Last night I had the pleasure of attending the first joint meeting of Minnesota Go and Rust users, and arrived home inspired -- not just by Go and Rust, but also about Drupal and its community.

I worked at a public radio station for eight years and I sometimes thought it would be fun to have my own show. So perhaps there is a bit of irony since I no longer work in public radio and I am finally going to get my own show! The newest member of Lullabot's podcast family is Hacking Culture, featuring in-depth interviews with free software advocates.

Over the past couple of years, the Drupal community has been hard at work trying to confront a variety of challenges concerning Drupal core development, especially issues like burnout and funding.

"You're always you, and that don't change, and you're always changing, and there's nothing you can do about it.”

    ―Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

I am writing to announce that I have made the difficult decision to resign from Wisconsin Public Radio. My last day will be Friday, February 14. I have accepted a job offer to be a Senior Developer at Lullabot.

I hope that you see a lot of reminders to vote this week. Of course, I am referring to the vote for the Drupal Association (DA) Board of Directors. I have already seen a number of blog posts and tweets that link to the candidate profiles, the first and second "meet the candidate" sessions, and the URL where you cast your vote.

If you have not read Alex Bronstein's (effulgentsia's) excellent blog post about creating your first Drupal 8 module, go read it: Drupal 8: Hello OOP, Hello world! This post will expand on Alex's discussion and introduce the new configuration API in Drupal 8. Here we will have the modest goal of making the display of the text "Hello, World!" configurable -- more specifically, we will give site administrators the ability to make the text UPPERCASE or Title Case. I can tell you are excited.

DrupalCon Portland is over and many of us left feeling excited about Drupal 8. There will be a lot of changes from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, and if you are wondering about what is new, one of the best ways to learn is to get involved with Drupal 8 development right now. Until recently, I had tried a couple of times to get involved with Drupal core, but became frustrated when I couldn't find an issue appropriate for me or I worked on a patch that got stuck in "needs review." While there are many ways to help out with Drupal core development, I would like to highlight three areas where I think you will have success -- the first is an ongoing effort for new contributors, the second is for frontend developers, and the third is for backend developers.

These days I find myself splitting time between OSX and Linux, but when I'm on a Mac I like my development environment ready to go without having to do much clicking around. While I have tried a few times to get away from using MAMP, I find that it is just more convenient than configuring everything manually. However, I prefer to use the command line and have it run in the background without having to see it there in my dock and making me feel guilty for not configuring everything myself.

Over the weekend, I was sitting in my office watching an episode about Beethoven's 3rd ("Eroica") symphony from the excellent PBS series Keeping Score, when Michael Tilson Thomas said something about the symphony that intrigued me.

[Reprinted from opengoldberg.wpr.org]

On June 24, 2012 Wisconsin Public Radio, in partnership with Open Goldberg Variations and MuseScore, built on its tradition of innovation. For the first time in history, radio listeners were able to follow the digital score of a broadcast recording as it was broadcast.

If you missed the opportunity to hear on the radio and watch online the new public domain arrangement of Bach's Goldberg Variations, you can still: