out this thing called "Mosaic" because it would be HUGE soon, and we should totally have a departmental website before anyone else got around to it. From there I started doing Websites for professors at school, for deans of departments, for my kids' elementary schools, for non-profit organizations, and eventually it just ended up being what I did for a living full-time, making my degrees in Latin American Studies and Migration Studies pretty much equivalent to degrees in underwater basket weaving. (To this day, on interviews with new companies, I always get the "How did you go from studying human migration patterns to building Web applications?" question followed closely by, "And how are you going to blend in with a very technical team where everyone has degrees in Computer Science?") I've worked for some pretty big or well known places like Wells Fargo Bank in the US or Amazon.co.uk in (you guessed it) the UK. I've also done some sites that I feel almost guilty for being proud of, like Justin Timberlake's official fanclub or RingoStarr.com (but not the flash landing page... I didn't do that).

I got into Drupal by accident a little over a year ago because I needed a CMS for my own stuff and for a project my eldest kid was doing and for a joint business venture with a friend... and I found out that Drupal is SO easy to throw together and run a bunch of very different sites all from the same base. And then, recently, I met the guys at Linnovate.net, and a couple of weeks ago I started working on a contract with them. Now I'm getting mega Drupal-geeky and working on some really massive projects with them, which is a lot of fun to say the least.

Howdy

add1sun's picture

Hey ya'll, I'm Addison Berry. Sadly I ended up missing the BoF due to the flu (that had me missing half of the 'con as well.) I work with Angie and Liza at Lullabot teaching folks how to rock their Drupal. It is totally awesome to read everyone's stories here. I'm stoked to see more and more women representin' in Drupal. I live in Maryland, USA and Katherine I so know that DC train commute! I did it for 10 years.

I've always been a bit of a nerd (I played "spin the globe" rather than "spin the bottle" as a kid :-p) but never really was in the tech geek stream. I have a degree in Anthropology, which I still love and miss. I lived in various places around the world but I ended up working for the Federal Gov't in Washington, DC stamping papers once I settled down back in the US. I ended up getting into this geek thing almost 7 years ago now when my office was introducing a new web-based platform and they needed a stamp-monkey to explain end user needs and processes. It turned out to be faster for me to learn how to configure/customize the new app than to explain to the geeks. When I started, the extent of my knowledge was that the big button on the front of the box turned it on and that if I didn't check that email thing my boss would get mad at me. Moving to IT was a great move for me since my brain was damned excited to actually be challenged and I started learning everything I could, getting particularly enthralled with the web. I taught myself HTML and CSS in my free time and came to Drupal a little over 2 years ago when we wanted to redo our website and I didn't want to hand code the whole thing and be the only one who could update it. I came to love the beast and the more I got involved with the community the deeper the love. I was happily clipping along in my federal golden handcuffs when Lullabot offered me the opportunity to do Drupal full-time with an awesome group of good-hearted, wicked smart people. I've been in heaven ever since.

My community involvement has me sorta all over the place, but aside from tinkering in code I am probably most visible on the docs team and working with the Drupal Dojo.

Learn Drupal online at Drupalize.me

waves to Amanda, Chach,

arianek's picture

waves to Amanda, Chach, Jacine, and the other ladies from DrupalCon! It's so great to 'see' you all on here :-) and hello to everyone who wasn't able to make it to Boston, it is so great learning a little more about the ladies of the Drupal community, everyone has such interesting backgrounds!

Keeping me sharp

YesCT's picture

Hi! I'm Cathy Theys from Chicago, IL, USA. I've always been around computers and technology and loved open source since I was at University. I played with computers as a kid (my dad brought a TI home, it used a cassette recorder to save programs so I could "listen" to them. that was cool.). Then the typical math/science/computer (art/music) route in HS and in college I was in Electrical Engineering: Computers, Architecture, Semiconductors, you know, the usual! grin Then I landed a job at UIC, full time for a few years, 2/3 time after 1 kid, and zero time for kid number 3. Now I'm back at it though!

I've been spending a few hours a month on Drupal for about a year now (just enough to keep sharp) and I finally feel like I'm ready to do work for other people... and ready to contribute to Drupal.

I'm a homeschooling (unschooling) mom of 3 young ones, so I do most of my computer work a couple nights a week from 9pm-2am with frequent breaks to get the baby back to sleep.. until I crash next to him eventually!

I'm starting to do freelance websites with Drupal and I finally landed my first paid gig! It's for a non-profit, so the pay isn't that much, but it's a start!

I remember meeting someone (was it webchick?) at a Flourish Conference at UIC in 2007... I was there when the "baby" was just born. (in case that jogs anyone's memory, he was sleeping/eating in a sling for the presentation...)

I have a lot of "jobs": dog trainer, computer science lecturer at UIC, web sites stuff, Shaklee distributor, but I really think freelancing Drupal stuff is the way to go for me. I really need something that I can do at home while the kiddos are sleeping!

Cathy Theys
YesTrainingAndEducation.com

Cathy Theys

This is too awesome

kdmarks's picture

I wasn't able to make the BoF in Boston...and now am even more sorry than before. What a great group! Am so glad to have a chance to (virtually) meet everyone, anyway.

I'm Kathy Marks from Tempe, Arizona. I'm a UX developer with Arizona State University and I spend most of my time building Drupal sites. I've been in web design for 10 years now, though I can't really say how I got here. It was pretty unlikely. I come from the bastions of anti-technology--I was a publishing house editor, a college English instructor, and a romance novelist (I know, I know). I guess I just got lucky when I bumped into the web.

I have two kids (7 and 9), struggle to balance work and family life, adore Drupal, love theming, am a standardista, and think the Internet has the potential to save humankind (or something like that).

Great to meet and be a part of such a fantastic group of women!

so glad I found this group

annez's picture

I'm Anne Zelenka from Denver, Colorado. I wasn't at DrupalCon as I've only just started getting to know Drupal, but I hope to be at one in the future. I've been interested in Drupal since I returned to working a couple years ago (I had stopped out to do kid care), but I was diverted into pro-blogging at tech blogs GigaOM and Web Worker Daily during 2007. I missed actually building stuff during that time so decided to redirect myself back to web dev.

I worked in software development in the nineties, mostly Unix/C++ database applications but also web apps in the late nineties and some Windows stuff. Was living in Silicon Valley during that time but moved to Virginia then Hawaii then Colorado for various reasons.

Now settled in my hometown of Denver with my husband and three kids (12, 7, and 5). Ditched the pro-blogging gig; now doing a few little projects to get to know Drupal. One in particular has potential to turn into a business, but I can imagine I might instead end up doing freelance work or getting a regular job.

Thanks for setting up this group, webchick and hello to everyone!

Hello from the land of lutefisk

zirvap's picture

My name is Hilde Austlid, and I live in Trondheim, Norway. I'm married, have two children, work in R&D in an electronics company, and am old enough that my age looks better in hex than in decimal :-)

To me, Drupal is a hobby. (Am I the first hobbyist in this thread?) A few years ago, I needed a CMS for a club, and since it's a low budget, volunteer based club it was the "free as in free beer" aspect that led me to open source. I found that making web sites with Drupal is a lot more fun than tinkering with HTML, hanging out in the forums and helping others is fun, translation is partly fun, partly a chore (but at least there's the satisfaction of seeing the end of a more-or-less finite task coming nearer and nearer), bickering about/discussing the best Norwegian translation of "feed" is interesting, community building can be intensely frustrating but very satisfying when you see (small, but noticeable) results, thinking about usability and GUIs and organisation of information is fun, and... ("Mom! Can I have the computer now?") Well, there aren't enough hours for all I want to do, so I tend to scatter all over the place. The PHP book I got a few years ago has mostly been gathering dust so far, although I have some vague ambitions to learn how to update small, simple modules. If/when I have time. Maybe.

I enjoy the lego aspect of Drupal: Thinking about how to fit various pieces together to build something that makes sense. Doing the final polish to smooth away the rough edges (completing all the pathauto rules, tweaking the theme to show the taxonomy terms and fields prettily and not just adequately, checking that all breadcrumbs make sense) is boring -- somewhat like my knitting projects, which tend to languish in "almost finished, only need to fasten the loose threads" state.

Oh, and while I'm not a coder, I can boast other geek credentials: My user name is the name of one of my favourite AD&D characters, a dwarven fighter/cleric. These days, I'm playing a half-orc fighter -- there's something deeply satisfying about playing someone who can (successfully!) solve most problems with a greatsword. (And kdmarks: I read romance novels ;-) )

--
Hilde Austlid, Drupalchick

Hey hey!

Allie Micka's picture

Hi Folks,

I've always been a bit of at tech/tomboy, but eventually I decided to attend film school. In 1999, I wanted to build an online community because I didn't have access to the tools and knowledge that I felt I needed to do film and animation work without the resources of a major firm. So I taught myself PHP and MySQL, and began writing some community tools. In my infinite wisdom, I decided to host this community myself, so I also took on learning Apache, Linux/FreeBSD, qmail, Nagios, LDAP, and a whole slew of other hosting-related technologies.

After a year of this, I had developed a core competency in server management ( and landed a cushy senior developer's job at an online brokerage ). However, I hadn't pushed my art or my community forward one iota. Given the relative size of my infrastructure, plus the smaller hobbyists; I can extrapolate from my own investment that Tens of thousands of years of human potential has been poured into setting up little web hosting islands, with massive duplication and minimal growth of ideas.

Based on this little epiphany, and the fact that I really like facilitating people, I focused my efforts on community participation, open source, and knowledge transfer. Through my hosting company, I ran several user groups in the Twin Cities, and made meeting space available to anyone who wanted it. This turned out to be a unsustainable, because folks looking for free information aren't always looking to spend an extra $5 on hosting. So to put food on the table, I did web development on the side.

Like everyone else, I wrote my very own CMS ( cumulatively, how many millennium would that make? ) . This was open source, of course, but not very broadly adopted because it was rather esoteric: It had a node-like system, the module concept, hierarchical data storage, and self-generating tables like CCK, but it was written entirely in PostgreSQL stored procedures! Then I found Drupal and the fantastic Drupal community, and I've been a full-time Drupal user/developer for over 3 years. To share more of what I know and have been working on, I founded a Drupal-specific development and hosting company, where we do training, hosting, and formal and informal workshops/help groups, meanwhile attempting to fund more Drupal-related development goals.

The cool thing about knowledge and code is that you can give them away and still have them for yourself. Better yet, if you're fortunate enough to give them to someone of the same mindset, they'll return them twofold with a different approach or a new perspective that you didn't have before. Ultimately, it's greater than the sum of its parts. It's amazing to see this applied on the massive scale of the Drupal project: With that many parts, it's pretty darn great!

I'm glad this group has finally happened

laura s's picture

At our BOF in Barcelona, I think there was a sense that forming a group like this would somehow be seen as too ... separatist. Well, I hope nobody takes this group as separatist in any sense!

Anyway, I am Laura Scott. I got into Drupal about four years ago after a journey of dissatisfaction with hosted blogs that took me back to web design (which I did as a sideline in the '90s), which took me to these content management systems that offered so much more, which took me to open source, which is when I started to realize that there was something new happening that was revolutionary, which led me into looking at content management systems strictly in open source, which led me to Drupal and a long long time of banging my head against a wall, asking all sorts of stupid questions and probably driving a lot of people crazy. In the end, I once I started to grok things, out of embarrassment I created an entirely new Drupal.org account and kept going. To make a long story short, I co-founded pingVision, a Drupal design and development company based in Boulder, Colorado.

I'm sorry I missed the BOF in Boston. I don't remember, but I had some sort of conflict. But now we have this place!

If anyone has questions about Drupal or the community, please don't hesitate to contact me.


Laura
pingVision, LLC (we're hiring)

Laura Scott
PINGV | Strategy • Design • Drupal Development

Impressive group of women

betsy's picture

Hi everyone,

Wow, there's a lot of amazing talent here. I've met Laura (hey!) but don't know anyone else.

I've tinkered with Drupal a bit now and then and follow the community mostly as a lurker. I was hoping to use Drupal for a couple of projects that never materialized, so I like to stay informed in case similar opportunities arise again.

I'm a front-end developer and communications strategist. I've been hand coding HTML/XHTML/CSS for about 12 years. I do a bit of design and enjoy mucking around with PHP. My background is working with development teams to build and support Web interfaces for large institutions, including content management systems.

Let's see...I'm not a programmer, but I once made an animated mouse tap dance across the screen on my VIC-20. Oh, and I had a brief love affair with Perl 5 in the 90s.

I'm currently working as an independent contractor and doing custom Wordpress theming. I live in a two-geek household with my husband in Denver.

Aha!

sooz's picture

I wasn't at the BoF at Drupalcon Boston but I might have met a bunch of you. I helped out with event planning for the conference. I'm based out of Boston and left my office job in January to return to freelance work. At that last office job I ran the web department for BostonNOW, a free daily newspaper in Boston that's doing a lot online with blogs, comments, tags, etc. After my predecessor got the initial website launched a couple months before I joined the company, I decided we really needed to move it to Drupal. So, we did. That finally came to life in October. Fast forward to today, Drupalcon Boston is over so I'm moving on to new freelance work helping Acquia with a series of community events. And hopefully I'll have a chance to conspire with all of you more.

greetings

sisyphe's picture

Another mostly lurker saying hello -- it's a thrill to meet so many Drupalstars! I've been working with Drupal for almost a year now. In my tiny organization (6), I spend most of my time on the content/UI/IA side of things, but I'm also our designated Drupaler, which means that I get to install, configure, test, theme, code custom modules, and do pretty much anything else you'd need to do in order to get to the proof-of-concept stage. I adore Drupal for prototyping. It's taking a bit longer to get everything production-ready, but that's to be expected. I look forward to getting more involved in the community!
-Sara

I am living in DC and am

winter's picture

I am living in DC and am interested Drupal. Thanks for having me.

Hi

aufumy's picture

I grew up in Malaysia, attended an international high school in Malaysia, where the girls were smarter in math and science than men, I believe because most of our teachers were females. We had students from all across the world, one of my best friends at the time was Dutch and she was a brainiac.

However, when she went back to the Netherlands, she became a model, which was very glamorous, but not needing to use much of her math talent. Taking grade 12 in Canada, I was shocked at how difficult it was to find other girls that were capable in math and science. To me, it seemed odd that North American girls were less equal in these topics. Even the lady counselor for Grade 12, would not allow me to take a metal working class, saying that there were many boys there etc, and basically forced me into taking Social Sciences instead.

I found a pattern even for university counselors to discourage me from entering Engineering, maybe they were right, in the sense that those disciplines are still very male-dominated, but then again it could be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

After working as an engineer, I realized I was more excited to be involved with computers, and made the transition, taking programming classes, learning unix on the job, operations, a little of everything, PHP as a hobby as well as being involved with the local PHP community.

Eventually being in Vancouver, I inevitably had to cross paths with Drupal, and started working with it full-time since August.

Audrey

Why So Slow

YesCT's picture

Audrey, Your post reminded me of a book I read: "Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women by Virginia Valian". I read a few years ago, when the Dean of Engineering recommended/required department heads to read it at UIC (or some one my memory is fuzzy). It speaks specifically to academia, but some of the concepts might apply well to here too.

One of the basic take home messages I got out of it was that small decisions or effects add or cumulate into larger effects. One of the examples in the book was a newly hired female was assigned a small class of 20 or so students to teach instead of the large 100-200 student class typically given to new professors... theoretically if she had done the small class, she would have less contact with students, and less of a pool from which to pick (and recognize) brilliant graduate students which would be needed because typically, getting tenure is partially based on the number of PhD students someone graduates. ... I dont have the book in front of me, so I might be muddling it as I try to explain it, but the book was a great read for me!

I also found it helped me with some of my parenting decisions (hello other parents!) as it looked at some situations involving babies and preschool aged kids and how those effects add too.

Maybe I should give it a re-read!

Cathy Theys
http://YesTrainingAndEducation.com

Cathy Theys

very exciting!

caroltron's picture

Hey there ladies,

My name is Colleen Carroll and I live in Chicago, IL (born, raised, and for some unknown reason haven't left). I work at Palantir.net as a Project manager and themin' developer. I'm actually fairly new to Drupal, just over 1 year doing development. Before Palantir, I worked at the Art Institute of Chicago for 5 years as a web developer and administrator/"fake programmer" of their Serena Collage content management system. And I can tell you when I saw drupal I dropped Collage and drank the koolaid. I find myself dorking out about Drupal a little more than I might like to ;).

Although I have great CSS skills, I am not the best with PHP. And if you want to find out more about that ask Crell. I spend most of my day skinning a site, and dorking out on semantic markup and the "user's experience" with drupal and then forcing Crell to program something custom here and there for me to then skin again.

I've worked on a number of drupal sites: ragdale.org, ima.museum, artic.edu/aic/collections, ave-mater-dolorosa.org, there's more trust me. I have to say that I've never been excited about web development like I am now. I've been trying to find a way to break into the Drupal community, as I have been a bit intimidated, and I think this group just helped me get past that hurdle. I didn't make it to Drupalcon in Boston, but I promise to be at the next, b/c I'd love nothing more than to hear what other people are doing, get to know people face to face and just feel like part of the community.

Thanks Angie for setting this up!

-cc

-cc

Yes!

stevryn's picture

Hi everyone, I am from New York, no not NYC, but about 5 hours north! I work for an engineering company where my first assignment was to research and choose a CMS to be used for our department website. Once I got started with Drupal there was no going back! It amazes me how much it has grown since I signed up for my Drupal account and did my first install. My background is in network and systems administration, not web design, but I have been learning and getting some training along the way. I'm hoping I may soon be able to contribute back to the Drupal community. On the personal side, I'm mom of two teenage boys, and a very proud great Auntie to a little preemie baby named Braelyn, who was my inspiration for my latest Drupal site, Braelyn's Page. Its a simple site, made for my sister and niece to help keep family and friends updated on the baby & his progress.

Having a group for the women of Drupal...awesome idea!!I hope there is an event close enough for me to get to someday and perhaps I can meet some of you!

Thanks to Angie for bringing us all together..virtually :)

Tammy
(stevryn, = Steven & Ryan, my sons names...everyone thinks I must be a guy because of that name :) )

again with the slow

esmerel's picture

I haven't gotten around to posting my intro yet, even though I joined right up after webchick made the group :)

I live in San Jose, CA. I've been peripherally involved with the community for a while, mostly vicariously through my husband, but before Boston I decided I wanted to get more directly involved because there's so much opportunity here and < censored > my job ;) If you were there and saw the toddling little girl every day - that's me :)

I've done technical support for 12 years for network performance management software - oddly, my team is mostly women and always has been at least half women! I've done a lot of documentation work (writing and mostly reviewing), bug reports, all kinds of stuff.

I had more, but my brain fell out. :)

My long and winding road to geekdom...

tracy_pilcher's picture

I probably shouldn't even be a geek. I grew up before the Apple computer or any computers were in schools. I didn't get my hands on a computer (at work) a mini computer, until I was in my early 20's. I didn't get a "personal" computer until I was 26. I spent the first weeks I had it just looking at it I was too afraid to even turn it on. It was one of the first Mac Plus computers and it didn't have a hard drive, and only one floppy drive. I spent many hours building system disks and figuring out how many programs I could fit on a disk and still have room to save data. It took me a year before I could afford a 10 M (yes megabit) hard drive. To save money I bought a raw drive and external enclosure and built it myself. It had a 50 pin ribbon SCSI cable which I also had to assemble. I was able to find information on one of the many BB's on how to attach the cable adapter to the cable. They all involved a special crimping tool which I had no idea where to purchase. So, I used a hammer and very carefully bashed the adapter end onto the cable. It worked! I don't think I have enjoyed any computer I've owned since as much as that first one.

Really, what I used it for most was connecting to the pre-cursor to the internet, bulletin boards and then the very first public internet access company, "The World", part of the group of people who published the "The Whole World" magazine.

I started playing around with HTML in the early 90's when the internet first started to come together. I've never stopped trying to learn new things about software and hardware. But until recently, it was more a passion and a hobby than a profession. I think the one things that slowed me down (but didn't stop me) from becoming a wage earning nerd was my own self doubt about what I could do. I have always been intimidated by "professional" IT situations, both in education and in work environments. I didn't do well in college computer classes. I found the terminology and concepts too vague. I held myself back from applying for technical positions because of my lack of formal education.

What really allowed me to grow and finally accept the fact that I can do pretty much anything (technically) that I set my mind to, was open source software. Before that the only way to learn about software was to be able to afford it and then be able to get access to training. Two things that were difficult to get unless you were already and established IT professional.

Once I got my hands on my first linux distro (slackware) and an affordable PC there was no stopping me. I soon became, at least at home, my own system administrator and web master. This led to a job at the University of Arizona, Physiology Department where I built their first Linux Server and course web sites.

I then did free-lance web development LAMP, using one of the first PHP CMS, phpSHOP. Fast forward to today and I have been using Drupal for almost 2 years. I was recently hired by the Family Education Network http://www.fen.com as a Community Application Developer. I am getting to delve deeper into Drupal and PHP programming in a way that I haven't before. And although I sometimes get overwhelmed and think I can't do it, I always do :-)

I think many people are "hackers", especially women, but they don't know it. Before Open Source Software, entry into the IT world was too steep, either financially or culturally, to get the opportunity to learn about programming, system administration, etc. But even with the opportunity for anybody to just start going on the internet and letting their geek freak out, most people don't. I think for me it was because I just couldn't visualize my self succeeding in programming, there was no clear path, just an unending need to learn more.

Summer of Code is a wonderful thing, but there needs to be opportunities for all people to realize they may be hackers too.

Speaking of Hackers, is anyone going to "The Last Hope" this summer? Hope stands for Hackers on Planet Earth. This has been a bi-yearly hacker convention held in NYC. This may be the Last Hope because the Hotel Pennsylvania is scheduled to be torn down and this has been the traditional venue of the con because of it's layout and affordablility. To learn more check out http://2600.org/news/view/article/9018 (they may be using drupal :-)

Thanks Drupalchix!
Tracy a.k.a webdevgirk, a.k.a. geekygirl, soon to be the crazy computer lady in a cat filled house near you :-)

Hiyas!

narnigrin's picture

Hi all,
Try as I might it'll take me half a week to read through all these introductions - it's amazing how many "drupal girls" there are around, and here's me being used to having to hang out with the boys!

Anyway, I'm probably the most newly "converted" (is that even the right word? I don't know) among us here, as I only started to use and dig around in Drupal last December, after heavy persuation from snufkin. Funny enough, having looked all over the place for any sort of "web geeking" job for the last five years or so, now I'm getting proposals! Oh joy!

I started my geek career by reading my mum's notes from HTML class one very long and boring summer in 1998 or something like that. Then I did IT for my upper secondary/college/Highers/whatever you call that level of education, after which I moved from Sweden to Scotland to study maths at the university. I'm hoping to work with web development or something similar once I grow up, until which there is still a few years, by the looks of it (growing up, that is). Until then, I'll be maintaining at least three or four web sites at any given time (currently, one for a Uni society and two of my own) and obsessively checking the Paid services section about twice a day. :P I'm also planning to apply to code for Drupal in the Summer of Code this year.

I didn't go to Drupalcon in Boston, mainly because I barely had time to hear about it before it took place (plus I was busy with studies anyway). Reading what you folks write about it though, I would have loved to be there. Next time there's anything on in Europe there's a considerable possibility that I'll show up.

For the record, I want a Drupal hat too. Maybe I'll combine it with my plans on knitting a Klein hat (yay to anyone who gets the reference).

Erika a.k.a. narnigrin/Narn

Late to this, but Hi!

CrystalWilliams's picture

I'm Crystal Williams. I'm a lifelong geek and about two years in with Drupal.

I started with Drupal as a production designer/themer with Raincity Studios up in Vancouver, took my knowledge of it and got the awesome design studio in LA I worked at next (www.sisumedia.com) into it, and now I'm the Director of Technology Projects at Warner Bros Records. (and we're an all-Drupal shop for our artist sites and internal sites/projects). By the way, our Technology department here is 5 women, 3 men. :)

Along the way, I helped out with DrupalCamp Seattle 2006, and solo-organized DrupalCampLA 2007. (We're about to start on another one).

I also organize BarCamps. (Vancouver, Shanghai, and three in LA so far!) It's a ton of work, but it's a great feeling when people make really good connections and you can't get anyone to go home on Sunday evening. :)

So sorry I couldn't make it to DrupalCon this year (hard to travel when you're new into a job), but looking forward to attending one soon.

Cheers, ladies!
-C

hey chica nifty seeing you

Silona's picture

hey chica nifty seeing you here!

Late ...

Sree's picture

Hi all,

Webchick thanks for the initiation!

I am Sree from India.
I have been involved with drupal from past 3+ years.
I work for a software service providing firm & also do consulting with few startups in making their hands on with drupal.
I was actively involved in women development related things from long back.
An active contributor to http://phpwomen.org/

Its very happy meeting all of you here at one place.

Cheers,

Sree

Pleased to hear about this

DevElCuy's picture

Pleased to hear about this group, I've followed some links here and learned that first computers were women!! so it is true that women are difficult to understand just like computers, but once you know the one, you cant live without her :)

My name is Fernando, male, I live in Lima-Perú. I'm joining because I would like to introduce my wife to Drupal, I've did her blog in Drupal: http://mapiart.com.ar/en (now working on a new theme), but she can't use it because she doesn't know a bit of Drupal, so I'm sure she can provide nice feedback in her learning process (I'll be translator because she doesn't speak English). Her name is Nancy Contreras, bachelor in Environmental Engineering, and loves to make handcrafts, specially of recycled paper.

Blessings!

--
(3 John 1:2) Dear friend, I pray that you may enjoy good health and that all may go well with you, even as your soul is getting along well.

--
[develCuy](http://steemit.com/@develcuy) on steemit

YADI (Yet Another Drupalchix Introduction)

indie's picture

Hello all, and hello again Angie Byron! My name is Shawnee Cook, and, Angie -- if I remember correctly, we were hanging out on those crazy purple Dr. Seuss chairs/couches at the OSCMS last year at Yahoo! which was fun. Anyway. . .

Being a female in this industry can be daunting, if not tough. However, it's always nice to see other females at various techie conferences, and to participate in the spread of open-source cheer. The OSCMS inspired me to expand my site to be somewhat of an open-source toolkit, but Linux-based; thus it evolved into the FOSS resource that it is today, http://www.zentu.net. The "community" part of the site is, of course, Drupal-based and always open to newcomers! http://www.zentu.net/network. Um, also do I administer, maintain, or otherwise contribute to a variety of websites, blogs, etc.; I like to write and to otherwise experiment with code and often do so under the nickname indiejade or just indie, for short.

So, it goes without saying that I'm a geek, and not ashamed of it. I've lived in Alaska, Nevada, Utah, Florida, Oregon and Arizona and currently live in the Silicon Valley area. It's close enough to a CalTrain station. My business operates under the name Zentu, LLC, which is really not as fancy as it sounds. I haven't quite figured out what title to assign myself in this business; when I do, I'll maybe have some business cards printed. Or something. :)

Proud to be a DrupalChix

drupalqueen's picture

I distinctly remember my father telling my older sister and I when we were little that we "could do anything a man could do - if not better!". So, I never felt discouraged pursuing what I found interesting. My father is a mechanical engineer, my sister is a mechanical engineer and so is her husband. My mom isn't, but she surely thinks like an engineer. I started my educational pursuits by taking every computer, science and math class offered in highschool. My college career has been a long and winding road beginning with biomedical engineering through graphic design and now computer science. It has taken me a while to find my true passion, but I knew I was on the right path when I took my first HTML class a couple years ago. Naive as I was, I thought people who built websites were designers. I didn't know what php was when I took an art class. The art class was so difficult as I struggle with even stick figures. The realization that some people design websites and some people build websites lead me to where I am today. I build.

I have only been Drupal-ing for 6 months and love every minute of it. When my company chose Drupal for a large scale social network, I immediately installed it at home so I could understand how all of the pieces were put together. The couple week head start I had over my colleagues gave me some confidence and I was moved out of design/development into the engineering department. Right now, I do whole lot of everything with Drupal and am grateful to a team that prides themselves on being a "team" and mentoring my skillset.

Currently my Drupal knowledge is so specific to my company's project. As I learn more, I would love to contribute back to the community. A colleague is organizing local meet-ups which will enable me to get more involved.

Proud to be a DrupalChix,
Michelle
New Hampshire

Heya Drupalchix

amycham's picture

Hi all!

Angie - we met at Thursday dinner at Drupalcon. Great idea to start this group!

My name is Amy Cham, and I'm the Tech/Marketing Convergence Manager at Tree House Interactive Agency. I did front-end development for a few years (and still do some now) before branching out into marketing, with the goal of using marketing principles to create more effective internet solutions.

I am an almost total newbie as far as Drupal goes, though my company uses it a lot, so I'm trying to ramp up to a general competency as quickly as I can. It seems like a fantastic platform...I went ahead and did a small freelance site on it, and it was pretty painless to set up (though I had some issues getting TinyMCE to work the way I wanted it to). The selection of modules is very exciting, though it can be tricky to guess where to start looking for some things.

Most of my friends growing up were guys, so I honestly never really noticed the gender ratio until I realized there was only one other girl sitting in my intro Java class! I was reminded again when I hit business school and had the impression that the class was about evenly split, then discovered we were only 27%...

It's always surprised me there aren't more women in tech. I can't say I've ever felt unwelcome or discriminated against, (though I am guessing I'm the only person RIT ever had building a video game involving shooting people with lipstick!) but I get the sense that women outside the industry expect it to be this inpenetrable boys' club. Many, I think, are or know women who had bad experiences a couple decades ago, when I think things were quite different.

Comments like, "It must be hard working with all those guys," were pretty common. I would guess that the "computers are not cool for girls" factor growing up, with the expectation that internet industry is somehow hostile to women, combine to make it more difficult to attract women to the field. Slipping on my marketing hat, I'd say tech has a branding issue!

Looking forward to getting to know more tech girls!

Amy
New York, NY


Amy C. Cham
Twitter: amycham

ambereyes's picture

Hey Webchick!

My name is Katrina Messenger. I began my technical career with the telephone company here in Washington DC. I started as a frame technician and was promoted to electronics tech, transmission engineer, QA/Testing manager, researcher, standards guru then internet architect before taking early retirement after 25 years.

I now have a web design company (Amber Eyes), a mystery school, a public ritual group and a career as a minister, shaman and crazed mystic. I am also a writer, singer, poet, songwriter and priestess.

My tech creds include two degrees (BSEE & MSCS), an event management application (10K lines of perl code) that I am considering implementing in Drupal and seven web sites up on Drupal so far.

As a child, I was a math prodigy. And growing up in the ghetto, it was lucky for me that my family was also known far and wide as being tough. So I was the egg head with street cred. I joke that I was probably the only geek gangster in history. The street toughness however helped me stand up to many a bully in my career.

But when I had a chance to retire early I took it, and now I am living a life filled with work that feeds my soul. And lately that includes Drupal too.

Thanks so much for starting this group.


www.ambereyes.net
www.katrinamessenger.com

Intros

emmajane's picture

hey all,

I too am a woman using drupal. waves atta angie too Within the Drupal community I haven't contributed a lot of code (a few patches here and there). I'm better known for having knit the Drupal socks that walkah wears. Before the inevitable questions start: I won't knit you a pair, and the pattern will be available for free as soon as I get the energy to chart out the drupal drop on the heel. :)

I'm a freelance Web dev and consultant in small town Canada. Before that I taught standards-based Web development at community colleges in Toronto (HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, etc). I use Drupal for (almost) all of my Web contracts. I specialize in building communication tools/sites for not-for-profit organizations especially for domestic abuse prevention orgs, culture organizations and international on-line craft communities. My highest traffic Drupal install is the on-line crochet community at www.crochetme.com. Kim had installed Drupal 4.7 pre-CCK with a lot of custom modules. I moved everything over to Drupal5 with CCK (everything is now either core or a downloaded Drupal module).

In general I'm not a huge fan of single gendered groups (but am a fan of girls-only science & math classes); however, I also think it's important to stand up and be counted in a community that assumes everyone's a man. I think that it's hugely important to provide positive role models to the entire community. On that note: I'll be giving a talk on gender and FOSS at LugRadioLive in San Francisco (April 12), and Wolverhampton, UK (July 19) and at OSCON (July 24). If you're planning on attending any of those conferences please please come say hi! Although I love public speaking I'm hopelessly awkward at "networking" and will end up stuck in the corner drooling if I'm forced to approach groups of people for casual chatting.

The talk is getting interesting press within the craft community... and they're even using a shot of me and the drupal sock!
http://blog.craftzine.com/archive/2008/03/crafter_emma_hogbin_speaking_a...

I've been enjoying reading everyone's stories and am looking forward to more!

--

.carey's picture

For privacy reasons, the author has deleted the contents of this post.

hi

malcolm8's picture

In spite of my name, I am indeed a woman! I've been working with Drupal for about three years. Started at a company called Agentic; most recently themed the openwebvancouver.ca site - where, as an organizer, I pushed very hard to get women speakers, btw. I also just wrote a review of Drupal 5 Themes.

yet another story...

WorldFallz's picture

So many!

It's truly awesome to see so many amazing technical women all in one place. I'm not thrilled to date myself, but I saw someone else post about the TRS80, so I know I'm not alone.

My road to drupal is long and windy.....

The "personal computer" was just being invented and bill gates was probably still riding a bike, lol. I was a psychology major in college when I took my first computer science class junior year-- that's all it took. Within days i was locked away in the CS basement creating mountains of punch cards writing my first solitaire program (only took me once dropping that stack to start numbering them with a sharpie, lol). My bachelor's thesis was a biofeedback assembler program for the TRS80. I've been writing code, one way or another, ever since. From assembler to the original "basic" to PL/1-- all the way through visual basic/C/javascript/ and the .net variants up till now with PHP/Python/Ruby.

Anyway, after graduation I got a job as a human factors engineer (that's what we called UI work back then, lol) with Bell Labs. You know those "can you hear me now?" commercials? Thats was real--- except we started doing it with cordless phones. Yes, I would walk through the fields of bell labs literally saying "can you hear me now" like 1000 times-- until the call faded. I also did UI design work on the interface of the phones as well. But at every opportunity I would grab programming work (programming usability lab experiments on an Apple IIs, statistical analyses, prototyping phone interfaces, etc) until I finally made the cutover from R&D to the IT dept. And I've been a very happy geek ever since. Currently I'm an IT process engineer / information architect for one of the largest health systems on the east coast of the US.

A little less than a year ago, I found Drupal. I was searching for a "wiki" to bring to my intranet for IT process/procedure documentation. I evaluated mediawiki, joomla, plone, and drupal. Drupal won. The rest is history (and "yay me" for my awesome decision, lol).

However, there is one downside that no one seems to talk about-- I think I'm pathologically obsessed with it. I drupal for fun. I drupal in my spare time. I drupal when I'm bored. Sometimes I'll setup a site and try something out just to see if it can be done-- with no real need for it. Sometimes, I'll be sleeping and wake up with the solution to a drupal problem ive been wrestling with. Sad, very sad. LOL.

Well, that's my story.

Like the previous poster I'm usually not a big fan of gender based groups-- except in cases where the gender disparity is totally abnormal. I think this group is a great idea. Wandering around the forums and issue queues I would of course see webchick and add1sun, but I had no idea there were so many of us. I probably would have found some reason to attend boston08 if I had only known! lol.

Looking forward to seeing ya'll around...

Your story is great! You are

brenda003's picture

Your story is great!

You are so right, though - sometimes I just need a BREAK from work, and what do I do? I still Drupal a lot of the time. I'm like, "oh yay! I can finally put this patch together or work on this module or chat with some Drupallers or or..."

Thanks webchick!

stella's picture

Thanks for setting this up, it's a great idea!

Thanks webchick!

stella's picture

Hi all!

Been away for the last month, so just catching up on stuff. First off, thanks to webchick for setting this group up! I think it's a great idea!

Anyway, I'm Stella Power and am from Dublin, Ireland. Brief summary of myself - i'm a geek, gamer, metal chick and amateur artist (photography, pottery, silversmithing, you name it!) Sadly I missed BostonCon (was off getting married and such), so unfortunately didn't get to meet any of you at the DrupalChix session :(

I originally studied science in university, then switched to computational physics, then after graduating decided to ditch the science completely and now am a full time software developer. I currently work for a company called TNS but before that used to work for a small open-source driven company called Doolin Technologies (which I still miss!).

I've been involved with Drupal for almost 2 years now and enjoy every minute of it! I initially got hooked into Drupal when I decided I needed a proper CMS for managing my new website (http://www.stellapowerdesign.net) and gradually, as I needed new features not covered by existing modules, or needed improvements added, I started developing for Drupal. I now spend most of my spare time maintaining the lightbox2, faq, avatar selection and coder modules. However, I've also started helping out with the shoutbox module more recently and also maintain the ocadia theme.

I really like the idea of a #drupalchix IRC channel. It would be great if we could get this set up. It'd be great to talk to ye all.

Cheers,
Stella

Two Dublin Drupalchix :-))

katbailey's picture

Hi Stella,
nice to (virtually) meet another Dublin Drupalchick - I'm sure there are more of us out there...
Is Doolin Technologies actually based in Doolin, Co. Clare?? For some reason I just love that idea :-) would be such a cool place to have a tech company!

Katherine

Yup

stella's picture

Yup, the head office is there. The main office used to be in Dublin however - we used to go down to Doolin each Christmas for our Christmas party, it was fantastic!

Stella

A Southern DrupalChick

NancyDru's picture

Hi, all. Stella mentioned this group so I had to come see what it was about.

I started Drupal-ing in January of 2007 because I found that my frames-based sites weren't getting picked up by the search engines. I had been slight exposed to CMS when I worked for IBM, so I started trying to fine something more SE-friendly. I happened upon Drupal almost by accident, but am so glad I did. I wouldn't want to use anything else now.

I'm from Columbia, SC (USA) at the moment, but am looking real hard at moving "north" to Charlotte, NC soon.

@Stella, I had no idea there was another "weird" girl out there. I also got my BS in Physics - and ditched it for software almost immediately.

I was quite honored to have been the January "cover girl" for PhpWomen: http://www.phpwomen.org/wordpress/2008/01/15/nancyw-pmp-women-in-open-so...

Nancy W.

Hiya!

codeknitter's picture

It's about time I introduced myself. My name is Erin Rasmussen, and I live in Portland, Oregon. I've been into computers since I was 12, and my Dad brought home one of the first PC's and my Mom brought home one of the first Apples. :) I've been pretty geeky ever since.

For a long time, I worked with computers all week, and relaxed by fiddling with them all weekend, but my three year old changed all of that when she was born. I looked deeply into her newborn eyes and realized that I'd be a part time geek and a full time mom for a while.

I'm pretty good at matching clients with appropriate web technologies, and building solutions for them, and I've been working at doing that part-time. (there's more detail on http://codeknitter.com - which I realize this week, I need to redo in Drupal 6 -- i need the features).

My main drupal effort is http://www.bioenergylists.org -- which is a set of 5 sites that all run off the same drupal code base (that started in 4, and uses at least 2 languages) it's a total bear to upgrade, but it's amazing what we've been able to do with the site.

I've been noodling along contributing to some of the queues and I've been a bit baffled by how to make a bigger contribution until y'all helped me figure that out recently. Thanks!

texas gal

Silona's picture

"who are you, where are you from, what do you do for a living, what's your background, how'd you get into this crazy Drupal stuff, what do you do with Drupal, and whatever other random facts you'd like to share?"

Silona Bonewald from Austin Texas. I am the OS evangelist for grid.org and I advise Univa-UD on work flow processes to support their OS initiative (which is groovy.) I was only hired here a few weeks ago.

My background: First computer in 82 when I was twelve was a Kaypro 2 the first luggable also had Trash 80 and 100 after that. Started doing large databases in 89, ran political campaigns and their databases (89-94), did a (failed) startup called ElecTech (94-95), did an ISP for web designers in 96-97, did large CMS systems (97-02), ran a tech college (03) went back to massive db's (04)

And for the last 4 years I have been creating the League of Technical Voters - a 501c3. It is my baby. Some people have children - I have an NPO. http://leagueoftechnicalvoters.org

Drupal history: I first started playing with Drupal 3.7 yrs ago with the League stuff. I first did the LoTV site in Plone. Cause I liked python way better than php (my languages previously were C, C++, C#, Java and Pascal and of course javascripting, cgi's in perl, Tcl/Tk etc but I prefer object oriented languages) I however HATED Zope. Talked to David Geilhufe - he convinced me to give Drupal a try. I did. I really liked the modularity of it (Dries you are a god to add structure to Php) And did a codeathon in support of it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccDORj0syyE

The funny thing - I haven't coded in 4 yrs now other than quick tweaks on websites, install scripts and such. I look over all modules I use pretty throughly - and haven't needed to code myself. Though the programmers I have hired have all contributed back to the base - it is a requirement of mine.

I just decided that grid.org is going to be redone in Drupal. I am also taking things a bit farther than that and hope to have a press release about it in a month or so after I talk with all the peeps I am supposed to get approval from...

and if you wanna know more about me google "silona" it is usually me :-) random fact - I'm also a "burner" whatever that means. I also volunteer a lot on wrangling cats for the Austin Maker Faire.

A brit says hello :)

kellyharding@drupal.org's picture

Well, I've just recently started looking through drupal groups again, I have a habit of drifting a little in some spaces, do'h.

Anyway, I'm Kelly, I live in the Midlands, UK.

I use drupal presently for my own personal website, and have been using it since around v4.5 iirc.

I am currently developing a redesigned version of my personal site, and developing a site using drupal for a friend locally too.

I'm not a developer, and not really savvy with CSS, etc. But I learn as I go presently.

I intend however to try to teach myself PHP (amongst other languages) to be able to get both a better understanding of how drupal works and to be able to put back some of the greatness I've found.

Away from drupal, I'm approaching 30, and am somewhat of a geek, be it old UNIX (Sun, SGI) boxes, old games consoles (I've several, SNES, Jaguar, Saturn, Dreamcast, etc), old computers or Macs.

I use Macs for almost everything, other than server stuff (thats done with Linux). I love my iBook, and Quicksilver PowerMac, they're not the quickest things really now, but they work ande I get a lot more done with them than I ever did with an equivelant PC.

I'm also a classic car enthusiast, and am interested in various history subjects. I drive a car thats older than I am presently!

Theres more I could say, but I think I'll leave it there as I've covered most stuff, and anything else is on my website (which is a bit of a jubbled mess presently).

Kelly

Nice to meet you all

Grammarian's picture

I come from a large, geeky, intellectual family – my dad was with IBM research for 30+ years and all the math majors I know are women – but the closest I've ever come to coding is an "IF" function in Lotus 1-2-3. I'm an English Literature major; my so-called career wandered through publishing and software companies as a marketing manager and copywriter. I'm old enough (48) that when I was in HS and college, the computers were off in their own isolated space – I did my writing on a typewriter (ugh!). I compared accounting printouts to the hand-made reports to help the programmer fix bugs for college work-study, was the first in my dept to put the budget on a spreadsheet in my second "real" job, laid out flyers in WordPerfect for VAX (non-WYSIWYG!), and became Mac/PC ambidextrous by working with graphic artists & printers as well as the business & sales side. My first involvement in the web was doing corporate site content and advertising promotion at Ziff-Davis when they were the leading computer mag publisher. Besides computer publications, I've done marketing for educational, medical and news publishers and scientific and energy tech firms, so I'm that rare person who can communicate effectively with sales types AND arty types AND techies.

When I met my husband in '93, our first conversation was Mac-vs-PC. I've converted him to the right side ;-) since then. He was launching a tech consulting firm which he ran for ~15 years. I've been involved all along in that, and several other ventures, including his Web Hosting firm. He now does business consulting, networking, and fund-raising. We have two fantastic boys, 5 and 8, and I've given up on the corporate world (downsize me once, shame on you, downsize me 4 times...) and am trying to build up a freelance web-dev and marketing business in my non-existent "spare" time. I got into Drupal in Jan '07 because my other half selected it as the most secure blogging solution for the hosting company and needed someone to learn how to use it. Got involved in the NYC group as soon as I found out it existed and attended the last two NYC Drupal camps, which were fantastic! In the past year-and-a-quarter, I've done several sites for my husband's various ventures, my business site, a personal blog on camping with children, and a few small client sites. I've worked in 4.7, 5x, and 6 so far. I'm also working on a Joomla! site with a Taproot foundation volunteer team (I like Drupal much better).

I'm interested in part-time or work-from-home or freelance gigs,, learning enough to start real theming, building a business while parenting, and contributing in areas like documentation, training, and evangelizing for Drupal. I looove the open-source community, and the bar-camp concept. I'm neither a tomboy or a girly-girl; I'd rather curl up with my head in a good book.

Jean Gazis
Brooklyn, NYC
www.jeangazis.com
WebHostNY - affordable, reliable Drupal hosting
Camping Paradise

Hello

jinglesnbells's picture

Hello,

This is my second go round with drupal. The first time was a couple years ago and was not successful. I am not as technical as I would like to be. :( Anyway, I have an idea for a community website that I have been toying with and am going to give it another try. I have a little experience with html, but not much of anything else. I love to learn.....so that is a good thing.

Currently, I teach middle school math.

Is there a place where I can ask questions in this group? or should I just stick with the drupal forums for my support questions? I hope to eventually learn enough so that I can give back to the drupal community.

Thanks for creating this group!

Not yet a Drupalchick...

lee_brew's picture

I guess I'm a wannabe Drupalchick. I want to learn it, and want training with another human(s), rather than slogging through the manuals in isolation. I have found Lullabot, but wonder if there might be other (less expensive) ways to learn:
1) to do a basic install of Drupal
2) to create a basic web site.
3) next steps to grow

I live in Sonoma county (one hour north of San Francisco, California), and would like to connect with Drupalchix in my area.

"Let the beauty we love be what we do."

"Let the beauty we love be what we do."

looking for the same thing

jinglesnbells's picture

I, too, want to learn drupal and be able to talk to others about issues and solutions.

I live in Austin, Texas. Does anyone know anyone who would be willing to give lessons. Currently, I am trying to create a business directory using CCK and views. The CCK I think I have figured out, but the views is another thing. After reading the documentation, I am still confused on what to do.

Anyway, I am sure there has got to be someone out there who would be willing to give people a lesson on how to use drupal.

Have a great week!

Welcome! Have you checked if

brenda003's picture

Welcome! Have you checked if there's any local Drupal groups near you? There's popping up all over the place and seem to be a great resource.

Dahlink-

webmamma5000-gdo's picture

I struggled for quite a time until I found this--
http://learnbythedrop.com/gettingstarted

videos, yes, that guide you step by step through a WAMP installation on a Windows pc. There are also videos avail and other tutorials for MAMP if you google around...

Also, I recommend book Using Drupal.

You're in for a lot of fun!

Hello Everyone

robinfly's picture

I'm Judy Lake, from NewYork. I'm very happy when i knew not only men in Drupal community, it have so many great lady here. I start develop Drupal from last year, so i'm new in drupal community. I'm learning a lot of things from drupal community. But drupal is fun, it inspire me learning more about it. I like drupal same as everyone!

Judy Lake

Greetings from Philadelphia

cassking's picture

Hi Gang
My name is Cassandra. I've just begun with Drupal , love it, and would love to meet other women in the Philly area who are deep into Drupal. Weekend bootcamps or something like that to get into the CCK and Views nitty gritty would be awesome. Please keep in touch

Drupal phillyphan
:)

Bonjour!

victoire's picture

Thank you Angie for setting up this group. My name is Victoire. I just began with Drupal and I am fascinated. I live in Orange County, sunny California, originally from Paris. I would love to learn more and/or to team up as I want to set up a SNS for active women in business who connect. I have the network but not yet sufficient drupal skills. Like you , I am a true believer of helping women to be in charge and get the place they deserve!

Hello, So Happy I Found You!

Tanisha's picture

I am already loving this group. I am new to drupal...have been tinkering for a few months now and I must say that I enjoy everything about the learning process. I hopped into a local group here in Indianapolis, IN and yes, it is riddled with men. I'm the only female thus far to attend a meeting I believe. But by any means, I'm fevered with learning more and more about drupal and evolving into an actual creator of life in the drupal community. My quest began with the desire to build my church's website. Aside from that I've been brainstorming other internet ideas and would really like to see them developed with Drupal. I started out with Joomla but switched over.

I look forward to sharing and learning with this group.

I finally went to my first

brenda003's picture

I finally went to my first local Drupal meetup and was also the only girl, though I think there's been a few others that've shown it. Drupalcon Boston was awesome in that regard, lots of Drupalchix in one place.

We have quite the gathering at least on here now, though, and it seems to be steadily growing. Hurray!

Stick with it!

Grammarian's picture

I was the only woman for most of the first NYC group meeting I attended, until some Lullabot people came in. However, there have been other women at every NYC event since.

Jean Gazis
www.jeangazis.comJean Gazis
www.jeangazis.com
www.webhostny.com (Drupal hosting)

just a "not so* quick hello to everyone :P

audre's picture

First off, WOW what a cool thread.

Even tho I'm way behind and have a zillion things to do today I found myself HAVING to read each and every introduction here. What an amazing group of people with equally fascinating backgrounds. Normally I am a full time lurker but I got so excited about all the success and positive stories here I just had to say something LOL

I'm a geek from way back, from a family of geeks, who really is proud to be a geek. I guess I just love learning about anything and everything, which makes me really dangerous at a whole lot of things but maybe not an expert any any of them. Which is fine, because really my expertise is in System Integration. Seeing projects as a whole is what I do best.

I started off getting a degree in Electrical Engineering, mostly to prove to myself that I could I spose. Really I enjoyed the theory much more than any practical application of it. I mean I built a few radios sure and did a few hardware oriented things but didn't quite find it as fun as I'd expected. The whole time I had also been tinkering with code and it occurred to me that programming was kinda fun, and that I wasn't horrible at it, either. So, right after getting my EE degree I promptly threw it in the trash and got myself hired as an entry level programmer. No regrets, even eons later.

Around the time it became possible to create cool graphics with computers (think pre Mac days here and dot matrix printers!) me and my Amiga (brave little toaster!) were happily dabbling with fractals and making really colorful, if ugly, images. LOL. Ever since then I've been a huge addict always looking for new ways to make colorful images using my computer. I even wrote a book a while back on using Poser 6, one of my all time favorite and fun-to-use graphics toys. I've been involved both professionally and personally in the support of the CG community for years and years , tho recently tapered off because it seems like online communities as a whole have lost their way. (Oh, but I digress... LOL)

Eventually I had created so many images that hosting my galleries was costing me more than my arm and leg together so I decided to host my sites myself. [ This was way back when domain names were $100(!) ] It was a hugely frightening and expensive prospect back then... but hey, no one has ever accused me of biting off less than I can chew, so off I went trying to figure all this internet stuff out.

Over the years I've evolved from having a lonely little website, to sharing virtual server space, to actually having my own servers at a data center. I've been running my own servers for a few years -- I even have clients whose sites I've created and also host.

So, I come into all this web stuff rather obliquely. While it wasn't what I'd originally envisioned, having my own very small hosting business has been fun, and has allowed me to experiment with open source applications for both myself and on behalf of clients. In the past I'd tried several but none really 'spoke' to me. Frankly, I thought most of the internal coding was really horrible. I mean, really UGLY stuff in some of these OS things! ACk!

Recently I decided to overhaul all my sites and determined that Drupal was the way for me to go. [ Sadly, as in the case where the mechanic's car is always broken... my own sites are in such disarray that I'm really even embarrassed to be associated with them LOL. ] Hopefully it will be "Drupal to the rescue" for me.

So, while I'm not an expert at any thing, I am very dangerous. My focus these days is in overall systems, rather than code-programming-nitty gritty and I'm very okay with calling in the experts when I find I'm in over my head.

I decided to lurk around the Drupal site for a bit, to see what's available and even who might be too. While rummaging around Drupal.org I discovered this group and really got a kick out of your posts. Thanks everyone for taking the time to share your stories. :-)

Best of luck to us all and great to meet you.

Peace,
audre

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
http://weird-art.com
hey, why be normal?

http://weird-art.com
hey, why be normal?

hello lovelies!

ohsweetie's picture

well, hello! i've been told by those computer whiz guys in my life that i didn't need to build pages in code anymore! and then they showed me drupal. and despite the sharp learning curve i'm in absolute LOVE with drupal.

right now i'm doing my first drupal project and it's bilingual (hello internationalization du suck!) and time sensitive. yikes! but the good part is that it's for a young feminist conference!! yay!

you can check out my progress here: http://drupal.rebelles.koumbit.org and hopefully soon rebelles2008.org.

nice meeting you all!
xo di.

===================================
ohsweetie crafts + consulting

academics
crafts
to do lists
stickin' it to the man

www.ohsweetie.com

===================================
ohsweetie crafts + consulting

academics
crafts
to do lists
stickin' it to the man

www.ohsweetie.com

Hi everyone!

majsan-gdo's picture

I can't believe I have missed this group before! Happy to meet you!

I am Maria Tingvall, a hobby-coder. I live in Sweden.

I have worked as an engineer (kind of electro: railroad signal systems), but after childbirth I decided to become a midwife instead - so that is where I am at now. I love computers and everything you can use it for. I have an "old" website (first published in 1997-98) which my husband made a CMS for a couple of years ago but there were so many special solutions it made it hard for me to make adjustments myself and my wishes came faster than he could help me.

So I started looking at other CMS-solutions. I liked the Idea with typo3, it is quite like my husband's solution - and as complex to get a grip of. So I looked at Joomla only to find it very simple but confusing with moules, plugins and so on. Then I found Drupal and I adore it!

What about my site, then? Well, I am still working on the Drupal-version. Been working on it since the beginning of -07. But now it is almost ready to launch. I was going through my modules one last time when I found this group.

As this only is a hobby project I am a bit worried about how to keep up with all the upgrades of all modules...

  • Maria
    Jag är inte disträ, jag har bara lite kort minne
    I am not unmindful, it's just that my memory is a bit short

Jag är inte disträ, jag har bara lite kort minne
I am not unmindful, it's just that my memory is a bit short

Grammarian's picture

Look on Drupal.org for it - it will give you an alert in your admin screen or something like that.

Jean Gazis
www.jeangazis.com
www.webhostny.com – Drupal hosting

oops - things that have new versions

Grammarian's picture

Where is that preview button when I need it?

Jean Gazis
www.jeangazis.com
www.webhostny.com – Drupal hosting

Hi!

webmamma5000-gdo's picture

I've been sending you some emails via your websites and have gotten no answer. Would you be interested in a drupalchix meetup in NYC?

which sites?

Grammarian's picture

I'd be interested, it is sometimes hard for me to get out in the evening but I'd certainly try. I go to most of the Drupal NYC group meetups. Another idea would be to have a drupalchix night out around the next NYC Drupal Camp (late summer?).

What sites email didn't get an answer? Sounds like I need to fix something! Anyway I am jgazis at gmail or jean at jeangazis.com

Jean Gazis
www.jeangazis.com
www.webhostny.com

Late summer sounds good

webmamma5000-gdo's picture

I'm a morning person myself. I think the challenge for some drupalchix is those of us with little chickadees and evening is already booked most of the time. Mornings are good for me personally. Week after Labor Day good?

I've definitely tried to reach you via both sites at http://www.jeangazis.com/contact and webhostny. Also, you have a blog, right, about camping which hasn't been updated in a while.

hello geeky gals!

mariethacker's picture

I'm so glad to have found this group!

My name is Marie Thacker, and I live in Seattle, Washingotn. I've been working in the web industry for over 12 years as a designer, web dev and art director. I recently quit the full time job to go back to freelancing, and have been focusing every minute on my new biz Sparkle*Shelf (http://sparkleshelf.com) which is built on Drupal.

All I can say is... Thank God I found Drupal! This site would have taken twice as long (if not more) to develop without Drupal, and I doubt I'd even have half the features. SparkleShelf is the first site I've built on Drupal, and after working with it intensly for 8 months, I can say I'm totally sold! I've decided to use Drupal to build client sites as well from now on (if it makes sense for the project) and scrap the previous CMS I've been using.

Anyhow, it's great to find so many other female drupal-addicts, I didn't know you were all out there! Nice to meet you all, and happy to be part of the group. :)

Marie Thacker

http://sparkleshelf.com
http://mariethacker.com

hi everyone

AliaK's picture

hi everyone, nice to meet you all. I've come in late to this group. my name is Kath and I'm living in Sydney, Australia though am originally from Brisbane & hope to move back there sometime. I've been working overseas for past 4 years or so in UK, New Zealand, India, Israel, Turkey which has been a great experience, but I'm loving being home again and closer to friends.

by profession I'm a broadcast digital tv engineer/systems integrator and have worked at various broadcasters around the world (for vendor), and for tv stations (FTA & pay-tv) in Australia in IT/engineering roles. I'm not that good a uni student though I spent a long time doing part-time courses! I did a year of Science, then an Assoc. Dip in Electrical Engineering and Bachelor of IT (though I never finished it - changed majors a couple of times then left with one subject to go and I was over it!! I was doing more interesting IT things at work/home than uni so got bored I think). now I do shorter online courses in subjects I'm interested in rather than full uni degrees, so I still love learning new things.

I'm a drupal hobbyist too. I started using drupal in 2003 or so when a friend asked me over to check out some CMS' he was trying. at the time I'd built my own php site for the arts/music projects listings & internet radio show maillists I was running for past few years - it was very basic, but was easier for me to update than checking in/out web pages on a static site all the time and it formatted the pages for me to make the newsletter easier to email. once I tried Drupal I quickly moved the site over to it as it was so much quicker than reinventing the wheel all the time on my hand coded site! I'm not really a drupal programmer though - I've modified core/contributed modules when need be, but haven't written any modules from scratch. I'm ok at reading code & working out what it's doing, but really slow at writing it from scratch.

I've introduced drupal to a few independent arts collectives who are now using it - I tend to build a prototype site for them and explain the features and how to use the site & answer questions on how drupal might help their sites/organisations etc then they go off and admin/build/maintain their own. the best part I like about Drupal is that I can build sites and not have to touch code unless I want to - which probably goes against the grain of this group. but sometimes I just want to use the site and post creative things. (I have to do technical things at work so like a break/balance sometimes at home). I think drupal is great as you have both options.

I went to the 2005 fosdem drupal session in brussels which was great, and last week & weekend I went to the sydney monthly meeting and drupal camp Australia and they were great too. I didn't realise there were so many Australians using drupal now. there were a few women there too. I've been out of the loop a bit whilst working overseas, but now I'm trying to get back into it all again. just coming up to speed with the new modules - I'm used to how drupal used to work a few years back, so drupal 5 & 6 are a little different, but I'm liking drupal 6 a lot!

cheers
kath


http://www.AliaK.com

Introduction

pearlbear@drupal.org's picture

I'm quite new to Drupal, although I've been using and talking about open source software for a very long time, and also have a long history doing web development. I took a break from it for a while, but now that I'm back, it looks like Drupal is going to be one tool that I use a lot to build websites.

I've been a long-time member of Linuxchix, and I'm glad to know this group is around.

I live on the West Coast of the US (Oakland, CA to be precise), and that too, is recent (I spent many years on the East Coast.) But I'll be at Drupalcon DC.

Just saying a quick hello

jvvw's picture

Just saying a quick hello :)

My name's Juliette Culver and I work for The Open University in the UK developing education-related websites. I've been developing in Drupal for about a year now - outside work I was involved with http://www.operationsleepercell.com/ last year which used Drupal, though didn't actually write very much of the code of that myself in the end as took over from the person originally in overall charge. The Drupal site I'm developing for work is embarrassingly down at the moment due to a hard disk failure :-(

Started programming when I was eight and my parents got a computer for the family, did mathematics and then worked as a cryptographer and then on the operating system of Cisco's flagship router, programming mostly in C. I began developing web applications with PHP about three or four years ago now and have contributed to Moodle core in the past. I recently discovered Python too which I'm falling in love with.

Oh, and I love playing board games and computer games :)

Juliette

Hi Learning Drupal

webmamma5000-gdo's picture

I love it! It is very exciting! I am the all-around-technical and art department at Women's eNews http://www.womensnews.org an online daily news service on issues of concern to women around the world. We are in the middle of a redesign due in July, launch in late August.
Nice to meet you all! I think the virtual get together is a great idea, please count me in.

Hello from Sweden

glazyr's picture

I'm new in the group since 30 minutes or so :) I live in Sweden working with Drupal since a little more than one year. I make web sites for a living and at the moment I'm starting up some Drupal training as well.

My background is as a systems developer, systems architect and project manager working in the insurance and financial industry for 10 years before I started my business in April 2008.

Patricia Erlandson

http://www.glazyr.se
http://www.drupalskolan.se

Hej

MalinG's picture

Nice to see another Swedish chick in the group.

Hälsningar Malin

Hello friends

bala11bala's picture

I am new to drupal and i am interested only in Travel and leisure and i am a member of drupal since 1 day ago.
Happy to see all members here who share their opinions.

Chennai-Coimbatore

Hey drupalchixs!

MalinG's picture

Hi everybody!

I'm new to this group and pretty new to Drupal as well. I live in Stockholm, Sweden and I have fallen head over heels for Drupal. It all started about four months ago when I got an internship at a company called NodeOne, which is one of the few companies in Sweden that specializes in Drupal. After my internship I got hired which is fantastic because i get to work with Drupal all day long.

Before Drupal my passion was basketball and I’ve played professionally in Sweden and in Spain. I have also worked in advertising and I am about to finish my degree in Interaction Design.

I want to (and will) get more involved in the community and my goal is to get more Swedish women interested in Drupal. It’s pretty lonely out there right now...

Anyway, nice to meet you all and I hope that some of you will be at Drupalcon in Copenhagen this summer.

//Malin Gernandt
NodeOne