I came to web development in June 2006 as an intern at Canary Promo+Design. That December I worked on our first Drupal site and never looked back.
Since then I have been working on Drupal fulltime as a freelancer, both building sites and consulting. Needless to say in the past two years my skills have grown considerably, thanks to the amazing power of passionate self-education and in large part to the extraordinary cumulative efforts of the Drupal developers and other web folk who post helpful tips to the internet.
As a bit of a freedom-freak, I have enjoyed freelancing very much. While working in the corporate world made me depressed and lazy, working freelance pushed me to my mental limit on a continuous basis.
Recently however I had found myself finding some disadvantages to my freelancing and toying with the notion of taking a fulltime job. For one thing, I was tired of doing all the business side of freelancing and just wanted to spend my time writing code. My disinterest in business and the process of selling my abilities to potential clients was holding me back from the kind of work I could be doing. In addition I was spending time doing simple Drupal site-building tasks which had become boring because I had no one to hand them off to. Furthermore the stress of juggling everything by myself, having to always be the expert in all matters related to a website on every level, was getting to me.
Partnering in a business will allow me to keep my self-employed liberties and share my responsibilities. I began the process of partnering at Zivtech last month at Drupalcon. My business partner, Alex UA, is a fellow Philly Drupal developer I know from our Philadelphia Drupal Meetup. He is much more interested in business and in general I would say he has better people-skills than I do. While I like to focus on code, he is involved in Drupal in many complementary ways. Working together is allowing each of us to do what we do best and to take on larger projects than we could do independently. It also gives us someone to drink beer with at lunch while we talk modules.
Moving forward, I will be doing my Drupal-related blogging at the Zivtech site, so those of you who may be subscribed to my feed directly (rather than Planet Drupal), please update your reader.
