I've just finished a great 3 day session at Drupalcon D.C. 2009. On a sad note, in the last hour of the conference I lost a gold cross pen that I bought on my first date with my wife. It had my name on it so my outside hope is that someone will look up "Anthony Garcia Drupalcon" and find my profile and contact me. Either way, I'll going to take the sentimental energy I had stored up in that pen and turn it into a lot of Drupal energy.
At the conference, I learned alot of new techniques to do cool things with data and Drupal and visualization, Integrate Drupal with Facebook, my special interest in Education/Church sites, the business side of Drupal and more. I've met the Drupal luminaries. I especially was star struck by the Lullabot folks. Now, it's time to go back home to apply it. I thought I'd write up an action plan on practical ways I could apply what I've learned in short, medium, and long term ways. I'll put together a list below of things specific to what I am working on rather than made up stuff.
Short Term (1 - 5 months)
- Watch some of the Drupalcon videos I missed.
- Annotate some of my sessions noting out the modules I learned about and start testing them out. For instance, I want to make sure I can use the Feed Api to parse CSV data to feed it into a map or a chart.
- Plan out a new site for my father-in-law who is with us for 5 more months. He dedicated his career to a business making WWII Army Jeeps and parts for them. I'd like to build something that tells his story, rally some of my friends around the site, and cut out some of the middlemen that have been profiting from his work and let him have more of a share in the profit. I have a client of his who may be interested in the platform. For this one, the plan is to start it as an Acquia Drupal distribution using Apache Solr search. A model site would be like his friends Daryl and Lida Bensinger at www.dlbensinger.com. We would add forums to this though.
- Consolidate all my sites onto Bluehost. I am still paying a premium for TextDrive which has been great but limits me to 4 sites. Bluehost lets me have 99. Eventually for other things I want to do in the medium to long term, I need to find a dedicated host. I ran into some guys from Blackmesh at the conference that would be good. Rackspace was also there. I need to be able to justify the cost for my personal use and/or slice out some of the cost to a few folks who might want e-commerce sites living off of it.
- Start Avenue Cheeseshop Drupal site for my niece/nephew's aunt. We'll need to migrate it somewhere when real transactions are needed. Initial target implementation - Acquia Drupal with Faceted Search and Shopify for the ECommerce side. Longer term, we'd like a more integrated experience using Acquia/Ubercart Install Profile on secure servers - What's the cost/benefit? I'm going to try and figure out the minimum steps for Bluehost and Drupal for small clients. I'll contribute my findings as a cookbook to the community. Need to find out but going with the easier solution for now.
- Clean up my sites - www.spafloridian.com, www.joyandcaregivingfoundation.com, www.cognitivemetaphors.com, www.foreigntraineddentists.org, phillypinas.us/com, kofcconshohockencouncil1603.org, www.lockandkeyid.com.
- Get my nephew Marc involved for the next 2 months of his summer vacation on the Army Jeep site - start with thinking up a name. See if he can recruit Edison again or someone else.
- For my pay the bills job at an Energy company, we are locked into Sharepoint and Microsoft technologies (for now. hehehe) I'll see what sorts of concepts I learned at least can be applied to the general process of making things open and bringing in more folks to engage with the technology we build there.
- Explore taking on a part time side Drupal gig that a recruiter has mentioned to me.
- Start learning by doing more PHP so I can be more active in the Drupal community.
- Two years ago, I hired 1 Filipino over summer vacation (my nephew Marc - Comp Sci). Last year, I took on 2 (Marc and Edison). This year during the Philippine college summer vacation, I want 4. Perhaps I'll put them on a summer of code task - Team Philippines Drupal or something.
- Take what I've been doing these past two years and create a core values statement as suggested in Liza Kindred's business of open source talk.
Medium Term
- I've got to answer all the real questions about doing secure transactions for selling stuff. I burned myself in the past on a project I thought I could just wing. Perhaps once I figure out things, I can go back to my client and make it up to him. In the mean time, I need to implement the server space that is needed and
- Talk to my friend Aimee Saulog about how to do Ad serving on my www.foreigntraineddentists.org site.
- Make a copy of the conshohockencatholic.org website I work on so I can upgrade to the latest Drupal. Work on alumni section using Organic Groups. Perhaps also tie in a Facebook account to the site that others can participate in. Perhaps get the marketing person to help plan out ways to tie in others to the build up of new features.
- Become more active in the Drupal Community. Learn enough PHP/Drupal module building to be helpful.
- Work on a plan that I can execute to integrate Pentaho with Drupal with the goal of presenting at next years Drupalcon - probably as a birds of a feather session - perhaps as a presentation.
- Document and formalize processes for all research I'm doing so I can package it and pass t on to others in the form of a cookbook. Lock in is from massing data aggregation not from hoarding ideas.
Long Term (1 year+)
- Attend Drupalcon U.S. next year with Melissa and hopefully some of my other friends who I hook into Drupal - perhaps as a company of our own - with business cards, stories to tel, etc
- Take next steps with foreigntraineddentists.org, conshohockencatholic.org, joyandcaregivingfoundation.org, and the Jeep parts site.
- Take on any/all clients wanting solutions that can be derived from real stuff I've built without to much if any extra complexity in requirements.
- Take on Amazon web services and expand Pentaho/Drupal solution.
Opportunities To Build On Over Time
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Cognitive Metaphors Business/Marketing Material
Business Card: I'll need a resource to photoshop the logo into something nice, smooth, and professional looking. I've been going to PHP meetup and Java User Group meetings and don't have a good card to give out. Should say: Anthony Garcia, Founding Engineer 610-397-0976 (o) acgarcia21@cognitivemetaphors.com
Slide Deck - a deck that can describe the kind of company I want to represent. Some possible slides that would need good graphics. 1. Why are our systems in such disrepair?
2. Agile Decision Support Systems
3. Company Background
Value Statement The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed. - We value the equal distribution of the future. It's the only way to get there faster. We must become the change we want to see - We value leading by example, harnessing the power of teams, starting with small practical solutions, and building elaborate architectures on top of strong foundations (people, process, and technology). Collaborations Standards
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| Site: www.joyandcaregivingfoundation.org |
| Description: NGO , non-profit - main projects St. Anthony's Development Center, microloans |
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Medium Term
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Long Term
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| Module: Pentaho Drupal Module |
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Description I have a good amount of knowledge about both projects. The integration of the two would bring serious analytics to Drupal and the community tools Pentaho needs to leverage data effectively. I will develop this along side my Agile Decision Support Systems Whitepaper. |
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Medium Term
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Long Term
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| Site: AvenueCheeseShop.Com |
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Description My brother-in-law's cousins own a cheese shop in Philadelphia. They want to sell food baskets over the internet. |
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Medium Term
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Long Term
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| Site: www.conshohockencatholic.org |
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Description This is the site we built for my children's Catholic school. I went to a birds of a feather for Drupal Education sites. There's a lot more we can do with this site. |
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Medium Term
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Long Term
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| Site: www.foreigntraineddentists.org |
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Description This site is meant to promote a political cause. It will be a microcosm of the need for America to utilize all resources it has available to them. This means removing the barriers to entry that keep qualified foreign trained dentists from joing the resource pool. We'll look for legal lower cost alternative career paths like contributing to open source dental practice management systems, dental assisting, dental informatics, dental hygiene. We'll also tackle the problem of "credential building" for our members. Lastly, we will have a concentrated attack on the arguments the American Dental Assoication puts up to keep us out. |
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Medium Term
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Long Term
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| Site: www.commercialpropertiesinflorida.com |
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Description A real estate web site for my Uncle. He has some ideas about creating a real estate location specific solution for selling commercial properties. I need to get him to put things down on paper instead of showing me other sites and saying build something like that. |
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Medium/Long Term
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Long Term
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| Site: www.lockandkeyid.com |
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Description I met Tony Euganeo through my neighbor. Tony has passion, a lot of ideas, and has built a side-line/moonlight reputation on a niche of locksmithing for classic cars particularly old Porsche's. |
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Medium Term
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Long Term
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| Site: www.dmgjeepwilly.com |
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Description My father-in-law's life's work. For some reason, my writeup was erased. I have to redo this one. Let's tell his story and build it to be something a lot of people will go to and build a community behind it. |
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