Black Mountain is the personal website of Steven Peck.
The original intention was to continue playing with web pages and in general having a fun little hobby while learning web servers and stuff. The tag line My Experiment on the Internet came to me in February of 2000 as that was what my web site was and still continues to be.
In my work life, I am an IT Professional. Generally with job titles of Systems Administrator, Systems Engineer or whatever the company deems appropriate for their culture and history. Primarily I support Windows environments with a focus on Messaging and Active Directory but have in the past leveraged Linux solutions when appropriate. My biggest asset is being able to troubleshoot issues, a strong desire for a stable environment to drive down support calls and building relationships with other groups to improve communications which help reduce issues in project planning stages. I also like my projects documented. As my cousin says, "No one is indispensable, if you think you are, you can't go on vacations, get promoted or do something different."
My open source hobby started with finding Linux and the Linux Router Project (LRP) . Several of us left the LRP and with Mike Noyes as project manager continued on as the LEAF project, a floppy/flash based firewall/router distribution of incredibly flexibility and power, especially on lower powered systems. My main reason for participation was learning and my coin of trade was support and documentation. I learned a heck of a lot about routing and networking on that project and got to meet and interact with a lot of great people. However, my job and my interests changed over time.
I maintained this site and my sister-in-laws website with a combination of old style tools (Notepad / Dream Weaver / etc). It was a pain to update and maintain and I wanted something my wife could upload pictures and my sister in law could update herself. I also wanted something with a database so I could learn more about maintaining and playing with those as well.
So began the search. I started with the criteria of no phpNuke based software. I did try phpWebsite to begin with, at the time it was still in pre 1.0 versions and I couldn't get it to work with any consistency (especially on IIS5). I found this news article to DeanSpace software which I discovered to be a fork of Drupal. So on October 1st, 2003 I created my account and began my experimentation with Drupal. Figuring out MySQL on Windows, getting Drupal to work with IIS... It took me three times installing 4.3 to realize I had been successful on my first try.
I am still experimenting, learning and having fun. Having gotten involved in this great community of ours, I did the traditional things I normally do. Experiment, learn and ask specific questions, when possible return the favor. The Drupal developers were far more developer oriented back then, 4.3 was out they weren't that for from releasing 4.4, it was a lot of fun. After a while, it was obvious the Drupal community had two groups of users, developers and people who were used to HTML file based web sites and no real clue how to research technology or experiment and ask questions.
My goal became to build the documentation and support infrastructure. Teach people to not answer the same question three times but to document the answer the third time in the handbook and link to it. Help give people the documentation and tools to help others and let them know it was OK to try. For the most part I've succeeded. I got far more involved than I ever thought I would be with the community. I've even gone to two conferences for my own vacation. Currently I hold the title and responsibility of Documentation Team Lead for drupal.org, inheriting the position from Charlie Lowe. and focus on the state of the support forums in the community.
In 2006 I was asked to become a Permanent Member of the General Assembly of the Drupal Association. The reward of doing work in the Open Source community is of course, more work.
