Acquia Inc. podcasts

While speaking with Melissa Anderson about behavior driven development (BDD) at BADCamp 2014, she suggested I get John Bickar from Stanford Web Services in front of my cameras to talk about his experience during last year's "Drupalgeddon" security vulnerability. The result is this podcast and some great insight into how this kind of testing can significantly improve initial, ongoing, and emergency delivery of software. As John puts it, using BDD means: "delivering better software, delivering it faster, and knowing that it is delivering the value that we have promised to our partners." I would have named this episode of the Acquia Podcast more in the spirit of Dr. Strangelove: "Behat tests mean death to Linky-Clicky or how BDD helped Stanford Web Services recover fast during Drupalgeddon," but reason won out. We also touch on the changing nature of digital needs and access in education in the last few years and how that affects how and what gets delivered through digital channels. Note: Funny camera angles! – I recorded this interview the very first day I had my new, 2-camera setup. I was doing some guessing, especially on the 2nd one, which hasn't got a monitor screen, so in the end, let's say the angles are "interesting" :-) What is Stanford Web Services? "Stanford Web Services is an in-house Drupal development shop. We do Drupal site builds for partners on campus. We're also an infrastructure and hosting organization. We run a software-as-a-service [SaaS] platform that we call Stanford Sites. It runs mostly Drupal 7; we started it in Drupal 6. And we maintain this self-service website building platform for anyone at the campus to use for free. We also make much of our code available for free to the campus community and the wider Drupal community," including a responsive theme, and several features and modules. What is Behavior Driven Development? "Behavior Driven Development [BDD] is a process by which you define your user stories and your business values based on what a user of the website wants to get done and why it matters to them. BDD then allows you to write those steps down, in plain English and you can then use that to build towards "complete". So when those use scenarios and those features are complete and testable, then you know that you are finished." The creators of behat ("an open source behavior-driven development framework for PHP 5.3 and 5.4"), describe it thus: "It’s the idea that you start by writing human-readable sentences that describe a feature of your application and how it should work, and only then implement this behavior in software." Thinking one step further, once your site is in production, behat tests help you prevent functionality-regressions in future releases, too. Build towards agreed-upon business value with BDD John and Stanford Web Services started using BDD and Behat "as a way to do functional testing, but we've really started to adapt the BDD part because it allows us to get everyone involved in writing the user stories and in creating and agreeing on the business value. And then the developers, we know what we're building towards." "We care about delivering websites that work to our clients. We care about partnering with the various stakeholders on campus and delivering cutting-edge communications. That means it always need to be up, it needs to deliver the information that they need. BDD is a way that we can meet that in a rapid and accurate manner." "There are a number of ways that we use BDD to deliver better software. We use tools that are part of the BDD toolkit to ensure stability when we make changes to code. So at heart, the function of what I do is that I am a software developer, but no one cares about the code that I write ... and I can't blame them. They care about whether or not they can do the things that they came to a website to do. When we push out code updates, we use tools like behat and Mink [...

PHP security expert and member of the Global Cybersecurity Group at Hewlett Packard, Chris Cornutt and I had the chance to meet in person at PHP World 2014, in Washington, D.C. We compared notes on the "PHP Renaissance", looking over other projects' shoulders, sharing code, and PHP security basics. PHP: easy, useful, friendly ... a little dangerous Chris says PHP's ease of use ("It's really easy to get everything set up and running. You don't have to compile it; it's nice. It's refreshing to work with after working with some other languages.") and its friendly, welcoming community have played a big part in his staying with it all these years, but that his favorite thing about the language itself is its flexibility. "Which, unfortunately, sometimes is its downfall ... It's really easy to do really bad things with PHP." I suspect all of the above feeds Chris's interest in PHP applications security, which has been his focus for the last few years. He describes reading Chris Shiflett's 2005 book, Essential PHP Security, from cover to cover and laments that, "unfortunately, a lot of that stuff is still relevant today ... A couple of years ago I decided that was where I wanted to go. That was the niche I wanted to fill. I write articles, I speak at conferences [he also writes books]. It's been very enlightening at times about all the stuff that is out there ... and all the problems. But I try to do my best to educate people and write the most secure code I can." PHP's interoperable future I proposed that Drupal 8 is setting a good example of what the future of PHP looks like: embracing best-of-breed solutions, wherever they may come from and concentrating on its specialties. Chris agrees, "It's really good. Composer is still a relatively recent thing, but to see the [Drupal] project latch on to that and say, 'This right here is where the future of PHP is going. We need to integrate this or we're going to be obsolete and stay in our own, little silo forever.' It's good to see." "I hope this keeps going. It's good to see various kinds of packages coming up on the PHP side as the standardized [solution] for certain things. I hope to see Drupal and maybe even Wordpress come in and say, 'This is good. We need to reuse this.'" Bojan Živanović, Drupal Commerce 2.x co-maintainer, is setting a great example of this thinking. He has released a number of commerce-relevant PHP libraries for use in Drupal Commerce 2 and any other PHP projects that want to take advantage of them. Secure PHP in four words I challenged Chris to tell me how to write secure PHP in one sentence. He gave me just four words as an answer: "Filter input, escape output ... That's the biggest things right there." Chris wanted me to be clear on a little more than this, though. "There are some language specific things. Filter input escape output works for any language, not just PHP, but the way that you do that, the implementation of that is more specific to the language itself." PHP security resources Here are some resources to learn more about PHP application security: OWASP.org, an online community dedicated to web application security. OWASP draft PHP security cheat sheet PHPSecurity.org, the companion website to Chris Shiflett's book, Essential PHP Security Securing PHP, Core Concepts by Chris Cornutt Securing PHP: The Usual Suspects by Chris Cornutt The Securing PHP Project Securing PHP Twitter account: SecuringPHP Guest dossier Name: Chris Cornutt Twitter: @enygma Website: http://phpdeveloper.org/ Blog: http://blog.phpdeveloper.org/ Work affiliation: Hewlett Packard Global Cycbersecurity Group A selection of projects: Co-creator of Joind.in, creator and maintainer of phpdeveloper.org, co-organizer of the Dallas-based Lone Star PHP Conference, check Chris's...

Working with simplytest.me and Drupal.org Tips and tricks for getting the most out of simplytest.me – Patrick Drotleff is a passionate contributor to the Drupal project whose work – including simplytest.me, pareview.sh, and the tongue-in-cheek BreakingHead card game – often centers around building tools that help others contribute to Drupal. Within minutes of Drupal 8 beta being announced at DrupalCon Amsterdam, I saw a tweet saying it was available to try out on simplytest.me. Though I had used the service before, I wanted to know how it actually worked and Patrick was kind enough to agree to show it off here on jam's Drupal Camp. Session description With Simplytest.me you can easily evaluate and test (nearly) any module, theme, distribution or Drupal core version available on Drupal.org within a temporary sandbox without the requirement of any local setup. While it was created as a demo-tool in mind, people started using it for contribution and it has proven especially useful for non-developers who want to help in the issue queues. In this session you will learn about some of simplytest.me's lesser-known features and how to use them when working on Drupal core and your own projects on Drupal.org. Further information simplytest.me Questions & Answers page Here is a 2013 blog post with information about how simplytest.me works and some tips for using it. Session video Thank you, simplytest.me sponsors! Thank you simplytest.me sponsors for your generous support. maloon Realityloop brightsolutions Druid Guest author dossier Name: Patrick Drotleff Work affiliation: developer at Maloon Drupal.org: patrickd If you like simplytest.me, check out pareview.sh, "Resources for Drupal Project Application reviewers" Github: patrickd- BreakingHead, "Open source card game about the Drupal.org issue queue" Personal website & blog: http://patrickd.de/ Twitter: patrickd_de Facebook profile Google+ profile Xing: Patrick Drotleff Support Patrick on Gratipay: patrickd Interview video

Eric Mandel, CEO of infrastructure provider Blackmesh, and I got the chance to speak at PHP World 2014 (where I was also a keynote speaker). We spoke about his history with development, open source, and Drupal. I also had the chance to ask Eric about how Blackmesh has become a leader in the area of corporate contribution to Drupal, employing Cathy Theys to work on Drupal core, mentor new Drupal contributors, and help out at code sprints around the world. Blackmesh and Drupal Blackmesh has been involved with Drupal since version 4. Eric is excited about how Drupal 8 is bringing the community "back off the island" to work with the rest of the PHP community. He's looking forward to easier administration, control, migration, configuration for his business when clients start moving to Drupal 8, "but at a bigger level, it's going to make Drupal more available to more people to do more things. That's going to be great. At the end of the day it comes down to making things easier for more people." Drupal 8's configuration management is clearly going to be a big win for Blackmesh's core business. Eric is excited about "how the back end configuration has been simplified and you can keep much more of it under source control," since it is no longer in the data base, but rather in simple text-based YAML files. "It simplifies some of the deployment process and things that our internal tools use. That will be a nice change." Paying it back/forward, the business case Not everyone who uses and benefits from Drupal contributes back to the community. And to be fair, not everyone can, but the sustainability of contribution has been a hot issue in Drupal recently – Dries spent a lot of his Amsterdam keynote talking about it – and it has come up over and over again in the project's history. Relying solely on volunteer efforts to build and maintain one of the leading FLOSS solutions in the world is clearly no longer possible. The cost in human terms (burnouts and stress), time lost through inefficiency, and lost opportunities is too great. Blackmesh is one of the companies doing right by Drupal. As an infrastructure provider hosting a lot of Drupal websites, Blackmesh has a lot to gain from a stronger, more sustainable Drupal and they've put their money where their mouth is. Since early 2014, Cathy Theys has been employed by Blackmesh – "Your job description is: be Cathy, wear a Blackmesh shirt." – working on Drupal core, mentoring new contributors, and running code sprints around the world. Benefit: You get a better Drupal back – Eric prefers making a specific, measurable difference for the project, rather than (as I put it) "Throwing pizzas at it and hoping it'll get better." He explains: "We used to sponsor and give back and help in communities that way. This gave us a much more concrete, a much more impactful way to influence and work with little camps, little communities, and bring Drupal up. She's in the mentoring, she's in the Drupal 8 testing and the issue queue, so she sees the forefront of what's coming down the pipe, but also the new people coming on. She's doing a lot with the sprints. For us, it was an ability to personify and [make an] impact on things, as opposed to that sort of, 'Here's some sponsorship; go make these dollars do things'." Benefit: Closer ties to the technical community – How does Blackmesh, the business benefit from having a non-revenue-generating, Drupal contributor on payroll? "We thought is was much more focused and impactful to have her out there doing those sorts of things. It was for us to be able to give back to the community; to have a better pulse on the community and understand what's going on, where the pain points are, how we can help, how we can do things. It has been amazing how much she's been able to do: raising our awareness of things that are coming down the pike, issues where we could help that we didn't necessarily know we...

Part 2 of 2 – I ran into Elia Albarran, Four Kitchens' Operations Manager at BADCamp 2014. She mentioned she'd read my blog post 10 Tips for Success as a Remote Employee; we started exchanging tips and ideas until I basically yelled, "Stop! I need to get this on camera for the podcast!" She graciously agreed and brought along two Four Kitchens developers for the session, too: Taylor Smith and Matt Grill, whom I spoke with in part 1. In this episode, I speak with Elia Albarran about the manager's perspective on running great teams, whether mixed in-house/remote or all remote. In addition to the great remote-team tips – on personal productivity, survival, and sanity tips for remotes and team tips, tricks, and technologies for teams with remote members – Matt and Taylor talked about in part 1 (be sure to check those out here!), Elia added a few more and generously agreed to share with us the Four Kitchens "Hello Web Chef!" guide for new employees. It is a compact guide to 4K's mission, working philosophy, and their curated technologies list. 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 Living open source "It really excited me," explains Elia about moving to an open source company, "because that's sort of what I have been living my whole life: this open source idea of 'Share.' Share, share, share, learn from other people. The advantage is that we know that there are things we're not doing perfectly and there are some things that we're doing really great ... And we're okay with that. We are constantly finding out more from other teams who have distribution ... 'Hey! Let's compare notes!' Every conversation, you learn something new that you can bring back." We're all in this together. We might as well compete better. Elia's top tips for remote teamwork technologies With six of 23 Four Kitchens employees remote, Elia stresses that an important part of her job, "Is to evaluate tools and make sure that we're using the best tools available for our remote communication; to make sure that communication is easy, accessible, and good quality." For example, video conferencing tools, "Which one allows all of us to have our own line? Which one has the best video quality so that we can actually see the expressions that we're making on the other end? Because when you lose those things, you lose so much in communication." Hello Web Chef PDF! - download a copy for yourself and your organization. Thank you Four Kitchens for your generosity and putting open source ideals of sharing, transparency, and contribution into practice! Here are some highlights from the guide and my conversation with Elia: It's about empowering people – "Hiring a remote teammate is not just about 'getting the best people.' It's also about empowering that person to work their day the way that they want to and work from where they want to live." "We're all remote," equal rights and technologies – "We have this idea that when one person is remote, we're all remote. When we have a video conference, we all take it from our own laptop so we can each see each others' faces. There's not a conference room where we're all looking at the one person ..." and microphone problems, and a whiteboard the remotes can't see ... "We did that for a while, but we learned. We try to do things differently." Headsets with mics! Everyone at Four Kitchens has to...

Presenter, Brad Czerniak caught my eye with a blog post entitled "10 things I learned using Drupal at a hackathon," based on his experiences taking part in the #hackDPL (Detroit Public Library) competitive hackathon. In our podcast interview we talk about that – before moving on to Brad's session about the Drupal development best practices he and his team use at Commercial Progression in Michigan. Session description There are lots of hooks, templates, and other development avenues in Drupal — "more than one way to skin a cat." Often choosing a particular method can affect the operation of a site, lock you into a particular way of doing things, have implications on future work, and get the notice of fellow developers; all for either better or worse. This presentation explains different endpoints for developing, and introduces a mindset for making the best choice given the circumstances. Takeaways A list of helpful 'Do' tips, including some of the best lesser-known contrib. modules A list of 'Don'ts', with lots of "code smells" to watch out for Theming and development methodology best practices — with helpful graphics "Everything is a block" :-) ... shout out to the Blockify Module! Session slides Session video Guest author dossier Name: Brad Czerniak ("Drupal developer, recovering librarian") Work affiliation: Developer at Commercial Progression Twitter: @ao5357 GitHub: ao5357 Facebook profile LinkedIn profile Interview video

Part 1 of 2 – I ran into Elia Albarran, Four Kitchens' Operations Manager ... ahem "Funmaster", in the inspiring atmosphere of BADCamp 2014. She mentioned she'd read my blog post 10 Tips for Success as a Remote Employee; we started exchanging tips and ideas until I basically yelled, "Stop! I need to get this on camera for the podcast!" She graciously agreed and brought along two Four Kitchens developers for the session, too: Taylor Smith and Matt Grill. In this episode, I kick off with developers Matt and Taylor talking about Drupal itself, then we get into some tips and tricks they use to keep on track with work and maintaining healthy communication as members of remote teams. In part 2, I speak with Elia Albarran about the manager's perspective on running great teams, whether mixed in-house/remote or all remote. Check out that episode and post (and my original post and the comments there) for a lot more great, practical information on this topic that concerns so many of us in the tech industry today. 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 Personal productivity, survival, and sanity tips for remotes (Almost) over-communicate as a remote – jam & Matt: I mention that I will write an extra email or make an extra call to keep my team and boss up-to-date with what I am doing to keep things in balance. Matt adds, "Even if you think that a person won't find it valuable [now], send it anyway. They can potentially parse it at their own rate." Get out of your house, set a schedule – Taylor: "Sometimes I work from home, but I also made an arrangement with a local non-profit to share office space. Having to drive into downtown ... I made that my goal for the day: get dressed, get ready to go, and I go to work," adding a change of space to one where work should happen. "When I work from home, I miss having people around." Separate work and home-distractions - Matt: "I'll work in very defined chunks of time. That makes it easy to get things done. Not pick one task for all day, then you lose focus. Segment your time, that can be beneficial. I am at home, and there are tasks and responsibilities that might come up. I shut all that out and ignore it all till I can condense all those activities down into a break in between a large chunk of working." Discipline ... Get dressed (seriously) – jam & Matt: Imposing discipline on yourself help a lot of people, whether it simply means getting dressed at all, going to a different room, starting at a particular time, or what have you. Matt points out, "Four Kitchens has always had a pants rule. Wear pants in the office, please. I was working in a big office before I started working remote and I kept that same schedule: I wake up; I take a shower; I eat breakfast every morning ... and put on pants, obviously ... and I just start working. I don't like staying in my pajamas all day. That feels icky." :-) Work when you want to – Taylor: "I felt like [being remote] opened up more opportunities to work when I wanted to. If I felt like I could work from home, no one was tracking when I was and wasn't there. Some mornings, it's just hard to get going and I'd rather go outside and take a walk. Or some evenings, you're feeling really motivated and I know I can get a whole lot done and I'll sit at my desk and turn out a whole bunch of work for a project in the middle of the...

I met Ian Read, Front End Development Team Leader at TSO/Williams Lea Public Sector at Drupal Camp Brighton, where I found out that he has recently been involved in a subject close to my heart: Drupal and government. He was part of the team that designed and built the attractive, responsive, and very functional London Borough of Croydon's new council website. In our conversation, we touch on the value that the Drupal community provides to everyone involved; Drupal and innovation in government digital services; the thought process, needs, design and more that went into the new Croydon Council Drupal website; and more! Best quote of the day When I said how much I am moved by the fact that I see many examples of, "This very abstract set of code on the screen letting us change the real world," Ian got to the heart of the matter: "That's what becomes obvious with all of the work we do. A lot of it you think you wouldn't have been able to do that without open source. It's people giving back; it does make the world a better place." Note on audio and video quality: Today, 2015.Feb.04, marks the first time I have completed a podcast episode's audio and video with a new set of capture and processing tools. While I am happy with the process in many ways, the result you see and/or hear (inconsistent audio volume and low-res video) is not up to the quality you might be used to in my productions. Though I believe I have discovered the problem and have found a solution (insert boring details about codecs here, if you care about that kind of thing), I wanted to get this episode out today rather than putting it off. I hope to replace the audio and video files for this episode in the next day or so, at which point I shall also remove this notice! - jam. Meet the community, take it back to work with you! Ian's impression of Drupal Camp Brighton on day 3 was exactly what I'd hope to hear if I were a camp organizer. It makes me feel like all the stuff we say in the Drupal community about sharing isn't just hot air and niceties. Even though he says that he "looks at Drupal.org at least once an hour ... you know it's the best source of information," the in person exchange of ideas at the Drupal Camp trumped that. "It was really good. It was much better than reading any blog post. Going to see someone talk about it and show 'This is what we did; this is how we did it.' And they'll be more candid, 'We tried this approach, it didn't work,' and that kind of approach you don't get from reading web pages. It's absolutely priceless. It's like consultancy, basically. It's open source consultancy. It's really great to learn from others' experience." Based on what he had heard and learned at the event, Ian told me, "We've got some configuration changes," on his work web properties, "that we're going to do tomorrow," – a direct result of having attended Drupal Camp Brighton. Ian's team was also going to implement automatic user tagging in forum responses based on another session he saw in Brighton. If there was any doubt about the value of these events to employers, customers, or businesses, I'd say trot out this story! Ian explains, "To have it at that level out-of-the-box was a really nice touch. There's a piece of work we're doing that we needed a forum on. You see all that stuff and you think that solves what we were trying to do! And we can just use that!" As Ian says himself: "You wouldn't have been able to do that without open source." Guest dossier & Links Name: Ian Read Work affiliation: Front End Development Team Leader, TSO/Williams Lea Public Sector Twitter: @readikus: "Front end team leader at @TSOSolutions and rider of mountain bikes." LinkedIn profile GDS – Read more about the UK Government Digital Service, the pragmatic and powerful GDS Design Principles, the "mandated preference" for open source, and open standards as the default for the UK...

Lorna Jane Mitchell is back to show us some great reasons for upgrading your projects to PHP 5.3 or newer. Drupal 8's minimum version requirement is already up there at 5.4.5 (as of 2015.Feb.02), so we're doing well! Lorna and I have a quick chat about her history and experience, open source versus proprietary software development ("Projects and companies that work in that open source technology space make much better use of tools ... and they are wonderful, free, and well-supported tools!") ... specifics of how and why the PHP "Renaissance" is happening, and Drupal 8 as a PHP meta-project before she gets down to her jam's Drupal Camp presentation. I apologize for the slightly spotty quality of the audio and video in these recordings, the bandwidth doesn't seem to have been up to scratch when we recorded this. Now on to our session ... Session Description: New Wave PHP With new PHP versions being released more often, and projects including Drupal increasing their minimum requirements for PHP versions, it's clear that things are changing rapidly. This session is all about the changes introduced in newer versions of PHP (5.3 onwards), and what that means for PHP projects everywhere. There will be practical examples of the shiny new features, advice on finding hosting and safely upgrading existing projects, and news about the performance improvements you can expect as you move between the versions. The way PHP is evolving is truly exciting so come and join in on the fun! Session takeaways: PHP is a fabulous platform for a fabulous CMS and the new features and incrementing release numbers are totally a Good Thing. Let me show you some shiny and tell you how good the world is now :) Session Video Session Slides Presenter dossier Name: Lorna Jane Mitchell Twitter: @lornajane Website: http://lornajane.net Acquia.com guest author profile Work affiliation: Freelance, "I work where there are people who need me." Drupal/FOSS role: Project lead on joind.in, PHP writer and speaker, "I don’t know any Drupal but I keep finding excuses to hang out with the community." Current projects: Joind.in mainly, but I just had some contributions accepted to XHGui. When/which PHP you started with: PHP 4.2 in 2002 About: Lorna is a web development consultant and author based in Leeds, UK. Her books include "PHP Master", "PHP Web Services" and "N Ways To Be A Better Developer", and she loves to write for other outlets such as netmagazine and her own blog http://www.lornajane.net. When she's not writing either code or words for a living, Lorna leads the Joind.In open source project; a tool to enable communities to give real-time, public feedback to speakers and organizers of events. Lorna has spoken at events around the world giving both keynotes and technical talks and is available for hire on interesting projects. Podcast Interview Video

Dustin Whittle, Developer Evangelist at AppDynamics, and I sat down at SymfonyLive Berlin 2014 to get to know each other. We touched on PHP's past and potential futures through HHVM or PHP7, how competition and collaboration both improve open source software and how business benefits from that, Drupal 8, and more. This podcast is some extracts from that conversation! Get more done faster When I asked Dustin my old chestnut ("What is your 1st memory of ..."), his response really got to the heart of what gives us many of the benefits of using open source software: cooperation, collaboration, and contribution. Dustin's first memory of open source: "Was using PHP as a language itself and using extensions. Ten years ago, I was doing a lot of consulting and I realized every project is pretty similar, so I'd just have to tweak a couple of pieces and 'Hey, that's a new website!' I thought, 'Why am I writing all this on my own?' so I started to look at different frameworks and tools that were available and I found Symfony. All my projects were the same: I need a way to log in and out, I need a way to manage data, and I want to do all this in English and German. With all the tools available, I thought I should stop writing all this myself and use one of them. I discovered Symfony. I started building a bunch of projects on it and what I realized is that it's way better if you take an open source project and only add the pieces that are special for your project instead of having to write everything from scratch." "It made me much more productive. I spent less time getting the end result, which means I spent half the time to earn just as much money. I realized there's not only this coding benefit of leveraging much smarter people's work than mine, but there's also a business benefit," to being twice as productive ... :-) And you get to concentrate on the hard, interesting problems. "Nobody wants to write another login system. Once you've written a blog system once, you don't want to do it 50 more times." We all have the power! Here are a couple of great quotes from our conversation: "The open source world really empowers you to make a contribution. It's not just enough that you complain, but you can actually contribute the solution." "You're building on the shoulders of giants. Why solve all those problems when you can leverage an open source community: hundreds or thousands of developers that you're not paying to work on features that you benefit from. Why would you not want to leverage that?" Guest dossier Name: Dustin Whittle Work affiliation: Developer Evangelist at AppDynamics Twitter: @dustinwhittle Speaker Deck presentations LinkedIn profile Dustin's about.me page includes a long list of his (other) social media accounts. I found this nice recap of SymfonyLive Berlin 2014 where Dustin and I met. Here's a video of Dustin presenting at phpDay 2014: Scaling PHP in the real world! Here's another interview with Dustin from OSCON 2014: Dustin Whittle (AppDynamics) Interview - OSCON 2014 Interview video!

Sally Young, Senior Developer at Lullabot, let me take her away from the DrupalCon Amsterdam sprints to talk with me. I was thrilled to finally get her in front of my podcast microphone and camera. She is a smart and interesting developer involved in innovations including headless Drupal and mobile applications. More importantly to me, I've been figuratively dying to get her story on tape about her mother's misunderstanding of her first job ever since I first heard it a couple of years ago. Listen on and you won't believe what happens next! ;-) ... We also touch on the beauty of her job, CMS v Framework, the Drupal community, being an open source developer, why Drupal 8 will be nice for developers and clients. Full geek, all the time. Sally's job sounds great in that she gets to use a broad variety of skills and technologies regularly: "I work in Client Services. I talk a lot to other people, which is fun, but most of my day is actually spent coding away. I do back-end stuff and front-end stuff. I tend to work on quite big enterprise projects. My day is very varied. I could be working on crazy, hard Drupal problems one day or building little decoupled things with Angular.js or something another day ... full geek all the time." Why would a dev want a CMS? When I asked her why she stuck with Drupal, she pointed towards being more efficient and getting to do more interesting problems things than rewriting a lot of boilerplate code for every new project. "I was building a lot of stuff with Zend Framework at the time and there were a lot of things that I would have to keep doing over again. I had my own libraries for doing things, but it's just really boring writing a user registration again, or a menu system again. I think Drupal's implementations of those were really solid and they were pretty easy to use compared to a lot of stuff out there. So why not use those and I can go off and solve some more interesting problems." Guest dossier Name: Sally Young Work affiliation: Senior Developer at Lullabot Twitter: @justafish Blog: justafish.co.uk Drupal.org: justafish GitHub: justafish Sally is one of the team behind the London Learning Drupal Meetup Here's Sally presenting with Blake Hall at Drupal Camp London 2013: Going Mobile 1st Drupal memory: Choosing Drupal to run a wiki for work, then hacking core, and thinking, "This is great! I can do all the things! Then I learned you probably shouldn't do that. It's not very maintainable and I learned how to make my own modules and changing things to how I wanted them to be. It kind of took off from there." Interview video!

Stephan Hochdörfer from bitExpert AG and I got the chance to sit down and chat in the event hotel lobby following his session (and my keynote address :-) at SymfonyLive Berlin, 2014. Surprisingly, this podcast contains "the s-word" once. You have been warned. :-) Why PHP? Despite this very positive statement, "I discovered PHP and stuck with it because it helps me solve my problems on a daily basis," when we got to this part of Stephan's history in open source, his tone got a little defensive. This is something I hear every now and again in the PHP community. I would figure at the point when PHP, as part of the LAMP Stack, is running around 80% of the Internet, nobody has anything to be ashamed of. Stephan then brought up something interesting and different about PHP community culture that, for me, hold a clue to PHP's success: "I've been to a few conferences where I was treated like the 'stupid guy' because I do PHP and I show PHP examples on my slides, so people didn't get the point of my presentation. Maybe I did it wrong, but that was really weird to see. When you are at a PHP conference and you talk about other technologies, we are quite open. It's weird to see and experience it the other way around." Composer and migrating proprietary PHP to open source "Back when we started the company, I did what all people did [at the time], like writing their own frameworks [or CMSs!]. Unfortunately, we are still sticking with that because we have lots of customers and projects out there. But slowly, and especially thanks to Composer", we're trying to get rid of a lot of stuff and replace it with open source implementations," from the Symfony2 framework and elsewhere, thereby removing risk from his own business. Stephan also promises to open source the good stuff he and his colleagues have built. :-) Guest dossier Name: Stephan Hochdörfer Twitter: @shochdoerfer Blog: http://blog.bitexpert.de/blog/ Work affiliation: Principal at bitExpert AG, Mannheim, Germany: "Whatever's possible with the web, we do it." LinkedIn profile GitHub: shochdoerfer When/which PHP you started with: "A really early version of PHP 4." Here are some conference session videos in which Stephan talks PHP ... well mostly dependency injection :-) The 7 Deadly Sins of Dependency Injection – PHP UK Conference 2014 The state of Dependency Injection in PHP – Dutch PHP Conference 2012 Separating the concerns - with Joshua Thijssen, Dutch PHP Conference 2012 Real World Dependency Injection – phpday 2011 Video!

David Aponovich knows the web content management business far beyond just the "Drupalsphere". I was thrilled when he joined Acquia from Forrester Research in 2014, since I believe his voice, experience, and insight can help convince more businesses of the benefits of using Drupal, especially given the upcoming release of Drupal 8. He and I sat down at DrupalCon Amsterdam – David's first Drupal community event – and talked about digital transformation from the "information superhighway" to today, corporations and open source software as a pragmatic choice, and how the definitions of cooperation and competition are changing in business today. Taking the web seriously "Any organization that takes itself seriously today, is taking the web and digital seriously. Digital being the manifestation of web, mobile, social, even commerce activity. To take this seriously means to be invested in technology, as well as strategy and planning, and other elements. The maturity of those companies has come a long way from those old days when they were trying to figure out what this meant to them and to their customers, to today where it's very strategic to the corporate and brand mission." "This is where the winners and losers in business are happening today. The ones that get it are winning because they get it in the following ways: They get technology; that's going to underpin what they decide to from a business and a brand strategy. But they look at the digital channels through which they operate as the channel through which they talk and interact with customers, or prospects, or partners, or whomever. This takes maturity both from a technology standpoint, but from an organizational standpoint, too. Who is going to own it? Who is going to create content? Or who is going to think about the strategy that takes your business into the realm of these digital channels? How do best communicate? How do you best apply advanced techniques like personalizing the experience or giving people what they want in their moment of need whether they're on a website proper or on a mobile experience or on some other channel? These are things that take a lot of thought; take a lot of strategic planning. It takes a lot of smart people and takes technology underpinning it all, too." Discovering Drupal: passion and sharing in the community "I spent a lot of time at a digital agency in Boston and Portland where a significant amount of the work we did was in higher education. That was where I first started to encounter significant usage of Drupal as a platform for web content management. And I saw it in the spirit and the eyes of the people using it there; a kind of a devotion that you don't see often in software, where software is [usually] a tool to get something done. Drupal for these organizations was kind of a way of life almost. It was something they were devoted to both as a product, but also saying to themselves and those around them that they were part of a broader community of people advancing the technology to solve higher education needs. And then contributing back ideas or code to the Drupal community to say, 'Hey, this is how we're doing it!' Even their ideas, it was very open as a community, telling each other their strategies and their secrets to success. They were sharing that among themselves as they were sharing Drupal as a platform." Business + Drupal: pragmatism and passion "On it's simplest level, the ideal for any technology is that it serves your business needs very specifically. In this case, running a web platform, running websites, or mobile experiences, or commerce experiences. This is what companies need today from a digital standpoint. We're finding [Drupal] has crossed the chasm from [for example] higher education and non-profit into the world of true corporate brands, true enterprises that are using it, our [Acquia's] customers and others in the Drupal community. Our who's who of brands...

I am looking back on 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 am lining up for 2015! Nonetheless, here's a recording from one of my favorite moments from 2014: Drupal Dev Days in Szeged Hungary, where more than 300 contributors went wild working together on Drupal, I was honored to be the keynote speaker, and where Adam Juran and Campbell Vertesi debuted their now-legendary "Coder v Themer" ultimate smackdown grudge-match. In this podcast, Michael "Schnitzel" Schmid and I talk Drupal 8 from his perspective as a service provider. Also check out the other conversations I had in and about Szeged: Search in Drupal 8 - Thomas Seidl & Nick Veenhof Drupal for Digital Commerce – Bojan Živanović Indivizo.com: Using Drupal to Build Your Agile, Saas Product Business Gábor Hojtsy: Devdays Szeged and the new Wave of Contribution in Drupal ---Original post from July, 2014--- Michael Schmid, CTO of Amazee Labs, and I got the chance to talk in front of my camera during the Drupal Developer Days in Szeged, Hungary. As the technical lead of a successful and growing Drupal shop, I was keen to get his perspectives on how the technology of Drupal helps him do business and how Drupal 8 might help him and his clients even more than ever before. Clicking v coding - love it or hate it? Early in the interview, Michael talks about how Drupal 7 and 8 look like "tools with a lot of brainwork behind them" with which you can do almost anything, "everything is built so you can configure it on the site, you don't need to code a lot." Amazee Labs employs three back end developers, but nine site builders. Michael hits the nail squarely on the head right here: "All the [non-coding site builders] use modules. That's one of the fundamental things people love and hate about Drupal. Basically a site builder can build a whole site." Drupal remains the only open source CMS of significant complexity, flexibility, and power that is designed from the ground up for the end user. I don't mean for site visitors, I mean for the people who put the sites together, who run the sites on a daily basis, and now with initiatives like Spark, also for authors and content teams who work in the administrative interface day in and day out. Customers as partners and contributors Michael talks about how customers nowadays often not only have already done CMS evaluations and specifically ask for Drupal, but that they are now often prepared to pay for more than just the bare minimum of code necessary: Customers don't just want to use Drupal as a tool. They also want to invest in it. The conversation goes something like this: "We can build that specific, new feature for you and it'll take one day of work. It won't be test-covered and it won't be tested by the community [for compatibility, security, etc.]. In total it would take 3 days of work to get it to the point where somebody else can use it. And they say, 'Yes! We want to invest the time!' Most of the time we say let's go 50/50 and Amazee contributes half that work and the customer the other half. So the customer pays more than if there were just getting that simple, untested feature, specifically for that single website. They tell us, 'We use so much of the community's code and work already, we want to give something back.'" This is also a smart investment by Amazee Labs in their own toolset. Drupal 8 means better business In response to the question "What in Drupal 8 is going to benefit you as a Drupal business and how is it going to benefit you?" Michael first talks about how Drupal 8 being fully RESTful internally and externally makes it easier to do massive, multiple integrations...

Part 2 – Larry Garfield and I had a long chat in front of my camera at DrupalCon Amsterdam to warm him up for writing "Building Bridges: Linking Islands" in the Future of PHP guest blog series on Acquia.com. In this second part of our conversation, we touch on Drupal's specialist value-adds over and above straight PHP, what defines community, sustainable contribution and services v products businesses, rebuilding Drupal's foundations to make a better project for everyone, the php[world] conference and Drupal 8 itself as manifestations of all the good changes coming with PHP interoperability, how communities are building bridges between their islands and sharing innovation, and how to do the Drupal Hug™. In part one, we covered 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. Community beyond the code In the past, I think a lot of us in the community thought "Drupal is this code and we happen to be working on together so I'll hang out with these people." When the codebase (What is Drupal? What is not Drupal?) becomes more amorphous, how do we maintain a positive community identity? Larry explains, "At some point our mission statement shifted from 'build a product' to 'be a community'. That means in some ways, we've lost focus on the user; lost focus on what we are trying to accomplish. I would argue growing the community for the sake of growing the community is the wrong approach. If our goal is to build a world-class content management system (or platform), then there are some places where community is not necessarily the answer. It's a part of it. We need to have some hard conversations around [whether there are] parts of building Drupal, the platform, that are better handled in a non-grassroots-community fashion. Dries talked about some of this in is [Amsterdam] keynote; we've got 2000+ contributors to Drupal 8, but still 80-90% of the work is done by 200 people. Dries talked about how we need steady resourcing and how we can incentivize companies to pay people to work on core in large chunks. That does change the dynamic. It might be, if we make that change, Drupal 9 – years down the line – has fewer contributors than Drupal 8. We should not automatically think that that's a negative. It's not a bad thing if there's still a healthy community and a successful platform as a result. Building the better Drupal He continues, mentioning something I say a lot (and I wonder if it was me who said this to Larry in Denver :-) ... "One of the things that makes Drupal so powerful and so special is that we can disagree, we can argue, we can fight, we can have different views, but at the end of the day, you know the people you're dealing with when working on Drupal, their goal is to make life easier for somebody else. They may disagree on how to do that, on what that means, but at the end of the day, our goal as the Drupal community is to make life easier for someone else ... using Drupal. That's something we should make sure we never lose." But to get to the best experience for everyone from developers to end users, Larry points out the need for strong fundamentals: "If you try to build on something that is complex, you inherit all of that complexity. If you have a weak foundation and you build on top of it, there's a limit to what you can do. If you fix that foundation, if you make that lower level simpler and less coupled and higher quality, that ripples out to everything you build on top of it." "The analogy that I used for Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 back when we first started was that our house is getting old. We've got some nice furniture, but the foundation is cracking, so let's pick a foundation off the shelf (Symfony components), build a new house on top of that. That house can...