MikeyLikesIt

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Drupal

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After quitting my job in the corporate world, I decided that I wanted to start a web business of my own. It turned out to be a lot harder than I expected. I thought that I would write my own CMS and sell it to clients. For a few years I built some relatively simple websites, but it became clear that I couldn't write a complete CMS all by myself. So I looked around online for alternatives in the open source world and within a month or two of playing around with them I decided to devote myself to Drupal. After doing everything wrong for the first couple of years by continuing to work on my own, solving my own problem, trying to figure out everything by my self, I had a breakthrough when I went to my first conference and met the people of the community. I saw the the true source of the projects greatness, and recognized that I needed learn how to operate more as a piece of the community, find the niche in which I could best serve not just myself, but also the rest of the community and the project as well. Now, 4 years into working with Drupal the experience has changed a lot about the way that I view programing and concept development in general. I have a strong belief in the strength of the open source methodology and love the people that I meet within the community.

I use Drupal to build social networking sites that help create a community around an organization. I have had a focus on working with non-profits, delivering solutions for their content management and providing community management tools. I enjoy working with non-profits, especially ones which help protect our civil liberties and the environment, as these are issues that are deeply important to me.

I have recently been changing my methods for working with clients, moving away from just being a web developer into the realm of being a consultant, because I realized that this is something that my clients need to have a successful implementation of their site. This ties into the fact that my development process follows more of an Agile model now rather than Waterfall, which means that long term development goals are not fixed at the start of a project. Website implementation/deployment is done in many small stages rather than all at once at the end of a project. In this way, the future goals of the project remain flexible and can be adapted to perceived requirements as a result of interaction with users on the site.

I'm very interested in working with other consultants or drupal development firms on larger projects because the complexity of modern websites requires too broad of a skill set to properly implement on my own. Looking forward to working with you.

I have a Drupal Association organizational membership

I am on the Drupal documentation team

I attended OSCMS 2007, Sunnyvale

I attended DrupalCamp LA 2007

I helped spread the word about Drupal from a booth at SCALE 6.x (Feb. 2008)

I attended Drupalcon Boston 2008

I attended DrupalCamp LA 2008

I attended San Diego DrupalCamp 2009

I volunteered at the Drupal booth at SCALE 7.x (Feb. 2009)

I attended Drupalcon DC 2009

I attended DrupalCamp LA 2009

I give presentations at the LA Drupal meetups.