Returning to the fold 13 April 2012

This post marks the first time I have blogged in any personal capacity in many many years. It’s not that I had nothing to say mind you. I actually found myself writing a lot of blog posts, either for my employer DevelopmentSeed, or in my role as the lead developer of the Aegir Hosting System or even as a Drupal core developer.

Something interesting happened near the end of 2010 though: I reached the limits of what I had ever hoped to accomplish with my work on Aegir, and had less of a use for Drupal itself too. I also felt that I had reached the limits of where PHP could take me as a programmer. It was time for a change, and I was not the only person who felt so.

Everything changes

The entire DevSeed pivoted at this point, passing on our interests in OpenAtrium to Phase2. For my part, I passed on the maintainership of Aegir to my trusty co-maintainers, and embarked on what has probably been the most exciting and enriching phase of my professional life since discovering the internet and open source as a teenager.

Our days would now be spent working with the just-exploding node.js, as we started building things that we didn’t even think we were capable of a few months before. It has been a lot of fun, but our new direction also changed our communication priorities. We were no longer at the forefront of trying to disceminate and get buy-on for community wide best practices to make our lives easier. Instead we started from scratch, and had to figure out a lot of stuff for ourselves.

Learning and sharing

Over the next year and a half, I learnt a lot. I also found that I had a desire to share everything I was learning. The end result is that I was posting ever more elaborate posts on the development seed intranet around various technical subjects. These were actually pretty thoroughly researched, and often got so out of hand that I needed to split them into multiple posts.

Going back over all this information recently, I realized that I had inadvertantly documented the entire process of finding my feet in the node world. These documents were actually still very useful, and provided a very necessary outlet for me during this period. It would be a real pity if they could only ever be seen by the people working at DevSeed directly.

Because of that, I have gotten permission to start republishing those posts over the next several months on this blog. The information in them might not always be 100% current, but I will be going through each of them as I republish them, annotating what has changed as my understanding has grown on the subjects.