Business

As Alex UA recently posted, we have recently partnered in Zivtech, a Drupal-only development business. I have been working freelance since coming to web development, and while it has been by far the best job I've ever had, I think that starting a business with a good partner with complementary strengths is going to be even better.

Alex and I are both Philly folks who are very passionate about Drupal. A key principle of Zivtech is to always work as part of the community, submitting patches as we fix bugs and add features for our projects, and taking the extra time to contribute to Drupal in many ways on a daily basis.

I look forward to working with everyone from this new role.

I'm extremely excited to announce a big step for this small firm: as of last week Jody Hamilton and I officially became business partners. I know what you're probably thinking, and no, I didn't partner with Jody Hamilton the wrestler (pictured - you'll have to google it, I don't want to help his search ranking), though Jody is one mean developer and I hear she occasionally does wear a mask. I met Jody at a Drupal meetup in Philly this past winter, started following her blog, and was immediately struck by how smart of a developer she is. Every time I would meet her in person and tell her about some problem I was having--almost always involving a module that wasn't behaving or a behavior that didn't have a good module--and she would offer me a simple and elegant solution on the spot. As we got to know each other better it became apparent that we both were in need of working with someone like each other, and during DrupalCon we formally decided to merge our efforts. Jody's main role will be something along the lines of Lead Developer, while I will take on a more business oriented role (though we will both remain developers for the foreseeable future).

As with many Drupal firms, one thing that we've decided from the getgo is that we will aim to use 20% of our time on projects that have a direct positive effect on the Drupal project, which will include developing modules, writing documentation, helping at the Dojo, and more. As we grow and bring on new people we will also encourage our employees to do the same.