Acquia Inc. podcasts

All about govCMS - An interview with and presentation by Adam Malone--Acquia Solutions Architect, based in Canberra, Australia. In the podcast interview, we start off learning about Adam's background and history in Drupal. We touch on how Drupal has gone from being very specifically a content management system in the Drupal 6 days, to the power and flexibility of Drupal 7, to being a powerful framework, still with a great user interface, in Drupal 8. Make sure you check out the presentation video (embedded in this post below and here on YouTube), in which Adam goes into detail about building and maintaining the govCMS platform and project. Drupal & govCMS in Australia "govCMS is a whole of government rethink about online, agile, accessibility, procurement, security, support, and open source. - Not just code." Adam explains the motivation behind building govCMS: "The entire Federal Government of Australia has said 'We want to revolutionize how we operate online. We want to take our digital strategy to something very modern, taking hints from what the US government has done with the Whitehouse [and more!], with what the UK government has done with gov.uk. We want to take those ideas and we want to leapfrog them. We want to make this platform that's available for the entire government. If anyone wants to get online and they want to have best practices and they want to have modern code and security and a string base to build on, then we'll make that available.'" This system is called govCMS and the choice fell to Drupal to build this platform and systems. "This has expanded Drupal immeasurably here [in Australia]. Its been exciting to be a part of that." All carrot, no stick - What is govCMS? The Australian Government offers its department and units a real set of advantages with govCMS. The result, as Adam points out, is "a huge shift in the thinking about how we put a site online, which has in turn, shifted departments' digital strategy and how they think about marketing themselves to the citizens and residents of the country. The system includes: Drupal distribution (a preconfigured set of Drupal functionality) based on best practices and that offers guaranteed compliance with Australian government standards (security, accessibility, etc.) Security compliance out of the box through secure, scalable infrastructure through the Acquia Platform and Amazon Web Services - "We're open sourcing the ability to go onto a secure environment." support offering for government departments using govCMS competitive cost point thanks to economies of scale, open source license costs (zero dollars per license), and pre-configuration of the govCMS system. accelerated delivery and simplified governance for the whole package through the elimination of lengthy procurement and tendering processes--or rather the pre-selection of the system by the Finance Department. "It's faster to go from the idea [of needing a new site] to going live. We've seen sites go from start to going live in six weeks." Compare this to the normal (in Australia and elsewhere) government process, in which procurement has to last a minimum of three months (!) and in which departments need to tender (possibly separately) for a website, infrastructure, development, design, security assessments and more. govCMS has covered all of that in a single package offering. Improved return on investment not only in technological efficiencies, but also in the fact that developers, content authors, and user users can move from department to department and hit the ground running because they are working on the same platform--one that they are familiar with and enjoy using. And it's open source! - "By making the code freely available to everyone, putting it on GitHub and Drupal.org, we're hoping that anyone interested in...

jam's Dev Camp is back with something a little different this week: Rick Donohoe, Account Manager at Microserve in Bristol, presents a case study about how his company delivered six sites on a five-sit fixed budget contract. He gives some great tips on making a project like this successful. I saw Rick do a shorter version of this at Drupal Camp Bristol 2015 and thought that the information he has to share is valuable and that many of us building websites for clients could benefit from it. Thanks to Rick and Microserve for sharing! The Roman Baths project Microserve worked hand-in-hand with Torchbox on a fixed budget contract, initially to deliver five sites for the Bath & North East Somerset Council Heritage Services. Microserve's smart and efficient way of dealing with this kind of challenge--based on feature commonality and functional templating--allowed them to easily deliver an initially unexpected sixth site for minimal additional cost and development time. The sites Rick talks about here are: The Roman Baths, Bath - www.romanbaths.co.uk Fashion Museum - www.fashionmuseum.co.uk Victoria Art Gallery - www.victoriagal.org.uk Bath's Historic Venues - www.bathvenues.co.uk Bath Record Office - www.batharchives.co.uk The City of Bath World Heritage Site - www.bathworldheritage.org.uk The Wisdom of Rick Here are a collection of good ideas and practices that Rick touches on in the case study. I assume they are not all *his* ideas (thank you, team!), but I liked the headline too much to do without it :-) Tip: Feature-driven development workflow to minimise risk in a fixed-cost build. The team identified the functionalities required across all the sites and which ones were shared across sites. They then built the largest, most complicated one (www.romanbaths.co.uk), building each functionality as a reusable Drupal feature (therefore "Feature-Driven Development"). The next five sites in the project were reduced instances of the first one--with different visual branding within a common base theme--so each required less work and there was no chance of adding conflicts that would then retroactively affect all of the other builds and require fixing across six codebases (Drupal multisite would solve this, too, but was not an option for this project.). Rick explains, "We built Roman Baths first. Then we could copy the site over and enable or disable features and that would provide us with exactly what we wanted on each site. That allowed us to provide these six sites at a fixed budget." Tip: Use in-browser design for easier UAT. Torchbox delivered a fully responsive, multi-browser design that Microserve turned into a Drupal theme at the beginning of the project. Starting from a working prototype, your client will be seeing the real site at every stage of the project. Rick loves it when it comes time for User Acceptance Testing and the client says, "It looks just like the design!" ... Because it *is* the design. :-) Intuitive, simple to use sites and close, personal support save time and money over the life of the project: Tip: Reduce your training and support burden by investing in the admin interface and limiting user permissions. "Limit things. Only give the content editing team what they need. If you don't confuse them, it's going to make your life easier; they're going to find it easier to do and it's going to work so much better." [Pamela Barone from PreviousNext talks about making a great back end for content editors in this video of her jam's Dev/Drupal Camp session.] Rick and the Microserve team put all of the content/administration tasks and items on the sites in concise, focused "dashboards" or pages, with nothing extraneous (or dangerous to site reliability or security) visible or even accessible to those users. They are not burdened with Drupal-specific terms or knowledge...

One dev shop: Talking with Richard Moger about the success of his small-scale agency, Claritis, and how reuse of open source tools like Zurb Foundation and Drupal allow him to work efficiently and grow with his clients. Doing most of the work at Claritis himself, Richard has become adept at being efficient. His experience seems to have given him a good sense of when he should solve a problem himself and when he should bring in a specialist--for example a professional designer, or an open source tool--to get the job done quickly and well. The Wisdom of the Small Here are a few tips Richard shares: Old days v new ways - Pre open source, "In terms of the way we built stuff, it was very fluid, if we decided we needed a feature, we just went and built it. There wasn't the shared knowledge out there and the team were very insular. We knew our systems and we knew how to get the best out of them. And that's what we did. Obviously, the big contrast nowadays with something like Drupal is that you can leverage all this wonderful stuff that everyone else has done. If we went through the same process now, a good 60% of it would have been from the community." Drupal is the right way - Richard explains that he made an informed decision to go with Drupal and learn it, as well as "Linux, PHP, and so on, so that's taken time, but I've always known at the back of my mind that I am doing it the right way. It goes against the grain for me to use the wrong technology, a not-scalable solution, when I know that Drupal is a more scalable solution." Use, reuse: standard tools - "I have found it incredibly difficult to find good resources at good rates to do theming, for example. So for me, using something like [Zurb] Foundation means that I can use something standard with the hope that at some point in the future, I can find resources out there that know how to use Foundation. And I can bring them in to help me with projects." The power of suggestion, or "How to help your clients help you help them." - "Foundation reduces the amount of time it takes me to do theming. I've got the luxury as well of being able to steer a client toward a certain design and look. The designer I work with uses Photoshop PSD's, but he uses the buttons and all the styles from Foundation within Photoshop so that we can present something [easier for us to implement]. Smaller clients just want it to look good." Faster is better - "If a project can be done in half the time," by reusing design elements, tools, or processes, "it doesn't need a genius to work out the difference in profitability of the company." Be the community - Richard is trying to do the right thing by the community that has given him so much. He gives sessions to share his experience and methods with others. He points out the benefit of attending Drupal Camps and the like for himself, too, "These events are great because you if you pick up a new tip that saves you a couple of hours a month, then cumulatively, that's a really good saving." Direct service - "Being small, the person who picks the phone up is probably going to be the one who does most of your development." Guest dossier Name: Richard Moger Work affiliation: Drupal agency, Claritis.co.uk Drupal.org: richierampage Twitter: @richardmoger LinkedIn: Richard Moger 1st version of Drupal: 6 About: Richard started building websites in 1997, when most people didn't even have access to it. Over the years, he's progressed from trying to convince his boss that the web was here to stay, to building everything from scratch to make that travel business a huge online success, to being able to produce great, responsive sites for clients almost on his own thanks to the power of collaboration and open source tools like Zurb Foundation and Drupal. A little more info...

Beyond websites: Drupal as a rapid development and deployment platform for enterprise applications - Behavioral Science + Analytics + Collaboration + Drupal = OnCorps. I spoke with Laura Lafave and Peter Hallett, two-thirds of the founding team at OnCorps, after meeting them at the business day of Drupal Camp Bristol, 2015. I find their product concept--apps to improve team performance at companies--very interesting, but at least as exciting is how they are using Drupal to make it all happen. Nudge, nudge ... OnCorps builds "Nudge" apps. Nudge in this context refers to providing cues, rather than mandates, that can influence decisions and behavior towards desired outcomes. OnCorps nudge apps use diagnostic data and help extract more value from them by "nudging" team members towards actions that should improve those data over time ... As I type this, my definition sounds a little dry, but it is a hot topic in politics and economics these days. To even be able to address it, you need to have a handle on behavioral science, data (big and small), analytics, and be able to collect and deliver the nudges in some form. OnCorps is leading the field, working with global enterprises and consulting firms, and they're powered by Drupal. Go, team! Laura and Peter describe an app for a sales team that can do a couple of valuable things. For all you tech-types, this reminded very much of agile methodologies for development teams: Track goals versus achievements over time to determine what kind of targets--"home run" or incremental, for example--deliver the best results, then nudge team members towards pursuing the optimal target range. Track what kinds of deals succeed and fail so that the app can nudge you into putting more energy into successful deal-types, and nudge you away from those that have been less-successful in the past. Track sales cycles and calculate the odds of various sales succeeding based on how long the process is taking and nudge you away from a deal unlikely to ever close, "You might want to wrap that up or move onto something else." Drupal, not just for websites anymore As I put it in the podcast, "Drupal is this engine that is driving a huge amount of business that is not a bunch of websites." OnCorps chose it as a platform for rapid product development and deployment. Peter explains, "I've used a lot of different technologies, across different parts of building applications and architectures. I don't do fashion code. I see a toolbox with tools in it and use the right one for the job I am trying to achieve. So we looked at it from that perspective. Drupal gave us flexibility; it gave us speed. As a startup company, we started with an idea. As we've come along in the last three years, we've pivoted a few times. We wouldn't have been able to make those turns as quickly if we had gone for a more bespoke, lower layer to the architecture. Drupal allowed us to be flexible. At a pace that allowed us to make those turns and land where we are with what we feel is a really good business offering and good technology." "Secondly, we knew that when we settled, what we'd done to that date wasn't going to have to be replaced. [We knew] what we had built would then scale. You can make Drupal scale. As long as you have some good architectural principles in place, you can then really build on top of that once you lock it in." "We've got the classic use of Drupal [as websites] with some marketing content, but for us that's a very small part, just to advertise our business. The actual deliverable that our customers end up with are HTML5 applications. Our platform-as-a-service built on Drupal basically spits out apps that we can configure very quickly. We've built 40 or 50 of these so far." Drupal manages group management for each enterprise customer and a lot of configuration data for a select administrative user group. "That's a perfect place for Drupal...

The first Drupal 8 book on the market was Drupal 8 Configuration Management, by Anja Schirwinski and Stefan Borchert from undpaul in Hannover Germany. Anja is Co-Founder and CEO of undpaul. I ran into her and undpaul's other Co-Founder/CEO, Johannes Haseitl in early May at the re:publica 2015 in Berlin, where I gave a presentation on open source and the economy. This podcast audio and video contains excerpts of the conversation we had in a corner of the very busy event location--apologies in advance for the audio challenges. Among other things, we touched on: undpaul's wonderful origin story (also check out this video of it). Drupal empowering less-technical users. The re:publica conference and why it is important to expose yourself to new communities and ideas. How Drupal and technology can solve real problems. Our responsibility to use it to make a real difference and make the "real" world a better place. How open source technology and the open source mindset--sharing, openness, working together--lead to better solutions and outcomes. Drupal 8 and Configuration Management, deployment, version control. Running Drupal (and open source) businesses in Germany. Guest dossier Name: Anja Schirwinski Work affiliation: CEO and Co-Founder, undpaul, Hannover, Germany undpaul Drupal.org profile Drupal.org: aschiwi Twitter: @aschiwi LinkedIn: Anja Schirwinski Xing: Anja Schirwinski Name: Johannes Haseitl Work affiliation: CEO and Co-Founder, undpaul, Hannover, Germany Drupal.org: derhasi GitHub: derhasi Twitter: @derhasi LinkedIn: Johannes Haseitl Xing: Johannes Haseitl 1st version of Drupal: 4.6 Drupal 8 Configuration Management by Stefan Borchert and Anja Schirwinski Order the book here! Read more about the book in this blog post! Check out the video of undpaul's origin story! Interview video

This week’s podcast: Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire’s virtual, mini-keynote at Drupal Camp Cape Town 2015. This is a short talk that includes ideas from the “Idealism as Code” presentations that jam has given at a few events in recent months. Watch the video to see the slides jam refers to. I was thrilled to be asked to give the keynote address at Drupal Camp Cape Town 2015, the first-ever South African Drupal Camp. Since I couldn’t make it down there in person--I want to be there next time!--we set up a live video connection for my session and limited it to about 15 minutes. Once we got some technical difficulties out of the way, the connection via Google Hangout on Air was great and I was even able to hear the audience reacting to me. If you’ve ever done a presentation without any live audience feedback, you know it can be tough. Dear Cape Town audience, thanks for laughing at the right times! The following headers cover some highlights from my talk. Watch the full video [below] of my session to see the presentation slides and learn more about the Four Freedoms that define open source software; a comparison of working with proprietary v open source software; DRM (digital rights management), digital locks, and transparency in the era of the Internet of Things; the power of owning your software; trust v openness and accountability in systems of record; and more! Idealism as Code I see open source software--Drupal perhaps especially--in a tradition of idealism and idealistic communities; communities driven by ideals to effect real-world change. We’re in an amazing position now as Drupalists to effect real-world change with technology. We’ve built powerful tools for digital communication, but this comes with responsibilities, too: We are the empowered practitioners who are building the web and building the next generation of digital interconnected technology. We can build our products and projects in ways that empower us all. And we are privileged, we’re the gatekeepers and controllers of technology. We should always strive to build safe and secure applications by default. We shouldn't make things ugly and hard to use and RTFM stuff. And our project--Drupal--is very good at empowering less-technical users. Even more importantly: Digital rights are human rights in this day in age and we have an opportunity and a responsibility to enable others, less technical than ourselves, to enjoy freedom, privacy, and security. “Digital rights are human rights in this day in age and we have an opportunity and a responsibility to enable others, less technical than ourselves, to enjoy freedom, privacy, and security.” - Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire, 2014 Successful open source I want you to be successful at free/libre open source software. That means building safe and secure applications that maintain our privacy and our freedom. And they need to be compelling. We're living in the iPhone age; we’re living in the world where beautiful, fantastic digital experiences are available to all of us very cheaply, and we have to build those, too. Let’s keep that in mind. They--your sites and applications--should empower people to do good, to do well, to realize their own visions. That’s what we’re here for. To be “successful,” in my opinion, open source projects and products need to be all of the following: Safe by default Secure by default Compelling by default Empowering by default Drupal’s fundamental design decision: empowerment Speaking of empowerment, I did a podcast (here and here) with Angie Byron in 2014 at the United Nations. She made a great statement that I really like. She said: “We [as Drupalists] make really abstract, complicated programming concepts accessible to non-developers … Available to them by clicking a few buttons without having to understand all the code that comes underneath it. What I get excited about is the...

The co-founder of Blue-Bag, George Boobyer, has been in the business of making websites and online applications longer than Drupal has been in existence. In this conversation, we talk about why Drupal is his toolset of choice and how happy he is that PHP and Drupal 8 are catching up with object oriented code, interoperability, and other factors that will make his work for his clients even better. "We took a look at [Drupal]; looked at some great podcasts and screencasts of how to do things with it and we were sold then and there. And we completely changed the whole business from proprietary to open source." Ready for Drupal 8 I asked George if looking at Drupal 8 under the hood was like coming home. "Definitely. The principles that we had in Object Pascal, it's exciting to be able to start using these again." Drupal 8 moves Drupal into territory that George is very familiar with and he's very excited about the change: "Being delphi programmers, everything we did was very object-oriented and we used to do a load of object-oriented work in C#, so jumping in [Drupal] 8, the object orientation," of the code base, "is something that really appeals to us." What are you most excited about in Drupal 8? - "There's many things. I think the integration with Symfony is exciting. I think that using standards and frameworks that have a wider usage outside of the Drupal environment ... certainly as an employer, that's going to be attractive to people that we employ ... that they've got a wide skill-base that's got a greater applicability. I think it's more exciting for a younger programmer." George also hopes Drupal 8 will make it easier for him to attract employees. Technology choices: from closed to open "We're not just forcing Drupal on people because we want to work with Drupal. If Drupal couldn't do it, we would do it another way." 15 years ago, when Blue-Bag was founded, the technology choices available to build online solutions were different than those today. In 2000, open source software was in its infancy; Drupal had yet to be released. George and his co-founder Guy Schneerson started with a selection of proprietary tech. In 2000, "We were working with Microsoft platforms with SQL Server, but writing web applications in Borland Delphi (in Object Pascal), writing ISAPI-based applications." We were doing that for companies like The Natural History Museum. We wrote a system for them that they used for 12 years. And that was based around templating and all the sorts of things which we're familiar with in Drupal, but obviously, we built from scratch ... from the ground up in Delphi. With the templating system that we developed for them, they were able to restyle it themselves without any input from us. Those sorts of things that we take for granted in Drupal are key and that's what attracted us to Drupal." Finding that Drupal's concepts matched their thinking, "Was very appealing. But the big difference for us was open source because we were working in Microsoft technologies, proprietary technologies. Our customers were having massive hardware and license refreshes every year with no change of functionality," including paying for just turning something on, not knowing whether it would solve your problems. "We were managing hardware stacks that were costing tens of thousands of pounds a year just to have a license in a drawer somewhere without any change." Drupal lets you focus on the interesting bits "We decided to go to open source. We looked around and evaluated a wide range of frameworks. We dabbled with Wordpress. We wrote some automated sites with Wordpress, but we just found it not really flexible for our needs. We came across Drupal because we did a lot of work in the environmental sector and it was well used in customers that we already provided solutions for. So we thought we ought to take a look at it, so we were up with the technologies that...

"My full-time job is writing open source software ... at Microsoft." Josh Holmes, Director of Architecture, Microsoft Partner Catalyst Team, has one of the coolest jobs I can think of in the IT and startup worlds. He runs a large team of top notch engineers whose mission it is to help startups with hard technology problems. And they help them by fixing, improving, and contributing to open source tools that they need. Yes, this is a Microsoft job. Yes, everything they work on is contributed back to open source projects. Really. "Old" Microsoft to "New" Microsoft "It was interesting joining Microsoft nine years ago. I've been in the Microsoft camp for a very long time. However, I've been an open source guy in the Microsoft camp. So that has always put me in a weird place. It was interesting that they wanted to hire me at the time because of their current sales model, but there was a shirt starting to happen. They started hiring a bunch of people who were of like mind; in the MS camp but all open source. That was an interesting shift to watch and be part of." "I started out as a local evangelist in Michigan, then I started working more and more in the web space, where my love and passion were. One thing that came up--pre-Azure, pre-cloud. They wanted to expand their share of the server market. We started talking about how we could do that. I started looking at the PHP space," and he determined the projects that were dominating at the time. "We should go engage with them and make sure they run really well on Windows." Note that when Josh says 'on Windows' here, he means a whole Microsoft stack: Windows, IIS, SQL Server, PHP--the MS equivalent of the LAMP stack. "A number of great things came out of this. I got to meet all these great people here," referring to the PHP community. "But I also got to meet a lot of the founders and core teams of a lot of the really big projects. And that was great. ... Microsoft also started to shift as part of this as well." One proof point Josh mentions was helping the Joomla! project and the MS IIS team come together. The result of this matchmaking was a caching solution that allowed Joomla! to run well on IIS servers using WinCache as well as when using APC caching on the LAMP stack. From an open source project perspective, the win here is that when Drupal or your project of choice runs and runs well on Microsoft infrastructure, you have a much larger potential client base for your solution since many companies run on it. From MS's side, given the increasing popularity of PHP and open source solutions (nowadays PHP runs 80% or more of the web), this kept the company relevant and potentially attractive to these projects. This was a big deal. "This was the first time that Microsoft had really contributed to a major PHP project. The IIS team actually signed the JCA, the Joomla! Contributor Agreement, which was a huge deal to Microsoft!" since Joomla! is copyrighted but also open source under the GPL. "So we had the product team writing open source code; code that they were going to give to an open source project. It was phenomenal. This is better than us taking one of our projects and open sourcing it. It is contributing to the community." Fast forward ... 2015 "Fast forward a number of years," beyond the initial open source code contribution," ... This is a sentence that took me a month to grok this in my own head ... My full-time job is writing open source software ... at Microsoft. What I do on the Partner Catalyst Team, where I am the Director of Architecture. We are in teh Evangelism Department. We are an outward-facing, community-facing group. But specifically, we work with a lot of startups at the very top edge of the enterprise space. We look at their toughest problems and we go solve those problems with open source [software]. We've got 70 engineers and architects and we go work with the startups hand-in-hand, even sit down and...

David Bishop from NinetyOne Consulting and I sat down to chat at Drupal Camp Bristol 2015. Our conversation essentially covers three main topics: The sailing charity, Bart's Bash, invites you for a day out on the water in Barcelona harbor on September 20th! If you are coming to Barcelona for DrupalCon, come early. Contact David, who is kindly coordinating this and matching people with boats. Bart's Bash is an amazing charity in honor of a respected British Olympian, Andrew "Bart" Simpson, who died young in a tragic sailing accident. While organizing what they thought would be a small fundraising effort, the charity singlehandedly kicked off a new movement and inspired a new, international movement and community in sailing. More on this in the podcast audio! A great Drupal scalability and functionality story: David Bishop built the small, 2-page brochure site to support the initial funding effort and then ended up building it out to include mapping, community sign-ups and groups, real-time data-ingestion and -processing. In 2014, the site collected sign-ups and processed race data for 30,000 sailors in 17,000 boats from around the world - wow! More on this below ... Along the way, we talk about creating a new handicap system in international sailing and how Drupal got Bart's Bash into the Guinness Book of World Records. What a show! The path from zero to huge for BartsBash.com When I asked him why he's stuck with Drupal as his technology of choice, David said, "It's a platform that I have not found any project I haven't been able to build on yet." The website for Bart's Bash is a case in point. Build a one-page site for maybe 50 sailing clubs to honor Andrew Simpson and raise 10,000 pounds as part of their usual Sunday races (spoiler: they ended up collecting £366,391.95). In stead, within 2 weeks, 350 sailing clubs from around the world wanted to take part in the event. Added maps - During the year the event was being organized, 750 sailing clubs ended up being involved on the day. Added the Openlayers Module to create maps of the participants around the world, "and that was a really easy thing to plug in." Built participant sign-up and integrated JustGiving fundraising. Thousands of sign-ups pour in. "That was a big step. We built an online process for people to go through a six page sign-up where they gave us the information: what boat they were going to be sailing, they could sign up for a JustGiving fundraising page within the sign-up process. And the sign-ups started to come in. And we were starting to get the picture that this was going to be a busy and a popular site. As we got nearer the event, we passed a few thousand people signing up quite quickly." Added user-created sailing club pages to site. Sliced and diced the data with Views to show how big the event was becoming. - "There were two strong community-engaging tools that we used. One was the ability to create this directory of all these sailing clubs, which didn't exist before we created it. Secondly, it was how we used Drupal and lots and lots of break-downs of Views to show lots of top tens of different bloat classes in different countries to show the volume of people signing up ... so that you could see this momentum. Build handicapping and results calculation system in Drupal - Given that Bart's Bash was ostensibly a race, participants wanted to know know how they did. The organizers even created a new, international multi-class boats handicapping system, the "Bart Number", to make this happen. "In Drupal we had two challenges: One was collecting the results from all these sailing clubs. Sailing clubs traditionally work with CSV files. They were happy with that, but we realized on the day that actually asking 750 different teams to create a CSV file to one standard was problematic :-) ... They all uploaded their own data and...

Part 2 of 2 - In a recent conversation with Tom Erickson, Acquia's CEO, we got to talking about Acquia's "Drupal 8 All-In", what it is and what it means for the Drupal world and those we have yet to convince ... Acquia has drawn a line in the sand, saying, this thing is so great, we are confident we can deliver the kind of help and experience that we've been guaranteeing with Drupal over the last 7 or 8 years. This thing is ready enough. And all of the rough edges that we find along the way; this is the perfect opportunity to sand them off. This thing, Drupal 8, is ready for real business. In short: Acquia is running customer sites on Drupal 8 already, supporting all of Drupal 8, helping get the last rough edges off it for general release, and would love to talk with you about your next project and whether Drupal 8 is a good fit! In part 1, Tom and I talked about Acquia's early days, the advantages and challenges of running a business in the open source world, the Drupal community, "community open source", what Tom is excited about in Drupal 8, and a lot more. Why should I choose Drupal 8 for my organization? In the context of the digitalization of business, whether in retail, education and training, or elsewhere, "What's exciting to me is that Drupal 8, through its architecture improvements is able to [support the digitalization of business] better than any other system on the market. And we're proud as part of Acquia to be able to offer that in a complete, almost SaaS-like environment. It gets me really, really excited, that potential." "Multi-brand enterprises are starting to realize that the creative freedom [the Drupal offers] is something that I think today's marketer, today's business executive who wants to create a branded digital experience absolutely has to have ... at the same time without sacrificing issues of governance," (Tom discusses creating and managing large numbers of sites with Acquia Cloud Site Factory in part 1 of this conversation). More posts about D8 All-In and Acquia Dries Buytaert: Acquia announces it is ready for Drupal 8 Conversation with Tom Erickson 1 of 2: Excited about Drupal 8 - Meet Acquia CEO Tom Erickson Conversation with Tom Erickson 2 of 2: Drupal 8 All-in: Acquia is ready for your D8 project now! Gender balance in tech sales through data-driven, objective hiring Building a great remote team, helping clients & giving back Drupal 8 now "Effectively, for someone adopting Drupal 8 now, [Acquia is] completely mitigating the risk associated with that and being able to go live--fast--with Drupal 8." "Sometimes, particularly around Drupal, organizations are a little but shy about saying, 'Hey, I want the software to mature. I want to have some of the contrib. modules already available.' And there's occasionally a lag there. Once again, these are risks that are there relative to a brand-new release. Consistent with our approach around Drupal in general, we've assessed it. We've taken a look at it and we've committed already to some customers that we will mitigate that risk. We will help organizations adopt Drupal 8 now, if that's their preference. We will help with the porting of modules to ensure that that experience is extremely straightforward. " "We've got a lot of experience with Drupal 8. And we're excited about working with our partners as well on this. We've reached out to our partner community and they're very enthusiastic. So it's not just an Acquia-alone effort. This is something we're doing with a couple of dozen of our best partners. Why now? Acquia has clients who are already running on Drupal 8. "They're excited they're on the Drupal 8 platform, because that's the platform of the future. As they're able to grow their digital experience initiatives, they'll be able to grow alongside of Drupal 8. That's the...

Part 1 of 2 - I recorded an audio-only conversation I had recently with Tom Erickson, Acquia's CEO. In this podcast, Tom and I talk about how he met Acquia's founders Dries Buytaert and Jay Batson, why Drupal looked like a good bet even back in 2007, how Drupal has changed and grown, the advantages and challenges of running a business in the open source world, the Drupal community, how Acquia Cloud Site Factory helps businesses manage hundreds of sites in a cost-effective way, Acquia's contributions to Drupal over the years, "community open source", and what Tom is excited about in Drupal 8. Tune in next time for the down-low on what Acquia's "Drupal 8 All-In" effort is all about. Drupal then and now: the competitive landscape Rather than talking tech features or community, Tom focuses on "the people that use it and how they use it," which seems to be to be a great barometer for how we're doing in Drupal today. "The real difference is first and foremost the number and kinds of organizations that use it; it's much broader than it was 8 years ago. Whether they are consumer packaged goods companies like SAB Miller or MillerCoors or life sciences companies Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer, those large organizations were not adopting Drupal in a big way. Another thing that was happening at the time was people were hitting limits in their ability to scale Drupal. I can remember a conversation with Kieran and Dries with Disney back in early 2009 where Disney was struggling with some of their modest--what you'd describe today as modest--page requirements. And today if I look and say what people are scaling to, you look at something like Weather.com with billions of page views per month... The world has come a long way in terms of their understanding of how scalable Drupal is, how sophisticated, how ready it is for the enterprise. It's being used in situations today where people are deploying hundreds and thousands of Drupal sites in their organizations where I'd say back in 2007, it was used in a few, isolated places inside of enterprise. Lots of people thought about 'Is it Drupal or Joomla! or Wordpress?' and today, our conversations are, 'Is it Drupal or Adobe or Sitecore?'. A very different thing; competing with the main proprietary systems as opposed to thinking about ourselves first and foremost as an open source product [in competition with other, open source products.]" More posts about D8 All-In and Acquia Dries Buytaert: Acquia announces it is ready for Drupal 8 Conversation with Tom Erickson 1 of 2: Excited about Drupal 8 - Meet Acquia CEO Tom Erickson Conversation with Tom Erickson 2 of 2: Drupal 8 All-in: Acquia is ready for your D8 project now! Gender balance in tech sales through data-driven, objective hiring Building a great remote team, helping clients & giving back Running and open-source-based business I asked Tom what the differences are running an open-source-based business compared to a "classic" or proprietary-based one. Advantage: "The difference with open source is first and foremost the power and innovation of the community is unbelievable. We realize this is a huge advantage." Advantage: "There's no notion of a 'roadmap prison'," where you ask your proprietary software company to put a feature you need in their roadmap, "and maybe it comes out in three years and maybe it doesn't ever come out. So there's tremendous amounts of innovation." Advantage: No vendor lock-in. "You're not tied-in to working with Acquia to be able to work with Drupal." Advantage: "There's a tremendous feeling of community, people around the world working together, even though it's this notion of 'coopetition,' where agencies might compete with each other, yet they all contribute to a common good. That's a very wonderful dynamic that I think is the future...

At a recent Acquia all-company meeting, I was glad to hear that half of the current group of Acquia U students and 7 out of 12 of the latest "BDR" hires in Sales were women. Acquia's CEO, Tom Erickson added that this was the result of some "objective, data-driven" hiring practices. I had to know more. I got Acquia Senior Manager of Business Development and Sales, Chris Hemberger on the line to talk about all of this. "BDR" stands for "Business Development Representative"; this is an entry-level position in Acquia and other companies' Sales departments. These are the young people who are going to advance and shape companies' successes in years to come. Chris explained that tech companies' sales departments, even Acquia's in the past, are quite male dominated. The good news is that things have really changed at Acquia in this regard. If more objective hiring processes lead to more balanced hiring, I'm more hopeful for the future of our industry, too. Data-driven hiring drives balance and business success Acquia is succeeding as a business and doing so while objectively hiring as diverse teams as it can manage. I feel this is great news for others wanting to follow similar practices. Chris compares our success to other places he has worked: "If you look at how the team is composed overall now, we're very close to a 50/50 split if we're talking about gender diversity. I would say this is vastly different from other tech business development teams that I have been a part of. We're pretty happy about that. The best we can do is get as close to objective and as close to hiring the best for every seat on our team as possible. We think we've gotten close to that by being a little bit more data-driven; by giving different exercises and different things to do throughout their interview process." "I know that some other similar organizations that have similar processes that are data-driven--not just focused on the 1:1 interviews--have wound up with much more of an even gender split on their teams. Their net results are also close to a 50/50 gender split. I do think that if you put a really objective process in place, that the world of tech sales comes closer to a 50/50 gender split than what we actually see happening in the market." More diversity gives more perspectives Chris describes a common state of affairs in the tech industry, "You see some pretty consistent trends on the tech and sales sides of the building in tech companies. I've definitely seen that. At [Chris's previous company], my team was 100% male. Most of the sales teams I've been a part of here at Acquia have been 100% male. That does seem to permeate even companies like Acquia that have awesome cultures to be a part of. It's an issue and worth combatting, worth talking about." I brought up the fact that I think that most work in technology is about solving hard problems, making the world a better place in some way ... at least most of us would like to think so. I contend that the more different backgrounds you have in a team--orientations, range of ages--as well as an even gender split, varied geographic and cultural origins, and so on, the better. The richer the mix, the more perspectives you have and the better the solutions will be that your team will come up with. When asked about what the negative effects of too little diversity can be, Chris preferred to highlight the positive, agreeing with me that, "Diversity, in every way that you define the word, help breed diverse perspectives and allows people to collaborate at a deeper level." "If you have ten people on the sales team and they all come from the same place and think the same way, then you have ten people but one perspective. If you have ten people from different backgrounds, that have different thoughts about how things work, you end up having a much richer collaboration and I think you can come to ideas and thoughts that you would not have been able to...

Part 2 of 2 - I spoke with John Faber, Managing Partner with Chapter Three, on March 17th, 2015. In part 1 to talk about the business advantages of contribution and sustainability when basing your business on open source software. We also touch on Drupal 8's potential power as a toolset and for attracting new developers, doing business in an open source context, and more! This conversation was recorded via Google Hangout and hotel WiFi. I apologize for the occasionally poor audio quality. Open source and doing business "Doing business in the context of the open source world at times has a tendency to straddle the double yellow line. Sometimes there's making money and then there's contributing back. We've tried to do a good job of that." "For me personally, I find that the open source community is just an easier place to do business for my personality and for the type of person that I am. I don't like really structured things. I like things that have a lot of possibilities. I don't like being constrained in things; I don't like having edges. Drupal gives me no edges. For [me as a business person], that's been the most exciting part of operating and working within the Drupal world. You can really take on any project from a crazy simulator data model project to helping out universities to anything you want. And that's what I love about doing business in this open source world." What about "finding time to contribute"? In October 2015, "Chapter Three will have been an incorporated organization specializing in Drupal for ten years. We have always been an organization focused on helping the Drupal project grow. That means giving time back and we don't really look at it as 'making money' and 'giving time back.' When we give back time to the community it's the same as making money. It's in the DNA of our organization to give back and to be part of what's going on right now. And we have always been that way." "Is it a marketing expense? For us it's worked. I spent no [other] money on marketing at all. I can reallocate things. So I can say my marketing expense is giving back to the community," so John has decided to make the investment in Alex Pott working full time on Drupal core, believing that it will benefit Chapter Three in the long run, whether it be through 'karma' or simply getting a better toolset released faster. "It's like a karma stream. When you give, it gives back after time. This is paying off on our investment with Alex and it's paid off with our investment that we've made into Drupal in the last ten years. For me, giving Alex a good, full-time, basic salary was driven by my need for Drupal 8 to come out. I watched this for a little while. I talked with my team. We need this trajectory to pick up; let's do it. And we just did it." John says they didn't go through much mental math on the subject, like, "If we hire Alex, we're going to get this, we're going to make him do that. Alex is fully self-directed. He does what he wants to do. Nobody on my team manages him ... My team asks him stuff all the time! And we do have that resource ... Maybe that was a subconscious game plan. It's been a year now of solid getting this thing together." John waited until Alex was giving the team messages that they could build something solid in Drupal 8 and then he was off selling it into enterprise businesses. "Maybe that was a business plan from my perspective, but people need to understand, we don't ask Alex to do anything. We just want him to feel as though he can actually succeed at this project." Contribution is a pragmatic choice "We know that everyone's boat is going to rise (including Chapter Three's) and we're not going to have spent that much money and think about what has happened! I have a pile of clients waiting in the wings. It's the next two years of work for Chapter Three. I think that all of the clients that I've worked on for the last...

Part 2 of 2 - I spoke with John Faber, Managing Partner with Chapter Three, on March 17th, 2015. In part 1 to talk about the business advantages of contribution and sustainability when basing your business on open source software. We also touch on Drupal 8's potential power as a toolset and for attracting new developers, doing business in an open source context, and more! This conversation was recorded via Google Hangout and hotel WiFi. I apologize for the occasionally poor audio quality. Open source and doing business "Doing business in the context of the open source world at times has a tendency to straddle the double yellow line. Sometimes there's making money and then there's contributing back. We've tried to do a good job of that." "For me personally, I find that the open source community is just an easier place to do business for my personality and for the type of person that I am. I don't like really structured things. I like things that have a lot of possibilities. I don't like being constrained in things; I don't like having edges. Drupal gives me no edges. For [me as a business person], that's been the most exciting part of operating and working within the Drupal world. You can really take on any project from a crazy simulator data model project to helping out universities to anything you want. And that's what I love about doing business in this open source world." What about "finding time to contribute"? In October 2015, "Chapter Three will have been an incorporated organization specializing in Drupal for ten years. We have always been an organization focused on helping the Drupal project grow. That means giving time back and we don't really look at it as 'making money' and 'giving time back.' When we give back time to the community it's the same as making money. It's in the DNA of our organization to give back and to be part of what's going on right now. And we have always been that way." "Is it a marketing expense? For us it's worked. I spent no [other] money on marketing at all. I can reallocate things. So I can say my marketing expense is giving back to the community," so John has decided to make the investment in Alex Pott working full time on Drupal core, believing that it will benefit Chapter Three in the long run, whether it be through 'karma' or simply getting a better toolset released faster. "It's like a karma stream. When you give, it gives back after time. This is paying off on our investment with Alex and it's paid off with our investment that we've made into Drupal in the last ten years. For me, giving Alex a good, full-time, basic salary was driven by my need for Drupal 8 to come out. I watched this for a little while. I talked with my team. We need this trajectory to pick up; let's do it. And we just did it." John says they didn't go through much mental math on the subject, like, "If we hire Alex, we're going to get this, we're going to make him do that. Alex is fully self-directed. He does what he wants to do. Nobody on my team manages him ... My team asks him stuff all the time! And we do have that resource ... Maybe that was a subconscious game plan. It's been a year now of solid getting this thing together." John waited until Alex was giving the team messages that they could build something solid in Drupal 8 and then he was off selling it into enterprise businesses. "Maybe that was a business plan from my perspective, but people need to understand, we don't ask Alex to do anything. We just want him to feel as though he can actually succeed at this project." Contribution is a pragmatic choice "We know that everyone's boat is going to rise (including Chapter Three's) and we're not going to have spent that much money and think about what has happened! I have a pile of clients waiting in the wings. It's the next two years of work for Chapter Three. I think that all of the clients that I've worked on for the last...

Part 1 of 2 - Drupal user number 5622, John Faber, has been involved with Drupal since late 2003. He is a Managing Partner with Chapter Three, a San Francisco-based digital agency. Their slogan sums up well what a lot of us think about what we do: "We build a better internet with Drupal." John and I got on a Google Hangout on March 17th, 2015, to talk about the business advantages of contribution and sustainability when basing your business on open source software. We also touch on Drupal 8's potential power as a toolset and for attracting new developers, doing business in an open source context, and more! Check out part 2 here: Sustainable contribution 2/2 - Giving back is the same as making money. This conversation was recorded via Google Hangout and hotel WiFi. I apologize for the occasionally poor audio quality. Contribution: Pay it forward or just common sense? With a gruelling, 5-year release cycle nearing the finish line, Drupal 8 has been a challenge for the Drupal community in many ways. It has raised many questions about the contribution models and their sustainability, from "amateur" contributor burnout to professionalization, to how to credit clients and employers for contributions, and more. John and Chapter Three have taken an approach that only a few companies have taken so far: hiring a full time contributor to do nothing but work on Drupal itself. Alex Pott is on staff at Chapter Three with the title "Drupal Research Engineer". Alex doesn't do any billable or client work; his the specific responsibility to be a Drupal (core) contributor. Running a business in the context of an open source toolset, according to John, "Has the tendency to straddle the double yellow line ... There's making money and there's contributing back. And we've tried to do a good job of that." Drupal 8, big and live The Fortune 50 Drupal 8 early adopter that John mentions ("We want to be innovative and we are willing to roll the dice on Drupal 8.") is C2HM Hill. Their site was built by Chapter Three and runs on Acquia Cloud. John points out that having Alex Pott working for Chapter Three gives them legitimacy to offer Drupal 8 services and an emergency "let's ask Alex!" channel if they were to get stuck anywhere. "I have to tell you, it really excites me. I feel like as soon as we have this adoption rolling with somebody and they see some success on this thing, Drupal 8 is really going to be the future for a lot of organizations who've invested their time in it--Chapter Three being one of them." Drupal 8, Drupal restart I put it to John that some of the new features of Drupal 8--everything is an entity, everything is fieldable, combined with a powerful, flexible, Drupal-Views powered admin back end--mean that we're entering a new era of sitebuilding. We don't even know what best practices are going to look like, how much we'll need modules, how much will be configuration "recipes", and of course how much will be Drupal wrappers around other, external PHP libraries. He got very excited: "It's kind of like the beginning of Drupal again. When Drupal 4 came out, we knew that this was a platform that had extensibility, legs, and this extremely cool modular system that allowed you to do anything. And I feel as though Drupal 8 with CMI and other tools built into it ... We're right at the beginning of ... Now we have a new platform that can do ... We already know what the old platform can do and it's great! But this is great times two! Or great times unknown!" Guest dossier Name: John Faber Twitter: @flavoflav2000 Drupal.org: flavor Work affiliation: Managing Partner, Chapter Three. 1st Drupal version: 4 How John found Drupal: "Some random guy in the [offshore fishing] club who had done very well in the beginning of the Internet era sent an email: 'You should check out Drupal. Cool project.' I installed it and I was like, '...