Austin Drupal

I first met Tim Hamilton, the CEO of Astonish Designs at one of the GeekAustin lunches earlier this year. Tim told me about a tool his company made for the city of Houston, called the E-catalog. The tool provided a public website that anyone could use to access the spending activity of the City of Houston. Due to the growing interest there has been in creating greater government transparency, especially in areas of government finance, this project piqued my interest.

Following the discussions at the In Code We Trust panel at this year's SXSWi, I made arrangements to meet Tim for an interview, to get the whole story.

I transcribed this as the conversation started, so the conversation picks up early -- we had been discussing Drupal (I had just had lunch with Lynn, who spent most of SXSWi in Drupal-related meetings) and this is how we began discussing the E-catalog project...

Recently, a friend of mine got a quote to re-do his website. It was over $5000. Upon reviewing the statement of work, I realized that the site was going to be built in Drupal, and all of the 'customizations' were relatively minor changes that could be done in less than an hour.

When I told my friend this, he was reluctant to believe. So I told him to pick a time, we'd get together and I'd build his site for him -- everything except for the theme.

The first Austin Drupal Dojo at Mangia

The Drupal Camp Austin videos are up at Vimeo. If you missed the presentations, here's your chance to catch them.

Because this is the week of the Austin Drupal Meetup, the weekly Austin Drupal Dojo will not be held this week.

For this month's Drupal Meetup topic, Jerad Bitner, co-founder of Rapid Waters Development will be discussing some of the tools used in rapid and large-scale Drupal deployments - specifically, Devel and Backup and Migrate. Jerad will be taking this information from his planned DrupalconSF presentation, where he will focus showcasing "local environment, development environment, moving data between the two, talk about keeping object such as Panels and Views in code, basic installation profiles, and other best practices."
The meeting is Wednesday the 17th, 7PM at Mangia. For more details, see the meetup page. Hope you can make it.

Despite the overall job situation nowadays, for a Drupal developer/designer, things look pretty good. There are way more drupal jobs and contracts than the local talent can fill. Way more.

For quite some time, I've been discussing with the other folks in the Austin Drupal community how to bring more beginners up to speed, and how to help the intermediate level folks become drupal ninjas.

While there are a tremendous amount of resources for those wanting to learn Drupal, it's important to connect and share experiences with other drupalfolk. Previously, the only regular opportunities for Drupalistas to meet up have been the monthly meetups.

This last week, myself and a few others in the community, launched the Austin Drupal Dojo. Call it a hack night or whatever, this is a weekly opportunity to get together with other folks in the Austin Drupal community. No agenda. No speakers. Bring your problems, bring your solutions, bring your laptop.

The word Dojo (道場) captures what we're trying to create -- a place to practice and master one's art. Thing of it as a place to become a Drupal blackbelt, a Drupal Ninja.

I should say that we're not the first in town to do this. Matt Buck launched the Ruby Dojo last November, and there has been a virtual Drupal Dojo at groups.drupal.org for quite some time. Although he doesn't use the word "dojo", Jim Hillhouse has been hosting the weekly Cocoa Coder meetings Conjunctured for over a year now.

If you're looking to ramp your skills up quickly, meeting weekly makes a difference.

Our first meeting last week at Mangia was a great success. So much so that we've reserved dates for the next 8 weeks. Tentatively, the dojo will be held at either Mangia (Spicewood and Mesa) or Triumph Cafe. Both venues are centrally located near Spicewood/Anderson and Mopac.

Here are the tentative dates for the upcoming dojos: