Technology

Randy Fay is doing a session at DrupalCon on Burnout:

We have an incredible group of people who invest deeply in our common project. Some significant portion of this group is near burnout at any given time, and we've lost important contributors, some famously, as a result of this.

The more general problem is: How can we help our contributors to manage their work so they don't get so close to burnout? How can we help people find (or regain) balance while dealing with the technical and social problems of contributing to our great project?

Proposed solution:
- Begin a concentrated initiative to grow and keep our contributors, and to keep them happy.
- Make this a goal a key project responsibility.

He just posted a blog post, on defining burnout and signs of it, this week as well.

My Thoughts...

Burnout among community leaders is real and damaging, not just to those who are burnt out, but the greater community who rely on these people. I have seen friends burn out, and I have been teetering on the brink of full on burnout for a while. Now I'm going to be blatantly honest about why I think it happens and what we could do about it. Please take my complaints as fodder for improving, and not slights on the community!

Factors

I think that personally, and as Co-lead of Docs, my increasing burnout can be attributed to a few factors:

1. Work. Of course, I have my non-volunteer work to do as well, and that takes precedence over my volunteer position. Work has been really busy for the last year, and that's taken away a lot of the time and energy I was previously dedicating to Docs and core.
2. Life. General stuff going on in life has also distracted me from working on Docs. It's a fact of life that personal factors will come into play, good or bad. Last year when I was sick a lot, I actually had more time at home on my own to be online.
3. Health. I have chronic health problems and my energy levels fluctuate wildly from week to week. Some weeks I can keep up, others I can't. But the issue queue doesn't care about my health!
4. Lack of community support. Let's face it, docs can be the ugly duckling of development work. Lots of people write code and don't put docs online for it, or update code and don't update docs. There are a TON of docs. There are a TON of redundant docs. There are a TON of missing docs. It's a real beast, and the amount of material to write, format, and maintain is hugely disproportionate to the amount of time the community puts into docs. Which brings me to...
5. Lack of resources. There are not many people who write and maintain the docs, and this group is often transient, moving onto development, or working in short bursts. That is not helpful in keeping up on the amount of work to be done. This could be a fulltime paid job, and there is virtually no funding for docs. Managing people is a big job, I think I actually got way more done for docs before becoming Co-lead as none of my time goes to writing docs now, it all goes to managing the issue queue and responding to questions/requests, leaving no time to do more overarching tasks.
6. It's often a thankless job. Sure other avid contributors are often extremely thankful for the work the Docs Team does. But sometimes I feel like the project's documentation is taken for granted, and there is a tone of entitlement to good documentation (contrib maintainers surely see this as well). Issues in the queue complaining about the state of the docs or demanding documentation on a particular topic are disheartening - I see the same thing in the queues for popular contrib projects. Maintaining the docs is like treading quicksand, and it's a losing battle with the current resources.
7. Expectations. I can't even imagine doing the job of Docs Lead on my own! OMG. I have no idea how Addi survived it as long as she did. This position is not realistic! Even with Jennifer managing docs infra and API docs, and me just managing the online docs, it's a hefty job. It's not enough. We have a few a few topic coordinators listed, but we really need more, as well as team members who can help with docs for the ever growing library of contrib, and help maintain the docs queues. Additionally, this is an under-resourced volunteer position and people need to adjust their expectations accordingly. For me, the expectation that I will attend a DrupalCon, and submit sessions, as well as lead the docs sprint is even a large one. My health doesn't often allow me to even attend full days of the conference, nevermind those added responsibilities. 
8. Give some, want more. It seems when someone volunteers to give some of their time and energy to the community, there is always a want for more. I understand that it's a compliment that the community thinks a volunteer does good work. But it's important not to overburden people who already have huge responsibilities. I've been learning the hard way to say no more, but as much as I appreciate being given additional opportunities, don't care for any kind of "oh, you're missing out" attitude when I turn down opportunities that would take up even more of my time/energy/finances.

Maybe I'm not cut out for this! But maybe "this" just needs to change for all leaders in the community...  Enough about what is going wrong, what can be done to improve?!

Solutions

1. More, smaller leadership positions. The community and amount of docs and code we maintain is constantly growing. Co-leads and more coordinators are essential for the continued health and sanity of our contributors. Topic coordinators in docs, and things like the Views bug squad are good starts, but we need more people helping, and we need to work on enabling them to be more self sufficient so they're not always waiting on feedback. (If you want to be a topic coordinator for docs, let me know! More are listed on g.d.o.)
2. Respect the time of community leaders. If someone doesn't respond immediately, don't get angry. If a leader needs to take a break, for instance going on hiatus for a couple months, respect that. We are doing our best. That said...
3. We need to accommodate time off! Leads shouldn't have to be on duty 365 days a year. Every person in a leadership position that is fairly critical should have either a co-lead and/or an understudy. Someone who can help out and when needed take over for a while. Just the existence of this structure would take a lot of pressure of leaders to not have to be available all the time.
4. More people need to help. I know, this is an ongoing issue for open source projects. But we need to get more Drupal users and community members to participate, especially in some of the less popular tasks. They still need to be done! Maybe we need a marketing campaign of some sort? Some people, like me, even enjoy these kinds of tasks, so we should also...
5. Revere "gruntwork"! Things like support and documentation aren't just gruntwork - they are really important tasks for all levels of community members. They shouldn't just be looked at as a stepping stone to development work. Support and Docs Team members should be nurtured just like developers are, and given the same respect so that they aren't perceived as lesser positions in the community. Not saying everyone has this attitude, but it's important, especially as the community grows to recognize these tasks as critical parts of the ecosystem.
6. Funding for docs? I don't know if it's realistic to get funding for documentation work. It sounds like it'd be possible for a huge infra project, but isn't so much for day to day needs. Not sure how to get more help with our infra from the larger community so that we can help our processes become more efficient.
7. Reset expectations. When interacting with anyone in a major leadership position, remember how much we are responsible for. Try not to be impatient with us, or demanding of our time. Don't put pressure on leaders to contribute more. We're volunteering to help, but that doesn't mean we are solely responsible. Which reminds me, we need to find a way to...
8. Make contributors more self-sufficient. Documenting how to help doesn't seem to be enough. I would love to see a more structured mentorship system in place that would take some of the weight off of the shoulders of people already in leadership positions. There are many community members who could answer simple questions and help onboard new contributors. And yet it always tends to be the already overburdened leaders who take this on.
9. Rethink things. Finally, I think that we could really rethink some of the more burdensome parts of the community task list. For instance the documentation. Should Docs Team really be responsible for this massive amount of community contributed docs? Should we just manage some "official" core docs and end user tutorials? Maybe there are other approaches that would work better with the growing community. Open to suggestions!

Preventing Volunteer Burnout

And now, some tips from our dear friend, the internet, for preventing volunteer burnout:

In my experience, burnout can happen for a number of reasons: the work I’m doing isn’t challenging, the work I’m doing has little meaning, I’m not learning anything new, I’m doing something I’m not passionate about, or the workload I’m shouldering is overwhelming. - Tom Johnson, 'Avoiding Burnout as a Technical Writer'

Moderation is key...aying no is difficult, especially if you think your answer is going to disappoint someone. But it's necessary since spreading yourself too thin can be a bad thing for you and the recipient(s) of your volunteer efforts. It's best to be sensible about your time so that you're able to maintain the energy and desire to honor the commitments you make. - John Barrymore, 'How Volunteer Burnout Works'

As the saying goes, "if you want something done, ask a busy person." ...in Canada. Interestingly, a small minority of volunteers accounted for the bulk of the hours. The top 25% of volunteers accounted for 78% of total hours of volunteer support... If they do not get the balance they will get burnt out...The problem is that we do not notice the burnout coming until it is too late and what you are left with is either a very unhappy volunteer or a great volunteer who quits. 

Tips:
- Connect to purpose
- Create an achievable position description
- Give volunteers holidays
- Set guidelines at the start
- Create an environment that is welcoming
- Thank volunteers

- Lori Gotlieb, 'The road to volunteer burnout: How to avoid it and how to manage it' 

Slideshare, takes a while to load - the slides are pretty self-explanatory...

- Meredith Kennedy 'Preventing and Addressing Volunteer Burnout'

In my volunteer management work, I see and hear about volunteer burnout. Volunteer 'burnout' was the term coined years ago to mean asking those faithful volunteers to do more and more to the extent that they actually burned out, left the organization, and likely stopped volunteering altogether. This was likely the beginning of serious recruitment issues: instead of recruiting new volunteers, those who could be depended on were asked for more 'time'.

"Volunteers who are committed continue to be asked to give more time. We are also expected to give more money to the causes we volunteer for. We are also expected to sell more, promote more, and show up at fundraisers." - Donna Lockhart, 'Volunteer Fatigue: What impact on the future of volunteerism?' 

Finally, a great post from my favourite Project Management author, Michael Lopp, on bordom and burnout (not directly related to volunteering): 'Bored People Quit'. I think this is also important because doing repetitive tasks and being constantly overburdened can also be boring - it strips away the creativity that keeps people engaged. We need to try and make sure that smart, engaged contributors have that creative time so they don't get bored!

So first, a little catch up from before my last posts... back in June, I went to Saskatoon for a weekend to go to the wedding of one of my next door neighbours from where I grew up. The Sulatyski family lived next door to me my entire Saskatoon-life (plus a couple years after I moved to Vancouver), and are like my second family... sometimes I feel like I grew up more Ukrainian than any other culture!

The middle kid from the family, Markian, (who's a year older than me, on the right in the photo below) got married to his lovely now-wife Emily. The wedding was out on Emily's family's acreage outside the city. It was beautiful outside for the ceremony, and then right before dinner there was a CRAZY flash storm - pouring rain, wind, lightning... a big gust came up and tried to pick up the big party tent just like in one of those crazy home videos. Everyone jumped up and held down the tent for about a half hour till the storm passed. Lots of excitement, then it calmed down and we had a great evening.

I love, love, love seeing my old neighbourhood crew, I spent so many summers hanging out with these boys (Evan on the left is the youngest brother, and their cousin Chris is in the middle). I also got to see their older step-sister who I hadn't seen in well over a decade, and it was awesome catching up with her (especially because she convinced me to try and make it to Evan's wedding which was just last weekend, even though it was really close to getting back from my big summer trip).

Then, the end of July was completely absorbed with moving into my new place. That's right, no more West End Girl here... I've moved out to East Van and am loving it here. It's quiet, I have a ton of space, and am closer to friends (and really not much further from work). It's been a lot of work getting moved in here while not being home a lot this summer, but it's going to be a great place to be for the next while.

Then, a couple weeks after moving in, I took off for my first trip to Europe! I'll just start by saying it was as great as I could have hoped, and I now feel like a relatively competent overseas traveller.

The first place I went for a week and a half was Copenhagen (photos), where DrupalCon was held. I wanted to go last year to Paris, but then my boss was having a baby at the same time, so I decided to stay and help hold down the fort at work instead. So, this year was my year, and a huge bonus that it was in Copenhagen, which was somewhere I really wanted to go (after studying urban geography for so long).

It was a great city (as full of bikes as you can dream), and I stayed in a gorgeous apartment in the center of town that I rented with Scott, Sam, and Rok. Rok's girlfriend Tamara came for the first weekend as well, which was lovely as it was all of our first time meeting her. I had virtually no jetlag going over (probably largely thanks to splurging for an upgraded ticket on the way over), and had a great time wandering around the first few days.

DrupalCon was awesome as always - I went to the Core Dev Summit (which I'd missed when I went to San Francisco's DrupalCon in the spring, thanks to being sick), and it was one of my favourite parts of the trip. I got some traveler tummy halfway through the week, and missed the last day, but all in all it was absolutely fantastic. (You can read more about my DrupalCon adventure here if you are interested/nerdy.)

And I loved Copenhagen - good food, neat shops, really pretty city. It definitely had its own vibe and style - everyone was so sophisticated, well dressed, and the stereotype did hold true, a lot of tall, nordic, good looking people!

At the end of the trip, Scott, Sam, and I had to say goodbye to Rok, who was going back home, and we hopped on a train to our next destination: Berlin.

Berlin (photos) got off to a rough start when I left my backpack (containing my laptop, digital camera, prescription sunglasses, and medication) on the last leg of the train. Yes, really. I spent the first few days trying to see if I could find my bag, frustratingly trying to talk to the right people in german (thank dog I speak a little bit, as middle aged government service people there sure as heck don't speak much english). Luckily, all of the annoying trips back and forth to the train station, and phone calls of broken german proved worthwhile when on our last full day there I got my bag back! Go-go german lost and found system! 

The only thing missing was my little digital camera (and the photos I'd taken at the conference), as well as my cell phone's USB cable (which I believe the thief mistakenly took, thinking it belonged with the camera). Can you believe they took just that and not my laptop??? Me neither. I was so stoked to have the rest back that I was happy to cut my losses. My only guess is that they opened my laptop and saw it was password protected, and so left it alone... Needless to say, the rest of the photos in this post (and on Flickr) are all cell-phone photography. But I did have my film SLR with me as well, so there will be more to come when I get those developed.

That last day in Berlin was great - I did some shopping in Prenzlauer Berg, a hip area of the city north of the hostel we stayed at. Then after the second trip of the day to the other side of city, when I actually got my bag back, I took the "tourist" city bus line and saw a bunch of stuff, including the Berlinner Dome church, which I went inside. It was totally beautiful.

Aside from cool shopping and sights, I have to say, Berlin had by far the best Ariane-friendly grocery stores! It was amazing, all the grocers I went to were full of gluten-free this and dairy-free that. And omg the soy yogurt in Europe is DELICIOUS. They are doing it wrong over here. What I would give to be able to get that stuff here...

After Berlin, we had a final day of train rides - we didn't know ahead, but the last train was a crazy fast train! (Pardon Scott's head blocking the photo...) It did make me a bit nauseous compared to the normal trains, but we went up to 327km/hr!!!! SO FAST. SO COOL!!! Walking down the aisle when we'd go down any small hills, it felt like I was about to levitate. Glad I got to ride one afterall.

And our final destination was Paris (photos) for the last couple days before heading home. I think I have some more photos from there on my phone (can't download em without my cable, but S & S have a card reader when they get back from visiting Scott's brother out in New Brunswick), and on the film, but nothing too stellar other than photos from the plant shops near Notre Dame (which I kind of botched finding) for now. 

Paris is a huge city! The weather was fantastic there, and I had a great time wandering around while S & S were out sightseeing. Highlights were a private opera concert at night at the Louvre, delicious chocolate, talking to the owner of this great jazz/classical music shop, shopping, and eating at La Ferme (this delicious and really pleasant veg-friendly cafe I found my last day there).

The day of travel home and resulting jetlag was probably the worst part, so I can't complain. All in all, a fantastic and victorious first overseas trip, and bonus getting some quality time with some of my favourite friends and Drupallers from all over the world.

Finally, a couple weeks after getting back (and surviving a terrible but short-lived stomach flu), it was time for one last adventure out to Edmonton for Evan (youngest brother from next door) and Jaime's wedding. I am so, so, so glad that I went in the end. Sure, I was pretty wiped out, but dammit I love those guys, and it was so nice getting to spend some more time with them. Everyone stayed in the hotel there, so we saw a lot of each other, and didn't have to go running all over town (sidenote: parts of Edmonton seem pretty cool, I almost want to go back to explore). Can't believe my little brother-from-another-mother is a married man now, we're all grown up!

I also got to see his big sis, Elana, for the first time since she became a momma herself (right around when Markian's wedding was), she's a superstar, what can I say!

(And this last photo, I just thought was cool enough to post, taken the night before the wedding while we were hanging out watching the Riders game.)

This weekend, I finally get to myself, to rest and catch up some more on finishing my move-in. Next weekend is the last hurrah in the string of events that I've been working my way through, finally the much anticipated PNW Drupal Summit (which I've been helping a tiny bit with organizing). There's people coming from all over the PNW (Pacific Northwest) and further afield, and I've got three of my favourite Drupal gals coming to stay at the house for the weekend, so it should be a blast. (Oh, and also I'm co-presenting a session as part of my plan to conquer my fear of public speaking...eek!)

After that, no plans till Christmas, which makes me extremely happy! There will be lots of Drupalling, Crafternoons, regaining of social life, and other enjoyment, that is for certain. Life has been better lately, and I have a feeling more good things are on their way in the next little while... ;)

This one's all Drupal folks, cause that's pretty much all I've done for the last two and a half weeks. This is what happened when I asked the question, "Is there some reason we don't just fix it all?" I did not know then what I was getting myself into...

A small inconsistency

It all started in late summer, when I was testing some Drupal 7 core patches for moving fields and image handling into core, and at some point clicked my way into the Help pages. There was a blatant typo on the Node module help, and then a change in language that needed to be made, so on August 1st, 2009 I created an issue for it.

Then someone posted a patch to update the text. And Emma Jane Hogbin posted another...and then she and I started talking on IRC about how it would be much better to have some more clear formatting that could be applied across the board, fans of consistency that we are.  And we went back and forth for a while making little improvements. Thanks to having learned how to apply and create patches several months back, I had just enough experience to make changes and roll new patches.

The patch was marked RTBC (reviewed and tested by the community). Yay! But wait... then Angie, who is the Drupal 7 core maintainer saw the issue (as she is the one who does final reviews of issues marked RTBC before they are committed to the core codebase). And she was like WHOA, this is a major change! A good change, but a major one, which would need to be applied across the board to all the core modules (and eventually all the contributed modules). She also made us aware that if we wanted to make such an overarching change that we would need to be able to prove a higher level of discussion and consensus on the issue and then complete the change in time for the string freeze deadline.

A much bigger task at hand

Various documentation team members went back and for for a while about whether the new standard would be supported, and kept updating the patch getting closer and closer to a format we were happy with. By now it was the end of October, and the patch was finally set back to RTBC. This is when it popped back up on Angie's radar, who was like (paraphrasing)... "So, you guys haven't really addressed the question of whether you are going to make a massive across the board change here." Oh, right, that.

A new patch was created that reverted the format updates, and just updated the text to match Drupal 7 functionality. There was nothing wrong with this patch, and it could have just been applied and nothing else said about it.

But I didn't feel right about it... So I thought to myself, is there an actual reason that we are not making this massive change? It's not exactly challenging, it's just a lot of grunt work. And at the end of it, we would have some much more helpful and readable help references for the core modules in Drupal 7 rather than the difficult to read and horribly out of date information that was currently on the help pages.

Accepting the challenge

I posted back on the issue and asked this very question, and said that I thought it was really important to improve the help. Jennifer Hodgdon, who was another initial supporter, started a thread on the Documentation team mailing list, and it turned out that people agreed on one thing: the help text sucked and we ought to fix it. Happy birthday to me, on November 13th, 18 days before the Drupal 7 string freeze deadline, we made the final decision to overhaul the help pages, and Jennifer posted the template for the change.

Since Jennifer is a more experienced member of the Documentation team, as well as a much more advanced programmer than me, she got us off on the right foot and lead the charge for the first half, with the agreement that when she was going to be away for most of the homestretch I would take over and steer the ship. We'd been working well together and I felt like I was competent enough (and had enough other support available) to take on this responsibility.

The standard was signed off on, and on November 20th (ten days to the deadline), a list of modules was posted so people could start signing up for which updates they would take on. And then the real work began. And oh my...was there a lot of it.

Nose to the grindstone

I had no idea starting this out how much there really was to do. I was only thinking about the template change. But there was also a major need to update the content of the text, and those changes had to be reviewed and tweaked, and reviewed and tweaked some more. And then some more... I learned more about Drupal, the contribution workflow, and writing docs in PHP in that week and a half, than probably in the previous six months. Slowly but surely, myself and the others who were helping out got into a groove, and started cranking out some great updated help text patches. I got a couple of hours of "fun hour" at work to work away at this, but otherwise it was all afterhours; it basically devoured my free-time for almost two weeks.

Maybe it was the timing with American Thanksgiving, or having Jennifer away (thank goodness she was back for about a day and a half before the deadline!), but we definitely lost some momentum after the first five or six days. Feeling a certain level of responsibility, I basically crammed like a crazyperson most evenings and all through the final weekend, reviewing and updating patches. Thankfully a couple other dedicated people stuck with it, tag teaming on patches and reviews. Yes, I totally burnt myself out, but with the help of those great people who stuck it out, we miraculously got all of the patches for the 39 help texts done (44 if you count the Field submodules), updated to Drupal 7 content-wise, reviewed until within an inch of their lives, and marked RTBC (many of them already committed) by the December 1st, 2009 deadline.

The result?

Here is an example of the old help text for the node module:

And here is the updated version:

It might not look like much, but particularly for new site admins, and even more so with some of the more complicated modules, this is going to provide a truly useful resource (rather than a slightly confusing bunch of text that mainly just forces people to click through to the handbook). It was one of those highly neglected and unloved parts of Drupal, and it makes me extremely happy that is got a little much-needed love. On top of that, the first one of my help patches that was committed was my FIRST CORE PATCH! In Drupal-land, this is a momentous event, and I was thrilled to see that two of the others who were helping out both had their first core patches shortly after me while working on this.

(For anyone interested, the help doc standard is here, the main thread for the issue is here and there are several more branched off of it, all tagged with d7help.)

What I learned

This can be summed up in three points.

1. How much work really goes into Drupal. This was the most time I'd ever spent actually working on Drupal (core), not online documentation, not event organizing. I had done some patch reviews before, but this was the most concentrated amount of time spent in the issue queue, and on IRC, working away alongside all of the developers who have also been cramming for this deadline. Countless hours and energy by people around the world goes into making this an amazing open-source web platform. It's pretty mind-blowing to see how it all comes together.
2. Technical skills. I can now roll patches in my sleep. The whole process of tracking issues, downloading and applying patches, reviewing and making changes, and posting updates is something I now am completely comfortable with. I also learned some basic PHP coding, and also some of the associated coding standards that the Drupal development community uses. Prior to this, I could at best cut and past PHP into the right place. Now I am beginning to cross the line from memorizing to actually understanding what I am looking at. That is a huge accomplishment for someone who three short years ago was finishing off a Masters in Health Geography, and looking at her first CSS code.
3. A few determined people can make a big change. The crazy part of this was that despite having to gather a lot of feedback and get consensus on the change, it was really just a handful of dedicated people who made this come to fruition. Several people helped out with reviews, but I have to give extra-special props to the people who did the bulk of the work with me: Jennifer Hodgdon (aka. jhodgdon) from Poplarware, Lisa Rex (aka. lisarex) who is a Freelancer specializing in usability, and Boris Doesborg (aka. batigolix) who from what I could gather works at Erasmus Hogeschool in Brussels. Last but not least Drupal 7 core maintainer, Angie Byron (aka. webchick) from Lullabot, who by golly is one of the most patient and dedicated people I know. Angie fielded a ton of questions about module functionality and what should or shouldn't be included, as well as doing a ton of final reviews and giving great, useful feedback to everyone who was working on this. We never would have made it without her help, and it was great fun some of those late nights on IRC.

All in all, a great learning experience, a great result, and my goodness am I glad it's done (at least until issues start turning up for contrib modules)!

And.... the busiest of months has come to an end. Exhales.

October was a great if not overbooked month. Between BarCamp Vancouver, the Drupal 7 Conrib Sprint, and the big PNW Drupal Summit in Seattle last weekend, I had only one weekend off the entire month (on which there was also Drupal Camp Portland, but I decided that would be pushing it).  I made up for the past month in a big way this weekend, going out to socialize only once (last night for Halloween), sleeping in till 10am both mornings, doing laundry, cleaning my bathroom, cooking, reading, chatting with my folks on the phone, and generally being a homebody.

The PNW Drupal Summit in Seattle last weekend was something I'd been looking forward to for quite a while. My coworker Shawn and I drove down a day early, and Shiraz (another one of our coworkers who lives on the island) took the ferry over and met us that night. We managed to do a little exploring of the Pioneer Square area Friday, where I bought a bunch of cool books, and drove through Capitol Hill and up the waterfront before tiring out and going back to the hotel for naps. Everyone else arrived by bus or train Friday night; we had quite the crew amassed over the weekend, with 5 people from AB, 2 others who have been doing contract work with us, and then my friend Katherine who works at another company and has been a conference roomie before.

It was great catching up with the Seattle crew, as well as lots of people who I'd met at previous Camps and Cons, and also getting to know some new people. It's such a great group, I never tire of hanging out with everyone from the PNW plus a few others who came in from Idaho, and even Montana.  I learned a few new things including, a new (to me) tool for managing content deployment using Deploy module [slides/vid here], and my Agile project management/development BOF was actually one of the highlights of the weekend for me. It was well attended, and there were some really great conversations and sharing of experiences from other PM's and devs who have been (or want to start) using Agile methods. I think that the session may have been videotaped, and am crossing my fingers that footage will surface at some point! Thanks again a million to the great Drupallers in Seattle for all their hard work making that come together.

To abruptly change topics, I got this crazy white pumpkin to carve last night (the photo Rachael took really shows how white it was); I thought it was some strange tough inedible gourd, but it really was this fantastic pumpkin. Probably some kind of heirloom variety, as it had not had all the amazing squash-iness bred out of it. Very thick and meaty, huge seeds, and so orange inside that my hands were completely stained after I was done.  Rachael and Boris used some of it for soup, so I am hoping that it was as tasty as it was entertaining (I hate to waste them, even if they are just grown to be decorative veggies).  It was a quiet Halloween, but I think that's ok. I am up for some quiet times.

ps. For the record, I still think daylight savings is bunk. Saskatchewan has it right (disclaimer: I am biased).

pps. People I know are raising money for cancer research, and you should donate!

• Jo Biggar (my friend's brother) is going to cut off his amazing dreadlocks, which he's been growing for nearly a decade to reach his goal of raising $10,000 - he's over 2/3 to his goal, so help him out!
• Also today marks the first day of Movember (ie. the month where boys grow 'staches to raise money for prostate cancer), and my coworker Shawn is participating - you can pledge on his mo growing here (if the link doesn't work, go to http://ca.movember.com/ and search for "Shawn Price").

This blog post comes to you in two parts: 1) Drupal 2) Everything else

Drupal7 Codesprint

This weekend was the Drupal7 Contrib Upgrade Sprint that Károly Négyesi (aka chx) organized at the NowPublic offices. I spent a good part of yesterday there, helped out with coaching the one beginner who turned up to learn some of the tools for helping out in the community.  Otherwise, after a bit of a rough start, the devs all hunkered down and have been making some Drupal magic, upgrading super important things like Views, Panels, database stuff, and various other bits and pieces of modules and themes.

A good number of people came in from out of town and they've all been working  their butts off.  Sam Boyer came in from Chicago and was working on panels, Jakob Perry was up from Bellingham (I think?) and was working with some others to get Coder module functional for D7. David Strauss was in from Austin, TX, and I think he was working on some DBTNG stuff (?), and Josh Brauer came up from Idaho and Amye Scavarda (who I'd met at the Project Management BOF in DC) was in from Portland as well... I lost track what everyone was doing (and ended up staying home today thanks to a tummyache) but trust me you want to thank your lucky starts there are all these amazing dedicated people around.

Highfives to all the Vancouverites who came out and helped and showed their support! Rick, Dale, Katherine, Francis, Hubert, Richard, Catherine, and a brave "newb" (more new to the community than new to development) Chris.  And also to the others who joined remotely, Damien Tournoud, Dmitri G., Larry Garfield, Daniel Wehne, and Mike Prasuhn spent the better part of their weekends helping out from their respective homes.  I'm sure others stopped in that I missed, but I just feel like it's the least I can do to say a collective thanks to everyone who spends so much of their time and energy keeping this ship afloat.  Open source communities are a pretty amazing thing when you think about it, it just gives me the warm fuzzies.

Everything Else

Had a great Thanksgiving dinner last weekend, with a few friends and a lot of strangers out in East Van.  Makes me happy knowing the kinds of people in my life are the kind where a mish-mash of their friends can turn up at a dinner party, many who know only one or two people there, and chit chat all evening and have a great time. There were several people who worked in urban planning, resource management, non-profits, tech, and social media, so there was a lot of really passionate, interesting conversations.

I've been on holiday this past week, recharging in order to get through the end of the month, October has been crazy packed full of tech events... the final one being the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit which is in Seattle at the end of the month.  I'm excited and trying to keep my energy up so I don't totally burn out before getting through it!  One of my coworkers gave me some advice recently about prioritizing and energy levels, suggesting that maybe I ought to be a little more selfish (in a taking care of my self way, not a being a jerk way) about my priorities and not overdo it when it comes to extracurricular (ie. non-work) commitments.

That is a really hard thing for me to accept, there is so much that I want to do all of the time, and the reality is that I never have enough energy, and that is quite likely not going to change.  I realize maybe I haven't quite struck the optimal balance yet, but I can say with relative certainty that my life is always going to involve pushing myself, since I'm not willing to give up doing the things that keep me happy and keep me feeling motivated. It's more of refining exactly how much I can and should push myself so that I still get to do stuff that I want to, but don't feel totally drained all the time.  It sounds easy enough, but as anyone who deals with ongoing health challenges knows, it's not just that simple.

 I've no idea what I am talking about.  I'm trapped in this body and can't get out.
- Radiohead "Bodysnatchers"

I'd love to hear how you all balance your personal/health needs with your work and extracurricular passions if you feel like giving a little feedback.

Lots of things to catch up on...

BarCamp Vancouver 2009

BarCamp was this weekend - I was so-so on it last year, it was still fun, but not many sessions really did it for me, so I came in with relatively low expectations, thinking that maybe I'd just been to too many Camps and Cons now for them to still inspire and interest me...  I am happy to report that I actually had a superb time, and am not too old and jaded to enjoy these events. :-)  The organizers did a great job (thanks a bunch, you are all awesome) and everything went off flawlessly.  Enjoyed the sessions I went to, and there were many more I wish I could have made it to (most sessions are listed here, some have notes/slides).

I loved Stephanie's Design Charette session, where we did a brainstorming session to design something that would help solve the problem of pedestrians (especially those who are homeless and for whatever reason lacking caution when crossing) being hit in the DTES.  Our group decided to focus on visibility and proposed armbands with reflective/LED strips that activate when in the roadway to make people visible. I thought it would be good to also provide an incentive to wear (and not lose) the armband by having local companies sponsor some services for those wearing it - ie. free coffee, food, etc. for people with them. (We couldn't present the full idea because of time constraints.) (In case you're wondering what a "wicked problem" is, from the photo, see wikipedia)

The discussion session led by Boris about potential new coworking space/hackspace ventures was good too, as the community is still feeling the loss of Workspace. Looks like there are some interesting times ahead as W2 opens in the near future, Irwin filled us all in on what to expect. A new face in the community, Nick Molnar, also talked about the possibility of a larger hackspace. And of course, there's the ongoing discussion about Bootup Entrepreneurial Society opening up some kind of space that includes a cafe/coworking space. Notes (taken by Nick) for this session are here.

Boris and Mark Busse's session on Balancing Frustration and Passion (notes taken by Jenny Lee Silver) was one of my favourites - I don't know how I've managed to go this long without properly meeting Mark, but he definitely had some enlightening opinions and experiences to share.  Boris encouraged me to talk about some of the struggles I've been having with the local Drupal user group, which because of Drupal being an open-source project and working on a do-ocracy type of structure (ie. there is no real leader, basically whoever wants to organize/contribute is free to take initiative to do so). I think partly because it's such an unfamiliar type of organizational structure for most people, there weren't a lot of solutions suggested, but some of the experiences people shared from different types of organizations definitely gave me some food for thought. It was the first time I'd spoken publicly about it, and that's a bit nerve wracking, but hopefully it will serve to open the door to more discussions about how to make the group awesome, and figure out how to get people to take the initiative to go for it and get more involved.

(As a sidenote, I discovered this video of David Strauss' great session at DrupalCamp Dallas on how to contribute to Drupal - it's a must watch for anyone who wants to get more involved in contributing to the Drupal project/community, and reviews a lot of etiquette and how-to's for using IRC, patch queues, etc.)

The pre-party Friday night was also fun and a great excuse to hang out with all those wonderful people I don't see nearly enough.  All in all, things were interesting enough that I didn't end up in the hallway track until about 4:30pm when I got too pooped to be a good listener, so I consider that a success!  There were lots of other great things going on, like Roland's bike/icecream out trip, a remote session about the impact of being in a choir, Rick's session on Vinyl, and Haig's session on design vs. code, so poke around the session list and hopefully some of the other stuff has been documented elsewhere (if you have links to blog posts on any of the other sessions please post in comments!)

Other stuff

My awesome coworkers surprised me with Ariane Appreciation Day last week, and boy did I feel appreciated (sorry for thwarting the first attempt, you did a great job of catching me off guard!) - they are rad, and I thank my lucky stars every day to be able to work on projects that excite and inspire me, with such fabulous and even more inspiring people.

The little bits of the week that were not work/tech related gave me time to appreciate beautiful sunsets...

Beautiful flowers - this rose might have well been the best smelling one I've ever encountered, reminding me of rose-flavoured Turkish delights...

And the beauty of a pile of freshly washed and folded laundry after putting it off way too long.

ps. As if laundry couldn't get any better, I discovered during it that in addition to finally supporting an official podcast, the CBC's got a complete archive of seasons 1-6 of Wiretap posted now for your streaming pleasure (and any pods that weren't fully licensed to be released on podcast are streamable in their entirety).  I listened to about 6 or 7 episodes over the course of the afternoon while folding laundry, snacking, and basking in the glorious sunbeam that I get in the late afternoon on my couch in the winter.