Oh hello,

My name is Rob and I live in beautiful Honolulu, Hawaii, Planet Earth and I'm lucky enough to work for Sprout. I do various development things using Drupal and Flex, some design and a little project management.

I finally had a breather a few weeks ago and sat down to build my first complete sprout. It sounds pretty funny to say I built my first sprout a few weeks ago since I've been working at Sprout for over a year. But, we've all had our heads down for so long, meticulously testing and developing each little piece, that I had to take a step back and look at Sprout Builder as an end-user, not a developer. I think Sprout Builder is one of those things where you don't really realize it's potential until you take 5 minutes and start messing around.

So, I'll set the scene for you: It's about 9pm after a long, gnarly day of coding and I'm pretty burnt out and ready to call it a day (or night I guess). I'm wearing the mandatory Sprout Hawaii office uniform, which consists of OshKosh B'Gosh overalls, a sleeveless turtleneck rashguard, one pair of Tevas, and a corduroy fannypack. As I was pulling the other half of my ham sandwich (the standard Sprout company rations) out of my fannypack, the thought occurred to me that it'd be fun for everybody in the company to have a sprout battle to see who could make the coolest sprout.

With the competitive stake in the ground, I took a minute to brainstorm potential sprout ideas. One of my big loves is music. Like if I wasn't so scared of commitment and it was legal in the state of Hawaii, I would marry it. Since that's frowned upon by society, I instead started to make a sprout of music I'm real passionate about at the moment. I was pretty tired at that point and just wanted to "start" the sprout out and then work on it more the next day. I looked at some of Kevin "The Mad Scientist" Hughes' really cool sprouts (see http://sproutbuilder.com) to steal some ideas and jumped right in. I created the my first sprout page with a little design and a YouTube vid. Then I thought, "Hey, maybe I'll make just one more page and call it a night."

The next time I looked at the clock it was like 1:30am and I had been sprouting like a madman for almost four hours! I had made a nice Master Page template which included navigation which made it easy to add a bunch of pages with photos and audio. Then, I spread it around my social networking sites and watched all my copies update every time I tweaked my sprout (muhuhuwhawwaaa). It took a lot to pull myself away and call it a night. I was quite parched and I had gone cross-eyed from spending 15 hours at the computer, but I had a couple killer sprouts to show for it! And, the potential glory of winning the company sprout contest was a bonus.

Check out and rate my very first "real" sprout at http://sproutbuilder.com/forum/share-your-sprout/if-thats-what-youre ...if that's what you're into.

But, just be aware that sprouting is addictive. So I'm hereby issuing a public service announcement for the rest of you: always use Sprout Builder in moderation.