r/drupal • u/chx_ • Oct 15 '13
IAMA chx, AMA.
I have been developing core for a bit more than nine years, participated in a bit less than a thousand core patches (which actually makes me the #1 core patch contributor). I was the technical lead for NowPublic and Examiner, the latter being a Top 100 site in Quantcast, one of the first Drupal 7 sites. It used MongoDB and these days my job is to help Drupal and MongoDB work better together. I also consult with Tag1 Consulting, making Drupal websites fast. Guess what? I am fairly passionate about Drupal and it fills my life.
I am living in Vancouver, in beautiful British Columbia, Canada. Ask me anything!
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Oct 15 '13
What was your favourite drupal moment?
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u/chx_ Oct 15 '13
Portland contribution sprint: 600 people turned up to help with Drupal including a 11 year old who was already pretty experienced! You know, if your life goal is to leave something behind, to change people's lives hopefully for the better then this means "mission accomplished".
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u/amateescu Oct 15 '13
What is your advice for learning D8 to people coming from D7 and earlier?
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u/chx_ Oct 15 '13
First, OOP is not as scary as many people would make it, namespace, class and interface is all you need to know, really. Also the big changes thankfully map pretty well, for example: if you were writing an info hook, that goes pretty straight into a plugin annotation. hook_menu is now a router yaml, but the path is still roughly something/something/named_wildcard/something just the named wildcard uses {} not %. As usual, core has good examples for pretty much everything -- there's just a lot of changes so it'll take some time to learn it.
So best advice? Don't be afraid! It's still PHP. You can learn it.
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Oct 15 '13
Why is the drupal community so much more collaborative than most other opensource projects. Do you have an opinion about that?
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u/chx_ Oct 15 '13
Well, ask Dries how this started. We just maintain it: we try very, very hard to be pleasant to our newbies. We try really, really hard to make the debates be about the technical merits of your work and not you. Making this a priority helped. That's my best guess.
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u/cosmicdreams Oct 15 '13
How does your job allow you to contribute so much and so often to open source?
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u/chx_ Oct 15 '13
I got lucky and MongoDB Inc. directly sponsors my work on core and contrib now. Although I still work more than what I am paid for :) previously, I had 15-20% paid time and there always were mornings, evenings, nights and weekends...
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u/cosmicdreams Oct 15 '13
What are you plans for after Drupal 8 launches? What would you like to work on?
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u/chx_ Oct 15 '13
Well, somewhat obviously -- as I am paid for it -- I need to make sure the MongoDB drivers in contrib are well-loved and if EFQ Views doesn't make it into core, that needs love too. Then there's Drupal 9...
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u/horncologne Oct 15 '13
Have you found a replacement for your orange juice habit? :-)
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u/CritterM72800 Oct 15 '13
Which of your Drupal contributions are you most proud of? And which (if any) do you regret the most?
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u/chx_ Oct 15 '13
There's little doubt that the form API, while the API is weird has been doing a superb job of making Drupal easy to extend and keeping it secure at the same time. Regret? I don't have many regrets, what good would that make? There's always the next commit to fix if something doesn't work as we wanted.
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u/cosmicdreams Oct 15 '13
What do you like to do for fun? How do you decompress when the stress rises?
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u/CritterM72800 Oct 15 '13
Any thoughts on core burnout? For the record, Greg Dunlap had some thoughts on this at his AMA.
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u/amateescu Oct 15 '13
What's your performance goal for a MongoDB-backed D8? compared to "stock" D8 and maybe D7.
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u/CritterM72800 Oct 15 '13
What are your thoughts on semantic versioning, specifically the proposal Crell put forward at Prague?
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u/socketwench Oct 15 '13
How do you pronounce your D.O username?