10 years of Drupal

At 12:54pm on January 15th 2008 (based on the created time stamp of "1200401651") I signed up for my Drupal.org account while working for International Baccalaureate. Before my interview there I had never heard of Drupal, but managed to ace the interview and get the job, no idea why I didn't bother signing up for Drupal.org until after I started the job, but hey, that's just how it was. I was jamesfk who introduced me to Drupal there and who I worked with building a bunch of community sites in Drupal 5, then 6. I got the chance to visit Toronto for training with Lullabot where I got to meet great people such as James Walker, Matt Westgate, Jeff Robbins, Addison Berry, and fellow student Doug Vann. I also landed a trip to DrupalCon DC 2009, where I met even more great people and many people I now knew virtually from Drupal.org, IRC, and Twitter.

Later in 2009 I started work with Mark Boulton who was already well into his work with the Drupal.org redesign, and starting work on the new admin theme for Drupal 7. It was awesome to be a part of these projects, as well as many Drupal projects which were coming in on the back of these. While working here I got to attend DrupalCamp UK, DrupalCon Paris, and DrupalCon Copenhagen.

In 2011 I moved to a position at Acquia which saw me become the 4th Acquia employee in the UK, along with great Drupalists like Hernâni, and the first support engineer based in Europe, shortly followed by Aurelien. Later that year I co-load organization of DrupalCon London (or Croydon) with Jeff. At Acquia I moved to help form the customer success team, assisting clients getting their Drupal sites up and running and launch successfully.

After nearly 4 years I left Acquia to join Appnovation who were looking to setup a UK office in Wales (where I live). This also saw me start working with Pfizer on their Drupal 8 projects, initially I was contributing to a lot of the Composer related issues, then moved on to start the Workflow Initiative.

Outside of "work" in this time I have contributed to many contrib modules, become the core maintainer for Statistics, Content Moderation, and Node modules, been a DrupalCon track chair three times, attended 9 DrupalCons, written Drupal articles for Net magazine and appeared on some Drupal podcasts. Outside of Drupal I have moved house twice, got married, and had two kids.

It's been a fun time, here's to the next 10 years!

timmillwood
Wed, 10/01/2018 - 13:28