 to the reason we're all here. Since starting Drupal in his dorm room roughly 15 years ago or so, Dries's vision and leadership has grown Drupal from a custom CMS to the enterprise software it is today. He's passionate about the web, open source and photography. He's obviously the original creator and lead of Drupal. He's also the co-founder and chief technology officer of Aquia, a venture-backed software company that offers products and services for Drupal. So please help us welcome the man himself, Dries. Thank you, Eric. Congratulations, Cathy. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for getting up early to be in this keynote. As Eric mentioned, I love photography. And so here is a photo, an image or a drawing of what is called the photographic apparatus. And it's sort of one of the early, early cameras that existed. And so if you look at the manual of the photographic apparatus, it has a lot of different steps. A lot of manual steps done by many different people, even. Like you see women and men basically all working together to make one photo. And so it was a lot of work. It wasn't easy to take a photo with this thing and yet it got adopted, right? The invention of the photo was so big that it actually did get adopted. And so a little bit later along came the Kodak. And as you can see, it already looks a lot simpler. And so what they actually did, this is an ad from Kodak. And one of the things you'll see is that they have this notion of you press the button and we do the rest. And it sort of encapsulates how they simplified photography. And actually on a quick side note, it actually works a little bit like cloud computing. So you would take a photo and then you would ship the film to a factory and they would actually develop the film and then ship the photo back to you. And so a lot of the complexity was sort of outsourced and abstracted in the clouds. And of course the history of photography has many, many steps and along the way things changed drastically and were simplified drastically. Another thing that happened was the introduction of the 35 millimeter film. And so that was actually originally invented by Edison. Not sure how many of you knew that. And what's interesting about the 35 millimeter film is that it was actually a form of standardization. We standardized on a common format. And as a result, there was a whole ecosystem born of different cameras, Nikon, Canon, but also different tools. Tools to project photos and all these kinds of things. But it also drastically simplified cameras again. And so if you start to look at the first 35 millimeter camera shown on the slide, you can see that there were still a lot of steps involved. You needed to load the film and you needed to make a photo, unload the film, develop the film, enlarge it, print it, and eventually you could store it, keep it and share it with your friends or your family. And so if you look at the history of the camera, beyond that, you see that every single iteration of the camera essentially replaced one or more steps. And so with the introduction of the Instamatic, enlarging and printing was replaced by developing film in a store. And with the Polaroids, basically you no longer had to unload the film like it was directly developed there for you. And so at the time, people thought that the Polaroid was it. It was the easiest, simplest camera that we could ever invent, right? And so they felt like we plateaued. It couldn't be made simpler. And yet, with the introduction of digital cameras, you didn't need film at all. So you didn't need to load the film. And yet it wasn't still optimized for sharing. And so, most lately, of course, with the iPhone or other smart phones, it can just shoot photos and they're instantly shared like with things like photo streaming and these kinds of things. And so eventually over more than 100 years, we were able to simplify this huge process with all these people, all these different steps into something which became much simpler. And so that's really interesting to me because I feel there's a lot of relevance to what we do. And what's also interesting is that with every step along the way, it actually became easier for the end user but the complexity under the hood drastically increased. If you think about a digital camera, that's all sorts of things going on. Hardware, software, JPEG, compared to the initial camera, which was just basic chemistry just to simplify things a little bit. And so for that kind of innovation, for that kind of simplification and evolution to happen, we needed all sorts of innovations. And so obviously before cameras could exist, we needed to invent optics and that led to telescopes. And after that, we needed to invent technologies like chemistry and silver nitrates, which led to the creation of a camera which could take one photo, a single print camera. Next, we invented things like printing and plastics which led to film cameras, which could take multiple photos. And eventually, things like electronics and LCD screens and sensors led to the digital camera. And so there's these big technologies that need to come together for us to make the transition from one phase to the next phase. And of course, the same is true with regards to the web. Like if you think back, first we needed to invent HTML and HTTP in a browser and that gave birth to the static web, where we could share information with each other online. And it wasn't until five years later, around 95, that technologies like PHP and MySQL and Apache and Linux came about. And so they magically sort of emerged around the same time. And it really led to the creation of what I call the dynamic web. And the dynamic web was huge because it gave birth to Drupal. Like Drupal would not have been invented if it wasn't for these technologies to be invented first. And so if you look at how dynamic websites are built, they're pretty complex, right? Some of you probably remember this. Actually, many of you still live in that era with your sites, where you have to define the database schemas, you have to build your own authentication system, you have to write your own queries. There's a lot of complexity involved. And so what happened next is that CMSs were born. Solutions like Drupal sort of led to the creation of what I refer to as the assembled web, where you have modules and themes and web services. And effectively what it did, it created this very complex experience and it simplified it to something that is much easier, where you have a core platform, you have modules, you have themes, and you can download and install them and configure them, and then you're basically good to go. So huge evolution, which would not have been possible without some of the other steps along the way. And so of course the question is, what happens after the assembled web, right? What is the next big thing that we need to chase? What is the next big simplification, just like with the camera that we need to bet on? And so I want to talk a little bit about that in this keynote. All right. And so personally, I'm very, very excited about what's happening in the world today. You know, if you think about how evolution happens, there's all of these technologies coming together. And I feel like today we have a whole bunch of exciting technologies that didn't exist five years ago, just like PHP and MySQL didn't exist when we started with the static weapons. So we have things like augmented reality. We have things like machine learning that are very hot topics. We have things like wearable technology, Google Glass and others. Things like near field communication with iBeacon. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. We have drones. Holly mentioned there may be drones flying around later. But also geolocation and personalization and social login. And they're kind of a big deal. Just think about Uber. You know, Uber is a, as you guys know, it's a company which is extremely disruptive because it uses geolocation and personalization. Like it knows where you are. It knows where the drivers are. And therefore it can disrupt an entire industry. And so think about what some of these technologies could mean for your business and how they could revolutionize what you do today. And so more than ever, I feel like there's this whole slew of new things which just were invented, but weren't necessarily mainstream yet. So we're at the verge of these things becoming widely spread. And so just like the way PHP and MySQL and Linux and Apache came together, I feel like all or some of these technologies will come together as well to basically get us through the next wave in the web. And so I believe that we're at the beginning, the early, early beginnings of the fourth wave of the web which I call the experience web. And so I wanna talk a little bit about that. But first I wanna caveat that we've been working on this vision for the assembled web for over 10 years. You know, but we've been working on this for a long time and we're not quite done yet either. There is more work that we need to do. And the experience web may not happen overnight either. It may take us 10 years as well to basically fulfill that vision of where to go next. So what is the experience web? And I wanna give you two examples. One is around commerce and two is around search. All right, and so if you wanna buy something today, you know, you may start from a catalog. You see address or something that you like. And so usually what you do is you go to their website and then you start looking for the product which there's a lot of products on that website. Once you find it, you add it to your cart. You have to create an account. Next step is you need to enter your payment information. You have to enter your shipping information. You have to enter your billing information. Finally, you review the order and then you hit submit. And so what happens next, it gets shipped essentially and you know, you wait another three to five days or more for that product to be delivered. And so a lot of different steps involved. Let me get a water real quick. And so the question is, what would that experience look like in the future? Excuse me. And so this is pretty exciting. So here's all the 10 steps of today's experience. It's exciting because the commerce industry as a whole, you know, offline and online commerce is roughly, is almost $5 trillion. So it's, you know, like it's massive, right? And only or less than 6% of all the commerce in the world happens online today. So there's a massive opportunity for Drupal or for the web to basically embrace e-commerce. And what limits people from buying things online today is the experience. Like all these steps get in the way. There's also physical things that get in the way. Like, you know, you can feel the fabric of something that you wanna buy, but on the flip side, there's also advantages to the web. Like, you know, when you walk into a physical store, they don't know anything about you. Versus online, people actually may know a whole lot about you. And so there's trade-offs. And so if we start to think about what can we eliminate in this experience to make e-commerce go easier, there is a massive opportunity in terms of capturing that market. And so, imagine we had some sort of magical identity server. And so imagine going to a website and never ever having to create an account. Your account follows you, you go to the website, and with one simple click, you can actually create an account. Imagine if an electronic wallet was attached to that identity server, and now you never ever have to enter your payment information. You never ever have to enter your billing information, your shipping information, and all of these things. And so, effectively, we could take a whole bunch of steps out of the process, and that would be huge. That would be a huge invention that I don't believe exists today. But even further in the future, we may be able to eliminate more steps. We talked about drones. We talked about self-driving cars. Now, all of a sudden, these things are no longer dependent on humans and could start driving or flying at night. And so things like drones are pretty interesting. And Amazon is actually doing interesting things here as well. They've started to pre-ship items from one warehouse to another warehouse that is physically closer to you if they can predict with a certain level of certainty that you're gonna buy this product. So they're already starting to do some of these things to reduce shipping times and to improve the e-commerce experience. But what if every item in the world had an RFID? Or what if we had really strong image recognition? And so now, I'm wearing my Google Glass, I can just look at something like maybe I really like that bottle of water and I can say buy me a bottle of water, right? And Google can just go and buy that for me. And so this is starting to look really, really interesting because again, just like with the camera, it eliminates all of these steps. And so the experience could pretty much look like this. So you're hanging out with your friends, you see, wow, what a nice jacket. And you say, glass, buy me a jacket. And basically, glass is smart enough. Is it showing? It's smart enough, like it knows, it can identify where the jacket comes from. It knows your size because it has your profile. It says, are you a medium? And it knows it's in a warehouse nearby. So it says, I can deliver this immediately. And you say to glass, buy now, right? And glass buys it and 30 minutes later, it will basically be delivered wherever you are because glass knows where you are thanks to things like geolocation. And so basically, there is this opportunity to go from one click purchase to one blink purchase. And I think it will happen, I think it will happen. But what's interesting about this story is what is the role for Drupal in this? Because nowhere did you go to a website. You didn't go online, you didn't look at products. You didn't have to fill anything out in a form. And so magically, these things start to work. And just like with the camera, this may be the optimal experience. So let's look at the second example, which is search. All right, so this is, whoops. So this is, you know, let's go back in time. This is Google in 2010, you know, five years ago. If you searched for Lady Gaga, you would get this. And the first day, this was another artist, but she wasn't an artist back then. So you had to change it. But, you know, imagine you searched for Lady Gaga. It would look like this. Very textual, just links, no graphics. If you do the same search today, you get exactly this. All right, so you can see some images. Is it blinking? All right, and so in the sidebar, you have all of this rich information, like upcoming events. It even knows that I'm in Boston. It says, near you. It has all of the songs. It has recent Google Plus messages that she may have posted albums. There's all of this rich information. Her age, her real name. And so, that's a big change in five years. And so why would Google stop there? You know, why wouldn't Google make that experience even more compelling? And so five years from now, this could look like this. And obviously we have to, you know, create a mock-up here. But as you can see, it's much more rich experience. It shows things like, you know, concerts near you. Again, it knows that I'm in Boston. It knows which albums I have. It says, your albums. I have those albums. It knows that. It also knows which songs I don't have yet. And it has a buy button there, so I can buy it straight off the Google homepage. I don't have to go to any other site. And then Google Integrated Social. And I can chat about, you know, Lady Gaga online on google.com. And all the way at the bottom, of course, there is still the old sort of Google links. And so why wouldn't Google do this? This seems to be their natural evolution. And also in this example, it's interesting. What's Drupal's role in this website? Because now I can find a whole lot of information about Lady Gaga without having to go to ladygaga.com. Like Google effectively gave me all of that information. So I think this is a big question for us. And so what's happening really is kind of funny. In a way, well, it's called disintermediation, which is a big word for cutting out middleman. And what's interesting about the web is that the web is sort of disintermediating brick-and-mortar stores. Like, you know, Amazon has replaced many, you know, bookstores, obviously there's still bookstores. iTunes has replaced many CD stores. Or, you know, digital music has replaced traditional CD stores. eBay has replaced a lot of flea markets. Things like monster.com has replaced, so I guess newspaper ads for job postings. And so what's happening right now is like Google is actually disintermediating the web. And so everything, at first, everything which had a physical listing was moved online. And everything which has an online listing, Google is starting to take over. And so Google can do these things. Google can build this, you know, e-commerce experience because it basically controls all of these pieces. It has cell driving cars. It has drones. It has Google Glass. And then it has cloud and, you know, big data. Like, it has all of the different building blocks to build this today. The same thing with search. But, of course, it's not just Google. I don't want to, like, talk about Google all day here. It's the same thing with the other big platforms, like the Facebooks of the world, the Apple's, you know, Amazon and LinkedIn. They're, like, basically building these very rich experiences which, you know, users like. But in doing so, they pose some interesting challenges for us. So let's talk about what that means for Drupal. And so what's kind of happening is the open web, as we know it, is closing up, right? The big players are taking over more and more of the front-end of the web. And Drupal sites risk being sort of the deep web, if you will, for lack of a better word. And the sad part, in a way, is we won't be able to stop it. I thought really, really hard about this, and I couldn't think of a way to stop this. And I couldn't think of a way to stop this because, one, it's actually easier for the users. It's simpler for the users. And secondly, it's actually better for the businesses as well. And I talked to the people that run Lady Gaga.com, and they said, it's great. Google sends us a lot of traffic, you know? And so it's better for users, it's better for businesses. So how would we be able to stop this? Here are some quick examples. Like, you can now enter flight destinations straight from Google, and Google will give you pricing right in the main page. This one was the creepiest, which I found out by accident. Oh, sorry. We'll come later. Same thing if you look for a camera. Now, all of a sudden, in the sidebar, you have all of this information about cameras. And it's very convenient for users because I can compare prices, something that wasn't necessarily easy to do in the past. Plus, it's also great for the companies who were being listed there. All right, and so in a way, Google is becoming the big box of the web. It's becoming like Best Buy for the web with all of these different cameras listed on the front page, which is, of course, a very powerful position to be for the Googles of the world. On the other hand, there is a big but here, on the other hand, brands don't want to share their customers with Google, and brands do want to build very custom experiences. So here's a crazy example. So I searched on Google my recent Amazon purchases, and this is what showed up. Because Google connects, because I'm logged in with Gmail, Google actually knows exactly what I bought on Amazon. I don't think Amazon likes that. And so you can see, you know, you can actually drill in and you can see I bought this multi-purpose pastry scraper and a couple of other things. But this is a real order, and you should definitely try it out later today. It's kind of creepy, but it works. But think about how Amazon feels about that, because now Google knows exactly what I bought, and why wouldn't they inject themselves there? Or next time I try to buy something, they could easily try to steal Amazon's customers. And so these large platforms are kind of like this. They have these tentacles and multiple eyes, and they say, don't run, we are your friends. And everybody loves their functionality, but if you look under the hood, it's actually quite scary about what it all does. And so brands actually do want to own the experience. They totally want to own the experience, because if you think about Best Buy or other big box stores, you get all of these cameras and there's no differentiation whatsoever. All you see is a bunch of cameras, some pricing, and in the best case scenario, you get like one or two bullet items, like these little cards that differentiate one product from another. So imagine companies putting so much effort and energy building better products, and then once you end up in the store, it's reduced to one bullet item or two bullet items. And so that I think is a huge opportunity that we have with online commerce. We can actually provide a lot of great information about each of these products. All right, and so brands don't want that. They don't want to be sort of the online equivalents of the big box stores. And so one such organization is Whole Foods. They're local here in Austin, and they're basically using Drupal to create really branded experiences. And I have a quick video that I would like to show you about what Whole Foods is doing with Drupal. Here we go. People who love organic food love the experience that we provide them at Whole Foods Market. They love coming to the store. They love shopping for the products. They love the healthy lifestyle that we enable. Our guests, when they come to the store, want to know that this is an experience. They appreciate the theater of the store. Some of the challenges we have with the Whole Foods Market.com website is creating that one-on-one interaction that guests are able to get in a store in a digital environment. Aesthetically, it's very pleasing. It is a lot like how our stores are. The artwork and the creative nature of it are beautiful. I think that what else we do that's cool is we let the stores customize that. You will get a different experience when you visit that website, depending on where you're visiting from. So the experience you get visiting from Las Vegas, Nevada is not going to be the same when you get from Austin, Texas. You get store-specific content. You're connected to that store. It's not a pure commerce site, and it's not a pure content site. It's all three of those things, right? It's about the community and the content and the commerce all together. It's been invaluable to be able to tap some of the greatest minds in the community to help us solve problems. For a number of years, Whole Foods.com was run exclusively as a brochure website. One of the things that Drupal specifically allows us to do is to have a lot more control over creating that unique experience between customers. I think the key things that Drupal offers us and the Whole Foods Market.com site are the flexibility and ability to control our destiny. We're able to give back literally to a community and build an ecosystem that we can continue to be a part of. Pretty awesome. Because Whole Foods is local, I reached out to Jason Bekel, who's their CIO, the CIO of Whole Foods, and I asked him to come on stage and to give a little bit more background information about what they're doing for a few minutes. So welcome, Jason. Thanks very much. As one of the local companies, we want to welcome you here to Austin. And what I want to share with everybody today is sort of three different things, sort of why we chose Drupal, two, some of the things that we've done, and three, where we plan to go. First and foremost, when we look at selecting technology partners and solutions at Whole Foods Market, we do it very similar to what we do in our supplier world as we select products for our store. It's very important that those partners match our core values and some of our principles. For those of you who don't know Whole Foods Market, we're about a $14 billion local retailer comprised of 382 stores that are focused on community, innovation, and having a local presence. And for us, when we were looking to expand our website, and as you saw in the video, we were pretty much a brochure website, it was important that we were able to capture that local experience and have the local content. For each one of our sort of individual microsites, if you will. As we looked to select a partner, we wanted to make sure we had something that was flexible, something that allowed for innovation. And we didn't want to be tied to a traditional product release schedule and roadmap. We wanted to be able to control our own destiny. And that was really important for us. Secondly, we wanted speed to market. And being able to leverage the portfolio of modules that Drupal had to offer made a very compelling case. And lastly for us, one of our core principles and core values of our company is community. And we're very excited to be part of this community where we can be part of giving back and part of something that's in for the good of all. The second thing I wanted to cover is sort of what we've done. And you saw in the video, we were able to pull together and what I would say in a very rapid pace compared to a lot of other retailers, a mobile and a web presence that allowed us to differentiate experience with both local content and experiences that can be driven and supported with a global team as well as local presence of some of our team members that are in our stores. Secondly, what we wanted to do is make sure that we were able to have a platform that could expand and can connect with other aspects of our environment. And where we plan to go is to connect to some of the broader ecosystems that you just heard about. For us to be able to capture some of that customer acquisition in places where other customers are at. But at the same time, now develop more enriching experiences through content. And we're very excited about where the future is going with this. And I can't wait to hear about more. Awesome. Thank you, Jason. Thank you. All right. Great. So prove that organizations do wanna tightly control and own that experience and have the flexibility to make it their own. And so, of course, I think it's time to sort of jump into Drupal 8 a little bit. I painted this picture, probably some of you may be a little nervous about what that means for our future, but let's talk about what it really means for Drupal and specifically in the context of Drupal 8. All right. So, I think one of the things we've done really, really well with Drupal 8, if you think about this assembled web journey map and I put it back in the screen, we've actually made each of these little steps better. So we've become a lot better in being the assembled web platform. And there's a lot of room of growth in just being that because, as I mentioned, most organizations are still stuck in the dynamic web. They're still messing around with the database and SQL queries and all of these things are writing a lot of code from scratch. And so, let's talk a little bit more about what exactly we've done. One of the things we've done actually is we've adopted symphony. And we've talked about that, but I wanted to talk about it in the context of, let's say, the 35 millimeter film, right? Symphony is a way for us to standardize. If we adopt tweak, imagine if WordPress adopted tweak, right? So now every WordPress themeer would automatically be able to build Drupal themes. And so, by leveraging something like symphony, we actually are able to innovate faster. We're able to attract more people to Drupal faster as well, and it's not just tweak. There's many other things that we've done that way. But it also begs the question, and I don't have all the answers, like can we give back more to symphony, right? Like, we've built things like CMI, and I'll talk a little bit about that in a second, and there's actually not that much Drupal specific to what we've done around CMI or configuration management. Is there a possibility to put that back in symphony so every other CMS can maybe leverage that? And is that a way that we can grow and increase our adoption over time? The other thing we've done is, you know, Drupal 7, one of our strengths is actually our data modeling tools, you know, Entity, CCK, all of these things. We've worked on this for many, many years, but it was still wasn't quite perfect. It still wasn't quite right. Some of the things that we have, like blocks that weren't entities or, you know, aggregator feeds weren't entities, and then if you look at nodes, like node titles weren't proper fields, and like the publication date of nodes weren't proper fields. And so one of the things we've done in Drupal 8, we've actually made that already great data modeling tool even better. And so now blocks, for example, are entities and every little field, you know, will be a proper field that is configurable, that can be, you know, added to something, all of these things. And on top of that, we've also added views to core, which will make it even more powerful. So the other thing we've done here is we've added actually more fields than we have in Drupal 7, things like link fields and phone fields and date fields and email fields and some entity reference fields. And in doing so, these are actually semantic fields. And so we're able to support things like schema.org. And Drupal 8 will be semantic from the ground up. And we'll talk a little bit about that in a second. All right, and so even, you know, both to entities and views, we've actually made them completely restful from the ground up as well. So every time you have an entity, you're able to update it, delete it, edit it through RESTful API. Same thing with views. Like you can quickly configure a view, and then not only can you output that view as HTML, you can also choose to output it as chase on or any other format. And so that is quite powerful, as I'll show you in a few minutes. Theming, we've done a lot of work there. We simplified a lot of the HTML. We've adopted Twig, I mentioned that. We added responsive theming throughout the core. And we're also making, we're also working on making themes more secure. Chicks is doing some work on that this week, actually, which will make it easier to share themes or to have other people help build your themes. Configuration, you know, views and REST are basically all configurable through UI. So you don't actually have to write codes to start using these things, which again fits into this vision of going from the dynamic web to the assembled web, and really simplifies building great experiences. And then we've done a ton of work on the authoring experience, you know, from in-place editing to redesigning the content creation page to responsive backends, so you can edit things from your smartphone. A lot of work has gone into simplifying this experience here as well. So every little step along the way, we've made these things better and we've simplified the experience. Same thing with deploying codes. Configuration management will make it easy, you know, for people to deploy Drupal sites and give them greater control over that as well. So how does this all it up? Well, in Drupal 8, once we've released Drupal 8, you'll be able to create semantic content like in events with a name and a date and a location, even an image, and that will map onto entities in Drupal, you know, in different fields. And these are structured in the database. And you can then create branded experiences out of the data. You can reuse those data elements, these entities in views. You can contextualize them, you can translate them, or you can even, you know, change location, because we now have that all in a structured format that we can work with easily. And you can also make these things discoverable, like we can easily output these things for, you know, the Googles and the Facebooks to pick up. And of course, thanks to the RESTful APIs and the responsive design and all of these other things, it will also be completely multi-channel. So it will work on any device. And so, and I wanted to, you know, take a moment and actually, you know, talk about that because we kinda forget about that sometimes. And there's really no other system in the world that does this or that does this so effortlessly. And I feel like we're always great at sizing ourselves, but there's really nothing else. And people complain about how WordPress is easier to use. Again, maybe it's easier to use, but it doesn't even come close to doing these kinds of things. It doesn't come close. It's like miles and miles away from this. And so we shouldn't take this for granted. Like this is pretty amazing that's not available anywhere else. Not just WordPress, the same thing with our proprietary competitors. So this is a very big deal for Drupal 8. And so effectively, what that will allow us to do is to loop it back, is we can actually embrace these big players, right? Because what we'll be really good at with Drupal 8 is creating this semantic markup and content creation and content creation. And then we can easily output that and let the big player sort of visualize it in whatever way they want. And it actually gets us a little bit closer to this notion of a headless Drupal, where Drupal is sort of a content repository, but where multiple other frameworks can interact with that. And we've made a lot of progress on that. All the things I talked about, but also we've been talking a lot about the notion of addressable blocks and the improvements in a render API will actually start to allow us to do these things. And hopefully we'll be able to integrate with frameworks like Angular, JS, and sort of embrace some of the new or alternative ways of building websites. So I feel very, very excited about that. At the same time, we can also focus on building these custom branded experiences. We can actually do both. We can play with the big guys and make data available to them for them to visualize and we can create our own experiences as well. And the way to do so is we don't control all the pieces the way Google does, but we can actually build a bigger platform by using integrations with other systems. We can do all of these same things and our improvements to the RESTful APIs and all of these other things will actually make it easier for us to integrate with many players. And this is also not a small deal. It's a big deal because none of our proprietary competitors can do that. I mean, they can integrate with a few platforms, but they don't have the flexibility that we have in Drupal to integrate with hundreds or thousands of different platforms, right? And if you use a proprietary CMS and your integration doesn't exist, your toast versus with Drupal, you have the flexibility to actually build it. There is no limits in what you can do. And so this is a very unique advantage to open source in Drupal and I think sometimes we don't realize that, right? And so I don't even know how these other players will actually compete in that world when they can build these really compelling integrations that we need to build. And so very strong, unique advantage. And so it effectively will enable brands like Whole Foods and many others, hundreds, thousands of others to build unique experiences that aren't just big box experiences. And I think that's really important. And so all things considered, I really truly believe that Drupal 8 will be a game changer. Like we've done so many of the things right. We have all the right ingredients to get to that next level, to the fourth wave of the web, the experience web. And as Holly mentioned, the number of people that contributed just to Core has actually doubled or more than doubled since Drupal 7. So that is a very impressive number. If we look at sort of patches committed per day, we see that number is up by 55% as well. So not only more people, but also of course more velocity in terms of patches committed. And this is just for Core. And so I wanted to take a minute and ask everybody that has a patch in Core to stand up. Because I think you guys have done such an amazing job. Thank you. I've been working on this for over three years. And, you know, they can use that. It's not been easy. So of course the big question is, you know, when can I use Drupal 8? So I'd like to talk a little bit about that right now. And so today, there's only 15 beta blockers left. So we may actually be at 14, I don't know, but last night we were at 15. All right, we need to fix one and then it's 14. That adds up to me, 15 minus one is 14. And so if we get to zero this week, I'll buy everybody an ice cream. I'll buy that. It's promised. But we need to get to zero by the end of before Friday night. And so once we get to zero, what's gonna happen is we'll start doing beta releases. So we'll do beta one and beta two and beta three. And what that means is that it's sort of the starting point where we would encourage you to start porting your modules from seven to eight, right? And so the APIs, I know, should be stable, but we may still change the APIs based on feedback critical bugs. But pretty much we commit to trying to keep the API stable. It's not ready for production yet, but it's sort of the point where contributors should start upgrading their modules. Once we get to zero critical bugs, which is different from the beta blockers, we will start doing release candidates. And once we feel good about that, we will eventually do the Drupal 8 release. So today we have 99 critical bugs left to resolve. As you can see, this graph shows sort of the number of outstanding critical bugs over time. And you can see that we sort of peaked in September last year, and that ever since the number of critical bugs has been going down. And today we have 99 critical bugs left, which is a good thing because it means that the number of bugs we fix on our say weekly basis or monthly basis is actually bigger than the number of new criticals that are being filed. Because of course we still discover new bugs as well. And so the fact that it's going down is great. It also means that if you wanna release, if you just look at the data, if you wanna release Drupal 8 this year, we somehow need to increase our efficiency by a factor of three. And so we can do that in multiple ways. We can get more people involved to help work on these critical bugs. And I think we should. Too many companies, frankly, that use Drupal, they don't give back to Drupal. And I think it's a great opportunity for these kinds of companies to get involved here. I think we should also be smarter about what we treat as critical bugs. And we should think about, is this really critical? Or can this be fixed in 8.1? And that way we can also increase our efficiency. All right, so. And we've been working in that pretty hard. And we've made big improvements lately in the way we deal with these critical issues. So once we get to zero critical issues, we'll basically throw a party and release Drupal 8. I don't know exactly when that will be. But I'm guessing that it may be early or middle of next year. All right, and that's not everything. We've decided to introduce continuous integration. And so even after the release of 8.0, we're now gonna be able to add new things to Drupal Core. This is something which we haven't done in the past. And so for example in 8.1, we could maybe choose to add my great module to Core or in 8.2, we could say add media functionality or layout functionality and so forth. So this will allow for more continuous integration and allows us to keep Drupal relevant that way. And the way we'll do that is in a way that doesn't break backwards compatibility. We'll try not to break backwards compatibility, but we can add APIs and we'll manage that process that way. All right. And so to wrap up the keynote, I think this is a really exciting time. As I mentioned, there's all of these new innovations, many of which I mentioned that there's many more and they're all coming together. We're at the early stages of that. Like they're not readily available for everyone yet. And it gives us an opportunity to rethink what the experience of many things online should be and how Drupal can help accomplish that because as we've shown with the camera, it's all about the experience and simplifying the experience over time. And as I mentioned, under the hood, things may get more complex, but ultimately we need to think about the experience for the end user and the end user being the visitors of the website, not the site builders. And I think that's a big shift that we'll have to make. We need to continue to improve the developer experience, but we also need to start thinking about how to improve, drastically improve the end user experience. And that will allow us to build these great experiences and to work with the big players. And I feel really, really good, frankly, about where we're at with that with Drupal. I think more than any other CMS, I think we've sort of navigated us to the right place at the right time. And so with that, I'd like to thank you. I believe there may be some questions. We have a few questions for you, Dries. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right, so we had a lot of great questions come in. All right. So we're gonna get to as many as we can. You kind of just answered this first question in one of your last slides. Indie Drummer from Butler University just tweeted, Butler University is new to all this. If we're starting a complete overhaul of our .edu site now, Drupal 7 or Drupal 8? Drupal 7, yeah. Drupal 7 right now? Yes. Okay. That's the answer for 99% of the cases. Unless you have, I think if you have core developers on staff, people that really know Drupal 8 inside out and that are willing to what we call chase head. If you're okay with APIs that change and data models that change and you're capable of sort of migrating your site from one unstable version to another unstable version without a provided upgrade path, then you're welcome to start with data. But that's really what we're at today. All right. So God forbid you get hit by a bus or a malfunctioning camera drone flying around. What happens to Drupal leadership? I mean, right now you're in a unique position. Right. That's a good question. And I'll say that in the past, it was actually worse. And by that I mean that over the last years I've actually put many steps in place to sort of remove myself from being the bottleneck and all the way from co-founding the Drupal Association which took over managing the server and organizing the conference from me to more recently putting in place a governance model with different committees, the Drupal.org software working group and the security team formalized that and we started a technical working group and each of these groups or committees have like leaders that are officially appointed. And so that's another way for me to sort of make sure we have a governance structure in place. Having said all that, there's probably more I should do and can do. And so I think I don't have the answers today but I think that's something that I'll continue to work on. Okay. So I definitely want to make sure that if something were to happen, Drupal is in good shape and to be honest, I feel pretty good about that. I feel like we have a lot of strong leaders in the community today. I think the question was more or less about the governance structure and the organization around it but your role as someone who basically chooses the next core committers and helps push things along and people come to you to make the big decision when a decision has to be made. Right. Well, I think we have many strong people that do a lot of that today. People like Cach and Alex Poth and Angie like just relative to core. They're making a lot of big decisions along the way. And again, I think there's more we can do and I'll think about what else we can do. I don't really have that answer today. I don't think there's anything to worry about. I think a few people will jump in front of you if the drone starts heading your way. So I think we're good there. JCL324 asks, how do we not leave behind the freelancer or small shops as Drupal continues to grow in the enterprise? That's a good question. I actually feel like a lot of the things that I talked about from the improvements to our data modeling tools to describe it abstractly, CC entities and views, as well as to all of the authoring experience improvements, better usability there actually are great improvements for both small and large organizations. So I don't necessarily feel like we're leaving them behind that way. Like if I feel like we're actually doing a lot of things which benefit both of them, and that is in line with where we need to go as a project to stay relevant. So I think it might be one of those things where people in the community feel that to be a developer, Drupal developer is being more complex and they could become, they could fall further behind that way. What you're saying is that the improvements we're making to Drupal 8 make it so that more small shops or more hobbyists can get involved without having to know more code? Well, so it's a very complex topic of course, because one of the things I mentioned in my keynote is as we evolve the complexity under the hood becomes more complex, just like with the cameras. And so that's reality. And so then the question is how do we best manage that? And I think us adopting object-oriented programming techniques and symphony which brings a level of standardization and reuse is actually the best way to do it, even though it's still becoming a little bit more complex for some. So I think we're doing what we need to do and I feel good about that. Okay. I think you made a trip to Asia last year for a... That's a couple years ago. A couple years ago. Well, we have a question from, well, it's H-P-N-A-D-I-G. So I'm not sure how to pronounce that, but they ask, how do you see Drupal in South Asia or India during the next few years? What's the priority or what is of priority? Yeah, so I've been to India a couple years ago and I was amazed. Like, was there for 10 days or something and I organized or attended a Drupal camp in a different city in India every other day. And so it was organized by the local community. So I went to Mumbai and Hyderabad and a couple of other big cities and at every one of these events, like hundreds of people showed up. Unlike in some cases, five, 600 people showed up. And so it's impressive to see how much Drupal there actually is in India and also how advanced they are. So I think they get a lot of negative credit oftentimes from our part of the world, so to speak, but I think they're actually doing really, really well. And there's been a lot of growth and adoption there of Drupal as well. Same thing, I've been to Australia a couple of times. Like, I mean, obviously big difference with India, but very impressed with the level of maturity there as well. I've never been to China or Japan. So I'm planning a trip this year in September to sort of go to China and take temperature of the state of Drupal in China because I honestly don't know much about how things are going there. So I think it's important for us that we try to be inclusive and that we think of Drupal as a global community and a global project. And now we can get all these people involved. All right, so you mentioned, again, this topic towards the end, but you wrote a blog post a couple of weeks ago about employing more or the community organizations, employing more Drupal core contributors. What more can we do to help that process a lot? Yeah, so I think one of the biggest things I think we can do, so the way things work in my mind, and it's a simplification, is large organizations, like Whole Foods or I met with companies like Pfizer, and they're literally spending millions of dollars on Drupal. And so what happens is they spend that money on Drupal shops, and those Drupal shops hire people actually, you know, Drupal developers, and they're contributing, and so we should recognize that that is how the world works a little bit, and we should provide credit to these organizations that actually do give back, because in oftentimes organizations don't have developers that give back to Drupal. And so I think we do an excellent job at giving individual developers credit but I think if we were to give organizations credit for having developers that contribute back to Drupal, whether it's Drupal shops or sort of end users like Whole Foods, I think that would really stimulate these organizations to give back more. Like it provides a real incentive, like the visibility that they get from giving back is really valuable to them and encouraging. So actually if some thoughts which I'll write up in post today or tomorrow and post it on my blog about how we can actually implement that on Drupal.org. Well we can do it right now because I think since your blog post, chapter three, is it, Hire and Alex? They did, no. And Eric mentioned earlier that, you know, Black Mesh hired Kathy, so I think the more we can see of that, the better. Exactly, and that's fantastic, and so in my blog post I suggested that we need to understand the impact of hiring people, and so for example, in the case of my company Acquia, the core developers, they also are involved with webinars, and so we've actually started tracking how much revenue comes back from doing these webinars, and that allows us to make business cases. Like if you can demonstrate that there is real financial value in having core developers on staff, and I think a lot more organizations will be eager to hire core developers, and I think that will help us sustain Drupal development and increase our velocity. So it sounds like you're talking about it's less about just the feel-good aspect of doing it, but we need to move towards being able to quantity provide numbers as far as the return on investment. Exactly, and I gave some numbers in my blog post. I don't know them at the top of my head, but I encourage you to have a look. All right, just a couple more questions, and then we'll have the drones take off and take some pictures here. What surprised you most about the Drupal development process? Good question, so I should have learned this many times already, but I was actually surprised by how difficult it can be to cope with a lot of change, and that it actually takes a lot of efforts to help people move along and learn, because Drupal 8 brings a lot of changes, and I guess I sort of naively assumed that people would understand that easier. You know what I mean? Okay, so like once there was a decision, more people would get on board quicker. Right. That is what you originally thought, okay, how about a lesson that we all have to learn over and over and over again? I think making change in a community the size of Drupal is really hard. Like we need to retrain hundreds of thousands of developers to go from seven to eight, and that is a massive undertaking. Absolutely. All right, we'll do three last quick questions. Byron Sims asks, what kind of barbecue do you like? I actually love Texas barbecue with the slow cooking, or I don't know how it works, but with the big thing, with the steam coming through. I would just say all barbecue, I don't know. I love all barbecue, actually. There you go, okay. This might be my favorite question, because I'm kind of upset that I didn't think about it, so Andreas W. Beck asks, Dries, I'm an organizer for Drupal Camp PA in Pittsburgh. Will you be their keynote speaker? I'm happy to talk about that. I need to look at my calendar, I don't know when it is. Okay, very good. Well, I told them I'd ask, so I dug my job. I like attending these events, and I try to do a good amount of them each year. All right, so last question. We had a lot of comments during your talk, mainly about privacy when you were showing the Google slides up there. A lot of nervous people. But I think most importantly, and the most tweets we got back was about your shopping history, and what exactly is a vacuum beard? Funny. It's actually quite cool. It's a beard trimmer, and it has a vacuum in it, and so it actually sucks in all the hairs, and then instead of all the hair going all over the sink in the bathroom, it's like contains basically in your trimmer. I'm picturing you doing this in the car on the way to work. I know. I don't shave in the car. Well, we're all set. Thank you very much.