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Mid-2018 Drupal Coffee Exchange Updates

Posted on Sat, 05/26/2018 - 15:48

We are about to start another quarter of the Drupal Coffee Exchange. Personally this has been a lot of fun to see this start from humble beginnings and an off-the-cuff idea posted to Twitter to now have a growing membership and have been running for over a year now. We now have international participation and are looking to expand that. For me, it’s yet another reminder our community goes well-beyond the commits. Now we have a way for community members to stay caffeinated and share our favorite coffees between community enthusiasts. It’s unique, it’s fun, and it’s become a creative and

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Achieving Clarity in Component-based Best Practices

Posted on Mon, 04/02/2018 - 14:02

IntroductionHere we are. It’s been over a year now that our community has explored design components (integration of design systems, pattern libraries, etc) and Drupal. The community has shared different tools and solutions, presentations from many individuals representing different companies and perspectives, and processes/workflows that enable the different teams and disciplines. I would classify the time spent to date as research, exploration, and innovation. While this is expected for something new, we need to define best practices. The purpose of this blog post is to help us start a

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2017 Conference Review

Posted on Sun, 01/14/2018 - 14:49

2017 has been incredible and a year of both personal and professional growth. Events like camps and conferences are critical for me to be active in the community, as I don’t have a local group or regional meetup. In 2017, I gave more presentations than I ever expected to. I travelled to many awesome cities. I had a personal goal of giving a keynote/featured talk. I ended up giving three. I went to many places I had never seen before (both at work and through community events). I’m astonished by how much effort and care volunteers put into these events. I shared meals, craft beers, and locally

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Exploring simplicity in Drupal design components

Posted on Mon, 10/02/2017 - 11:40

Component-based architectures have become both a popular and fairly crowded space in the Drupal community. For over a year, I have followed the progress of some tools created by those leveraging Pattern Lab as a component based design library. I can’t claim to know the full breadth of problems these individuals encountered, many of which are experienced technologists in our space. But, every solution I have seen has been complex and demonstrates some architectural red flags. I wanted to take a fresh look. I paid a designer to redesign my blog for a migration to Drupal 8. This presented the

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An Analysis of Drupal Governance

Posted on Tue, 08/29/2017 - 15:54

In my earlier blog post, I researched community governance in other open source communities. While it was not exhaustive, I identified a set of trends and practices communities use to serve community members. The question remains: what can Drupal learn from other communities? To answer this question, we must understand where we are today. It turns out that answering this is quite difficult depending on our individual experience, network, and exposure to the community. Admittedly, with respect to Drupal’s governance, I am far from an expert. While I have been in the community for a while, I

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Promoting Community Toxicity

Posted on Tue, 07/18/2017 - 23:36

Something has been bothering me and I haven't been able to put my finger on it. I hesitated writing this. By doing so, I fully understand that some will choose to twist or misinterpret my words to further instill doubt into the community. While this is one's right and often turns into a lengthy Twitter debate, many in the community have shied away from sharing their voice for fear of retribution. As a community, we have accomplished great things not because we agree on everything, but because we know how to disagree without being disagreeable. We are capable of debate through issue queues

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A Drupal Contribution Non-Profit

Posted on Thu, 06/08/2017 - 11:47

Jrockowitz's recent blog post on crowd sourcing, found here, sparked so many ideas for me. I wanted to discuss the most prominent idea in this blog post, the idea for a company that nurtures community contributions. Such a topic has often been on my mind and Jrockowitz post might have helped me to connect enough dots around this idea. Community members (especially maintainers) often volunteer their time and energy to community projects with little incentive aside from their will to do good. BackgroundBefore elaborating further, I think there are some key motivations to align. The first is

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Community Governance Considerations of Open Source Projects

Posted on Mon, 06/05/2017 - 16:25

DrupalCon was a great way to connect with the community and gauge the pulse from recent events involving Crell. After writing blog posts, I engaged with many people to share thoughts and hear perspectives. One common question that came up: what do other communities do for governance? This motivated me to do some research of my own. I wanted to be better informed in discussions to know what other communities are doing in an effort to identify where our communal gaps might be. I am a firm believer that the Drupal community doesn’t need to “reinvent the wheel” or think we are “special snowflakes”

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What Gets Me Up In The Morning

Posted on Thu, 05/25/2017 - 12:43

It is safe to say that people like talking about themselves. I'm guilty of that, but I don't think I have actually given any real consideration or focus to the matter. That changed this morning. I had a friend ask me: "What are you passionate about?" I was disappointed by how lame I responded. At my core, I'm a problem solver. I'm also a social nerd - I love people; I'm an extrovert; I'm nerdy. I'm also a self-recognizing honey badger as this has traditionally served as my "winning strategy". None of these things define what I'm passionate about - they just define aspects of who I am and how I

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Removing Site Building From Drupal's Vocabulary

Posted on Tue, 05/23/2017 - 14:55

Drupal has a full vocabulary of Drupalisms. While I think that is fine for Drupal-specific features, it also is a sign that we seem to promote our own island when there are similar concepts that exist in the technology space. When possible, we should try to align with more conventional terms that others outside of Drupal understand. If anything, this can make Drupal more approachable and better understood in broader context. I think I identified one such term: the term "Site Building" has never sat well with me - both as an activity and as a role. Site Building is an activity generally

development drupal people