Edit comment Jen, thanks for sharing your

Administration

Authored by

Leave blank for Anonymous.

Homepage

Authored on

Status

Published

Not published

Comment *

Jen, thanks for sharing your motivations.

I was recently talking with some folks about how Drupal 7 (and Drupal 8 more so) are not cost effective for the long tail of projects. That is projects with a lower budget (thousands of dollars rather than tens of thousands of dollars). When I started with Drupal this was a segment that was easily hit. Doing the same types of things now takes more work. When you're working on Backdrop it would be great if there were ways to ease the burden and make things easier to do.

When I look at Drupal 8 the big things I see sticking out is targeting the more traditional enterprise programming culture. This how I label it rather than some levels of programming. That almost says you need to become like this culture of programming to become better at programming. This is not the case. Better developer experience includes being able to do more with less work and less complication.

I'd argue the old enterprise ways are slowly in decline. The enterprise companies like HP, Oracle, and IBM are all making product shifts because of it. Take a look at the code of OpenStack, the open source cloud project the enterprises are jumping on, and you'll see a codebase that doesn't look all that old school enterprisie. Times are a changing.

I do know a number of people with Drupal exit strategies going forward. You are spot on when you say that some people are doing that. I know some who are already out. I've recently discussed strategies with some others who are looking to talk about it. Have you reached out to some of these folks to find out what would keep them around but using backdrop? Just to get an idea where they are at.

If there were one piece of advice I'd give you is to help people succeed. Don't build software to build software. Build solutions that help people succeed at the end of the day. The long long line of people who use the software but don't contribute to the development. It's both satisfying and useful to do that.

I wish you and the rest of the backdrop folks the best of luck.

Formatting options

Basic

To post pieces of code, surround them with <code>...</code> tags. For PHP code, you can use <?php ... ?>, which will also color it based on syntax.
Web page addresses and email addresses turn into links automatically, unless the parent tag has the 'nolink' class.
Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <blockquote> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <div> <p> <br> <pre> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <figure> <img> <figcaption> <hr>

Cancel

Leave this field blank