The new year (this post is a little late!) has brought me new opportunities and some new roles;

• As of 21 December 2009, I am a front end Drupal software engineer at NowPublic Technologies Inc, aka NowPublic.com (Clarity Digital Group and Examiner.com).
• As of 3 March 2010, I am a permanent member on the staff of the Drupal Association.

New job at NowPublic

At NowPublic I work on front end theming and customizations for NowPublic.com and Scan — a realtime twitter and social media tracker for NowPublic.com, Examiner.com, WashingtonExaminer.com, SFexaminer.com and The Vancouver Sun.

Currently I am the skeleton dev team that maintains NowPublic.com, while the rest of the NowPublic dev team works on the Examiner.com migration to Drupal 7. Though I spend most of my dev time in the depths of the javascript and theme layer of Scan.

One of the most exciting things about this job is that I am able to work with an amazing team of developers including some other CivicActions alumni, whom I respect and seek to learn from. Such as chx, kkaefer, douggreen and Morbus Iff and many others.

Vancouver

The new job at NowPublic saw me relocate to Vancouver for two and a half months, from just after DrupalSouth Wellington

at the end of January, until DrupalCon San Francisco, this week.

Vancouver has been astounding! Some highlights of my first trip ever to Canada and my stay in Vancouver include;

• meeting fun people and making great friends
• the winter olympics, especially watching Canada;
  • win the first ever olympic gold on home soil
  • win more gold medals than any country in any winter olympics ever
  • defeat the USA in the ice hockey finals; a heart-stopping match with a golden-goal by Canada's favourite player – Sidney Crosby – in overtime
  • celebrate unreservedly and fanatically — even as crazily as I remember Argentines celebrating World cup football match victories on the streets of Buenos Aires in 2006

  

• meeting the NZ winter olympic team on the streets of Vancouver, by accident
• snowboarding at Mt Baker, Whistler-Blackcomb and Grouse Mountain
• cycling around Stanley park
• visiting Victoria, now one of my favourite cities

Returning to New Zealand

This Friday 16 April I depart Vancouver for San Francisco, where I will stay with the Clarity Digital Group developer team at Westin Hotel Market street for 8 days, for the Drupal core developer summit, DrupalCon SF, code sprints, meetings, social events, and a Drupal Association retreat.

Finally, on April 26 (after losing April 25 to the date line) I will arrive home to Christchurch NZ to stay indefinitely. It will be exactly 8 months since my wife and I departed Christchurch for DrupalCon Paris and a journey across 5 continents. I am looking forward to having a home (when we find and rent one!) and our bed back.

Drupal Association

Being elected onto the Drupal Association's General Assembly was largely unexpected and came as a surprise to me. I have been a core part of the DrupalCon Asia-Pacific Organisers (DCAPO) group on groups.drupal.org since it started in September 2009 and collaborated a little with Cary Gordon (Drupal Association Board, Director of Events) over that time. Cary asked me to join the Drupal Association to help centralise international DrupalCon coordination efforts (as per the events plan) and provide the association with a more internationalised perspective.

It is still early days at the association, but my goal (as per my application) at the Drupal Association is to empower a team to organise and run a DrupalCon somewhere in the Asia-Pacific region, hopefully around 2011. There are some ideas and projects at the association to do with scholarships and mini-conferences — but I will save that for another time, when it is ready.