SimplyTest.me Welcomes Matt Glaman
SimplyTest.me is a labor of love but it has been one of the most unique, satisfying contributions I've made to the community. Most of that labor has been dedicated toward maintaining the Drupal 7 version. Our maintenance was massively improved with the introduction of Tugboat.QA, but this year found major changes in the Drupal community with the launch of Drupal 9, the major changes to Composer workflows, and the Gitlab integration. All of these things are of high impact for Drupal and required major changes to SimplyTest. This has been especially hard to keep up with for me. Our latest incident showed the limitations of the current system, where SimplyTest.me was blocked from the Gitlab infrastructure due to updates in Drupal.org's patching workflow. Much of this pulled my attention away from our aspirations to launch a new version. Until very recently, that is.
On a whim, I had asked Matt Glaman if he could help. He had a little bit of time over the holiday season to pitch in and this rapidly changed the course of our new implementation. Matt stands out for his deep knowledge of React combined with his knowledge of Drupal itself. Several people have pitched in on the React frontend, but it was incomplete. The backend was also only partially completed, difficult to know what was left given it wasn't yet integrated, and was largely based on Drupal 7 code with only nominal improvement. Since we implemented Drupal 7 last year, Tugboat itself made some nice improvements that also were not implemented yet. In SimplyTest, we had the chance to simplify the architecture by more direct API calls and removal of the repository-based approach we used. React itself had an opportunity to invoke Tugboat APIs in a more straight forward way for logs, progress updates, and more. In short: we needed Matt.
Matt graciously agreed to help and at a community rate. We will be sponsoring his time through the Open Collective. Any contributions to SimplyTest's Open Collective will help us finish this effort up faster.
Matt is an expert. He knew every part of this stack. We needed someone to come in, sort things out, and get the basics of things in place to help move this effort forward. I was able to provide answers on what needed to happen, but I wanted Matt to have the full autonomy to implement it properly. This investment now delivers brand new long requested features, sets up future contribution in new ways, helps us make huge strides toward shutting down our Drupal 7 current system, and is overwhelmingly simple.
I want to thank Matt for making this possible. His contributions have brought a much needed jolt of energy into these new efforts. I can't wait to share this work with the community. Thanks for helping the cause, Matt!