Well, back in 2003 when I joined the Drupal developer community (got my welcome mail from the drupal-devel list on September 15, 2003), I haven't thought I will be that involved with the system a few years down the road. It was (and is) a rather cool tool for a big Hungarian web development community website I was migrating from some ugly CMS... Now I do so many things around Drupal that it is not easy to track.
- I had a small part in getting the Pro Drupal Development book to life by reviewing chapter 18 (about the locale module). Seeing my name amongst the other respected fellows on the acknowledgments page is quite charming. (Viewing the publicly available table of contents excerpt, still waiting for the book to arrive).
- These weeks I am into finishing up my thesis about multilanguage web sites / web applications, going through the requirements, examining existing systems to learn from and implementing solutions with Drupal. This way I can actively participate and work with people like Jose A. Reyero (of i18n.module fame), and most recently Roberto Gerola (localizer module maintainer) too to get new i18n features into Drupal 6. Not to forget that I am also into localization fixes and improvements for Drupal 6. There is a nice list I collected for those interested in the current issues.
- Earlier this week, Dries Buytaert announced that I am the new Drupal 6 core maintainer, joining Steven and Dries in helping to get Drupal 6 in a good shape and taking maintenance once they move over to Drupal 7 development. I have just done my first commit to core (thanks to Amr Mostafa for pointing out that small problem in language.inc!).
- Being a student in my last year, I figured this is my last chance in the foreseeable future to experience Google Summer of Code, so I sent in a proposal. Well, with 19 other proposals, it got accepted, so this summer, my locale module and language improvement plans aimed at helping translation teams work much easier will hopefully get into actual applications to use.
- While all the above keep me busy with Drupal, I also try to keep on managing drupal.hu (hopefully) for the good of the community. I am into recruiting more people to expand on what is already there and encourage them to improve the experience. No wonder Hungary is where Drupal is searched for most (according to Google Trends), so it is just logical to keep up and expand. It might also be worthwhile to point out that among the 20 accepted Drupal SoC proposals, three of us are Hungarians.
Developer share
It might also be worthwhile to point our that among the 20 accepted Drupal SoC proposals, three of us are Austrians.
The combined force of Hungary and Austria should make for a nice center of Drupal activity in central Europe :)