Drupal People
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.