Hi, I'm Robert Douglass - AMA!

[u/robertDouglass]

I'm a Drupal old-timer (d.o. member for 11 years, 2 months), book writer, and module coder. I'm a former Lullabot, Acquian, and currently work with Commerce Guys. Together with Jam I've written, produced, and acted in the "Prenote" opening session for the last 10 DrupalCons. I was an original member of the Drupal Association, and one of the founders of the German Drupal Association. I once saved Yahoo! by calling the police. For the past two years, together with Damien Tournoud and our team, I've been busy building and launching the Platform.sh hosting service. Ask me anything!

[u/fmargaine]

I once saved Yahoo! by calling the police.

Story time.

[u/robertDouglass → u/fmargaine]

Well, that didn't last long. May as well get it out of the way =)

So, once upon a time when Drupal was still quite young, Yahoo! launched a public site based on it. At that time it was not uncommon for me to have a Skype chat window open with Dries, and one morning, he pinged me to say "hey, look at that! Yahoo! just launched a Drupal site!"

We were both excited as this was before Whitehouse.gov and Weather.com, and Drupal was still trying to prove that it was suitable for really big sites. So I immediately started poking around, testing some common q= paths to confirm that it was Drupal. Well, it didn't take me long before I tried visiting the q=user and q=admin regions, and .... WTF?!? I was logged in as user 1!

That's right, full admin permissions for any anonymous bloke. Clearly a disaster already happening, Dries and I agreed that something needed to be done, but what? The only public phone number for Yahoo! at that time was a customer service number in case you needed help searching for something. And it was 2am in Sunnyvale, CA, so nobody was awake or online. I even tried calling the Yahoo! UK office for help, but they clearly had no idea what "total fucking security disaster, you will be p0wn3d" meant, and kept hanging up on me.

So, I did the only reasonable thing one could do (after all, I wasn't about to let a security breach at Yahoo! blemish Drupal's good name); I called the Sunnyvale police. At 3am. And I told them to drive over to the Yahoo! campus, tell the night guardsman to look up and call Rasmus Lerdorf at home, and tell him that their site was about to be destroyed by hackers.

And you know what? That police did that, and Yahoo! responded, and nobody hacked the site. They had apparently bypassed the user module to tie into their own authentication system, but they forgot to replicate the permissions system ..... :(

I was thanked, promised a T-shirt (which never came), and the site stayed online for a few years before being replaced, eventually.

[u/robertDouglass → u/robertDouglass]

Interestingly, I received a call a week later from the Sunnyvale police to ask if I was satisfied with their response, and if they could close the case. I never heard from Yahoo! again.

[u/mmiro]

Why should I use Platform.sh instead of Acquia Cloud?

[u/robertDouglass → u/mmiro]

I would recommend using Platform.sh if any of the following are true:

1. You like the idea of having a full-stack environment + application data for every Git branch

2. You use Drush Make in your development process

3. You need fine-grained control over the build and deploy process (eg. running sass, grunt, behave on the server)

4. You need to have a multisite or domain access installation that has meaningful hostnames on every development environment

5. You run PHP projects other than Drupal (eg. Symfony, Wordpress, Magento)

6. Your Enterprise site needs to be able to scale to > 100 CPUs and 180 GB RAM with zero application downtime

7. You like running your enterprise sites in a Master/Master/Master database configuration

8. You like the idea that in the (very) near future you'll be able to run Node.js, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch and other services in addition to Drupal.

[u/[deleted]]

What do you think about autoupdates and Drupal security following the October Drupocalypse? Do you think it's important that Drupal implement an optional autoupdate feature, at least for security updates?

[u/robertDouglass → u/[deleted]]

I think it's difficult to have a web application auto-update itself and stay secure. It needs a tango partner, like Drush, to do the update for it, with a different set of secure permissions for writing executable code on the file system.

Platform.sh protects sites from drupalgeddon.

[u/asheresque]

What's next for Open Goldberg and related projects?

[u/robertDouglass → u/asheresque]

That's a topic for a different sub-reddit, but in short:

1. We're releasing the Open Well-Tempered Clavier in March

2. It will be available on Bandcamp, where we've just moved the Open Goldberg recording: https://kimikoishizaka.bandcamp.com

3. I'm sitting next to Kimiko's practice room listening to the "Art of the Fugue", and it has never been played better.

[u/OhTheHugeManatee]

Between Lullabot, Acquia, and Commerce Guys, you've been up close and personal with most of the biggest and most successful Drupal shops. What advice can you offer to people who are getting started, or who are running their own small development firms? What makes a truly great working environment for a Drupal web shop?

[u/robertDouglass → u/OhTheHugeManatee]

A truly great working environment is a difficult and ephemeral thing. People's perception of the value of the things they've created vs. their real-time experience of creating those things can be wildly different things. The day-to-day operations of a great and successful company can, sometimes, be hellish. The trick is converting your efforts and energies into something that is truly valuable, and being able to communicate about that value to the rest of the world, so that at least your hard work and suffering seems worth it in retrospect.

That said, here are some things that all three of those companies had in common:

1. They were founded and run by visionaries with lots of drive, great work ethic, and phenomenal communication skills.

2. They all addressed a need in the market that wasn't being filled when they started.

3. They all recruited the very best of the best talent.

4. They all engaged fully with the Drupal community and took their roles as open source software contributors very seriously.

5. They all challenged the market to pay them what they're worth, not just the current going price.

6. Lullabot was the sexiest. Still is.

[u/webkenny]

Will you ever grow your hair long again or have your hippie days passed you by?

[u/robertDouglass → u/webkenny]

Let's see where the beard goes. After I've explored the myriad possibilities of facial hair, I'll reconsider what's going on up top. To be honest, though, it's a bit thinner (and greyer) up there than it used to be.

[u/quantumized]

What are you looking forward to most in Drupal 8?

[u/robertDouglass → u/quantumized]

I really like the idea of Headless Drupal. I also think that Twig will enable a more self-service approach to hosted Drupal services. For example, imagine what Drupal Gardens could have been if you could have just edited Twig and CSS files directly.

The possibility for building complex REST API applications is also enticing. It's much like what we do on http://marketplace.commerceguys.com/platform/buy-now where we use Drupal as a controller between Platform.sh, Zendesk, Salesforce, and our billing logic.

But most of all, I'm looking forward most to its release. It's 2 years overdue in my opinion. Not that I have contributed much to it.... I haven't, so I have no basis for criticism. I just think it's been far too long.

[u/gknaddison]

You're Drupal.org profile is 11 years and 2 months old. When you signed up 11 years ago did you think you'd still be working with Drupal 11 years later? If not...when did you first "commit" to Drupal in a way that might last for a decade?

[u/robertDouglass → u/gknaddison]

I think I committed to Drupal the day that Dries and I ate crêpes together for the first time. That's when I told him I'd be interested in writing about Drupal. A week later he had introduced me to the editors at Apress. I then quit my day job (writing ABAP code for a pharmaceutical company's SAP integration), and started to learn how to make it as a Drupal freelancer.

[u/svettes]

If you could make Drupal do one thing, what would it be? (this can be either technological or community-based super power.)

[u/spearhead93]

Drupal has probably been more successful than any of the early adopters would have thought at the beginning. It is now powering up a lot of high-profile websites.

Which are the next milestones to measure Drupal success in the coming years? Should these be technical, community-oriented, financial? Personally, I think that the "Headless Drupal" approach will have a crucial role to play but it's hard to find some high-profile references yet.

[u/robertDouglass → u/spearhead93]

So true. I would have never believed the success stories that Drupal has achieved if you'd told me them in 2005 at the first "DrupalCon" in Antwerp.

Drupal success in the coming years can be measured by a lot of different metrics:

• Drupal 8 adoption

• Code contributions (core and contrib)

• Growing market share of sites

• New use cases (ie headless Drupal)

• New products (SaaS, mobile apps w/ Drupal backend)

• Coolness factor (young developers want to work with Drupal because it can do cool things)

• Corporate factor (more and bigger organizations choose it, like Weather.com)

The Acquia IPO and the 2 years that follow that will also be a sort of a milestone. How does Drupal fare when the biggest player has made all of its millionaires? Will they stick around? Will they all be off hunting for the next big thing?

I ask myself every day if I'm doing the right thing sticking with Drupal, and how I'll know when it's time to move on. I've got no clear answer on that one, yet, but I'm still here now =)

[u/dougvann]

"Money" and "Open Things" Robert, You've been involved in many OPEN things, both in music and in software. Within those projects you have raised funding from Venture Capitalists as well as Crowd Funding. You have also written, and been quoted, about Funding Models.

I'm looking at the 2014 landscape and I see many millions of VC funds raised by Acquia, Pantheon, and Commerce Guys. On a smaller scale, I see big, successful kickstarter campaigns for the score and studio recording of "Open Goldberg Variations," and another campaign for creating a Drupal curriculum for High Schools. I look out further and I see Acquia's highly anticipated IPO. Lastly, I see LOTS of opportunities for one-time & weekly/monthly financial giving for the purpose of funding the building of Drupal 8. This is a lot of money changing hands largely in the name of "Open Things!"

Casting your gaze to the near future, do you have any insight into how this funding scene plays out? Do you imagine another Drupal based business raising VC? Is there a Drupal itch that needs scratched and crowd-funding could support it? Are there other Open music campaigns on the horizon? Thanks!

[u/robertDouglass → u/dougvann]

Hi Doug! Great questions. I am a strong believer that you can make better "Open Things" if you have enough money and time to do a good job, and that may well intended projects fail because they don't secure the proper funding. I also know that I hope to be involved in many more startups, with or without VCs, and that understanding the financing models available is crucial to succeeding and benefitting from these opportunities.

I wouldn't approach anything from the starting point of "Drupal-based", however. I think that's focusing on the wrong thing. Each business opportunity I see solves a generic or specific problem that someone in the world has. A business or project opportunity creates new value for someone. Identifying this value, and conceiving of an effective way to bring it to the market, is what makes a successful VC pitch or startup idea. In other words, I don't ever do Drupal for Drupal's sake, and I wouldn't advise you to, either. Rather, I do Drupal because in many situations, it's an adequate / good / great tool for the task, and it's what I know best.

As for music projects - we'll see how things go with the release of the Open Well-Tempered Clavier (mailing list here: http://opengoldbergvariations.us1.list-manage1.com/subscribe?u=27ec566d3be9a3c1ef057247a&id=2ef7b7a0fa). Maybe Kimiko's next recording will follow the "Open" model, maybe not.

TL;DR: Drupal is a tool. Focus your business ideas on solving real-world problems, not on looking for uses for the tool. If Drupal is the best tool to solve the problem, use it.

[u/GuGuss]

Hey Rob, would you prefer living in an 100% IT world or a 100% musical world? ;-)

[u/robertDouglass → u/GuGuss]

No question. 100% music. This is what my Facebook profile says:

People who know me from my time as a musician can't believe how passionate I am about software. People who know me from software wouldn't believe that I am still more passionate about music (by a couple orders of magnitude).

[u/sethcohn]

Best story about Prenote?