Summary: Gaelan Steele was the youngest delegate at DrupalCon Portland. Since I had had the pleasure of speaking with him and his father Douglas Urner while leading the Drupal Association scholarship committee earlier this year, I really wanted to meet this extraordinary 5th-grader in person. Dries himself showed up while we were talking and asked Gaelan how he uses and contributes to Drupal. The result of the interview hijack is really worth checking out! Gaelan is 11, in the 5th grade, and has been involved in Drupal for the last two years. He's an active member of the Seattle Drupal scene and seems to have made a big impression on the community in Portland. He lists his favorite things about Drupal as, "not having to do everything from scratch and a nice community ... that's pretty much it." :-) What do you do with Drupal? When Dries asks him what the most challenging, the hardest thing he's ever done with Drupal is, he says, "One thing that was definitely hard was integrating Drupal and this grading system that my dad uses called Active Grade. It has a pretty much undocumented RESTful API. It's like a single page app, so you can use the web inspector to kind of figure out how it works, but it's pretty much undocumented." We asked him to give a session on this or something similar next time around. I'm hoping he'll submit a proposal. Best answer of the day After listening to Gaelan talk about some Drupal tech and techniques, Dries asks: "How did you learn all this stuff?" Gaelan: "Um ... The internet." gaelan_meets_dries.mp3
