Since attending PyCon 2022, I saw many different people, and speakers have their own blog where they have talked about what projects they have worked on in the last year. As I got more familiar and met more people in the Python scene the question that always kept coming up was "Do you have a blog or somewhere that you talked about this more in depth that I can look at later?" or "Is there somewhere that I can keep an eye on that isn't Twitter?"

One of the tutorials I attended even gave a presentation on creating their own website that had blog functionality using FastAPI by Mario Munoz

While I really wanted to do this and have my own site using FastAPI, the one thing that held me back is the amount of time to maintain it. It would largely be my own code base that I would have to maintain. I had too many projects (and I still do).

Later that year I took a full time position at Platform.sh as a Cloud Support Engineer. A french Platform as A Service company. I've been working their for almost 2 years at this point. By far most of our applications are PHP based, and with me not having any projects that are PHP based. After around 8-10 months at Platform.  I ended up looking into what may be a small project that I could do in PHP.

Drupal is Platform's bread and butter, we have tons of clients running it. Platform is pretty synonymous with it from its roots (with Acquia probably also coming to mind). Drupal 10 is the newest stable version of Drupal at the time, with Drupal 11 on the way sometime this year. We typically will work with a lot of Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 sites, and I wanted to be more familiar with Drupal 10 for when sites start to migrate it. 

With me wanting a blog, and with it being a very small project that I could work on in my free time, I decided to spin up a Platform.sh project and learn how it works. I basically worked on learning the insides of Drupal and didn't work on a front-end until months later (Last week). Throughout the process, I managed to corrupt a the ClassicBlog theme to where it didn't work anymore, and had to completely rework it from scratch through the use of modules and customization. 

Just being able to have all of my work, projects, and posts about my projects in once place is great. But now I also have a site that I could spin up a staging environment for, if I need to test something.  Whether that entails me having to get Apache Solr installed for this is another question. 

I know the frontend of the site, looks very "templately" as one of my friends put it. But, Jeff Geerling's Drupal site looks very similar and I am a programmer, so I am busy to really put more effort into it. Especially with not being as familiar with the Drupal ecosystem. 

I hope to have a blog about my new RabbitMQ and CockroachDB out soon regarding the setup for DeviantCord 4. I did see that Bluesky went public this week, and I intend on setting an account over there. Drupal doesn't have a module for Bluesky. Hopefully by the time I'm less busy, maybe someone will have created a module. If not, well maybe I will look into Drupal's developer ecosystem :)