Summary: Gregg Marshall contacted me while he was finalizing his book, Mastering Drupal 8 Views, for Packt Publishing. Flatteringly, he asked me whether I'd be willing to write a foreword for it, after having a look at a late draft. I had a look, I liked it, I wrote the foreword and was pleased to run into Gregg at DrupalCon New Orleans. Listen to the audio or watch the video of our conversation. Below is also a full transcript of our chat. jam: We are still in glamorous, beautiful New Orleans, Louisiana at North American DrupalCon 2016. This is Gregg Marshall. How was your Con, Gregg? Gregg Marshall: Great, much different from other ones. As I get more involved with the community, it becomes less about going to sessions and more about seeing the people and I help the people. jam: You help people a lot, right? Gregg Marshall: I’ve volunteered to be a mentor and I actually got into that by – I’ve showed up in my first couple of sprints and in those days setting up Drupal on a Windows machine was a unique skill that I had and so I found myself doing that more and more. I said, well, if I’m going to spend my whole day setting up other people’s machines, I might as well volunteer! jam: Right. Gregg Marshall: I started volunteering to do that. Now, it’s gotten - thanks to Dev Desktop 2, to the point we’re almost through with this. jam: We’ve made you redundant. I’m sorry. Thank you for your contribution. Gregg Marshall: ... My retirement party is next week ;-) jam: How many DrupalCons have you been to? Gregg Marshall: First one, I went to in the US was 2010, San Francisco. That’s when I made the decision to stop using Drupal and start actually developing using Drupal. Whitehouse.gov had been announced and that was a significant announcement. It became clear that the federal government was going to go that way because Drupal was going to become the IBM of CMS’s. No one will get fired for picking what the White House picked. Standing in line for coffee at the first coffee break, the people in front of me, lamenting the fact that they couldn’t hire developers, no matter how much they paid them. I went, “Okay. I’m a channel marketing consultant. I have to work really hard to convince people that they need me even though they really do, most of them.” With that, I said, maybe I should rethink my priorities and ... jam: Wait. Fast forward six years, what do you do now, Gregg and for whom? Gregg Marshall: I’m the senior architect for the State of New York. While I live in Denver, I work in Albany so it is a bit of a commute and I’m responsible for helping build a system that will house all 257 New York State websites. They’re standardized on Drupal. They did that about a year ago and they’re now in the process of building a common platform that will house everything and move everything off many different CMS’s and not CMS’s flat-HTML files into a Drupal environment that is big and Drupal-based. jam: Your job is Drupal now. Gregg Marshall: Yes. jam: The prediction in the first break coffee-line in 2010 in San Francisco, DrupalCon was essentially true? Gregg Marshall: Essentially true. I’ve thought it would be federal government. I did a project for the SBA but it accidentally ended up being the state in New York and it’s been interesting. jam: Why not. So, Gregg, please introduce yourself. Tell us who you are and what you do. Gregg Marshall: I’m Gregg Marshall and I’m a contractor that is working for the, - as we just said, the state of New York in Albany as a senior Drupal architect. I started a two-month contract 41 months ago. I was originally brought in to help with an upgrade from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7, that particular site was interestingly built. It had 800 nodes of PHP in it. So about two weeks into the project, I said, “Yes, we’re not upgrading. The best we could do is migrate.” It took them about a year...
