Work

After two years of working from home, I've decided it's time to make a move back into an office and look for some contract-based or perhaps permanent work in London.

I have four years of experience using, developing and helping guide the development of Drupal projects as well as a background and interest in all things geographic, from maps to open data (as you've probably seen from the topics I cover in my blog). With these skills I am looking to find some work as a Drupal developer for an organisation based in London, ideally integrating my geographic interest. Alternatively, I'm open to other opportunities that I may be suitable for.

If you have, or know of, any positions coming up from January onwards, I'd love to hear from you to discuss the details. You can find out more information about me in my CV (pdf) or on my LinkedIn profile.

OpenBand has today unveiled its new OpenBand Labs website to help improve the information around the work we've been doing over recent years as well as hopefully invite some discussion.

We hope to make some improvements to the new site over the coming days as we continue to add some more information and blog about some of our experiences here at DrupalCon. We'll also be adding the slides and some writeups about the XMPP talk Darren gave yesterday and the distributed enterprise talk Ben gave today.

We had a great presentation yesterday with Darren Ferguson talking about the XMPP Framework, and today with Ben Lavender talking getting a chance to demonstrate our collaboration platform.

From the start of 2009 I am going to be self-employed, and while I will still be working much of my time on the projects I've been working on for the past three years at OpenBand/M.C. Dean, I would also like to start taking on some small Drupal-based projects to go side-by-side with that.

Some of the services I am planning to offer in the New Year include:

• Drupal site creation
  If you are looking to get a site set up for your small business or organisation, and you like the power that Drupal can give to your site, then I can set a site up for you to meet your needs. I'm particularly interested in creating sites based around geographic information or related to the tourism industry, but I will happily consider any project.
• Drupal site setup support
  If you need advice on how best to achieve your requirements with existing Drupal modules, I can help point you in the right direction and get you started with your Drupal site setup. This can either be on a remote basis, or on a face-to-face basis in the London area if needed.
• Drupal module development
  If there isn't already a module in the Drupal community to do what you need, I can help you by building a module to meet your requirements.

If you're interested in taking advantage of these freelance Drupal services for your project, please contact me to discuss your needs.

My employer, OpenBand, is going to be a Gold sponsor of DrupalCon DC in March 2009 and a number of our team members will be attending the conference.

We have a few presentations to give, and will be keen to see many of the other sessions that are going to be given.

In the Powering collaboration in a distributed enterprise session we'll be giving an overview of the work that we do, the collaboration platform we've been building (largely on Drupal) for our customers over the past three years or so, and some of the modules that we've contributed back to the Drupal community during that time.

Miglius Alaburda will be presenting a session titled Introducing a new File Framework about a new and powerful way of handling files in Drupal.

Alex Karshakevich will be giving a talk about Data Visualization in a Social Networking Context, taking advantage of some of the social networking capabilities of Drupal.

Darren Ferguson will be talking about Drupal with XMPP Integration and all the functionality that he has built up around the XMPP framework, allowing users of a Drupal site to use instant messaging capabilities.

It's also great to see some of our associates presenting about work which we've sponsored, like Audrey Foo's talk about how to Search private content between multiple drupal sites with Distributed search (and the related Add powerful features and improve performance of your drupal site with Apachesolr Search), Justin Miller's talk titled Beyond The Web: Drupal Meets The Desktop (And Mobile), as well as others in areas we're involved in like OpenID and RDF.

With all the sessions that have been proposed by attendees, this is shaping up to be a great conference!

Updated: Added Darren's XMPP talk

Tomorrow I'll be traveling down to Barcelona with my colleagues for this year's DrupalCon.

Much like last year's OSCMS Summit (which basically turned into a DrupalCon) and DrupalCon Brussels it will be a great chance to meet up with other Drupal developers and users, see what others are using the platform for, join in discussions about its future and hopefully promote some of the pieces that we've been developing at work or have sponsored.

I'll hopefully be doing a lightning talk on the use of Drupal as a GeoCMS - if there are enough people interested - perhaps demonstrating some Google Earth integration through the KML module, GeoRSS integration, or even WFS integration (if I can get it working before then).

If you're going to DrupalCon and are interested in the geo aspect of Drupal (or geo in general), let me know or catch me there - I'll be the one with the 'geodaniel' name badge.