One of the things that was exciting to see last week at Drupalcon in Boston was the amount of New Hampshire based folks who are involved with Drupal. I know Seth and I briefly discussed the possibility of trying to get the ball rolling to do some meetups, so I figured I'd step in and see if I couldn't start up some introductions because I know I'd love to see what other Granite Staters are doing with Drupal!
So, who are you? Where are you from? What do you with Drupal? How did you get started with Drupal? What's your background? What areas of the state would you be willing to travel to for meetups?
I guess I'll start it off....
I'm Nikki Henninger, I live in Manchester, NH, I work as a themer for Advomatic, and occasionally do some lightweight development, and I'm making a resolution to get involved with the documentation of Drupal this year.
I got my starts in web design/development as a middle schooler (late 90s) wanting to publish bad poetry and stories online. It started out with static html sites, and over time evolved into blogging, I used b2/cafelog and then switched to WordPress when the project forked that direction. I went to college at NHTI for general studies and Computer Engineering Technology, neither of which were particularly web related per se.... but there were certainly things I learned, particularly from the CPET program that have been useful.
I got my start professionally with web development and with Drupal when the Concord Monitor launched blogsNH.com. I was interested in blogging (hmm... I haven't done that in awhile, I probably should) and in the process asked a bunch of technically nosy questions on what platform they were going to run the project on and somehow ended up getting hired on a temporary basis to help with some theming and configuration post-launch.
While I was working on blogsNH and looking for Drupal guidence, I reconnected with Morbus Iff (you'll never see him, but you'll hear of) whom I'd previously met elsewhere on IRC and remembered because he lives in the state. After I was finished with blogsNH, I took a few months off to do some things like get married, and when I started looking for jobs again, I complained on my blog and the next morning, Morbus had sent me an email pointing out that his employer was hiring and even though I wasn't a Drupal expert by any means, I was at least familiar with what nodes and taxonomy were and that's better than nothing! I worked there for about six months, then moved on to Advomatic where I work at home and make sites look pretty!
Comments
Thanks, Nikki!
Indeed, and funny enough, just today, I forwarded a link to the new DrupalChix thread (where you'd posted) to one of my female co-workers so she could see she isn't alone as a DrupalChick, who upon seeing your post, proclaimed loudly "Hey, she's in Manchester!", and that reminded me that we need to start planning a get together in NH, if not a regular meetup.
During Drupalcon, I met folks from Portsmouth, Nashua, Concord, and more... and I know people from Keene, UNH, and elsewhere attended but didn't get a chance to put names to faces. Everyone was universally in favor of having a NH based event... Which we might even attract some non-NH people to if it's worth the trip.
Something in early April maybe? Maybe eventually a DrupalCamp... but for a first meeting, let's just make it a good topic that everyone will want to attend... Ideas? Not too techy, and yet with some meat...
As for myself: I live in the Concord-ish area, and have worked professionally with Drupal for more than 3 years now... I'm currently with Commonplaces, as a Drupal software engineer, and it's a great place with a great bunch of folks...
Good Morning!
I'm still fairly new to Drupal, only being introduced to it by Seth last year. Before that I was a Windows C++ programmer for about a dozen years. Nowadays I'm trying to earn money by putting together sites that will earn me revenue, as well as some small jobs for small customers. I'm also doing some volunteer work for some good folks.
Living in Deerfield, I find working at home the only way to go. My cable Internet connection is much more reliable than my driveway :-)
I'd be interested to know how others organize their development work. Does anyone use any of the task modules for keeping track of website development? How do you keep track of logins and passwords for client sites? Do you measure progress, and if so, how? How do you bill and invoice?
Ron Helwig
In the company I work for,
In the company I work for, we use Basecamp for our project management and client communication because it provides a centralized space to put information so everyone in the company can get the information they need to get their work done. Basecamp seems to be a fairly common tool of choice, but it tends to have a lot of drawbacks to it too... There are tools that would be really useful to have, like being able to assign tasks time estimates, that Basecamp just doesn't have. In the company I work for, there's talk of developing our own project management tools using Drupal as a base to replace Basecamp for us, but it's one of those things that comes down to a time and resources thing.
Where I work, the overwhelming concencous is that the best thing to do is to look at a project as a list of tasks. Give the tasks time estimates and dollar amounts for yourself and the client. Keep a running tally of what's been done and how much it's going to cost. When the client changes his/her mind about something, it gets added onto the project as a new task with a time estimate and a dollar amount so the client can decide right then if it's worth the money to change that font in that one spot. When you don't keep on top of little things like fifty million font changes, that's where things start going downhill.... Suddenly you'll find yourself over budget with an unhappy client who doesn't want to pay.