The Acquia Podcast

The Acquia Podcast: Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire and guests in conversation on topics in and around Drupal, open source, technology, community, and business. Meet people and hear stories at the interface between the digital and the real. Hear about challenges, successes, and how open source thinking and practice is changing the world.

256: Drupal 8 Certification Crash Course at Texas Camp 2017! 05/04/2017

255: No one wants a website - Don't sell Drupal, move up the value chain! 03/31/2017

255: No one wants a website - Don't sell Drupal, move up the value chain! Episode 255: Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire - keynote address, Drupal Camp London, 2017 See the conversation video at the Acquia Developer Center: Subscribe to the Acquia Podcast in iTunes and rate this episode! https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-acquia-podcast/id1195473066 Subscribe via our RSS feed: --- Thank you, Drupal community - I want to express my sincere thanks to everyone who helped me prepare this presentation, sharing their insights into how Drupal fits into bigger and better ways of doing business. The fact that we can all talk about this so openly while competing for business is one more sign of how special the Drupal community is. I’m so glad you all choose to “open source” some of the ways you are succeeding and help the rest of us along the way! And thank you Drupal Camp London organizers for the invitation to give a keynote address at your conference, and thanks to the audience for your presence and warm reception despite the early hour on Sunday. Drupal isn’t enough anymore 10 years ago, just having a website was transformational. But pretty much every business has one nowadays; they're a commodity. You need something especially good looking, functional, or powerful for it to be special. Your skillset--the ability to make functional, powerful websites--was also transformational, a good base for running a business. Now that is largely a commodity, too. Competitors like Wordpress.com, Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, and others offer solid, attractive, basic websites with lots of useful functionality. And they are only getting easier to use with every release. So don’t sell Drupal! What's the answer? How do you stay relevant and build a sales pipeline today? Don't sell Drupal. Move up the value chain. If you simply receive instructions to put a banner here and a slideshow there--to turn someone else's plan into code and nothing more--you're not where you need to be on that chain. Placing yourself and your business higher up the value-creation chain means offering more than writing code, more than offering to build Drupal websites. You need to offer more: business value. You might have special insights or expertise. You might be able to solve the problems of a particular industry or vertical especially well it. You could deliver value through something you build with Drupal. Drupal might be one of your weapons of choice for facilitating digital transformation, or marketing, or what have you ... and you have a choice: specialize or diversify ... Session Takeaways Why hanging out the Drupal slate isn't enough anymore. Questions and problems that businesses need help with today ... That you may be able to answer. Examples of Drupal-based businesses delivering more value than just Drupal code. My Thanks ... My thanks once again to all of the following people and everyone else whose ideas and actions helped inspire me and help our community: Florian Lorétan - Wunder Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg - Zivtech / Probo.ci Tim Deeson & Christiann Jansen - Deeson Megan Sanicki - Drupal Association Lukas Fischer - NetNode / OpenInbound Dave Ingram And Andrea Rosi - Acquia Lift Adrian Rollet & Ronald Ashri - Roomify Dominique de Cooman - Dropsolid / Cooldrops /episode/index/show/acquia/id/5222792

254: Mumbai Memories - meet Rakesh James 03/16/2017

254: Mumbai Memories - meet Rakesh James My trusty microphone, camera, and I recorded a few great conversations at DrupalCon in Mumbai that have never been released until now. Today, a conversation with , who credits Dries for giving him a way to live and support his family with Drupal. Rakesh is an extraordinary and generous person; he's personally paid that forward, giving others in India the chance to change their lives, too, by teaching Drupal and giving them a shot at a career, too. He's also a . Rakesh told me about the moment he both discovered and fell in love with Drupal. His manager gave him permission to check out Drupal for a project, "I started it with Drupal 5. I got a big error. My senior [colleague] said I could post on Drupal.org because he was sitting far away and could not debug for me. I posted the error ... After one hour somebody from the community replied that it would be better if you started with Drupal 6. That was amazing. If you post it, somebody from the [other side] of the planet replied to me, 'You should do this.' From that amazing [moment] till now, I have that feeling. All the time when you go to the community and post something, you'll be getting the right answer. In an hour's time. That is so amazing." "I feel like when I have gotten something, I should give back to others who are struggling. If they have a little education, know how to play with the computer, I should teach them Drupal. That is the best way of doing it. I spread the word because I got something. The people are around, this magic should be with them also ... So they will have a better life. They'll have a better salary. It's a better way to do that; teach the kids in pre-university colleges. We should teach them. I volunteer my time for that. Two Saturdays a month, we go out to the colleges. Every first Saturday, we have a community meet-up; the other Saturday we go to a college and teach them Drupal." If you have any doubts about Rakesh's sincerity in all this, watch how moved he is in the video from about 10:30 to 11:50 :-) DrupalCon Asia Mumbai 2016 was almost exactly a year ago now. Of all the conferences I have been to, Mumbai was probably my favorite. I met an incredible, active, enthusiastic Drupal community that welcomed everyone with open arms, incredible food (!), and a LOT of selfies :-) See the conversation video at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/254-mumbai-memories-meet-rakesh-james Subscribe to the podcast! Subscribe to the and rate this episode! Subscribe via our . /episode/index/show/acquia/id/5176017

253: Mumbai Memories - meet Abhishek Anand 03/16/2017

253: Mumbai Memories - meet Abhishek Anand My trusty microphone, camera, and I recorded a few great conversations in Mumbai that have never been released until now. Today, talking about full-time contribution to Drupal 8 while building the Acquia Lightning distribution, passion for community and paying it forward in open source, and Drupal in India with Abhishek Anand. At the time of recording, Abhishek had been a Drupalist "for seven years and two months." He started using Drupal to prepare for a job interview for an internship while he was still studying and said he wished he'd discovered it sooner. It would have saved him a lot of coding to make websites for his college. Later on, Abhishek even turned down jobs at bigger companies to stay where he was and doing Drupal, "I just loved this job. And seven years later this journey in Drupal has been exciting." Though he is a capable coder, Drupal's toolset made his life and work easier, "For doing anything else, you had to write a lot of code, even for small things. With Drupal, I can sit with someone who knows nothing about PHP or coding and they can build a website. At the same time, the biggest thing was that I can also be a part of this community that's built this. Whatever I'm building, can go back to the Drupal community. Having code written by me on Drupal.org is exciting for me. Someone else will use my code ... When someone files an issue [on one of my modules], I know that they are using it. It's a great feeling knowing other people are using the code I am writing. It's an amazing feeling." DrupalCon Asia Mumbai 2016 was almost exactly a year ago now. Of all the conferences I have been to, Mumbai was probably my favorite. I met an incredible, active, enthusiastic Drupal community that welcomed everyone with open arms, incredible food (!), and a LOT of selfies :-) -- See the conversation video at the Acquia Developer Center: -- Subscribe to the Acquia Podcast in iTunes and rate this episode! Subscribe via our RSS feed: /episode/index/show/acquia/id/5176013