Podcasts
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Open Source and Local Economies - Meet Ranko Marinic
Here is one more conversation I had at Drupal Camp Alpe-Adria in April, 2013. Ranko Marinic is from Croatia and has some great perspectives. He works as an IT consultant with a wide range of technologies and with Drupal "by night". He is studying economics and has become interested in the economic effects on local communities of implementing open source software. Ranko also talks about the moment he really started believing in open source as a social movement.
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Sam Lerner is an Acquia Client Advisor with something of a specialty in search technologies; he is the co-maintainer of the Google Search Appliance and Apache Solr Drupal projects. His job is to use his own knowledge and take advantage of Acquia's "deep bench" in all things Drupal to help clients make their websites successful. He calls working at Acquia "fuel injected knowledge".
Hernâni Borges de Freitas, a Technical Consultant at Acquia, specialises in "Doing lots of things with Drupal at scale: training and helping people go the right direction in Drupal. Acquia is bringing Drupal to different markets and perspectives, to big companies who want to use it to achieve better results. We make sure they go in the right direction. When they choose Drupal, we help make sure they choose the right solution, adapted to their needs, and that can grow with their business, instead of some closed solution that dies after a while."
As Senior Director of Solutions Architecture at Acquia, Christian Yates makes sure that Drupal is able to compete head-to-head with any and all competing technologies. He translates organizations' business needs into a vision of how Drupal can solve the large-scale, complex problems that large organizations face. Since showing and doing is always better than saying, he also builds proofs-of-concept in working code to help get them on board with Drupal.
Kent Gale, Senior Director of the Client Advisory Team is on the front lines of keeping Acquia's clients happy and productive: "Every day is a pretty intensive exercise in making customers successful ... one way or the other ... either helping them develop, or deploy or maintain and manage their site."
Kenny Silanskas, Acquia's Tier 1 Team Manager, has a passion for getting Drupal right that rubs off on his team – Acquia's crew of frontline Client Advisers. They are in the happy position of being able to train client-developers in best practices, choosing and using the right Drupal modules, how to use the open source process, and more. Kenny says, "The Support Department gives Drupal sites the TLC they need." All of this results in happier and more successful Drupal users and a healthier Drupal project.
In 2004, Peter Wolanin, then a full-time scientist, discovered Drupal while volunteering on a political campaign and building its website. As he puts it, the road to becoming a full-time software engineer at Acquia started when he discovered that "pretty soon, I got more interested in fixing the bugs than building the site ... "The satisfaction of fixing things sort of drew me in."