Education

Last weekend I had the good fortune of being able to attend TEDxRainer. The event could best be summed up in one word:

Passion.

Everybody there seemed passionate about being there, sharing ideas, looking for ways to make the world a better place. And after spending a solid 10 hours among such passionate, engaged people, it's hard to come away without being inspired.

All the planning and preparation in the world won't prevent an incident, but it can greatly reduce the consequences.

Nothing better prepares you for responding to disaster than experience. In the world of web applications, sometimes we act as firefighters, coming in to rescue the smoldering remains of a hacked site, a crashed server, or an unexpected traffic burst.

No matter how diligent you are at preventing vulnerabilities and securing your environment, it's impossible to be completely secure on the Internet. What you can do is plan for how to limit the damage that people can do when they manage to compromise some part of your system. This line of thinking is called "Defense in depth" -- you can't just apply security updates and call it good.

The International Training and Education Center for Health (I-TECH), a non-profit collaboration between the University of Washington and the University of California, San Francisco, came to Freelock for help building an internal system to improve collaboration and communication within their organization. With a headquarters in Seattle and teams spread across the rest of the world working diligently to improve the development of skilled medical workers and health delivery systems an online based intranet is a perfect solution.

We built a system using a heavily customized Open Atrium installation that features separate, private spaces for each country's program. These spaces provide a central location for every level of the program's operation from overall yearly goals down to an individual user's daily tasks.

I have a lot of respect for graphic designers and people who can come up with clear, concise information in a graphical way. Which is why I'm a huge fan of GraphViz, a crazily effective layout engine for drawing flow charts, graphs, and the like -- you basically throw pairs of labels at it and it draws lines (called "edges" in mathematical graph-speak) between them, doing its best to automatically lay out everything so there's minimal line-crossing.

For the Bellingham School District, Freelock put together a large Drupal site for the main district site, and as a base to build out individual school sites in the future. In addition to creating custom department menu functionality and directory lookups, Freelock provided extensive training material, ongoing consulting, and importing of several thousand pages of content previously managed using Dreamweaver.

I get this question all the time: What's the difference between Drupal and Ruby on Rails, or another framework?

Quite simply, Rails is something you build an application in. Drupal is an application. So chances are you're one major step closer to building a web site that does what you want it to do, if you start with Drupal.