17

years of Drupal

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Drupal is 17 years old today. Quite an achievement for a web software to stay around, let alone stay relevant for such a long time.

I’ve been around for 12 years. Quite a stretch as well. Getting involved in this open source project as a designer has taught and brought me a lot. I put quite a bit into it as well.

I get a lot of benefits from things I learned in Drupal that I can apply in other contexts.

  • Provide rationale for design decisions. So much typing in issue queue comments!
  • Help people see the other’s point of view and then come to a shared decision.
  • Or agree to disagree, then still make a choice.
  • An appreciation and at least a “gist of things” knowledge of the complexity of software development. It helps with clarifying scope, finding a good place to start, and understanding what is difficult and what can be relatively straight forward.
  • Pragmaticism over purism
  • Edge cases are important
  • There’s a difference between patience and stubborness
  • Accessibility, multilingual, extensibility, modularity are hard but worth it
  • If you can’t imagine why somebody would want do do X, it’s always from a lack of imagination from your part
  • There’s always so much more to do
  • There’s only so much you can do
  • When you start taking things personal it’s probably time to take a break
  • It’s amazing what people can get done when driven by a passion for doing a good thing and doing it well.

… and many returns!