Getting Drupal Done Interview
by Michael Samuelson (mlsamuelson)
Any seasoned Drupaller will tell you that in addition to Drupal being great software, it's also a great community.
There are a number of folks in the Drupal community that "get it" and make consistent contributions. The following interview is dedicated to uncovering a few of the tips, tricks and practices used by one of those individuals to Get Drupal Done.
Update to Interview with Peter Wolanin
The interview below was conducted before Peter joined Acquia as a senior engineer in June. Since then he's obviously been doing full-time work with Drupal, is using a MacBook Pro with system 10.5 and MAMP as well as the built-in apache and PHP, and added the Komodo IDE as a development tool. However, Peter is still using the same approaches outlined in the interview to get Drupal done.
Interview with Peter Wolanin, aka pwolanin
What sort of work do you do on Drupal?
I maintain a bunch of modules, though I've lagged a bit in updating them since I was putting lots of time into Drupal 6.x development.
I got into Drupal through using it for our local Democratic club, so a number of the modules I maintain are due to that connection.
Describe how Drupal fits into your average workday.
Not much - I work for a small company doing (broadly) biotech R&D. I implemented a chemical inventory system with Drupal for use internally, but that's not something that requires frequent attention.
So, most of the Drupal stuff I get done is during the evening or weekend, or occasionally on my lunch break.
How do you organize your workspace?
For Drupal, it's usually just the laptop and me sitting on the couch.
Describe your development environment (hardware, OS, software). Any favorites regarding productivity?
MacBook with Mac OS 10.4, Xcode installed to get cvs and other utilities. A logitech trackball with the computer on the lap desk.
I've been using JEdit as an editor - it's GPL, has pretty good syntax highlighting, etc. And has a variety of helpful plugins.
On the laptop, default apache 1.33, and I recently installed PHP 5.2.4 from www.entropy.ch for local testing.
MySQL 5.0 community server, with MySQL GUI tools. Colloquy as an IRC client.
Sometime use an old PC with Ubuntu 8.04 as an alternate test platform (e.g. for PostgreSQL).
I visit http://api.drupal.org and http://php.net frequently to check usage or examples.
How do you keep up with Drupal news and developments? What practices do you use to keep from getting bogged down or distracted?
I read the dev list, but have it moved out of my inbox automatically since I don't always have time to look right away. I think that list can be useful for those interested in core development (along, of course with all site admins being subscribed to security announcements). When I have lots of spare time, I look at Planet Drupal and http://groups.drupal.org . When 6.x core development was really heavy, I subscribed to e-mail updates
for all my issues, but now I just hit http://drupal.org/project/issues/user regularly.
Any tips and tricks regarding Drupal productivity?
Don't assume that people are going to see your patch and recognize its importance. Especially for core patches. Even for critical patches you need to keep following up and re-rolling, as well as working to find qualified reviewers. Don't get aggravated when someone finds a typo in a code comment, or a commit means your patch doesn't apply.
Essentially, if a patch is important to you, you need to maintain some ownership of it and advocate for its inclusion. And after the patch is in you should then be a good citizen and help update the documentation, especially when you help effect a core API change.
Oh, and sometimes, just take a break from it and forget about it for a few days (or weeks even).
Share your biggest "breakthrough" or "ah-ha" moment regarding working within the Drupal community.
When I started hanging out more in the IRC channels (#drupal, etc) I was able to get a lot more done. Through this I've built working relationships with other contributors, and I've found it to be really key for helping find people to look at and review patches, post follow-ups, etc.
Any advice for newbie developers on how to Get Drupal Done?
I spent the first several months answering questions in the drupal.org forums. At that point I was still getting a handle on PHP and the Drupal API (note that I had coded C, etc before so I was not starting from scratch), and by answering even trivial questions, I was able to enhance my own confidence that I understood what was going on. In probably half those first posts, I was wrong in what I posted - so that also gave me a chance to learn when someone else posted a comment to say so.
Special thanks to Peter for the interview.