Edit comment Jen and folks, tonight is the

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Jen and folks,

I have no CS or engineering training. I studied geography and religion. My first CMS attempts in 2006 were in WordPress where "hacking" connotes something that is good.

After my first WordPress upgrade which overwrote all my code customizations and finding the tone on the help boards often nasty, I found Drupal.

At Drupal I learned the religion of "don't hack." At Drupal.org I followed many issues, especially in core development, where there were philosophical issues discussed. Though I had no CS training I found myself able to understand the conversations. I liked it so much that people took a passioned philosophical approach.

As I started doing Drupal professionally as a site-builder around 2008, I found I had an advantage over a lot of coders. Often coders, typically those who had not been partaking in the philosophical discussions and were not interested in them, were coding way too much when they were building real sites for real clients.

I really understood that the less custom code there was in a site, the more stable and cheaper it would be to maintain it for the client that I was trying to deliver value to. Sometimes that meant convincing a client to change their requirements in order to fit what existing, stable, well-coded Drupal modules could do.

I've learned to code, and to love code, but I'm still not good at it. My strength is being able to evaluate other code. I don't usually do that by looking at the code itself, but by following the discussions in the relevant queues.

I don't know where I'll fall out on how I feel about Backdrop. I have known for a long time that Nate Haug is in a very small elite of absolutely fantastic module maintainers. With Nate being involved, I'll be paying attention.

But I guess the reason I'm writing this is to share that there are people who are not CS folks or engineers who have appreciated Drupal's passion for code elegance and who appreciate the determination of the community to keep pace with the world by being willing to throw out a lot with each major upgrade in order to get at something that is truly better. At this point at least I have to believe that "better" would trickle down to my clients (small businesses and small non-profits).

But I'll be keeping my eyes and my mind open as I follow closely the evolution of Backdrop.

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