2022 has proven to be quite the year. I did not intend to go many months between posts, but life has been very busy!
I am on the go all the time this year but here's some quick run downs of whats going on.
I attended Drupalcon, the annual conference on all things Drupal, last April. It took place in Portland, Oregon. I have been attending these conferences since 2009 and can say that this was one of the best ones I can remember.
A large part of that is because we talked to so many people every day at the booth. This was the first in-person conference since 2019 and everyone seemed very willing to engage (myself included) on any topic that we felt like. Virtual conferences got it done talk-wise, but the interaction and networking just cannot be done virtually. Everyone seemed very thrilled to just be there in person and the sentiment was magnetic.
I collected some pins that were handed out at the Acquia booth so people had a better idea of what I do when talking to me (the badges were absent of job titles or anything like that, oddly enough). Peep that sweet official "Speaker" pin too - this was my third time speaking at Drupalcon. It also dawned on me that I have been working with Drupal for 15 years now - I had to grab a 10 and a 5 to "make up" a 15 year pin!
Despite not creating a community profile initially, I have been working with Drupal since version 5. I assume I waited a year to create my account because the better part of the year was investigating if Drupal could replace an aging Coldfusion CMS I built. It did. It's been quite a ride ever since.
Since then I have done nearly 100 client and personal sites in Drupal and contributed back as much code as possible. More importantly I have been surrounded by and learned from several people in the community in that time and grew as a developer. I try to pay it forward as much as possible and help others out in their journey. I spend 15 minutes every morning on the Drupal StackExchange and anywhere in the Drupal Slack that I can. Despite all these years in, I am still learning from people every single day. I am no powerhouse core committer, but I am still proud of things accomplished. There is still so much more I want to do.
At Velir we recently completed work on 5 new modules for Drupal 9 & 10 as a part of a few client projects we are finishing up. I will be posting about them on that blog throughout this year.