This month, a few of the Lullabots (myself included) have been working on one of our rare development projects. Most of our work is training, architecture, and workshop oriented stuff, but every once in a while a client that we've been working with has a last-minute need for some ninjas and we put our heads together for some custom coding work.

While short, it was definitely an interesting project and one that I think might be a first for Drupal. When the site goes live I'll have to point it out; the Treehouse Agency team is doing some great theming work for the site, and I'm curious to see how it all turns out. We built the site in phases, and created a set of custom module-managed tpl.php files for them to customize. It's the first project that's involved a hand-off like that, and Drupal 6's templating made it quite a bit easier. I'm looking forward to kicking around ideas with them about how that transition can be smoothed even more.

James and Addi and I hustled out to Penn State last week to give a cool group of educators the Drupal intensive boot camp. CCK, Views, theming... they ate it up and we were really impressed with how much they absorbed in a short stretch of time. On the downside, Addi was hit with the flu and James and I ended up stranded by flight delays... but we're safe and sound now, so all is (pretty) well.

And now? The holidays are sneaking up on us all, and Catherine and I celebrated preemptively with a nice dinner dinner and... well... An X-Box 360. We've been eying one for a while, and the sudden appearance of Fallout 3 was the tipping point. She's got Assassin's Creed and I'm making my way through the post-apocalyptic wastelands with my trusty Pip-Boy 3000... I don't think I will ever go through the hassle of building a gaming PC again. Having things just work is awesome.

The next few months are looking pretty busy in terms of travel and teaching and presenting. A quick rundown of the schedule, with some tentative dates:

• October 25th: DrupalCamp Chicago
  While DrupalCamp schedules stay fuzzy until the morning of the event, it looks like I'll be doing two sessions. Views 2 gets some love (naturally), and I'll also be doing Soup to Structure, a session on turning Drupal's normally fluid content model into a coherent site structure.
• December 10th-12th: Do It With Drupal
  James Walker and I will be presenting "How We Built Twitter in Drupal," a session on grafting social messaging features onto Drupal, and how to leverage them effectively. It should be fun, especially since I've used "Don't build Twitter in Drupal" as a catchphrase for quite a while...
• March 4th-7th: DrupalCon '09
  The final session lineup is still being ironed out, but I've pitched two sessions for the next DrupalCon. Building APIs That Rock is looking like the front-runner so far, and I think it'll be an interesting session. Plus, puppets.
• March 13th-17th: SXSW Interactive '09
  Final sessions haven't been announced for SXS yet, but depending on how things go I'll either be participating in one of the CMS-related panel discussions, or moderating Drupal With Its Pants Off. The idea is to hold a No-BS™ panel discussion about building mission-critical Drupal sites, helping evaluators spot the pitfalls and take advantage of the easy wins.

I'm terrible about updating, aren't I? OSCMS went really well, though I came back with a lingering ugly cold/flu thing that's had me at 75% performance for a while. I finally feel like I've kicked it -- hooray!

This week I'm in Providence, RI again with the Lullabot crew, teaching a Drupal API workshop. It's been a blast so far, and the 20 or so people attending are really sharp. We've gone through a pile of core APIs, development best practices, FormAPI internals, security issues, and so on. Today we're going to be learning about hooking up with APIs like Views, CCK, Actions, and so on. Good times, good times!

I miss my Catherine, though -- she's back home writing and planning crazy garden plans and watching British mysteries, and I can't wait to get back. Yay!

Observations about New York:

• Pedestrians are aggressive, and cars stop for them. Street traffic and foot traffic seem to exist in a homogenized mix here, with traffic lights only indicating where the heaviest flow is currently going. It's fascinating.
• Chicago may have the best deep dish in the world, but I think we should be willing to conceded the Thin Crust Crown. Holy cow is the pizza here good.
• A nontrivial percentage of the population actually does dress like they're auditioning for Sex And The City. I tripped over more twiggy, heavy-lidded makeup models with gigantic furry hats on one subway ride than I thought actually existed in the wild. Is LA like this? I hear about this fierce LA/New York rivalry, but I'm a simple Midwestern boy. We're too busy herding our cows and chewing straw to pay too much attention.
• Soho is cool, and I like the shops there. If the traffic weren't o heavy and the weather weren't so bitterly cold, it'd be fun to just spend a day or two poking around and browsing and eating at vegetarian pasta cafes, etc.
• I managed to swing by Purl, an awesome little textiles/crafts/knitting suply shop, and pick up some fun stuff for Catherine. (Shhhhh. Don't tell her, it's a surprise.) The store is awesome, but also dazzlingly packed with yawns and fabric and needles and so on. Like, thousands of patterns. Jillions even. I felt dizzy.
• The Apple Store is three blocks from my hotel room. It is a shrine to geekiness. Naturally, I used a digital camera to record a movie of it.

So. All in all, New York is cool. If I ever come back I think I'll have to bring the Canon; I don't think I could live with myself if I didn't get some high quality shots of the assorted bits of city life. But I'm ready to scamper back home now, and watch movies and play cribbage and be with Catherine. My everyday life is good, and I'm eager to get back to it.

So, Ted and I are here in New York for work, doing a week of meetings with a client to nail down specs for a project that's been moving along for a while but is approaching the final stretch. It's funny that now is when we have a meeting like this, but the project has been on track up to this point. The biggest problem is that the folks we're working with are facing 'catastrophic success' -- all the other business units in their company now want them to roll out sites that duplicate what we've done on a limited scale. And, of course, it has to be done yesterday...

So, between rounds of meetings we're enjoying good New York eatin' -- deli sandwiches the size of my head, amazing thin-crust pizza to die for, things like that. The Apple Store is an amazing temple of geekiness, too. Tomorrow I'm going to try to wander over and get some photos of it, maybe a Quicktime clip. Am I a geek? Yes. I am a geek.

When I get home, Catherine and I are totally going to go see Children of men. Awwww yeah.

The Lullabot workshops continue! On Tuesday, Angie and I finished up the teaching on Drupal Basics. We led a class full of 25 (relative) Drupal newbies through the process of building new content types with CCK, organizing them with custom views, and assembling them into various combinations of pages with the Panels module. There are other ways to do the same stuff in Drupal, naturally, but we explained that this was a way to do it without writing any custom code. Without exception, everyone was blown away by the rapid prototyping capabilities and the flexibility of Drupal's core system. It was a blast.

Today, while Ted and Nate teach the second half of the theming workshop, Angie and (perhaps!) Robert and I would like to kick back and get to rolling some of the initial patches to core that we'd like to see go in now that Drupal 5 is released and development on the next version has started.

And finally, I sorely miss Catherine. Thank goodness for cell phones. :-)

Things have been pretty quiet on the blog front lately, save the frequent Drupal related geekery. Flowcharts of the Forms API are definitely useful, but probably don't really qualify as serious blogging.

I've been pretty busy over the past month or so, and one of the big reasons is that I've left my job as a .Net developer, and have joined the Lullabot Collective!

Over the past two years or so, I've gone from a curious CMS-shopper to a Drupal newb to a die-hard convert to a hacker to a contributor. I've been messing with CMS stuff for years (As Matt Westgate of Lullabot said in one of our early conversations, every developer writes a homebrew web CMS at some point in their lives), and Drupal pressed all the right buttons. I've become a part of the community and I can say that it's a genuine pleasure to work with the code and the people.

Lullabot embodies a lot of the values I find great about the Drupal community. The assorted 'bots want to build great stuff in Drupal, and teach others how to do the same. It's all about teaching people to fish. Today was my first day working full time with Lullabot after a variety of freelance projects and other interaction. They have a really amazing team of dedicated and knowledgable developers and it's a blast being on board.

The flip side, of course, is that the awesome opportunity to pursue something I'm passionate about also means leaving behind the company I spent the last three years with. Leaving was uneventful -- there were already some changes underway as my old employer started bringing new people on, and they had plenty of advanced warning to plan for my departure.

It was a small shop in a profitable niche market, though, and the development team was close knit. While it'll be fine logistically, I'll miss the guys. Heck, one of my best friends, Jeff Benson, shared an office with me. The convenience and flexibility of working from home is great, but I don't want it to mean that I fall out of touch with a great friend. On Friday (my last day), all of us wandered over to Rock Bottom and spent a few hours reminiscing, having a few drinks, and jokingly apologizing for all of the ugly hacks we had to foist on each other at times.

So. New, exciting beginnings and cool new opportunities to build great CMS software. Cool people (Hello, Lullabots!) and cool projects! And, this Wednesday, lunch with a buddy I no longer share an office with. Life's full of changes, and it's an exciting time to be a code monkey.