It's easy to show design examples but much harder to convey your development skill level. I've found that a good developer intrinsically understands good development practice and, in a way, lives to create. It is these intangible factors that make the difference between a good and bad hire; a failed and successful project.

As a child, once computers began making their way into households I was enthralled. Whenever I saw a url on a commercial or in print, I would write it down in a list or tear out the ad to remember to visit when we had our very own machine. When our family finally got one, I realize in hindsight that my very first inclination was to create. I instantly tuned into this new culture of sharing that was emerging and sought the challenge of learning the technology to enable me to participate.

I've been doing a lot of talking recently with colleagues who do front end development. The topic of conversation has often been why the profession is regarded, explicitly or not, as secondary to back end development. It is my view that many developers who do back end view front end as easier, even if too fiddly for their liking. Therefore, back end developers like to take it upon themselves to write markup and CSS evaluating it the same way as they would their server-side code. If it works, it works. Which, as I think any CSS developer worth their salt knows, is completely not the case on the front end.

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.

I really, really wanted to love my Nexus One and Android. I did, for awhile.

The Nexus One is a beautiful device. The screen is beautiful. The design is beautiful. The scroll wheel is a little useless except for when you're on the command line but it's fun to fiddle with. I really adore the taskbar workflow which makes a ton of sense for me. Having apps run in the background and the taskbar/way that Android surfaces information was the main reason that I purchased it to replace my original iPhone. I still think that the Nexus One is the more grown-up device in that way.