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PAST ROLE
Senior Drupal Developer

LevelTen Interactive

Senior Drupal Developer building and maintaining client sites on Drupal — the job that led to a published book and a start in the Denton startup community.

The Role

I started at LevelTen as a Developer Intern in 2012 and stayed on as a Senior Drupal Developer through 2018 — building custom modules, features, and themes for client websites, and shipping everything from backend work to production releases on Rackspace, Pantheon, and Acquia.

I also wrote a lot — dozens of posts on LevelTen’s blog covering Drupal hosting comparisons, performance tuning, DrupalVM, Display Suite, and whatever else I’d just spent a week debugging. A few are still up here: Automatic Theme Generation using Bootstrap and LESS, Best Bang for No Bucks – A Comparison of Free Drupal Hosting Platforms and its follow-up The Golden Toolbox, Facet Blocks – The Unknown Hero, Fighting Field Labels with Display Suite Extras, Managing your DrupalVM Environment, and My Top 5 Favorite Drupal Development Workflow Tricks. Enough people read the jQuery Masonry ones that a Packt Publishing editor reached out about turning one into a short book.

Around the same time, a research project from my last semester at UNT pulled me into Denton’s startup community, which is where the DrawAttention side project (and most of what I still do outside of work) traces back to.

Notable Work
Instant jQuery Masonry How-to
A short technical book for Packt Publishing (2013), grown out of a couple of popular blog posts I'd written about the jQuery Masonry library.
DrawAttention
Co-founded a small whiteboard-sticker company on the side (2014–2016) — see the write-up.
What I Learned
01
Writing about what you build is worth it

A couple of blog posts about a library I was already using at work turned into a publishing deal I never went looking for.

02
Production is a different job than local

Shipping to Rackspace, Pantheon, and Acquia environments taught me more about deployment than any tutorial did.

Related Write-ups

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