Migrated from Medium

I used to have a short blog on Medium. I have copied the main stories here as it's probably best to consider Medium "abandoned" these days...

2017 has been a really interesting year for me in our lovely Drupal community. I think I have learned (or realised that I have yet to fully learn) a few lessons that have helped me along the way.

I want to just list them for the time being and then come back to each one over a few weeks to go into detail about what they mean to me.

So, this year (or maybe the last couple of years) I realised:

I am happy to see that many people are doing a really good job of writing up about what happened at DrupalCon Vienna 2017. I canā€™t do a better job than that already done so Iā€™m going to try and take a different approach and talk about how all the things that happened made me feel. Buckle-up, this might get emotionalā€¦

Or, why Driesā€™ interesting article is missing incredibly valuable data but thatā€™s fair because that data is really hard to collectā€¦

Iā€™m very happy that Dries had had the opportunity to update his blog post, ā€œWho sponsors Drupal development?ā€ as it does create an interesting picture about the project and community I care so much about.

I donā€™t think it will come to the surprise to many, though, that I am left feeling frustrated that it concentrates on code-contribution, though.

My Drupal user profile says I have been around for ten years now. Itā€™s a bit of a lie in some ways. You see, there is a very big difference between using Drupal and being part of the Drupal Communityā€¦

May 2011 was when I really entered that community. I had not that long come out (L, B, T, Q; one or more of these, Iā€˜m easily confused) and remember being dropped off outside the venue of Drupal7Camp in Leeds, feeling absolutely terrified whether I would be accepted by the people inside etc.