A Flood Can Change Your Priorities

This is what my kitchen looked like on November 7th. To even call it a kitchen is a stretch, although there was still a microwave set up off to the side.

The last few months have been an interesting ride. In August I attended Decoupled Drupal Days and Drupal GovCon back to back and while both conferences were excellent, I found myself a little burnt out and itching to deliver something a little more concrete. Thankfully, that happened to align well with the opportunity to lead the development effort to rebuild my company's website. Coinciding with a substantial drop in output on this site, I dove headlong into converting hs2solutions.com to bounteous.com (new site, new brand, new everything!)

October came along, and with it was my first trip to BADCamp at the end of the month. The timing wasn't great as we were launching the new brand on November 5th, but I was looking forward to the conference and the travel. While there was still quite a bit of work to do, I felt like we were on track for launch.

So as I returned home from Berkley on October 28th I thought I had a pretty solid understanding of my priorities - a push to launch. The water line to my dishwasher disagreed, flooding my entire kitchen leading into the final week. As I saw the final touches on the website come together, I also had the joy of watching my kitchen come apart as the water damage was remediated. We made it though - we have a website, and while I don't have a kitchen, at least what remains is dry.

This roller coaster of a fall has given me some interesting perspective as I start looking ahead to next year. I'll typically be making grand plans for the next 365 days, but this year I'm a little more inclined to be flexible and allow myself to be led where my focus can have the most impact. More enhancements lie ahead for the Bounteous site, and my personal site could use a fresh coat of paint along with an update to the latest version of Gatsby. Drupal community wise I'm considering a little less travel and speaking and a little more contribution in code. The UI Patterns Pattern Lab module seems to be getting some renewed interest as UI Patterns recently had a stable release, so I'm going to see if I can add some requested improvements and hopefully bring that module stable as well. Or maybe the proverbial kitchen will flood again, who knows.

Whatever next year brings, I hope it is much drier and has a place to put my dishes.