Portland

This is WAY over due, but I've been meaning to mention a new site that I helped put together and launch for the Portland Web Innovators.

This has been one of my favorite professional development and networking groups since I first attended an event over a year ago.  I had a hard time finding a group of people who are entrepreneurial, technical, independent, and creative.  Many other groups also have a narrow focus, which is also critical to have, but being more of a generalist myself, I find this one appealing.  Great job to Adam Duvander and Ryan Williams for starting it up.

 The site was a very natural fit for Drupal, since one of the primary goals is to connect a community of users. We took advantage of an excellent theme called Deco.  The site is in its infancy with many features to come, but please sign up and get involved in the mean time.

I had the pleasure of attending the first ever Ignite Portland event last month. For the uninitiated, Ignite events consist of set of short, fast paced, presentations on everything from Twitter to unicycling.  From the Oreilly site:

If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Around the world geeks have been putting together Ignite nights to show their answers.

If you missed the first event, the next one is just around the corner.  Be sure to check it out.

UPDATE

I had the pleasure of attending Ignite at the Bagdad Theater last night. Over a 1000 people showed up for the event after it received considerable coverage, including in the Oregonian, and several hundred had to be turned away at the door. The overall atmosphere was bubbling with creative energy and anticipation. Some of the presentations touched on a "why Portland, why now" theme, and being at this event drove home the answers to those questions for me. I count my blessings every day that I can live in Portland, with my family, as a part of this community. Presentations can be seen below in the embedded Splashcast (PDX company) player, posted by a devoted fan, LinuxAid.

Day 2 of the workshop was much more rewarding. We covered some truly advanced topics, including automated unit testing, modifying the core search index, manipulating node access, best practices for writing secure code, and how to contribute and get involved in the Drupal community. Matt Westgates presentation on security was the best of the day - I may not be an expert in securing my sites yet, but I have enough ammunition to cause some trouble on others! I'll skip posting my notes since they are likely only valuable to me, but if anyone is curious, let me know and I'd be happy to share. I also have a couple of great presentations which I can post.

Overall, while I felt the workshop was over priced ($900 for 2 days), I did some tricks and and met some great folks. I was really surprised to find that I was the ONLY Portlander attending the workshop. The other 50 or so attendees were from all over the country, and even a few form oversees. I think this speaks to momentum Drupal has as a web platform, which is great for everyone involved.
Thanks to the Lullabot team for a very informative couple of days.

I have the pleasure of attending the Lullabot Drupal Advanced API and Module Development workshop this week. I've enjoyed getting to know the Drupal platform and community over the past year and have based many successful projects on it. The team at Lullabot are known for their Dupal training and consulting work, and have some great sites and contributed modules under their belts to prove it. If any Drupal geeks happen to come across this, what follows are some tidbits I picked on day one.