Column

Drupal people are good people. They are the recipe’s secret ingredient, and conferences are the oven. Mix and bake.

March 2007, Sunnyvale, California, the Yahoo campus and a Sheraton.

OSCMS, my second Drupal event and my first conference.

Dries gave the State of Drupal keynote, with a survey of developers and a vision for future work. His hair was still a bit punk and he was a bit younger. Dries has the best slides. Where does he find those amazing slides?

I like Dries a lot.

I wish I had created Drupal.

In 1999, I created my own CMS named Frameworks. I remember showing my friend Norm an "edit" link for changing text and how cool that was. Back then, I didn't even know about Open Source – despite being a fanboy of Richard Stallman and the FSF – and I was still using a mix of C/C++, Perl, and IIS. (If you wanted to eat in the 1990's, Windows was an occupational hazard.)

But I didn't create Drupal. I didn't have the hair, I've never had those amazing slides, and I will never be able to present that well.

But mainly, I didn't have the vision.

Rasmus Lerdorf gave a talk on the history of PHP. I was good with computer languages. I had written a compiler in college, developed my first interpretive language in the late 1980's and another one in the early 1990's. I wondered why I hadn't created PHP. At the time, most web apps were written in Perl. I loved Perl. It was so concise. It was much better than AWK, which in itself was also pretty awesome.

(Note: AWK does not stand for awkward. It’s named after Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan – of K&R fame).

So I didn't see the need for PHP, we had Perl!

Again, no vision.

Meanwhile: 2007, Sunnyvale, California, OSCMS.