Oliver Davies is a PHP specialist, Senior Engineer at Inviqa and former Developer at the Drupal Association
Firstly, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you became involved in Drupal
I'm Oliver (aka opdavies), a PHP and Drupal Developer based in South Wales, UK. I used to work in IT support and hardware repair before becoming a PHP and Drupal developer. Then I was asked to build a website for a martial arts club I was training at. It started as a static HTML site. But, as a self-taught developer, this became my test project for learning and trying new things.
When I wanted to be able to store content in a database and to be able to add and update pages and news articles without editing HTML files, I watched some online courses and started learning PHP. This is how I expanded my skillset to become both a PHP and Drupal developer.
I was a user on a forum on which I'd asked some questions. Then I created a post asking about updating content, managing users and setting different permissions. A reply to this post was my introduction to Drupal.
I remember trying Drupal and Joomla and some other CMS, but ultimately I decided to go with Drupal. That site became my first Drupal 6 project. This was the start of becoming the PHP and Drupal Developer that you're talking to today.
I continued to work with Drupal for other personal projects. Then I started doing some freelance work for local development agencies before making the switch into web development full-time a few years later.
You recently celebrated working full time with Drupal and PHP for ten years. What comes to mind when you think about the work you've done that's made the biggest impact?
I've worked on projects for various charities such as RNIB, Parkinson's UK, the MS Society and the Canadian Red Cross. Those have been quite impactful. This is because of the people using those sites and who rely on the information and services those sites provide.
From a different perspective, the work I did on Drupal.org whilst employed by the Drupal Association was impactful too. Without the Association and Drupal.org, the Drupal project would be very different. I worked on some of the tools the Drupal community rely on to build Drupal itself. Including some issues that were blockers for Drupal 8's release.
The Drupal Association and its Engineering team are still doing fantastic work on Drupal.org. Such as the Composer integration and adding semantic versioning for contrib projects.
As a non-profit organisation, I'm always keen to support the Association. Through things like memberships and initiatives like DrupalCares. Also, I continue to be an advocate for them even though I'm no longer employed by them.
Tell us how your interview for Horse & Country TV went, 10 years ago
I knew it was a Drupal 6 website and I'd gathered a few years of experience with Drupal; working on projects during the evenings and weekends around my IT job. My experience was still quite narrow. I remember being asked about various services and things I didn't know much about at the time.
I've always been keen to learn new things. I was confident I'd be able to pick these things up if I got the job. Looking back, I was very enthusiastic about wanting to see how this large Drupal site had been built and architected. Also, how it compared to the approaches I'd been taking in my own projects.
Before the interview, I was asked to pick an issue from the Drupal.org queues, attempt to solve it, then talk about it during the interview. So I picked a core issue about showing the wrong message to blocked users if they tried to reset their password. Then I pasted some updated code into a comment and later submitted some patches after learning CVS and later, Git.
I suppose I did OK - I was offered a Junior role and started a couple of months later. This approach is still one of my favourites when interviewing others for roles.
I also kept up to date on the Drupal.org issue and when mentoring at the contribution day at DrupalCon Los Angeles, one of my mentees was working on a similar issue. We closed it as a duplicate and started working on the original one I looked at five years earlier. A patch was committed to Drupal 8.0.x shortly after that DrupalCon, which was pretty cool and was the first core patch for some of my mentees at the event.
How do you remain innovative in your role?
I'm still keen to learn, whether it's a new skill like automated testing and test-driven development or a new framework like Symfony or Vue.js.
I watch a lot of training videos and attend meetups and conferences. Also, I like learning what others have been working on, how they approached a task or problem.
What I like is seeing how I can add those things into my own toolkit. Plus, how to pay it forward by sharing with other team members through brown bag lunches, internal contribution days and pair and mob programming sessions.
What books or blogs are you currently reading? Or maybe podcasts you're enjoying?
I read and listen to a lot of blogs and podcasts on development (and Drupal), Linux, technology in general, productivity and time management, mixed martial arts and jiu-jitsu and true crime and crime fiction.
Recently I've been listening to audiobooks or Sherlock Holmes narrated by Stephen Fry and reading a crime fiction book written by a local author, set in the village where I live.
If you could pick one thing, what's the main change you'd like to see in Drupal over the next few versions?
I've been very impressed by the new release cycle in Drupal 8, bringing in new features like Layout Builder, the changing from SimpleTest to PHPUnit and the better Composer support in core.
I've personally been a big fan of the adoption of Symfony components and object-oriented code. I'd love to see the last remaining hooks converted into their object-oriented counterparts to bring even more consistency to Drupal code.
What do you think is the biggest fear companies have about adopting an open source platform?
One thing I've noticed whilst being involved with pre-sales work at various companies is how they sometimes get confused when comparing free open source software to other solutions with large licence costs and limited technology choices. It seems sometimes companies assume something is better because it's paid for, compared to something that has no license costs and you can host practically anywhere. Either that or they think it's too good to be true.
Another is around security and how can something be secure if anyone can read the code.
What advice do you have?
Most open source projects, including Drupal and Symfony, have great communities behind them. If you're unsure about a particular CMS or framework, reach out to your local community and there's a high chance there's a Slack workspace you can join or a meetup or conference you can attend and learn more.
"These communities are one of the biggest assets of these platforms and are full of passionate people who are, in my experience, always willing to share information and give an honest opinion.
Likewise, if you're working with a company like Inviqa or Code Enigma, they will make suggestions and recommendations based on your requirements, which may include one or more open source projects depending on what best fits your needs."
On the security point, I think Drupal, Symfony and other open source projects have some of the best Security teams and team members possible and thousands of Developers who are able to find and fix security issues.
Sometimes when I've heard something like "oh no, not another security update for ", I remind people the change is making the project better and more stable and secure and fixing it is a good thing. It's a sign of a healthy project in my opinion.
Aside from an impressive list of certifications for site building, you've organised and spoken at a number of Drupal events. What do you like sharing with the community?
I enjoy sharing whatever I've been working on if I think it might be useful to others. Even better if it's something I'd personally like to learn more about. Giving a talk gives me a reason to set aside some time to research and deep-dive into that topic.
Automated testing has been one of my favourite subjects for a few years and I've given talks on it at various Drupal events. Before lockdown started, I gave a half-day workshop on automated testing and test-driven development at DrupalCamp London which was great fun and I think everyone learned something new.
As well as organising and speaking at events, I try to blog regularly. Also, I've been a guest on some podcasts and do some occasional live coding on YouTube.
What's been your favourite Drupal event and why?
I enjoyed my first DrupalCon in Prague. It was an eye-opener in terms of the Drupal community and its in-person events. Here, I was a contribution mentor for the first time - helping others contribute to Drupal.
I've been to DrupalCamp London almost every year since 2012 (when the UK hasn't been covered in snow. Additionally, I've been a volunteer and given various talks and workshops there. It's great to meet and catch up with current and former colleagues. There are also people I've worked on freelance projects with, project co-maintainers and people I chat to on the Drupal Slack and issue queues.
I have great memories from the DrupalCamp Bristol conference I was an organiser of and sitting in sunny Bristol in the summer with Drupal friends.
What is your experience of diversity and inclusion in our community?
"I like to think the Drupal community is very inclusive and open to all people. Though I'm not part of one of the typically under-represented groups. I'm always happy to see diverse speaker line-ups at Drupal events. Plus, seeing so many different people contributing to Drupal through code, documentation and other means."
The Drupal Diversity & Inclusion organisation does and has been doing great work, as do the Community Working Group and others. I'm looking forward to when we're all able to get together as a community at an in-person event again.
Thank you to Oliver for taking the time to talk to us!