If you’re reading this blog post then you probably know what Drupal is...and I’m pretty sure that you are from the “Drupal world”. But just in case you don’t know - Drupal is an awesome open-source content management system. And for me, the best thing about Drupal is the community! With over 1 million members, and 30,000+ developers, it is one of the largest and most dedicated open-source tech communities in the world. For some people “Drupal community” means their developer friends around the world, for others it’s all about giving back to the Drupal project. No matter what you think - everyone must admit that DrupalCon is one of the main symbols of our community! DrupalCons are the most important conferences of the year for the Drupal community, and an event that Propeople supports as a sponsor year after year.

Unfortunately, DrupalCon is also one of the most expensive Drupal events of the year, specially when compared with small Drupal camps and events (e.g. DevDays in Szeged or a local DrupalCamp). Companies attending the conference will usually be represented by team leads and other senior team members. All the while, there are many, more junior Drupalists that would like to attend, but are not able to. For DrupalCon Amsterdam, we have decided to give some of our younger team members here in Propeople the opportunity to go to the event.

In order to do this, we had the idea of setting up a contest for our team. After all, some friendly competition is always fun! And what’s the most useful, interesting, and honest thing to base a DrupalCon contest around? Contributions to Drupal, of course! Whoever had the most Drupal contributions and patches to their name at the end of the contest would win a ticket to attend their first Con! Actually, our formula was a bit more complex than just a sum total of contributions. We accounted for the final status of the task or issue (if it was committed to Drupal - then max points, if it’s in the “needs review” stage - then no points); kind of project (Drupal core - max points, small sandbox - minimum points); and whether the patch was just a reroll or full of new logic. Other small multipliers were also used to “keep score”. Also we had some ground rules: contributions to documentation did not count, and there was only one month.

Personally, I think that the best and the easiest way to begin contributing is to find an interesting task, grab a laptop and start writing code. Similarly, I also think that the best and easiest way to become familiar with Drupal 8 (the upcoming version of Drupal) is to start contributing to the Drupal 8 core, or to port a module from Drupal 7. And even with tasks as simple as “Replace file_load() with File::load()”(https://www.drupal.org/node/2321969) you could learn a bit about EntityAPI, new FieldAPI, internal storage API, Unit test API and even fix some non-ideal code or remove external dependency to keep the DI pattern!

As a result of our month-long competition, those who competed were involved in 80+ Drupal 8 issues, and many of them have been resolved and committed to the Drupal core! Keep in mind that those who took part in the competition didn’t have any previous experience with Drupal 8.

So here are the results of our top-three contestants, who are in attendance at DrupalCon Amsterdam this week!

Temoor Gilmutdinov (https://www.drupal.org/u/temoor) - 25 issues: 10 were committed

Yaroslav Kharchenko (https://www.drupal.org/user/2312280) 30 issues: 12 were committed

Mike Sokolovskiy (https://www.drupal.org/u/lokeoke) - 23 issues: 12 were committed

These young developers were not alone. Afterall, when you help the community, the community helps you in return. Thank you to the great mentors that helped throughout:

• @m1r1k

• @andypost

• @podarok

• @dawehner

And of course, a big THANK YOU to our core committers:

@Webchick and @alexpott!

Overall, this was a great internal initiative for our team, motivating a number of our developers to contribute to Drupal 8. In addition to the opportunity to attend DrupalCon, they have also earned valuable experience that will be put to good use in the coming months, as we continue to be involved with the development of Drupal 8. When Drupal 8 launches, initiatives such as this will ensure that Propeople will be in a good place to continue to provide the professional Drupal services that we are so proud of!

Tags: DrupalCon AmsnterdamService category: TechnologyCheck this option to include this post in Planet Drupal aggregator: planetTopics: Community & Events