This is the first in, hopefully, a many part series of short posts where I want to help highlight people in the Drupal community who I think are awesome, but might not get much spotlight. See below for more explanation.
The first person I want to highlight and say thank you to is Tom MacWright (tmcw). I have worked with him on the OpenLayers module for over a year now and he has been crucial in making the project what it is today and teaching me lots of things along the way. He also is very active in the overall web mapping space in Drupal and outside with such technologies as Mapnik and Mapbox.
Tom has recently lead the upgrade of the OpenLayers module to Drupal 7 (still alpha) and is very active in the issue queue. He has definitely picked up a lot my slack. Tom was also the driving factor behind getting the OpenLayers module on a Ctools architecture, which, though took me a while to see, has shown me the power of Ctools and the plugin goodness. This has lead me to starting a new project to build a common set of Ctools plugins for a general mapping architecture in Drupal.
Tom is also one of the leads at Dev Seed behind awesome work like live complex mapping in Drupal (TileLive), Maps on a Stick, TileMill, and so much more. Though a lot of this work is still not all that accessible to the average web developer, Tom and his colleagues have and are making huge strides towards a future where custom, open source web mapping is easy for us all. This is just awe inspiring and deserves a great big thank you; keep up the awesome work.
About These Posts
Drupal Highlights is a series of short posts saying a small token of appreciation to members in the Drupal community who might not otherwise get as much recognition as the more prominent contributors in the community do (though they totally deserve it as well). I think it is very important and strengthening for a community to showcase all the amazing things that happen in a community no matter how small. Please let me know if you want me to highlight someone you know.