Drupal

Before we get started, here's some new LCD Soundsystem for your listening enjoyment... (Awesome, SteveK, your tip about just shrinking the height on the YouTube player works!!!)

Much of my thoughts go like an agile retrospective these days... project management is permeating my thinking patterns.

Good

• I made it to DrupalCon San Francisco, and despite being sick and going late, had a great time, and rested lots so I got better and not sicker while I was there.
• Over the flu. After shaking the death cough, my lungs actually feeling better than they have in over a year and a half. My voice is back which makes me very happy, except my high singing range, but I'm sure that will return with a little more time.
• Work is busy. I feel like I am being effective, and like my hard work over the last year and a half is paying off making things run smoothly, having everyone feel self-actualized, having happy clients, and getting to do the kind of work we enjoy.
• I feel more appreciated and at peace in various aspects of my life than I have in a long time. (Ever?)
• Eating lots of good food; I have gained back about 2.5 of the 8.5 pounds I lost since February. Might not seem like much but I was worried it would be even harder to gain anything back.
• Got a crapload of blood tests done last weekend, and they all came back normal. I was getting lots of bruising, but I can safely assume now that it is just from being a bit malnutritioned, and that some steady Vit C intake will fix me up.
• Also, I went back to the old walk-in clinic I used to go to before I started hunting for a GP...Holy I forgot how much better a couple of the docs there are. 
• I've mostly been sleeping a lot better lately, and sleeping/waking earlier than is normal for me. It's felt very odd, but in a good way. I doubt it will last much longer, but it's been nice.
• I have been feeling more relaxed in general. I like this. I'm pretty sure the people around me like it too.
• I have more spoons lately.
• I've been doing a better job at keeping a balance, taking care of myself, asking for help, not being mad at myself for not feeling well.
• Oh, and my Drupal Voices podcast that was recorded at the conference was posted this week!

Bad

• My stomach is still generally feeling awful, more awful than normal, as has been the case since last summer. (Luckily looks like I'm gonna get a referral to a new, hopefully more helpful, GI doc when walk-in doc is back from vacation.)
• My apartment is getting more construction. It makes me crazy. I am househunting. I don't find moving fun.
• My back and neck have been fucking killing me lately. Too much computer and sickness, not enough yoga and off-computer time.
• I ate moldy soy yogurt today. No biggie, just gross.
• I don't have much Drupal Docs mojo right now.
• I really, really miss several beloved friends who are not here.
• Not sure if this is really a "bad" but I'm not sure going to DrupalCon Copenhagen is really going to be the best thing for me right now.

Do differently next time

• Get annual flu shot. It's just not worth getting the flu (I've had it 4 times in 3 years since moving downtown!)
• Not stand for useless and/or rude doctors.
• Not eat suspicious soy yogurt. (I have made this mistake more than once now.)
• Do more yoga! Do more yoga! Do more yoga! When will I learn?

What's that? Oh yes, that is the smell of sweet, sweet VICTORY!!! 

And just like that it's over. It's a small miracle that I actually made it to San Francisco for DrupalCon SF.  As I mentioned before, I caught the flu just over a week and a half before I was supposed to leave for the conference, and was SOOOOO sick. I got a fever, then the worst cough I think I've had since I was a kid.  My mom saved my ass and came out and stayed with me for a week, I hardly left my bed the entire time. She went back to Saskatoon about three days before I was supposed to leave for SF, but I was still pretty sick, and was about 5 days into a week of having lost my voice. Making the con did NOT look promising.

I had to get Ben (thank you again!) to help me change my plane ticket via a crazy Skype conference call (because I couldn't speak), and pushed it to Sunday, hoping that might give me enough time to recoup some energy. Going down Sunday meant missing my day and a half of tourist time, the Core Dev Summit, and the pre-con sprint day. But there was no way I was going anywhere Thursday, so I just had to come to grips with the situation.

Friday I still felt like crap. Saturday, I felt only marginally less crappy, but went out for a walk to test my stamina for possible airport-going the next day. The walk went okay, so I packed. I still wasn't at all sure going to bed Saturday whether I would feel well enough in the morning to go, but Sunday I woke up, didn't feel too terrible, and decided to go for it.

I went to the airport, and found Olly and Ben, who were on the same flight, and off we went!

The house I'd rented (photo c/o SteveK) for a big group of us was FANTASTIC. It was one level of one of those huge old SF houses, up near Alamo Square, and coincidentally the level above us had another group of DrupalCon-goers, including the lovely Katherine (ksenzee). It was a nice bonus sitting on the stoop having a chat the first night there. Over the course of the week, 9 PNW folks stayed at the house off and on, and it was lovely having such a nice home to settle into.

The place worked out great - big kitchen, lots of space, nice neighbourhood - and was conducive to lots of hang out time with everyone. I'm so glad that everyone who managed to stay with us did, as it was great getting some quality time in with some of my favourite geeks who I never get to see enough of. (This is half of the crew at the end of the week - for sure the funniest photo, tho Andy's kinda blocked, click through to see a few more.)

I managed to actually make it to about 3-5hrs of conference each day, which I think is pretty great, all things considered, but generally was way more low key than previous DrupalCons and crashed late afternoon, having to come back to the house for a nap. I didn't get out at all in the evenings to the code lounge, or any of the socials, but had a good time chilling out at the house, and made it to all the keynotes, a few BOF's (birds of a feather sessions, ie. smaller sessions for various niche topics), and a bit of the final Docs sprint. The Drupalchix BOF had an amazing turn out (we counted over a hundred attendees!), and it was great to meet a bunch more of the people I had yet to meet in person.

And of course, what really makes DrupalCon so important to me is getting to reconnect and spent a little quality time with all the awesome friends I've made who are scattered all over the globe (though sadly a few of them were victim of the ash situation over Europe and didn't make it). From the the PNW crew to friends from out East, to others from Europe who I only really see once a year, I can't even explain how much I love you people. You bring me a world of happy, and I feel so incredibly lucky to have found myself part of such a wonderful community and now also call many of you friends.

I arrived home today feeling much better than when I left, and realistically no more worn out than I've been at the end of previous DrupalCons! I still have a bit of residual sick, and certainly have a bit more recouperating to do, but things went as well as I could have possibly  hoped. I am sooooooooo glad I made it.

I want to say a special thank-you to everyone who sent me good vibes, cheered me on, gave me lots of hugs, and had my back making this trip under less than ideal circumstances. All of your offers to help me out if things didn't go well, bring me groceries when I was tired, and generally keep tabs on how I was doing, were what gave me enough peace of mind to take a bit of a risk and travel when I was still in a bit of a sketchy state.

Till next time...

This one's all Drupal folks, cause that's pretty much all I've done for the last two and a half weeks. This is what happened when I asked the question, "Is there some reason we don't just fix it all?" I did not know then what I was getting myself into...

A small inconsistency

It all started in late summer, when I was testing some Drupal 7 core patches for moving fields and image handling into core, and at some point clicked my way into the Help pages. There was a blatant typo on the Node module help, and then a change in language that needed to be made, so on August 1st, 2009 I created an issue for it.

Then someone posted a patch to update the text. And Emma Jane Hogbin posted another...and then she and I started talking on IRC about how it would be much better to have some more clear formatting that could be applied across the board, fans of consistency that we are.  And we went back and forth for a while making little improvements. Thanks to having learned how to apply and create patches several months back, I had just enough experience to make changes and roll new patches.

The patch was marked RTBC (reviewed and tested by the community). Yay! But wait... then Angie, who is the Drupal 7 core maintainer saw the issue (as she is the one who does final reviews of issues marked RTBC before they are committed to the core codebase). And she was like WHOA, this is a major change! A good change, but a major one, which would need to be applied across the board to all the core modules (and eventually all the contributed modules). She also made us aware that if we wanted to make such an overarching change that we would need to be able to prove a higher level of discussion and consensus on the issue and then complete the change in time for the string freeze deadline.

A much bigger task at hand

Various documentation team members went back and for for a while about whether the new standard would be supported, and kept updating the patch getting closer and closer to a format we were happy with. By now it was the end of October, and the patch was finally set back to RTBC. This is when it popped back up on Angie's radar, who was like (paraphrasing)... "So, you guys haven't really addressed the question of whether you are going to make a massive across the board change here." Oh, right, that.

A new patch was created that reverted the format updates, and just updated the text to match Drupal 7 functionality. There was nothing wrong with this patch, and it could have just been applied and nothing else said about it.

But I didn't feel right about it... So I thought to myself, is there an actual reason that we are not making this massive change? It's not exactly challenging, it's just a lot of grunt work. And at the end of it, we would have some much more helpful and readable help references for the core modules in Drupal 7 rather than the difficult to read and horribly out of date information that was currently on the help pages.

Accepting the challenge

I posted back on the issue and asked this very question, and said that I thought it was really important to improve the help. Jennifer Hodgdon, who was another initial supporter, started a thread on the Documentation team mailing list, and it turned out that people agreed on one thing: the help text sucked and we ought to fix it. Happy birthday to me, on November 13th, 18 days before the Drupal 7 string freeze deadline, we made the final decision to overhaul the help pages, and Jennifer posted the template for the change.

Since Jennifer is a more experienced member of the Documentation team, as well as a much more advanced programmer than me, she got us off on the right foot and lead the charge for the first half, with the agreement that when she was going to be away for most of the homestretch I would take over and steer the ship. We'd been working well together and I felt like I was competent enough (and had enough other support available) to take on this responsibility.

The standard was signed off on, and on November 20th (ten days to the deadline), a list of modules was posted so people could start signing up for which updates they would take on. And then the real work began. And oh my...was there a lot of it.

Nose to the grindstone

I had no idea starting this out how much there really was to do. I was only thinking about the template change. But there was also a major need to update the content of the text, and those changes had to be reviewed and tweaked, and reviewed and tweaked some more. And then some more... I learned more about Drupal, the contribution workflow, and writing docs in PHP in that week and a half, than probably in the previous six months. Slowly but surely, myself and the others who were helping out got into a groove, and started cranking out some great updated help text patches. I got a couple of hours of "fun hour" at work to work away at this, but otherwise it was all afterhours; it basically devoured my free-time for almost two weeks.

Maybe it was the timing with American Thanksgiving, or having Jennifer away (thank goodness she was back for about a day and a half before the deadline!), but we definitely lost some momentum after the first five or six days. Feeling a certain level of responsibility, I basically crammed like a crazyperson most evenings and all through the final weekend, reviewing and updating patches. Thankfully a couple other dedicated people stuck with it, tag teaming on patches and reviews. Yes, I totally burnt myself out, but with the help of those great people who stuck it out, we miraculously got all of the patches for the 39 help texts done (44 if you count the Field submodules), updated to Drupal 7 content-wise, reviewed until within an inch of their lives, and marked RTBC (many of them already committed) by the December 1st, 2009 deadline.

The result?

Here is an example of the old help text for the node module:

And here is the updated version:

It might not look like much, but particularly for new site admins, and even more so with some of the more complicated modules, this is going to provide a truly useful resource (rather than a slightly confusing bunch of text that mainly just forces people to click through to the handbook). It was one of those highly neglected and unloved parts of Drupal, and it makes me extremely happy that is got a little much-needed love. On top of that, the first one of my help patches that was committed was my FIRST CORE PATCH! In Drupal-land, this is a momentous event, and I was thrilled to see that two of the others who were helping out both had their first core patches shortly after me while working on this.

(For anyone interested, the help doc standard is here, the main thread for the issue is here and there are several more branched off of it, all tagged with d7help.)

What I learned

This can be summed up in three points.

1. How much work really goes into Drupal. This was the most time I'd ever spent actually working on Drupal (core), not online documentation, not event organizing. I had done some patch reviews before, but this was the most concentrated amount of time spent in the issue queue, and on IRC, working away alongside all of the developers who have also been cramming for this deadline. Countless hours and energy by people around the world goes into making this an amazing open-source web platform. It's pretty mind-blowing to see how it all comes together.
2. Technical skills. I can now roll patches in my sleep. The whole process of tracking issues, downloading and applying patches, reviewing and making changes, and posting updates is something I now am completely comfortable with. I also learned some basic PHP coding, and also some of the associated coding standards that the Drupal development community uses. Prior to this, I could at best cut and past PHP into the right place. Now I am beginning to cross the line from memorizing to actually understanding what I am looking at. That is a huge accomplishment for someone who three short years ago was finishing off a Masters in Health Geography, and looking at her first CSS code.
3. A few determined people can make a big change. The crazy part of this was that despite having to gather a lot of feedback and get consensus on the change, it was really just a handful of dedicated people who made this come to fruition. Several people helped out with reviews, but I have to give extra-special props to the people who did the bulk of the work with me: Jennifer Hodgdon (aka. jhodgdon) from Poplarware, Lisa Rex (aka. lisarex) who is a Freelancer specializing in usability, and Boris Doesborg (aka. batigolix) who from what I could gather works at Erasmus Hogeschool in Brussels. Last but not least Drupal 7 core maintainer, Angie Byron (aka. webchick) from Lullabot, who by golly is one of the most patient and dedicated people I know. Angie fielded a ton of questions about module functionality and what should or shouldn't be included, as well as doing a ton of final reviews and giving great, useful feedback to everyone who was working on this. We never would have made it without her help, and it was great fun some of those late nights on IRC.

All in all, a great learning experience, a great result, and my goodness am I glad it's done (at least until issues start turning up for contrib modules)!

And.... the busiest of months has come to an end. Exhales.

October was a great if not overbooked month. Between BarCamp Vancouver, the Drupal 7 Conrib Sprint, and the big PNW Drupal Summit in Seattle last weekend, I had only one weekend off the entire month (on which there was also Drupal Camp Portland, but I decided that would be pushing it).  I made up for the past month in a big way this weekend, going out to socialize only once (last night for Halloween), sleeping in till 10am both mornings, doing laundry, cleaning my bathroom, cooking, reading, chatting with my folks on the phone, and generally being a homebody.

The PNW Drupal Summit in Seattle last weekend was something I'd been looking forward to for quite a while. My coworker Shawn and I drove down a day early, and Shiraz (another one of our coworkers who lives on the island) took the ferry over and met us that night. We managed to do a little exploring of the Pioneer Square area Friday, where I bought a bunch of cool books, and drove through Capitol Hill and up the waterfront before tiring out and going back to the hotel for naps. Everyone else arrived by bus or train Friday night; we had quite the crew amassed over the weekend, with 5 people from AB, 2 others who have been doing contract work with us, and then my friend Katherine who works at another company and has been a conference roomie before.

It was great catching up with the Seattle crew, as well as lots of people who I'd met at previous Camps and Cons, and also getting to know some new people. It's such a great group, I never tire of hanging out with everyone from the PNW plus a few others who came in from Idaho, and even Montana.  I learned a few new things including, a new (to me) tool for managing content deployment using Deploy module [slides/vid here], and my Agile project management/development BOF was actually one of the highlights of the weekend for me. It was well attended, and there were some really great conversations and sharing of experiences from other PM's and devs who have been (or want to start) using Agile methods. I think that the session may have been videotaped, and am crossing my fingers that footage will surface at some point! Thanks again a million to the great Drupallers in Seattle for all their hard work making that come together.

To abruptly change topics, I got this crazy white pumpkin to carve last night (the photo Rachael took really shows how white it was); I thought it was some strange tough inedible gourd, but it really was this fantastic pumpkin. Probably some kind of heirloom variety, as it had not had all the amazing squash-iness bred out of it. Very thick and meaty, huge seeds, and so orange inside that my hands were completely stained after I was done.  Rachael and Boris used some of it for soup, so I am hoping that it was as tasty as it was entertaining (I hate to waste them, even if they are just grown to be decorative veggies).  It was a quiet Halloween, but I think that's ok. I am up for some quiet times.

ps. For the record, I still think daylight savings is bunk. Saskatchewan has it right (disclaimer: I am biased).

pps. People I know are raising money for cancer research, and you should donate!

• Jo Biggar (my friend's brother) is going to cut off his amazing dreadlocks, which he's been growing for nearly a decade to reach his goal of raising $10,000 - he's over 2/3 to his goal, so help him out!
• Also today marks the first day of Movember (ie. the month where boys grow 'staches to raise money for prostate cancer), and my coworker Shawn is participating - you can pledge on his mo growing here (if the link doesn't work, go to http://ca.movember.com/ and search for "Shawn Price").

This blog post comes to you in two parts: 1) Drupal 2) Everything else

Drupal7 Codesprint

This weekend was the Drupal7 Contrib Upgrade Sprint that Károly Négyesi (aka chx) organized at the NowPublic offices. I spent a good part of yesterday there, helped out with coaching the one beginner who turned up to learn some of the tools for helping out in the community.  Otherwise, after a bit of a rough start, the devs all hunkered down and have been making some Drupal magic, upgrading super important things like Views, Panels, database stuff, and various other bits and pieces of modules and themes.

A good number of people came in from out of town and they've all been working  their butts off.  Sam Boyer came in from Chicago and was working on panels, Jakob Perry was up from Bellingham (I think?) and was working with some others to get Coder module functional for D7. David Strauss was in from Austin, TX, and I think he was working on some DBTNG stuff (?), and Josh Brauer came up from Idaho and Amye Scavarda (who I'd met at the Project Management BOF in DC) was in from Portland as well... I lost track what everyone was doing (and ended up staying home today thanks to a tummyache) but trust me you want to thank your lucky starts there are all these amazing dedicated people around.

Highfives to all the Vancouverites who came out and helped and showed their support! Rick, Dale, Katherine, Francis, Hubert, Richard, Catherine, and a brave "newb" (more new to the community than new to development) Chris.  And also to the others who joined remotely, Damien Tournoud, Dmitri G., Larry Garfield, Daniel Wehne, and Mike Prasuhn spent the better part of their weekends helping out from their respective homes.  I'm sure others stopped in that I missed, but I just feel like it's the least I can do to say a collective thanks to everyone who spends so much of their time and energy keeping this ship afloat.  Open source communities are a pretty amazing thing when you think about it, it just gives me the warm fuzzies.

Everything Else

Had a great Thanksgiving dinner last weekend, with a few friends and a lot of strangers out in East Van.  Makes me happy knowing the kinds of people in my life are the kind where a mish-mash of their friends can turn up at a dinner party, many who know only one or two people there, and chit chat all evening and have a great time. There were several people who worked in urban planning, resource management, non-profits, tech, and social media, so there was a lot of really passionate, interesting conversations.

I've been on holiday this past week, recharging in order to get through the end of the month, October has been crazy packed full of tech events... the final one being the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit which is in Seattle at the end of the month.  I'm excited and trying to keep my energy up so I don't totally burn out before getting through it!  One of my coworkers gave me some advice recently about prioritizing and energy levels, suggesting that maybe I ought to be a little more selfish (in a taking care of my self way, not a being a jerk way) about my priorities and not overdo it when it comes to extracurricular (ie. non-work) commitments.

That is a really hard thing for me to accept, there is so much that I want to do all of the time, and the reality is that I never have enough energy, and that is quite likely not going to change.  I realize maybe I haven't quite struck the optimal balance yet, but I can say with relative certainty that my life is always going to involve pushing myself, since I'm not willing to give up doing the things that keep me happy and keep me feeling motivated. It's more of refining exactly how much I can and should push myself so that I still get to do stuff that I want to, but don't feel totally drained all the time.  It sounds easy enough, but as anyone who deals with ongoing health challenges knows, it's not just that simple.

 I've no idea what I am talking about.  I'm trapped in this body and can't get out.
- Radiohead "Bodysnatchers"

I'd love to hear how you all balance your personal/health needs with your work and extracurricular passions if you feel like giving a little feedback.

Lots of things to catch up on...

BarCamp Vancouver 2009

BarCamp was this weekend - I was so-so on it last year, it was still fun, but not many sessions really did it for me, so I came in with relatively low expectations, thinking that maybe I'd just been to too many Camps and Cons now for them to still inspire and interest me...  I am happy to report that I actually had a superb time, and am not too old and jaded to enjoy these events. :-)  The organizers did a great job (thanks a bunch, you are all awesome) and everything went off flawlessly.  Enjoyed the sessions I went to, and there were many more I wish I could have made it to (most sessions are listed here, some have notes/slides).

I loved Stephanie's Design Charette session, where we did a brainstorming session to design something that would help solve the problem of pedestrians (especially those who are homeless and for whatever reason lacking caution when crossing) being hit in the DTES.  Our group decided to focus on visibility and proposed armbands with reflective/LED strips that activate when in the roadway to make people visible. I thought it would be good to also provide an incentive to wear (and not lose) the armband by having local companies sponsor some services for those wearing it - ie. free coffee, food, etc. for people with them. (We couldn't present the full idea because of time constraints.) (In case you're wondering what a "wicked problem" is, from the photo, see wikipedia)

The discussion session led by Boris about potential new coworking space/hackspace ventures was good too, as the community is still feeling the loss of Workspace. Looks like there are some interesting times ahead as W2 opens in the near future, Irwin filled us all in on what to expect. A new face in the community, Nick Molnar, also talked about the possibility of a larger hackspace. And of course, there's the ongoing discussion about Bootup Entrepreneurial Society opening up some kind of space that includes a cafe/coworking space. Notes (taken by Nick) for this session are here.

Boris and Mark Busse's session on Balancing Frustration and Passion (notes taken by Jenny Lee Silver) was one of my favourites - I don't know how I've managed to go this long without properly meeting Mark, but he definitely had some enlightening opinions and experiences to share.  Boris encouraged me to talk about some of the struggles I've been having with the local Drupal user group, which because of Drupal being an open-source project and working on a do-ocracy type of structure (ie. there is no real leader, basically whoever wants to organize/contribute is free to take initiative to do so). I think partly because it's such an unfamiliar type of organizational structure for most people, there weren't a lot of solutions suggested, but some of the experiences people shared from different types of organizations definitely gave me some food for thought. It was the first time I'd spoken publicly about it, and that's a bit nerve wracking, but hopefully it will serve to open the door to more discussions about how to make the group awesome, and figure out how to get people to take the initiative to go for it and get more involved.

(As a sidenote, I discovered this video of David Strauss' great session at DrupalCamp Dallas on how to contribute to Drupal - it's a must watch for anyone who wants to get more involved in contributing to the Drupal project/community, and reviews a lot of etiquette and how-to's for using IRC, patch queues, etc.)

The pre-party Friday night was also fun and a great excuse to hang out with all those wonderful people I don't see nearly enough.  All in all, things were interesting enough that I didn't end up in the hallway track until about 4:30pm when I got too pooped to be a good listener, so I consider that a success!  There were lots of other great things going on, like Roland's bike/icecream out trip, a remote session about the impact of being in a choir, Rick's session on Vinyl, and Haig's session on design vs. code, so poke around the session list and hopefully some of the other stuff has been documented elsewhere (if you have links to blog posts on any of the other sessions please post in comments!)

Other stuff

My awesome coworkers surprised me with Ariane Appreciation Day last week, and boy did I feel appreciated (sorry for thwarting the first attempt, you did a great job of catching me off guard!) - they are rad, and I thank my lucky stars every day to be able to work on projects that excite and inspire me, with such fabulous and even more inspiring people.

The little bits of the week that were not work/tech related gave me time to appreciate beautiful sunsets...

Beautiful flowers - this rose might have well been the best smelling one I've ever encountered, reminding me of rose-flavoured Turkish delights...

And the beauty of a pile of freshly washed and folded laundry after putting it off way too long.

ps. As if laundry couldn't get any better, I discovered during it that in addition to finally supporting an official podcast, the CBC's got a complete archive of seasons 1-6 of Wiretap posted now for your streaming pleasure (and any pods that weren't fully licensed to be released on podcast are streamable in their entirety).  I listened to about 6 or 7 episodes over the course of the afternoon while folding laundry, snacking, and basking in the glorious sunbeam that I get in the late afternoon on my couch in the winter.