Hamilton Trust
Nov. 10, 2014White October asked me to come on board to focus on getting some finishing touches to the Hamilton Trust website so phase 2 could be finished off. Once done, I was asked to stay on to help with some specific change requests, and also to be the sole developer on a new piece of functionality.
Senior developer
Primarily my role was to act as senior developer to help take load off of the lead developer on the team, and have focus on this specific project. There were regular standups and conversations with the client, resulting in implementation plans, and improving current implementations of requirements.
Sole developer
This was later on in my contract, when we had a specific requirement to create an end-to-end registration process for new teachers. There was a kick-off meeting with everyone, and then I took things forward to spec, scope, plan, and implement the Drupal module which would take care of this. I was generally required to self-manage my time, and was also communicating with the wider team to ensure everything was on track to reduce the chance of blockers later down the line.
Architecture and process planning
A piece of my work was to try and tweak the generally development process to work better for Drupal, and also to cater for the fact we would be working on a large piece of functionality alongside support tickets on the same site. This required a lot of time looking at Ansible and Capistrano configuration, getting servers enabled in rackspace, drawing infrastructure diagrams, and documenting how the process would work. Once done, we used this process going forwards on the website, and it appeared to work well with the team we had in place.
Custom module with install configuration
The most interesting part of this module, was how self-contained it was. A lot of planning and work was put into it so that we could install/uninstall the module reliably, and it would manage it's own config itself, without features. It did this using variables and ctools exportables mainly, aswell as a few custom entities.