25 Years of Drupal

Drupal turned 25 yesterday.

That’s a strange thing to type. Twenty-five years is an eternity in software. Even so, Drupal has been a constant presence throughout my entire professional life. I created my Drupal.org profile over 17 years ago (and I was using Drupal for a year or so before that). In many ways, it’s “just” a tool that I happen to use and like. But it’s also something that shaped how I work, who I work with, and what good software (and good communities) should look like.

There are plenty of blog posts that talk about Drupal’s history. This isn’t one of them. This is a reflection on what Drupal gave me, what I’ve tried to give back, and why (despite not doing too much Drupal work these days) I’m so thankful for the project and the community as a whole.

What I did for Drupal

Over the years, I made it a priority to give back to the Drupal project and its community. Like many people, I started contributing because stuff didn’t work the way I needed it to. Workflows were clunky. Bugs got in the way. I contributed code to Drupal core and to contributed modules. Over time, that turned into maintaining projects that other people depended on. For example, Composer Patches, started as a way to solve my own problems, but it ended up changing how thousands of developers worked.

That’s a strange and humbling thing to realize: that something you built to make your own life easier became infrastructure for a community (or in some cases, many communities).

Once you’re in that position, the work is about code less than it was. Maintaining open source software teaches you restraint. It teaches you empathy. It forces you to think about tradeoffs, backward compatibility, communication, and stewardship.

Maintaining open source projects shaped how I showed up beyond code contribution, too. I spent time in forums and issue queues answering questions, mentoring newcomers, and sharing what I’d learned. I helped organize local Drupal meetups. I opened and staffed the Boise office for a major digital consultancy and developed training programs to bring non-Drupal developers into the community. All this was my way of strengthening Drupal and supporting the community that had given me so much.

What Drupal did for me

Drupal, in turn, had a profound impact on my personal and professional growth.

Drupal gave me opportunity. That’s the simplest way to put it, and probably the most important. Because of Drupal, I was able to do work I would not otherwise have been qualified for, invited into, or trusted with. Drupal was the reason I could say “yes” to projects early in my career that would have been out of reach without a flexible, powerful system underneath me.

It gave me credibility. Knowing Drupal meant I could walk into rooms (physical or virtual) with people who cared deeply about their work and be taken seriously, even early in my career. It gave me a shared language with developers, designers, content strategists, and product owners all over the world. It plugged me into a professional ecosystem that valued depth, thoughtfulness, and long-term thinking.

And it gave me people.

“Come for the code, stay for the community” is a motto that gets repeated a lot in Drupal circles. It fits. What usually goes unsaid is that the community stays with you too. Long after the project end, long after you move on to other tools, the relationships don’t disappear.

Colleagues. Collaborators. Mentors. Friends. People who challenged my assumptions, improved my ideas, called me on my bullshit (usually politely), and raised my standards. My career is inseparable from the Drupal community because of those relationships. Even after mostly stepping away, the relationships I built there continue to this day. In my current role, I’ve worked with three other people who were previously members of the Drupal community.

What Drupal did for tech

Working with Drupal (especially in its earlier versions) forced me to grow my “figure shit out” muscle – the ability to dive into complex problems and solve them through research, experimentation, and sheer persistence. Early Drupal wasn’t always user-friendly. Documentation could be sparse, and you often had to read code or tinker extensively to make things work. At the time, that could be frustrating. In hindsight, it was a gift. It trained me (and many others in the community) to become self-sufficient problem-solvers. By grappling with difficult technical issues, I became a better developer and learned how to learn – an invaluable skill in tech.

That experience didn’t just shape me. A lot of early Drupal contributors went on to do significant, high-profile work across the tech industry. The culture of figuring things out and innovating within the Drupal community helped launch countless careers and even companies that you’d definitely recognize today. For example, the popular mapping platform Mapbox grew out of an agency that did extensive Drupal work.

Individual Drupal contributors have similarly gone on to shape the web platform itself. Jen Simmons, for example, designed Drupal’s Bartik theme (the default theme that introduced in Drupal 7) and was an advocate for modernizing Drupal’s front-end with HTML5. Jen later became a Web Evangelist at Apple, working on the Safari browser and the WebKit engine that powers it. She even joined the W3C’s CSS Working Group to contribute to the evolution of web technologies. There are many other similar stories that show how Drupal’s ecosystem has been a training ground for people who go on to make a difference in the wider web world.

Thank You

Drupal exists today because people keep showing up.

Because someone chose to share their code instead of keeping it to themselves. Because thousands of contributors reviewed patches, wrote documentation, mentored newcomers, organized events, and argued passionately (sometimes very passionately) about the right way forward.

I’ve benefited enormously from that collective effort. My career, my skills, my confidence, and much of my professional identity are downstream of this project and this community.

So mostly, I want to say thank you.

Thank you to Dries for starting something that outgrew any single person. Thank you to the maintainers who quietly carry responsibility year after year. Thank you to the contributors who make Drupal better in ways most users will never notice. Thank you to the community for proving over and over and over that open source can be thoughtful, durable, and human.

Drupal gave me more than I ever expected from a piece of software. I’ve tried to give back in return. I’m grateful that I got to be part of a project that’s still here, still evolving, and still worth caring about after 25 years.

Happy birthday, Drupal.