CivicActions

I’ve worked in Drupal for almost a year. The mysteries of FAPI (Forms API) and theming have unraveled. I’ve written ten contributed modules. I submitted dozens of issues and patches to Drupal, even few for Drupal core. And I just attended my first community Drupal event – Open Source Content Management Systems (OSCMS) hosted by Yahoo.

I’ve been programming since I was 12. I graduated from Cornell Engineering ‘86, with a Computer Science degree. I spent most of my career as a C/C++ programmer, the first eight years in Unix and next 12 in Windows, with some forays back and forth or on both. I had my own dot.com boom and bust. I developed (or helped develop) two proprietary 4GL languages, two ecommerce platforms, a CMS before anybody knew what one was (mine was called Frameworks), and an incredibly fast web robot (Inspector Web) that is still listed in the Internet Robots database, but hasn’t crawled anything in over ten years. Most what I’ve done over the last twenty years is propriety and is no longer in use.

So I find myself at "Open Source Content Management Systems (OSCMS)" hosted by Yahoo. I gotta give that Yahoo plug – they were great hosts, free conference space, breakfast, lunch, drinks and snacks – even if the legal department non-disclosure was rather Draconian.

I’m a fan of Open Source. I write new code for two reasons: either because I have an itch to do something or because someone's paying me to get something done. Invariably, within hours of releasing any new module, I receive an email from someone, who lives on the other side of the world, and whom has looked at my code -- either loves it or has found some little problem. I "open source" code I write and in return I get peer review and Quality Assurance testers -– my code gets better, my clients get a better product, the world gets a new widget -- everyone wins and it’s all free!

I love Content Management Systems. Back in the late 90’s I was a part owner in an Internet store. It was a wild time. In March we sold $50k of computer parts, in April we sold $75k and by August we sold $600k in the first 20 days before we went bust. My partner was constantly asking me to change this page or that to say something other than what it said. It was a royal pain and not a good use of time. The pricing model needed work, I was working on the inventory system, the daily price updates took a lot of CPU... So when I was asked to develop my next store, I did something novel, I added links to the top and bottom of every page. An administrative user could click on the links, edit the text which were stored it in the database and then displayed as part of the page. It was that simple, but it was a CMS, before we even knew what a CMS was. (I called my CMS Frameworks.) I remember demo'ing it to another developer friend and how cool we both thought it was!

Last Thursday I attended day one of OSCMS. I was impressed with the Performance and Security talk given by Rasmus Lerdorf (the founder of the php project). If you were ever afraid of using the Internet, you should be. Rasmus showed the dangers of XSS on several live sites -- this reinforced my desire to improve the coder security review. I attended most of the more technical sessions. I even presented some of my work on using views in searches in a session with Robert Douglass. Those of us staying at the Sheraton Hotel meet afterwards and finally organized about thirty or forty people for dinner.

On Friday I gave a brief Lightning Talk on the coder module, attended a few more technical sessions. Steven Wittens demonstration of CSS, jQuery, and Firebug was really cool. There was a podcast session and we all sang the Drupal song. This night the entire conference organized going to dinner, this time with maybe sixty.

At CivicActions we use the word "teaminess" to describe the relationships we build amongst ourselves. We’re a virtual company with strong bonds to each other, mostly because of shared values and a shared drive to do good. I’ve been with CivicActions for about nine months. I attended the Amsterdam retreat in September, the Engineering Code Sprint in Florida (actually a mile from my house on Amelia Island) in December, and then this trip. So in nine months, I’ve spent about three weeks with my fellow team members. It’s really during this facetime that we build "teaminess" at CivicActions. And we really do have strong bonds.

This week I experienced some of this same "teaminess" in the larger Drupal community. I’ve been a relatively big contributor to Drupal in the short time I’ve been with the project. I receive the occasional email that says "thanks for the great module," but mostly my contribution has been in a void. This week I meet people and they meet me. I discovered that people already knew me by name and reputation, that everyone was approachable and really nice, and that I was a peer in the community. I put a face and personality to the people I deal with and who deal with me on a regular basis. This week I helped build relationships, and that is what "teaminess" really is.

On Saturday I attended the Performance and Scalability Seminar. I mainly went because Dries was one of the presenters, but I’m very glad I got to here everyone talk. I took extensive notes. This was a for-fee seminar, but almost everyone who came into town for OSCMS also attended the seminar. The proceeds went to the Drupal Foundation (so if you get anything from my notes, consider making a donation to the Drupal Foundation).

On Sunday, I attended hackfest. I started the day working on one of my contrib. modules, but heard Karoly Negyesi (easier pronounced Charley) say "I ‘av plun-tee of core vork, if you need vork pleaz see me" (Hungarian accent exaggerated). I can work on my stuff anytime, so I put my stuff aside and offered my services. First, Charley didn’t know who I was, and I got a bit of a questioning on what I’ve done, mostly so he could access my skill and how I could help. Then the “Ohhhh!! you’re douggreen!!!” It felt good. I spent the rest of the day reviewing the new language subsystem patch for Drupal 6. I’m not sure that I did such a great job at it, but I found and fixed a few problems and received a little credit for a core contrib (others deserve a hundred times more).

I’ve left out the time I spent with CivicActions folks. I spent four nights at Fens. I co-worked with Jenn the first couple days and one with Karyn. I spent a little time with Dan, got to see Gregory and Aaron, and meet Jacob.

It was a great trip! I learned a lot, I shared a little, there was "teaminess" and community. That’s what Open Source is really about and that’s what CivicActions is really about too!