Drupal's Runner-Ups
By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source TeamAs we mentioned last week, many of the mentoring organizations participating in the Google Highly Open Participation Contest had a difficult time choosing their Grand Prize Winners. All of our projects had stellar participants, and we're pleased to join them in sharing kudos with their unofficial "runner-ups." Angela Byron and Adam Light from the Drupal project sent us these accolades:Jimmy BerryJimmy Berry was a pleasure to work with over the course of GHOP. He has a real knack of coming in, tackling a difficult task that's been long-neglected (such as SimpleTest coverage for most of Drupal core, or the new Git back-end for our Version Control API module), and knocking it completely out of the park. Jimmy rocketed his way up the Drupal learning curve and is now one of our best new contributors.Edward YangEdward Z. Yang already has open source development experience, as the developer for the HTML Purifier project. During his time with the Drupal project over the course of GHOP, he has shown a penchant for impeccable code quality, and takes incredible pride in his work, always going above and beyond (often way above and beyond) what has been asked for by the task description, as particularly evidenced by his work on the Coder Format module.Charlie GordonIf GHOP were based solely on community participation, Charlie Gordon would far and away take the prize. In addition to suggesting tasks and helping to answer other students' questions, he also spear-headed efforts to setup the Drupal community's successor to the GHOP contest, DROP. Oh yeah, and he also kicked butt on several GHOP coding tasks, and made very short work of everything from writing SimpleTests to porting Revision Moderation module to 6, and even creating and maintaining the new Citation Filter module.Wilson LeeWilson Lee took on a wide variety of GHOP tasks ranging from documentation to code to marketing. Kourge did a particularly awesome job on a marketingpresentation for Drupal 6 (.zip) and a Core Hooks Cheatsheet (.zip) which will be of great use to Drupal module developers everywhere. Kourge was also frequently found in our IRC channels and helped other students find answers to their questions.Dmitri G.Dmitri G. was actually too *young* to participate in GHOP, being only 12 years old, so wasn't eligible to claim any tasks or prizes. However, he more than made up for that by helping to mentor and guide the GHOP students throughout the duration of the contest. So we'd like to name him as honorary GHOP runner-up.