Acquia Inc. podcasts

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, '...

Ani Gupta, Drupal Mumbai community lead, StartupNext lead, formerly at Axelerant in India, and I got the chance to continue the conversation I began with Piyush Poddar at Drupal Camp London about the changing face of IT and open source in India. Under the heading "from consumption to contribution" we talk about India's move from being perceived as being good for cheap, outsourced code to being a place rich with brands and startups in their own right and the home to much open source contribution. We also talk about old versions of Drupal, the Drupal community and its mentoring culture, open source acceptance in business and government, and more! Open source and Drupal in India "India is infamous as a very cheap destination for software services and the sweat-shop-like factories that people have set up of 100s of coders hacking away on machines. To some extent that is still true. I personally--and a lot of my colleagues and peers--have felt that India actually has an amazing amount of talent. That is evident today. It's been a challenge for us to actually establish India as a destination to source really good, fantastic software development work. In the last 5 years, there have been a lot of new changes to the landscape. A lot of that is because of open source software, communities like Ruby and Drupal, and also the startup boom that is happening in India in the last three years." Why are there so many software developers in India? "Because it's easy to get a certification in Microsoft .NET or Java or something and people got that and quickly got a job. That was a very big consideration for a lot of people. It was based around 'How can I be secure and get a good job?' Today, things are changing quite rapidly. Two things have happened simultaneously. One is that the open source community exploded. Drupal has exploded since 2011, when Dries came to India. Everybody who was providing Drupal services became aware of the larger community and why contributions were important. The discussions started happening. Business have started moving towards a contribution culture; they understand the ROI. But more importantly, developers themselves became aware that becoming part of an open community and sharing ideas actually makes them stronger and better." "The startup culture has been very important in terms of showing that there is a better was to enjoy software and develop really cool applications, and make a lot of money as well in India. There is massive demand for really good talent. The startup scene in India has provided very profitable homegrown companies that acquired a massive amount of really good talent at really good salaries. The startups are definitely looking inward and unlike before, even the startups are solving Indian problems." "I do believe that the culture is carrying over. A lot of professional services companies, especially those built around open source software, they understand that without contributing back to the community--be it Ruby, or Python, Wordpress, or Drupal--they understand that if they're not part of the community then they're actually losing out in a massive way. Branding becomes very important. People start talking about these companies that are contributing back. It's important. Productivity and motivation is not dependent on how much money you can throw at somebody. Motivation is going to come from getting that person happy. How does that person get happy? By actually building things and owning that and getting recognized for that. That's what open source communities provide." The last three to five years has been a complete [180 degree turn] as I see it. Today somebody who wants to set up a company doesn't think 'I'm going to get an Adobe license or a Microsoft license.' They're going to say, 'Okay, I'm going to get into Drupal or Ruby. I'm going to start building applications and I'm going to provide those services.' That's a completely different...

When Tom Feichter told me he only gets to one Drupal event a year, I wanted to know why. When he told me it's because he runs a Drupal shop–mspiral creative media–in Yangon, Myanmar, I had to know more! We talked about Tom's history in Drupal, how Drupal's multilingual capabilities have helped him, how excited he is about Drupal 8's architecture, his history working with NGOs on the Thai/Burmese border and how that has flowed into ethical digital agency work, and more. Drupal really is everywhere It is so exciting to find out that the promise of open source–free to use for anyone, anywhere–really does empower people everywhere to take their destiny in their own hands. Until I met Tom, I would not have guessed that there was a flourishing Drupal economy and landscape in Myanmar. Tom says, "80% of the new sites developed in Burma are running on Drupal." I asked if that was thanks to his company, "No, that's not all me, it's most of the other agencies have started to work with Drupal as well. Some of them already did Drupal work before, but now it seems nearly all of the agencies are going for Drupal." He also cited security concerns (and a perception that Drupal is less risky even when set up my less-advanced teams) and better multilingual support in Drupal over Joomla! as reasons why the Burmese have moved to Drupal. Open source, helping civil society "Technology can help civil society a lot, especially in being able to get a message across. We have seen that in many cases already in the past. Even Facebook can help a lot in spreading a message. And that's going to be easier in the future in Myanmar ... it's already becoming much easier because now the country has been opening up. The Internet is more affordable, people now have mobile access and so on. This kind of technology can help people to get their message across. And also some people can make a living out of that." :-) Guest dossier Name: Thomas Feichter Drupal.org: thomas.feichter Work affiliation: MD & CTO, mspiral creative media (mspiral Drupal.org profile page) 1st Drupal experience: Choosing Drupal 6 over Joomla! for an NGO project using CiviCRM in 2008. "I didn't know Drupal at all at that time, but I had been working with Joomla! for a while and didn't want to touch it anymore." LinkedIn: Thomas Feichter More like this ... Drupal and security Recorded webinar: Security in Action - Keeping Your Site Secure in an Insecure World Drupal, NGOs, and doing good Case Study: Red Cross - Acquia helps American Red Cross bring its disaster preparedness teams together through global platform Case study: Stand Up To Cancer Campaign - Acquia Develops Digital Platform for Cancer Research UK and Channel 4’s Stand Up To Cancer Campaign Case study: World Press - Acquia helps World Press Photo’s mission to increase the standard of photojournalism and reach a mass audience with uncensored information Interview video

When Tom Feichter told me he only gets to one Drupal event a year, I wanted to know why. When he told me it's because he runs a Drupal shop–mspiral creative media–in Yangon, Myanmar, I had to know more! We talked about Tom's history in Drupal, how Drupal's multilingual capabilities have helped him, how excited he is about Drupal 8's architecture, his history working with NGOs on the Thai/Burmese border and how that has flowed into ethical digital agency work, and more. Drupal really is everywhere It is so exciting to find out that the promise of open source–free to use for anyone, anywhere–really does empower people everywhere to take their destiny in their own hands. Until I met Tom, I would not have guessed that there was a flourishing Drupal economy and landscape in Myanmar. Tom says, "80% of the new sites developed in Burma are running on Drupal." I asked if that was thanks to his company, "No, that's not all me, it's most of the other agencies have started to work with Drupal as well. Some of them already did Drupal work before, but now it seems nearly all of the agencies are going for Drupal." He also cited security concerns (and a perception that Drupal is less risky even when set up my less-advanced teams) and better multilingual support in Drupal over Joomla! as reasons why the Burmese have moved to Drupal. Open source, helping civil society "Technology can help civil society a lot, especially in being able to get a message across. We have seen that in many cases already in the past. Even Facebook can help a lot in spreading a message. And that's going to be easier in the future in Myanmar ... it's already becoming much easier because now the country has been opening up. The Internet is more affordable, people now have mobile access and so on. This kind of technology can help people to get their message across. And also some people can make a living out of that." :-) Guest dossier Name: Thomas Feichter Drupal.org: thomas.feichter Work affiliation: MD & CTO, mspiral creative media (mspiral Drupal.org profile page) 1st Drupal experience: Choosing Drupal 6 over Joomla! for an NGO project using CiviCRM in 2008. "I didn't know Drupal at all at that time, but I had been working with Joomla! for a while and didn't want to touch it anymore." LinkedIn: Thomas Feichter More like this ... Drupal and security Recorded webinar: Security in Action - Keeping Your Site Secure in an Insecure World Drupal, NGOs, and doing good Case Study: Red Cross - Acquia helps American Red Cross bring its disaster preparedness teams together through global platform Case study: Stand Up To Cancer Campaign - Acquia Develops Digital Platform for Cancer Research UK and Channel 4’s Stand Up To Cancer Campaign Case study: World Press - Acquia helps World Press Photo’s mission to increase the standard of photojournalism and reach a mass audience with uncensored information Interview video

Michelle Sanver–developer at Liip–and I sat down and talked at SymfonyCon 2014 in Madrid. Michelle and I have a number of interests in common (community, FTW!) and I really enjoyed getting to know her better in a conversation in front of my microphone and camera. We covered her long history in PHP, her SymfonyCon presentation (Life After Assetic: State of Art Symfony2 Frontend Dev) the PHP Renaissance bringing communities together, Michelle's "open source addiction", building PHP applications that touch the lives of almost everyone in Switzerland, and more. Who is Michelle Sanver? Michelle has one of the better personal biographies I've seen, so I'll let her speak for herself here: I'm a president of PHPWomen, an inclusive & global network providing support within the PHP community and I work as a software developer at this awesome company called Liip, based in Zürich, Switzerland. I love *anything* community related and I'm a big advocate of Open Source. I'm a code-passionate, colourful geek with more than 10 years of PHP and web experience. I am eager to share my extensive knowledge, and I do this all over the Internet! On being an open source developer "Open source enables other people to come in and have their ideas. Before when I was programming, I had pet projects on my own, on my computer, no one else came with their ideas and it never really evolved in the same way. Open source opens all these possibilities to grow together as a community, which is really cool." This is how geeks are made "I had a computer since forever. My parents always supported me. I made my first website when I was 11-12 years old. And then I just kept on going from there." I am always interested in first moments, when I asked Michelle about the first moment she wanted to take control of the computer, she explained, "I always used computers and played computer games and I grew up with them. In the end, I wanted to do more with the computer. I wanted to make small scripts, like in a chat channel so it could show what I was listening to. And I started, 'Okay, how do I do this? How do I change things in the computer?' And then I just got naturally interested." Reusability, aka The PHP Renaissance "I think it's pretty amazing that you can actually now finally take a part of some other framework and put it in your own code. I was at PHP World [November, 2014], and there we had all these different frameworks and CMSs all working together solving the same problems ... Especially the Drupal/Symfony thing is really exciting." I proposed that Drupal 8 is an example of a new kind of project (now, I would say it is the product of the PSR or PHP-FIG Era ... when I mention "namespacing" in this context in the interview recording, that is what I am referring to), a sort of umbrella, outsourcing basic functionality to other projects and specializing in being a great CMS. I asked if that is a positive example of what one can do with PHP nowadays. "I think so. Before, you would just pull in functions.php, functions2.php, and have a big mess. You would pull in functions from other projects, of course, but that was in PHP 4 days. After that, people didn't really make modules. I think Composer with Packagist was one of the things that really pushed people to make packages you could separately use." "I think we're moving more towards just pulling in everything you need and making everything work nicely together and that's the application. And we're also separating the front end and the backend a lot more because it's possible now to do it. You can have your API and then your front end applications and you can have a million applications on one API and that's something I'm really excited about." More on the PHP Renaissance: Here's a podcast I did with Composer Lead Developer Jordi Boggiano, in which we talk about all this: Acquia Podcast 192: PHP Reset,...

I was happy to talk with two major contributors to Drupal 8 at the same time at Drupal South 2015 in Melbourne Australia. At the time we recorded our conversation in March 2015, Hussain Abbas from Bangalore, India and Jibran Ijaz from Lahore Pakistan had both contributed well over 100 patches to D8. In this podcast we talk about their history in Drupal, open source software as a force for good in society, the benefits of contribution, Drupal as the 1st project of the PHP-FIG era, Drupal 8 for developers, the incredible energy and size of the Australasian Drupal community, and more. Drupal is helping society Jibran: "As you can see in Drupal South, we have a lot of government-related people here, a GovCMS BoF and session about government and open source. I attended a BoF with universities, about how they have similar problems and how the Drupal community can help them to fix those issues. I think we all have the same goal: to improve Drupal and provide a better solution for them and us. We are definitely improving a lot of communities and governments and states together." Hussain: "We can also say that since the cost of acquisition, the overall cost of entering into any such product for the government as a whole becomes much lesser, the benefit is ultimately driven to the people. Of course, it's a long, uphill battle, especially in countries like India, but it is very necessary. As a Drupal core contributor and Drupal user, I have seen what a solid, good technology base can do in determining the end product." Why Drupal 8? I asked these core contributors what they are most excited about in Drupal 8 and what will bring the greatest benefit to D8 users. Hussain: "The underlying system and its reusability factor. Now that Drupal is no longer an island or we are connecting to other islands, that is something which excites me most. I wrote my own set of PHP components, maybe 10 years back. When I started with Drupal, I realized I didn't need most of them, but there were some which I had to move. But now in the new, modern PHP Renaissance world, we don't have to do that. Composer ... and seeing Drupal adopt it. I was talking with someone about all this and he mentioned that Drupal 8 is probably the first product of PHP-FIG and all the PSRs, the first real application built on all these things. It's great! The fact that Drupal is leading the way reinforces my belief in it since the beginning." Jibran: "I have worked on a lot of components so I have a lot of favorite things in Drupal 8, so I can't pick one, but the main thing I think we have achieved in Drupal 8 is that reusability of the idea. I mean that you have to learn the approach once, then you can apply that approach everywhere in core. You just need to have the knowledge of one thing and you can reuse that knowledge." For example, a plug-in is a plug-in and once you know how to write one, "you can write block plug-ins, and Views plug-ins, and field plug-ins. That's the best thing I can think of from the developer point of view." On the shift from "Not Invented Here" to "Proudly Invented Elsewhere" ... because, as Larry Garfield puts it, "Everybody loves pie!" Guest dossier - Jibran Ijaz Name: Jibran Ijaz Work affiliation: Drupal developer at PreviousNext Drupal.org: jibran GitHub: jibran Twitter: @jibranijaz Google+: Jibran Ijaz LinkedIn: Jibran Ijaz About.me: Jibran Ijaz Guest dossier - Hussain Abbas Name: Hussain Abbas Work affiliation: Technical Architect, Axelerant Drupal.org: hussainweb GitHub: hussainweb Twitter: @hussainweb LinkedIn: Hussain Abbas Blog: Hussain's chronicle Website: http://hussainweb.me/ Facebook: hussainweb.me page Interview video

In April 2015, I was excited to talk with John Doyle, General Manager Technology & Solutions Architecture at the Australian full-service digital agency Komosion, to explore their decision to adopt Drupal to replace other technologies, including an in-house CMS they'd invested 10 years of work in. In this podcast, John very clearly lays out what Komosion's priorities were in making this decision, the benefits for the agency and its clients, and the future he sees using Drupal as the basis for future work. The full-service agency I wanted to get a feel for what a "full-service agency" is, what sort of technologies and solutions they offer, so that I would better understand what Drupal can do for Komosion and similar businesses. John explained, "We offer the full digital solution from strategy, customer experience, design, right on through implementation ... apps, websites, etc." Meeting customers' needs PD (pre-Drupal) "Komosion came about from the merger of two organisations," a Melbourne-based, product-focused company, "called Komodo CMS. They had a proprietary CMS which went through a couple of different iterations and came into being ten years ago. It's now up to version 7 and it's still our proprietary system. Over the years, it's won awards for innovation. It was one of the first SaaS based CMS offering in Australia. We offer a managed technology solution for our clients; we manage our whole infrastructure. Along the way, we've looks at a number of different technologies and trends, but we've kept everything in-house to date. It's on our proprietary system which comes with its own foibles." "It's getting to the point now where we're saying, 'What else is there in the marketplace that is mature enough, enterprise ready, and able to deliver for our clients ... and for us ... what we need for our strategy, not just in technology. We deal a lot at the C-level, the executive level, with organisations, driving digital strategy, helping then shape their digital teams through content, through design, through our digital and technology solutions. We partner with them for the long haul ... and we need something to partner with for the long haul, too." Becoming a Drupal-based agency John sees parallels between Komosion's practice and Drupal's evolution from wanting to be the standalone solution to everything to integrating with and leveraging the best specialist frameworks and tools out there. Komosion went from building all of their own systems and infrastructure, "but it has got to the point now that for us to take the next step and extend out platform the way that we want to–we see our platform being much more than just the CMS, it needs to be a full marketing tool suite–we need to partner with best-of-breed. Bring them all together, package [and extend] them as a solution for our clients that is going to give them everything that they need day to day from a marketer's point of view." "We just can't compete with the passion and the level of input and contribution that a project such as Drupal has behind it. We understand that. We agree with the direction it's taking. We think that the minds that are behind it are brilliant and we're jumping on board. That's how we've come to where we are." "The best solution for our clients is the goal. For us, as a client, our best solution at the moment is Drupal. We're actually taking our proprietary platform and we're going to be converting that to run off Drupal." John is expecting to have features beyond the current set and have clients on the Drupal version of their platform within 12 months–"highly, highly rapid development." They're going further than using Drupal just as a CMS and are looking at everything that Drupal the framework is capable of, from decoupled Drupal applications, to integrations with marketing automation, EMD & CRM tools, and more. The solution will still be Sass-based and fully managed, but...

At Drupal Camp London 2015, I spoke with Piyush Poddar, Director of Drupal Practice at Axelerant. We talked about Piyush's history in Drupal, Drupal as a business-ready solution, India's coming of age in open source culture, and how that is driving business value. Highlights "Drupal really has become a business-ready solution. It allows those of us running businesses or selling solutions to clients to really not think about anything more, just go ahead and use it for production sites–large, huge production sites." On working in proprietary v open source software: "I've done both. We sued to buy expensive books when we worked on [a proprietary technology], just to know how to do things the right way. Then we realized that it doesn't tell you how to do things the right way, just how to use the software. So best practices, how other folk are doing it, lessons learned, there was nothing there. Nothing to be shared. No platforms. No camps, no events. Now [using Drupal], it's out there. It just depends on you what you wanna grab." On the Drupal community and the Drupal project: "Solid. Rock solid. It's an awesome project. Without community, I don't know if it would have been so useful. It's an awesome community, but without a project, what would we have been doing? Together, we are doing a wonderful job." From consumption to contribution in India Piyush says that it was pretty quiet on the Drupal front until Dries Buytaert, the Drupal Project Lead, visited India in 2011. "A lot of excitement happened. A lot of traction came into the ecosystem. There were a lot of camps in the country." "The way Drupal started, it was seen as a job-based technology. We were consuming Drupal then. Most folks were looking at Drupal as a job, a 9 to 5 job ... Go to the office, work on a Drupal project, come back, forget about it. But now, companies and individuals have realized that it's not just using Drupal, not just consuming Drupal, but investing in the Drupal ecosystem locally, nationally (and perhaps internationally as well) is where the real value lies. And that's where you're getting good Karma and besides that, it's also about establishing your reputation, your stand, your maturity up in the marketplace. So organizations understood that over the years and a lot of them started that. I would say the journey is still on. We still need to get to a stage where we can say we are all there. But a lot of companies are participating in domestic [Drupal] Camps and meet-ups in different cities in India, with 300-700 people in each of these meet-ups. I've seen a lot of companies starting to push their developers towards contribution, at times even during their day job. There are companies offering jobs with Drupal contribution as KPIs; Axelerant is one of them. We encourage a lot of contribution in-house," during both busy and less busy times, "And from a profit and loss perspective, we are absolutely fine about that." Axelerant, in fact employs the top Indian contributor to Drupal 8, Hussain Abbas. Contribution generates business value I asked Piyush what Axelerant gets back out of encouraging and paying for so much contribution to Drupal. "Being an IT company, acquiring good talent and retaining them is probably more important than sales itself. There's a lot of business, a lot of leads, a lot of opportunity out there. You can just go grab them, but you have to deliver them and you have to do that constantly. And for that you need a team, you need people who are excited about this thing, who know their stuff, people who are experts. Hiring is a big problem. The two most important things we've don to solve this problem are getting onto Drupal–people love working in Drupal and people love working with companies that are so active in the community. They feel they'll learn more and how to become like Hussain and other [role models]." "Lately, a lot of clients are asking...

The European Acquia Global Support team had an onsite week in Reading the week after Drupal Camp London 2015. I got the chance to see a number of them there and sit down with two of my friends from "Supporta!"–Daniel Blomqvist and Henk Beld. We talked about remote teams and helping others succeed with Drupal, while also paying it back/forward by sharing and teaching what they learn and what they know. Making a global team a team Daniel and Henk shared some of the things they do and use on a daily basis to keep a "follow the sun" support team happy, helpful, and productive. Wake-up meetings – Henk explained the European team has a wake-up meeting with the Australian team, who can pass on any news, open tickets. or problems. About six hours later, the European team "wakes up" their colleagues on the US East Coast (the Boston office and remotes), who in turn had off to US West Coast (the Portland office and remotes), who finish their day with a wake-up meeting with the Australian team members. "We are problem solvers" – "We're such a tight team," explains Henk, "because we're problem solvers. I really believe if you have to solve problems, you have to rely on each other." "Solid onboarding" and training – Daniel was preparing for a full week of helping a new team member to get up to speed. "We do quite solid onboarding as well. Next week I will be meeting our newest addition. At the same time, she will meet with Amy Q, from the Supporta training team every afternoon together with me." Lots of communication on lots of channels – The team members are in touch with each other all day. The European support team does daily audio-visual hangouts and Daniel tries to keep one open all the time in case someone needs to find and speak with him. There is also a dedicated company-internal chat room for the Global Support team. Henk points out that if there's a problem, team members will open a hangout dedicated to that specific situation and that getting on a voice/video channel saves time and confusion compared to endless text communication in email or otherwise. "Anyone who works with customer support of any sort also knows that a 5-minute call from time to time with a customer can take away a lot of pain and a lot of stress," add Daniel. The backchannel ... Just like the Four Kitchens teams, Acquia Global Support team members have a specified context and tool for letting off steam, off-work topics, telling jokes, and building their teams outside of the job. They use a Telegram chat room for this. Meet. In. Person. Regularly. – Get to know each other. Face to face relationships help later remote ones enormously, as shown by the success of the Drupal community itself, which holds around 100 conference-style events a year and countless meetups. The European Supporta! team has quarterly all-hands onsite meetings that last a week and are help in Acquia's Reading offices. Related posts on Acquia.com 10 Tips for Success as a Remote Employee – blog post by Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire Working on Remote Teams – the Developers – Acquia Podcast 182 with Four Kitchens developers Taylor Smith and Matt Grill Helping Remote Teams Work - The Manager – Acquia Podcast 180 with Elia Albarran, Four Kitchens Operations Manager Building a great remote team, helping clients & giving back - Acquia Podcast 193 with Acquia Global Support team members Daniel Blomqvist and Henk Beld Paying it forward the open source way Henk talks about how the team handles common, hard, or repeated issues, "The beautiful thing is that if a recurring issue happens, there's always somebody stepping in and writing some manual or doing a short training video on that so we're up to speed quite quickly." Daniel continues, moving into how Acquia Support makes a difference both...

It was great to get the chance to sit down and talk with Jordi Boggiano at SymfonyCon Madrid 2014. Jordi is responsible for Composer, one of the most important pieces of technology that is driving PHP interoperability and the PHP "renaissance" of the last couple of years. He's also on the Symfony2 core team. Use what you know When I asked Jordi what made him stick with PHP, he replied, "Vendor lock-in, I guess. ;-) It does the job. It's a self-fulfilling circle at some point: It does the web stuff well and I do so much of that that the only ideas that I have are for more web stuff. I would love to do more [with other languages], but I don't have the need." Jordi's presentation at SymfonyCon, Five Weird Tricks to Become a Better Developer, was a collection of wise advice for developers. On the one hand, pragmatic technical advice like, if you have a tool that works, just use that. Compare the security and safety of using a known set of older tools to the risk of something new and shiny. "One of the points I made was 'Use what you know.' I know PHP very well and I know a but of Python and I know I could do something with it, but it doesn't offer anything [more] than PHP. It has a different syntax, this is nicer, that is not as nice. Down the line, it's still in the same league." Beyond code - "Think of the people" Apart from the technical tips, Jordi's Madrid presentation had some good on being a better colleague and person. I was thrilled that Jordi was sharing this kind of wisdom (he called it "random things that annoy me")–"Be a better listener," and "Learn to have empathy, put yourself in other people's shoes." I feel technology communities often focus on code to the exclusion and detriment of everything else. Jordi agreed, "Some aspect of the job," for coders with eyes for nothing but code, "they can't do. If you want to be just code, code, code, you have to go work for Google or something just doing algorithms and being that math-y server guy that does the hard stuff. I'm sure you'll get someone who talks to you and will nurture your dangerous personality, and it'll be fine." "I think for most of us that are in this business at web agencies or just in general, at web start-ups, I think you have be involved in business thinking and knowing why you are doing things and going a bit further than just the code. The code is a means to get us there. It's by no means an end." Working with clients and colleagues is, after all, essential to keeping most of our businesses running. My concern is that the code-only attitude contributes to the misogyny and poor gender balances in the tech industry; not intentionally, but as a consequence of the neglect of the human side. Jordi adds, "I guess it does play a part ... If you don't have the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes then you will treat anyone different as though they were you. And then you go with the di** jokes to someone who might not be into that. That's just an example, but obviously ..." a relevant example. PHP Reset, PHP Renaissance I asked Jordi what he thought of the statement, "Composer is driving the PHP Renaissance." He seems to be comfortable with that: "I think it's very true in a way. I just thought of a talk I gave three and a half years ago ... maybe two and a half. [Ed.: It was in 2011.] It was a few months after we started [Composer]. I gave a talk called 'PHP Reset' at the IPC in Berlin. I had ten people in the room and nobody really got my point, I guess. But that's what I was seeing coming. With Symfony already, I saw that ... That's why I joined the Symfony project originally; the 2.0 was a clean slate. Not an incremental version over the old stuff that all the frameworks had. It was 'Let's trash the whole thing and start new with a good basis.' That appealed to me." "This already triggered quite a few new things. There were already a bunch of libraries came out of this Symfony...

If only non-Finns could easily pronounce it, I think "yhteisöllisyys" would be a perfect motto for Drupal. To explain what it means, I dragged Lauri Eskola, Drupal Craftsman from Druid.fi, away from the contribution sprints at DrupalCamp Brighton 2015 long enough for him to fill me in on that, as well as his trip to Drupal Camp Delhi 2015, what he's excited about in Drupal 8, and how doing business in the Drupal world–based on values like sharing and openness–must seem strange and different to outsiders. Global Drupal: DrupalCamp Delhi "It was such a huge honor to me to be [at Drupal Camp Delhi]. I am so glad I had the opportunity to take part in that event. The community is way larger than any other community I have ever seen. Drupal Camp Delhi had more than 1000 registrants for the event, which is a huge amount of people. They don't get many international visitors; it's mostly just the local people there. It's weird people don't go there: it's really easy to get there from Europe. It's worth visiting. It's something you should do. It's an experience I will probably remember forever. Indian people are amazing. They are so friendly and easygoing. All the things I thought before I went there were completely wrong." "There's a lot we can learn from India, especially what they think about community. They are very community-minded people. They appreciate community and Drupal a lot because Drupal creates possibilities for people there. Vijay [Vijaycs85 on Drupal.org] is a good example of a person who had gotten options to get out of his small village in India because of Drupal. Now he lives in London. That kind of good example in India empowers people to take part in community because they believe it can create great future for people there. Not everyone wants to move to London, but they get new opportunities even in India." "They are actually going to [have] DrupalCon in India and that is one more example of how serious we are now taking India in our community. I hope that it will change what people think about India and that they realize how easy it is to access. For me, it was only six hours flight from Helsinki to Delhi. It was really easy." Global Drupal: one big family I asked Lauri why he stuck with Drupal. "Because I found a job immediately," was his first answer :-) ... but then he went on ... "At some point, I was thinking of moving somewhere else," to another technology, "but then I went to my first DrupalCon in Prague and it changed my thinking about Drupal. Drupal is more than just technology. It's like one big family. There, I met my good friend Ruben Teijeiro and others." Lauri is an active mentor for new Drupalists and got into it ... "Mentoring is one of the most important values we have in our community and it's one of the reasons why we are as successful as we are. New people are the power of the community. We have to ensure that the community keeps going. The fact is, there are people leaving all the time. Their life situations change, they get family, they burn out, whatever. People leave. And we need new people in the community all the time if we want to grow." Yhteisöllisyys "My favorite thing about Drupal is people." I then asked Lauri to describe Drupal in a single word. He hesitated a while and then said "yhteisöllisyys", a Finnish noun defined as "communality", "sense of community", or just "community". If only non-Finns could easily pronounce it, I think "yhteisöllisyys" would be a perfect motto for Drupal. :-) "One of the things that no one outside of the Drupal community can understand is that in Finland, we build projects together and there are friendships beyond business. That's not just one word, but that's what I could say about the Drupal community ... to describe how things are from my perspective. That's one of the reasons why we are as good as we are: When we do something together we are much more powerful then when we...

Drupal is more fun - meet Karen Grey I sat down with Karen Grey at Drupal Camp Brighton 2015 to find out more about who she is and what she does with Drupal. I apologize for taking her out of the code sprints for that time! Since we spoke, Karen has taken on a position as Senior Drupal Developer at i-KOS in their Brighton office. During our conversation, we touch on the difference between early Drupal 6 and working with Drupal 7 now, how public contribution helps companies build their reputation and build passion and excitement in employees, Drupal's tough-love coding standards, how Drupal's steep learning curve pays off ("I've used other CMS's, they're not fun to use.") in enjoyment and community, the expense of the project discovery phase when using proprietary software compared to open source, personalization on the web as the next big thing (shoutout Acquia Lift and Context DB!), and more! Guest author dossier Name: Karen Grey Twitter: @greenybeans84 Drupal.org profile: karengreen Work affiliation: Senior Drupal Developer, i-KOS Brighton office LinkedIn profile: Karen Grey A recent Drupal contribution: Commerce Smartpay module Which Drupal version you started with: Drupal 6. "I built my own CMS for my final year project at university, so I understood what a CMS is and does and when I was introduced to Drupal, I thought it was pretty cool." jam's favorite photo of Karen Interview video

PHP: The entire world is your development team – Beth Tucker Long Beth Tucker Long, PHP Developer and Advocate at Code Climate, and I got in front of my cameras at the 2014 PHP World conference and got to talk about her history and priorities in development, PHP, and open source; her welcome into the PHP community, the culture of sharing and teaching in PHP, her work and the mission of Code Climate ... including how she got hired as a Perl programmer right out of college and was handed a PHP codebase to fix. "So I had to learn PHP really, really fast." When she had to ask some questions the weekend she learned PHP, the welcome the PHP community gave her convinced her to stay and inspires her to this day to give other just as warm a welcome to the project. The biggest open source advantage The biggest advantage for developers in open source is also a huge advantage for businesses: "The biggest advantage for open source is that you aren't the only developer out there making sure the code is good. You have teams of developers all over the world double-checking the code, making suggestions for ways to improve it, adding features that you can use. It's like having the entire world as your development team instead of just you by yourself somewhere in an office. We don't have to know everything, we just have to know the person who does. I don't have to be an expert in every, single aspect of my field, I just have to know the experts." ... or how to search online to find them :-) On the PHP "Renaissance" Thanks to new standards, many PHP projects are now compatible with each other, leading to previously unheard of cooperation between developers from various camps within the PHP sphere. "As programmers, we've always had a tendency to make fun of anyone who is not using our specific technology or area. And lately there's been this awesome motivation to stop doing that and we're starting to learn from other languages and other technologies. It has brought about so many amazing new features in PHP and so many new things to make our lives easier. I think we're really starting to appreciate that fact. I love the fact that we're bringing more people in through this sort of renewed appreciation for outside things." Guest dossier, links and references from the interview Name: Beth Tucker Long Twitter: @e3betht Website: http://www.alittleofboth.com/ PHP Developer and Advocate at Code Climate GitHub: e3betht LinkedIn profile: Elisabeth Tucker Long Interview with Beth from the Madison PHP Conference on the Voices of the ElePHPant podcast 1st version of PHP used: PHP 3 Find your local PHP user group on php.ug (not usergroups.us as we said in the audio!) Other PHP topics we mentioned: HHVM PHPNG (aka PHP 7) Anthony Ferrara's PHP compiler, the Recki Compiler Toolkit (Recki-CT) PHP Architect and the exceptional 2014 PHP World conference Interview video Also in the Future of PHP series Future of PHP series landing page Perspectives on the future of PHP – "The Future of PHP" series intro, Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire The future of PHP ... at a distance – Lukas Kahwe Smith Composer – Dependency Management in PHP – Lorna Mitchell The Future of PHP is Shared Power Tools – Ryan Weaver PHP is getting Faster – Richard Miller PSR-What? Shared Standards for a Bright Future – Lorna Mitchell Voices of the ElePHPant / Acquia Podcast Ultimate Showdown Part 1 & Part 2 - Acquia Podcast audio/video with Cal Evans and Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire PHP: Under the Hood, Running the Web - Michelangelo van Dam A Symfony Shop Embraces...

Ronald Ashri, former CTO at BlueSpark is now a Founder at Roomify - a Drupal-centric startup focusing on online reservations. Here, Ronald presents an enjoyable and valuable session about content strategy and Drupal, full of practical and actionable advice – worth watching in full for all strategists, site builders, and anyone who wants to know how to build a better content-oriented site. Before we got to that, Ronald and I had a great chat, covering Roomify, the Drupal Rooms module, Italy Magazine (a Bluespark property), Ronald's history in Drupal (from taxonomies to breaking backwards compatibility – aka "willingness to change" – as a competitive advantage), selling open source benefits to businesses, building out into new markets with Drupal technology, and more! Session description Title – From Content Strategy to Drupal Site Building: Connecting The Dots Abstract – Organizations are increasingly becoming far more appreciative to the value of a carefully developed content strategy. There is, however, a gap to bridge between concepts and strategies proposed by a content strategist and the practical implementation of those in Drupal. Our aim is to help bridge that gap by directly relating Drupal concepts and tools to content strategy, providing a common framework where the two disciplines can meet. Through the use of practical examples and references to available modules we will show how different approaches to Content Strategy can be practically implemented on Drupal sites. The aim is to equip Drupal site builders with a handy toolkit that will allow them to implement a content strategy and help content strategist better understand the tools and capabilities of Drupal. Takeaways How different aspects of content strategy relate to Drupal site building. Different approaches to building content types and an overarching framework for guiding decisions. Best practices in using fields. How to structure information through vocabularies and navigation. What workflows should you be considering. Helping content strategists through analytics. Wider engagement strategies and social media. Session quotes Ronald's session is full of useful information. Here are a couple of points that stuck in my mind. Regarding the unique Drupal site builder role: "The Drupal Site Builder is often an unrecognized Architect, assimilating a wide range of concerns and implementing them in a way that can support evolving needs." What does successful content strategy look like? Content is not bound to a page - flexible and future-ready We can provide the content that best stands a chance to fulfill user goals given context Finding, using, sharing and repurposing content is easy Message and editorial vision clear Content creators can focus and enjoy the process, not fight with technology to get their message out We know it works because we measured it Guest author dossier Name: Ronald Ashri Twitter: @ronald_istos Work affiliation: Founder, Roomify – Roomify creates reservation solutions that make it easy for people to book services and a pleasure for businesses to manage. The company is the creator and maintainer of Drupal Rooms - an open source solution for reservations on the web." LinkedIn profile: Ronald Ashri Italy Magazine: "Everything Italy. Authentically Italian." Learn more about content strategy Video: Content Strategy for the Web, presentation from the Acquia Engage conference. Kristina Halvorson, author of “Content Strategy for the Web,” discusses the challenges and strategies for developing a content strategy that will truly serve your needs. Video: Improve the ROI of Your Drupal Site with an Updated Content Strategy, webinar recording with Dawn Borglund, Sr. Digital Strategist,...

Looking back on 2014, it was a great year of events and conversations with people in and around Acquia, open source, government, and business. I think I could happily repost at least 75% of the podcasts I published in 2014 as "greatest hits," but then we'd never get on to all the cool stuff I have been up to so far in 2015! Nonetheless, here's one of my favorite recordings from 2014: a terrific session that will help you wrap your head around developing for Drupal 8 and a great conversation with Frederic Mitchell 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! ---Original post from October, 2014--- 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