Acquia Inc. podcasts

Drupal & PHP: Linking Islands, the podcast – part 1 Part 1 – Larry Garfield and I had a long chat in front of my camera at DrupalCon Amsterdam. Part of the idea was to help Larry prepare his thoughts for writing the blog post that has turned into "Building Bridges: Linking Islands" in the Future of PHP guest blog series on Acquia.com. In this part we cover Larry's start in Drupal, some project history, what Drupal can teach (and needs to learn) about contribution and community ("celebrating the newbie" and the power of "thank you"), The New PHP, fuzzy project boundaries and inter-project collaboration. Building Bridges Larry explains, "The PHP ecosystem is coming together. The web ecosystem is coming together. It's a lot more integrated. It's a lot more collaborative. So projects that are collaborating need to ask themselves 'What is our value-add?'. Drupal's value-add over the PHP baseline is not that it does dependency-injection. It's not that it can serve HTML. It's not that it has forms. It's value-add is entities, views, and the community. We are a content management system and a very good one. By that I mean a structured system to manage content, not a tool for building pages. And we have a community behind it that has your back, that you can rely on, that is not going away any time soon. That's Drupal's value-add. So put our emphasis and effort there; on building a really solid, flexible CMS platform with a community that can support it." "Those other things that get us there? That's not our value-add. People don't use Drupal for hooks. They use Drupal for nodes. They use Drupal for Views. The more we can outsource our irrelevancies and focus on core competencies, the more we can say, 'The important things that make Drupal worth using, let's focus on those.' And the things that are not the reason people come to Drupal, we can save time by outsourcing that. It may not be perfect ... Could we write something better [than the Symfony routing component] ourselves? Probably. Would it be done right now? Not even close. But we brought in all this code and got 3/4 of the way we wanted to be by adding one, single library." I proposed one more aspect to Drupal's value-add, "Drupal is architected in a way that is extensible and flexible. You get some more baggage, but its advantage over a specialized system is when your next requirement comes in, we're ready to incorporate it or communicate with it." Larry adds, "That goes to the whole framework versus application debate we've been having since there's been a Drupal. In Drupal 8, in some ways, we became more of a framework, in other ways, more of an application." Pointing to himself, "As one of the framework people for a long time, I think the [framework side] actually lost that battle and we lost it to modern PHP." "Meanwhile, the application has evolved to being a platform and we should focus on thinking of Drupal as a PHP-powered content management platform. And think of it not in terms of, 'What is the canned user experience we can offer?' But [rather] how can we make a toolchain that let's you build a great user experience. How can we build a toolchain that let's you do all the content modeling shenanigans for whatever site or task you're doing and have reasonable defaults. Look at it as not an application, but as the core of a platform ecosystem. That means designing things and planning things in different ways than you would a pure application. You need to think about extensibility in a a different way between a framework and an application and a platform. I think at this point platform is the right way to think at the high level ... with some framework stuff alongside it." Links/References Building Bridges: Linking Islands" – Larry's post in the Future of PHP guest blog series on Acquia.com. If Larry and I are thinking of the same top ten open source projects list that he mentions, it is this one...

Chris Jolly, CTO Ontraq Europe, and his company have a strong technical background, going back to "old school" (pre-internet) IT. Their main focus until now has been eCommerce, Symfony, and solving hard problems like legacy-system integrations. Now, thanks to its use of Symfony framework components, they've started using Drupal 8 as their content management technology of choice! Chris and I talked at DrupalCon Amsterdam about getting there and what they're up to now. Getting to Drupal In late 2013, Chris told me, "I can't wait for Drupal 8 to be useable, because I need to work with a PHP content management system and I never want to work with Typo3 again as soon as I can find a viable alternative." By the time we met again at DrupalCon Amsterdam, Ontraq was already running a production site for a customer on Drupal 8: www.sommercable.com. I guess he liked what he saw! :-) "We come from the Symfony and eCommmerce world and this is our third year looking at Drupal and our second year doing Drupal. We've used a variety of CMS systems in the past; we've done integrations with Typo3 and Wordpress and to be honest, we were not really very excited by where they were going. We've also used Symfony for our own applications and integration work, so when we saw that Drupal was going to use Symfony, that was a trigger for us to look at Drupal much more seriously. Just before we came to that conference [in Vienna, where Chris and I met in late 2013], we'd already made the decision to use Drupal and so we were very excited last year in Vienna to have it confirmed: what a great community and the quality of the team and the software. Coming here [to DrupalCon Amsterdam] this week has reinforced that it was a good decision." Speaking of the componentized web ... As Ryan Weaver pointed out in his post, The Future of PHP is Shared Power Tools, sharing the best components between systems is the way PHP and the web are moving. Chris and Ontraq have grasped the essence and point of Drupal 8's architecture and where the web looks like going now: componenization. Sommercable.com "integrates four separate sub-domains. It has a Drupal sub-domain for the main corporate content for the front page. It has two Oxid eCommerce websites, one for B2C, one for B2B. And then it has a Symfony sub-domain for for single sign-on between Drupal and the eCommerce side." How was it to build that in Drupal 8? "Actually, it was much more straightforward than we'd expected. It was brilliant, because the way that the modules in Drupal 8 are constructed, [and how they work with Drupal core], is for me as a Symfony developer, very straightforward. It's like a slightly different dialect, but it feels like the same language. It was really good for us." "The new REST interface is fantastic, too; we used that as well. If you go to www.sommercable.com, you'll see on the front page, in the central area, is product information that is pulled out of the eCommerce websites and we use the REST interface to go and grab that information. Our business is all about integrating with legacy systems for business customers. For them, Drupal now offers a platform to build more complicated websites." "We don't really do the traditional, pure corporate website; it's more about the integration of services. For example, in our eCommerce, we integrate with legacy ERP systems. Bringing a diverse set of systems and displaying information, reusing business knowledge that's buried in another system and displaying it in Drupal, that's just the way to go forward." What are you most excited about in Drupal 8? "That's very difficult. There are so many things and, in fact, every time I speak to somebody here [at DrupalCon] it's like: Oh Goodness! That's yet another thing we could be doing! So it's very hard for me to say one thing that is the business reason for Drupal 8." Business benefits of Drupal 8 Looking at Ontraq...

At the 2014 Government ICT 2.0 conference in London, I gave a presentation on Drupal and open source software as an essential facilitator in the practice of good digital government today, "Code for a Better World: Open Source Drupal + Government." (presentation slides embedded below). Hugo Pickford-Wardle, Chief Innovation Officer at Matter Digital, helped me out by speaking for ten minutes about Matter's activities and experience on the front lines of government transformation in the UK today. Afterward, we got the chance to sit down and talk in front of the camera about all this and a lot more. This podcast includes parts of our conversation and as a special bonus, Hugo's part of the presentation from the event, talking about helping government work better and more efficiently with open source software, "working to create digital services that are going to meet the new [UK government] standards, where they need to be so good that people actually want to use them. It's all about digital-first." Why Drupal for Digital Government? "We're very much about putting the customer right at the heart of what you're creating. And so you need a lot of flexibility when you do that. What we see with Drupal is that there's a lot already done, so you don't need to reinvent the wheel. It's got the extensibility, so that you can go and refine the bits that you need to refine. And there's a huge community out there who've already solved a lot of the problems; so if a problem's already been solved well, that's not one we need to look at. We actually need to look at solving the problems that haven't been done well ... and it means that we get a lot for free." And those are the hard, interesting, valuable problems to solve, "Those are the customer's problems." "What we see when we're designing services working with government organizations is that there is definitely a drive towards using mobile devices. The interesting thing about the need to support mobile is the move away from apps and towards responsive design. One of the things we often see if someone's caught on to the idea of the need for mobile starts talking about the need for an app. But what they mean is that they need to support people on a mobile device." And they are often unaware of the cost of supporting apps for multiple devices and platforms compared to the efficiency of a single, responsive website or application that works on all of them. "Having a platform [like Drupal] that gives you responsive design as standard is critical to reducing the cost of implementing the processes that you need to support mobile devices." Technology v Communication / Widgets v Benefits "A lot of the time, we might just be focused entirely on content because what we find is that people think technology can solve problems, when often it is actually about people being able to communicate with people that's going to solve the problem." "We think that technology should be an enabler for those human-centered aspects of change that you are trying to create. A lot of my friends are massive techies and they get a buzz out of solving the hard tech problems. What we can then do is to take those hard tech problems and tie them together to create [solutions for] the hard human problems. And that is where we see the power of open source really coming into its own. I think it's also one of the challenges of open source: Because there's such a tech community behind it, sometimes it's hard for non techies to enter the realm. Techies are not always designers, so there are times when it can be hard for open source projects to explain themselves to the people who might actually want to use them. That's an interesting thought back to the open source community: How customer-centered is your open source project? Could you be getting more support for it by thinking more about the wider range of people who would actually participate?" Presentation slides: Code...

Voices of the ElePHPant / Acquia Podcast Ultimate Cage Match Part 2 - I had the chance to try to pull Cal Evans out of his shell at DrupalCon Amsterdam. After a few hours, he managed to open up and we talked about a range of topics we have in common. In this part of our conversation we talk about 'Getting off the Island', inter-project cooperation in PHP and Drupal's role in that; the reinvention and professionalization of PHP core development; decoupled, headless Drupal 8; PHP and the LAMP stack as tools of empowerment and the technologists' responsibility to make devices and applications that are safe, secure, and private by default. In Part 1 of this 2-part series, we talked Drupal, PHP convergence and the "PHP Renaissance" (and "Why PHP?"), open source communities, proprietary v open source business and the ethics of helping, the Nomad PHP user group, and more. Cal on PHP inter-project cooperation "The PHP community is famous for reinventing the wheel. I've got a closet full of wheels. I don't need any more wheels ... The more all of us can work together ... The fact that we're starting to tear down these walls and stopping reinventing these wheels and starting to work together ... I think this is awesome!" Decoupled, headless Drupal 8 Cal points out, "All of a sudden, you now have this entire CMS that's headless. I don't have to do the 80% of every project that is exactly the same. It's already built in Drupal! Lemme just take that and then I can do the 20% that is the fun stuff that makes my project special." Speaking of the fun stuff, as I say in the podcast, here's the biggest benefit I see in Drupal 8 and the biggest differentiator between Drupal and most other projects: "The architecture of Drupal 8 makes it a user interface for building digital businesses. It is a user interface for making APIs and web services – consuming them, outputting them. And the one thing where I believe the Drupal community is going to remain incredibly stubborn is that we are not a developer project to enable developers to do more developing. We're a bunch of developers who've put this system together to empower non-developers to communicate, to build community, to take action in the real world with our technology ... So we will remain the point-and-click community." :-) We have the technology and the responsibility Cal puts it like this: "One of the reasons I love being a developer is that it becomes my job to make other people's lives better. What we do makes an impact on everybody, so we need to do it well. Because that makes their lives better, they don't have to worry about those problems. If they want a publishing platform, they want to say something, they can install Drupal, they can get it up and running, and they can get to publishing, which is what they want to do. What we want to do is write code! So it's a win for everybody. But it's wonderful for me to be a developer and to think that what I do has a positive impact on other people." Guest Dossier See Cal's full guest dossier in part 1 of this conversation Name: Cal Evans Twitter: @calevans Website: http://blog.calevans.com/, Postcards From My Life Github: https://github.com/calevans LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/calevans Work affiliation: Developer Advocate, Pantheon. Read this great post about Cal and how he got to Pantheon. FLOSS role: Nomad PHP virtual PHP user group (aka "The World Wide Herd") helping developers wherever they live, Voices of the ElePHPant podcast, "Interviews with the people that are making the PHP community special" Current projects: Nomad PHP (@nomadphp), "A developer who doesn’t learn at least one new thing every 3 months is a paperweight." Read the rest here ... Interview video

Voices of the ElePHPant / Acquia Podcast Ultimate Showdown Part 1 - Cal Evans and I got the chance to sit down and talk (a lot!) at DrupalCon Amsterdam and talk about a range of topics we have in common. In this first part of a 2-part series, we talk Drupal, PHP convergence and the "PHP Renaissance", open source communities, proprietary v open source business and the ethics of helping, and more. Why PHP? According to Cal, PHP has three things going for it: "It is a great language; the only language designed for the Web." "It has an awesome set of documentation, maintained by some great people." "It has one of the most vibrant and exciting communities out there. And that is what I think makes the difference and has kicked it up to running 80% of the servers on the Web," he goes on, "which means that Drupal is immediately available to 80% of the servers on the Web." Disco Cal and his "Side Hustle" "I have one major passion in my life and that is to help developers. The last ten years of my career in one way or another, it's been my privilege to be paid to go out and find ways to help developers. Nomad PHP is a user group for those that don't have a user group. A lot of people can't get to conferences or just don't have a local user group and that's what Nomad is for." "Nomad PHP is a user group. You pay to attend; we have subscribers and we pay our speakers. These are the same people you see speaking at PHP conferences, I can't pay their travel, so I pay them. We sell a live ticket and a video-only ticket, but we encourage people to attend live because you get more out of it. You have what's going on on the screen, you can ask questions, we have an IRC channel with all the guys and girls kibitzing, making bad jokes ... it's like being at a real conference. We have that hallway track and that is where really interesting conversations take place. But once the talk gets going, you get good questions, you get people that are supporting each other and I can always tell when we've got a really good speaker: the IRC channel will go dead until they finish and then all of a sudden explodes with questions." Cal runs Nomad PHP, Nomad Javascript, and Day Camp 4 Developers. "Those are all designed to help developers. Yes you pay money to attend all those, but I give away an inordinate amount of ticket. My passion is not making money; my passion is helping developers. So I am glad that Nomad has caught on and that" Guest Dossier Name: Cal Evans Twitter: @calevans Website: http://blog.calevans.com/, Postcards From My Life Github: https://github.com/calevans LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/calevans Work affiliation: Developer Advocate, Pantheon. Read this great post about Cal and how he got to Pantheon. FLOSS role: Nomad PHP virtual PHP user group (aka "The World Wide Herd") helping developers wherever they live, Voices of the ElePHPant podcast, "Interviews with the people that are making the PHP community special" Current projects: Nomad PHP (@nomadphp), "A developer who doesn’t learn at least one new thing every 3 months is a paperweight." 1st open source memory: Microsoft told Cal's parents they'd have to pay $15,000 in licensing fees to update and continue using the software (Windows and SQL Server) they'd built their family business on. That is a lot of money, especially for a small business, and Cal took matters into his own hands: for $4500 he bought a new server, installed Linux and "this new language called PHP" and rewrote the business applications using open source software. "Six months later, we had totally ditched the Microsoft servers. I had the entire site back up and running on PHP and honestly, I've never looked back." Open source as marital strain: Cal is a Wordpress guy in his heart, but "My wife, the lovely and talented Cathy, when given the choice, she deploys Drupal. It'...

I met Vinita Rathi at the recent Digibury Weekender, where she gave a presentation entitled "Why we all need women in tech." Her presentation was thought- and audience-question provoking and I was thrilled when she agreed to sit down with me and talk about women in technology. In this conversation, among other things, we touch on how businesses with more women in leadership tend to be better performers financially; motherhood and maternity leave as a business advantage; perspectives on problem solving; and how to move technology companies and industries towards gender balance and diversity. Diversity helps the bottom line Vinita has gathered performance data on companies and points out that the top financially performing 20% of companies have roughly 37% of women in leadership roles, while the bottom 20% only have around 19% female leadership. "I'm not saying having women on your board will make you successful," she clarifies, "but I am saying it definitely increases the probability of making the company successful." "It's a long-term story. I'm not saying it will happen in a couple of years. It's more like looking at the ten-year horizon and you would see that difference." Different brains, different advantages? "I always hear that men are probably better at programming because of their inclination towards mathematics, because that have a bigger brain which works faster when solving problems. However, I disagree with that in the sense that programming is not just about solving problems; programming is also about finding problems. The faster you figure out the problem, the more efficiently you'll be able to solve it. And scientifically – what I found in my research – female brains are faster when coordinating between the right brain and the left brain. Even though men have a bigger brain, the coordination between right brain and left brain – between creativity and problem-solving skills – is faster in females. What differentiates females is that if you have creativity in analyzing the problem, then you're halfway there and it's just about the solving. At that point the 10% bigger brain thing really doesn't matter," and mixed, balanced teams are going to get you better solutions faster. Motherhood as an advantage "If you think about the skills I would say women are usually great at, we have been known for nurturing relationships. The value system that we carry with us, the emotional stability that a woman has only improves after we have gone through motherhood. However, at the same time, you would have some arguments about different areas where you would say that because women go on maternity leave they get out of touch, they go out of the industry and that makes it difficult for their organization to absorb them and encourage them further because it's commercially not viable." Vinita makes a strong point about why this does not apply in tech: "Technology is no longer single-coder work." It's rare nowadays for individuals to be solving the big problems alone, or implementing massive projects on their own. "Technology is more about teamwork, more about bigger teams working on bigger things, doing bigger innovation. This is where you need all these skills." "Think about a mum, what she has learned," during maternity leave, "She's now more patient, she knows how to make sacrifices, she now has more emotional stability, she now knows how to nurture relationships, build people ... That's where I say that women are very good at building teams. They are not made for winning the game, but they are more there, working behind the scenes, building teams which, at the end of the day, win. That's why we need more women in tech, so that we can do more wonderful things." Finding balance "There's this prevailing thought in society that programming and technology is all about boys, versus the 'softer' things are more for girls. " To change that perception, "There...

On being an open source developer "Like a lot of people, I did both sides of technology; working on paid, proprietary systems [and open source]. There is a big difference. I can't imagine myself going back to any proprietary system where I have to pay; I can't share the code I am doing with anyone; I have to ask a company about the right tool to use. I love the way that everybody contributes to the same piece of code, trying to make it the best ... and for free!" I asked about working on proprietary systems where you can't look at how your peers have already solved a problem: "If you are lucky, you have great people around you, whom you can ask for help. But you always rely a company behind it, who is the real owner of your product. It's not you; it's the company." In open source, "The only limit on what you can produce with the tools is your brain." Drupal in the Philippines "The Philippines is in Asia, but the situation is a bit different than in other countries around it. If you saw the post by Dries about Japan, Japan is having this problem with translation. There's no problem like this in the Philippines because everybody speaks English. It's a very interesting ecosystem between Filipino-American companies, offshore companies, and a little bit of local development, but there's no Drupal shops that I know about, working directly with locals. Most of the time it's offshore work and working for Europe, the Middle East, or for the US." The Drupal community in the Philippines is mainly split between the capital, Manila, and Cebu City, the second largest city in the country. "Because of the country's geography – it's 7,100+ islands – it's really difficult for people from one island to meet the community in the other. In Cebu there are at least two meet-ups a month. They had a monthly meet-up since 2010." Luc added one more, an idea he says he "stole" from his time in London: the Drupal beer and chat. "It's much more about networking and meeting each other. It's not formal at all." Hey Filipino Drupalists! Check out IRC and Twitter! The Filipinos are "heavy social sharing people. They are ultra-social, but they don't use Twitter. They use Facebook; the Filipino group on Facebook has more than 3000 members. They use a lot of Facebook, but they are missing a lot because they don't use any other social tool. They don't use IRC or Twitter." Drupal Philippines, here's how to chat with the Drupal community on IRC, and here's a quick start for what's going on today on Twitter about Drupal. Presenter Dossier: Luc Bézier Drupal freelancer & community organizer in the Philippines, Co-organizer of Drupal Camp Cebu, 15-26 November, 2014. Drupal.org profile: luukyb LinkedIn profile" Twitter: Luukyb 1st Drupal memory: Choosing Drupal because it handled multi-level menus well out-of-the-box. Favorite thing about Drupal: The events! You can travel around the world and find people with the same interests as yours. That's pretty unique. On contribution: "When you get such a great tool for free ... a lot of people want to give back the way they can. It can be documentation, or organizing a camp. You do what you can, that's the main idea, isn't it?" Interview Video!

Part 2 of 2 – Kris Vanderwater (EclipseGc), Acquia’s Developer Evangelist, and I got together in a Google Hangout to catch up on our impressions of DrupalCon Amsterdam. We prepared a list of our top ten sessions from the Con for you to catch up with at home (technically nine sessions and one “other cool thing”). In our list, there’s a little something for most everyone, from coders, to themers, to site builders, to those of us who pitch and sell Drupal to clients – but we would recommend all of these sessions to anyone involved in Drupal. See how the other side lives! In this podcast, video, and post, we cover the 2nd half of our list. Check out Part 1 for the rest. Thanks to everyone who was a part of DrupalCon Amsterdam, the folks on r/Drupal and Twitter for pointing out a couple things that made it into this list! Let us know what you thought of these sessions and what the highlights of your DrupalCon Amsterdam were! Managing Complexity - Larry Garfield Larry draws a line from complexity in code – the differences between writing and managing 200 lines, 2000 lines, 200,000 or 2,000,000 lines of code – to informal and formal leadership and structures in social movements, to the past and present state of Drupal, the Drupal community, and the sub-community of core- and sub-system maintainers. He proposes broad structures and concepts to deal with managing the complexity of our project – mainly the idea that with responsibility must come authority for anyone to be an effective leader – but leaves the specifics as an exercise for the community. As I say in the podcast, there are at least two sides to this story. The immediate "opponents" to his ideas take issue with his choice of examples, some specific language he uses; while the most concrete alternate suggestions revolve around improved communication and project management in Drupal core development. You should listen to the entire session and the live Q&A after, read all the references Larry links to and all the comments on the DrupalCon Amsterdam session page. For more background and thinking around similar topics, Emma Jane Hogbin's session “The danger of having no why” from DrupalCon Austin and Lisa Welchman's DrupalCon Prague keynote, ""The Paradox of Open Growth" are both well worth (re)watching. Future-proof your Drupal 7 site - Dave Reid Building a Drupal site now? You're probably doing it in Drupal 7. This remains a valid option and Drupal 7 will continue to be actively supported for several years to come. Dave's presentation arms you with information to help you design and build your Drupal 7 site using modules that will migrate smoothly into Drupal 8, features developed for Drupal 8 and back-ported to Drupal 7, and a list of deprecated modules and functionality to avoid if you are looking to migrate to Drupal 8 at some point in the future. Shout out to OS Training for this helpful post about the session on OSTraining.com. You can see Dave's session slides here. Keynote - Cory Doctorow Cory Doctorow, as well as being a science fiction author and popular blogger, is a leading thinker in and around issues of copyright (and -left), human rights, privacy, and society in the digital age. His keynote at DrupalCon Amsterdam was in turns witty, powerful, and moving. Watch it to get a sense of the importance of what we are doing in the free and open source software movement: If we don't build the systems to guarantee privacy and civil rights on the internet and in the internet of things, who will? DrupalCI (not a session) Jeremy Thorson, Nick Schuch, and Ricardo Amaro describe this best themselves (and I did a terrible job of explaining in the podcast!): "DrupalCI is an initiative born out of the requirement for new testbot infrastructure. Our goal is to implement a brand new Continuous Integration (CI) workflow that can not only be used for Drupal but...

Part 1 of 2 – Kris Vanderwater (EclipseGc), Acquia’s Developer Evangelist, and I got together in a Google Hangout to catch up on our impressions of DrupalCon Amsterdam. We prepared a list of our top ten sessions from the Con for you to catch up with at home (technically nine sessions and one “other cool thing”). In our list, there’s a little something for most everyone, from coders, to themers, to site builders, to those of us who pitch sell Drupal to clients – but we would recommend all of these sessions to anyone involved in Drupal. See how the other side lives! In this podcast, video, and post, we’ll cover the first four things on our list; check out the rest in part two. Thanks to everyone who was a part of DrupalCon Amsterdam, the folks on r/Drupal Twitter for pointing out a couple things that made it into this list! Let us know what you thought of these sessions and what the highlights of your DrupalCon Amsterdam were! Prenote - Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire and Robert Douglass. The latest edition of what has become a DrupalCon tradition. Focusing on the theme, “Memories,” a couple dozen members of the Drupal community told their stories live or on video about “How DrupalCon changed my life”. From new relationships to finding long-lost family, from quitting day jobs to founding companies, and much more. Don’t miss this moving testament to the very human side of our project! Drupal’s PHP component future - Kris Vanderwater Drupal in a post-PHP-Renaissance world: Discussions about the nature of Drupal; its place in PHP in the past, today, and where it could be going. Modules v libraries, from “Not Invented Here” to “Proudly Invented Elsewhere” and how PHP projects and communities are coming together to write the (hybrid) applications of tomorrow. Coder v Themer Ultimate Grudge Smackdown Fight to the Death - Adam Juran and Campbell Vertesi Watch a coder (can only touch the back end and Drupal code) and a themer (can only touch the theme layer) try to fulfill a client site spec in 15 minutes. A demonstration of the power of both the front end and the back end – watching other people code live has never been this much fun. The moral and last part of the session is that we need everyone on our teams; we need to cooperate and communicate to build the best possible Drupal sites. Twig in Drupal 8 - MortenDK Morten Birch Heide-Jørgensen, Jen Lampton and others worked long and hard to get Twig adopted as the default themeing layer for Drupal 8. In the latest iteration of his talks explaining the power of Drupal + Twig, Morten shows off some of its power and flexibility. Kris and I were especially blown away by the built-in debugging and selector-suggestion functionality built into our new front end system. Check this out! Video! DrupalCon Amsterdam Top Ten Part 1 Part 2

Apart from presenting a terrific session that will help you wrap your head around developing for Drupal 8, Fredric and I had a great conversation that covered the use of Drupal and open source in government, government decision-making versus corporate decision-making, designing Drupal 7 sites with Drupal 8 in mind, designing sites for the end users and where the maximum business value comes from in your organization, and more! Drupal in Government "We were part of the original Whitehouse.gov [Drupal] build, and the We the People petition system that they use for the democratization of ideas. I feel it opened up this conversation about what open source was, the security of open source, and what it really meant in terms of democratic principles. Of course, in the land of politics, perception is important." "I was the lead developer at one point on the Energy.gov project; that was one of the first Drupal 7 sites. That checked all of the political checkboxes: it was going to save money it brought various offices under the Department of Energy under the same branding they didn't have the recurring licenses and because it is open source, because we can manipulate it, we can custom tailor those content authoring experiences and those tools to the needs of the various offices while still having that kind of super administrator and allowing that person to control what needed to be controlled."" "Being able to enable government officials to get their message ... It's a public service ... We're continuing to work with the Senate, with the House of Representatives; it's been absolutely great because everyone understands at this point in 2014, that open, transparency, open source, democratization – they all have a single, underlying thread." Presenter Dossier: Fredric Mitchell Senior Engineer, Phase 2 Drupal.org profile: fmitchell Website: http://brightplum.com/ Twitter: fredricmitchell 1st Drupal memory: Meeting Drupal while working with Larry Garfield at Palantir ... "My first Drupal memory was trying to absorb all of Larry's eagerness and enthusiasm about Drupal 5." Session Description Now that you know how to build sites, it's time to take the next step and jump into the Drupal 8 API. This session reviews the 30 API functions that you should know to begin your journey. This is an updated version of my popular talk at Drupalcamp Chicago and Drupalcamp Costa Rica that now covers Drupal 8! We'll jump through common API examples with some derived examples from the excellent Examples module and others that will carry over from Drupal 7. Attendees will learn the behind-the-scenes functions that power common UI elements with the idea of being able to build or customize them for your projects. Some of these include: drupal_render() entity_load_multiple() (node_load_multiple in D7) entity_view_multiple() menu_get_tree() taxonomy_get_tree() Field::fieldInfo()->getField() (field_info_field in D7) QueryBase class (EntityFieldQuery in D7) Request->attributes->get(‘entity’) (menu_get_object in D7) Session Video Session slides You can grab a copy of Fredric's slides he updated for DrupalCon Austin from his GitHub repository. Interview video

DrupalCon Amsterdam was something of a family outing for me. My wife Francesca attended all week and my kids were able to come out Thursday evening to attend Trivia Night and the Friday sprints. My daughter Victoria had sewn a dress and a cape to appear as Drupal Girl on Thursday evening. Her weeks of work on that really paid off; she was a big hit. She also got to meet her Drupal idol, MortenDK, who was the inspiration for her brand new Drupal.org and Twitter username: Drupal_Princess. There's a great photo of her meeting Webchick floating around online, too. Proud Father On the way to the venue Friday morning, Victoria surprised me by telling me she didn't want to go sightseeing in Amsterdam, she wanted to contribute at the sprints. "Wow, I better strike while the iron is hot here," I thought. Within 5 minutes of showing up, 2 people had offered to loan Victoria a laptop and both of my kids were off in the new contributors room in the capable hands of Alexar Pendashteh, Ruben Teijeiro, and Brian Gilbert at various times through the day. While Brian was helping Victoria build a Drupal 8 site, teaching her about Views and such, she discovered a bug. They set her up with a d.o account and filed a bug report – achievement unlocked: CONTRIBUTION! – I am so proud. Even better, Brian and Ruben wrote and tested a patch to fix it that is now RTBC, too! My son, Oliver was no slacker during the sprints, either. While he didn't find a bug or get a patch in, Ruben taught him some new skills and he worked on the CSS styling of a Drupal site. The day inspired him to start a course on Code Academy, which is great timing since they both have two weeks off of school right now! Geekery ahoy! Contributor Dossier: Victoria McGuire High school student, designer, seamstress, maker, Drupal Girl Drupal.org profile: drupal_princess 1st contribution: Double escaped label on change of field machine name Twitter: Drupal_Princess 1st version of Drupal: 8 Beta 1 (at the DrupalCon Amsterdam sprints!), though she had a D7 Drupal Commerce site built for her in the past to sell her jewelery. Video!

The BADCast "Why should I come to BADCamp?" you may be asking. Well, if you can get to San Francisco, one of the biggest and free-est tech events on the calendar awaits you: free training, free food and drink, free summits, free sessions, amazing keynotes (free), a party (entry fee ... probably zero), "fancy coffee", and opportunities galore all await you! This is the camp for everyone "We want to keep the barrier to entry as low as possible so that we can make the event open to everyone ... people who have heard about it and are maybe curious or 'future passionate' about it. Maybe they don't know yet that they are going to be super passionate about Drupal and they might not have come if it had had a big sticker price. We want to get people who love software into the community as easily as possible so they can see what Drupal is all about," explains Jen Lampton. She also mentions scholarships available for those in need and that the event has highlighted cheaper accommodation available near the venue in San Francisco as well. Summits, Trainings, Sessions Here's a quick rundown on some of the official action at BADCamp 2014: Summits Non Profit Summit Higher Ed Summit DevOps Summit Front-End Summit Behat Mini-Summit Core Developers Sprint Training Object Oriented Programming Advanced SASS and Compass for RWD Enjoy Drupal: Site Building Basics - Thursday Enjoy Drupal: Site Building Basics - Friday Drupal Immersion for Beginners Drupal Immersion for Beginners Level up your Themer Drupal 7 Multilingual Hands-On Drupal Performance and Scalability with the Dream Team Session tracks Main Stage Business and Community Coding and Developing Designing and Themeing DevOps and Performance Site Building and Using Drupal Listen to the story for yourself The Bay Area Drupal Camp has been around since 2007 and has always attracted large number of attendees, from hundreds (an incredible number at the time) the first time around in 2007, to more than 1600 in recent years. You won't find this many expert technologists, networking opportunities, and this much fun at this price anywhere else this year. Listen to Andrew Mallis, Anne Stefanyk, Darius Garza, and Jen Lampton tell you themselves about BADCamp's history, purpose, and this year's plans in this podcast. The video has a couple of good visual moments, too. :-) Video! Sorry for t.. sou...nd Sorry about the problems with image and sound quality during the recording.

Meet Ruth Fuller, she's here to help businesses get more out of Drupal by helping them engage more effectively with the Drupal community. She'd like to help you with effective Drupal and open source sponsorship, how to engage with the community, planning, coordination, presentation preparation, and public speaking coaching. Give more to get more A lot of businesses are using open source nowadays; there's a lot of Drupal out there. Ruth has seen organizations struggle with getting the most out of it. Drupal is a lot more than "just some software package." Those who can engage with the Drupal community in productive ways, there can be great rewards: increased productivity, better tools, easier hiring and more. For example, if you build a reputation for contributing as a company, "One of the big things people aren't realizing is that you have that great open source code, but if you send your developers," on company time to open source events, "and they're learning more and they're getting involved then company-specific pain points that you have can be taken care of, not just by people in your organization, but by entire communities." "The people working in your company are the main ambassadors [to the broader Drupal community]. It's an individual first, and where they work second. You gotta get your employees out there, in the sprint rooms, working with people, learning from people. People will see your company wanting to be involved." Drupal: A place of passion I think Ruth hits on a key point about successfully interacting with the Drupal community. When she was getting started at the DA, "I quickly learned why people were being so passionate in their emails. They were really excited or really upset, but the reality was that this wasn't just a program or software that they worked with or a company that they worked for 9 to 5 ... This was something that was incredibly important to them. Especially working with the Association, any sort of feedback was almost like, 'Please take care of my baby.' I enjoyed that any sort of intensity was really from a place of passion for the project." Consultant Dossier: Ruth H. Fuller Freelance consultant for communication and open source community engagement, formerly with the Drupal Association. Drupal.org profile: ruthief Website: http://www.ruthhfuller.com/ "I am Ruth and I am a ... communicator, teacher, facilitator, voice ..." Twitter: DrupalRuth Best Drupal memory: "The first time I met Dries in person was at DrupalCon Portland when they needed to use my apartment to pretend it was his apartment for a documentary ... He used my keys and was like 'Home sweet home!' and walking in to my apartment ... That was a little weird." :-) She'd like to help you with effective Drupal and open source sponsorship, how to engage with the community, planning, coordination, presentation preparation, and public speaking coaching. Video!

Part 2 of a 2-part conversation with Angie Byron in front of the cameras at NYC Camp 2014, held at United Nations headquarters in New York. In this part of our conversation, we talk about improvements in the Drupal developer- and learning-experience thanks to the major changes under the hood in Drupal 8; the "PHP Renaissance"; and about being welcomed "back into the fold" of the greater PHP world thanks to the nature of Drupal 8 being a sort of "meta project" (my words) that includes parts of many others. In the first part of our conversation we went over some of the inspiring and thought-provoking ideas we encountered there, and jumped to some of the benefits to users of the technical improvements built into Drupal 8. D8 DX - Drupal 8 developer experience "In addition to the user facing changes," that we talked about in part 1, "there's also been very significant refactoring under the hood to essentially to turn Drupal from a procedural and naming-convention-based application to something more object-oriented, extensible architecture, more in line with what everyone else is doing. Dries, the Drupal Project Lead, really felt that with Drupal 7 we had really reached this tipping point. Drupal 6 and below were this really easily accessible, hackable system where you could jump in with little knowledge and hack things together till you kind of got something working and then move on. In Drupal 7 we sort of broke that mold. Drupal 7 became a little more advanced: we used an object-oriented database abstraction layer, we got into things like automated tests, we had a new entity system that required knowledge of all these different parts. It came to a point where it was too inaccessible for 'weekend hackers' to just jump into and fix, but at the same time, the ways that we extended Drupal in Drupal 7 and below were just ... oddball to people who were used to any other language." "Since we hit this tipping point, Dries felt we either had to simplify Drupal, go back to the old days, which didn't seem realistic because we'd made it that flexible for a reason ... Or, move in the other direction and start embracing these modern standards and patterns that are in other languages and frameworks, and making it more accessible to a broader spectrum of developers. That's the direction that he chose to take the project." "When Drupal 8 is actually shipping, I think you'll find that if you have any experience in any language other than PHP, it will be really accessible to you. It uses classes, inheritance, interfaces, namespaces – all the stuff that you'd expect from modern programming languages. If you learned PHP before 2006 or so [Angie says "1996" by mistake in the interview], it's going to be a little more challenging for you. Before PHP 5, PHP didn't really do object-oriented programming. If you've never had experience with that, it will be a bit challenging. If you've learned PHP any time from when PHP 5 came out, it's going to be pretty accessible to you. If you've done any work with Symfony or Laravel, or any of the other PHP frameworks, it's all going to look the same to you." "Our challenge in our community is the subset of people who either learned PHP back in the day (like myself), or people who learned PHP via Drupal, they are going to have a tougher time because there are a lot of concepts for them to learn. The good news is that because every other language works this way, there are a ton of resources out there to help you understand. The thing that I like about it is that instead of it all working off of people's good will about following conventions, it actually enforces guidelines and rules and structures so that programming is actually easier to understand." "There's a huge commitment form all of the people working on Drupal 8 to get the documentation right, to get the developer experience right so that people come to Drupal 8 and they love it." Drupal as part of...

Presenter Dossier: Jesus Manuel Olivas Drupal 8 Solutions Engineer, Blink Reaction Drupal.org profile: jmolivas Website: http://jmolivas.com/ Twitter: jmolivas 1st Drupal memory: "I tried Drupal 5 (at the time I had my own Java-based CMS), it was not a good memory because you load it and Boom! you have nothing ... :-) ... I didn't get the idea of Drupal that you have to add modules to add functionality. I admit I didn't try very hard; I just quit." ... Later Jesus tried Drupal 6 and *did* RTFM and discovered how easy Drupal is to extend and he was pretty much 'hooked'. Favorite thing about Drupal: "It's the easiest way you can add external libraries to your project." He also likes how Drupal, "is pushing all these best practices in building sites or modules and how we forgot the 'not invented here' syndrome." Session description Every modern framework nowadays provides a scaffolding tool code generator for speeding up the process of starting a new project and avoiding repetitive tasks. Now Drupal does, too! In this session you can build a module while following along with the live demo. You will learn how to take advantage of the Symfony Console Component to provide a CLI tool that automates the creation of Drupal 8 modules, automatically generating the module directory structure, controllers, forms, services, plugins, and required configuration files. By the end of this session you will learn how to: Set up a local environment for Drupal 8 using a Virtual Machine: http://drupal.org/project/vm Build modules for Drupal 8: http://drupal.org/project/console Topics mentioned in the session: Composer, YAML, Namespaces, Dependency Injection, Annotations, Routing, Controller Session video Session slides Jesus's session slides are available here: http://bit.ly/drupal-console, but they aren't much without his code demos. You can see those in the video of his session! Interview video