For the past four months I have been working at Raincity Studios as a co-op student and thought it might be nice to try and sum up my experience. So what did I learn? Well, a couple things struck me in the first week that I still find impressive.

The importance of including community in your projects isn't normally covered in class and so far my schooling has had a focus on siloed programming and development. Raincity really stressed community involvement and some of my tasks in the first week were drafting a blog post, introducing myself to relevant Drupal groups, digging into the code, and filing issues for small improvements, with the overall goal of letting others know what we would be working on. Building momentum on your work is a great way to keep yourself going and often people are even willing to help out. Being able to build on an existing project like the SMS Framework module by Development Seed really helped get our work off the ground and now that I see my code and ideas being picked apart by other community members, it's nice to know that others can continue to improve on our contributions.

There is a lot of engaging work happening in the mobile phone community and we would like to see Drupal become a larger part of it. Half the world's population now has a mobile phone and the lowest common denominator for mobile communication is SMS text messaging.

The SMS Framework module comes with in-line message sending, bulk message sending, phone number integration with user profiles, support for email gateways, as well as support for the Clickatell SMS gateway. For a great overview of some of these features check out a screencast by Development Seed here.

Building on Development Seed's work, we have implemented support for receiving messages as well as support for the Mobile Muse gateway. Mobile Muse is a free SMS platform for non-commercial use hosted here in Vancouver (yes, free – if you're Canadian and would like to have access to the MUSE gateway, we can get you access). Its aim is to foster experimentation and innovation with mobile platforms and for us it is a great way to get our hands dirty with SMS.