Angela Byron is moving on. Known as "webchick" to most in the Drupal community, she came to us as a shy, wide-eyed, and timid programmer and over the past 5 years, we've watched her grow into a self-confident decision maker capable of leading an entire open source project.
Angie joined Lullabot in 2006 and for her first project, we zoomed her off to London to help us build one of Drupal's first "big projects" – MTV.co.uk, the website for MTV in the UK. We all had steep learning curves on that project, but we learned a lot, and launched a great Drupal site. By the next summer, we'd rented an apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side and Angie, along with Addi Berry, and Nate Haug spent 3 intensive months architecting and building MyPlay, a video website for Sony Music. It was during this time that Addi empowered Angie to swear - a helpful skill on some high-pressure projects.
Over the years, Angie has led Using Drupal (O'Reilly), a book co-authored by several on the Lullabot team. She's also led consulting relationships with Anderson Merchandisers, The New America Foundation, The George Lucas Educational Foundation, and several others. More recently she led development and site architecture for Grammy365, an extranet site for members of the Recording Academy. She's also been an empathetic and knowledgeable trainer, participating in many Lullabot workshops, videos, and the Do It With Drupal conference.
But all of that is eclipsed by her biggest project to date: Drupal 7. For the past 3 years, Angie, along with project founder Dries Buytaert, have led the development of the latest version of our beloved CMS. One of only 2 code committers, Angie spent thousands of hours reading and rereading every line of code which was submitted by thousands of developers in the Drupal community; she diplomatically participated in hundreds, if not thousands, of discussions in the Drupal issue queue; and she made decisions – lots of them – which shaped the most revolutionary release of Drupal to date. Simply put, you will not find another person on this planet who cares more about Drupal or is willing to work harder for Drupal than Angela Byron.
She's been recognized for her achievements too. Prior to being chosen for the gargantuan task of leading Drupal 7, Angie won the Google-O'Reilly 2008 Open Source Award for Best Contributor across all open source projects. More recently, she was the first woman to appear on the cover of the Linux Journal. In January and Febrary of this year, Lullabot put her on tour teaching people about Drupal 7 and we printed up (now coveted) t-shirts with WEBCHICK printed across the front in an homage to Metallica. Angie has become a well respected leader in the Drupal community and people are often shocked that she still remains so friendly, approachable, and willing to help out new Drupalers.
We've been proud to support Angie as she's worked so tirelessly on all of these projects over the years. We're sorry to see her go, yet we want to be sure to publicly thank her for everything she's done not only for and with Lullabot, but for everything she's done for the people of the Drupal community. Angie has accepted a job at Acquia which will allow her to work full time on Drupal core. We wish her well.
We hope that whenever Angie hears herself drop an f-bomb, she'll have fond memories of her time with Lullabot.