My Drupal Life
(Picture taken from Flickr)
Last week I attended Costa Rican Drupal community meetup and one of the sessions was about the speaker's journey with Drupal. This made me start thinking a lot about my own history with Drupal so I got motivated to put it down and write about it.
I'm the younger of 3 siblings in my family and thanks God I was the first to have the chance to go to college. Just before entering college I was presented with Ubuntu and I decided to install it in my pc so I ordered a CD copy and the very same day I received it I installed it. This was my first direct contact with open source software.
I went to the local facility of the biggest public university in my country (Universidad de Costa Rica). During my first year there, the college was hosting the Central America Open Source Software Conference and even though I wasn't able to attend, this encouraged the adoption of open source in this facility so that the next year we hosted the Central America Drupal Camp. During this camp in 2011 I started knowing about Drupal. At that time I was already a Linux enthusiast so one thing that I really remember of that conference is me entering to a session just because its name was Drush and it was presented as "Drupal-Shell". I remember my thoughts at that time: "I love Linux shell, so I may like this session". Conclusion: I didn't understand anything because I was totally new to Drupal. However, this and some other sessions I attended motivated me enough to start learning about Drupal.
During the college me and a few other people were responsible to build our facility website. Even though Drupal 7 was released in 2011, there were still a lot of modules that hadn't been ported to Drupal 7 so, we had a lot of discussion whether build the site in Drupal 7 or Drupal 6. Finally we (luckily) decided Drupal 7. This was my very first Drupal site and we were really proud of it.
In second semester of 2013 I had to start my internship. Me and one friend were to an "interview" (it was in fact a casual talk) with the managers of two partner companies (at the very same time and place). That day we decided that he was going to do Drupal and I was going to do Linux sysadmin. I was really happy with that arrangement; however, things changed and when we were actually starting the internship we both started doing Drupal. During the internship I started learning about this great CMS and several other stuff. It was a great opportunity to learn.
Then, to start 2014 I landed my first official job with the same company. I worked there for over 6 years. During this time I had plenty of chances to learn about Drupal and several other stuff and for personal growing. Therefore, I'll be forever thankful to such a great company like Manati.
During this time I presented at my first Drupal Camp Costa Rica in 2014 (and several other editions after that first time); my first time traveling out of country for Drupalcon Latin America 2015 (Colombia), my first time presenting out of my country in English for NYC Camp 2016 (also my first time traveling solo and entering USA), also my first time presenting in the Drupal community biggest event (Drupalcon Nashville 2018), several contributions to Drupal and a some other open source projects.
At the beginning of this year I landed my first job out of my country in another great company (Evolving Web) full of lots of talented folks. This year has been a year of profound challenges and changes for everyone in this world but it's been a great opportunity for me to continue learning, improving my skills and continue with this big journey of personal growing that have been my professional life and that has been really impacted for this great tool and community named Drupal.
Today is a great day to be happy about Drupal because we (the Drupal community) has just launched Drupal 9 thanks to the contribution of a huge amount of people around the world and somehow I feel part of this because of the big impact Drupal has had in my life and the chances I've had to give back to this community even through code, documentation, spreading the world and other ways to be part of this great group of people.
Do you want to share any bit of your experience with Drupal? Feel free to do so in the comments and join the celebration :)