Nathaniel Catchpole

As an engineer and technical lead at CivicActions, Nathaniel works on Drupal with an emphasis on module development including usability, performance, unit testing and scalability.

His work on the Sony Internationalization project led to significant i18n improvements to both core and contributed modules in Drupal 6 and the upcoming Drupal 7 release. By focusing on producing code with broad application, and on improving well maintained Drupal.org projects rather than rolling our own, this has directly benefited internationalized sites for other clients - such as Amnesty.org, which is in the process of moving away from custom code to the Drupal 6 i18n suite.

Nathaniel got involved in Drupal and web development accidentally, working on a working class history, news and strike support site which badly needed a more flexible, more secure system to accommodate it's growing content and user base. This rapidly led to an addiction to Drupal, resulting in him being highlighted as in the top-ten contributors to both the Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 core releases. Doing a lot with a little (code, server resources) has turned from a necessity into a virtue but remains a primary factor in approaching projects to minimize costs and maintenance burden.