 okay am I heard okay good also good so yeah I think we can start so we won't be too long because this is I think the last set of sessions so probably have plans after 6 p.m. so yeah today's talks will be about how to onboard the next generation of Drupal engineers or as Dries said today villagers now we're calling them villagers so yeah this is me that the photo is not completely new but I hope I'm you can recognize me from the picture I'm a development director at agile drop it's a development company mainly doing Drupal from Slovenia this handle is also my username on Drupal.org and also on social media and it's actually the pronunciation of my name because I know that there's a characters that are not usually in your languages so this is how you actually pronounce my name the first contact with Drupal was somewhere around 2010 and at that point I was working in an agency on a proprietary CMS and in my free time I was discovering other options and Drupal was one of them and luckily enough the owner of that agency was also discovering alternatives to the expensive proprietary CMS that we were working on and yeah hopefully I was lucky enough that we were able to start using Drupal at that point and yeah since then I'm in Drupal this is Anmir he's not here today so he's not like a co-speaker or something he's just a co-worker of mine that will be that I will use to explain a thing he joined agile drop in July this year he started working on a Drupal onboarding project that we have internally so learning Drupal learning best practices and he already made first contributions of Drupal.org this is AdmirDrupal.org profile three months one week and you can see that he has 22 fixed issues I mean he has credits on 22 fixed issues so this is what we'll be talking about yeah I could I admit he's a real talent and I really like him but yeah it if we compare the two of us as I said before I started I learned about Drupal around 2010 but I'd registered on Drupal.org in 2012 because no one told me that this is actually the place to go I actually was doing Drupal projects for almost a year but it was you know we were learning by ourselves and and even though I was already making patches for our projects which of course at that point was Drupal 7 so which meant that we were also of course a little bit well it was not it was not pretty all the time because we were hacking modules as well but yeah my first issue credit was in June 2016 well you can see the difference actually and what was actually the difference between me and Admir well my path was that I was self-taught I learned about Drupal on the internet and of course my first projects were really a low quality project if I think most of you can relate that if you could go back to your first Drupal projects that you're not very proud of but yeah we were learning from mistakes but we were learning from mistakes and those mistakes were haunting us for year or two or three or even more because yeah the projects weren't built in in the proper way at that time I also with the colleagues attended Drupal events Drupal camps mostly to get more information then it sessions like this one and after many projects we were able to apply the best practices into the projects of course while I was doing a job for a living I had to learn the best practices in my free time and of course it took me a couple of years to come to a point well Admir's path is different he joined our company he has a mentor he is able to learn Drupal from experienced developers he has time to learn during the job and he also adopts back best practices from day one because well he's not allowed to do the other way but yeah this is the difference and the result was on the previous screen he he's actually contributing to Drupal modules already so what we learned until now is yeah we we need new talent in Drupal I mean of course we people are coming and going and we need to build the next generation of Drupal engineers to maintain Drupal and all the modules in the future and yeah the problems that we have today one problem I see is a step before coming to Drupal is PHP PHP might not be the hype of today it's hard to attract new developers where where all the other nice and and and sexy things are there out there and in PHP there's many old projects with bad code base which are still kept alive we know that there's a lots of Drupal 7 sites still out there it's the end of life is just postponing and postponing and of course this is showing a bad reputation to the language itself which actually evolved a lot in the last 10 years or so but because of the old projects you know the newcomers the juniors see a 10 year old and usually those are the guys who get the old projects because of course the seniors are working on new projects and then of course they don't like it and PHP is also loses the reputation and of course I think the Smith is as old as PHP is that PHP is that of course we all know that that's not true at least hopefully here all of you know PHP and know that it's well the changes in PHP 8 and and actually with every new version are really great and it's still running lots and lots of internet so it's not just going away because it can't yeah also the salaries I think we have to touch this point are lower compared to the niche languages which rust go and others but why is that I think because on average the problems the code solves there is of higher value we have to admit that you know learning curve is steeper which means that the less experienced talent is available which means of course that salaries go up but of course you have to but a 22 year old developer doesn't know that he just read the blog post that rust and go have higher salaries he doesn't know that he would probably need five or ten years of experience to be able to work on a project in those languages we are the one we have to tell them that maybe start slow and also those languages are usually used in startups products and stuff like that which we have to be honest compared to agencies have usually a bigger value per developer and also Drupal has some problems I started with Drupal 7 you know what we did was not the most beautiful thing but it was easy Drupal 8 plus we have to be honest requires more knowledge it's if not it's if for nothing else it's object oriented the programming standards are higher the folder structures because in Drupal 7 you just created the dot module file and just let's go put everything in there and you were just writing writing writing until you know and of course there's composer and everything else so I think that the entry to the technology is harder as it was in Drupal 7 and I also believe that it's not that suitable for hobby projects anymore I think Drupal 7 you know you were able to download it put on a server FTP and you were able to do something well of course now if you want to follow best practices you can't work like that because you know you have configuration you have everything else that it has to be done in a proper way and of course comparing to 10 plus years ago there's also lots of other solutions including even frameworks so not even if it's and if if a company or a client is in a need of a CMS at the end of the day you can also use Lara so what is the solution well this by accident I mean by accident by coincidence this is a little bit connected to what Dries was talking before but agencies have to work on promoting Drupal you know we have to teach people how to use it and it's not enough to just post the job ad and say well there's no Drupal engineers out there of course it's not there's no rust engineers out there there's no go engineers out there there's no engineers out there you have to learn them you have to take them on board and take some time and learn them what what you have to do is find people who are still exploring you know lots of times I hear people from on universities you know they learn them usually at least in our country universities learn you know computer engineers a small portions of different you know areas and languages and they have to decide where to go well this is this is the place where we have to find them and see if there is a prospect of course tell them what we're doing and yeah tell them in a way that they will like it impress them so yeah there will be three steps that we are actually doing an agile drop and that I want to share with you as well and of course hopefully you'll be able to get some results out of it so first find people that can become great developers to be honest and I will be honest we are mainly looking for talent and junior mid developers fast learners I said before you know the the seniors are looking for other options there are other opportunities of course there are and and also if you want to learn a framework or a CMS like Drupal it's good to start with someone who doesn't have much backstories you know who has started with fresh then what all companies can do in their local environment is of course organize workshops organize local meetups PHP meetup open source meetup so it's not necessary to go to and say we will organize a Drupal meetup it's it's a big chance that you won't get as much people as you would like but go wider organize a PHP meetup or even open source meetup this open source word I think it's it's it's quite attractive and if you you know start or start open source workshops or something like that so this is something that to attract young developers and then of course during those sessions you you sneak the Drupal in yeah and below be active in local universities and other educational institutions because that's where you will find the talent our companies is I mean we try to do our best of course other technologies are also there you know pressing on universities to learn especially some I mean some technologies with more traditional with with with more money but yeah every agency can do this locally and again we are not into looking for rockstars to be on it we're looking for newcomers we want to find the talent and we want to learn them step two now you have expertise in your company already now it's time to inject the skills directly into their veins agile drop has a Drupal onboarding project it's well it depends how much time it takes but usually takes at least a month to maybe even more which is a dummy Drupal project where they start with side building custom modules and during the custom modules they learn how to build custom entity how to build custom block as the controller everything else everything else so and yeah you have to mentor them so you have to make sure that one of your senior guys or someone who has been with Drupal quite for some time can spend a couple of hours per week probably and you know just review the work they did and be available for possible questions then of course when they go on the first project have to help them also maybe teach some soft skills so they become more independent because you know young developers are usually quite shy and afraid because and also scared of doing something wrong so we have to build a culture where mistakes happen of course we try to avoid repeating that mistakes but yeah and then build or take over maintenance of an existing module and Drupal.org this is what we did with Admir you know we are maintaining a couple of modules there are a couple of there are lots of modules out there who are not maintained or have 10, 20, 30 reviewed and tested by the community issues but nobody merges them in so find those modules contact the maintainers and maybe take over the maintenance of some module you know this is the way that you can also learn them and step three which is important this is not a one-time job you have to do this all the time because if you just go and say okay we'll organize Drupal workshops and out of 50 people will probably find five and then we'll hire them and then those five will work for the next couple of years doesn't go like that so you probably have to organize a couple of workshops to find one or two but yeah workshops meet up sessions in universities they must be constant you have to be constantly present on those for those events as I said before block the time of your seniors to review the work and help if you know that you have a couple of juniors in your team you have to make you have to find a way to block some time of your seniors and you know give them an opportunity to review the work build a culture where everyone is encouraged to help I think the whole Drupal community is built in this way so we don't have so many problems here because the story is somewhere else are you know they're not even helping the juniors because they're afraid that they will take over their job in the future and stuff like that I mean this is totally wrong and yeah in the company try to build a culture where everyone is encouraged to help and also find a way to praise and reward those who help a lot so if you see a guy who's actually working all the time on the project but you can see that he's spending you know his time going around desks and helping other people you know we have to find a way to praise and reward them whatever that way is I'm not going into details but yeah fine and of course mentor new mentors this is really important because mentor being a mentor is not you know not easy and it's not natural to be just everyone can be mentor it's not that easy so mentor new mentors means that if you are in a situation currently I don't know if you are a senior developer maybe already taking care of couple of junior developers mentoring them find some meat to senior developers who will be able to you know do the same thing in the future and maybe ask them over help them what you're doing and they will hear you they will see what you're doing they will they will be able to learn about the things you do and the result I mean at least in our company over the last seven years we hired hundred plus developers and at our peak we had six people doing the onboarding project at the same time so it was really an internal Drupal workshop during their job time you know that they came to our company in the span of month month and a half so yeah some of them were already a little in front but what happened was that those who were there for a month helped the new ones on the first desk you know because they already made them they and they were proud and they were happy that they were able to help so this is how you how you try to build we started Drupal workshops in 2017 and we had 22 Drupal workshops already in our country so this is what six six years now and from the first we have an employee who joined a girl who joined the first Drupal workshop in 2017 and is still an employee today actually we we I think usually it's about 10 to 15 people we just gathered them usually it's one day or two Saturdays or something like that so we really do from 8 4 or 9 a.m. to 3 4 p.m. and we just go over the Drupal basics and then we see a talent we see that someone is really you know interested and they understand things and yeah this is how we actually got her and she still and of course after her there were a couple of them as well PHP masterclass again a workshop that we organized was a little wider but then you know we go to Drupal and then we are also organizing meetups in our office Drupal symphony as well and PHP and other events job fair is an event in our University once per year somewhere in spring where the the final years students are able you know to meet with the companies so yeah that's it this is the slide so yeah this is actually the slide that was like not I will not say mandatory but it was suggested to edit at the end of the your presentation but really those of you who are developers it's really connected to this session because yeah if you haven't contributed yet these are the these are the opportunities because I know that at the beginning it's always hard and you always feel that you don't know enough and you always feel that all those guys are too smart for me which in reality is usually not the case because quite quick you can solve an issue or two so yeah this is also slide for feedback in the mobile app you can put the feedback and this is a thank you from my side and if you have any questions look there's been two questions both asking the same basically is your dummy onboarding project available anywhere or open source no not but I mean we could do this yeah I mean it's at the beginning it was a little we were a little bit you know it was a little of our secret but it's it's it's not a big deal it's it's just dummy project with with the tasks I mean it's it's trying to simulate the real-life project trying to simulate but of course going through all the through all the aspects of Drupal but yeah maybe I mean at the moment it's not but I think we can think about and then put put something out okay and thank you again