I was never a Drupal or PHP developer, or even thought about it, early in my career. I began working with Drupal independently in 2008 after years of C, Java, and Python development, because I was looking for something different. Something that would let me get a basic website up and running without endless lines of code. That led me to getting some early contract work with small websites and notably, NYU Langone, working with (gasp) Drupal 5 and 6. Over time, I helped migrate some of their internal and external sites to Drupal 7, something I would work with for years afterward.
After that I continued to work on various Drupal sites as a contractor - the San Francisco Art Institute (closed in 2022), KicktheCan.info (a website about the health benefits of not drinking soda), HealNation.com (extinct) and WCIRB.com, which I helped maintain for over 10 years, among others. In addition to backend development, which was my main focus, I also spent a lot of time working with CSS and jQuery/Javascript. handling nearly all phases of the projects. WCIRB is a site for workers' compensation information and claims, and searching using Solr and an eCommerce piece connecting to Authorize.net also played big parts.
In 2014 I joined 3BLMedia.com, a company dedicated to the distribution of sustainability news and information - 3BL standing for triple bottom line. Having joined with just myself, one technical manager, and 2 offshore programmers as the tech team, we developed, maintained, and continually improved multiple Drupal websites as well as a short-lived Wordpress website and old school Ruby on Rails website. Basically, we just handled whatever was thrown at us in whatever language it was written in. Our sites had clients posting sustainability content, including media, which we published on our websites, distributed to various news organizations, added as "widgets" to affiliate websites, and processed analytics for custom reporting for clients. Our database, suffice it to say, was enormous.
We ran our own servers, which was a daunting task for such a small team. Faced with that, we first moved all our media to AWS, updated our database to point there, and then moved all our code and entire database to Acquia. Not my favorite weekend.
Over time we acquired some other websites including Triplepundit.com and CSRWire.com, both non-Drupal sites and both of which we converted to using a React front end with a Drupal 8 shared backend. This was my first foray into the Drupal 8+ world.
Eventually due to an ever growing Drupal 7 database and aging code for our main 3BLMedia.com website, we needed some modernization. I helped lead a project that combined our resources with a contractor to update our entire Drupal 7 codebase to Drupal 9 and to move all of our analytics to an external database more suited for our custom analytics called Timescale, which we then moved to Snowflake for better performance. We also implemented a new data and reporting visualization tool called Sigma which I wrote all the backend integration code for.
After 10 years at 3BL wearing many different hats, I left to take a bit of a break and check out some other technology that I had never had time for. I delved into Amazon Web Services, spent some time rebuilding my own meager website with AWS and some automated processes, and explored iOS and Swift programming so I could check off the "I built an actual working app" box. I'm always looking for new things to try, new Drupal projects, and opportunities that scratch my creative itch.
I also went ahead and got my Drupal 10 Developer Certification from Acquia.