Introductions

Thanks for posting this, Jausan! I'm Christefano, one of the Larks and the CEO at Exaltation of Larks, a design and engineering firm with a large team of Drupaleros in Southern California (mostly in Los Angeles); and I'm one of the founders of Droplabs, a coworking space and business incubator that's also the top Drupal location in the world (according to Drupical).

A few side projects I've been developing over the past couple years include Antimatter Drive, a talent representation service where I've placed awesome Drupal and WordPress devs — at no charge to them — at companies like Disney and Riot Games; and Solar Ignition, a startup accelerator program that came out of all the open source values, community goals, product development consulting and startup mentoring we've had going at Droplabs for the past 3-4 years now.

I'm also a CTO-for-hire and Friday5, a for-good startup where I was the Director of Technology and acting CTO, was acquired by Sports Spectacular in 2014 (for an undisclosed amount, sorry!). There's a case study on Drupal.org from earlier that year about how Friday5 uses Drupal.

I've been using Drupal for about… well, forever. I'm a Drupal core contributor, a contrib module maintainer, a member of the documentation team, have helped run DrupalCamps, organized multiple Drupal job fairs in Los Angeles, have presented at DrupalCons, and was a webmaster for Drupal.org and Drupal Groups for several years. I've done a lot in the Drupal world and have an interest in anything that helps build community and empowers people to be at their best, be lifelong learners, teach others what they know, and develop public speaking and leadership skills along the way.

After I slowly realized that the LA Drupal user group was having growing pains and resource constraints that made it difficult to serve members outside of its usual circles, in 2011 I helped start what is now Greater Los Angeles Drupal (GLAD), which is a super active Drupal user group that often has between 5-10 events a month, including free meetups and workshops, paid trainings, job fairs, mentoring sessions with Drupal experts, and social events like Worldwide Drupal Happy Hour. One of our best resources is our business directory of organizations, businesses, freelancers and customers using Drupal in the Greater Los Angeles Area.

My eventual hope for Greater Los Angeles Drupal is that it merges back with LA Drupal, and that LA Drupal empowers more area organizers and expands its mission to include all the cities the Greater Los Angeles Area.

Due to the roles I have at all the various places where I work, the one thing they all have in common is that I'm focused on proven and stable technologies and happily ignore tools and frameworks that are trendy but untested. That means that for the time being, I'm not very interested in Drupal 8 and I'll wait 6 months to a year after Drupal 8 is released before seriously considering it for any critical projects, both current and future.

The next big thing I'm working on is a DrupalCamp on a cruise ship. Follow @DrupalCruise for news about it!