Cracking it
I’ve started doing some different kind of work recently. As well as a being a flash developer I’m now offering ‘pro drupal services’. Drupal is an open source content management system that allows people to quickly create sophisticated community based websites (very popular concept at the moment, with facebook, myspace and the like), without having to reinvent the wheel every time. I already have a couple of new clients (both in the US as it goes) by whom I’m being paid to work with this new technology.
Trouble is… It’s a pretty steep learning curve. There are few problems that arise when I’m working with flash that I haven’t seen before and can’t fix quickly. That’s not the case with drupal. It’s technical, complex and at times difficult. When it goes wrong I don’t have the experience to spot the solutions.
I’m working on my first professional, paid drupal job this week but it was starting to worry me. I know what I need to do, and I know that I can do it, but I was stuck getting to the point where I could actually start working. Setting up a development environment that worked was starting to look like it was going to beat me. It seemed I wasn’t going to be able to actually do the job, which would have been catastrophic to be honest. The pallaver with those dickheads at NWYH has really knocked my confidence. I’m bouncing back from it now, but to screw up another job- especially the first in what I hope to be a new career direction- might have broken my confidence completely.
So it’s not that I was panicking, but I was certainly getting nervous. Then all of a sudden, after several days of Marting and I working hard, bashing my head against a brick wall and making zero progress, I cracked it last night.
Now I can get on and finish what I’ve been hired to do and bring this project to a successful conclusion, get paid, relax, have a holiday in the knowledge that there’s plenty more of this kind of work lined up.