Development frameworks, in the loosest sense of the term, do a good job of preventing developers from having to reinvent the wheel each time they begin a new project. Each project naturally calls for a different starting point dependent upon what the end result should be. Drupal, I think, begins at a pretty high level of done-ness.

I should think that it is a given that frameworks currently in use by any sizable community offer this basic benefit to the degree which it is designed to. I think, then, that frameworks need to be judged on what I see to be an almost equally important factor: its ability to prevent developers from boxing themselves in, or over-engineering their application.

I released my first ever module today! Anyone who knows me can probably guess that this is a pretty big feat for me. I'm rather pleased with myself but still anxious!

The module is Twitter Backtweets. What exists right now is the base functionality. Any nodes posted on your site within the last 48 hours are taken when cron runs and put through the Backtweets API. This gets any tweets that have been posted linking to said nodes (URL shortened links included) and posts them as comments to the appropriate node.

As promised, here are the slides and the codebase to accompany the session.

Slides at Google Docs
Code, test site, etc

Notes:

• To view the site in the browser, go to /drupal-6.16
• To download the codebase, download theme_session.zip. See sites/all/themes/

• If you plan to run this site on a web server for testing, you will need to add back default.settings.php/settings.php. I've removed them for security reasons.
• To get a dump of the database with test content, download session.sql. The UID 1 user is 'admin', password 'tester'.

I've long said that there is a whole lot of feel-goodery in the Drupal community. It's taken me awhile to come to appreciate this fact, but I have in my own way. When I say feel-goodery, I mean that people are, for the most part, diplomatic and patient to a fault. There is a general sense of goodwill and a whole lot of back-patting. Which is great. It's infectious.

I, however, am totally not that person. I like to think of myself as a friendly person who gives credit where it is due and typically makes a net positive contribution to anything I involve myself in; which is a decision that I never take lightly. Something I lack that many in the community possess is diplomacy. When there are names to be named, I name them. If there is something that is on the collective mind but is not a palatable thing to say, I say it. It is for this reason that I don't get as involved in the Drupal NYC community as I would like to be.

I recently did a little design in the browser experiment to come up with my web based resume and have desperately needed a new blog theme for awhile. I mean, the last one might have broken world records by being created in an hour and fifteen minutes, but I needed something better thought out. I had a lot of fun creating this one in the browser, too, and have Mason to thank for making me think twice about doing so.

This little number took the better part of the past 24 hours, but I'm proud of the level of detail I was able to get to during that time. I'd like to think that this is one of those themes that users will find themselves delighted with every so often as they notice another obscure piece that is more polished than your average theme.

So, I signed up to write a blog post for Ada Lovelace day as I am a woman, I'm in tech, and womens' issues are altogether close to my heart. As today started I didn't think that I was actually going to get around to doing it with the other mountains of things to do piled up around me - literally in part, as I'm moving. But a tweet about webchick's AL day list prompted me to at least throw something together.