Podcasts
Latest Podcast:
Drupal: A Global Army of Nerds
It's the DrupalCon Portland Floor Show! I went around the exhibitors' area and through the halls of the Oregon Convention Center asking two vital questions to our community: What is your favorite thing about Drupal? Why should other people come to DrupalCon?
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Erica Ligeski, Acquia U graduate, now full-time Marketing Engineer on the Acquia.com website is another of the many Drupalists with a non-technical background. Her path took her from performance and dance, to arts management, to total geekery! Just like me, at some point along the way she needed a website for an arts project and fell in love with Drupal. The rest is history.
New shows, new gear
The Acquia podcast crew has been hanging out at HQ in Burlington, Massachusetts this week recording a bunch of new material. The newest member of our team is the appropriately named Deadkitten wind protector by Røde microphones. I can't think of a better one for Drupal podcasts!
I also thought of calling this episode of our Four Freedoms podcast series "The interesting journey of a company producing proprietary software being involved in an open source project," ... not so catchy. Or maybe "Why business and openness do not have to be enemies." The point is that on February 12, 2013, Opera Software announced that it was dropping its own, proprietary rendering engine in favour of the open source WebKit engine. I wanted to know more about that decision and the consequences going forward. What I discovered is a company with a commitment to open standards, knowledge sharing, liberal licensing, and a long-term history of actions to back those claims up.
Robert Douglass, Director of Products at Commerce Guys, the originators and maintainers of Drupal Commerce sat down with me this week. We talked about how content, community, and commerce relate and help each other and why Drupal is the best platform to provide you with the digital elements of your users' experience of your online presence. Commerce Guys, in partnership with Acquia also has the support mechanisms that you need to succeed with Drupal and Commerce: from architecting your site, to training your developers, to the ongoing enterprise support that you would need for a serious store in the long term.
Three great past podcasts this week on Drupal in government. The first (and the audio included directly here) is "Helping the Federal Government solve public sector problems with Drupal" with Acquian Bryan Hirsch, originally from May 2012. Check out the other two I have linked to for other interesting perspectives on this important subject.
Heather James, Acquia's Manager of Learning Services, has been in and around Drupal since the version 4 days. She says people new to Drupal "have an easier time at this stage coming to Drupal" than they did 6 years ago. Nonetheless, her early experiences learning how to use Drupal are still reflected by the questions people ask learning Drupal today. This, combined with her excitement about Drupal's potential and her background as an educator, motivated her to become a Drupal trainer. She is passionate about education ("When you're teaching, you're building a bridge from what people know to what they don't know.") and says about her job at Acquia, "I feel like I have a patron who helps me do the things I like to do, which is get out there and teach people."