Many web developers, especially Drupal developers (who are in particularly high demand these days), won't touch speculative work, period. With so many options available to us, we can choose work that will pay now over work that might pay some day. Still, not everyone who has an idea has the front money to build it. I have had some luck with speculative web development work over the years, and I thought I'd talk about why I do it and how I choose which projects are worth speculating on.

Not long after I diverted from my former career path to pursue life as a Drupal consultant, I received the following advice from a trusted friend: "Every good independent web developer has a project or two that is their own, besides what they do for their clients." It's turned out that he is right. Good speculative work gives me a chance to build a product I'm really happy with, free of portfolio-harming client compromises and NDAs. It also provides me with important experience following a project through its entire life cycle, so that I can jump into my consulting projects and easily answer "where do we go from here?" no matter what state the site is in. Finally, good speculative work gives me something potentially profitable to do when my consulting business slows down. Instead of having tons of work or no work, I have tons of paying work and a little speculative work to fill in the gaps, which is better than no work!

Despite the potential benefits of developing a few well-chosen speculative projects here and there, there will always be far more demand for speculative development than there are developers available to fill it. I, like every other developer who considers speculative work, must somehow separate the wheat from the chaff. There isn't a formula for a successful project (if there were, we'd all use it and be rich) but here are some key points to consider before taking (or offering) a speculative web development project:

Support leeches are a fact of life in the open source world.  Some people don't understand how to be worth supporting.  Others are just so obsessed with their own short-term wants that they are willing to destroy the community they are trying to get support from in the process.  Below are my observations, gleaned from years of actual support leech encounters.

Anatomy

There are two subspecies of support leech, however hybrids are not uncommon:

Today's BoF for new Drupal contributors went better than I could have hoped. I've seen three of the participants in the issue queue already! One thing that came up at the BoF session was taht new contributors aren't always sure how to set up their dev environment and choose tools that will make playing in the issue queue easier

My activitystream_identicagroup module is included with activitystream_identica as a submodule. You may still want to use my view to dress it up a bit -- that will be contributed upstream when I have time. If you previously downloaded and installed activitystream_identicagroup from my blog post, you should disable it and delete it from your modules directery before installing/upgrading to activitystream_identica version 1.1.

If you've tried activitystream_identicagroup module for Drupal, but still don't love the display, here's what I did for Frog and Owl: I installed and enabled activitystream_identicagroup module, then edited one user's settings to add frogandowl group to their activitystream. Note please that the identica field (if enabled) and identica group field are totally different things -- identica group is toward the bottom of the form. Then, I created a view for what I thought was a nicer-looking identicagroup block.

Frog and Owl now has a group on Identi.ca, an open-source microblogging service (like twitter, but without a culture that thinks I want to know when people use the restroom). The activity stream module seemed to be a good way to get the Identi.ca stream on to frogandowl.org, but the activity stream identi.ca module only supported user streams, not groups.

I am almost sorry to see winter break drawing near. For the past two weeks, I've had the privilege of introducing an amazing group of kids to open source software. Inspired by GHOP, Google's pilot Highly Open Participation contest, I've put together an extracurricular computer club for interested students at nearby Sandridge Elementary. We meet twice per week after school for an hour and a half.  I came into this with the slim hope that the school's new administration would let me shepard a couple of students through GHOP. Mr. Hollingsworth's (Sandridge's principal) and Dr.

I started the morning with a round of Drupal lightning talks -- eleven topics in sixty minutes. dww even convinced me that if I ever actually have free time, I should pitch in a bit on project module.

Dries' "State of Drupal" talk was excellent, though the audience as a whole didn't seem to react well to the bit about eliminating the webmaster, developer, designer, etc. The whispers and whines in the crowd implied that some people found those statements threatening. I'm mentioning this because I didn't feel that way, and I'd like my fellow geeks to know why: web technology is an ever-evolving industry. I've been doing system administration since the early 1990's, working with open source software since 1995, and playing with web technologies on and off since the 1990's as well. NOTHING is like it used to be, and *I'm still here*. So are a lot of other people.

I started OSCMS by making hasty child care arrangements from my cell phone in the airport Wednesday night, due to my mom's flight being canceled in the eleventh hour. Everything worked out, though I also spent a large part of Thursday on the phone, ducking in and out of sessions to coordinate the situation at home. My poor mother finally made it to my place late Thursday night. I'm still glad I went, though I feel pretty bad that my mom went through all of those delays and cancellations.

Rasmus Lerdorf's talk alone made the trip worth it. He's an even better public speaker than I'd heard, and I learned some new things about PHP, including the existence of some tools I can't believe I didn't know about. The OpenID talk was well done, but really didn't tell me anything new. I changed my mind about "Theming Drupal" and instead went to chx's talk on the new menu system. I am glad that I did. Not only did I learn quite a bit, but I ran in to webchick, the first of my fellow Drupalers besides chx to whom I could match nick, real name, and face. She is even more awesome in person than online. Her astute questions and comments added a lot to every presentation or discussion I saw her in. I certainly picked up a lot more than I would have had she not been there.

Update: I found a roommie, yay! I can't wait to see you all at the summit.

I'm trying to figure out how I can attend DrupalCon 2007 at the Open Source CMS Summit sponsored by Yahoo! The summit and related events are free, so it's mostly a matter of child care (got it covered) and affording transportation and the hotel stay. If any non-smokers in Washington would like to carpool to Sunnyvale, or any nonsmoking webmonkeys would like to split a hotel room with an easygoing lady geek, please let me know. I'm a night owl, I don't hog the bathroom, and I'm happy sharing accommodations with geeks of any gender. Please note that I am deathly allergic to cigarette smoke, so not smoking in the car/room isn't good enough -- you really have to be a nonsmoker.