jobs

Since 2014, I've been working for Acquia, doing some fun work with a great team in Professional Services. I started out managing some huge Drupal site builds for Acquia clients, and ended up devoting all my time for the past couple years to some major infrastructure projects, diving deeper into operations work, Ansible, AWS, Docker, and Kubernetes in production.

In that same time period, I began work on my second book, Ansible for Kubernetes, but have not had the dedicated time to get too deep into writing—especially now that I have three young kids. When I started writing Ansible for DevOps, I had one newborn!

In 2008, I started working for the Archdiocese of St. Louis, my first job where I ended up working on Drupal sites practically full-time (my first Drupal experience was on 4.x in 2005). I also started Midwestern Mac, LLC in 2008, and from that time to now have built two SaaS services (Hosted Apache Solr and Server Check.in), and over 100 other Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 sites, along with a few mobile apps and a Mac app (Quick Resizer).

In 2011, I moved on to Flocknote, and learned a lot building a Drupal-based communications platform used by more than half a million people. This was also a full-time remote job, and I worked with a small but very strong team from Texas, Missouri, Florida, and Tennessee.

I wanted to post this here, since this is more of my sounding board for the Drupal community, but the details are on my personal blog: starting October 6, I will be working for Acquia as a Technical Architect in their Professional Services group!

What does this mean for this site/blog, Hosted Apache Solr, and Server Check.in? Not much, actually—they will continue on, likely at the same pace of development they've been for the past year or so (I'll work on them when I get an odd hour or two...). I am still working on completing Ansible for DevOps, and will actually be accelerating my writing schedule prior to starting the new job, since I'll have a little wedge of free time (a.k.a. unemployment!) between Mercy (my current full-time employer) and Acquia.

I'm excited to start working for Acquia, and am also excited to be able to continue doing what I love—working on Drupal, working on Solr, working on Ansible/infrastructure, and working in their respective communities.

In 2011, I left my job as the web developer for the Archdiocese of St. Louis to join Flocknote, and help build Flocknote into a great communications tool for churches, ministries, teams and organizations.

Lest I forget to mention it, flockNote's 'version 3' website has been launched as of Wednesday afternoon! I spent many (if not most) of my waking hours working on the website and hundreds of features contained within, and after a couple days up and running, the website's still going like a champ!

Excellent home page design by Matthew Warner.

The site is built entirely on top of Drupal 7, and over the past three months, I've grown to appreciate Drupal many times more, as I've learned so much more about the deep and thorough APIs—bugs and all—that have developed into an extremely solid, reliable, and capable framework that is Drupal 7.x. Heck, I even dream about Drupal these days!

Since the announcements seem to be making the rounds today, I figured it would be a good time to post this little bit of news to my blog: I'm leaving my position in the Archdiocese of St. Louis to pursue another opportunity!

Starting May 2, I'll be working with a great new team of Catholics for flockNote, a service/website for Catholic parishes and organizations to help register individuals and send them, well, "Notes!"

I've been working for the Archdiocese of St. Louis for almost three years, first in the Catholic Youth Apostolate, and for the last year as the Director of Web Development, and it's been a wonderful experience. I'd like to sincerely thank everyone in the Curia of the Archdiocese of St. Louis for some great professional development, wonderful memories, and for being in a very wonderful and Catholic workplace (we had Mass in the building almost every day that I was working there!).

From Seth Godin:

Factories used to be arranged in a straight line. That's because there was one steam engine, and it turned a shaft. All the machines were set up along the shaft, with a belt giving each of them power. The office needed to be right next to this building, so management could monitor what was going on.

Read on...

Well, six weeks after leaving the Seminary, I thought I'd provide a small bit in the way of an update about where I am now, as I have finally had a little time to settle into my new role as a member of the the non-seminarian laity. (You can see from my former post that I have figured out that cookies will now have to be made by me, rather than from some magical source that automatically replenishes the kitchen's cookie jar!).

The New Job