 So, glad that you guys made it out, we didn't have too much of the bars last night. So we're going to get into this here. What is a superhero? Right? We see them in the movies, we experience them in comic books and we grow up with them but we don't really, and sometimes you don't really know how to relate to them. They're human, they're part, you know, something that you can relate with, but at the same time some of them fly and can breathe in outer space and look amazing while doing it. Others are faster than a speeding bullet and they can, you know, move through time as if it was nothing. Some come from really strange places and they get their powers from radioactive spiders and, you know, injected materials from government agencies and all sorts of weird places. But what you may not know is that a lot of superheroes do Drupal, too. And this is Captain Drupal here. He actually has a comic book series that you can find on Facebook. But I think that we need to start looking at ourselves as superheroes and the powers that we have in Drupal with the same light that we look at Superman and Flash and X-Men and all those. And so, first off, a lot of you guys are going, who is this guy? My name is Chris Taitzel, I'm the founder of Walker and Cellar Door. I've had experience all over the world and I've been blessed to be able to work in many different startups all the way up to Fortune 100s, all over the world, different cultures. I'm an open source developer for about eight years now, Drupal and WordPress. Yes, I'm sorry, I've dipped into the dark side, but actually it's been very interesting to learn from both communities. And then those who were in my session yesterday, my claim to fame is I'm actually a third generation tech nerd. My grandfather started at IBM in the 50s. My dad started in the 80s at IBM and I said to hell with this, I'm not going to do technology. And here I am to prove that genes are a hell of a thing. And before we get started, I want to introduce you to my superheroes. This is Caleb and Evan. They are three and one. And then my beautiful wife whose birthday was yesterday and I missed it for this. So, honey, you're on the recording. I love you. Happy birthday. She actually gets to stay home with these two who are running around like crazy. They already know how to like bend time and do all sorts of crazy stuff. So she's my real superhero. I'm a big nerd. I'll make mistakes. Call me out on Twitter. So if I diss your favorite superhero that you secretly love and have the whole collection at home and I get their origin story wrong or something like that, I apologize now. It's just a talk. So let's go back to my history as a superhero. It started off very early. I was about the same age as my boys in that picture and my mom came out and I was just bawling my eyes out, just crying as hard as I could. And she goes, what's the matter? And I was wearing my superman pajamas. As all kids do at my superman pajamas, I keep on, but I was just bawling my eyes out. And I was like, what's the matter? And she looks over and my sister, older sister, two years older, is sitting there and she goes, if you just run a little bit faster, you'd fly just a little bit faster. So I'd run down the hall and I was like, did I do it? No, just a little bit faster. I almost saw you get off the ground and I was just crying and bawling my eyes out. Why can't I fly? And she said, they're going just a little bit faster. And I feel like a lot of the times we feel like that in technology, like if I just do a little bit more, I'm going to be this really amazing prolific developer or amazing prolific speaker or whatever it is. You always feel like you're running just a little bit. But I kind of came to an epiphany. And it was after, it was after Drupalcon, Vienna, I took a trip to Istanbul for a couple of days. And I decided to experience the culture. I'd been there before, so I kind of knew where I was going. But I sought out and found a local hookah bar. That was, you know, locals only. I walk in and it's almost like the record stops and everyone's just like, what is this guy doing here, right? I'm by myself and they just sit me down. So I started talking with folks. And we started talking and what do you do? And back and forth, I was like, well, I kind of work in tech and then, oh, what do you do in tech? Well, I build websites. Well, that's really cool. Like I was like, I want to have a website. And I've been talking with a developer. It's been taking us years to get it out. And he's like, here, let me show it to you. It was absolutely horrible. And he's like, it doesn't work. I don't know why this developer can't do it. He's like, well, how long does it take you to build an e-commerce site? I was like, well, I'm kind of friends with the guy in Bill. Plug in for the whole thing. And so I was like, half a day, a couple hours. And he's like, no. I was like, yeah, you can kickstart something within a couple of hours and get it up online. He goes, well, what about hosting? Because our host is constantly going down. The website's never online, anything like that. I was like, actually, I got some friends that do hosting as well. The website will never go down. And it was just like mind explosion. And I didn't realize until that point, because I get so caught up in the details of how are we going to do this complex module and we're going to build this e-commerce site that's going to plug into this therapy that's going to do this and this and this. Then you take a step back and you realize what we do, everybody in this room, what we do on a daily basis, is magic to like 99% of the world. They don't understand it. It's just five lines of code. To them, it's millions of people watching a video online. And so Drupal actually does some really cool stuff as well. We power worldwide brands like Tesla, NVA, Nasdaq. I mean, multi-national, multi-billion-dollar companies are running on this. Funny thing about Tesla, the new car here actually does a zero to 60 faster than this page loads, which is pretty amazing that they've built a car that can go zero to 60 faster than their website. Like Ryan was mentioning yesterday, there is billions, billions with a B in dollars in revenue happening through commerce, right? It's powering governments and universities, including Oxford, Harvard, some of the brightest minds in the world have chosen Drupal as the platform that they're getting their message out, that they're teaching. Even your London.gov.uk, I found out, is based in Drupal. It is everywhere you're looking. And it's no small feat. So we've got, and this is from a Dries post a while back, so the numbers are obviously a little larger now, but 190,000 sites on Drupal 8, that was the 80% year-over-year growth, 1,600 stable modules, a 95% year-over-year growth. And this was, by the way, 76,374 hours of automated testing were run in 2017. And that's almost nine years' worth of automated testing running on Drupal. So what we have built and what we continue to build is powering some pretty freaking amazing things, but to us it's just like, oh, it's a little bit of CSS here, a little bit of sass there, a little bit of PHP, and whatever you want to throw together. So like every good superhero, your journey has to begin somewhere in Drupal, and unfortunately this is what it looks like for the most folks. This is the famous learning curve for popular CMSs, and you can see WordPress and Joomla and ModX are kind of, you know, simple and you get it over time and you've got crucifixes and people hanging off of the Drupal cliff that will never really get there. And this is what it feels like when you first spin up Drupal. I mean, how many people have that reaction when you first spin up Drupal and you go, oh, what did I just do, right? And it's funny enough that even Dries has mentioned it in a blog post at one point of there is a Drupal learning curve and you kind of have this like, I suck, I kick ass threshold, and then I'm like one of the top core contributors over time. I myself am no stranger to this. This is me kind of being open and honest in the light of Ryan yesterday. I feel like we can all just be honest here. We actually did this a while back, and I encourage you guys to do it is to go back and look at your first ever post on Drupal.org. It's the most embarrassing and awkward thing to do. And for those of you that it's not, you are a better person than I. So this is my first post. I posted, I said, I'm having trouble getting a border to show around my image. If you go to the, I redacted the link to see what I mean. You'll see what I'm talking about. The code is, and I did want to post my code because it's so horrible. I believe I'm getting overwritten somewhere, but I just don't know if I add or add border equals 10 pixels solid. I get a solid border, but I don't get a clear border around the picture. What am I doing wrong? CSS is what I was doing wrong. Very kindly, somebody later on was like, you're looking for something called padding, not border. I was like, oh, cool, thanks. And that's where I ended up, that's where I ended up starting in Drupal. I bought a theme off of monster themes. I installed it and I realized this doesn't look anything like that demo did. Hence the, I sensed the camaraderie here because there's a lot of folks that have done that. And so what I did is I said, well, in light of my upbringing, all else fails, just do it yourself. So I took Fusion, which was the popular framework in triple six at the time. I took Awkward Slate, which was one of the popular kind of darker themes, and dark themes actually used to be really cool. And then Dan Land, which was again popular, and I was like, what if I just mash all these things together and actually make the theme that I wanted? So I did. And I learned about it and it was horrible. But at that time I ended up getting involved and getting involved in the IRC channels. And through doing this work, I ended up getting connected with a project called Omega. And this was right when Omega 2X was turning into Omega 3X. And lightning struck and everything got crazy after that. And what I realized is that hard work pays off. Like you can't just simply do Drupal. You're not just simply born with the talent of doing Drupal. You have to learn it. So you have books and publications. There's online tutorials. You're here at conferences and camps and meetups. This is where you want to be. You want to foster it. And I kind of look at it as the X-Men. You have the Xavier School for the gifted youngsters. It's like we all have these superpowers inside of us. We all know how to do things in our brain. We just can't put it into Drupal. We come to these events to kind of learn and hone and get our skills to where they're at. But you can't do it alone. You can't go into it and just be like, I'm just going to read all the books and listen to all the events and speakers and know what I'm going to do. It takes a little bit of help from the community. And I believe this is DrupalCon Vienna. And you can see that there's just a small community in Europe around Drupal. But the amazing thing about the Drupal communities, if you engage the Drupal community, they will engage you back. And one of the things that I found most amazing, because my initial introduction to technology was in iOS, and I went to WWDC, was that there was no camaraderie amongst developers because you were all fighting against each other for a slice of the pie. And when I went to Drupal, it was like, Drupal and that guy built the module that 200,000 people have installed. And they're just sitting around drinking beers with them and having fun. And it leads to a fairly funny story. Alex, are you in the room? Oh, I think I saw him yesterday, so okay. Yeah, I'll embrace him now. So one of my first Drupalcons I went to was Drupal in Portland. Late at night I was kind of staggering back from the bars as everyone does at Drupalcons. And I meet another guy. He's wearing a Drupal shirt. We kind of have this bond with each other instantly because it's like, oh, you're Drupal, I'm Drupal. And he's like, I've got some scotch. You want to come back and have some scotch in my hotel room? Normally if you meet a stranger on the street in Portland... Hey, do you want to come back to my room and drink scotch? You say no. But I said yes. And I went back and we sat down, we drank scotch and we talked about the time I was in Omega and how that was going and where everything was going on. I had no idea who I was talking to. So we were just drinking and having fun and all of a sudden I'm at the conference the next day and I'm like, that's the guy I was having whiskey with at like two o'clock in the morning last night. Someone's like, yeah, it's Alex Pott. He's like one of the core contributors. No idea whatsoever that I had been sitting there drinking with a core contributor completely unloading on how horrible I thought some of the things in Drupal were. The guy who was actually writing them. He was very, very nice about it. He's very, very kind. But I look at that as an experience of my own of saying Drupal is a very, very engaging community and it took somebody who had been there a while reaching out to somebody who hadn't and said, come follow me, let's have some fun and I'll show you the ropes. So one of the cool things about superheroes is they come in all shapes and sizes just like we do and I think that's part of the reason why we relate to them. But in the same manner, not all Drupalers are the same. This might ruffle some feathers, but we're not all the same, right? And that's a good thing. I am not a back end programmer. I try and all of my developers now try to get me out of the back end programming. My brain just doesn't think that way. There's certain ways that I just can't click. I pass it off to one of my developers and it's done. There are other people who have design and they can look at something and say, wow, if we move this here, we make this color this and we do this, it's going to look amazing. Me, I almost failed art in college because I just don't do art. I couldn't even blend my colors properly. So what do we do in that situation? We embrace our abilities and we work together. This is a clip from X-Men here where you, you know, the, tossing Wolverine into the, again, sorry, for spoilers. They're tossing Wolverine in because he's pretty much the indestructible thing that everybody relies on when the world's about to die. But it's a good example of using your abilities of strength to throw in somebody who is completely indestructible, who has a sharp claws, to defeat, believe it was this point, it was Magento. Sorry, Magneto. That was for you, right? But I think if we all work together, we can actually use our abilities together to actually go out and tackle some pretty big things. And it's at this point that we're going to need to montage every great superhero story, you have that montage of them failing and then working out and doing all this crazy stuff and learning their powers and shooting the cat with lasers and stuff or whatever it ends up being because they're trying to figure out what they're doing. But then once you have that capability, once you know what you're doing, it comes with a pretty great responsibility. I love this quote from Spider-Man is that with great power comes great responsibility. In Batman, Aras Al Ghul says, if you become more than a man to vote yourself to an ideal, then you'll become something else entirely. And this is kind of in the same vein of what Ryan was talking about yesterday of doing well and doing good, is now that we know that we have a superpower, we do these amazing things on the web. We need to use it to help people in need. It's not something that we just hoard to ourselves. Keep inside and say this is my superpower. And I think that's one of the amazing things about most superheroes, super villains are the opposite. Most superheroes feel compelled that now that I have this, I have to give it back. And how do we do that? This is an example of how I've been able to do it. From DrupalCon Denver, we created during one of the hackathons a geolocated text messaging service. Kind of fun, kind of cool. Hacked it in a couple of hours over a couple of years and it worked and it won. We ended up taking that technology, going to Haiti and allowing aid workers to post text messages to each other during the earthquake response. To some success and to some failures, we then took that and said, well, what if we applied that to the homeless crisis in Washington D.C.? Now, this is a drive where there are many people to register. Now, folks who are experiencing homelessness in Washington D.C. can sign up for a service and then all the service providers can go out and say, and I get text messages even when I'm here in England, of food available, legal services available. If you need someone to talk to and you're feeling like, you know, hurting yourself, come talk to us. Hypothermia and hyperthermia alerts. And it's really fun to be able to say, like, we're taking this technology that we built on Drupal with Drupal at Drupal-Con and we're actually using it for good. What does that also mean? You know, this is relevant for everyone in this room right now is, you know, keep calm, comply with GPR. But I feel like it's our responsibility as developers, as these folks that have amazing powers have actually put them to good use. And a safe web is our responsibility because we're the ones who control it. So I always say, clients aren't asking you for security, but they require it. So it's our responsibility to be secure. Strong encryption is getting a lot of flak from over here in the U.K., in the U.S. just the same. And we have to be able to stand up and say, no, strong encryption is the tool with which we fight. It's like our shield for Wonder Woman. And I feel like the Hippocratic Oath, if anyone is familiar with the Hippocratic Oath, it's what doctors say that, you know, first do no harm, right? As a doctor, you're supposed to always help the patient, not hurt the patient. And I think that we need to have a new Hippocratic Oath for us as developers with these powers that we possess to say, yes, we're going to actually use them to do good. But sometimes superheroes need help, too. Like one of the things that I'm passionate about is empowering developers to realize who they are and what they are and how good they actually are. So be a Superman, not a Clark Kent. You may feel like a Clark Kent in your daily life. You may feel like you don't have this superpower, but you really do. And what does that mean? And I will keep this safe for work and safe for children. But there's an amazing, amazing video called FU Pay Me. Watch it if you don't have children in the room because there is a lot of swearing during it. But I always tell folks if you are starting out as a freelancer or as a new agency, this is required material. You need to watch this. You need to read it, read the transcripts, do exactly what it says. It talks about how to structure your contracts to respect yourself. And in doing so, the clients will respect you. And how to get paid. And so part of that is if you respect yourself and your work, it shows. So if you respect your work, you put value on your work, your clients and your customers will put value on your work. Why is a Rolls-Royce worth as much as a Rolls-Royce is worth? Granted, it has like virgin calf leather that's been sun-dried in the South of France or whatever. But it's worth something that people put worth into it and they've put value into it. Same thing with your work. Know your value and don't be afraid to fight it. If a client is saying I think your rates are too high or I think you're unreasonable in this, at some point you need to learn to walk away and respect your powers and respect that you have something that is special that other people don't. And this is a big one. If you're a leader or a team manager, stand up for your team. If a client gets abusive, stand up for your team. If things are going wrong, deadlines are slipping and things are kind of going out of control, stand up for your team. It shows that you have some control and some power and respect for what your developers are doing, not just what you're doing. And if you're not on a team, if you're a freelancer, I know your struggle. I've been there before. Join a team. Even if it's other freelancers, I've been able to work on some amazing projects because I teamed up with other freelancers and said, hey, I do some cool stuff. You do some cool stuff. Together we can do even better stuff. So let's go work on something. And at the end of the day, superheroes are people too. This is... It's kind of a hard concept to get at times. And I will share a slightly embarrassing story here. We're working on a project. I was in Seattle. The project was for a client in Nigeria, in Africa. And we had developers in the Eastern Europe and Ukraine. And deadlines were coming up. And all of a sudden one of our devs just stopped responding to us. And I'm like, not cool. I need this. I was the manager at the time. And so I kept hounding them over Skype. I'm like, where are you? The code's late. You're late. Why is this going to happen? You're going to get fired, blah, blah, blah. Finally at the last minute he comes back on to us. Hey, sorry about that. My dad was in Ukraine getting bombed. And I had to go help him. Live. And so I'm really, really... He was apologetic to me about it. I'm really, really sorry. I didn't mean to, but we didn't have internet because we didn't have power. My dad was getting bombed and I was trying to get him out, but you couldn't get out. I am so sorry. Like, I am a horrible, horrible human being right now. I put the deadline over the life of somebody else. And I realized that sometimes in life, you need to take a step back. Like, Brian was saying, take a step back and realize that the people you interact with, yes, they're on the other side of the screen, but they're humans too. And so part of that is, if anybody you know might care, unfortunately, passed away recently. But you create these relationships in Drupal that impact you and they help you through tough times. And this was during some of the times last year when we were all kind of questioning the community and what was going on in the community and some of the strife that we had. And this is actually a shirt that he made that's a comment from the views module that says, if none are selected, all are allowed. And I thought it was actually pretty cool to put it in Drupal's code, but you end up connecting with people that will make impact on your life even if their life are cut short. And so respect earns respect. And so this is one of the things that we have to realize in the Drupal community, and I think it's something that I myself, because obviously I'm a global human being, challenges my developers when their father's being involved in Ukraine that though we may be family, there's still disagreements that occur and that's okay, but we need to learn how to respect each other through that. Though sometimes, I hate to say it, there are people in the community that just want to see a burn. And this is a really powerful quote from Batman is that some men aren't looking for anything logical. They're not looking for money that can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. They just want to watch the world burn. And we have to realize that there are people inside this community, outside this community that just want to rabble around. And that's fine. So don't earn internet points or respect. Yes, you may have the perfect comeback in that reddit post or you may have the perfect comeback to that d.o. post. But are you really going to be doing anything good? Are you going to be earning the respect of others when you're doing it? And when all else fails, fall back on the community. And I think that we found this through recent times and various things that have been occurring. But then we also see it historically throughout our community is that in times of strife, the community kind of falls back on each other. They fall back on the institutions that we've created. And then through that, we were able to get through anything that comes up. And so by our powers combined, and this is not a superhero world-ish, if you know Captain Planet from any of you 90s kids out there, you can actually go do some really cool things. And it's exciting to be here and talking with folks in the European community, because I'm over from Seattle in the States and I'm seeing so much different powers over here than I am over in the U.S. And I've had more meaningful conversations at this camp than I think I ever have at any camp. And so as we're ending here, I want to pose to you, what is your origin story? Everyone has one. Whether you realize it or not, whether you make the mistake of borders or padding, whether you post a stupid first question on D.do, or a really powerful, helpful question on D.do, what is your origin story? And I think it's important for you to kind of sit and think and go back to what got you into Drupal and why are you still here? And then what's your superpower? Everybody has one, right? And so once you know what your origin story is, then think through, like, what is my superpower? And then at the end of the day or by the end of the day, find somebody and talk with them. Get to know their origin story. Get to know their superpower. Get to know what drives them and why do they do Drupal. And I think that if we do that more and if we reflect on what we are and how we are, we'll be a much more powerful community because of it. So with that, I thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak here and I'll open it up for some questions if we want to do some questions. But more than anything, I appreciate all of you guys and the superpowers that you have. Chris is very inspiring. I think he shows how amazing and powerful our Drupal community is. And as I said, it's quite a huge question. It's my first question of Drupal. And it's very simple. And yeah, I've learned a lot obviously. So any other questions or Chris? And Chris, as I've been inspiring him here, what is your superpower and what did you decide to open? That's a good question. So my superpower is I come from an analytical background. When I said I didn't want to do technology like my dad and my grandfather had, I said to hell with this, I'm going to go be a doctor. So I went and studied science. And so I went through the University for Science and everything and then I ended up falling back into technology. But I still kind of have that science background, that analytical mind and that question in mind. And so what I tend to do is I tend to structure, whether it's structuring data or analyzing data, but then bug squashing. I love bug squashing. And so I can get in, find the variables, isolate the variables, take them out and then try to hone down to what the core issue is. So yeah, I would say that that's mine. It's kind of that analytical sense. I did some theming. I was okay at it. I tried some back-in developing. I'm horrible at it. So that's where I find myself in the Drupal community is more analytical and data oriented. So yeah. Drupals are super and heroes because they have super villains. Super villains. And for the Drupal community for Drupal heroes, what the world sort of is? What's the supervillain in the Drupal community? I think it's ourselves. I think it's our own doubt that we can do what we think we can. Right? We run the risk of saying, well, I have a hammer, everything's a nail, right? But I think with Drupal, we have a very, very powerful tool in our hands. And at times, our biggest supervillain or the biggest thing that's holding us back or fighting us is our own inability to realize the power with what we're dealing with. To us, it may just be a blocking engine or it may just be something else. And I think that part of it also is complexity. As we build this more and more powerful tool, it's becoming more and more complex. And our supervillain is that we're almost building a wall around ourselves and not letting others in. And so I encourage people that know to teach. Those that go be with others can help them because we're isolating ourselves by being as advanced as we are, I think. And while that's allowing us to go do these amazing things in large enterprise and throughout the world, it does kind of hinder us a bit. Any other questions? So in a world where we may be protecting people from things that they don't even know happen to them, how can we conflict that with a challenge that a lot of marketing can take more into decisions now? Correct. Yeah, and that is a battle, right? It goes back to doing well and doing good. Marketing wants you to do well. Marketing obviously wants to promote your product and do everything. And I think at the end of the day, it's up to us as developers to say, no, I'm going to take that extra step and do that right. Or I'm going to do that little piece. There is, you know, it can be good PR, it can be bad PR. Look at the encryption debate, which is near and dear to my heart in security. The encryption debate around strong encryption is that by providing strong encryption to the world, we're allowing bad things to occur. Yes, we are. We have to live with that. But if we weren't to have strong encryption in the world, even worse things would occur. And so it's one of those things where Apple took a stand and said, no, we're not going to backdoor our encryption into the Apple devices because we want to take a stand for what we think is right, even though it may hurt us and even though it may cost us a lot of money legally, we're going to take that stand. I personally respect companies that can take that stand and can do that. And I think more and more in Drupal, like Ryan was saying, I think folks are doing good as well as doing well. And if you're doing that, doing good is keeping us secure, is going out and building those things that people may not know that they need, but they really do. And sometimes it's a thankless job. You know, hey, I just fixed this bug that you didn't know existed and you really don't care about. But I did it. Go me. But at the end of the day, you are benefiting the community in essence, the world, in your code. And the more that you contribute back to Drupal, folks to go build tools that help the homeless or tools that doctors without borders has run on Drupal. Your contributions to Drupal core and to some of the contributed modules are helping save lives in Syria, even though you don't feel like the little chunk of code is. So, yeah, I don't know if that answers your question or not, but I think sometimes it's just doing the right thing and not expecting the marketing return out of it is what we'll have to be doing. Any other questions? I think we have time for one more. No? Awesome. Well, I really do appreciate your generous offer, Alex, to bring Ryan and I out here from the US and to have us be here with you guys. And I look forward to talking with you guys more today. So, thank you.