 Today we have Matt Barron from Commerce Guys. He is flying over from Kenosha, near where making the murderers films to speak here today. And he's very active in the community and a co-maintenor of Commerce 2.x. He's met a few of you already, but he doesn't get the ideal last orders at 11pm. So here's Matt Barron from Commerce Guys. Hello. Yep, you hear me? Hi, first I want to say thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here. So I wanted to talk to my keynote about open source and community and opportunity. And the spin I wanted to take on it was about my own story. So five years ago, I was throwing, to this day five years ago, I was throwing half barrels of green beer in bars, probably about 40 this week into just one single bar alone. And now I'm here keynoteing in London and I honestly have a lot of people in this room probably to thank and the Drupal community as a whole. So I just want to talk about why, you know, open source, the community, and the opportunities we build are really important. I mean, I don't have a super special story, but I think it's one that everybody could maybe connect to in a little bit to realize what makes open source and even Drupal great. So yes, a little bit more about myself. Senior Drupal Consultant at Commerce Guys. As I've said, Drupal Commerce Co-Maintenor. I don't know if any of you have used opensource.com, but that's something I whipped up a few years ago to make sprinting easier at the Global Sprint Week in 2015. And I also authored the Duplic Development Cookbook last year. So what is open source? The definition that I like best was from opensource.com. It says something people can modify and share because it's publicly accessible. Because it's not just code, there's more to open source and the idea than just free software. So if you want to believe that open source can open new doors. So like in my case, like I said, it's delivering beer. I did web development as a hobby and then a local firm happened to have a job opening. I was like, alright, I'm sick of this, my knees and back are going to shock. And because of open source, I could review and learn. I went in, it was a WordPress site that I had to build as my interview and I don't know what to do, so when I say review and learn, I Googled and I Googled hard to figure out how to build it and then when you look at the source, you're like, ah, there's the answer. I didn't need training or formal education and that was a big part of an issue that I had. Originally, I had an associate's degree in IT networking, so I was like, I'll be like a CIS admin. Everything wanted a certificate. I didn't have the money to go do that training. So open source allowed me to educate myself. And then, I was as knowledgeable as I chose to be and that's kind of true now. And I go do it for the book. I just looked at the source code and I dove in because I couldn't Google anything because it was back in like Alpha and Beta Drupal 8. So, as I said, I first started and I developed with WordPress for about six months and then in March 2013, I built my first Drupal site for an e-commerce client and it was on Commerce Kickstart 2 where I unknowingly installed, well, I knew only install the demo site, built the whole site and then realized that you can't uninstall the demo. And I spent two weekends rebuilding it and also pulled out a lot of hair and fretted a lot because well, Drupal Commerce said it can either be really great for you or it can also make you kind of go like, wow. So I'm still here now. So I got hooked even though I spent about three months being so frustrated. And there's some key reasons to that. Other options felt too close. A lot of the e-commerce software out there that's open source is on a very freemium type deal. Like Magento alone has Community Edition which is okay, but then if you buy their premium, their enterprise whatever they call it, you get a better solution. Same with WooCommerce. WooCommerce is free but they nickel and dime you for any extension where it showed up at Drupal. It's like, oh, you have this. You have this, they're handing modules out like Oprah would in her show. Drupal.org itself really sold me too. I have a plugin on WordPress.org and there's no way to provide support. There's like a support forum. I get to Drupal and it's like, oh, there's project pages, there's issue queues. I know who the maintainers are and people who have worked on it and I can easily get a hold of them. And the issue queues alone just helped me a lot with support and going through the previous items and being able to solve our problems. Support and IRC which I know a lot of people hate IRC but I personally loved it. I treated it as fishing, you know, throw it a line, be patient, wait, someone's going to help you. I was this new person and no idea what I was doing, way over my head but I had people I didn't know helping me and a chat client to solve my problems that they had no incentive to help me out. And the immense online tutorials too. A lot of people do blogs and videos on Drupal as we all know and that was a huge resource. A lot of other options like you get to pay to get those type of things. So that all comes down to the community what's sold me. I know this kind of our mantra come for the co-estate for the community that really resonates with me and that's why I'm here. It's also because it's more than just the code open source is about the community around the code. You can get software, you can do that and it's the people that make open source be special because it isn't just like I said, it's not just the free code but it's how we all act and how we collaborate and we openly share. So it makes the community share and have ideas, friends, meetups and conferences. We're sharing with each other and then we get our friends hooked and we make a meetup and you start going to conferences like these where you meet more people, you start chatting and that's why I'm a huge fan of the Drupal community's way of doing conferences. I know WordPress now has more word camps but when I first got started there's nothing near me at all. So Drupal and the community brought new opportunities for myself. At my previous, the first time I went to we became 100% Drupal because we were more streamlined. The community support allowed me to fulfill more projects like as I learned from the community we were able to take on more work. It was like having all of you behind me like here's a solution to something. It also got me my first freelance gig. Through that e-commerce project I contributed a lot to the shipping modules because there were some bugs and I was like, I get this for free I got to do something back at these and it got me a gig. I was like someone else wants to actually pay me to write code. I was like I didn't think it was possible because I had no idea what I was doing. And actually the person who freelance sent me to Drupal Camp Atlanta which is probably the most pivotal moment in my career is that active kindness. It was my first code conference I went there and people were like, oh hey just come with us. Come get some lunch come get some dinners. I don't know you but awesome. I was really so shocked by the community Ultimike was like oh you should go back to user group. So I did. And that's actually where I first became a module co-maintainer is counter reports. I don't know if anybody has the pleasure of using that module but I chatted with Ryan before I actually got to know him about that and he's like well just become a co-maintainer like if you have ideas and changes just go do it. Shoot fine I'll just go do it. And that is what kind of kicked off my dive into being part of the community of Drupal. So community is vital to open source. It's all of us. It's the companies in it we put in and help it grow. Networking and meeting similar individuals such as going to the conferences it provides a way to show skill set and interact with others. So as I said I had imposter syndrome because where I'm from I was the only kid in grade school that wrote code. I didn't know anybody else. I was like I was the third guy I played video games and wrote code and made some websites and then moving forward the only jobs were in the Chicago area which meant I had to drive two and a half hours for work and I was like no way am I spending five hours of my day on top of an eight hour day to pursue this hobby because I didn't think it was a career but then open source validated. The community was like I actually have a skill set and I don't need to worry about not knowing anything because there's something that we all don't know but we can all help teach each other and it also creates a demand for skills and people with those skills to, you know, the economy, right? We're building a product and a community which then drives people to adopt it which can help bring jobs and so that's all what got me here you know I look back to it it started, Dries happened to open source Drupal which is why we're all here and we all have a lot of jobs in Drupal back when Ryan was working at Prima Supply luckily he was told to go build Uber cart and then you know that story went on to commerce guys and he got me a job an unknown amount of people in this room and then Ryan actually made a point about Boyan, our 2.x lead he got into the Google somewhere of code as Ryan was his mentor and now look at Boyan he's already he keynote of Drupal can't tell Aviv, he's been at a handful of other ones here in Europe and he was building Drupal commerce too like he helped get Composer in Drupal 8 and all that and even a friend of mine was selling cars and I was like hey I got a job for you and got him hired at my other firm and when I code Academy I just wrote on the source of Drupal and now he's actually at Acro Media our affiliate partner in Canada so I helped him get a job as well through the open source and we contribute more than code so we contribute support like I said it's all about helping others inspiration when I first got started I looked at even Mr. Coker Ryan, Boyan, all the actually the OG commerce guys I was like I want to be like those people the code they write is phenomenal and I set that standard for myself and kind of like this is what I want to be like and then once I actually got to meet them I realized there were people too I'm actually, I'm there, awesome it's not this really super high goal and then jobs which I think is one of the greatest parts because it does help empower people from like I don't know where I would be right now if I didn't necessarily have it I'd probably still be lugging beer and then have bad knees, a bad back and who knows where I would be right now so these are my motivators when I contribute and even building Drupal commerce if I help build a better Drupal commerce you all that work in DoveShops has something you can sell the clients to compete with the other products out there which there is no perfect solution for one client you should use WooCommerce when it's appropriate Magento or DrupalCommerce when it's appropriate and the better product we build allows you to have those options to pitch to people and better compete with other firms that might be SullyX or whatever product and then knowing it also goes into helping Drupal which can help others reach this kind of same goal that also makes opportunities that make an impact and this really resonated at Triple Camp Dublin with the trees where you went through the meaningful moments, blog posts and then all the videos especially the apprenticeship program that happens here that blew me away because I feel that's something that it would be great if every community could post something like that off, help train people actually be like a developer incubator and be able to hand them off to an agency and say here you go because in the States around by me it was heavy in auto industry and also coal. Those jobs are gone. So being able to take open source as a way to train people and get them into a new job set is a way that could totally change it's not going to fix the world or save the world but it can help a lot of people out and to touch on that in the States and Westford in Kentucky actually a few years ago I read an article about BitSource. It's the guy that used to be a coal miner, became a developer and the topic was can you teach a miner how to code. I think they're not like 40 people their website said and you know they started out Drupal they used Drupal as a way to build an agency, get people a comparable jobs as they said a coal miner would make 60 to 80 thousand US dollars a year well when those jobs are gone their alternative is working at McDonald's minimum wage. You can't live on that. So the agency provided the living wage now they do like open source C sharp basically do some app development so it's crazy to see that open source allowed them to build a company expand the company and kind of help revitalize their community which kind of fell to the wayside once coal went away so that's where I think that open source really drives opportunities and can make a difference in people's lives as I said it brought me from where I was at to here social map all that yeah your story perfectly exemplifies something that I've been trying to figure out how do you think that we can as a community you know grow our community help make help even more in the world by removing the idea how do we fix the idea that coding is something for elites only it's something that regular people yeah so I actually had a conversation at my son's school with that I'm going to be volunteering to teach the coding club to 4th and 5th graders and there is a very like this is magic I think of the matrix right when all the stuff's growing on the screen what they show in movies and I showed them scratch or they have this robot called Dash and you take your iPod and it's just like scratch but it makes a robot go beep boop boop move around and I show that to some of the other parents that their kids want to get involved like oh we can buy this and do it at home we can make it a game I know gamification is like the new hot trend but it works simplifying it showing that code is just troubleshooting thought process and logic changes do I do this or do I do that and trying to find a way to just bring that down to a super simple level can help lower that barrier I know the way I've also told people at shops people are being replaced by robots so you need to learn how to be able to program those and there's a very simple language like if that do this so things I scratch I think can really help show people that and also build skills that they're going to need in the new workforce any other questions so it seems to me as if a lot of happy coincidences is happening to you I mean you took these opportunities but how do we you know I'll see things that happen to you met people you've seen videos inspired you you've been brave you've gone forward and done stuff and it's kind of exploded and you've done very well and you inspire some people or other ways as well how do we do a better job at creating these happy coincidences and almost I wish I knew I know I can't take all the credit for myself because luckily I had a very supporting wife when I quit the beer delivery job I did take like a $10,000 salary hit to go pursue my career and she stuck by me then and when I quit all my other jobs I think to help foster that kind of growth is getting people to meetups and conferences by trying to do some more meetups and talk to friends it's all about talking to people and that thread my friend Justin has a job now at that we have another gentleman named Mike who came to some of the meetups Drupal wasn't his thing he's like I can do this I can go to school I can be a developer he now works at wantable.com and is like a Ruby and Angular developer for them all because we talked to him about what we do he came to a meetup it was like the imposter syndrome got blown away so I think it's just talking like we're all people we're all human, we all make mistakes we don't know everything and you had the perception it wasn't a real job and now it's only three years ago about five five six, yeah it was my weekend thing that I did that's the case so what can you do to make that perception to grow based on that I really don't know if that's the case I want to ask a few people that and see if they think that it's still maybe in some of the more closed off areas where it's not there isn't like a mainstream IT type IT workforce or whatever you want to call it it's in my time we still have one company and then we have a marketing firm so for all I know there could be because I think that but that's changed in five years like now we have like github's exploded coding has become more of a social thing and mainstream, I mean back then right that's when I was tweeting via text message and Facebook wasn't even open had just opened up to like the public and now we live and breathe Facebook, Twitter, all of those so I think I don't know if people might think it's still just like a hobbyist they know they might be able to get a career so they might see it as a career path but jumping into it is still the difficult part I would imagine which if that's the way you could reach out to people like just come to this meeting just give it a shot I mean Drupal is great because you can build anything in the UI you don't need to necessarily be a coder to build an MVP an MVP product Any other questions? Like you talked about your town and kind of the way the economy changed there there's still a massive drive for lots of talented software developers to move to the valley do you think like how do we foster a kind of sense of kind of remote first because you're always in conversation like how do we how do you encourage that because one of the difficulties of people not seeing it as a proper job is that you work from home you can't possibly work from home it's mystified I go and drop my son off from the table so you're going to go to the office and I'm going to go back to my basement it's the biggest part I think there needs to be like a revolution of sorts in management because management still thinks that they need a micromanage they need to see you you're productive if a tree falls into the forest doesn't make a sound well they think no it's not going to you're not going to work here at home so I think getting management to embrace that and then also it has to be exposed more I mean in my town there might be some people that work at home but I don't know them so one of my goals is I want to try to open a co-working office we don't have one I don't want to work in my basement all the time so I want to try to open a co-working space to then draw out those people and then that's one way it can help grow is just getting those people together and saying oh we are actually a force in our community I actually got the pleasure of being interviewed by the local newspaper because they heard about the conference and we talked about remote workers and some of the feedback was well what about there's legal assistance that work at home there's people who do transcripts there's the old school medical coders back in the day so there's a whole group of people that actually work at home that you don't think about because they're not developers and if there's a way to highlight that this is like the unrepresented workforce that can help bring into the mainstream and I think push that forward Any other questions? I'll do you hand You have to think about how do we as a community avoid scaring people like if there's new coders new people just started why do people come from all the systems come and come all the systems might be simpler but you'll get to hear about that careful notice so I served with Drupal 7 and D it definitely was a huge change for the better of code it was too late in my opinion it should have been sooner but it just fixed a lot of problems there was the code base I'm not a fan of the functional procedural program I do like the loop which I know it brings it to like a more enterprise level you could say because it's object oriented but not really like that's just a modern program if you look JavaScript is becoming typed and having objects I think it's a good thing because it helps people that like our job developers it helps cross the bridge people can easily adapt it more easily but to help prevent scaring people is people using Drupal 8 it's not scary I've said that since day one I installed health phones this is a great improvement that we have on our hands and the new semantic version is going to help too now that we have all the minor releases which I think has kicked off way better than I anticipated I've really thought about all the decision to do that and that's going to help ease the fear so this was the big scare right I think D8 was the big scare we have to change the way that we do our builds we have to change the way that we write code we have to just change the way that we understand things which is always scary that's a threat to how you work but we have to just embrace the change and see okay how can we prevent this from happening again semantic version talking to people maybe getting more in the process all the changes that are there the report is near possible I try to pay attention but the one thing I do is I go look at some of the change records and I'm like oh well this was a huge change so I'll try to chime in and give my opinion so maybe that could be one thing too trying to get community feedback on some of the pending big changes which I feel a lot of the subsystem maintainers do a good job of considering that though I just think that the D7 and D8 jump just took too long and I think just too many people got burnt out so the other getting rid of the scary parts just kind of fell behind I have a question from the last question you know the off the cliff diagram wordpress and doomlet how did we change that perception so I think that's hilarious that infographic because I think of Drupal as the opposite way you so you can start out and then you hit this huge curve but with Drupal you can create an MVP so easily I don't really know where that learning curve comes from because that's what I hit with wordpress I started I needed to build a content type and I was like okay well let's write some code for this I needed to be able to dynamically set up a theme so I ported omega 3 and the block concept into a wordpress theme so that way I could easily build sites and that's when I was like screw this I'm doing Drupal so I don't know why it says huge curve because wordpress is like that you go here that's like oh I need this functionality it has its place it is a great blogging platform where you try to make it more you hit that curve so I think all the CMSs are that way especially since in Drupal you can use the UI for so much you have a lot of clicking to do and we have a lot of options of course everything is going to be in pain but you don't necessarily have to build a website so I don't I don't know how we can get rid of that maybe just better documentation but documentation is hard a Drupal diagram of our own cliff yeah I've heard of it any other questions you didn't have to I need full participation in programming and I was wondering whether now you feel that will be useful whether you have the whole dynamic you know as long as you feel it's needed so I actually did go back to the university and I did get bachelors in software engineering I graduated last year right as I was starting the book is when I finished school looking back the debt this was a stupid decision but when that's gone I think it was valuable especially the hindsight factor I was able to take things that I learned in the field and apply them to what I was learning I've always had a gripe about going to school to be a software engineer because do a binary research I've never had to do that some of the code I had to learn it didn't really give me value but it was all the other parts all the parts about being a good speaker being a good manager being all of the other things that go into being a developer that isn't code that we all forget about because we're just like okay do the code there's this there's communicating to your clients there's communicating to your boss and it just also taught me how to be a better like team lead at that time I was a project lead at a previous company and it just kind of helped me get on track with where I wanted to be and I think it actually made a great transition into commerce guys being a co-maintainer at Drupal commerce kind of gave me that frame of reference like how can I be a good maintainer feel welcomed to want to keep coming back so I think it is worth it and I think it is good if you already have some experience then go back because then you'll get more out of it you're not going to be so much lost in the woods which I my friend Mike that went to the meet up and then went to school I think that has helped him too because he went to a few minutes before that and then he went to the local tech college and he's going and he's also working alongside it so as he's doing code he's learning in school and being able to apply it properly I think cool so thank you very much for the amazing information