BIO:

Matthew is married to his wonderful wife, Amanda Connerton, and lives in the foothills of North Carolina with two kittens and a pony.  He is a developer and consultant that has been working with Drupal for the last three years. He is proficient in PHP, SQL, jQuery, Javascript, and Adobe Flex. He is a module maintainer and Drupal enthusiast, and can be found attending and speaking at Drupal events across the east coast. Matthew divides his professional time between working on client projects and working on his modules on Drupal.org. He also enjoys spending time researching and teaching Drupal topics at different venues when possible.

INTERVIEW:

How did you get started with Drupal?
Before I was a Drupal developer, I was an Adobe Flex developer. I got a job with a company that wanted to put a flex frontend to a Drupal backend. I worked mostly with flex, but was introduced to the Drupal 5 framework. When I left that job I decided to focus my time on Drupal for now on.
You organized DrupalCamp Asheville-- can you share something about that experience?
Organizing a drupal camp was both extremely easy and pretty difficult at the same time. I had a fantastic support team of individuals in the area that were essential in making the event happen. There was plenty of interest, generous sponsors, and the drive to make it happen. The key to making this camp happen was pulling on the community for advice and support. I spoke to many other drupal camp organizers to get the do's and don'ts to make our camp successfull. Besides a few video hardware issues, the camp was perfect!
What are you into these days as far as Drupal Development?
There is so much to do with Drupal that its very hard for me to focus on one area. My primary focus right now however is streamlining the development process with features and drush_make. I am also actively working, researching, and learning about tools to make development with teams effective and efficient using tools like git and drush. There are also a number of distros and ideas I have brewing in my library that I hope to get to one day, or get a team together to make it come to life.
Can you tell about a project or Website you've worked on that you're particularly proud of? What makes it special?
There are quite a few I'm proud of. The aclu-co.org is probably my favorite website so far. It was the first "enterprise" level (or closest thing to) website we have done. It was particularly special to us because we go to work with a great organization and used it as an opportunity to try out some of the latest and greatest at the time including deploying on a mercury VPS, using fusion and Skinr for easy theming and management by the client, and a number of other small but lovely modules. The client was quite satisfied and it is the pride of our (public) portfolio.
Any non-profit or volunteer work keep you busy?
Besides working on modules for Drupal.org? We had such a successful Drupal camp in Asheville last year, we wanted to expand and share that success with other groups in the NC area. We are currently forming a non-profit in NC that will be a collaboration organization that exists to support Drupal events in NC. We hope to have 3 more camps in NC this year as well as support the local user groups.