17

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!