ThinkShout is proud to announce that we are facilitating the first ever Drupal Day for Nonprofit IT Professionals event at this year's Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC) April 3rd, 2012, at the Hilton Union Square in San Francisco.
Implementing truly gorgeous online maps still requires some custom code and technical know-how – but, the cost and learning curve involved has dropped considerably.
Alas, the "we should blog about that" queue is getting pretty heavy here at the office. It's been a busy ten months since Lev and I officially opened the doors here at ThinkShout, Inc. And as we've been talking with developers this month about coming on board with the team, we've realized that we're missing an opportunity to share with the community what's been inspiring us in our own work, as well as in the Drupal community at large.
This blog post does a poor job of addressing that fact. But here goes...
We're at it again...our team is growing as we take on more and more exciting Drupal web application development projects. ThinkShout is looking to hire both a senior Drupal engineer and a site-builder with project management skills.
ThinkShout is proud to support this year's Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit as a "Silver" sponsor. More importantly, we're proud to have three of our team members presenting on development and project management topics close to our heart.
In the world of Drupal rockstar engineers, I'm, well, a groupie wearing a worn-out DrupalCon t-shirt. I consider myself a darn good Drupal technologist. I can build sites like nobody's business, using Features-based development practices to codify configuration management, as well as installation profiles for test-driven development. I contribute small bug fix patches to the community. And when the stars align, I occasionally release a Drupal module or two that helps with small tasks that make site building more enjoyable.
As some of you know, Lev and I formally went into business together as ThinkShout, Inc. this January. One of our primary motivations in doing so was to build a small, dynamic, highly-professional team of open source technologists with a passion for serving progressive causes. While excited to bring on the best minds in our field, we've also been conservative in our philosophy on growth. We've seen too many start-up consultancies try to grow too fast - often resulting in inefficiencies that negatively impact clients.
Wow, that's a dramatic announcement, but yes, ThinkShout is currently interviewing technologists interested in joining our team.
Over the last two years, ThinkShout has relied almost entirely on contractors - more than 25 talented designers, developers, strategists, and project managers in fact... While we are dedicated the the principle of connecting with the best technologist for each project, which lends itself to the "contractor model" and allows us to quickly scale to meet incoming project needs, we have also grown to the point where bringing on a few key staff positions over the next 6-18 months will allow us to innovate more fluidly and serve our clients better.
If you follow me on Twitter, it’s probably no surprise from all my excited tweets over the last year and a half that starting my own consultancy has brought me much joy, pride and personal growth. I’ve worked in the nonprofit sector my entire career. I’ve been a Drupal geek for the last 5 years. My academic studies have been in organizational development. The opportunity to combine these interests to build an effective team of technologists to solve problems for communities working to make the world a better place has been, at the risk of sounding cheesy, ridiculously awesome. I consider myself blessed that I can make a sustainable living, working in a great city, serving people who make a difference.
Developing our first open source Drupal product, Watershed now, as well as in our recent work on internationalization in Drupal 7 with Meedan.net, we've run into some bottlenecks managing the testing of new releases of Drupal installation profiles and features. The only way to make sure that installation profiles are built correctly obviously is to build them up from scratch. Features exports are great, but they too can be a little tricky, and thus require continual testing.
Especially for complex Drupal distributions, running an installation profile by hand takes a nontrivial amount of time. Then, clicking through and testing that everything is working correctly is even more time-consuming. Wouldn't it be great if there was a way that you could just check your new Drupal code into version control and have a dozen helpful little gnomes do all this testing for you?
