This post is part of an ongoing series detailing the new personas that have been drawn up as part of our Drupal.org user research.

Kate Marshalkina has been using Drupal for three and a half years. A web developer by trade, Kate was approached by a friend who wanted her to do Drupal work with him. After doing some research on the system, Kate agreed.

“It’s quite difficult to learn Drupal without paid work because it requires a lot of time and experience to learn the Drupal way of doing things,” Kate said. “I had joined a security startup, and a security company obviously cares about security on the web. So we decided to use Drupal because it’s a safe, well known open source system. I learned a lot while I was working on my tasks, but I spent a lot of my free time to learn Drupal. Once I started learning, I couldn’t stop— I’d previously worked with other content management with less documentation and information and then I started learning Drupal and... because of the community, and all of the learning resources and videos that are available, I was hooked."

“After working with Drupal for three months, I started my blog and not long after that I presented a session at DrupalCamp Moscow. Now, I’m a Drupal lover after three and a half years working with the platform."

Drupal.org: A Valuable Resource

Every day, Kate checks in to Drupal.org: she says she visits the site to find new modules, check the issue queues, and check API documentation. “I’m very comfortable with Drupal.org, but it was hard getting used to it when I started. Initially, it was a question for me why I should even use Drupal.org, and I didn’t know what the benefits are.

"I really like my dashboard on Drupal.org,” said Kate. “It’s a great page where I can see daily updates on my issues — and of course I follow a lot. It’s nice that I can also easily view updates on issues in critical bugs in core and so on, see crucial updates, core releases, and of course I also follow the Drupal Planet RSS feed."

Drupal Planet is one of the most helpful tools for Kate when it comes to getting new Drupal knowledge, and she often encourages her colleagues to follow it. "I think Drupal Planet is an exciting part of Drupal.org. It’s a great resource for Drupal related articles for everyone; beginner to expert, frontend to backend to sysadmin, the information for all these people is usually very high quality on Drupal Planet. When I’m working with fellow developers who have questions, I always ask them to look on Drupal Planet because I know that the information there is of a high quality, and that anyone can find the knowledge they need in there."

It's About the People

Some of the recent changes made on Drupal.org, including the addition of user pictures to the issue queue, have made Kate’s Drupal experience vastly better.

“[The pictures] are great because it makes Drupal.org more personalized, and you can more easily remember the people you talked to because of their photos. And, it reminds people that Drupal isn’t just a CMS, it’s a community, and the people are important.”

“It’s a big question for me how to enroll younger developers,” said Kate. “Looking at the contribution opportunities, [new people] may feel like they can’t be a contributor. So sometimes, they may encounter a bug they don’t know how to fix and think, “oh no, a bug!” instead of recognizing it as an opportunity to learn and grow. If we can encourage more people to become contributors, they will benefit from it and Drupal will benefit from them."

Kate’s advice for new Drupalers is to “start right out and register on Drupal.org. Share modules, create patches, learn how to use git and so on… it’s not easy, but it’s worth it."

Growing With the Project

As for herself, Kate hopes to increase her skill level by contributing to Drupal 8 core.

"I participated in DrupalCon Amsterdam, and really liked what Dries said about getting more benefits to small companies who contribute so that it will be easier for employers to understand why they spent their time and pay for developers on core. I would be much more experienced if I could participate in Drupal core development."

"I also want to someday give a session at DrupalCon,” Kate added. "I give a lot of sessions in my local community, camps and so on. I’ll be speaking at Moscow Drupal Camp in November, but hope to speak at a DrupalCon soon."

We all wish you the best of luck, Kate, and hope to see you on a stage at DrupalCon soon!

Personal blog tags: drupal.org user researchpersona interviews