Last week was my twelfth Drupalversary!

The first half dozen years as a volunteer contributor/student, the second half as a full-time contributor/Acquia employee. Which makes this a special Drupalversary and worth looking back on :)

2006–2012

The d.o highlights of the first six years were my Hierarchical Select and CDN modules. I started those in my first year or so of using Drupal (which coincides with my first year at university). They led to a summer job for Mollom, working with/for Dries remotely — vastly better than counting sandwiches or waiting tables!

It also resulted in me freelancing during the school holidays: the Hierarchical Select module gained many features thanks to agencies not just requesting but also sponsoring them. I couldn’t believe that companies thousands of kilometers away would trust a 21-year old to write code for them!

Then I did my bachelor thesis and master thesis on Drupal + WPO (Web Performance Optimization) + data mining. To my own amazement, my bachelor thesis (while now irrelevant) led to freelancing for the White House and an internship with Facebook.

Biggest lesson learned: opportunities are hiding in unexpected places! _{(But opportunities are more within reach to those who are privileged. I had the privilege to do university studies, to spend my free time contributing to an open source project, and to propose thesis subjects.)}

2012–2018

The second half was made possible by all of the above and sheer luck.

When I was first looking for a job in early 2012, Acquia had a remote hiring freeze. It got lifted a few months later. Because I’d worked remotely with Dries before (at Mollom), I was given the opportunity to work fully remotely from day one. (This would turn out to be very valuable: since then I’ve moved three times!) Angie and Moshe thought I was a capable candidate, I think largely based on the Hierarchical Select module.
Imagine that the remote hiring freeze had not gotten lifted or I’d written a different module? I was lucky in past choices and timing.
So I joined Acquia and started working on Drupal core full-time! I was originally hired to work on the authoring experience, specifically in-place editing.
The team of four I joined in 2012 has quadrupled since then and has always been an amazing group of people — a reflection of the people in the Drupal community at large!

Getting Drupal 8 shipped was hard on everyone in the community, but definitely also on our team. We all did whatever was most important; I probably contributed to more than a dozen subsystems along the way. The Drupal 8 achievement I’m most proud of is probably the intersection of cacheability and the render pipeline: Dynamic Page Cache & BigPipe, both of which have accelerated many billions responses by now. After Drupal 8 shipped, my primary focus has been the API-First Initiative. It’s satisfying to see Drupal 8 do well.

Biggest lessons learned:

1. code criticism is not personal criticism — not feeling the need to defend every piece of code you’ve written is not only liberating, it also makes you immensely more productive!
2. always think about future maintainability — having to provide support and backwards compatibility made me truly understand the consequences of mistakes I’ve made.

To many more years with the Drupal community!