You know, there’s an old joke about learning Drupal. Maybe you’ve seen it?
I mean, it’s funny. It’s true. And it’s kind of not funny.
When I was first starting out as a “web developer” in 2005 I didn’t know anything about anything. I was trying to wrap my head around PHP, HTML, CSS, and Javascript all at once. I dipped a toe into Drupal 5 and said… Nope! Not for me. Then I proceeded to dive headfirst into Wordpress for four years.
Fast forward fifteen years and I’m certified by Acquia, leading multimillion dollar builds for billion dollar companies and implementing some highly complex Drupal builds for Acquia’s customers. A fifteen year career (or even a ten year career, which is more or less when I joined Acquia) should not be a prerequisite to being successful in the Drupal community.
More and more (thanks, Drupal 8!) it’s really hard to jump into Drupal and be successful. Here is an incomplete list of skills you need to be successful as a backend developer on a Drupal project:
Composer (dependency management)
Git (version control)
IDEs / Debuggers
Basic Terminal use (for things like Drush)
Familiarity with using Virtual Environments / Containers
Object Oriented PHP (including Dependency Injection)
YAML
Twig
Basic CSS / JS
Coding Standards / Best Practices
Oh, I’m sorry, did you also want me to include actual Drupal skills on that list? Because you get my point. An entry level developer maybe has a handful of those skills, but by no means do I expect a junior developer who has only been working for six months (or god forbid, someone like me who was trying to start out with Drupal and was a few weeks in at most) trying to wrap their hands around THAT list all at once.
The problem though… is that it’s pretty hard to do even site building without some of that list. Assuming you have a Drupal environment you can work in, you can learn to build stuff in the UI. But the second you want to start dealing with Configuration Management you enter a whole world of other technologies real freaking fast.
So yeah, I’m blogging about a lot of entry level Drupal stuff. I’m writing tutorials for folks that haven’t used Drupal before. Because I want more people doing Drupal! My livelihood depends on Drupal, and if you’re reading this article, I’d say there’s a reasonable chance that yours does too. Think about this: every single day people are leaving jobs, taking promotions, and generally shuffling around in the job market. As a matter of course, some of those people are Drupalists, and some of those Drupalists are taking jobs that no longer have them actively working on / contributing to Drupal. Every time we lose even one person from our community, it can take (potentially) years of training to replace that individual.
As the complexity of working with (and contributing to) Drupal has gone up over the years I believe that the number of people picking up Drupal as a hobby / just for funsies is likely going down. I don’t have firm evidence to back this up (before you call me on it). But I know flat out that if I were me when I was first starting off today like I was fifteen years ago, I would take one look at Drupal 8 and 9 and go… man. That is SUPER cool and I have no idea where to get started.
So hey! If you happen to be new-ish to the Drupal community (or you’re a Wordpress or other PHP developer) welcome! I’m writing content for a lot of people, but I’m really explicitly writing content for you. I want you to learn Drupal. I want you to participate in the community. I want you to apply for Drupal jobs at companies like Acquia (or one of the many many other great places hiring right now for Drupal work). I recognize that isn’t going to happen over night. There’s a lot to learn. Make sure to subscribe or follow me on Twitter / LinkedIn if you haven’t, because I’m going to continue writing more content like:
How to get started with DRupal
I’ll tell you right now that if you try and grab that entire list of technology all at once, it’s going to go very poorly for you. I would decide if you’re going to learn Drupal first, or the backend piece. If you’re going with Drupal, use a service like http://simplytest.me to bypass all of the VM management stuff. If you’re going to try and do the backend development piece, try to focus on one piece at a time (e.g. php, then git, then composer, etc.). There are really great tutorials online (and there will be more here on my site) to help learn these individual pieces in the coming weeks.
The biggest thing is to give yourself time and patience. None of these technologies are simple on their own, especially if you (like me ) are coming at them from a non-technical background. But, if you take them one at a time and try to approach them in a bite sized manner, you can totally do it.
I’m where I am today never having taken a single computer science course. I have an English degree (and a Design degree). It’s very possible to be successful in the open source world if you put some effort into learning!
What things in Drupal are you struggling with? Leave a comment and let me know!
Finally, a quick note
Finally, I wanted to give a quick shout out to Feedspot for including my blog on their list of Top 40 Drupal Blogs! There’s a lot of great Drupal content out there from various people and companies (and Dries himself) on the list. Definitely worth subscribing to their list if you aren’t on it already.
Photo by Karol Dach from StockSnap
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