At Drupalcon Paris, Roy Scholten (yoroy) kept an amazing journal of notes from the sessions he attended, combined with illustrations that focused on noteworthy themes being presented by the speakers. I thought this was a really cool way to capture the essence of a session and kind of linger over and focus on the ideas that stuck with you. In that spirit I drew the following at a personal moment during Dries' keynote in Drupalcon San Francisco. While I am nowhere near Roy's talent as an artist, I think it manages to capture the moment.

The slide on Dries' left is a quote from Al Gore. It reads 'If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.' This hit me pretty hard because two days earlier I had held a code sprint for Services, a module I maintain that provides a modular web services interface to retrieve Drupal data. I predicted this would be a mellow affair in which myself and my co-maintainer Marc Ingram would sit in a corner and quietly crank through some issues. Instead, to my great shock, 12 people came by at various points throughout the day wondering how they could help.

This was great but I was caught completly unprepared. I did manage to scramble and get some people working on porting some submodules to the next version of the module. Hugo Wetterberg had written some good docs on this which helped a lot, but once ported testing became a real issue. These implementations are somewhat complicated and testing them is not always the easiest thing in the world. This led to some great discussions about how best to implement the automated testing framework into Services. Overall I'd say it was a success, however it could have been run much more efficiently had there been more organization on my part, especially in terms of having readily available low-hanging fruit for newcomers and non-coders.

This event was kind of eye-opening for me in terms of solidifying the idea that my role in this widely used project is as much project manager and awesome-enabler as coder or engineer. I had always kind of known this at an unconscious level, but this really brought it to the fore. A learning experience, and one I think I can make the most of.

Several months ago, Ryan Stewart (@ryanstewart), a platform evangelist at Adobe, approached me to talk about Services and its future. Adobe realizes that the growth of Drupal presents an opportunity for them, and with Services being the primary way that Flash integrates with Drupal it is in their best interest to keep the module strong and moving forward. To this end, he said that Adobe was interested in sponsoring Services development. This sponsorship would not be directed in any way towards specific features, Adobe was only concerned with keeping the module well-maintained and moving forward, their main concern being that it be ready when Drupal 7 comes out. This is sort of pilot experiment which, if successful, will hopefully lead to more sponsorship down the road.

After summer vacations and other distractions, the contract was finally signed this week and Adobe is officially sponsoring Services for $10,000. This is an amazing donation to the project and the entire team is very grateful to Adobe for their generosity.

So to tie these two threads together, I'd like to use this amazing opportunity to see that Services goes far by ensuring the project can scale and grow by massively lowering the barrier to entry for new contributors and attempting to reduce our support burden so we can focus on the real guts of the project. This will include

• More complete and thorough documentation on coding for Services, including methodologies and recommendations for testing.
• Continuation of a handbook reorganization with the intent of making information easier to find.
• Creation and completion of API documentation for all Services hooks.

This work will not necessarily move us forward the fastest, but it will help to ensure that we go farther in the long term by allowing more people to get involved more easily, and by ensuring that those of us already involved can spend less time on support and more time on building. Some of this work has already started and we should easily be able to complete it with plenty of time leftover to dig into further development on Services 3, a major rewrite of Services including several super-cool features. I'd say it is currently a little more than halfway done. Once it is finished, the port to Drupal 7 should be very easy. This development is currently taking on github, although I expect to transition it to drupal.org CVS as soon as it is reasonably stable.

I will also be holding regular online code sprints in #drupal-services over the coming weeks. Keep an eye on my twitter (@heyrocker) or the Services group on groups.drupal.org for more details. If you are one of the people who got left out in SF, or someone who has always been interested in contributing to Services but didn't know where to start, please come by and get involved! We can't go far without you.