 So, Drupal is not just a CMS, Drupal is an ecosystem, right? It's about open source ethos. It's one of the most successful open source applications in the world. And I have observed that every open source application, or every successful open source application has a chatty community to back it up. And Drupal is no different in this way. Drupal has a thriving community of people. They're talking about issues, starting different initiatives you would have just witnessed. And they're also sharing memes, gifts, and dancing parrots. And just helping each other to go one step forward, making Drupal better. And Drupal is also about collaborations, contributions, be it for the documentation, or code, or conferences like this. Just imagine that thousands of people sharing their stories, contributions selflessly, just for one thing, and that's Drupal. However, for me and personally, a lot of you will be agreeing with me that Drupal is about flushing cases. So this is the summary of my career. This is the highest thing I've done during my career, right? And it's not just any technical term, right? It's a hope that flushing cases twice will bring back my site. And many of the time that happens, how it happens, it's magic, right? So, hi and welcome everyone. I am Amjit Khan, Salim Khan, Ibrahim Khan Pathan. But you can call me Amjit. I know it will still be difficult for most of you, but I can't make it shorter than that. And also, you might have seen me on Slack channels and Drupal.org with my name, pen name, I would say, Amjit1233. So just before I start, I want to say this is my first ever public presentation. And so if you catch me suddenly talking in Hindi, right? Don't be surprised, right? It just could be two reasons. That number two, I'm very nervous, which you can feel me. Or number one, I spent too much time in Perimeter and Harris Park with my Indian brothers. So for those who don't know, this is two suburbs in Sydney with highest Indian population. And they wanted to change the name of it. They wanted to honor Indian community. And I was well-hopping they don't name it Melbourne. Well, chanting in another language is much better than this, I guess, right? I don't know many of you recognize this image. This came in, by the way, when I searched for what should I not do when being nervous. So moving forward, I currently work at District CMS as a tech lead. And for those of you who don't know what's District CMS, District CMS is a Drupal-based distribution. So it's a Drupal profile, basically, which leverages Drupal's unparalleled flexibility for cities and governments and enterprises. So it's pre-configured Drupal distribution, which you just have to install by one click. And it's a SAS solution. So besides the District CMS, the other product we have is called District Engage. And District Engage is a community engagement tool. It's multi-tenant SAS application as well, rapidly growing. Now maybe we have about 30 clients on it, 30 departments, including our first gig we started on US. So there is a client from US as well. And this is to manage public consultations through online tools. It provides deep analytics, user interaction, and all those things. But the second tool is based on Laravel. So agenda for today's presentation is very simple, right? There are two parts of it. The first part is about how Drupal and Drupal is basically my little journey to Drupal, so how we survive Drupal 7, right? And the part two will be some boring advice, whether you are a pro developer, you are a junior developer, or you are just starting up, right? And by the way, most of these are not just Drupal specific. They can be applied in web industry in general, right? So let's get started, right? So my first job, I started roughly around the tender age of 8,215 days. That's one way you can hide your old age. I started professionally in 2010, and all the former and current employers in the room. So part of that, I started that job just after I finished university. And then after that, I started doing multiple countries and blah, blah, blah, like I, these ten years, whole ten years, I've worked with different enterprises, companies as a contractor, as a permanent, as a part-time, different positions. So that's how I came to do this talk. Anyways, so as a junior developer, when you're starting, I had very little PHP and my SQL knowledge from uni, like when I say very little, I wanted to, sorry, as a fresh graduate, I wanted to conquer the world, by the way. As soon as I was introduced to this technology, that would change my life forever, right? And I was like, how hard it could be to create a Hello World module, which everybody does in their programming, Hello World module in Drupal. And I started that, and in my case, it felt more like Hello World. So just to say, Drupal, unlike all the love stories, it was not love at first sight, right? There was no composers, there were no symphonies, and there were no good views in Drupal 7. So learning, I'm not just saying Drupal 7, I worked from Drupal 5, Drupal 6, and Drupal 7. So the previous versions, the learning curve were very steep, right? It wasn't easy to pick up. It was sometimes very frustrating. You can't do, learn something without getting a professional, oh, sorry, an expert's help, right? Come to maintenance and debugging. I made a lot of rubber duckies unhappy, because it was always hard to maintain the code, being the functional nature of Drupal 7 and earlier ones. And the biggest pain point, in my opinion, was the templating or theming layer, right? Theming layer was particularly not very appealing. The template files were confusing. They were ending with .php. And it was like doing meditation while having haemorrhoids, right? Your sight looks beautiful, and everybody's praising it, but you know that pain which is bugging you. So I was still into it, right? I still like Drupal, mainly because Drupal was a great CMS, and it is still great CMS, I mean. It was far deeper connected to site builders, and then it came Drupal 10, right? Everything changed. So you might have attended Dree's note, and he spoke about calls now modern Drupal, right? And learning is easy as piece of cake, right? If you know all your OOP and PHP frameworks like Symphony, you are into it, right? You pick it up in no time. Lots of resources I've seen after Drupal 8, there are a lot of tutorials available, there are a lot of YouTube tutorials, and Udemy has Drupal lessons as well. Adaptation in the market was excellent, right? Drupal is being, you know, I don't have to say much, this was all in Dree's note, but Drupal is made for adapting moving market, right? It's one of the systems, and you know, there are a lot of examples in there. You can see the migration system, which is better than Australia's migration system, I say. You can import, you can connect it to any other bigger ecosystem, and it will just work, right? Not just developer experience, but you know, also site builders experience has changed, and the layer we were talking about theming, it's looking good, right? The Claro and only Varro theme have changed the Drupal's looks, so to say, and I think they are always, you know, being developed, so we have more to see coming on. So, given the free ticket to this conference, I can talk about Drupal the whole day. But I want to talk mainly about how we, as developers, we evolve with Drupal, particularly this is my perspective and my story, how I grew up with Drupal, right? So, we talked about how Drupal has grown up, and now we are going to talk much more about how Drupalers are going to grow up with Drupal and grow old, right? So, for this, I did quite a bit of systematic and scientific research, right? Drinking almost 1,000 coffees, having so many sleepless nights, and I kind of categorize all this in this three main stage of a life of a developer, right? So, I used a method called 5W1H, I'm sure everybody will be familiar, but it's 5W questions like what, when, how, and 1H is the how, right? So, just to, just to explain that I've put it in three categories, right? So, this is the answer, the WAN question. So, junior or entry level developer would be zero to two years experience. Meet to senior, you would say five to seven years, and this is not set to stone, like everybody has different views on it. And tech lead or, you know, very senior developer, project manager, 10 plus years, right? So, what they do, right? So, this is WAN, but what about what? So, starting with, you know, junior developers, they make coffees, which is then consumed by the senior developers, and criticized by the leads, right? In reality, you know, they also, the junior developers are very excited to learn, like how I was, right? And, you know, in reality, most of junior developers doing is they are learning, reading tickets, you know, helping in support, you know, support department, right? Mostly, you know, sharing their solutions and not, they're not at that's implement and stage yet, implementation stage yet. So, and then meet and senior level developers at that point, meet career crisis, right? And so, what is meet career crisis? I went to Harvard Business Review, and here's their definition. So, too much of your time at work spending putting out the fires and avoiding bad results, and not focusing on the purpose of your projects. So, basically, you know, meet and senior level developers at this point, they have very matured Drupal knowledge with experience, right? And there are a lot of animations and innovations happening with them, right? So, I wrote my more contributed modules in this period of time, right? And also, you know, I started diving into community. So, I started attending Melbourne Meetups, Drupal Meetups at this point. Not to say that you have to wait for like five to seven years to do that, but I'm just saying like when I had a knowledge I felt more confident to go and talk to other people, right? And Techleads, yeah. So, they talk nonsense at Drupal South. And in reality, like with the Techlead position which I've just taken on recently, you know, you talk about the big picture. You talk about the keeping board afloat, right? You are directly now reporting to CEO or CTO or the C-suite, right? They're not worried about which patch you're going to use, what module you're going to use. They're worried about the solution as well, right? And so, you know, you talking about maintainability, and there are a lot of teams you are involved, you know, front end, back end architecture. So, Techleads have a lot of things going on. And that's why, you know, we come to Drupal. So, Drupal is very lucrative industry, right? And a lot of people are, you know, just because generally there is always a shortage of developers. So, the salaries are very high if that attracts anybody, right? And so, who, that's the next question, right? Who are these developers, right? So, as I mentioned earlier, quickly touched on it, the juniors are generally starting new graduates or, you know, part like basically career changes. I see a lot of support people coming to Drupal. When they are supporting Drupal, they then transit to a Drupal developer role. Me too, seniors are more seasoned, you know, interested in bigger picture, right? Showing off their skills, right? And Techleads are part of furniture. Yeah, so, where do you find them, right? So, this is a joke, by the way. Juniors, you find them in LinkedIn because they want a job, right? Mead and senior, they have more money to buy fancy gadgets. So, you find them on YouTube giving tutorials. And Leeds, you find them renting about everything with paid Twitter blue tick mark. Yeah. So, yeah, that was the part one of the presentation, right? And I have now the second part, which is about giving an advice from my side, right? It's not, you know, you don't have to abide to it, right? It's just something I want to share as a fellow Drupaler, right? And my advice is basically to be stupid, right? And you all will be thinking, what? Like, why would somebody advise you to be stupid? Of course, there's, you know, it's just abbreviation of something I came up, right? So, STU stands for seek to understand and learn, right? There is the P for persist, inspire and innovate. And then D is for discussion. And this is my mantra I've been following for any level of developer, whether you are junior or senior or you are, you know, tech lead. This is something I've been following in my subconscious. So, let's start with seek to understand, right? So, nobody knows full Drupal, right? If someone comes and tells me that I know every part of Drupal, then I know either, you know, the person is from India or he's from Chet GPT, right? Because, yes, we Indian, we know everything and we do yes to everything. So, and only I can make that joke because I'm from India, right? Well, and the next advice is, so what I, sorry, besides the joke, what I wanted to tell you is to grow with unknowns. So there will be a lot of things, a lot of parts you don't know in Drupal. And that doesn't mean, you know, you don't know Drupal, right? You have to just try to learn those parts when it comes, when they are applicable to you, right? And it's same for any big system, right? Any big enterprise system. And the next thing I wanted to say is learning, right? So it almost never hurts to have something more than Drupal, right? For example, having a separate skill like how Dries was showing, you can engage something like artificial intelligence or front end from React or something else you want to add to Drupal. It always is helpful. And I found that very helpful during my career that if you have something plus Drupal, you always kind of make a difference, right? And the lastly I want to say is avoid using Drupal more than where it's necessary, right? So I had this crazy idea of creating a neural network with Drupal nodes. And that should not be, right? So you only use Drupal is a content management system. It's very good at managing content, manipulating content, you know? So don't use it for, for example, machine learning, right? So that's that. And so coming to persist, right? It's about keeping the momentum going, right? The tech world right now is very noisy, right? So you will see a lot of technology moving and Drupal is no different, right? So you will have a lot of tech noise. You will think, I should learn AWS or I should learn React or something else, right? So what I want to say here is just take a moment and do the technology which is concerned to your project or the problem you are solving then and then you're going to remember. Otherwise, you will just get down in, subscribe in a lot of tutorial websites and you will never use them, right? So keep the momentum going, keep solving your problem, experimenting, innovating, right? But you can use this technology when that's the time, but just avoid the tech noise, right? And maintain the balanced pace, right? So if you go too comfortable, you will lose all the creativity, right? If you're too comfortable, if you're doing the same job every day, you will lose the creativity. And if you are challenging too much to yourself, right? If you are getting a step forward but too much, then you will drain yourself. So keeping the maintain balance pace is very important. And yeah, inspire and innovate is, you've seen a lot of talks about this in this conference, so I don't have to say much. But just share what you have with the broader community. Teach others, bore people at conference with your stories, right? Like this one, and make a module, right? If you have a solution that can help other, this is an example of making a module. But if you have a solution which can help other, just make a module contribute to Drupal.org. This will give you number one, it will give you love from people. Like if people are using your module, you will get a lot of admiring there. And number two, you have a portfolio. You're building your own portfolio in the open source world, which is boosting your employability, right? So if you have like five modules you are contributing to, that definitely I would look at if I hire someone, or just feel about contributing back to community, right? And the last point I want to discuss here with the inspiration is, choose a company which inspires you to innovate, right? There are a lot of companies out there which let you give this wiggle room where you can do something extra from the client's requirement, right? And don't fall down into the salary pitfall, right, salary trap. So salary will always increase because you're going to be experienced. I've never seen people becoming more experienced and getting less salary. That's never going to happen. So what I want you to choose is a company which gives you more boost on innovation, a company culture which promotes that. So for example, at my company where I work currently, I love cybersecurity and I'm a practitioner in cybersecurity. So they give me, you know, we literally have a certain amount of hours allocated every week to experiment, right, in the real world projects, in the client projects, wherever you can put, you know, your input, right? Wherever there is a use case basically. So what I mean to say, and a lot of other companies they do by hack days, there is Contrib Sprint, I know other companies do Contrib Sprint and stuff like that. So what I mean by is don't go buy the book companies, right? And this you will find probably in giant enterprises, but go to the company which has right a new chapter, you know, mindset. So lastly, you know, engage with the community, right? There was a great talk recently about this. So when I first started attending my Melbourne Drupal meetup, I was so amazed that, you know, how many problems we can solve or how many new things you learn. So attend your local meetup, right? So if not for Drupal, attend it for pizzas because in Brisbane they give us free pizzas. So, you know, meet people, experts on site, you know, you have great resource like there's big developers come there, right? So you can ask your stupid questions basically and you get answers, right? I have one example that, you know, I don't remember which Code Sprint, but you know, I was very reluctant to commit patches on Drupal.org. I had always, you know, put them somewhere in my Reaper and then Lee who's sitting in the back inspired me and showed me how to set up and take out all the frictions from committing a patch. And since then I just counted I submitted almost 41 patches, right? So sometimes that's all you need, right? Sometimes that's the push you need from someone and that you can only find in these community meetings or even events like this, right? So don't be shy. You know, just come to the meetups and, you know, events and embrace the Drupal spirit, right? That's ask, participate and never stop learning. So that brings us to the end, right? I want to say besides all these patches, Drupal estimates, JS, casing, CSS, documentation, what I want you to most importantly remember from this slide is just remember to have fun, right? Well, you're going to spend half of your life with it, so you might spend it with fun as well and you might enjoy it as well, right? So I thank you all for listening, right? And have a good afternoon. Thank you. So we go back to 2010 and you're introduced to Drupal. I know it was a hard learning curve, but I'm guessing from this presentation that you've got no regrets. No, definitely. That was the best thing, the best technology I've ever met. And yeah, I have, you know, it was hard in terms of, you know, when you're starting from uni or something, but yeah, I mean, I was just comparing with that and currently, but yes, absolutely, yeah. So as your employer at that time, what is the feedback you can give to Jim and I on how we could have made that easier? You did a great job. So the best feedback I can give is the persistence part. You get the show must go on part there and that was the thing needed, right? You didn't let me go like, you didn't fired me. No, you did well. We did well to do it. I'm really proud of you. Thank you. Oh, here it comes again. I'm just really inspired and motivating all your team members including me and our team industry. What keeps you motivated in yourself? Like, you know, there are times, definitely hard times when you're coding or working. What keeps you motivated to be in Drupal? Well, yeah, one thing is, you know, the community and the other thing I like about Drupal is it's ever changing. It's always progressing, right? And that's something keeping me, you know, like always fresh. So like Drupal 10 has reacting in integrated in it. So I was like more curious on how react works. So I had to learn that technology. So, yes, I think the way it's changing and the way it's the whole ecosystem is, is probably the best motivation keeping me around. Just a quick one. We have quite experienced developers in our team and on different platforms. Do you want to give some tips for moving to Drupal, what, how they can transition from other CMS to Drupal, and not at a junior level, but at a very senior level? You know, how do you experience it? Best tip I would give is just start installing and playing with it, right? It's much easier than, you know, ever in the Drupal's history. So if they're playing with, for example, if they're doing symphony or Laravel or something, they will find them very familiar with the Drupal's code base as it is right now. And yeah, I think always I've found, you know, practically learning something. So spinning up a Drupal site or having a small, tiny project would definitely do the job. It should not be that complicated in terms because they have lots of experience, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, if they have lots of experience, that would definitely be a plus. They would make, probably, they will spin it faster than the juniors. But yes, I think if they want to experience what is Drupal, you know, they just spin it up in a local site or do a small project and, you know, maybe make a module. That's how I learned. I made a module first. So that's also one way to learn it. But I think tell them to join Australia New Zealand channel. Yeah, that's where we have a lot of discussions. And you know, they can ask questions and stuff as well if they get stuck.