 Hello, everybody. Thanks for coming by. Hope you had a great day. Yes, so this is the session. Let me help you help me. The Being Human track, I'm pretty excited being able to talk a bit about a personal story, share with you what I've done so far in the Drupal community. So I guess everyone who showed up for Being Human session already would expect not any technical details. Yeah, but I guess we are on the same page for that. So my name is Josef Darbonik. You can find me online at Stasio. I'm on Twitter and Drupal community. If you have ever questions, if you want to get in touch, just reach out to me. Also, the sessions, they are already online, so on slides.com slash Stasio slash help, you can find these. There's not going to be a lot of bullet points, as you can expect, but I try to kind of lay out different topics. And I want to just share my very personal story, how I got into the community, how I got into working in different environments. Yeah, I think personal growth is definitely something that just happens to us. And figuring out how to deal with that, I think it's something that I started reflecting more and more, especially also when hanging out with people like you at Drupal conferences. Some of you I already know from a couple of years ago. Some of you I've never met before. But those who I've met a couple of years ago, it's really interesting to see how people just start new jobs, they do new things. So I'm really passionate about the community and kind of want to share a bit today. So the outline, what's going to be about is, so I want to talk about how I got started with Drupal and doing the things that I do today. So that's going to be mainly related to work, but something that I find kind of similar as what's Daniel, the founder, one of the founders of Amazing Labs described today is that work and private life, that something that some people separate very strictly and some people don't separate it that much. And I think also, especially in my case, I am happy to shift in some work hours into the private life and then the other way around. For example, traveling to a Drupal con. Is it work or is it private life? I don't know. So then I want to talk a bit about the initiatives that led my work plus private life, plus Drupal life and what I recently have been doing over the last two years at Amazing Labs. All right, so let's get started. Who has been with Drupal for more than two years? OK, cool, most of you. And so I guess everyone has started at some point with open source. For me, so I started with technology. Basically, my father asked me to help him with building his website. So pretty early on, I got in touch with computers. I started computer science. And I worked for Siemens, like a kind of boring big company introducing SharePoint into a Microsoft environment. But already there, our department focused on Linux. So we already had some inspiration there. Now that always from what I read on the internet, open source kind of felt naturally right to me. Like the principles of open source felt really right. But I never really got into touch to other than downloading Firefox when it was available and feeling like, OK, now I'm on the good side or using Linux for a couple of time. Like using it really felt good to me. But I think somewhere underneath I already wanted to start to contribute, but I just didn't know where to start. So I got into another company where we used Java. And then I did some projects with Plone. So I got connected with the community. But the Plone community was not that active. Or it was kind of active, but I didn't know where to start. And then finally, in Nicaragua, that's in Central America, somebody organized the first triple camp that was in 2009, like an open source conference. And they brought in people like Enzo. So this guy over there, he will do the community keynote tomorrow, I think. So it was kind of interesting to see like a grassroots movement for open source in a development country like Nicaragua. And I just by accident happened to be there. I worked for a cultural center rebuilding their website that was built by development-seed people. So some folks that have been in the Drupal community quite a while ago. And they kind of brought me into the open source that is powered by the people. Because I think there's the open source that you can download and that you can see online. But then to be at an event, to be able to experience meeting people, I forgot there's actually Edison Barry also there, who is the community representative on the DA. So there were already quite a lot of interesting people in 2009 that I got to meet by luck, I think, by privilege. And yeah. So that kind of motivated me a lot. And then I started at the cultural center as I was learning Drupal for myself. I'm basically self-taught a lot. So I just learned by trying out new stuff. And I learned programming myself and so on. So Drupal was really a great tool. Like you can install so many modules. And you can basically teach it yourself. Or that works out pretty well for me. But also being able to connect with those, there were some really good mentors that helped me create my first patch. So finally being able to create a patch was kind of incredible for me because I was able to improve a system that is there and be able to contribute something back in terms of code. So thanks a lot to Netro Rogers, who introduced me into the patch workflow, for example. And that way I found out, OK, I can do something here. So I passed the whole year in Nicaragua building the website for the cultural center and also started teaching other students because, I don't know, just wanted to try it. And then in order to be able to do a bit more of that, I started traveling around whole Central America. And I think that's also where my private interest of getting to know places, getting to know people, kind of aligned well with the way we communicate today over the internet. So there was groups to Drupal.org. There were some mailing lists around where I could get in touch with open source enthusiasts, with people from local Linux user groups, already kind of existing Drupal user groups, and kind of arranged my travels around Drupal communities. That was kind of awesome. And it really took nobody to tell me to do that. It was just like, well, it's not like I have to give something, but it's more like I get back a lot from them. Because on that way, they organized everything for me. They set up like a workshop room like here. And we brought in some students, and we explained them what Drupal is, how it works. And we went through the first basic steps of setting up a Drupal site, which was kind of exciting. It was also very tiring, of course, like speaking in Spanish to students. But with every workshop, we got more practice. And especially the program around was also really nice. So for example, the guy down there, Cassie, he drove me around half of Guatemala. So we went up here, and then to the coast. So he was really helping a lot, and was kind of an incredible experience to say, to be able to just invest a bit of time, a bit of knowledge, maybe. But getting back so much positive feedback from the community. Yes. So I think from this first episode of finding out about Drupal, and then starting to build my own site, but also being able to share on the code level, but even more on the people level. That kind of really got me into Drupal. And I'm still super, super passionate about the technology, but I think just comparing it to other systems, maybe another system would be more interesting in terms of technology. But this kind of foundation of being able to present and connect with people from all over through the Drupal community and the wide open source communities. That's definitely an incredibly good foundation that kind of built me up there in Central America. So let's talk a little bit about other initiatives. So 2009, I basically did the one year Nicaragua was instead of doing a military service in Austria. So after that, I continued my studies as a master student at the university. But I also found people from the Austrian Drupal community. And they were already pretty awesome. Like they did so much stuff. There's a couple of Austrians also around at the conference. There's Wolfgang Ziegler and Christian Ziegler, who founded the Austrian Drupal community. Wolfgang is the creator of the entity module, of the rules module, the cloud system maintainer of web service client module. So they really built some foundational stuff. And just by knowing about Drupal, I was able to connect with them and exchange ideas. And then, well, they hired me. So I was able to work beside studies just 15 hours per week. I was able to work for Epico, which is an Austrian Drupal agency. And it was really fun because we always combined university work with actual work. So for the university, we had to take courses. And we said, OK, we're going to build, like, write a module. And that module we're going to publish on Drupal.org. We're going to benefit from programs like Google Summer of Code. So we would get some public funding or funding from Google Summer of Code. And then we could spend time on creating open source modules. But they would then be later used for the company's purposes, but can also be reused by anyone else. I think that really made up a big space for community contribution. And when we compare it to what we see today, a lot of work that the Drupal community relies on is basically has to be funded somehow, right? I mean, we either need students. We have a lot of time, or we need to have companies that invest a lot of time in order to build so well reusable parts. So working together with these people really allowed to learn a lot and also to contribute back a lot on a more foundational level, I'd say. So the recruiter distribution builds up on Search API, builds up on entities, builds up on a lot of foundational modules. And from there, when I talk about initiatives, I think that was the second really cool moment for me was the Drupal Dev Days in Barcelona in 2012. Because I was always interested in what the people from Development Seed do. I feel like kind of a fanboy of Development Seed. And now they have rebranded to Mapbox, or there's a new company called Mapbox. And unfortunately, they don't do much with Drupal anymore, but it's also understandable, because they just don't need the Drupal technology behind that. But back then, I was really into mapping. So there was open layers, and the new kid on the block was the leaflet module. So in 2012, I think we were still mainly on open layers. And I've kind of, through the issue queues and through Drupal.org, we kind of, I got more and more involved in the mapping area. So Geofield and all the open layers, extension modules, and Geocoder and so forth. So just for the Drupal Developer Days, we set up a sprint. More than 20 people showed up at the sprints, and we were all working together on mapping, which was kind of incredible, right? So I'm not a hardcore coder. I know how code works. But I think I found another way to be able to contribute by bringing people together and working together at this sprint. And then also started to write my own modules. So maybe you've heard about the Facet API Pretty Paths module, which sounds very specific, maybe it actually is. And it's not a lot of code, but it kind of solves a weird problem where in Drupal 7, we had Apache Solar and Search API modules. There's like those two different worlds that then have an abstraction on top of it. That's the Facet API. And in order to realize the pretty paths for them and to be able to integrate with all the different search modules, there was kind of a fun challenge to take on. And also, as I've mentioned, the university work aligned pretty well. So I started to write my thesis. And the thesis was about Geocluster. It's an extension module for Drupal 7 that implements a geographic clustering algorithm. And it was really fun to kind of work on a scientific level, but to be able to actually break it down to something that works as a module and kind of implement it on the different layers of views integration, search API integration, PHP integration. Yeah. So I think that was, yeah, I think both the community and the actual work really led well together. And as part of the Drupal Austria community, we did a lot of initiatives. So for example, we organized the Drupal Austria Roadshow, which was kind of those enthusiasts from Vienna. We felt like, OK, everything is happening in Vienna, but we also want to spread the word out to different parts of Austria. So we traveled from city to city and had presentations about Drupal there. Then we organized the Drupal camp in Vienna like this one. And then, yeah, I think also these kinds of being able to present at Drupal events, just by having practice. I just like to share with people that also made me now end up having two presentations at one conference. And yeah, for example, it allowed me to have a first keynote presentation in Donetsk, where it was a bit crazy, because that was just before the war started in the Ukraine. But in general, I really like that we came up with the theme together for Drupal camp in Vienna, for example, that's connecting open minds. So the conference really aligns well with what Drupal8 now is about, with building bridges to other communities and bringing together a lot of open minds as we do currently at Drupal.com. Yeah, so kind of the conclusion for that is working in open source is really fun. I mean, you can invest a lot, you can do a lot, but you also get back a lot. Now, you might expect also some other stuff. So what I'd like to talk a bit more about is how I then started to work for Amazelabs. And I think transitioning away from being a student, working part-time into a full-time position is definitely also that has changed a lot in my life. But I think it's really important for me to bring in all of these community values because they are still like the foundation that I want to build upon. So why Amazelabs? Well, I kind of got bored living in the same city all my life. I think there were like two options, either to help build up one of the agencies that already existed in Vienna. They were like around four to five people each. So it would have been a very tough job from my perspective because I'm just coming out of university. I don't have any knowledge about how a company works. And I felt like, so we all have the best powers in our hands. We have created all of these interesting modules, but we don't have cool clients. Or I don't know, the match wasn't there. So we had the best technology, but the project were kind of not as exciting as I would like to have seen them. So that was kind of one part of the decision. The other part of the decision was like being an explorer, being a traveler. I just wanted to get away from Vienna for a bit, at least. And then finding Amazelabs was kind of a fun accident, I'd say. I always felt like Amazelabs is a lot bigger than where I can be. And Michael had the job offer open to be like a deputy CTO. And I thought, well, I have very broad knowledge. I know about site building. I understand back-end. I understand front-end. But I don't feel really good at any of these. So maybe being a tech lead makes sense because I understand what's going on. But I don't feel like I want to specialize in any of these. So yeah, we met at Ruppedeftes. And then they just said, yeah, come by. Switzerland is maybe not the craziest move away from Austria. It's just an hour flight or like seven hours per train. But being close to the mountains and especially being able to work with such a passionate team, such a diverse team, I think that was one of the main reasons. Like especially diversity is one of the biggest plus that I see working there. So also the kind of getting started with the company was really fun because we had this kind of team event where we spent two days in the mountains or in the forest camping together and being trained by an expert that knows how to survive. Like so we had like a survival training. So kind of combining the hardworking on a laptop, kind of being able to put it into total contrast and just hang out with the team in nature. That kind of was the perfect start, I think. So yeah, starting, that's kind of exciting, right? But then you see like all these new challenges. Like, wow, should I now be responsible for a team? What does it actually mean being a deputy? Like they're still, like Michael is still there and managing everything. And I got really well introduced into new projects so I could like be responsible for tiny parts in the beginning, so I think that worked out really well. But both of us, neither Michael nor me, we really knew what would, how would the setup really work out being a deputy to him. So yeah, I kind of, I think I'm always thinking so I'm very much an optimist but I'm also fearful in a sense that I kind of see all the options and what could possibly go wrong and stuff. So kind of figuring out, like making those first steps was kind of, yeah, kind of weird because I just didn't, I usually don't have like a big plan, I know how to solve problems, I know how to be positive, how to have a good discussion and how to like try to convince people or most importantly, hear their opinions and try to align different opinions. But laying out a big plan for myself was never like how I approached life. I just said like to my parents, well I think I'm gonna quit the job I have. No, I haven't heard from Amazie yet so I don't know, we'll see. Yeah, and they were really worried before I took the decision. And then also at Amazie I was like, well, give me some tasks, let's do something and yeah, kind of figuring out that in the beginning was kind of interesting. So I think what I did in the beginning also was like, so when we had that first hike tour Greg, one of the founders and asked me about my strengths and my weaknesses and I said, well my weakness probably is that decision making is really hard for me. So I think one of the first steps that I had to learn is how to take decisions and how to take first steps. Maybe doing everything perfect in the beginning will just not be possible but being able to make first steps that really, really helped. So I think also aligning like personal goals like maintaining flexibility, being able to try out new things with company goals like stability, being able to predict stuff to clients, figuring out the right balance there. That was kind of interesting to figure out. Yeah, let's see. So how is it that you kind of, I think the picture for me is like nesting into something, like getting settled, how did it really work out? So I think what I'm really passionate about when working together with the team is that I try to listen a lot. My perspective on leadership is not that I want to tell people exactly what to do all the time but I rather want to be able to support them and coach them to reach their goals and the company goals together. And I think that's something that in the long term kind of makes sense at least to me but kind of just jumping into an existing team and telling them, hey, I will not tell you what to do but you will have to figure it out yourself is definitely a long term process that we kind of go through together. Yes, like just figuring out how to delegate task was really hard for me in the beginning because you used to build it yourself, you used to implement it yourself. You may be not even able to tell expectations to your coworkers or to your customers because you're just used to, I will figure it out that I cannot tell you now how it should be in the end because I still have to try it out. That kind of thing really changed how the way, like how I think about solving problems because I never was in a situation where I would sell something to a customer, I would sell something to a team member in terms of handing over tasks that was not something that I did before and that I do now a lot of course, right? But I really like those challenges I think without challenges life would be really, really, really boring. One very important thing for me is that I wanna step away from the critical path. So I think in like a leadership position I want to be able to jump in when I'm needed and be available to my team members when they need me. So one thing that I really try hard is because as a tech lead it's really easy for people to throw work at you because you're supposed to know a bit about everything. So one of the goals is to make the processes that way that it doesn't happen too much, right? I mean, that should be the case for anyone. Doesn't mean that the developer should get all the work but it should be in a way that it's sustainable. And I think being able to react fast is something that I really like and so the flexibility that is like a need that I have maybe I can also put it into a trend for the team to being able to help out and solve problems but not that they would continuously rely on me doing stuff. Yeah, so basically it trickles down to the word coaching for me. That's something that also AMAZ has been offering. Like basically every team member gets an offer you can take coaching if you like to. So we can like consult a life coach and discussing with him the goals I have or figuring out that I don't have any goals together with him and thinking about why I don't have any goals. That kind of situation made me think, well, coaching is kind of a description for the way I work at AMAZ. Like rather than being a manager that tells people today is this, today is this, today is this. I try to set up processes for the team to be able to perform excellent on the way they wanna perform that and definitely there is other people stepping up and taking management roles themselves. So we have tech leads who are responsible for an area for example like backend lead or front end lead. We have product owners slash project managers who set up timelines together with clients. So kind of I think also the team setup helps. I'm not saying that a team doesn't need a manager at all. I'm just, the way I see it is that I think where I'm good at is coaching. So that's what I think I'm trying to do good. And yeah, it's kind of like taking baby steps at the time, right? Because especially when for me like when starting something entirely new the pile of stuff to figure out kind of felt like impossible. And you're like also in between. Yeah, I mean there's like hierarchy of course. You have a boss and then you have developers. And I think with the way that trying to be supportive trying to find a balance and to be like very adaptive to others kind of makes me or allows me to take those steps. Yeah, so the way I think I take these steps or so far works pretty well. There's definitely some that have been times especially before we said like, okay we're now officially gonna hand over to the CTO role from Mike Kichumi kind of made me like, okay well now it's getting for real and stuff. But kind of taking steps another at the time now when I look back it's something kind of incredible. You don't really realize how much you can get done in a year like you think like I'm never gonna reach that goal but it kind of feels like I've been reaching a lot and we have been reaching a lot together with the whole team. Yeah, and how to reach that that goal is so I think it's really important to visualize the goals and that's something that we currently also I think sometimes are struggling that like AMAZ is like a group and has like different companies. So continuously communicating okay this is the goal of this project and this is the goal of the entire company this is the goal of the entire group is something that we try or that we're currently looking at how to align it or make it a bit more clearer. But I think in terms of structure what really really is like the big change that we started implementing scrum as an HR methodology and that kind of also very much I didn't. So when I now explain how I think and how I feel and how I think about my role it kind of fits well to scrum but I never like when we initially thought about doing scrum it was more like well we don't have a process we kind of need a process and it should probably be HR because waterfall is bullshit. That's like the common sense that you feel but you don't really know because everyone says like yeah scrum is really hard for an agency it's like impossible for an agency because you're never gonna be able to work in predictable sprints with a lot of different clients and so forth. So there were a lot of doubts and I have a whole session about how we adopted scrum there's a video about it online already so I don't wanna get into too much of the details but kind of aligning that with the leadership role with the kind of understanding of management that I have is really really important because so we have now two scrum teams in Zurich and we have another scrum team in Austin and another scrum team in Cape Town and that basically for me means I'm not directly part of one of those scrum teams I'm more like coaching them. I tried to be the scrum master of both scrum teams in the beginning but I just saw like by switching back and forth and being also responsible for other duties I wasn't able to really fulfill the scrum master role but yeah just figuring out that and together with the team decide okay what we're gonna do is a developer now able to step up as a scrum master and now we also work together with the scrum coach to continuously improve those processes that kind of very much aligns with the long term goal of having self-organized teams like that they can take their decisions. In the end a lot of stuff can be decided by the teams itself they don't really need management to decide stuff for them but they can consult management if they have questions and obviously there's criteria like client happiness and employee happiness that have to be fulfilled but at the end of the day like how it's exactly gonna be implemented if the sprint is gonna take one or two weeks that's definitely something that the team can decide. So I'm really really passionate about HIL and I'm really looking forward to further improve the processes that we have to figure out the best way to be HIL and it doesn't have to be scrum I mean it can be a mix of Kanban's scrum I don't know I've not had much experience other than having lived scrum for a year and what I can definitely say is compared to the way we worked before there's the quality of work that Kat's produced the predictability and the information exchange between the developers is a lot better there's definitely also challenges because that's just I mean HIL is just not as predictable as if one person has predefined everything from the beginning but I think the trade-off is definitely one to make and there's also one to be able to scale and not have a single point of failure that you rely on. So yeah, what I'd like to add here is so people ask me, hey, you are CTO now, congratulations. That's really nice to hear, thanks. It's also weird because I haven't felt that change. I started like as a deputy and I'm now officially the CTO but that was a very continuous transition so the day we sent out the announcement was more like, yeah, it's good to have accomplished that but I don't feel like I need that or it hasn't really changed the way how I walk into office or how I go home. What's definitely interesting when talking about the CTO role or any role I think is the way where do you fly? Like are you very high up? So for example, there's tech leads that will do programming or there's tech leads that will also be part of the development and for example, in my case I try to stay away from it as much as possible but that's not because I think it's better, it's more like I feel like that's where I am better. I just don't see myself producing very good code. I can give feedback, I can train people or I can specifically have foresight building, I can definitely comment on best practices and help establish them but I don't see myself being like a developer. So yeah, I think one thing that I struggle with is like time management or that I've been constantly looking at so for example, how do you make a plan for the week and how do you make sure that you will be able to do in urgent work and not so urgent work and not spend time on the wrong tasks. So for example, I spent five hours on an estimation for a big project. At the end I felt like maybe some hours were wasted because ultimately my goal is to not do that kind of big estimations in the beginning but rather have HR implemented that way that we don't spend so much time on an initial estimation without much information but rather set up a workshop together with the client and kick that off. So yeah, sometimes I'm still getting lost in those clouds but I try to stay above to have kind of the big picture and be able to support the team when they have questions and when they feel like okay, I need help now. So yeah, being able to support where needed, that's like the vision I have and in the end it's all about collaboration. So it's all about how we work together so bringing people together for conferences, bringing people together for sprints. This is also what I think is the solution for at work like rather than handing off work from one to the other. If you have good meetings together that doesn't mean you should do meetings all the time but finding a good balance I think is really important and for example, the way we do estimation meetings where in Scrum Poker we identify different views, different opinions, ideas about how something can be solved faster or how something is maybe bigger risk than other people would have imagined. Really strengthens the team and improves the quality of work being delivered. Yeah, so that's kind of what I think is important to kind of come to a conclusion. So the things and was it today? No, I don't know when it was mentioned but the word grit really got stuck in one of the presentations that we have seen. So I think being persistent and being able to also, maybe I cannot fulfill the vision of having a self-organized team today or tomorrow but kind of identifying that this is kind of the vision that I have and then finding out together with the team, together with the rest of the company if that vision can be accomplished or if that's like a common vision. That's definitely something where I would or I'm sure I invest my grit into, yeah. I think being able to communicate better is also something that I found out like sometimes I don't communicate enough because I expect people just to know what I'm thinking. So I'm constantly trying to improve that, yeah. Also being able to, so when reflecting, this is all about like figuring out what life and work should be about. So one thing that always comes to my mind is like creativity. I know we are like in an industry that is very tech driven, sounds a bit boring but actually like I'm, so one of the things that I don't do at work but the job I do is taking a lot of photography. I was producing music back then so I thought like maybe recently I got less creative because I don't do so much or why don't I write any lyrics anymore? And I think the creativity is actually also at work. I mean just finding new processes, finding good solutions and the solutions doesn't, they don't only need to be technical but the solutions can also be on the people level like figuring out how to best mix the team members, how to best define a process to work together. That for me is also really something creative. So I kind of want to put that on the positive notes. Yeah, so the conclusion is there's constant change and I'm really passionate about being able in an environment that is changing. I have to acknowledge that change is not always easy for everyone. So I think also to find the right balance is really, really important because we cannot expect all of our coworkers, all of our team members or even group of community members. Some of them just don't want change every day and I think that's also important to recognize. But I think to acknowledge that, yeah, every one of us kind of changes and the company changes over time that is constant I think is like really important. This talk is initially about like how to help others help me. And what I really like for example is that that person in Milan, he organized it to the Drupal and he said like, yeah, he only organized it because we were tweeting about to the Drupal. So you can sometimes you just make a very small thing like send out a tweet and then that kind of was helping others help me because he took me for a really nice ride. And also for example, when we work with the rules initiative that's another very successful sprint that we had the Drupal death days. Yeah, I think that's a nice way of putting it like as a conclusion and I'd be happy to hear your thoughts around how you organize your work, what makes you successful, what are the challenges. Thanks a lot for your attention.