 Good. All right. So welcome to our communities and the first law of Drupal Dynamics talk. I'm Lisa McCrae. We've got Jack Garrett on the end there. We have Ashraf Abed in the middle. And like I said, we only got half an hour, so we're going to jump right into it. So the first law of Drupal Dynamics, knowledge is never lost, it just changes form. So when we started putting this talk together, we were thinking a little bit about how the three of us were like a microcosm of Drupal in a way. We all got here from different backgrounds, took different paths, but our differences only made the Drupal community stronger. That reminded me a lot of the first law of thermodynamics, which is the one about the conservation of energy. Regardless of where you came from, people with many kinds of skills, abilities and backgrounds are valuable in the Drupal community precisely because they bring this other knowledge, not in spite of it. Obviously, we're not alone in this idea. Dries talked about it this morning in his Dries note. It's more of a given, really. And the interesting part is how we keep the community growing and bringing other new people in. So let's focus on that piece. We'll each start off with a little bit about our own backgrounds and how we got involved in Drupal in the first place. We'll share some of our own personal ideas of how to help the Drupal community continue to grow. And then we'll wrap up with a set of hopefully easy to remember guidelines for your own efforts. So I'll start with a little bit about me. I've been in tech for a long time and worked in a lot of different areas, kind of a jill of all trades. I can put together a plausible sounding career path. And if there's any UXers in the room, they'll know that humans are really good at rationalizing their actions after the fact. But in fact, I was never a Stacey. And Stacey was a girl in my fifth grade class. And I don't know why I remember this, but when they asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up, Stacey said, pediatric anesthesiologist. And I was just like, what? Not only did she know, not just a doctor, but she knew exactly what kind. And I doubt that very many of us are Stacey's, but we're kind of encouraged to be. They kind of make it sound like if you got to have a path and you got to know where you're going. You might have seen this quote from Lewis Carroll about if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there. And a lot of the times when I see that, it always seems to have kind of a negative connotation that, oh, well, any old road will do. But if you don't need to take a specific road, just think of all the interesting ones you can go down and look at. And that's kind of what I did with my career. I was kind of all over the place. I came from an engineering background. I worked for really big companies. I worked for some smaller companies, government contractors, did some teaching. I did all kinds of stuff. But some roads don't always turn out so great. So eventually I found myself becoming more and more stressed and anxious. It tipped over into depression and I was practically a walking what not to do, according to Sheryl Sandberg and the lean in movement. I cut back hours and levels of responsibility at work due to family needs and I was still burning out. Eventually there was a reorg. My job was cut and boom. Now what? I started interviewing and discovered that what I already knew was no longer enough, was a little stale, I needed to re-skill. And worse, as I was interviewing, I was being told things that fed every single one of my own self-doubts. The quote up there was one that I had that just, it was really terrible. I bombed that interview and at the end of it, the person interviewing me said, well, I think we'd both agree. While you were doing development, you weren't really a developer. Okay, no, I didn't agree with that, but I didn't know what to do with that. And I was really kind of lost. So I spent a long time thinking, I seriously thought about dropping out of the tech world, didn't really seem like I had a place and I didn't really know how to find one. I did decide eventually I wanted to be here, so what do I do? The key for me was personal connections. I had a former coworker who told me about some email list serve thing. And I signed up. And somewhere on there, it led me to information about Women Who Code in Washington DC, which is where I'm from. And that connected me with this super active, super supportive online community. And the more I was around them, I would find out about other opportunities and places I could learn things. Eventually I heard about this Debug Academy program. And I thought, you know, there's a lot about that that sounds good for me. But I don't know this. I've never heard of this before. Well, I had a personal connection in that group who told me about it and she could vouch for it. She'd actually taken the training herself. She knew it was a quality program. So after I got in touch with her, I said, well, okay, let me find this out for myself. So that's how I ended up getting involved, taking some classes with Debug Academy, and getting into the Drupal community. Shortly after finishing my classes, I got hired by a company in the DC area doing Drupal work. And after a while, I even had the opportunity then to come back to Debug Academy where I am now to help others learn. So yeah, things worked out eventually for me. But when I think about how I got started and what would have made it easier, the biggest things that helped or that I wished I had were supportive communities to point me in the right direction. That was one I actually think exists already. The question or the challenge is really more making sure that you can find it. Clear on ramps. Can I tell where to start? Like, okay, I'm interested in this. Where do I go? How do I get started? Who do I connect with? I feel like there's a lot of that that's happening. And the more I can get involved with that, I'm going to want to definitely do that. This one, Drupal welcome wagon. I think there may actually be some programs in process for that. And I'm kind of looking for it. But it was sort of like, if you're completely new and you're looking for a way to get involved, just people who reach out to you and say, hey, here's some stuff that you might want to know. Here's some, let me show you where things are. That would have been super helpful. And the emphasis continued integration on different types of people doing Drupal, not just developers, not just content people. I mean, that's one of the things that I think is nice about this year's DrupalCon is the fact that there are multiple groups there. I'd like to see them get even more connected together and have even less separation. All right, so I'm going to turn it over to Jack now. It's a little bit abrupt, but I want to keep things moving along. So those are sort of my own personal things from my experience. Thank you, Lisa. So my name's Jack Garrett. I'm a Drupal developer at Tobog Academy. But for most of my vocational life, I've been doing the humanities. I've been studying history really for 12 years, four of that in undergrad and eight in graduate school getting my doctorate, going to Germany, studying German colonialism in Africa and the slave trade. So this is a very weird experience for me making this career transition and suddenly talking at DrupalCon. So this is, once again, a little surreal. But what happened is in 2017, I eventually finished my graduate school and had to enter the workforce. And essentially, I kind of had to take a look in the mirror and decide whether I wanted to be a journeyman across the United States being an adjunct and trying to get a tenure track position, which is increasingly elusive, perhaps unicorn-like. And I taught at private schools for a year. And last February, so I guess 14 or so months ago, I started doing web development. I just learned HTML, CSS, JavaScript. And totally by accident, I found Drupal. It was like, what is this? This is a content management system. And as I finally started digging into it a little bit, I realized I could leverage all of those previous skills and put it in a nice little complete package and make some really interesting websites with some of these entry-level skills that I had built up for the past four months. Since then, I've built some nonprofit sites, worked on Drupal TV, and then even some federal government websites, which this is kind of like, for me, is mind-blowing how quickly this change has occurred in a very good way. So the question that I am currently struggling with is, OK, I made this career transition like, now what? Do I suddenly just drop my identity as a historian, something that I've been working towards for a lot of my life? And of course, no. You just don't drop your research and all of these ideas that you have. But you want to incorporate it in this new career path. And so for me, I guess these two bullet points is, the second one is what most people think about is, OK, I know how to build websites. Do I want to go into module development or theming? However, I kind of wanted to take a step back and think about how I could reach out to some of the previous communities that I inhabited and think about making new kinds of websites, new products, or taking their ideas and using what I'm learning to create a collaboration, something that would make me grow as a web developer, not even necessarily learning new skills, but taking those ideas, their research, and putting something together. So this is the interesting part. How do you get cantankerous historians interested in Drupal? Yes, there are digital history programs. But for me, how I was thinking about it is getting individuals who are just leaving PhD programs, people who want to get their research read and get them on a digital platform. Yes, they might be published in academic journals or monographs, but they want something else. And so I had to translate some of those Drupalisms into their jargon, speak in their terms, which for me was actually kind of fun, thinking about how do you take a dissertation and make it like a Drupal product. So for me, at the end of the day, when I'm talking to historians, it's really about content types. And that seems very basic or simple, but historians think about primary documents. And Drupal wants to give the information meaning. Historians look at documentation, and they have to interpret the past and give it meaning. Like these are things like their ears peek up when I say these things. So this seems like a promising path. So it's really just explaining really how Drupal thinks and connects to what they're doing. I mean, that's not really all that surprising, but in practice, I think that can be challenging. So just a little separate slide here. So talking about historians in Drupal, and there's already an existing conversation happening called digital history. This isn't just like history of digital media, but an actual discipline that uses digital methods to convey the past. And so for me, this was, all right, I want to engage into an existing conversation into this community that I had kind of since left behind in some ways. There are a few different ways of doing digital history. You can kind of read that up there, but the second one to me is most interesting. Is how do you make academic research accessible to everyone? Not only just for kind of historians to get their research out there, but for people, lay people who aren't necessarily reading the cutting edge history research, you want them to be able to access this. Or as a history teacher, how do you get high schoolers to be engaged in the past in varying ways? So I had to think about a little bit, or what does Drupal offer out of the box? And so this is the getting historians interested in Drupal. So I've already mentioned the content types, which for me is the beating heart of Drupal, but then also organizing data and giving it meaning. And then displaying it dynamically, whether you're using views or kind of locations on maps with custom map markers. I think for humanities professors or people engaging in meaningful research, there's a lot to offer out of the box here in Drupal that isn't necessarily a big customizing data or a nice project, but something that speaks to one niche of like an oral history program and making that accessible and used in Drupal. So to kind of come back is the point of this part of the presentation for me was to really think about what were the communities that I am or was a part of and engaging in some interesting conversations with them. What does Drupal offer them? And then conversely, what are the projects that I can grow as a web developer using their ideas? So not necessarily learning a new technology, but them bringing something new for me to work with. So it's not, yeah, like this new hot technology like React or something like that, but oh, this cool archive they found. So I wanted to like display that data. So I'll leave it at that and pass it on to Ashraf. Thank you very much. All right, hello, my name is Ashraf. Ashraf, I'll pronounce it properly. I'm the founder of Debug Academy. My journey to Drupal was a little funny. I think they all are somewhat. But before Drupal, I taught myself web development, at the age of 13 I was in a good place, lucky to have access to the right technology and build some websites. Eventually I went to college, not at 13, but I went to college and I really disliked it. I hated being assigned homework that was going to get thrown away at the end of the day. That that's just how I looked at it. And it felt like such a big time investment for, you know, like I said, assignments that just didn't feel practical. Eventually, like I said, I dropped out, I re-enrolled, I felt the pressure from society, I had to finish the degree, re-enrolled and I got my degree in electrical engineering, which was great, but I felt like I didn't know how to do electrical engineering, you know. So I ended up going back to software, getting a job in software. And throughout that, through that job, I was waiting for a clearance. And basically my manager came and said, hey, we started your clearance process. It's hard for people from, you know, Arab backgrounds, it's gonna take two years for you, we can't wait that long. So we're gonna put you on unpaid leave. If you could find another project in the company, we'll, you know, start paying you again and you can go to that project. So in that time, I was fortunate to be called by a recruiter, random LinkedIn recruiter. And they basically said, hey, have you heard of Drupal? I knew they were a recruiter, I was like, why do you wanna know? So they basically said there was an interview in three weeks and they wanted to know if I wanted to participate. I had not heard of Drupal, but three weeks was plenty of time while not working. So I picked up the pro Drupal seven development book and I pretty much read it's cover to cover. Three weeks later, I was able to land that job. So I was able to learn Drupal. Of course it helped, I had a background in web development, but I didn't know why we used Drupal. I read this book, which was all about this is how you make custom modules, this is, these are content types, et cetera. I was like, why would I get this whole framework just to make it more difficult for me to write custom code? I wasn't aware, essentially of the contrib space, I wasn't aware of the community. The book didn't talk about the community. So I really just knew that people were willing to hire for Drupal developers and they had a hard time finding them. So I ended up getting deeper into the Drupal rabbit hole. I ended up getting a job at Acquia after a couple of years and that's when I started to realize, oh, there's more to this software. So I learned more about Drupal.org. I learned about the community. I got all of those certifications, Grandmaster certifications at Acquia. I got to work on some really cool enterprise websites. And I learned essentially the proper way to build a Drupal site and I felt really bad for the clients I had worked for before. I really wanted to go back and rebuild their sites. Thinking about all of that, the fact that that company hired me, it's not necessarily that I tricked them. They knew I had a web development background. They knew I was willing to learn and they had no other Drupal developers to pick from. So I kind of realized, if I was able to land a job in Drupal just after a couple of weeks of studying, I have a lot of friends and family who also don't like their jobs or are in a bad situation. If companies are so desperate to hire Drupal developers, can we enable more of these people who are in a bad spot to get into the industry? So I essentially tested it out. I posted on Facebook and said, hey, I'm teaching this programming language. Anyone want to be a programmer? You can just come take it for free. And it was for three months, part time, in my house. I had a lot of funny stories out of that dynamic because it wasn't people I was necessarily close to or people I knew very well. But it worked out. We had people who started careers as Drupal developers, people who had not had programming jobs before. And to this day, it's really cool seeing how things have changed for them. So I moved on. I pushed forward with the idea, created Debug Academy and put a lot of time into essentially creating jargon-free education teachers. I tried to combat all the things I didn't like from college. We do real projects. It's not a repeat project. And it's very welcoming and inclusive. We're not just selling Drupal for the sake of selling it. You have to talk to people and see what their backgrounds are and how it applies. And I've been fortunate. It's been just naturally diverse. It might be that some of the community, family, friends I've had fall under the diverse category for tech. In the current semester, we had 40% of the class being women who enrolled. I do work to reach out, but at the same time, I'm not doing anything ridiculous. It's just a matter of making it a welcoming environment and sometimes convincing people that the doubts they have, while maybe based in legitimate things, are not as significant as they might think they are. You have to fight their impostor syndrome with them. So our ongoing efforts to essentially help in this department as a company. So now I left Acquia. I've been running Debug Academy for about two years. They're a handful of things I try to live by. And these are things that other companies can do. I try to hire people for their first droopal job when possible. So if I need a developer for something, I might know this person was really amazing, but they have a job somewhere. I'll try not to hire that person. I'll try to hire someone who maybe had potential. Maybe they're in a job they really don't like and maybe minimum wage job. Maybe I could swap out that income and hire them for this and give them some time to learn. Also, reputation is a really big thing. I'm fine right now, but there are many people who take the class who their name is not out there at all. So whenever I see an opportunity to patch, I just submit a patch to Drupal. I reach out to alumni and I say, hey, you worked hard and you don't have a job yet. Let's get you to submit this patch. Or if there's a speaking opportunity, last year at DrupalCon I was able to invite one of the alumni to speak with me. And essentially the idea is the whole concept of extending your privilege. I'm privileged in many ways and I see first hand that many alumni from our courses will go to a job interview and based on how they look, the interviewer will come talk to me and say, hey, that guy, he seemed a little shady. And I'm like, no, he was quiet while black. That's not shady, it's your biases and I'll tell them, you are being unreasonable. I was there, I know this person and I'll push back and I'll make them uncomfortable because other people can't do that for themselves necessarily without losing the opportunity. So if you're in a position to do that, to extend the privilege, it can have a huge effect. I've had people come and tell me, we've been holding off on having kids because we couldn't afford it, but now you help me get that job and now they have two kids and it's something they didn't foresee happening. I've had people tell me, we've had so much back pain because I had so much back pain because we used to move, lift things, have your machinery all the time and now I'm just building websites at Booz Allen. It's pretty significant. There's not this artificial community to help with. It's really individual people you can focus on, see how you can work with them one-on-one and you can really make a big difference for them and for you. You, of course, gain a friend, you network and it always pays itself back. Towards the beginning I was thinking, whatever, worst case scenario, I start Debug Academy for a year. It doesn't work out financially. I go back and get a job. I get to say I had a company for a year. Not a big deal. But I found that accepting people who can't afford it for free or telling them, wait till you get a job. You can pay me back. Doing things like that have, over time, actually paid themselves back because people will come back and say, hey, I got that first job. Thank you, I'm looking to switch. Now I can refer them to a partner company, get a referral, or they'll go to a company and other people in that company, maybe a secretary will be there and say, hey, why do you get to work as a developer and I'm a secretary and they'll tell them, well, I took this class. So these things tend to pay themselves back if just helping somebody was not enough. There are other good things that come out of it. In terms of looking forward recommendations, it would have helped me a lot if the community were discoverable, maybe even through Drupal itself, through the admin interface, you just say, hey, new to Drupal, don't know the community, it's a big part of this. So right on the admin status page, report status, et cetera, you can have something there, pointing them to the community, maybe pointing them to a YouTube clip that's just like, here, get to know Drupal, it's more than code. In each of our companies, wherever you work, look to hire and train beginners, they can bring a lot. And when I say beginners, it's not necessarily young people, it's beginners to Drupal. So just look to bring people in with different backgrounds than your own. And we were able to bring Drupal TV to the community, Drupal.tv, it's this free resource embraced by the Drupal Association, which allows, which is a centralized location for all of the conference videos. So you'll find this one and conference videos from pretty much all of the Drupal events we know about. You'll be able to discover those for free. For going forward, I'm hoping that we can make events easy to discover on that platform as well, because I personally don't know when events are going to, when the session submissions start, when they close, what's coming up, where it is, et cetera. So centralizing some of that information, potentially including a way to access it through Drupal itself, I think those would all really help. And as a person running a company, I've been fortunate to hire Lisa and Jack and have them join the team. And I get to cheat, I get to work with them in class and then see how great they are and then hire them. But really, it's spectacular, like the different backgrounds, what every person contributes. I'd say I'm very different from both of them in terms of my background and style and personality. And I love that in hiring them. We now work as a team where we each bring something very different, but very complimentary to the table. And I think the Drupal community can benefit from that on a wider scale if we expand these principles. We all have really different backgrounds and really different approaches. And it was really hard to figure out how to sort of pull this all together to summarize at the end of our presentation. So it seemed like a good way to do it was sort of to go really high level and say, okay, so here's some ideas that we had and we've told you about them as things that would help bring more people into the community. And if you were thinking of doing the same things, it might be easiest to think of it. There's like three different really high level ways that you could structure your thinking. So I'm just gonna go with these three right here. Make a space. I've got the little Pac-Man guy there. You may have heard this. Sometimes this is used for like physical examples, like if you're in a group of people networking and you're all standing in a circle and there's no way for a new person to come in and join your circle. The picture of the Pac-Man there with the little, there's a wedge missing. There's a clear space where you can go in and you can get connected. So if you're trying to think of how can I help new people join in, we'll look around and see, is there a space? Can I help make a space? And that could be anything from adding links on the admin UI to say, hey, the community's over here. This is how you can get into it. Just at a real high level there. Okay, so now you've got a space. Here's a space. It's a little scary. Not everybody really is gonna wanna go into that space. So just because you have a space, it's not if you build it, they will come, right? So think about what in your space might make people reluctant to go into it. And is there something that you can do about that? You're like, oh, this is actually a thing that I can change. Let me go ahead and address this so that more people might feel willing, I don't know, willing's not quite the right word, but they might be interested in joining in. And the last thing I'm gonna say is offer guidance or maybe better to say make guidance available. Some people just need a map. Like, I kinda know what I wanna do. I'm here in the space, I'm okay with it. I wanna go over there. Just help me figure out how to go there. So just hand me a map, I'm good. I'll go off and do my own thing. Other people will do better with a more guided approach and have someone actually helping them, you know, mentoring or something like that. Let me help you move along the line. And a lot of the things we've talked about, you could see that they fall into these different groups. So are categories, I guess. So making a space, making it not scary, and then making guidance available to the people who are looking for it. And that's the best way that I can think of to sort of summarize the approaches that we've talked about here. And I'm only 38 seconds over time, check that out. So we're gonna wrap up and thank you very much for coming and listening. We will mention, in case you haven't seen this already, Contribution Day is Friday. There are many different ways that you can get involved. There's mentored contribution and first-time contributor workshops. And of course, there are also surveys and providing feedback. So please let us know, let Drupal Khan know. It would be awesome to get your information. So thank you so much.