Happy 5th Anniversary (to me)

I'm a bit late in celebrating my own 5 year anniversary with the Drupal project. You can see from that URL, that I have made 166 pages worth of commits to the contrib repositiory since then. And submitted hundreds of core patches as well.

My first major contribution was a series of core patches for the Distributed Authentication system in core. Dries had already a working version, but I generalized it by adding the authmap table.

During those first months, I struggled badly with setting up PHP, and generating patches, and understanding the code. Newbies - I have felt your pain. We all have, really. My greatest insight into the workings of Drupal came when I setup a debugger. I like Komodo. I encourage new (and old) developers to do this as a learning exercise, if not as a daily development tool. It is so useful to watch Drupal process a request. It is like watching art in progress. There is also a deep comfort in understanding the whole request cycle.

Thanks to the whole Drupal community for being as great as you are. Sometimes people ask if my freelance consulting work is lonely. It isn't lonely at all, with all the great chatter and ideas that you all generate on the mailing lists, on chat, and at conferences.