Community

One of my favorite podcasts is Make Me Smart, hosted by public radio's Kai Ryssdal and Molly Wood. It's part of the Marketplace family of shows by American Public Media and is a friendly, casual look at the "big picture" of many of the stories of the day. One of their running themes is the "Make Me Smart question" that they ask everyone they interview, and encourage listeners to write or tweet or vlog in with their own answers to:

What is something you thought you knew that it later turned out you were wrong about?

It took me a while to decide what my own answer to that would be, but when I finally did I realized it was going to be way too long for a tweet to explain, so here we go.

Learning is important. I trust that is a non-controversial statement.

Much has been said about learning styles, and I will not repeat it here. However, something I see less talked about is learning phases. Specifically, I want to talk about two distinct phases of learning: Up and Out.

While learning usually is applied to a skill, the concept I'm talking about applies to anything: Learning a new skill, getting accustomed to a new community, or culture, or country, or tradition, or religion, or practice, or... pretty much anything.

Recent events in the PHP community in the past few days have reminded me of an important point that bears repeating. Quite simply: There are always community standards, and if you are not upholding them then you are actively undermining them.

Earlier this week a fellow PHP public figure tweeted saying that I write great session proposals for conferences. After I finished blushing I reached out to him and we talked a bit about what it was he likes about them. (Whatever I'm doing right, I want to know to keep doing it!)

Based on that, I figured it would be educational to dissect how I go about writing session proposals for conferences and hope that conference organizers don't catch on to my tricks. :-)

After my last post, a number of people asked if I was leaving Drupal all together. Perish the thought. :-) However, after a decade at Palantir.net and the five-year Wagnerian Saga that was the Drupal 8 development cycle (complete with singing), I have been asking myself "What next?"

Well, what do I like to do? I like to build. I like to teach. I like to make things better. I like to work with smart people, as colleagues, as community partners, and as customers. I want to be able to have an impact in making something better for other people.

To that end, I am pleased to announce that today is my first day as Director of Runtimes, Integrations, Engines, and Services for Platform.sh.

Today is the end of an era. After just over ten and a half years, this is my last day with Palantir.net.

The past decade has seen Palantir grow from a company of 5 to a company of over 30. From a company that wouldn't touch the GPL with a ten foot pole to a strong advocate for Open Source, Free Software, and Drupal in particular. From a company that did mostly subcontracting work for design firms to an end-to-end soup-to-nuts agency. From having two desktop screen sizes anyone cared about to an infinite scale of screens from 3"-30". From a world where IE 5 for Mac was considered a good browser to one where once again, the latest Microsoft browser is actually good. (Everything old is new again, I suppose.)

After ten years with the same company (which in Internet years is about a millennium) I certainly have stories. There's plenty I could say about Palantir, most of it good. :-) In the end, though, there's one thing in particular that has kept me here for so long.

Palantir.net is the kind of place that has your back.

A few weeks ago, I went on an uncharacteristic Twitter rant. At the suggestion of a follower or two I've turned it into a blog post for posterity. The following is a direct repeat of that Twitter stream, very lightly edited and paragraphed.

Three years ago, I ended 2012 with a call to the Drupal community to Get Off the Island. Mainly I wanted to encourage Drupal developers to prepare themselves for the major changes coming in Drupal 8 by connecting with other PHP projects and with the broader community, and called on people to attend non-Drupal conferences in order to visit and learn from other communities.

Two weeks ago (hey, I've been busy and trying to sleep for once), after 1716 days of work by more than 3312 people the Drupal community finally released Drupal 8, the latest release of the best community-driven web software in the world. The blogosphere is already filled with congratulatory blog posts celebrating the immense accomplishment, and deservedly so.

A number of people recently have asked me how I feel about Drupal 8's release, especially around the PHP community. Overall, my answer has to be that I'm happy, but not satisfied.