Summary: 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...
