Acquia Inc. podcasts

Part 2 of 2 - Sebastian Bergmann, the maintainer of the PHPUnit testing framework, came to our office in Cologne, Germany to talk with Campbell Vertesi (@CampbellVertesi) and me about PHP, PHP FIG and the PSRs, and of course testing. It is another in the series of interviews we carried out with important and interesting people from the PHP community in preparation for DrupalCon Asia in Mumbai. Our session, "Meet PHP-FIG: Your community just got a whole lot bigger, Drupal" is about Drupal 8’s membership in the world of PHP interoperability. We’re covering the basics of what the PHP Framework Interoperability Group (PHP-FIG) is, what the various PSRs are and do, and talking about testing and dependency management, and what it means to be a part of the new PHP community — including having better architecture, cleaner code, and less risk thanks to more interoperability. All of this adds up to a big move to get projects “off their islands,” saving developers a lot of code and companies a lot of money, among other benefits. "I always think about testing as an investment into the future. I also like to think about tests as being executable specification and or documentation of my software." Q: How can testing save people time and frustration? Sebastian: I always think about testing as an investment into the future. It’s incredibly hard to believe if you have never done it and have not been doing it for a couple of months because we have to make this experience – just that it’s one of those things that most people don’t believe when they are told or when they read about it. You have to make the experience yourself. “It’s an investment into the future,” like I said. So today I have the requirements for some process of my application and I implement that. Then in six months’ time or next year, something changes. I make the change and I don’t know--if I don’t have tests in place--that by making that change I did not break anything else that used to work. If I have tests in place I first go in (and if I do test-driven development), then I change the test first to reflect the new requirements. I run the test and the test will not work ... of course. The software has not been adapted yet for that. I also like to think about tests as being executable specification and or documentation of my software. So I’ve changed my specification. Okay so I’ve written down in code what the software should do and then I make the change. Now the test can tell you you things. Yes, the thing that you wanted to change now behaves in the way that you wanted it to behave after the test. More importantly, all the other things around it that are not supposed to change have in fact not changed. Q: It makes any change or any pivot or any addition to what you’ve written much, much easier and much more efficient and much more - with a lot less risks in it. Sebastian: It reduces the risk but it also reduces the time that it takes and that’s the most fascinating thing. There are plenty of studies out there from Microsoft, from Ericsson, from IBM that said when a team starts to introduce test driven development, for instance. For the first couple of months or so they will be 15% to 30% slower than they used to be because they have to learn a new tool. They have to wrap their head around a new process. After that they become much more productive because they spend almost no time on debugging anymore. Q: Because they’re testing before they commit? Sebastian: Yes. Q: Actually when we think about it that way then the value of the test increases proportionate to the complexity of the application. Sebastian: Yes. Q: If you’re writing a 15-line PHP snippet, writing a test is not going to help you. On the other hand if you’re writing a piece of code that has to integrate into a really complex multi headed application--I’m looking at every Drupal developer in the world--then writing a test for that 15 lines can make a really big difference...

Part 1 of 2 - Sebastian Bergmann, the maintainer of the PHPUnit testing framework, came to our office in Cologne, Germany to talk with Campbell Vertesi (@CampbellVertesi) and me about PHP, PHP FIG and the PSRs, and of course testing. It is another in the series of interviews we carried out with important and interesting people from the PHP community in preparation for DrupalCon Asia in Mumbai. Now we're releasing those to you! Our session, "Meet PHP-FIG: Your community just got a whole lot bigger, Drupal" is about Drupal 8’s membership in the world of PHP interoperability. We’re covering the basics of what the PHP Framework Interoperability Group (PHP-FIG) is, what the various PSRs are and do, and talking about testing and dependency management, and what it means to be a part of the new PHP community — including having better architecture, cleaner code, and less risk thanks to more interoperability. All of this adds up to a big move to get projects “off their islands,” saving developers a lot of code and companies a lot of money, among other benefits. “Hi. I’m Sebastian Bergmann. About 15 years ago I created PHPUnit to help PHP developers build better software. I would like to congratulate the Drupal community on the release of Drupal 8. As far as I know PHPUnit played some role in it.” :-) Q: You discovered PHP in 1997 or 1998, why did you stick with it for the last 18 years? Sebastian: I like the language. I like the very pragmatic approach to solving the web problem, which does not mean that I’m happy with everything that is in PHP. There are some things in PHP that I don’t think should be in PHP. There are some things missing that I think should be in there. Some things have been implemented in a way that I wouldn’t have done it, wouldn’t have done that way if I were the only one to decide but I can see the compromise was necessary for the greater good, but all in all, I’m very happy with PHP. Q: What is PHPUnit? How can I benefit from it? Sebastian: PHPUnit is a so-called unit testing framework that’s stands in the tradition of the XUnit family of testing frameworks that began a really, really long time ago. So, it’s a unit testing framework or at least that’s how PHPUnit started. It’s used for so much more than just unit testing these days. The unit test helps you test one unit of code in isolation from all collaborating objects. So, for instance, you have one method of a class and you want to test this known input that you get the expected output. That’s the smallest kind of test that you can do. You can do all kinds of other tests in a much larger scope. One of the biggest, one of the most important things in testing software is finding the smallest scope in which you can test what you want to verify and the smallest thing that you can test and the smallest scope that you can test in is the unit test scope. If you make it larger then you come to integration tests when you, for instance, test that one piece of code interacts correctly with another system, be it a web service or a database or whathaveyou. The largest thing that you can test in an automated way would be to test the entire application as a whole, which in the case of a web application it usually means, if you take a real HTTP client, send them real HTTP requests to a real HTTP server, get it to real HTTP response back and inspect that. That you can also do with PHPUnit. Q: What does a PHPUnit bring for Drupal developers? What do they get out of your collaboration with Drupal? Sebastian: Hopefully, better code, hopefully less bugs and hopefully fun. Q: Fun? Sebastian: Yes, it’s hard to believe and when I started working on PHPUnit and got interested in testing, I really couldn’t believe it, but it turns out there are many, many people out there, many developers for whom testing is a lot of fun. It brings, to some ... it has this feeling of being destructive in a constructive way ... like trying to find ways to break...

Part 1 of 2 - Sebastian Bergmann, the maintainer of the PHPUnit testing framework, came to our office in Cologne, Germany to talk with Campbell Vertesi (@CampbellVertesi) and me about PHP, PHP FIG and the PSRs, and of course testing. It is another in the series of interviews we carried out with important and interesting people from the PHP community in preparation for DrupalCon Asia in Mumbai. Now we're releasing those to you! Our session, "Meet PHP-FIG: Your community just got a whole lot bigger, Drupal" is about Drupal 8’s membership in the world of PHP interoperability. We’re covering the basics of what the PHP Framework Interoperability Group (PHP-FIG) is, what the various PSRs are and do, and talking about testing and dependency management, and what it means to be a part of the new PHP community — including having better architecture, cleaner code, and less risk thanks to more interoperability. All of this adds up to a big move to get projects “off their islands,” saving developers a lot of code and companies a lot of money, among other benefits. “Hi. I’m Sebastian Bergmann. About 15 years ago I created PHPUnit to help PHP developers build better software. I would like to congratulate the Drupal community on the release of Drupal 8. As far as I know PHPUnit played some role in it.” :-) Q: You discovered PHP in 1997 or 1998, why did you stick with it for the last 18 years? Sebastian: I like the language. I like the very pragmatic approach to solving the web problem, which does not mean that I’m happy with everything that is in PHP. There are some things in PHP that I don’t think should be in PHP. There are some things missing that I think should be in there. Some things have been implemented in a way that I wouldn’t have done it, wouldn’t have done that way if I were the only one to decide but I can see the compromise was necessary for the greater good, but all in all, I’m very happy with PHP. Q: What is PHPUnit? How can I benefit from it? Sebastian: PHPUnit is a so-called unit testing framework that’s stands in the tradition of the XUnit family of testing frameworks that began a really, really long time ago. So, it’s a unit testing framework or at least that’s how PHPUnit started. It’s used for so much more than just unit testing these days. The unit test helps you test one unit of code in isolation from all collaborating objects. So, for instance, you have one method of a class and you want to test this known input that you get the expected output. That’s the smallest kind of test that you can do. You can do all kinds of other tests in a much larger scope. One of the biggest, one of the most important things in testing software is finding the smallest scope in which you can test what you want to verify and the smallest thing that you can test and the smallest scope that you can test in is the unit test scope. If you make it larger then you come to integration tests when you, for instance, test that one piece of code interacts correctly with another system, be it a web service or a database or whathaveyou. The largest thing that you can test in an automated way would be to test the entire application as a whole, which in the case of a web application it usually means, if you take a real HTTP client, send them real HTTP requests to a real HTTP server, get it to real HTTP response back and inspect that. That you can also do with PHPUnit. Q: What does a PHPUnit bring for Drupal developers? What do they get out of your collaboration with Drupal? Sebastian: Hopefully, better code, hopefully less bugs and hopefully fun. Q: Fun? Sebastian: Yes, it’s hard to believe and when I started working on PHPUnit and got interested in testing, I really couldn’t believe it, but it turns out there are many, many people out there, many developers for whom testing is a lot of fun. It brings, to some ... it has this feeling of being destructive in a constructive way ... like trying to find ways to break...

Erica Schroder joined Acquia in 2012 as a graduate of the Acquia U Drupal training bootcamp and is an inspiration to me as a successful career-changer. As part of running arts and dance businesses, she's had a hand in with Drupal since Drupal 5 days, but Acquia U and her subsequent experience have helped make her a Drupal professional. We got the chance to sit down together in 2015 at Acquia's Boston headquarters. Q & A A few questions and answers from our conversation: Q: What made you stick with Drupal? Erica: I really gravitate towards things that are challenging. I don’t like things to be easy. If it seems like a puzzle and it seems like something I could work at to solve, it’s going to keep me engaged. I found Drupal to be really engaging on that level and I found it to be continually engaging everyday as I continue to maintain Acquia properties here. Q: What were your expectations going into Acquia U and how did you feel when you were accepted? Erica: I was surprised when I was accepted because I don’t have a technical background. I was a dance major and I have a master’s degree in non-profit arts management so I legitimately had never heard of command line, I had never seen a PHP template file, I had never done any of that so I thought it was really a far long shot so I was surprised. When I was accepted, I was expecting to figure out how to work with a team, see the backend code of a site, understand more HTML, CSS and PHP and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. Q: What’s the most important thing you got out of Acquia U? Erica: I think learning how to work on a team for a site was the most important thing for me because before this experience, I had done sites on my own so I didn’t have to worry about what other people were doing with their code, how it would conflict with my code if we were on the same timeline or timeframe for anything, that was never an issue or a conversation. So figuring out how version control works, figuring out how a team has to prioritize their projects to meet different deadlines and priorities and working within a larger organization with a lot of stakeholders, we learn that in Acquia U doing different projects and I do that every day now on acquia.com. Q: What’s the one piece of advice that you’d give people looking for a new career? Erica: I definitely was a career-changer, that’s for sure. You have to be willing to step back and know that you’re not the expert anymore. You’re not at a management level anymore. You’re not at the top of your field anymore. You’d have to be really comfortable in your own skin and know that it’s okay and maybe that you’re going to start maybe from the ground level and that it’s going to take you some time to work your way back up in the new field. Q: Would you recommend Acquia U to others? Erica: If people are willing to do a career change or if they’re looking to become a professional as opposed to a home cook, absolutely, yes. Interview video - 7 min. More podcasts about Acquia U Acquia U: "Making the world a better place, one Drupalist at a time." - with Amy Parker Acquia U: "Jump in and own it. Kickstart your career." - meet Amy Parker Meet Erica Ligeski: Drupal training means jobs (2013) Guest dossier Name: Erica Schroder Work affiliation: Engineer, Acquia Drupal.org: eligeski Twitter: @ericaligeski LinkedIn: Erica Schroder About: "As an Engineer at Acquia, I am part of the acquia.com website team. I work closely with marketing and design to bring their hopes and dreams to life on the web. Our website is a living organism, constantly growing, changing and adapting to the needs of a changing market; this in turn requires diligent care, maintenance and refreshes of look and feel. Outside of Acquia, I am...

Part 2 of 2 - Sharing is good for business. Ambrosia Vertesti, Global VP Human Resources at Hootsuite, and I sat down to talk about how open source models are spreading to human resources and other, non-code parts of business today. In part one, I strove to understand HR's needs, terminology, and perspective and what drew Ambrosia and her peers to open source. In part two, our conversation moves on to how open source values like sharing and contribution are helping human resources and a lot more about #HROS. "The How isn't competitive intelligence. That should be baseline." I learned about the #HROS movement watching Ambrosia and Lars Schmidt co-present the keynote address at LinkedIn's 2015 Talent Connect conference. Check that video out! Interview video - 22 min. #HROS - Sharing The How The sharing and contributing aspects of #HROS--the stuff that makes it "open source"--came about out of necessity, just like so many open source software projects and tools. When she was hired as the 20th employee, Ambrosia was the sole HR person at Hootsuite and she was responsible for four other departments ... Welcome to startups! She lacked time and resources and turned to her network for help. "I was in Vancouver. We weren't in the epicenter of innovation and startups. We were in a place that the ecosystem was just growing around us. We needed to collaborate. I was empowered by our founder to take risks and find a different way to do HR. This was my opportunity to see if this thing is real!" "It started out of necessity and being empowered to take a risk. That was me reaching out to people. 'I'm the only person here. I'm trying to find a way to do things.' I explained the problem I had and asked, 'Do you have The How?' Because a lot of times, people talk about why you should do something and what you should do. If you read Forbes articles about best workplaces and all that kind of stuff, like 'Performance Management Should be Dead!' And I say okay, but how are you going to ensure that you have a high-performance culture that is fair and equitable? So The How is missing from anything you read online. And in safe-safe circles, behind closed doors, people were telling me The How." "The How isn't competitive intelligence. That should be baseline." Ambrosia recognized that this practical information--what she calls "The How"--is like the code in open source software. It doesn't give you a competitive advantage over others, that all lies in other areas, just like we can all use Linux or Drupal to level the playing field and then compete on other areas of differentiation. "Competitive intelligence is me taking that and making sure it fits with my organization ... I've probably combined it with 4 or 5 other Hows ... It's alchemy. There are things I see as competitive intelligence: compensation, stuff like that." Opening up - asking for help, giving help I wanted to know how Ambrosia's peers reacted when she opened up to them about her needs, problems, and challenges. She told me, "I found they were very collaborative. My experience has been that anybody I ever sent a Bat-Signal out, asking for help, people have come and helped me. And then I've reciprocated when I was able to." Ambrosia could swap, for example, her expertise in the world of social media for someone else's experience of policy scalability at large corporations. "It was really about equal value propositions. It wasn't just about solving a need. I felt as though we could give something back and that every HR practitioner would have something they're up against," this sounds so familiar to me from the development and website-building world, "and that they could give an equal-value reciprocity ... if the got over themselves and the stereotypes and the reputation." #HROS isn't the first time HR practitioners have ever shared or collaborated, but Ambrosia explains, "My thought was that we could bring this out into the practitioners' space instead of...

I sat down with Rebekah Simensen & Beau Simensen as SymfonyLive Berlin 2015 was wrapping up. Beau is the maintainer of the Sculpin PHP static site generator and was until recently a voting member of PHP-FIG. Rebekah is the artist known as ninjagrl, whom I had heard of because of her #ossart, open-source-inspired work. Beau has promised to come back on the podcast soon to explain all about the PSR 7 HTTP message standard interfaces, but I didn't want to pass up this chance to meet such interesting people! Topics covered in our conversation include Drupal 8 and its release cycle, fish, Sculpin and its origin story, Symfony and SensioLabs, ninjagrl's #ossart, PHP-FIG, and more. Comparing company- versus community-driven projects In our conversation, Beau and I touch on the differences and benefits between a company-driven open source project like SensioLabs supporting Symfony, Twig, and their communities and the larger, wilder world of the community-driven open source project Drupal. Beau points out that in the case of Symfony, "You end up with people who are committed to providing it. They put money into supporting the ecosystem that they're building. I think it's a nice thing and I don't see it that often. It's unique and it's interesting to see what they've done with the community. And they've still been able to build a big ecosystem around it even though it's funded by a company." He continues, "It's nice to have someone who has the final say: 'This is going to happen. This is not going to happen.'" We then talked about the long Drupal 8 release cycle as an example of something that probably would not have gone down the same way if Dries or a specific company had tighter control over Drupal. To be fair, the Drupal core developer community has recognized this weakness and committed to regular releases and semantic versioning (new features every six months!) for Drupal 8. Ninjagrl and #ossart Among other projects, Rebekah's online artist persona "ninjagrl" has made a series of paintings--#ossart--"that have been inspired by the names of open-source projects, services, PHP community lingo, and related technical jargon." We talk about how she was exposed to this world through long runs with Beau and his venting about the stresses and politics of being part of PHP-FIG around 2013. The poignant "Pull Request" ... ninjagrl's #ossart! Check out ninjagrl's site and galleries at https://ninjagrl.com/ Buy #ossart prints! Interview video - 22 min. 30 sec. Guest dossier - Beau Simenson Beau's bio from monii.com sums it up pretty well: I keep the engineering team running at maximum power. I architect, design and oversee platform development. This picture we’re painting? It’s got my signature all the way through it, not just in the bottom left hand corner. Beau Simensen (@beausimensen, beau.io) has been a professional polyglot programmer since 1998. He is the Co-Founder and Software Architect for monii.com and is co-host of That Podcast (@thatpodcast, thatpodcast.io). An active open-sourcer, he created Sculpin (sculpin.io) and helped create Stack PHP (stackphp.com). He is also the Sculpin representative to the PHP Framework Interoperability Group (PHP-FIG). Beau is a proponent of framework agnostic code. Unglue all the things! At dflydev Beau was responsible for high-touch client services for two major clients over five years. Tasks and projects included devops, continuous integration, online resource management, enterprise application development, and writing C code for embedded systems. For Monii, Beau is responsible for ensuring Monii’s technical execution follows (and keeps up) with the commercial requirements of the business. These responsibilities include architecture, design, and workflows to support continual development, testing, and deployment.

I sat down with Rebekah Simensen & Beau Simensen as SymfonyLive Berlin 2015 was wrapping up. Beau is the maintainer of the Sculpin PHP static site generator and was until recently a voting member of PHP-FIG. Rebekah is the artist known as ninjagrl, whom I had heard of because of her #ossart, open-source-inspired work. Beau has promised to come back on the podcast soon to explain all about the PSR 7 HTTP message standard interfaces, but I didn't want to pass up this chance to meet such interesting people! Topics covered in our conversation include Drupal 8 and its release cycle, fish, Sculpin and its origin story, Symfony and SensioLabs, ninjagrl's #ossart, PHP-FIG, and more. Comparing company- versus community-driven projects In our conversation, Beau and I touch on the differences and benefits between a company-driven open source project like SensioLabs supporting Symfony, Twig, and their communities and the larger, wilder world of the community-driven open source project Drupal. Beau points out that in the case of Symfony, "You end up with people who are committed to providing it. They put money into supporting the ecosystem that they're building. I think it's a nice thing and I don't see it that often. It's unique and it's interesting to see what they've done with the community. And they've still been able to build a big ecosystem around it even though it's funded by a company." He continues, "It's nice to have someone who has the final say: 'This is going to happen. This is not going to happen.'" We then talked about the long Drupal 8 release cycle as an example of something that probably would not have gone down the same way if Dries or a specific company had tighter control over Drupal. To be fair, the Drupal core developer community has recognized this weakness and committed to regular releases and semantic versioning (new features every six months!) for Drupal 8. Ninjagrl and #ossart Among other projects, Rebekah's online artist persona "ninjagrl" has made a series of paintings--#ossart--"that have been inspired by the names of open-source projects, services, PHP community lingo, and related technical jargon." We talk about how she was exposed to this world through long runs with Beau and his venting about the stresses and politics of being part of PHP-FIG around 2013. The poignant "Pull Request" ... ninjagrl's #ossart! Check out ninjagrl's site and galleries at https://ninjagrl.com/ Buy #ossart prints! Interview video - 22 min. 30 sec. Guest dossier - Beau Simenson Beau's bio from monii.com sums it up pretty well: I keep the engineering team running at maximum power. I architect, design and oversee platform development. This picture we’re painting? It’s got my signature all the way through it, not just in the bottom left hand corner. Beau Simensen (@beausimensen, beau.io) has been a professional polyglot programmer since 1998. He is the Co-Founder and Software Architect for monii.com and is co-host of That Podcast (@thatpodcast, thatpodcast.io). An active open-sourcer, he created Sculpin (sculpin.io) and helped create Stack PHP (stackphp.com). He is also the Sculpin representative to the PHP Framework Interoperability Group (PHP-FIG). Beau is a proponent of framework agnostic code. Unglue all the things! At dflydev Beau was responsible for high-touch client services for two major clients over five years. Tasks and projects included devops, continuous integration, online resource management, enterprise application development, and writing C code for embedded systems. For Monii, Beau is responsible for ensuring Monii’s technical execution follows (and keeps up) with the commercial requirements of the business. These responsibilities include architecture, design, and workflows to support continual development, testing, and deployment.

Something a little different this week: In cooperation with the Swedish "Drupalsnack" ("Talking Drupal") podcast, Leander Lindhal, Robert Douglass, & Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire get together at the 2015 Internetdagarna in Stockholm. Quick notes In our conversation we go over all of our Drupal "origin stories" and reminisce about how we got where we are today, what we did, and what we do now. We talk about Drupal 8, who it's for, what it does, how every size of site and user benefit from the so-called "enterprise" features in it. We also compare it with some other options, the concept of the right tool for the job, and the value of having other perspectives (shout out Larry Garfield, Getting off the Island, and Building Bridges). Robert points out that most technology choices come down to having an honest and comprehensive requirements gathering process. Leander asks about one of Robert's favorite topics: how (Drupal and open source) developers can be better supported financially, what options for commercializing open source software there are, and how this can relate to code/product quality and quality of life for developers. Software as a service (SaaS) products built with Drupal like Roomify come up, too. In response to a question about standardizing Drupal development and architecture models, Acquia's Drupal distribution, Lightning came up, as well as the fact that including numerous components from other open source projects (Symfony, Twig, etc.) in Drupal 8 makes a positive difference on this front. Links & References Drupalsnack Episode 57 Internetdagarna Building digital government services? Here is the proven choice. - Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire at Internetdagarna 2015 Video!

Something a little different this week: In cooperation with the Swedish "Drupalsnack" ("Talking Drupal") podcast, Leander Lindhal, Robert Douglass, & Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire get together at the 2015 Internetdagarna in Stockholm. Quick notes In our conversation we go over all of our Drupal "origin stories" and reminisce about how we got where we are today, what we did, and what we do now. We talk about Drupal 8, who it's for, what it does, how every size of site and user benefit from the so-called "enterprise" features in it. We also compare it with some other options, the concept of the right tool for the job, and the value of having other perspectives (shout out Larry Garfield, Getting off the Island, and Building Bridges). Robert points out that most technology choices come down to having an honest and comprehensive requirements gathering process. Leander asks about one of Robert's favorite topics: how (Drupal and open source) developers can be better supported financially, what options for commercializing open source software there are, and how this can relate to code/product quality and quality of life for developers. Software as a service (SaaS) products built with Drupal like Roomify come up, too. In response to a question about standardizing Drupal development and architecture models, Acquia's Drupal distribution, Lightning came up, as well as the fact that including numerous components from other open source projects (Symfony, Twig, etc.) in Drupal 8 makes a positive difference on this front. Links & References Drupalsnack Episode 57 Internetdagarna Building digital government services? Here is the proven choice. - Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire at Internetdagarna 2015 Video!

Drupal is the open source, community software powering successful digital government around the world. I had the honor of speaking about Drupal and government to a packed room at the Internetdagarna in Stockholm, in November 2015. I used the opportunity to highlight Drupal’s success in helping governmental organisations and public bodies and went into some detail about the Australian government’s Drupal-based govCMS solution, as a shining example of good policy meeting good software. In conversations following my presentations, members of the Nordic Drupal community shared thoughts and frustrations with me about public policy and open source adoption in Scandinavia. I’ll attempt to address some of those here. My presentation at Internetdagarna 2015 Thank you! Thank you, Wunderkraut Sweden and the Swedish Drupal community for your hospitality and for inviting me to speak about Drupal and government at the Drupal sub-conference at the Swedish Internet Foundation’s 16th annual Internetdagarna in Stockholm. I had a wonderful time and was appreciative of the large, engaged audience and warm reception for my talk. It was great to meet a healthy mix of Drupal service providers and public servants interested in Drupal and improving their digital presence there on the day. If you were there, I am looking forward to following up on all our conversations! Selling into conservative organisations While I encountered strong interest from current and potential government end-users of Drupal, I also discovered some frustration on the part of Drupal service providers having trouble selling Drupal solutions into other government agencies. The problems seemed to boil down--as so many do--to communication difficulties and mismatched expectations. I don’t have any guaranteed formula for success, but here are a few points that might help: Gratis is not important. Remember, “free” (aka licence fee of zero), is not the only arrow in your quiver when it comes to pitching and selling Drupal as a solution. Despite the power of being able to redirect money from license fees to investing in your vision directly--be it in features, design, staff, training, or what have you--and improve ROI, there are many other good reasons to choose Drupal. Gratis is neither the most compelling, nor the most important. Not changing anything is the safest bet. An organisation with long-term investments in proprietary software licenses and a culture of risk mitigation (often a very smart thing), won’t be swayed by an offer of an unproven solution, just because it is cheaper. If I am running a system or website that is good enough and has been for a long time, my smartest move is to make no move at all. You still won’t interest me by offering a new build (risky), for a product unproven to me (risky), even if you can show me I could save money with it in the long term. Your most powerful sales tool is easing your clients’ pain. If pitching into an organisation with a seemingly-entrenched investment in a proprietary solution, engage them on a different front. Ask them about new features they are considering. Ask if there are areas that need improvement, pain points in their daily operations, ways they would like to improve in future. If you can make a genuine connection, you have the chance of making an honest assessment of whether Drupal would be the right tool to solve their problems. This is a much more powerful position than dogmatically selling Drupal “because Drupal”. If Drupal is a good fit, then ... If Drupal can, in fact, solve their problems, then and only then do a couple more points open up to you that could help tipping a decision in your (and Drupal’s) favor. I cover these in my presentation (below) from Internetdagarna 2015: Drupal is community software: open source backed by a massive community of...

Part 3 of 3 - Spend 18 minutes with Dries Buytaert and Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire behind the scenes in Antwerp as we drive back to the dorm room where Drupal was invented and Dries seeing it for the first time in 15 years. Video - 18 min. Drupal 8 Release & Happy Birthday, Dries Mega Episode Part 1 - interview Part 2 - interview Part 3: Behind the scenes with Dries visiting the dorm room where he invented Drupal! Congratulating Drupalists around the world - Acquia video with Dries Celebr8Drupal8 community video

Part 2 of 3 - I got to spend a half a day with Drupal Project Lead, Dries Buytaert, in Antwerp recently. This was a rare pleasure, given the success of Drupal and Acquia in recent years and how busy we both are. In between shots for some professional video material, Dries and I sat down in front of my tiny cameras and microphones to talk about Drupal 8. In parts one and two, we touch on how we got here and lessons learned along the way, what Drupal 8 brings to the table, and more. If you don't normally take the time to watch the video version of the podcast, this week is the week to do it. Parts one and two each have a couple of nice visual moments, but part three is something very special. It's all "behind the scenes" video of us driving back to the dorm room where Drupal was invented and Dries seeing it for the first time in 15 years. "Go port modules!" Interview video - 19 min. What did you learn from the Drupal 8 development cycle? "There's a lot of things we learned and we made a lot of changes as we were learning. Process changes, policies that we put in place to optimise things as we were going. To pick out one, one of the biggest things we did in Drupal 8 is this idea of initiatives. We didn't have them before Drupal 8. We launched Configuration Management, Mobile, HTML5," and many more. "Overall they've been very successful, but we've learned there that the initiatives that were the most successful were initiatives that were run by cross-functional teams, versus one individual. That's an important learning. I would like to do initiative again, but we would structure them a little bit differently." Drupal 8 Release & Happy Birthday, Dries Mega Episode Part 1 - interview Part 2 - interview Part 3: Behind the scenes with Dries visiting the dorm room where he invented Drupal! Congratulating Drupalists around the world - Acquia video with Dries Celebr8Drupal8 community video Scaling Contribution: burnout, bringing the fun back, deep or wide? "Burnout is a difficult topic and I'm not an expert, but my initial reaction would be that we have to keep going. We have to keep innovating Drupal. We don't have the luxury of just doing nothing because the world around us is moving so fast. We have to find ways to keep innovating. At the same time, it doesn't have to be the same people that keep doing all the work and it doesn't have to be the same people doing even more work. We have to find a way of working that allows us to keep our pace of innovation going, but at the same time, gives people a break. And make sure people can work in a sustainable and healthy way. With burnout, it's often people themselves that have to change. I don't know what we could do in Drupal that would fundamentally change that. The challenge here is that these people in our community are so committed, they're so passionate, they're so driven that they are unable to take a break. A lot of it is you as an individual deciding that, 'You know what? I need to take a break, I need to reduce how much time I spend. I need to go to a healthier state. In my mind, I try to decouple these: the pace of innovation of Drupal and the pace than an individual works at in our community." I have had conversations and seen presentations with Lauri Eskola, and others, especially in the Drupal mentoring community, who want to build a wider base--a larger number--of contributors to help solve both of these problems; keeping up with innovation and preventing burnout. "Drupal has a great architecture that allows a lot of people to contribute to the project. We have 30,000 active contributors. The architecture and the modularity allow people to contribute and allows us to work at scale with a lot of people. There are parts of core that are really hard and we don't have enough people that know these things...

Part 1 of 3 - I got to spend a half a day with Drupal Project Lead, Dries Buytaert, in Antwerp recently. This was a rare pleasure, given the success of Drupal and Acquia in recent years and how busy we both are. In between shots for some professional video material, Dries and I sat down in front of my tiny cameras and microphones to talk about Drupal 8. In parts one and two, we touch on how we got here and lessons learned along the way, what Drupal 8 brings to the table, and more. If you don't normally take the time to watch the video version of the podcast, this week is the week to do it. Parts one and two each have a couple of nice visual moments, but part three is something very special. It's all "behind the scenes" video of us driving back to the dorm room where Drupal was invented and Dries seeing it for the first time in 15 years. Interview video - 21 min. Why does Drupal 8 matter? Dries attempts a generalized elevator pitch: "Drupal 8 matters because, if I think about all the features, I really feel that we're at the right time, at the right place, in a world that's getting more mobile, in a world that's getting more personalized, in a world where content modeling becomes more important, pushing content to different channels. If I think about all the things we did in Drupal 8, from the authoring experience, to adding Views in core, to adding fields in core, improving the content modeling, to RESTful services and being able to output content to multiple devices or multiple channels, I really, really feel that from a features and functionality [perspective], Drupal has grown up quite a bit and that we will be able to be at the core of digital experiences. I really believe that we're at this point where we're going to move from just building websites to building much more than websites. That's what I am excited about and that's how I pitch Drupal." Drupal 8 is a milestone, not the end of the road. "We've worked on this for so long. The idea that it is going to be released," we were speaking in the lasst week before Drupal 8.0.0's release, "is a huge relief, a huge milestone for everybody in the community that has contributed to Drupal 8. I'm very excited for that." But of course, the work doesn't stop there and Dries's job as Project Lead is to be planning and thinking several steps ahead of the rest of us. "In my mind, the most important thing after Drupal 8 ships is the contributed modules. I really believe that the adoption curve of Drupal 8 will depend on the availability of these modules. If people want to help, I think that's the best way to help." "As it relates to core, we're probably going to go into a period where we're going to focus on shaking out more bugs. We're going to find things once Drupal 8 hits production, bugs, maybe some performance optimisation, things we can tweak. And dot more i's and cross more t's. That's also going to give us a little bit of a breather, versus starting to build big new features the day after we release." Drupal 8 Release & Happy Birthday, Dries Mega Episode Part 1 - interview Part 2 - interview Part 3: Behind the scenes with Dries visiting the dorm room where he invented Drupal! Congratulating Drupalists around the world - Acquia video with Dries Celebr8Drupal8 community video Semantic versioning in core Historically, Drupal releases were always "big bang" releases. Drupal 8 was in development for almost 8 years before its release. "But that meat we haven't actually innovated in [the Drupal 7] core in almost five years. We want to change that with the release of Drupal 8. The idea of semantic versioning is that every six months, we can put out new versions if Drupal: 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 ... and then these versions will have new features. We'll do bug fix releases as well, which would be 8.1.3 or...

Keith Donaldson and I spoke in Keith's 9th week as a Drupalist--he's done Django and run several startups in the past--and he'd already been using Drupal "in the wild" to win a hackathon and more. I was impressed! In this podcast, we talk about Keith's background, impressions of Drupal, how the Acquia U training program supports and creates new Drupal talent, our mutual conviction that it is one of the best tools to get a minimum viable product up and running for someone with a startup idea, and more! The ability to go from idea to MVP so quickly is awesome and powerful. One week of Drupal? Sure, let's do a hackathon! Keith's stand-out 1st Drupal memory - It's not often that the answer to my question about someone's first Drupal memory starts with, "After my first week at Acquia ..." but Keith's did! "After my first week at Acquia, I really wanted to test this out. for me, diving into the deep end, trial by fire, is the best way to get a new technology or any kind of learning under my belt ... So I participated in a hackathon called the Fish Hackathon, sponsored by the State Department and the New England Aquarium here in Boston. For that hackathon, there was an opportunity to create a content-driven site. They were looking for a solution that would allow them to connect with folks interested in eating oysters and looking for more information about eating oysters," Keith builtthe Oy-App. " I quickly hacked together something using Drupal 7 and PhoneGap and an available library to connect the two and create a mobile app that allows you to find oyster bars within a 4-mile radius. It looked very impressive. I didn't do a whole lot. One of the beauties of Drupal is that it gets you 90% of the way to a complete solution. As far as hackathons go, it was a great way to impress non-technical judges and get a win! That project is still going on. We're looking at figuring out what are the real needs of the oyster farmer and how to help them to a better job of communicating what products they offer. Hopefully, that'll be a Drupal 8 solution." Drupal First: Drupal and startups "From what I've seen of the market, there are a lot of people out there with great ideas and they don't have the technical experience. One idea that I wanted to push is to get people thinking about Drupal first. As a non-technical founder, Drupal is a great way to crystalize your ideas, get them in front of people and have it do something that can be tested. How much functionality the application actually has is probably up to you and the amount of time you have. But as a non-technical founder, someone with an idea, I think you can get a lot going ... enough to bring somebody on who can take it the rest of the way ... Get a better sense of the direction you're trying to go in, put it in front of people to test it, get their feedback. That's something I'd like to push heavily as I get deeper into my own Drupal experience and develop my skills." Drupal 8 and web-service-based businesses "One of the things I looked at early on," when Keith started to get to know Drupal 8, "was what's going on in web services. Some of the project that I had been developing worked a lot with APIs from other SaaS applications. It was a common thing that was appearing again and again: how you take advantage of some other resource, some other application and bring it into your own. Any framework that can help me do that faster and more securely is something I'd be interested in." "Also thinking of my own application API-first. That's the way you should be doing development these days and it looked like Drupal was preparing to go in that direction ... ready to offer that." And indeed it has! Drupal 8's RESTful-first architecture does just what Keith is talking about, consuming or delivering web services. Guest dossier Name: Keith Donaldson Keith's Acquia U profile Work affiliation: Full Stack Web &...

jam's Dev Camp is back with Alick Mighall, Managing Director of miggle in Brighton. He and I have a chat about Drupal and running your own business in the podcast interview part of this session. He goes on to do a very interesting presentation about the road to Drupal for himself and his agency, including some of the detours through proprietary and in-house software along the way. If you're wondering what Drupal can do for you and your company, listen to our conversation then watch Alick's presentation. Slides and full session video below! Misapprehension of the day "I thought--rather unfairly--that things like Drupal were crutches for bad developers because they did a lot of it for you. I now know that to be completely wrong." Alick and I now agree that a platform like Drupal empowers developers and others by putting the result of more than a decade of collaboration by thousands of great developers in their hands. As a developer at SymfonyLive Berlin 2015 put it to me recently, "I don't want to spend my time reproducing commodity functionality like a user login system or whathaveyou, I want to solve the interesting problems, which is why I outsource the basics to a Symfony or Drupal." Drupal - positioned for tomorrow We got to talking about Drupal's speciality--managing content--and how Drupal 8 is perfectly poised to serve the omnipresent Internet we are slowly approaching: "The really exciting thing about Drupal 8 and 'headless Drupal' [Drupal functioning as a back end for other systems functioning as the presentation layer like native smartphone apps, or Angular.js applications, and so on]. We've just recently started working on a project that outputs a JSON feed that is used to populate content across a range of different devices. As the Internet of Things grows, then Drupal's ability as a content store, to be able to manage repositories of content and point them at any IP-enabled device ... I don't see that you can easily do that in other solutions that Drupal might be seen as competing against." Business in the open source context "Being a business person in the open source context, to me, goes hand-in-hand with being a business person and the benefits I get out of that in terms of the community that I get through involvement with Drupal. What's great about selling open source to businesses is that you're able to sell in business continuity. Open source is something that allows your client not to have a dependency on you going forward. That's really key. We're always trying to sell our clients self-sufficiency. We talk a lot about operational freedom. Open source fits that really well." "As a business owner--and running a business can sometimes be a lonely place--I get a huge amount out of the community. When I go to Drupal events and I look at all of the fantastically talented people that are working on the platform ... and its open architecture means anybody can contribute to it. We're all pooling together to make sure that we've got a shared set of tools to be able to deliver on a wide variety of use cases. I find that a really reassuring thing because I am running a small business, but it makes me feel like I am part of something much bigger." "I've got certain go-to people in the community that we can always talk to about solutions. We've got a variety of people that we look up to for best practices. If we were working in a proprietary way or even if we were working with a range of other off-the-shelf software or other open source solutions, I don't think I would get the same benefits that I do out of Drupal." "When we come together as a community, we're trying to grow the overall pie. Everything that we work on together has the opportunity of making Drupal much bigger success story. If that happens, there should be plenty of work to go around. The businesses that have great, genuine community involvement don't struggle to pick up work. More...