Drupal contributions

While still a slightly slow month, September saw a slight increase in our contribution efforts over August.

Client sponsored

We were very pleased to have several clients look to make improvements in modules their sites use:

With many members of staff on vacation for part of the month, and with some projects under crunch to finish off, August was a little light for contributions. That said, I think we made some good progress for the work we did do.

Client sponsored work

Some limited but good work was sponsored this month by some of our clients:

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As with most other Drupal development studios, our May was dominated by DrupalCon. For the first week we were doing final preparations - making sure everything was ready for our booth, adding the final polish to our presentations, and packing for the trip. Needless to say, it was an excellent week from many perspectives, and we look forward to DrupalCon being in New Orleans next year.

The fourth month of the year brought reminders that Winter can show up at unexpected times, with snow flurries during the early parts of the month. It also reminded us that we can only juggle so much. With many of us involved in organizing regional events and preparing for Drupalcon, our code contributions waned for a second month, down to a rather low 20 hours.

Another month, another swath of work to improve our favorite content management system.

The Usual (Contrib) Suspects

Once again some of our main achievements during March was on client-sponsored work, most notably:

Our second month of having the contrib committee in place was a little slower in some ways than January. By the numbers, we put in just over 110 hours of non-billable time on contrib projects. There were many reasons for the drop in hours from January – several team members were putting their non-billable time into learning Drupal 8, the lack of a code sprint, and planning began on a number of camps for 2015. Also, remember that this is non-billable work – billable contrib work continues to be a priority for Mediacurrent and our clients.

After Mediacurrent's excellent retreat in October 2014 it was decided to set up some internal committees to help organize various company initiatives. Several of these committees were fairly straight forward - marketing, training, porting our corporate site to D8, etc, but I felt that one had been overlooked - a committee for organizing our contrib efforts.

One of the most outstanding things I noticed upon visiting Germany was how friendly and courteous everyone was. I know that I may have been just seeing the best side of people because I was usually giving them my money, but it was prevalent amongst even those who were not selling me something. Sarcasm seemed mostly non-existent, as everyone tried to communicate clearly and mean what they say. Plenty of "bitte" and "danke" no matter where I went.

Guten Tag

In less than one week I will be boarding a flight to Germany to attend DrupalCon Munich (August 21-24). This will be my third time attending DrupalCon, but it will also be my first European DrupalCon. My original plans to attend DrupalCon Colorado hadn’t panned out, so I made it a priority to make it to Munich. The locale is extra exciting to me because I’m of German descent. I’ve never been to Germany before, so my wife and I have planned an extra week of vacation immediately following the conference. We’ll be visiting Füssen to see the Neuschwanstein Castle, and then to Heidelberg for the remainder of the week. I’m quite excited about the vacation, but the conference itself has plenty of things to be excited for.