The NHL (National Hockey League), who controls all online operations for the entire league including all team sites, is using Drupal-based sites for its All Star fan balloting, fan favorite awards and "Greatest Captain Sweepstakes."

The seemingly omniscient Boris Mann forwarded me a link this morning to Dries Buytaert's post, and it seems the three of us agree; this is a huge endorsement for Drupal as a CMS. At Strutta, we consider it something of a badge of honour (if indirectly) for our own work, since our contest platform is based on none other than the aforementioned open source CMS. Looks like great minds think alike. 

If Mr. Bettman or his CTO happen to be reading this, I'll also humbly mention that our product is architected, developed, optimized and designed by some of the world's finest Drupal Jedis (you know, in case you ever feel like throwing us a bone like the fan video contests, etc. We're up to the task).

The team here at Strutta is excited and proud to announce that Steven Wittens has joined our team as Senior Architect. 

Although still a young man in his early twenties, Steven is already a wily veteran in the web development space. He has been working on the open source Drupal project (the CMS that runs this site) since its inception, and has contributed a number of modules and themes in the process. While Steven is best known for his skills as a developer, we can also vouch for his skills as a Rock Band drummer, Line Rider animations creator and web designer. In fact, just this week Smashing Magazine chose Steven's blog, Acko.net as one of 50 Beautiful Web Designs. One visit to the site and you can see why: 

Previous to joining us, Steven earned his Masters in Electrical Engineering in Leuven, Belgium, and was most recently a Senior Developer for Bryght, a local Drupal community hosting company. You may have also seen some of his past work in music visualization if you've ever used Winamp.

Here at Strutta, Steven is working on "building out the codebase in a clean and modular fashion." Along with Senior Developer Mike Holly and Senior UED Designer Ross Howard-Jones, Steven has been working on developing the new Strutta contest platform. The seemingly infinite number of statistics, variables and required security features is no match for Steven's ample grey matter.

Did you know that Steven is #10 of all Canadian Directors on YouTube for # of video views? Here's one of his more popular vids, Jagged Peak Adventure, which has nearly 9 million views: 

*img of Steven by Scott Hadfield

Drupal Camp Vancouver was an awesome mix of tech, social fun and open source collaboration. Our thanks go out to all of the organizers for throwing together such an excellent conference.

Strutta's very own Chief Mailroom Officer, Lyal Avery, delivered a great presentation on how we can all help improve Drupal modules and give back to the community, shocking everyone by demonstrating that his technical expertise extends far beyond sorting mail.