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On Drupal.org for 14 years 5 months
Over 10 edits to documentation
I've been building Drupal sites, involved in the community, and sometimes working on the code since Drupal 6. I've been building websites since a bit earlier and chose Drupal because I knew I wanted to write more content and less (redundant) code. To keep things a bit confusing, I got this sweet little username on Drupal.org, but of course I couldn't get it on Twitter, etc. So, I'm @lowellmo on Twitter. And I'm LowellMontgomery on GitHub... and I've just started a new photo website, lowemo.photo (more about that, later), and on it goes.
Before the "Web era", I was moonlighting in photographic services and DTP. I dissolved the fledgling photo/graphic business in 2001 to move with my new partner to Germany. I've lived in Germany (and for a while in Italy) since then; it wasn't the right time for her to move to the U.S. And I was born in the UK, so I had a British passport and living in the EU would be possible. And I was a hopeless romantic. (The things we do for love!)
For some time after moving to Europe, I specialized in teaching English (EFL/ESL), while also studying with the Open University (UK) and finishing a series of courses in Web application development as part of my B.Sc. Naturally, my course-work required all original code, but after learning my way around HTML (well, I'd already had websites years before), PHP, JS, and other technologies, I knew that I didn't want to re-invent the wheel for each project or even to build my own wheel to use for my projects. Somewhere along the way, I'd seen a video of Angie Byron ("webchick") talking about how awesome Drupal (4.7) was and how awesome the Drupal community was, so when I decided to build a rather complex personal project, I decided to try doing it with Drupal. It was a big learning curve, but it gave me enough experience to then start an internship at Cocomore AG, where I continued learning more about Drupal and helped with the content of their company sites, including their old Drupal-related blog. I also got to help organize the Drupal 7 release party, organize Cocomore-hosted code sprints for porting modules to Drupal 7, go to some Drupalcons, and became increasingly involved in the Drupal community.
Currently, I'm preparing to move back to the U.S. (Portland, OR) and would be happy to find a good Web agency to work with there. I'm also open to working with a European company to be a point-of-contact in the U.S. I've recently completed CSM and CSPO trainings (Certified ScrumMaster and Certified Scrum Product Owner) after some years of using agile methodologies while working on teams for Cocomore’s projects.
✓ Can opt projects into security advisory coverage
When I can, I try to pitch in; this is how the community works. My first contribution was organizing the Cocomore-sponsored Code Sprints for Drupal 7 and the Drupal 7 release party in late 2010 and early 2011, respectively. I've helped organize and pitched in at DrupalCamps and Drupalcons, wrote and contributed a small module that's enjoyed a lot more use than I expected, helped in various issues queues and was the driving force behind building the "new" Drupal books system on drupal.org (for published books about Drupal, which used to be basically static HTML pages and is now Views-based, with a new content type). I created that content type and the Views displays and staged content and migrated it via a Selenium-based script. Lately, I've been too busy to take on such tasks, but these things change; look for me at the cons! :-D