The purpose of this blog post is two fold: 1. To be clear on what and how we plan to address issues with the current system. 2. To address where the service is going.The service has a bright and promising future ahead as an open source platform that will serve people well and give people a chance to learn through contribution. The service will remain free and will be community sponsored. Before I begin, I want to start with an acknowledgement. I’m totally in awe over how far ahead of it’s time the SimplyTest service was and this is a testament to PatrickD’s efforts throughout the years. As an

2017 has been incredible and a year of both personal and professional growth. Events like camps and conferences are critical for me to be active in the community, as I don’t have a local group or regional meetup. In 2017, I gave more presentations than I ever expected to. I travelled to many awesome cities. I had a personal goal of giving a keynote/featured talk. I ended up giving three. I went to many places I had never seen before (both at work and through community events). I’m astonished by how much effort and care volunteers put into these events. I shared meals, craft beers, and locally

SimplyTest.mePatrickD, the maintainer of SimplyTest.me, recently expressed interest in transitioning the application to a new maintainer. Let me first acknowledge how valuable this tool is for the community. It helps first time contributors who want to rapidly test a patch. It helps community members prototype modules or distributions without the concern of standing up a server. It’s really helped people, especially those not deeply technical, and should continue to as far as I’m concerned. I’ve used this at code sprints, I’ve tested patches on d.o, and generally point people to this in lieu

This terminology has never sat well with me. I haven't had the time really to articulate why. Allow me to explore my thoughts further. I fully recognize that people need to use the right tool for the right job. But, this philosophy suggests Drupal is not the right tool for less ambitious digital experiences. What about sites for local non profits, web presence for a local restaurant without any digital staff, or local religious organizations that desire a straight forward way to communicate their mission to the world on a shoestring budget. Drupal was built on the backs of people creating

Over the last few years, there have been substantial discussions around ReactJS, especially with regard to its former license. This has little to do with the fact that ReactJS offers an attractive and innovative front-end development framework and that it has the backing of a major commercial entity. While I'm not an expert, the most controversial bits do not appear to be driven by copyright concern, but how their license applies to patents. I've learned that legal and licensing can be a significant consideration in determining the technology we select on behalf of our clients, how

Component-based architectures have become both a popular and fairly crowded space in the Drupal community. For over a year, I have followed the progress of some tools created by those leveraging Pattern Lab as a component based design library. I can’t claim to know the full breadth of problems these individuals encountered, many of which are experienced technologists in our space. But, every solution I have seen has been complex and demonstrates some architectural red flags. I wanted to take a fresh look. I paid a designer to redesign my blog for a migration to Drupal 8. This presented the

In my earlier blog post, I researched community governance in other open source communities. While it was not exhaustive, I identified a set of trends and practices communities use to serve community members. The question remains: what can Drupal learn from other communities? To answer this question, we must understand where we are today. It turns out that answering this is quite difficult depending on our individual experience, network, and exposure to the community. Admittedly, with respect to Drupal’s governance, I am far from an expert. While I have been in the community for a while, I