people

When I took over as the project lead for SimplyTest.me, the previous lead shared three primary things with me: The system had a non-trivial amount of technical debt and was rising more with time Significant changes were coming with Drupal 8, Composer, Drush, and more His interest was elsewhere As part of my proposal, I promised to do what I could to revitalize this. While this effort has taken years, we have hit another major milestone in our journey: We launched a completely new version of SimplyTest.me. We rebuilt the system from the ground up in an effort to revitalize the project. It’s

On the 20th anniversary of 9-11, it’s hard to ignore how fleeting life is. What we accomplish during our time is up to us. What do you want your legacy to be? Are you fulfilling it? Do you maintain awareness toward your goals and what impact you want to have? While I’m most proud of my family and the legacy I will leave through my kids, we are also afforded opportunities to leave a legacy professionally. Building great products is an incredible opportunity to help and serve others. The trust and confidence customers place in our hands is not a responsibility we should take lightly. We need to

Changes to teams, organization, structure, or process should be thoughtful and done with patience. Change can take time to materialize. Teams often don’t like change. Making changes too frequently often doesn’t allow a team to get past the storming, norming and performing phases and therefore doesn’t allow for the expected investment to be realized. And, changes are disruptive. Changes should only be executed when it’s necessary. They shouldn’t be knee jerk or reactionary. It needs to be well thought out and planned. Slow and methodical. Plus, we are all human. Change can be hard, even for

SimplyTest.me is a labor of love but it has been one of the most unique, satisfying contributions I've made to the community. Most of that labor has been dedicated toward maintaining the Drupal 7 version. Our maintenance was massively improved with the introduction of Tugboat.QA, but this year found major changes in the Drupal community with the launch of Drupal 9, the major changes to Composer workflows, and the Gitlab integration. All of these things are of high impact for Drupal and required major changes to SimplyTest. This has been especially hard to keep up with for me. Our latest

Let me welcome you to the new nerdstein.net. I'd like to thank Ana Laura Coto for help with the design. I'd like also thank Jonathan Daggerhart for being there when I needed an assist. I am really happy to finally share this project with the world. This has been a long time coming. Three years. Yes, you read that correctly. Three years. Why? I prioritized learning. And, I am slow and methodical. This website is a culmination of many things I learned over a three year span. But, three years?!? Yep. I have a rewarding and challenging full time job at Acquia. I have a family with two young kids

Our community has always meant more than just code. These last several months have been difficult to make the same kind of connection we have come to expect from things like in-person events. And, during this time, many of us are having to juggle new challenges, may have sick loved ones, face professional or financial uncertainty, and more. I’m choosing to do something about it. I am announcing free community care packages for Drupal. I care about our community and I care about the wellbeing of all of you. I recognize this is basically nothing at a time when people are dealing with much larger

I just closed about 100 browser tabs from an early year activity. While it’s embarrassing I left those tabs open so long (going on five months), I wanted to leave them open to reflect on what I learned. And, what a better way to reflect than a blog post.The SoapboxBear with me for a moment. I subscribe to the philosophy that DevOps represents a line of thinking and a way of working, not a technical product. Like security, when someone says, “I’ll sell you DevOps”, it’s a scam. For those “doing” it right, you need to focus on foundational concepts built into continuous learning. This ideology

SimplyTest.me is a project I continue to lead and volunteer my time to. I’m driven to help lower the barrier to entry for people in our community to contribute, use Drupal, and be a part of our community.For me to be effective, I need to keep my eyes open for unique ways to help the project. Much like our larger community, we must be opportunistic to remain sustainable. Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is just that. I previously participated as a mentor, helping students port security-related modules to Drupal 8. I was approached by Matthew Lechleider (slurpee) to see if there would be a fit for

Last year, I read Jim Birch’s blog post outlining his Aaron Winborn nomination of (now) award winning Kevin Thull. As a community, we need to do our best to celebrate accomplishments and I love that this award exists. We need to tell more of our stories regardless of who gets the award. I see no reason not to share my nomination for this year’s award publicly. Contribution takes many different forms. Our community recognizes many aspects of contribution, but I believe the spirit of the Winborn award is to “think bigger”. Community members find creative ways to have impact well beyond just

Last year was spent primarily learning about SimplyTest. We did make some progress, but I think “keeping the lights on” for a system of this complexity was quite a feat after the project transfer. It’s a unique and fairly complex endeavor that bridges all elements of an open source project, a completely free service, and underlying infrastructure. I see all of the good and the bad that comes from each aspect: system maintenance, feedback from community members, customer service (Slack, Twitter, etc), system outages, and more. I recognize how valuable this service is to the community and I