As many of you have heard I am leaving my job at The Florida Times-Union and Morris Communications to continue in the Drupal community with Mediacurrent. It was not an easy decision to leave the Times-Union. I started there as an intern in the last semester of college helping Ryan Garfat with Super Bowl coverage and all the sports coverage of the year. I came back in 2007 to replace Ryan when he went to Los Angeles and picked up where I left off. In that time as online sports editor I began a runningjacksonville.com which evolved from Gate River Run results to all the results for all the running races in Jacksonville. In addition I brought schools.jacksonville.com online featuring prep sports coverage and allowing our sports department to get scores online and in print without hassle and prior to converging online and print departments.

After sports I was lucky enough to begin working on migrating jacksonville.com to Drupal 5 in 2008. I had started to try and use Drupal for building a website for Jacksonville's Rotaract club prior to giving up and using Wordpress as so many developers have done. After being forced into using Drupal I saw the light and have continued working on it ever since. We migrated Jacksonville and all the Morris newspapers to Drupal 6 and continued upgrading. Just recently I added a slideshows feature to all the Morris sites which have account for millions of extra pageviews but also a great user experience for the user.

Its been a great ride but at some point it has to end. The next year at Morris would have brought great challenges and rewards for me in working to upgrade all the sites to Drupal 7 and streamline the sites for better performance but in the end its time to move on. I've learned a lot from Morris through the years and will continue to help out whenever I can but its time to move on.

One of the hardest decisions we have to make in life is deciding when to jump out of the comfort zone and into something new. This is one of those moments. I always told myself I wanted to keep moving jobs and getting new experiences every 5-10 years. At Morris I switched job titles four times in my career there and moved offices nine times but new opportunities arise.

I'll be leaving the Times-Union on April 17th and beginning a new career at Mediacurrent. Mediacurrent is one of the top Drupal development firms in the country and biggest in the southeast. I'm very excited to work with them and help expand my knowledge of Drupal and see what the country and other industries are doing with Drupal on a daily basis.

In addition to the great opportunities to learn and continue my love of working in Drupal Mediacurrent is a great community advocate. With sponsoring of Drupalcamps and meetups across the southeast we can continue to bring Drupal to more and more people everyday. Already I started the first Drupal meetup in Jacksonville just the other day and look forward to continuing that. In addition I look forward to contributing more back to the Drupal community and providing more support to others looking to start with Drupal. Mostly though I look forward to the challenges that lie ahead and the road I am heading down with Drupal development. Its been a great ride with the Times-Union and leaving the news business is very hard for someone who has grown up wanting to work in it but the time always comes to move on. Now is that time.