Summary: Wim Leers, Senior Software Engineer in the Acquia Office of the CTO (aka “OCTO”), has been busy in the last few years making Drupal 8 amazing! His contributions include working with Fabian Franz on aspects of Drupal’s new caching and rendering systems to make Drupal 8 performant. Today’s podcast is a conversation he and I had about who he is and what he’s been up to following our own collaboration preparing my own post on BigPipe. Below is a transcript of parts of the conversation you can hear in full in the audio and video versions of this podcast. In the audio and video versions, we also touch on: aspects of contribution and the professionalization of contribution in open source, especially in the light of Wim being paid by Acquia to be a full-time contributor to Drupal. how even small contributions, like a well-written bug report, add up to making a big difference ... and my daughter’s commit credit in Drupal 8 :-) Hierarchical Select module Many hands making light work in open source Plus everything below about caching, BigPipe, performance, and more in the transcript! Learn more about BigPipe in Drupal 8 Watch Wim’s webinar with Fabien Potencier, Best Practices for Drupal Performance Tuning. It covers BigPipe, caching, profiling, and more at a high level. Wim goes into a lot more detail about Drupal 8 and BigPipe in his webinar, BigPipe: The Architecture Behind the Fastest Version of Drupal Yet. Wim and Fabian gave two sessions on caching and BigPipe at DrupalCon Barcelona: Caching at the Edge: CDNs for everyone Making Drupal fly - The fastest Drupal ever is here! Check out my post about BigPipe in the Drupal 8 Module of the Week series. Interview video - 41 minutes BigPipe in a nutshell: “What matters in the end is not the number of requests, but how fast it actually feels for the end-user because that's what you care about and that's where BigPipe makes a huge difference." - Wim Leers Guest dossier Name: Wim Leers Work affiliation: Senior Software Engineer, Acquia Office of the CTO Drupal.org: wim-leers Twitter: @wimleers LinkedIn: Wim Leers GitHub: wimleers Blog/Website: http://wimleers.com/ - "Hello! My name is Wim and I’m interested in WPO, Drupal and data mining. I’ve worked on Facebook’s Site Speed team. And I love llamas." Drupal/FOSS role: Drupal core contributor 1st version of Drupal: Drupal 5 beta Partial Transcript How did you discover Drupal? Wim: I was going to build this website – or I needed to build a website but I was looking for a way that will allow me to set up a website that was maintainable, that didn’t require too much digging around in code, and that looks like it would be a good choice for the long run. I looked at WordPress, at Joomla, at Drupal, and I think a few others maybe, but Drupal stood above the rest like it was the obvious better choice back then, I believe. It was the time of Drupal 5.0 being in active beta. 4.7 was I think the active version. I never used that. I jumped straight to the beta because it looked much better. jam: I had the joy of installing 4.6 and 4.7. The good old days. Wow. Drupal 5.0 was such a massive leap at that time. Why did you stick with it now for nine years? Wim: Yes. I got kind of rolled deeper into the community as I think is the story for many of us. That was 2006 - the end of 2006. It was the Christmas break at my first year of University. I was trying to actually do less work on this Open-source project that I was working on before by building a website so that others could maintain it. So it’s kind of funny that I used Drupal 4 and other Open-source projects. In doing so, I needed a few things to be built myself in order for this website to really function well. So I started working on that and...
