Nick Lewis' post about never naming a module and theme the same thing in the Drupal content management system reminds me of a lesson I learned long ago.

Linux was new and all the rage and I'd just come back from some sort of system administrator training, likely an IBM AIX class. I was liking the whole Linux and UNIX thing and was having a grand old time setting systems up. More than that, though, I was a badass. I could make the system jump, roll over and lie down all with the power of my little finger. This too was in the days of limited disk space and the need to partition file systems for better performance. One night, sometime after midnight, I got this bright idea to make all the file systems separate partitions. It wasn't enough that /usr and /usr/local had their own. After all if two file systems could be mounted on separate disks then why not more things went OK while I moved /home and /opt. On a roll I moved /etc to its own partition. Having carefully copied /etc to the partition and had everything setup it was good to go. Mounted it and everything was good. Well until the next reboot that was. As it turns out it is rather challenging to find the mnt file to know which partitions to mount when it's not mounted as a part of the root filesystem.

It took a while to recover from that one but you can bet it is one "trick" I won't try again.

Like many in the community my first exposure to Acquia came back in the first part of the year. It was an exciting time for the Drupal community and what we learned at Drupalcon in Boston suggested many great things to come. At the time I was running an independent Drupal development shop. The news that an organization like Acquia was going to come to the Drupal ecosystem was great news. Some had early concerns that Acquia might compete in the site development space. These fears turned out to be ill-founded and the entry of Acquia into the marketspace a great boon for small shops like ours. Now the future held the promise that we could continue to work on the development we were doing and help customers build great sites, while having a solid organization we could hand off day-to-day support on the back end.

Over the summer my excitement about Acquia grew. First talking to Robert Douglass and Chuck D'Antonio about the partner program Acquia was putting together was very encouraging. The model sounded like it would very much help our business and grow the opportunities for all kinds of great shops doing awesome things with Drupal. Beyond a solid model as the various meetings about the partner program progressed it became obvious that not only was the model good but that feedback was being incorporated and the offering tuned in response to input from those participating in the discussion.

As the days of summer grew hotter and longer I was fortunate to participate in the alpha and then beta testing of Acquia Drupal, then code-named Carbon and the Acquia Network which was once "Spokes". These early sessions indicated Acquia had great things going on. And then as summer vacations everywhere were drawing to a close an opportunity to join the great team at Acquia came along. So for the last month I've been making the transition from partner to employee. It has been an invigorating experience being a part of the launch of Acquia Drupal and the Acquia Network. Without a doubt there is plenty left to do but the first release of Acquia Drupal is out the door and the Acquia Network is live.

So what does all this mean?

You wouldn't know it from the dearth of blogging going on here but indeed we do exist. And now, only several years after the house we live in was built, Google Maps thinks we exist too. No more do we have to explain to delivery drivers that they can't use Google Maps or they'll end up on the other side of the park with no way to get here. More soon on life, universe and yes, even Drupal but for now we're enjoying the first rain on this beautiful Saturday morning.