 Hello, it's Rachel Lawson here again from the Drupal Association, introducing another community chat for the Drupal Association elections for 2020. And this time I'm with Shadi Per Ayyomide, who is from Lagos. Hello Shadi Per. Hi Rachel, it's nice to speak again. How are you doing? It's nice to speak again. So the first time we met was in Lagos, only last year now. Yeah. No, it wasn't even last year. This year has been so long. February. It was this year, yeah. Oh my goodness, yeah, this year has been a long year. Yeah, it's been long, really. So you were instrumental in looking after me when I came to the open source festival in Lagos, which was fantastic. Thank you very much. And it was great to see how you recognised that that was so important. So the people coming into your community of the open source festival at the time was so important. So thank you very much. So you've got involved in that community there and all the different things you do in tech. And I wonder if you can tell us, say, building communities is something that you do. Tell me more about that. Yeah. So I've been in communities for quite a while, but before I came into becoming a community person, I was a software engineer full-time writing code as usual. So I said, I love the community. I want to work with the community and also work with developers at the same time to create that useful experience. The community is really a place where we can have a whole bunch of people come together and build our things. So my definition even of open source is a project built by the community for the community. So I'll call this, when something is open source, it means it's built by people in the community across different technical talents, writers, designers, developers, product managers brought together. And this product is being used and utilized by the community. So this is what a community is, that safe place where I can come into a community and say, I'm having this bug. I need someone to help me fix this. And no one tells me, oh, this is so simple. Why don't you know this? But they come and say, oh, wow, I can help you out with this. I can even jump on a Zoom call with you anytime you're free. I'm free. I'm going to help you out with this, where someone is helping the next person. And yeah, that safe place where we can communicate as really family, you can find your next co-founder there, you can find your next CEO, your next business partner, anything in a community. That's how the community should feel. Everyone should be free in a community. And what I'm fighting for, what I'm trying to build here in Africa is really that safe place in the whole of Africa where we can all converge together. And yeah, feel safe and feel safe to communicate with one another. That's really what a community is in general, yeah. Oh, fantastic. Yeah. So you have worked in lots of different open source communities over the time and so on. And I think that, obviously, this is a standing for, as a board member of the Drupal Association, which is helping to support the Drupal project. And obviously, we want the Drupal project to be known as something very significant across lots of different places and useful in lots of different places. So can you tell me about how you can or how you understand the whole idea of advocating for something like the Drupal project? Yeah. Okay. So for my last role, I'm currently, I left as a senior developer advocate. So as of right now, my roles and what I do daily is around senior developer advocacy and program management, just like two key things that I am specific about. Now, so for Drupal, advocating for something, it has to be something you love and something you really care about. So if I care about Drupal, I would talk so passionately about Drupal to the community that they feel my passion and my passion becomes contagious to them and say, oh, wow, this guy is so passionate. I want to do what he's doing. I want to become like him. I want to use what he's using because I have spoken with so much passion about what I love. So Drupal is an amazing project. When I started web development, I started about nine years ago. I used Drupal a lot those years ago. I feel like I told you that one week when you were in Lagos, I used Drupal, I used Drupal, I used WordPress, all of that, I used all of them so well. I'm still super excited that Drupal still supports many, many, you can build many products still on Drupal. And most importantly, the SEO part is really amazing. I have seen sites built on Drupal by people all over Africa, from Nigeria, from Nairobi. They have built sites and the SEO over GitHub is amazing. It's even still superseding sites that are even built on Gatsby that are even blazing fast. Gats, Drupal is still on the top in as much as it started like years ago. People will think Drupal will become so old and bad, but no, it's advancing, it's going forward. This is what sustainability looks like. We should push this in the community really, that we will bring people together and share our passion and why we like to use certain technologies. The major reason why I do a lot of conferences or talks is because I want to be able to teach what I know. I want to be able to share knowledge. I want to be able to get to people out there. Starting as a developer for me was very hard. I didn't have access to so many resources, like things were hard, really hard for me. Internet access was bad. Oh, suddenly it stopped. That's kind of weird. I'm weird timing. This is for people who are struggling. I can get them, get up on those. I can support them in some way that they can become better. Jennifer, Jennifer, you stopped. Just as you said, internet access was bad. Literally, you stopped for a moment there, which is so incredible. So that's kind of explains this exactly. So this is really good to see. And this is part of the thing. So you have personal experience of dealing with that thing, that type of thing. So if we're wanting to bring the Drupal project to a wider audience and a wider participation in places where internet access is challenging, you have that experience. I'm going to leave that in. I think it's the right thing to do. Yeah, I'm excited about Drupal and the things that people can build on Drupal. And I want to get more Africans involved in this and share my passion with them. I want to speak at conferences about Drupal. I want to run Drupal workshops. I want to do all of these things around Africa. And this is what I want to do. I want to get people to, for example, permit me to go a bit outside a bit. So there is this project again that I love so much called Code Sandbox. Everyone uses it if they do front end. Yeah, I don't work for Code Sandbox. But every single time I do a workshop somewhere, I use Code Sandbox and I sell them how awesome Code Sandbox is. Because this is something I love. I want to share my passion with them. So building Drupal applications at conferences is something I would want to do. And I want to get people to look at how easy it is to build applications on Drupal. Just click this. I just click that, like, variety of things you can build. And how strong, again, your ranking on Google search would stray. So it's going to go so high in less time. That's super amazing. People don't expect this. That's the best part. They wouldn't expect this. So when it actually comes, they'll be surprised. And that's where the market will start. Yeah, you're very, very, you're clearly very passionate about this type of thing. And I know you've explained about sort of, some of your sort of memories of Drupal are quite recent compared to some people. You know, I mean, do you want to tell us about some of the things that you've come across about Drupal that really excite you and good memories or anything like that? Okay, so I think the major thing I'm still more particular about is the fact that I can still be able to build cross applications from, like any applications at all, still on the Drupal application, I'm not limited to be able to build a certain kind of application. Let's say, for example, I'm not limited to build landing pages on Drupal. I'm not limited so that I can build the varieties of applications on limited kind of applications as long as I am not limited in my ideas, I can build any of that on Drupal. And like everything will think, again, yeah, this is one of the important fact. Drupal is open source. Yeah, very interesting fact that I think should be head out there. Drupal is open source. This is also going to be advancing CMS, headless CMS in the global community, not just even Africa, but the global community, and more again, advancing the use of CMSs, that's content management system across Africa, and like speed at which things are being built is also going to advance contributing to open source. So as we're tackling all of these problems that has to do with building side effects, building solutions, and still retaining such engine optimization as SU, and still at the same time contributing to open source at the same time, we'll be solving major problems all at once because of Drupal. So yeah, a lot of things inside me about Drupal and yeah, this is somewhere I would want to be. Yeah, cool. So, I mean, you're coming from quite an interesting background. I know that you have already been a member of a board. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that, about your background? Yes. So the Nigerian Eco Innovation Centre is a place, so it's like an incubation centre where we have startups there. So one major thing I'm passionate about is startups. I love how business, business like basically starts from like this small idea to like this big thing to like, I'm building another product, now I'm ready to like get investment and I'm ready to like really scale hire more people. I'm excited about all of this. So I got reached out to by the guys, by the team over at Eco Innovation Centre saying, hey, we are having this new platform and we need people to jump on this as board of directors and give us advices on how we can scale this in the community. I'm like, oh, this is exciting. It has to be community. You also have startups. I love Bospamak. Yeah, let's do this. Then I jumped on it and it has been awesome so far. We have been able to bring more startups into Eco Innovation Centre and into this new platform they just launched. And yeah, that's super amazing. Do you think there are any things that you have learned as part of that experience that you would bring to the Drupal Association Board? Yes. Yes. One major thing I learned in being a board member is strategy. We all have so many things to do. We all have so many great ideas. Many, many great ideas. It's so many. I can think of like a million or one thing to do. All great. But most importantly, most importantly, how to arrange in order of importance is very, very key. How to arrange things to do in order of importance. And this is first. All of these are super important but then I can say in this milestone, we are currently at this is what we must achieve to gain relevance in this community. So this will be start from then we go here, then we go here, then we go here. So I think that's what I would say that I will be bringing this onto the Drupal Association. That's great to hear. That is really great to hear. So I think they're the main questions I wanted to ask. I think that mainly at this point what I'd really like to do is say this is your moment to speak to the electorate and tell them about why they should vote for you. What one thing would you say that you need to vote for me because what would you say? You need to vote for me because of the fact that the Drupal Association needs someone who is ready and able to speak for its community passionately to a point because no one will really accept what you're teaching them or what you're trying to share with them if they don't feel your passion. So you have to firstly have a passion of which I have already that I can share with people over at conferences and meetups across Africa and not just even Africa we can go across the globe. It's not limited. There's no limitation anywhere. You can take flights they are all available. There's no limitation and I don't see limitation. What I see is that I see a great product. I see a great community out there that I can support. Then I see a great product that okay this community right here I believe Drupal again addition to them and I take Drupal to them. Hey guys I'm here to talk about Drupal and yeah you have to listen and like come on this is awesome and like even though you might start and I start out and people might be like Drupal is old is this but if you truly have a passion of which I have they get to see what exactly you love Drupal and you are with them and you're trying to make them understand so they get to listen because passion is contagious. So yeah it certainly is. I want you guys to help me on board because I believe I can change how Africans and people all over the globe see Drupal and how they even use Drupal in production and yeah I would love to be on board. Oh that's wonderful. I'm really glad you you stood as a candidate and I'd like to wish you the very best of luck and hopefully we will find out the answer soon. Yeah it will be voting soon so I hope to see you again I hope to see you again and maybe at a DrupalCon event very soon either way because I think it would be it would be really great to have you there. Okay well thank you very much. Yeah see you here thanks for taking the time to speak to me and yeah.