This is a transcript. For the video, see LINK.
[00:00:00] Michael Meyers: Hello, and welcome toTag1 Team Talks, the blog and podcast of Tag1 Consulting.
We're commemorating the 20th anniversary of Drupal with an interview series, featuring community leaders talking about their Drupal experiences. I'm Michael Meyers, the managing director of Tag1. Tag1 is the number two all time contributor to Drupal. We build large-scale applications for companies in every sector using Drupal as well as many other technologies.
We're also one of the few official providers of Drupal 7 Extended Support, and it can help you continue to run and build on Drupal 7 after it reaches end of life next year. I am really excited to have David Strauss on the show today. I could go on and on for the rest of the show about all the amazing things that David's done but I'm eager to get to the interview.
So I'm just going to highlight a couple of things. David is really well known in the Drupal community. He's been a prolific contributor for over 15 years now in, in almost every area. He is [00:01:00] an advisory board member of the Drupal Association. A member of the drupal.org infrastructure team. He's on the Drupal security team.
He's a contributor to core and many contributed modules, so he's really been an amazing asset to the community. David's an expert in performance and scalability databases and all things, infrastructure. He's helped amazing organizations, the Wikimedia Foundation, internet archive, creative commons, as well as countless enterprises deal with challenges at scale that I think few people ever get to see.
He is the co-founder and technical director of Four Kitchens, which is an agency that is really well known in the Drupal Community, and he went on to be the co-founder and CTO of Pantheon, which everybody in the community has heard of. And we're going to talk more about those later. But before we get started I just wanted to personally, thank you, David, for all the help and support that you've [00:02:00] given me over the years.
And I, and I hope that this gives our listeners just a little bit of insight into your character and how amazing you are as a person. You know, I, I always think back to this one experience and you helped me in, in many ways. But back in the early days of my startup NowPublic, we had an offsite at one of the DrupalCons you know, a hackathon for a couple of days.
And you came over on your own personal time to help us out, you work magic with our servers. You know, we were working with amazing people in the community. Tag1 was helping me that's how I met them, you know Chx you know, top Drupalers. And you did things in hours that blew all of us away and it would have taken us weeks, if we could have done it.
And I remember you reaching out to the founder of Ubuntu or something. And, I mean, it was crazy what you were doing and and you did it just to help us out just to see us be successful. And I, I. I'm forever [00:03:00] grateful and appreciate it. And so you know, I just want to thank you again for your help over the years.
And for joining me today on this show, I know you're a crazy busy guy.
[00:03:11] David Strauss: Thank you. I still remember working on that. and I still remember the Scotch sent me, as a little thank you for the contributions I made. The Port Ellen and the Rollercoaster, if I recall.
[00:03:27] Michael Meyers: Wow, well, I'm a big Islay fan and you know, Port Ellen isn't around anymore.
So I'm really glad that you enjoyed it. The least I could do. So just to set the stage I want to talk a little bit about your background and career. Then we'll dive more into community contributions, your experience with the platform itself. But to kick things off you know, you've been a member of the Drupal community since 2007 over 15 years now, how [00:04:00] did you first discover Drupal?
[00:04:02] David Strauss: So I was it all kind of is wrapped up in the story of early days at Four Kitchens where we were not originally founded as a Drupal studio. We started - actually some of our first projects were on MediaWiki. Because I was involved in some projects at the Wikimedia Foundation, especially some of their early fundraising systems.
And so I just had a lot of exposure to the Wiki platform and we were working on launching a local online. And at the time we were hoping to move into print publication called that other paper, and we built a website. Initially on MediaWiki, but we were just running into these barriers on what it could do, and really like looking back on it in my experience today, it was kind of a, a silly choice to, to move forward with Wiki software for publication.
But [00:05:00] eventually I got exposed to Drupal. We were only, I think, a couple months before launching maybe not even that. And I basically said like, this is so much closer to what we need. We should rebuild on this. And so we basically got heads down, ported the theme work that we had done on MediaWiki over to Drupal and launched on Drupal in less than a month.
And that website that we made for that other paper eventually got some exposure where there was a firm up in New York not around anymore, but they're called, they were called Plum TV and they they stumbled on ours. And realized that it was actually really demonstrative of what they wanted too.
Um, so we scrambled to put together an office. I still remember us going to Ikea picking up furniture to put in our living room because we, we, we had this client that was going to be potentially [00:06:00] signing with us and they wanted to visit our office and we didn't really have an office so that time, so we basically scrambled to make everything happen.
Um, and that was also one of our first major clients that we worked on for, for Drupal projects. And that just one thing led into another. We did some projects that were outside of Drupal at the time too. We did some - I remember one of the early blogs we had possibly our first paying customer was a $200 blog project on WordPress.
And why $200. I don't mean per hour or like any other measure of unit that was the project cost. So, um but we really found our our legs in the Drupal community because at the time WordPress was very focused on a blogging use case almost exclusively [00:07:00] and Drupal was the place where people were looking at it as anything from a content management framework to a hub before for other online interactivity.
[00:07:14] Michael Meyers: How did you meet Todd - was one of your co-founders at Four Kitchen. I'm curious how, how did Four Kitchens come about?
[00:07:23] David Strauss: We was entirely founded out of a satire magazine at the University of Texas at Austin for still around a publication that originally started in 1997, called the Texas Travesty.
Todd, Kris so it was founded by four people from the Travesty, Todd, Kristen, Aaron, and me. All of us had had leadership positions at the Travesty and experience working together through deadlines and and juggling it with other obligations. Say [00:08:00] academically and professionally. And so we knew we could actually spend time in a pressure cooker on projects, and and still like want to actually grab brunch on the weekend.
Uh, and that's, that's not true for everyone who's - who's just a friend or a professional acquaintance. So we formed that company that, that started in 2006, I believe as, as founding, as a company, but that was before we got really into Drupal. And I juggled that with my academic work for a good year or two before graduating.
[00:08:36] Michael Meyers: Oh, I'm a, I'm a huge fan of Four Kitchens. You know, we’ve occasionally done some work together. The team had the opportunity to hang out with Todd at various different conferences and he's amazing. And then the developers, I mean, it's, it's a really well-known agency and it's continued to do amazing work.
Um, you went from Four Kitchens to Pantheon. [00:09:00] You've grown Pantheon from an idea into a billion dollar company, which is insane. How
did, how did Pantheon come about? And how did you meet, you know Josh and Zach and, and the folks at Chapter Three you were running a competing agency.
[00:09:23] David Strauss: Well, I almost hesitate to frame it as competing because we went for such different projects where I don't know that we ever bid on a project competitively against Chapter Three here in San Francisco.
Any time we ever worked with them, it was often in a collaborative fashion, either on community projects or in attempts to to bid on other projects. So we've always had pretty good terms that way, but like, honestly, like even agencies that bid against each other in the Drupal space, [00:10:00] there's a sort of almost sibling relationship between agencies, especially historically where we would we would furiously compete with each other for projects.
And then all, all grab beers at DrupalCon that’s it. And that's not completely unique to the Drupal space. I know other industries where people have these, these sort of respectfully competitive environments, but in any case, um there's a, there's quite a story around the whole progression here and it's it's, it's like one step after the other.
And in retrospect, it's very clear how all of, all of these things that seem to be leaps happened. a lot of it goes back to early work I was doing with with folks like Narayan around Drupal.org, where for a long time Drupal.Org was the most, [00:11:00] challenging site that Drupal ran in terms of scale, in terms of the amount of traffic, it ran the users.
This has not been the case for over 10 years, but for a while it was. We would dive in as a community to keep drupal.org alive. And it really was about that precarious that like it would come down to, okay, we need to patch this thing in core or this other implementation in order to just stop Drupal.org from going down again.
Um, because we were, we were seeing major increases of traffic at the time as the community was growing under those circumstances. And what happened is, is that as an open source community, we always had that ethos in the sense that like the work we did on drupal.org was never intended to be proprietary in any sense.
But that didn't change the fact that it was still proprietary in practice. There's [00:12:00] this odd threshold around open source and free software where a lot of work happens privately. There's just too much work to actually make it public. that the actual process of publishing it, releasing it, sharing it with the community packaging it. That's an enormous amount of work. And some projects have no interest necessarily in having their work be proprietary in intent. In absence of going through any process to release work to the community. It's what happens in practice. What really convinced me that some things needed to change around this a bit in this space was that I was working on a project.
Um, I, I forget what client it was for. I think it might've been with some of the NBC Universal folks and [00:13:00] back it was very common for us to share the patches that we had used on drupal.org with customers or websites that needed to scale a lot of whether it was just some casual emails to share it with them or whether it was actually working as consultants on the projects and what really convinced me that things needed to change was that I got an email, I think, from someone at NBC Universal, that they had made an improvement to one of the patches that we had shared with them, for their site in order to, have it, be more flexible. I forget whether it was around database replication or page caching.
And it was obviously an improvement in the sense that it was exactly the sort of thing that I wanted to roll back into drupal.org and out to other people that had these patches. But there were two problems I saw at the time. One was already evident, which was that people who patched these sites often got into a bit of a tar pit around getting further [00:14:00] updates to the site because they would struggle to to integrate those patches into a newer release of Drupal. Especially once the consultants had left the project and it was under maintenance. but the other that really influenced me was the idea that I didn't realize. I realized we didn't have a great way to distribute these improvements to other people who are running the same patch.
Like I could send it to them, but it was really unlikely to actually get into their code. because once things were patched this way, it felt pretty brutal because it was - Each site would run the patches specifically that they needed to get through the challenges they had faced, because why would you apply more patches than you absolutely needed to?
So what we ended up with was a, um quite literal patchwork of, of code bases. And one of the what I, one of the early projects that I did was pull together these patches into what people have come up with [00:15:00] various terms to refer to us like a spork or a friendly fork of Drupal, which, um had had its life as Pressflow.
Um, It took Drupal 5 through 7, primarily, mostly 5 and 6 added support for external page caching, database replication, um and other optimizations to the way that certain things interacted with the caching to prevent stampedes. And provided this as a combined release that had the patches integrated, tested together and would release in a timely fashion with upstream releases of Drupal. So that once you were running this, you would still be in a position to get security releases and bug fixes from, from the community. It also provided a vector for us to share improved patches for some of this work, where if we made the database replication a little more flexible and we knew it was strictly an improvement, we could actually get that out to people in the next Pressflow.
Pressflow release. [00:16:00] So that was amazing at opening the door to the idea of people could get their hands on these impressions. Without having to basically personally know someone on the Drupal.org infrastructure team, but this, this was around the era that cloud was starting to get its legs and, and every chapter of his story is, is one of getting these advancements into more and more hands by reducing the barriers to entry. Because here we have this modified version of Drupal that has great support for doing things like throwing Squid or Varnish in front for page caching, throwing a database replica has behind it. Using - making better use of things, like say Memcached, but now we're getting feedback from people that, oh, I've installed, Pressflow.
I'm not seeing a big performance improvement just from installing it. And then we have to explain. [00:17:00] It's not that it actually directly provides the performance bump it's that it supports all this other technology you can implement and integrate it with for your for your a hundred thousand dollar Drupal project that you're clearly working on. Right. And so, and then of course we get a response back. It's like, well, I mean, this is. A virtual machine somewhere, or we don't have the time or the expertise to set up these things. Can you provide me some pointers on that? So Josh comes along - one of Pantheons co-founders now and sets up this project called Project Mercury Which is designed to just ratchet that barrier to entry down.
One more big step. This is creating Amazon, Amazon machine images. AMIs. That pulled together, Pressflow, Varnish, Memcache and a well-tuned mySQL configuration. And this for the first time actually introduced to something where you can take some [00:18:00] just well-defined steps to deploy something at a reasonable cost and with, or without a ton of complexity and actually start to get it take advantage of these traffic scaling capabilities from things like caching, the pages in something like Varnish.
And that was what started really unlocking the door to a lot of people who were capable of we're we're in a position to deploy these machine images. but not necessarily in a position to to deploy a clustered infrastructure say at some provider like Rackspace or Savvis at the time. and then of course, each step of the way, it's just a story of getting barriers to entry closed. So we get these machine images out there and now Josh is like talking to me about, okay, we have these machine images out there and we're having the exact same problem we had with the patches from, from drupal.org, which is okay. Now we make some improvements to these configurations.
We have a better VCL file [00:19:00] for, for Varnish. Now, how do we get that out to people? Okay. So now we need to bring all these things under Management. So I come back into the project. I had been doing work on the side with this supercomputing management system called B config 2 like BCF G2, primarily from Argonne National Labs.
I don't think that the project is maintained anymore, but it was, it was basically one of the next generation management systems that was designed to be way more modern than something like CFEngine, but has been supplanted in terms of philosophy now by tools like say Chef and then further supplanted by by more declarative infrastructure style systems like Terraform.
But at the time, there were still a question of how do you manage fleets of machines with management agents and and [00:20:00] focus efforts efficiently on that. So we pulled all these machines into, to B config 2. It also had a nice model where they could own the machine and they could basically subscribe to the way the configuration worked and have it apply.
So now these machines are under management. We can actually get changes, not only to Pressflow and these patches out to people, but even the configuration around it, which is really awesome because now we can make changes to core and a supportive, supportive changes to something like Varnish. And then now we're like at DrupalCon 2010 in San Francisco.
I'm hanging out with I think so the Chapter Three people at their booth, they're showing off some of the Project Mercury stuff, and now we're getting now we're getting like pings from people in the community of that's awesome that you've released this - a machine image. How could I just swipe a credit card to get this?
So this is, this is actually a story of like somewhat [00:21:00] getting to product market fit, well before even having done anything official for like Pantheon to have even its name, because we realized there were this, there, there was this gap there. and it was becoming clear at that point that like, the mission around things like Pressflow and Project Mercury was starting to exceed the the resources of what could be done on the side at agencies.
Um, say as supplemental effort to existing projects or as time we'd carve out on the side, because as anyone who runs an agency knows, the cashflow even month to month can be really tight. And it, it means that like, you don't necessarily just have the leeway to do massive community contributions.
I mean, Tag1, I mean, it's particularly impressive, like how much has been carved out to actually contribute back to the community, given [00:22:00] the agency structure, it's, it's just, I know how challenging that is. But that became more and more clear. And then that's actually what we built as the very, very first version of, of something that people could try out with Pantheon.
And it's, it's not, it doesn't actually share infrastructure design with the current Pantheon platform because like spawning, a virtual machine per website has scaling issues, both upwards and downwards. But it's what allowed us to show the product market fit around that. and that has propelled us to continue to be involved in a lot of the Drupal World, largely around these infrastructure questions around how do you manage Drupal sites?
How do you keep them updated? How do you build them out? How do you configure them? So if you look at. Say a lot of our contributions. We, we have an interesting balance because like a lot of our [00:23:00] contributions are, say 10% on the Drupal site and 90% on the infrastructure side, where, okay. If we do a little bit of tweaking on Drupal here, then it can work with these changes here in PHPs engine or or these caching approaches or this other infrastructure that we work on.
[00:23:19] Michael Meyers: Yeah. You guys have been amazing about contributing to a lot of other projects and the interaction of these things with Drupal benefits Drupal, as well as these communities. It's, it's so cool to hear that, that you said like looking back, it's a clear logical progression of how things came together.
As agencies, we really struggled with replicating these environments we create for customers. It's really it, it really inflated the cost of projects, which made it harder to close deals. And so you know platforms like Pantheon have, have really made it doable and things like [00:24:00] Pressflow.
Now Public used Pressflow like I know firsthand. I mean, how much, those things led to commercial adoption of Drupal. I don't think that Drupal would be what it is today without that component, because all of these organizations require performance, scalability, replication - all of these enterprise components come directly from that work.
And so it's been unbelievably influential on the success of Drupal. And, and this is a good segue to talk more about your community experience and your other contributions. And there are, there are so many ways to contribute to Drupal, and it's important to talk about the fact that it isn't just code you've contributed to documentation.
You work on the security team, you've put on some amazing events you know, talked to countless events. Do you remember one of your earliest contributions or even your [00:25:00] first contribution and, and how you got started on your contribution journey? And, and what do you recall about that experience?
Like I remember you used to be pretty difficult to contribute.
[00:25:13] David Strauss: It was both harder and easier to contribute. It was harder to contribute in this sense that it was literally CVS at the time for version control. When I first started at Drupal, Drupal was the only project I was using that that used CVS. I had almost every other project I was on used something like say Subversion or even other distributed tools that were still in like the competitive space before it gets solidified, um like consolidated a lot of popularity in that space.
The - I struggled to know what my very first contribution was, because I think my, I think my earliest contributions at least most substantial were [00:26:00] still on the infrastructure side for Drupal. Like I was, I mean, I even remember setting up the conference room where we took over the boardroom at one laptop per child and in Cambridge to, to upgrade Drupal.org from was, it was either 5 to 6 or 6 to 7.
I think it might've been from 5 to 6 at that time. This was back when almost every heavy lift by the community was basically “Let's do a barn raising” exercise. I, I, it's hard for me to characterize it any other way, because it was basically that we're all gonna come together intensely for a week and just push it over this threshold.
The - and it was always those infrastructure changes that drove me into these other contributions. Like I definitely, I remember working on some of the earliest VCL that was shared among the community. like I think that [00:27:00] to some degree, almost all of the, the VCL that people pick up at least to throw onto Varnish to use with Drupal at this point, probably trace their lineage back to some of the stuff that I worked on with some of the people like Narayan at the time.
Just to to get it through the door because it was, it requires such a narrow, narrowly available set of skills in the sense of someone who understands how Drupal thinks about caching and session management, but also someone who's familiar with say how the HTTP state machine for proxying thinks and how Varnish thinks about caching and logic.
So it - well, it was pretty rarefied there to actually get those contributions in. And then the most substantial ones that I can think of still relate to like management of Drupal, where I spent a lot of time as one of the tactical or architectural [00:28:00] leads on the initial configuration management initiative that went into Drupal 7 on some of the stuff we did for Field API and Entity API.
Especially managing configuration of that and schema around that. I would say a lot of what I've contributed is not even just through code itself, specifically to Core, but through the conceptual idea that almost none of the code and Pressflow actually directly got merged into Drupal.
The influence was conceptual in the sense that it, it showed the value of these approaches and little bit of a fire under, under some of the Drupal Core to get it done, but without too much urgency in the sense that we got a chance to do it right. because it was never the goal in a Pressflow of, of building solutions that would work for everyone.
Um, it - the goal was [00:29:00] to to unlock the latest performance and scalability technology. And then we would revisit those questions in ways that would be much more compatible for the long tail. As things went into Drupal core, and many of those concepts became supported as part of Drupal 7. Like the external page caching.
I mean, it's, it's hard to think about now, but Drupal 6 out of the box does not support the idea of actually externally caching pages because it starts a session every single time you make a request if you don't already have a session. The like it's, it would be inconceivable today to, to think it works that way, but it, but it did.
And I mean, we're not even that far past it, like at the beginning of this you were talking, talking about like long-term support on Drupal 7, which is the first release that didn't work that way. So that's, that's always been neat and then I've gone on to work on a lot of things around some of the security space, like right now, like for the last few [00:30:00] years I've been involved in getting Drupal's Auto Update design in place, which is super duper challenging for Drupal because we have so many more challenges than, than WordPress in this space because of the way that we bridge things with Composer which I also means we're going to have a solution that I think is going to be kind of mind blowing too. I and we're doing a solution that is actually, I think, going to level up much of the PHP space as, as we work with projects like Typo3 and Joomla around some of these capabilities.
[00:30:36] Michael Meyers: I I remember when I first looked at, at triple I, it was before 4 or 5 or around that. And I remember like looking at the number of database queries, looking into session, then session management and sitting there, like, I think it was Boris Mann who ultimately convinced me to adopt Drupal. And I was just like “How does this work? I don't understand how this could possibly work and not fall over?” And it, [00:31:00] and it, it worked really well and it got better. And I've talked to a lot of people in this 20 Years of Drupal series, which has been so much fun, but you're the first person to bring up these unsung heroes.
Unseen contributions. And the critical influence that the that these things like the infrastructure have had the, the ideas and how they've shaped and formed. A lot of what's happened in Drupal and you know, it's really great to hear about that because there are folks like Narayan Newton, who you mentioned, who a lot of people in the community probably don't know Narayan, and he might like that.
But you know, there are so many people that that don't get an issue credit on drupal.org that are making amazing contributions. And again, not just in code that we, we should recognize and, and value for what it is. [00:32:00] So you've made - you, you've talked about so many awesome areas that have had such a major impact.
Is there one that stands out as something that you are like, that just swells you with pride where you're like, yeah. You know, like it was so cool to do that, or you know, you talked about helping the DA with these barn raising events, like is there something that really is particularly special?
[00:32:28] David Strauss: Let's see. I mean, there definitely is some funny stories of solutions that I didn't expect would ever be still around that I worked on. Like, like I hammered out over one of the work sessions out in San Francisco. Before, way before Pantheon on this was like 2007 and 2008, I think? Maybe 2009 where I hammered out a tool called the Bakery for single sign on across Drupal [00:33:00] sites.
It was for, it was just, it was just to like get our, our log-ins like synchronized across groups.drupal.org and drupal.org, and a couple other things, so that we can. I mean, the, the idea at the time was let's get log-in consistency and single sign-on so that we can spin functionality into, excuse me, more sub-sites so that we don't have a one big monolith to, to upgrade over major releases because basically all the functionality other than groups was all piled into Drupal.org in terms of everything from our public homepage to all of our collaborative development tools, and that is still running a single sign on and drupal.org, but there is now a project actually to replace that, that I think is underway now.
The - I don't know if I would say that swells me with pride [00:34:00] because if you look at the architecture of it, it was not designed to last this long. It was one of those internet things of like, wrap rough consensus and running code. I think, I think one of the things that I am actually most proud of is the influence that I was able to have through drawing together the contributions from several people in the community, into Pressflow, not because of its stature as a project at the time, but because I think that having for me, the pride is in having conceptual ideas win. Not in having literal lines of code that I've written, like what is actually executing on someone's system. In the sense that I'm, I'm actually proud of how friendly it was able to all work out. [00:35:00] Like, like the because it - there were a lot of communities and efforts like that, where that creates a wedge and the community just never really recovers from it.
Or, or it's seen as a dark era for some reason, even if the community does recover from it. And so it was, it was an aggressive move. but I'm proud of how it all worked out in the sense that there's been no long-term fissure in the community over it. The, ultimately these projects came together.
I think that there's never anything as technically impressive to me as when it's possible to actually find a way for the use cases across the spectrum to all come together. Like there's a similar thing happening in the Linux Audio and Video space right now where like the Pro audio tools have gotten consolidated with the consumer audio tools all under this, this [00:36:00] new system called pipe wire.
And it's so impressive to me that we're getting everything to be easy to use. And low-latency and that's how I feel about the way that the Community was able to integrate the changes from that. It's like we could, people could see the value in it and, and Pressflow doesn't exist anymore. And that's awesome because like, it's, it was never about having that, that project like retain primacy or, or some division.
It was about checking off some serious goals and moving past things. And, um so I - I'm, I'm proud more of the actual social accomplishment and the community around that then than any of the technical things.
[00:36:42] Michael Meyers: Awesome. It's so funny that you bring up Bakery because I literally, just, before we got on this call was meeting with Tim, the CTO of the DA We've partnered Tag1 has partnered with Lullabot to, to take on that SSO project to, to replace [00:37:00] Bakery. And we're trying to weigh that to help them make that happen because everybody's so crazy busy right now, but, but the Community needs it and we've been really steeped in Bakery for the last few weeks. And it's, that's pretty wild.
Um, so you, you clearly have so many amazing stories. Do I want to hear like, is there like a crazy Drupal story, like a you know, like a really fun memory you've been through so much in the Drupal Community. Like regale me with one of your favorite Drupal episodes.
[00:37:38] David Strauss: I see. Drupal story. Oh gosh.
Got it. It's it's interesting today to me now, because I feel like the professionalism, the [00:38:00] professionalism of the community has changed so much since the early days, that the way that things were done in the common case on a project. 12 plus years ago would be like, if that happened today, it would be like, let me tell you this crazy story that you wouldn't believe.
Cause like the, there are so many launches back in the day where it would be like, I would literally be signed onto the database server, watching the queries to make sure that things didn't fall over. And I would be ready if things started to fall over to basically patch the code base to basically be like, we need, folks, we need to turn off this feature.
Like it's not going to stay up if we keep this feature on the it was, it was very worrisome. so many, so many of the launches that I did back back in the day. I mean, I remember flying out to like New York to be in like a boardroom that we would book [00:39:00] overnight to do a launch of some of these sites.
Um, the amount of confidence we have today in launching these things is so much greater than it ever was. And that's a testament to the maturity of Drupal as a project, but I think it's even more a testament to the maturity of, of organizations and professionals in our space that it's not good enough to just have people develop things, click through it, have it look good.
And then launch a, a top 100 site anymore. We didn't even have a staging environments for a lot of this stuff. I mean, are this the way things worked around version control with things like Subversion, didn't really support branching, at least efficiently, like a merging, merging branches and subversion.
It's just a nightmare. So like we would have these projects where it would just be our tools would determine how we worked. I was [00:40:00] on some projects where it had been 6 months since the last deployment of things that were on trunk, on, on subversion where we just like, we'd have to call a day and be like, okay, we're going to. Things look okay, we're going to push out 6 months of changes now. I mean, a lot of, a lot of Pantheon’s founding and the tools that we have were, are, are built around the idea of, I never wanted to do that again, but the or, or I want to build tools so that people in our industry never have to do that again.
But the - it's hard to pick out a crazy story. Cause they were all crazy stories. Like they were all there were all boiler room launches. They were all like, we're going to stay up all night and try and try and get this out. I I wish I had like a single one to call [00:41:00] out. I mean, there definitely have been some interesting parties.
[00:41:06] Michael Meyers: There've been a lot of great parties and that's definitely one of the highlights of, of being part of the Community.
[00:41:13] David Strauss: I mean, I remember the first after party in LA where it was in such a sketchy part of town that there were some people who showed up for the party with the invite and didn't really believe it was happening there.
And they didn't believe it was actually that address. And to this day, there's sort of a mystique around it, where there are some people who are not really sure. Whether that actually ever happened. And so they got the invite and they tried to go and they couldn't find it. And they didn't believe it actually was occurring there or in that forum,
[00:41:48] Michael Meyers: From what I remember of that event, there are a lot of people who went and don't remember what happened. That was, that was a lot of fun. I don't know what you said gives me [00:42:00] like goosebumps, because I remember when we launched examiner.com, which it was, it built a lot of Drupal 7.
It was the first top 100 Drupal website. I remember we set up a boiler room and everybody was around this huge conference room table and we went live and nothing happened. And we're like shit. Like, is this live like w w nothing went wrong? Like everybody would just in like, complete disbelief that it was a completely seamless launch.
And it was one of the first times that I had been part of a, a completely seamless Drupal launch. And that thankfully is, is commonplace now and we have testing harnesses and we've really, really matured as a community, as a technology to, to make it what it is. we're, dude..
There are so many questions I want to ask you. We're, we're running super short on time. So I want to wrap up with, with two questions. [00:43:00] You, I mean, you have worked on so many things with so many amazing people. I am sure it is impossible to single out a single person. But I'm going to ask you anyway. You know, is there a particular person, or you can say one or two that, that that you think back on that like influential who, who, you know you know catapulted your career with Drupal or who was there for you in a way that you've been there for, for so many people.
[00:43:36] David Strauss: Well I mean, I feel like, I mean, I already mentioned his name on this call, but I feel like I would be remiss if I didn't mention Narayan. I mean, we literally were sharing hotel rooms until I saved save a few bucks back in the early days of some of these boiler room things for Drupal. Like I, like, I believe we actually shared a room for a when, [00:44:00] we were doing that thing at One laptop per child.
Uh, when we had the boardroom there, which, which they gave us in exchange for buying their staff pizza, by the way, for the week. I knew that people were there through Wikimedia because there was a lot of overlap there, but they also ran Drupal and were happy to help us out. I also want to call out some of the really early people at Lullabot because, and not just one of the single people, but like basically the crew from, from the early days.
I remember going to our first, the first DrupalCon I ever went to, which was in Boston cause I didn't, I wasn't able to make it to to Barcelona the year before. In 2007, I think. and so I was in Boston and the folks at Lullabot were just extremely gracious in terms of giving us perspective as an [00:45:00] agency entering that space, even at the time, like I mentioned, this idea of even agencies that are competing with each other still have the sense that we're, we're really, we're really more in the same boat together than we are.
Uh, separately on on this ocean of, of the internet and this market. and so they were super supportive of us as an agency, um being active in the space. This was in the days when there were only really a handful of agencies and Lullabot was by far the most prominent, I think at the time I remember people on the project basically coming on, like contributing to Drupal saying like, like my dream is to be at Lullabot.
Like I, I really want to like, be part of that crew and it was a really esteemed position to be in. And I, I continue to enjoy working with them as an agency. It's not been, we still do. Like even at Pantheon. [00:46:00] So it I mean, we're, we're talking about like, basically the founders of Lullabot at that point, or at least some of the earliest people working there.
[00:46:12] Michael Meyers: Yeah. Jeff and Matt, the founders and Angie Byron was there, Eaton, Addie, just so many amazing people. And you're, you're, I mean, I experienced the same thing Matt and Jeff have always been welcoming and open to this day. You know, I spoke to Seth who's the new CEO a week or two ago.
You know, we were just openly sharing, like what's going on in your agency? You know what you know, like what's are you seeing the same things I'm seeing they too are a Drupal extended support provider. And we talked about like what's going on there. It's - we're competitors they're a top agency with a really great brand.
But you know, we're friends and we want to help [00:47:00] each other be successful and there's more than enough work out there for everybody. And it's who we are as a community, you know? And, and they, they pioneered it and they are still pioneers of that today. The Bots are, are, amazing so last question.
Um and I'm, I'm lazy. I'm asking you to do my research here for me. If you had to pass the torch who should I interview next? Who had a lot of influence over Drupal?
And you can't say Narayan, because I've already interviewed him.
[00:47:40] David Strauss: Oh, you have, okay.
[00:47:43] Michael Meyers: Which is a feat in itself.
[00:47:49] David Strauss: I think someone who has some of the most interesting stories around Drupal has to be ChX. [00:48:00]
[00:48:00] Michael Meyers: Yeah, Karoly. I love it. It's been way too long since I've talked to him.
[00:48:06] David Strauss: And he's, he, he rejoined the fold a little while back. I'm not sure where, where everything stands at this point in terms of like his interest in, in the community.
But he certainly The community has influenced his life and he has influenced the community and just ways that are inextricable. And it's, I mean, some of these stories are complicated but not, not every important story in the community is just like, it's just simple. So it's I think it would be really interesting to have his stories on the record too.
[00:48:46] Michael Meyers: Yeah.
I love ChX. He, I worked with him for 7 plus years. I don't know. A lot of my success is built on working with him and he's someone I'm indebted to and, and just love. Really great [00:49:00] guy. That's a great recommendation.
[00:49:02] David Strauss: Great, and as a little anecdote with ChX I was I had casually planned out working with him on some performance stuff in Vancouver.
And some wires got crossed in the communication and I, I never. I reviewed it to see exactly where there were wires got crossed, but I thought I was staying at his place and he didn't realize that. and so it was a day or two before, and I just like messaged him just to confirm just by the way, this is what.
Um, I think we have a range and he's like, oh, I don't actually have the means of doing that. So I, instead of packing. One bag, I packed two. and in my second bag, I took my camping gear to actually stay on his floor. And I spent a week basically on like [00:50:00] of my camping mat and sleeping bag and pillow.
Uh, and we churned out a bunch of performance improvements to, I think Drupal 7 at the time.
[00:50:09] Michael Meyers: The lengths that you and many others have gone to is, is unbelievable. And I will definitely reach out to Charlie and that's, that's a really great recommendation. David again, we're out of time. I, there was so many questions I wanted to cover.
This has been amazing. This has been so much fun to catch up. I really thank you for joining us today. I know you're crazy busy and I'm unbelievably successful. It's so great to see Pantheon's rocket ship success. I want to thank all of our viewers, really appreciate you guys joining us as well.
Uh, if you like this talk, please remember to upvote, subscribe, and share it out. You can check out all our interviews in this series at tag1.com/20 that's two zero. You can also check out our past Tag1 Team Talks and the latest technology [00:51:00] topics that Tag1.com/talks. We'd love to hear from you your feedback on this episode.
Topic ideas, suggestions, please write to us at talks@tag1.com. That's tag the number one.com. Thanks again for joining us David and for everyone who tuned in take care.
[00:51:24] David Strauss: Thank you, Michael.
[00:51:25] Michael Meyers: Thank you, man. I wish I could do more of this.