Early last year, around the time of DrupalCon San Francisco, Packt Publishing approached me to serve as technical reviewer for a book. Several Microsoft Word documents and 7 months later, the dead trees edition of Drupal Theming Cookbook by Karthik Kumar, arrived at my doorstep, complete with an acknowledgement of my work inside the front cover. In the hopes of branching out a little, I also received a complimentary copy of Django 1.0 Website Development by Ayman Hourieh. Over the course of a month in December 2010 it served as an excellent guide to completing one's first app, with little or no Python knowledge required, but taking the 'dive right in' approach. (Anything that didn't work with Django 1.2 was a quick Google search away. I have sticky notes at every point at which it differs from the current version as of this writing.) I hope to ship an app based on the example sometime this year.
At the end of last November, I helped instruct at a community-based clinic teaching a basic-level introduction to the Drupal CMS. Based on notes from the Seattle Drupal Clinic held in 2009, several members of the Drupal community and people new to Drupal converged at the FCV office in downtown Vancouver. We covered modules, content types, image manipulation, and for my session at the end, the Views and Block modules. We the trainers learned a lot from that first session, and it seems like the same can be said about the participants. My thanks go to everybody involved. It's an initiative I'd like to participate in again.
A third win involves getting back into the Drupal support game. You can find me on the #drupal-support IRC channel when things slow down at work, and recently on Stack Overflow's Drupal-related questions. While having reservations about not tracking the Drupal.org forums for support, I will go where the people are.
Since some people have asked, since June of last year, I've been working for OpenRoad Communications, a web services company based in Gastown. They're technology-agnostic, and when they had a couple of Drupal projects come their way, it made sense to have me on full-time. Separately from web services, they created a product called ThoughtFarmer, which they bill as a social intranet. (It might be tempting to make a connection between Drupal and ThoughtFarmer, but other than my sitting next to the development team, rest assured the two are not related.) Since months can go by between my mentioning my employer, it's probably best to refer to LinkedIn or my resume for my latest professional status.