Ode to the Drupal Association

This is an ode to the Drupal Association.

DrupalCI

  1. Yesterday, I stumbled upon Customizing DrupalCI Testing for Projects, written by Ryan “Mixologic” Aslett. It contains detailed, empathic 1 explanations. He also landed d.o/node/2969363 to make Drupal core use this capability, and to set an example.
  2. I’ve been struggling in d.o/project/jsonapi/issues/2962461 to figure out why an ostensibly trivial patch would not just fail tests, but cause the testing infrastructure to fail in inexplicable ways after 110 minutes of execution time, despite JSON API test runs normally taking 5 minutes at most! My state of mind: (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻
    Three days ago, Mixologic commented on the issue and did some DrupalCI infrastructure-level digging. I didn’t ask him. I didn’t ping him. He just showed up. He’s just monitoring the DrupalCI infrastructure!

In 2015 and 2016, I must have pinged Mixologic (and others, but usually him) dozens of times in the #drupal-infrastructure IRC channel about testbot/DrupalCI being broken yet again. Our testing infrastructure was frequently having troubles then; sometimes because Drupal was making changes, sometimes because DrupalCI was regressing, and surprisingly often because Amazon Web Services was failing.

Thanks to those two things in the past few days, I realized something: I can’t remember the last time I had to ping somebody about DrupalCI being broken! I don’t think I did it once in 2018. I’m not even sure I did in 2017! This shows what a massive improvement the Drupal Association contributed to the velocity of the Drupal project!

drupal.org

Of course, many others at the Drupal Assocation help make this happen, not just Ryan.

For example Neil “drumm” Drumm. He has >2800 commits on the Drupal.org customizations project! Lately, he’s done things like making newer & older releases visible on project release pages, exposing all historical issue credits, providing nicer URLs for issues and giving project maintainers better issue queue filtering. BTW, Neil is approaching his fifteenth Drupal anniversary!
Want to know about new Drupal.org features as they go live? Watch the change records — RSS feed available.

In a moment of frustration, I tweeted fairly harshly (uncalled for … sorry!) to @drupal_infra, and got a forgiving and funny tweet in response:

(In case it wasn’t obvious yet: Ryan is practically a saint!)

Thank you!

I know that the Drupal Association does much more than the above (an obvious example is organizing DrupalCons). But these are the ways in which they are most visible to me.

When things are running as smoothly as they are, it’s easy to forget that it takes hard work to get there and stay there. It’s easy to take this for granted. We shouldn’t. I shouldn’t. I did for a while, then realized … this blog post is the result!

A big thanks to everyone who works/worked at the Drupal Association! You’ve made a tangible difference in my professional life! Drupal would not be where it is today without you.

  1. Not once is there a Just do [jargon] and it’ll magically work in there, for example! There’s screenshots showing how to navigate Jenkins’ (peculiar) UI to get at the data you need. ↩︎

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