busy weeks, digging into code, learning new tools

I've had a few busy weeks, both at work and at home.

I've started creating a new website for my department, and I chose Drupal as the supporting framework. I didn't use Drupal before, so it took me some time to get to know how it works, and that also means getting into the code, because I have to implement some custom things, like creating a new theme to reflect the corporate layout of my university. It took me some time, but I'm almost where I want to be, with only some minor tweaks to do. Now I can get started on the structure of the website and later, I'll start exploring the code some more when I start building custom modules.

When I get home, I start digging into the internals of phpMyAdmin, an Open Source project that is written in PHP and provides a web interface for the MySQL database.
After attending a talk about phpMyAdmin on FOSDEM 2010, a few weeks ago, I decided to get involved in that project so I sent an E-mail to the project admin. After some weeks of getting acquainted with the code, trying to solve some bugs and getting patches out, I got accepted last week as a developer on the phpMyAdmin project.

Besides digging into the code of both Drupal and phpMyAdmin, I'm learning to use vim, a powerful text editor, and git, a distributed version control system, because phpMyAdmin switched to git last week.

I almost forgot to mention that I'm trying to get my new server up and running as my current server is getting a bit outdated.

Much to do, and I guess I found the challenges I was looking for some time ago. And I still have social life and get enough sleep. ;)