Episode: 1408
Title: HPR1408: Drupal in Gothenburg with Addison Berry and others
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1408/hpr1408.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 00:58:48

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Today on Hacker Public Radio, you will hear conversations from a Drupal camp, primarily
with Addison of Lullabot fame, Henrik from the old 90s radio as well as Patrick and Cornelius.
C.T. is back once again with an interview from Drupal Camp in Jatobori 2012. You see one
of the persons there was Addison Berry and who is that you wonder? Well, let me tell you,
according to the web page for the company which she works for, Lullabot, Addison has been
involved with Drupal since 2006. She is Lullabot's director of education and the product manager
for Drupalize.me. She also travels around the world, speaks at events from local high schools
to major conferences like Oskon. She works to improve Drupal and open source software.
Addison has been working with technical documentation and training since 2000 and was the Drupal
documentation lead from 2008-2010. She is one of the co-authors for the O'Reilly book
using Drupal published in 2008. In addition to her focus on coordinating documentation efforts,
she has provided core patches, maintains several contributed modules and has been involved
with the Drupal Dojo and the GHOP, the Google Highly Open Participation Mentoring programs.
In 2010, Addison was recognised as one of the most influential women in tech by Fast Company
magazine. So that's the lowdown and of course I couldn't let such an interesting person
go by without having a little conversation with me first. But before we get to that, before
we turn to the main interview, I will play a small informal conversation over lunch involving
Henrik, one of my co-hosts from the All in IT radio and two of my former students, Patrick
and Cornelius, now full-fledged web developers in their own right. Let's have a little
listen to what we all think about Drupal Camp.
So I'm sitting here waiting for food at a charming restaurant in Gothenburg. I've been
attending Drupalcon, that's not it. I've been just taste for it before. It's Drupal Camp
Gothenburg of course and with me are four strapping young gentlemen, sorry I'm the fourth,
but I'm not strapping or young, but I'm a gentleman in Solenhardt. And with me as always
is my co-host Henrik, say hello to the fans Henrik. Hello, say something more, all right
how do you enjoy Drupal Camp? I'm enjoying it a bit, I don't understand a word of what
they're saying. Both you and I know that that's not true. Well since I haven't worked
that much with Drupal I can't really associate to what they're saying or actually understand
what benefit I should have of it. But I must say the last speech we attended about
Drush was a bit fairly depressing. At least I wanted to check up on that to see what
it actually is capable of. You haven't used Drush before? No, not at all. Why? Because I
hardly used Drupal these days. As I said I worked on a few products a year ago, but nowadays
I mostly use other cancer frameworks or so yeah. You strayed from the true path, yeah and
the true path is a bit wonky so I didn't really want to stay there. All right, enough with
you. That wasn't fun at all. To my right we have who are you sir? My name is Paul
Ducoulson and what are you doing here? Well I'm sending to Drupal Camp. Why? Because I find
it interesting. I'd like to learn more about Drupal.
There's more experiences about Drupal so I can develop much better size in the future.
And what's your history with Drupal? Have you used it in any real projects? Well a couple
of projects was most for a learning Drupal. I've used Drupal for about a half a year or
something and well now I can develop some sites in Drupal, some basic sites. All right.
The fourth guy who's really the third. What's your name? My name is Klylys. And your business
here is? Tending Drupal Camp. I learned some words. And why are you here? Because you
told me to come. Right, blame me. Yes, yes, I spoke to the other. Okay, have you any previous
experience with Drupal before this? Yeah, I've worked with Patrick and a couple of projects.
We started at the same time so I'm just half a year old. All right, so the final decision then
is it thumbs up or thumbs down? We go round the table. Henry first. Thumbs up so thumbs down
about what? Drupal Camp. A big thumbs up because so far I've got at least three stickers.
And that's the main goal of any conference. All right, Patrick. Thumbs up. Well, I think it was
interesting the sessions we have to tend to do so far. I like it. One about Drush. It really
looked forward to work with Drush. All right, and we just half way through Drupal Camp as much
more to come. And the last man. I like it too. I like Drush, Drush session, but the other two
but the first one was really funny. What's his name? Mortem Mortem. Mortem DK. All right, thank you
and I hope we all have a nice lunch. And as far as I can remember, the food tasted great.
Cornelius mentioned Mortem DK who was the keynote speaker and I have an interview with him which
will be edited and available for your listening pleasure at a future date. Drush, by the way,
you who do not know is a command line tool with which you can do amazing things with Drupal.
Everything from installing, getting backups, installing and updating modules, packaging,
and so on and so forth. If you are a Drupal developer, well, you just must use it. There's no
discussion. It's too great of a tool. So let's have a talk to the person who had the presentation
about Drush on stage, Addison Berry. I'm Addison Berry. I'm an American but I live in Denmark
and so this was an easy trip to come up to Sweden and I came to speak about a few things.
Mostly I was very excited about helping more Drupal communities in Scandinavia,
spreading the Drupal community love and getting more people involved and making people feel
comfortable and this is a place that they can come and learn as well as hanging in the
sidelines and building websites. And since that's a passion of mine, I really get excited when
communities start to put on events and try and pull people together. So that's why I decided to
come on up and speak. All right, great. What might people know you from?
Well, in the Drupal world, I work for Lullabot and Director of Education there and Product Manager
for DrupalizeMe, which is Lullabot's video training site. In the past, I was the documentation
team lead for the Drupal project and I've been sort of involved in a lot of community efforts in
the community for the last five years or so. All right. You had two sessions today. What did you
talk about? Yeah, the first session I did today is on a new sort of initiative within the Drupal
community called LearnDrupal that creates a ladder of lessons that people can work their way
through from the very bottom. Learning about Drupal, but more about learning about the Drupal
community and how to actually contribute. You have to sort of learn Drupal in order to
contribute, but really being able to focus on how to actually give back. I think it's a really
great initiative that got started in Boston. I found out about it at DrupalCon Denver and got
really excited and talked to people and I've started doing meetups in Copenhagen to get people
sort of working through lessons and figuring out how to do things and then we're going to have
a sprint to work on core Drupal issues and actually get people who may not feel like they are,
you know, a lot of people feel like, oh, I can't contribute to core. That's for, I don't
either, really smart people or people who have a lot of time or all those things and
the systems really designed to say, everybody can contribute and we can help you. We'll take you
by the hand and walk you through it step by step. And so that was a really cool session. I'd
love to get more communities doing that and we had really good response to it in Copenhagen.
I think it's really going to give a very good environment for people who are new to Drupal
to really sort of explore and get to know people. And then my other session was about Drush,
which is just a really great tool in the Drupal world. But since it's not a module, a lot of people
are afraid of it or don't really know what it is. And so I just wanted to give people who hadn't
been introduced to it yet, understand that it is a great tool and it's not nearly as frightening
or weird as you probably think it is. So that was just a fun session to do as well. And I think
a lot of people seemed pretty interested from that. So that was great. I had two pupils of mine
here today with me and they attended your Drush session and they have only been using Drupal at
simple web hosts. So they have never had any shell access. But they were quite determined that
now they have to get some sort of hosting where they can actually use Drush. So they were quite
excited. I was attending the got together a couple of weeks ago, over at node one. And one thing
they told me was that at some point they had large signs everywhere, don't hack core. But you're
saying that they should. Contributing to core means making changes to core in a community effort,
not hacking on it by yourself. And every iteration, every new version of Drupal, we change a lot
of things because we're constantly trying to make it better software. I mean if we kept just the
same old thing, nobody would use it. But to make changes to continue to move forward with
technologies requires a lot of work because it's just, you know, there's on the one hand you just
change some lines of code. But what is the right direction for that to go in? There's a lot of
documentation. There's a lot of other thought, how does this work with the other pieces? So it's
a much larger picture. And the entire community needs to come together and we need a lot of different
perspectives. We need a lot of different people who use Drupal in different ways and interact with
Drupal in different ways. I mean people who don't code can have a huge impact in terms of Drupal core.
But those tend to be the people who don't contribute or don't feel like they can contribute and
it's frustrating because there are a lot of people who want to do good work but they want to make
sure they're doing it right. And so we need a lot of input from a lot of people. It's a tremendous
amount of code and there's relatively few people who are doing that and that's a big burden on them.
And so the idea is to come together, talk with the community, figure out what's broken that we
need to fix or new cool things we want to add. What's the best way to do that and then work together
so that it gets into Drupal core and then when the new release comes out and you download it,
everybody gets it. Rather than you just hacked out this great solution in the corner and nobody
else gets to share from that. Do you know roughly how many are contributing to core right now?
I don't know right now with Drupal 8. I know the numbers for Drupal 7 was somewhere around I
think 900 people. Which sounds like a lot of people it is. So you know it's definitely not like
you know it's three people who are working on core. But when you look at it in the perspective of
the overall the size of the community, the number of people who use Drupal and the number of
people who are trying to do things around it is just tremendous. And in numbers that we had
from the learned Drupal presentation in terms of the percentage of people who have Drupal.org
accounts who are ostensibly part of the community, who actually contributes to core is something like
0.15% like it's not even at one percent. And so that's when you look at it in that perspective,
it's a very teeny tiny tiny tiny little pin prick of people who are actually making the software
that hundreds of thousands of people around the world depend on day in and day out.
It's you know it's a sobering perspective and we'd like to we'd like to make that better.
And it was interesting to hear you talk about it. So what I want to thank you for your time and
what would you like to plug? What kind of thing are nearest to your heart and what do you want to
pimp? Well I mean the biggest things that are close to my heart now in the Drupal community is
is the LearnDrupal project. The website is at LearnDrupal.org. It's a great group of people it's
the initiative is just starting and so aside from people getting involved we also you know with
core we also need people to help the LearnDrupal project. There's a website we're trying to create
lessons we're trying to get feedback are the lessons effective you know are people able to actually
learn something from them and work through them and and make them better because we want it
to be as easy as absolutely possible for somebody who doesn't know anything to come in start at the
bottom and actually work their way all the way up to being able to deal with patches and be
engaged fully in the community discussion. So yeah anybody who's really interested in trying to
figure out how to contribute like I just want to do something but I don't know how to come check
out LearnDrupal and help us and it'd be a great learning experience I think in a lot of ways.
Spend it thank you. If you want a deeper interview with Addison you should have listened to
the Drupal EC podcast episode number 95 where she is the main guest otherwise you can always turn
to any of the Lullabot podcasts there are many of them in certain content here the creative process
but yeah but mainly the Lullabot podcast which is sometimes called the Drupalized.me podcast I'm
not sure how that works really but in the last one there Addison herself is a host and also have
a look at Addison's presentations from Drupal camp on YouTube I will add links in the show notes
and if you want to hear what Henry can I thought about this year's Drupal camp then you should
have listened to the episode Con of the Year over on our podcast the old 90 radio in that episode
we talk about all the conferences we have attended in 2013 including Drupal camp RetroSpare's
Mass Sun which my last episode on Hacker Public Radio was about as well as the FSconz and a few others
so have a listen to that follow me on it identica and twitter at altinamithe ALLTINOMIT you will
find links to all the ways to contact me in the show notes and please get in touch if you have
anything to comment finally I would say Drupal one more time just for the sake of it there's a
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