One year ago this week, I took a leap and started working professionally in web development. One year ago this week, I became a Drupal project manager. (And lord, did I have no idea of what I was getting into.)
In retrospect, this is one of the best choices I think I’ve made. It has also been one of the most frustrating and rewarding choices.
I was fortunate to come into Drupal with an open mind, enough web development experience to ask the right questions, enough project management experience to not really screw up. At first. I got better at screwing up later on. It’s a really valuable skill: recognize when you’re screwing up because you didn’t ask the right questions, because you’re in the wrong position or when you didn’t answer the right question. I’m still getting better at that.
It’s frustrating because as a non-developer, getting into the Drupal communities has an extra layer of complexity to it. It’s like learning a foreign language where the first three weeks that you’re listening in, you’re trying to distinguish what sounds are words.
It’s frustrating because as you’re learning, you’re not quite sure of the questions you’re asking. You’re learning the vocabulary with the technologies. You’re pretty sure that when something doesn’t work like it intended, there’s a good reason for it, but you’re ignorant of the starting place.
But once you get past that whole learning curve part, there’s a whole bunch of people who are genuinely amazing and want to see more people get involved. They want the CMS project to succeed, and they want it to be useful. They want to use it to build easier to use websites, websites that scale better, websites that are easier to design for and still have the immense vastness of possibility that Drupal has.
That’s the rewarding part, and it is why I keep doing this.
It’s why I go to the DrupalCons, and interact with as many people as possible. Developers, project managers, business-side: we’re all living in the same sort of washing machine. DrupalCons are about trying to add as many new points of light to your own Drupal resource universe, whether that’s people or modules or integration strategies or new companies to partner with. It’s about being able to meet up and discuss hard problems in person, where communications are easier and you put faces to familiar names. And then I come back to Portland and play with the open source communities and try to figure out what other places do better, and what Drupal has to learn. (Also, what Drupal has to teach to the open source communities.)
This is why I do project management for a living, and community organizing for fun. Somewhere in here the stories of being an independent project manager will come out, but in the meantime, this is a ‘happy to be here’ post. DrupalCamp Portland kicks off Friday night, but that deserves its own separate post.