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Exaltation of Larks celebrates its first 5 years

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A few days ago, Exaltation of Larks celebrated its 5th anniversary. It’s been an exciting five years, and it doesn’t go without saying that we wouldn’t have gotten this far without the outstanding clients, colleagues and talented developers, designers and themers we’ve had the pleasure of working with.

In the United States, we recently observed the Thanksgiving holiday, and our 5th anniversary is a perfect time to take a moment and express our gratitude to everyone who helped us get to where we are today.

From small opportunities to great enterprises

Our first Drupal client was the Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) at the MIT Media Lab. The CBA is best known for Neil Gershenfeld’s FabLab program, which freely shares its open source recipe for workshops built around rapid prototyping tools like laser cutters and 3D milling machines.

The site we built helped unite MIT’s numerous FabLabs around the world and included online courseware, a busy discussion forum, project photo galleries and a downloads section for the open source hardware drivers related tools. It was also the Media Lab’s first Drupal site.

We enjoyed working with the CBA and were inspired by its vibrant culture of experimentation, high technology, modular design and open source software. We value those principles more than ever today.

Doing things that haven’t been done before

We like technical challenges and one project that we’re particularly fond of was successfully integrating a third-party facial recognition library with Drupal. Multifactor authentication systems aren’t new, but we were the first to build a biometric/facial recognition login system for Drupal.

We demonstrated this technology at a Boston Drupal meetup and a video of that presentation is included below. It is also available on blip.tv in several video formats.

Looking back at that project, it’s clear that we were helping Drupal break new ground and didn’t even realize it at the time.

Taking Drupal in new directions

Another highpoint of ours was building Digital Dollhouse, for which we used Drupal to build a virtual world complete with an enormous catalog of virtual items that could be moved around in real-time in a 3D playarea. During the project, part of our team temporarily relocated to Los Angeles, California, where we worked directly with the brilliant Jesyca Durchin and David Schnepp at Digital Playspace.

This opportunity also opened up casual gaming and virtual worlds as new areas of expertise for us, which included perfecting our tools for creating and maintaining virtual economies with Drupal. This was recently covered in one of Lullabot’s podcasts, which features our work with virtual currencies in Drupal.

One of the unexpected developments of working on Digital Dollhouse was that by temporarily relocating our team from Boston, several of the Larks stayed and opened our West Coast office in Los Angeles.

Our community initiatives

Exaltation of Larks has been busy this year in Southern California and we’ve been major sponsors of LA Drupal’s DrupalCamp LA, Git with Drupal 7, Drupal Everywhere, the upcoming Drupal Design Camp LA conference, and countless LA Drupal meetups. We enjoy giving back to Drupal, which has given us so much, and we make an effort to help local community members build their Drupal skills and develop as leaders themselves.

Looking forward to the next five years

As we continue the usual development and design work that we’re known for, we’re also expanding into the training arena early next year. We are partnering with Chapter Three and are organizing trainings that coincide with SandCamp (the San Diego Drupal Camp) and Drupal Design Camp LA. We’ll be publishing our official training schedule in the weeks ahead.

The first five years have been exciting, challenging and nothing if not a lot of fun. Here’s to the next five years!

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