Blog

Angie Byron is Director of Community Development at Acquia. For this interview, during the final day of DrupalCon Amsterdam, we were able to find an empty auditorium. Alas, filming with my brand-new GoPro camera, we got off to a topsy-turvy start...

RONNIE RAY: I’ve had you upside down.

ANGIE BYRON: Oh hahaha!

I go by Angie Byron or webchick, and more people know me as webchick than Angie Byron.

Today, what I love to do at DrupalCons, on the last day of the sprint days, is just walk around all the tables and see what everyone is working on, cause there’s hundreds of people here and they’re all sort of scratching their own itches on everything from Drupal-dot-org to, like, what is the newest coolest content staging thing gonna be?, to how are we going to get Drupal 8 done?

And everybody working together and collaborating with people they don’t get to see all the time, it’s a lot of fun for me.

I feel like we made a lot of really great decisions about the Drupal 8 release management stuff here that we’ll be able to put into practice, and help try and focus efforts on getting the critical issues resolved, trying to clean up the loose ends that we still have, and getting the release out the door faster.

And the other thing I’m going to work on for the next month is something called Drupal Module Upgrader, which is the script that can help contrib modules port their modules to Drupal 8. It automates a lot of that task.

Now that Beta is here it’s a great time for people to update their modules, so I want to work on tools to help facilitate that.

RR: What are you reading, besides books on Drupal?

AB: Not much. Although I love reading kids books, because I have a daughter who’s 16 months now and she loves to be read to. So my latest books I’ve been reading are Where is the Green Sheep? and Go, Dog, Go! and a bunch of Richard Scarry stuff and things like that because she loves to know what everything’s called. She loves books.

There’s a Dr. Seuss book called Oh, The Places You’ll Go! That book is dark, man, that is like a dark book. It’s entertaining. I remember it from when I was a kid but I don’t remember it like that!

RR: Music?

AB: I listen to a lot of old music cause I’m one of those curmudgeonly people who thinks the best music was already made. So, like I’ve been having like a ‘70s rock, ‘80s pop, ‘90s punk rock, like – that’s sort of what’s in my chain all the time. Hair metal, junk like that. How to relive my kid-age stuff.

I think the community has grown to such an enormous size now that I guess one thing I wonder about, – not really worry about– but am curious about, is if can we still maintain that small-knit community feel that we had back when I started, when we were 70 people at a DrupalCon – not the 2,500 people we have now.

It’s cool to kind of walk around DrupalCon, especially on a sprint day, especially because I feel we have retained that – and people are finding people to connect with and cool things to work on and stuff like that.

I think it’s something we all need to collectively be intentional about is, you know, it’s not just enough that Drupal is just a great software project, it’s also about the people and trying to maintain that welcome feeling – that got us all in the door – for generations to come.

So that’s something I would leave as a parting note.