By Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire - Evangelist, Acquia
The podcast currently has 225 episodes available.
At DrupalCon Baltimore, I got the chance to chat with David Porter and David Stinemetze from Rackspace. Listen to this conversation to learn a little more about the Daves, Drupal at Rackspace, and the value of Acquia's certification program to individuals and organizations. If you can make it, don't miss your chance to get a 10% discount on taking an Acquia certification exam by taking the Drupal 8 certification crash course at Texas Camp 2017!
The Texas Camp 2017 Drupal 8 Certification Crash Course: a full day of Drupal 8 learning goodness on June 2nd!
"We're hoping to get as many people certified as possible" - Dave Porter
Read the full post and see the conversation video at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/256-drupal-8-certification-crash-course-texas-camp-2017
Episode 255: Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire - keynote address, Drupal Camp London, 2017
See the conversation video at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/255-no-one-wants-website-dont-sell-drupal-move-value-chain
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Thank you, Drupal community - I want to express my sincere thanks to everyone who helped me prepare this presentation, sharing their insights into how Drupal fits into bigger and better ways of doing business. The fact that we can all talk about this so openly while competing for business is one more sign of how special the Drupal community is. I’m so glad you all choose to “open source” some of the ways you are succeeding and help the rest of us along the way! And thank you Drupal Camp London organizers for the invitation to give a keynote address at your conference, and thanks to the audience for your presence and warm reception despite the early hour on Sunday.
Drupal isn’t enough anymore10 years ago, just having a website was transformational. But pretty much every business has one nowadays; they're a commodity. You need something especially good looking, functional, or powerful for it to be special. Your skillset--the ability to make functional, powerful websites--was also transformational, a good base for running a business. Now that is largely a commodity, too. Competitors like Wordpress.com, Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, and others offer solid, attractive, basic websites with lots of useful functionality. And they are only getting easier to use with every release.
So don’t sell Drupal!What's the answer? How do you stay relevant and build a sales pipeline today? Don't sell Drupal. Move up the value chain. If you simply receive instructions to put a banner here and a slideshow there--to turn someone else's plan into code and nothing more--you're not where you need to be on that chain.
Placing yourself and your business higher up the value-creation chain means offering more than writing code, more than offering to build Drupal websites. You need to offer more: business value. You might have special insights or expertise. You might be able to solve the problems of a particular industry or vertical especially well it. You could deliver value through something you build with Drupal. Drupal might be one of your weapons of choice for facilitating digital transformation, or marketing, or what have you ... and you have a choice: specialize or diversify ...
Session TakeawaysMy thanks once again to all of the following people and everyone else whose ideas and actions helped inspire me and help our community:
My trusty microphone, camera, and I recorded a few great conversations at DrupalCon in Mumbai that have never been released until now. Today, a conversation with Rakesh James, who credits Dries for giving him a way to live and support his family with Drupal. Rakesh is an extraordinary and generous person; he's personally paid that forward, giving others in India the chance to change their lives, too, by teaching hundreds of people Drupal and giving them a shot at a career, too. He's also a top 30 contributor to Drupal 8 core.
Rakesh told me about the moment he both discovered and fell in love with Drupal. His manager gave him permission to check out Drupal for a project, "I started it with Drupal 5. I got a big error. My senior [colleague] said I could post on Drupal.org because he was sitting far away and could not debug for me. I posted the error ... After one hour somebody from the community replied that it would be better if you started with Drupal 6. That was amazing. If you post it, somebody from the [other side] of the planet replied to me, 'You should do this.' From that amazing [moment] till now, I have that feeling. All the time when you go to the community and post something, you'll be getting the right answer. In an hour's time. That is so amazing."
"I feel like when I have gotten something, I should give back to others who are struggling. If they have a little education, know how to play with the computer, I should teach them Drupal. That is the best way of doing it. I spread the word because I got something. The people are around, this magic should be with them also ... So they will have a better life. They'll have a better salary. It's a better way to do that; teach the kids in pre-university colleges. We should teach them. I volunteer my time for that. Two Saturdays a month, we go out to the colleges. Every first Saturday, we have a community meet-up; the other Saturday we go to a college and teach them Drupal."
If you have any doubts about Rakesh's sincerity in all this, watch how moved he is in the video from about 10:30 to 11:50 :-)
DrupalCon Asia Mumbai 2016 was almost exactly a year ago now. Of all the conferences I have been to, Mumbai was probably my favorite. I met an incredible, active, enthusiastic Drupal community that welcomed everyone with open arms, incredible food (!), and a LOT of selfies :-)
See the conversation video at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/254-mumbai-memories-meet-rakesh-james
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My trusty microphone, camera, and I recorded a few great conversations in Mumbai that have never been released until now. Today, talking about full-time contribution to Drupal 8 while building the Acquia Lightning distribution, passion for community and paying it forward in open source, and Drupal in India with Abhishek Anand.
At the time of recording, Abhishek had been a Drupalist "for seven years and two months." He started using Drupal to prepare for a job interview for an internship while he was still studying and said he wished he'd discovered it sooner. It would have saved him a lot of coding to make websites for his college. Later on, Abhishek even turned down jobs at bigger companies to stay where he was and doing Drupal, "I just loved this job. And seven years later this journey in Drupal has been exciting."
Though he is a capable coder, Drupal's toolset made his life and work easier, "For doing anything else, you had to write a lot of code, even for small things. With Drupal, I can sit with someone who knows nothing about PHP or coding and they can build a website. At the same time, the biggest thing was that I can also be a part of this community that's built this. Whatever I'm building, can go back to the Drupal community. Having code written by me on Drupal.org is exciting for me. Someone else will use my code ... When someone files an issue [on one of my modules], I know that they are using it. It's a great feeling knowing other people are using the code I am writing. It's an amazing feeling."
DrupalCon Asia Mumbai 2016 was almost exactly a year ago now. Of all the conferences I have been to, Mumbai was probably my favorite. I met an incredible, active, enthusiastic Drupal community that welcomed everyone with open arms, incredible food (!), and a LOT of selfies :-)
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See the conversation video at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/253-mumbai-memories-abhishek-anand
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My trusty microphone, camera, and I recorded a few great conversations in Mumbai that have never been released until now. Next up in “Mumbai Memories”, taking Drupal 8 from awesome to super-awesome with Neetu Morwani!
Neetu landed a Drupal-related job right after graduation, as she explains: "Accidentally, I started working in Drupal." In the nearly four years since then, she has become an enthusiastic member of the community and made a lot of code contributions to Drupal (thank you, Neetu!). She's now a Drupal developer at Acquia's New Delhi office and was a speaker at DrupalCon Asia in Mumbai. Listening to Neetu talk about the significance of DrupalCon coming to India, how it is changing people's lives in India, her excitement is palpable. This energy was everywhere at DrupalCon in Mumbai. The Indian Drupal community is a wonderful (large!) group of men and women who are bursting with energy and ideas about how to improve the world.
DrupalCon Asia Mumbai 2016 was almost exactly a year ago now. Of all the conferences I have been to, Mumbai was probably my favorite. I met an incredible, active, enthusiastic Drupal community that welcomed everyone with open arms, incredible food (!), and a LOT of selfies :-)
See the conversation video at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/252-mumbai-memories-taking-drupal-8-awesome-super-awesome-neetu-morwani
My trusty microphone, camera, and I recorded a few great conversations in Mumbai that have never been released until now. So lets’ get started with a little thing I’m calling “Mumbai Memories”.
Meet Ujval Shah from the state of Gujarat in India. He’s been doing and evangelizing Drupal for a long time — he’s worked with every version of Drupal from 4.6 to 8! Ujval was part of the first-ever Indian Drupal Camp in Ahmedabad in 2008, and he’s been generously speaking, training, and contributing to open source software for a decade.
DrupalCon Asia Mumbai 2016 was almost exactly a year ago now. Of all the conferences I have been to, Mumbai was probably my favorite. I met an incredible, active, enthusiastic Drupal community that welcomed everyone with open arms, incredible food (!), and a LOT of selfies :-)
See the conversation video at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/251-mumbai-memories-ujval-shah
Suchi Garg is an IT professional through and through and happened upon PHP and Drupal essentially by accident at work. As of 2017, she has been working exclusively in Drupal for a decade and is still very passionate about code, contribution, the community, and passing on her knowledge through training. She is Technical Services Manager at Acquia.
Read the full post and see the conversation video at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/250-suchi-garg-career-makes-community
DrupalCon Dublin keynote community voices - In Acquia podcast 248, Acquia Office of the CTO Multimedia Designer, Alena "ASH" Heath and I talked about helping capture stories of contribution and change from the Drupal community. In this quick follow-up, here are the soundbites that were featured in Dries Buytaert's "Driesnote" address at DrupalCon Dublin, 2016.
A warm round of thanks to Vijaya Chandran Mani, Zsófi Major, Drew Gorton, Franck Seferiba Salif Soulama, Suchi Garg, Ronan Dowling, Jack Holding, Sheena Morris, and Crispin Read. Thanks for all your help, contributions, and being part of the Drupal community!
See the conversation video at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/249-changing-lives-changing-world-voices-dublin-driesnote
Acquia Office of the CTO Multimedia Designer, Alena "ASH" Heath and I collaborated in 2016, collecting stories about contribution and changing lives from members of the Drupal community. Soundbites from some of those conversations were included in Dries Buytaert's "Driesnote" keynote address at DrupalCon Dublin. In this podcast, we talk about ASH's history in Drupal, this project and what we learned along the way!
See the conversation video at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/248-whats-driesnote-ash-n-jam-talk-community-stories
While passing through London in late 2016, I sat down with Tim Deeson, lead at the Deeson agency. We talked about the history of his company, delivering value with Drupal is more than delivering code, and Tim's revelations and action regarding diversity at his company and in the tech industry.
Read the full post and see the conversation video at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/247-diversity-differentiation-values-tim-deeson
The podcast currently has 225 episodes available.