Summary: Michael Schmid, Group CTO at Amazee, sat down in my Cologne office in March 2016 with the idea of comparing the promise of Drupal 8 to the real life experience of him and his teams. The conclusion? It's already great and will keep getting better. With so many Drupal 8 projects now underway, I expect to be hearing a lot more of this sentiment in the near future! Below is a full transcript of our conversation. Interview video - 41 min. Guest dossier Name: Michael Schmid Work affiliation: Group CTO at Amazee Drupal.org: schnitzel Twitter: @schnitzel LinkedIn: Michael Schmid Facebook: Michael Schmid Blog/Website: http://schnitzel.io/ 1st version of Drupal: Drupal 5 Transcript Section headers: Welcome to my Cologne Office! The history of Amazee Labs Too many features is too many features From Drupal product to Drupal services April Fools Drupal 8 Delivery Boot Camp Boiling it down: Focus Drupal 8, the product Less contrib, more core And it all comes together ... Working with Drupal 8 now and in the future More devs, more community, out-of-the-box Welcome to my Cologne Office! jam: We are sitting in my office in Cologne, the office that I share with the Coder-Themer wonder twins, Campbell Vertesi and Adam Juran. Michael: Do they actually fight like during the days sometimes? jam: So, I’m kind of like the office dad and I literally used to walk-in and catch them practicing Kung Fu, karate fighting stuff, and I got really upset with them, and so, they never do it when I’m around. Michael: So, they have a Jam-Signal somewhere? jam: I don’t know, but it was – I literally walked to the office sometime. They’d be like So, yes. I don’t know. I wasn’t cool with it. Anyway, this couch in the office is kind of turning into the podcast couch. I’ve spoken with a few people here. Campbell and I did a podcast with the PHP Unit maintainer, Sebastian Bergmann, who doesn’t live too far away. I had the HR vice president from Hootsuite here which was really, really cool talking about putting open source methodologies in thinking into HR which is really very interesting. The history of Amazee Labs Now, I have Michael Schmid, CTO of the Amazee group. Michael: Correct. jam: Which today comprises three global offices. Zurich, Austin, Cape Town plus a company called Amazee Metrics. How many people worked for Amazee Labs nowadays? Michael: Altogether, I think it’s 34/35, something like that. jam: Okay. That’s an interesting size. Michael: It’s a good size, yes. So, one of the things that we say is that we don’t want to grow too big in each location. So, we want to keep the locations rather smaller. So there’s like number of 18/19 people because we feel that’s a really nice size that is still the team. Everybody knows each other, we can sit together at the table, but again, we want to grow as a whole company so that’s why we have different locations. So in total, we have more than 18 people. We have like 33 all over the world. jam: Right, and if you have three locations, then these locations can grow to 60 people and then you’re going to have to open more offices. Michael: Correct, yes. jam: Cool. Now, Amazee amazingly has been around for just about 10 years. Michael: Correct. Next year is it’s 10-year anniversary, yes. jam: And you didn’t start as a digital agency at all. Michael: Not at all. Too many features is too many features jam: Back when I first heard of you, somebody told me there is this Drupal site called amazee.com and you can use it for fundraising or something. Now, cast your minds back 10 years ago, that there wasn’t Kickstarter and there wasn’t IndieGoGo, right? Michael: No. jam: What was Amazee....
