Summary: 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...
