How I learned to stop worrying and love Drupal contribution

About five years ago I was made tech lead on a Drupal 7 project. The organisation I worked for had an extremely restrictive corporate IT policy, but I was sufficiently curious to install Drupal on my own laptop and play around with it. I also went to DrupalCamp London over a weekend in March. This impressed the senior managers enough to give me a fancy-sounding job title (though in truth it involved rather a lot more meetings than it did actually writing code). I’ve gone on from there through a variety of senior Drupal developer positions, but my dirty secret is, I’ve never really contributed back to Drupal. Until the last few weeks, that is. So, I thought I’d take the time to write about why that is, and what’s changed.

Rookie mistakes

While I was learning to use Drupal, I also started learning to use StackExchange. Naively, I asked a couple of questions and got the kind of terse responses noobs who haven’t really read the contribution guidelines often get. My interior monologue said, “Well, screw those guys. I tried my best to ask constructive questions and this is what I get?”

In reality, I think I’d asked a not-particularly constructive question that at least one person had asked before, but hey, why let details get in the way of a self-righteous sense of grievance?

Fast-forward to… DrupalCon

My company sent me to DrupalCon, I think probably because I’d had the nouse to go to DrupalCamp. Amongst other things, I went to a session on the Media Module. The guy presenting said something to the effect of, we know large organisations use this, but we don’t really know how any of them use it. I put my hand up and said, well I’m the Drupal lead at a large organisation, and I’d be happy to work on some use cases for you. Someone else in the audience (I felt slightly witheringly) said, “well, yeah, but if we just do it for one organisation we’ll lose half the developers who are contributing.”

“But… but… that wasn’t even what I was suggesting,” my interior monologue wailed. “And besides, it wasn’t even me that suggested it. I was just trying to help. Screw those guys.”

Fast forward to… Drupal Global Sprint Weekend

Manifesto ran a sprint weekend a few months ago. Despite my previous experiences, I decided I’d go. I looked around for issues for a while until I found one. It was a test, so I ran it. It looked good, so I moved it into ‘Reviewed and Tested’. Almost straight away, someone moved it back.

“Well what was the point of that?” my interior monologue fulminated. “If you’re not going to trust other people to review things then why even bother?”

Actually, looking back through the issue, I realise it was perfectly reasonable to push it back to ‘Needs Work’. The issue was far from simple and the subsequent discussion covered lots of things I’d not even really thought about.

That afternoon I found another, slightly fiddly issue that needed a test. It’d been open for months, so I tested it and put it into ‘Reviewed and Tested by the Community’. I left feeling fairly negative about the whole experience. I’d spent a day mostly just looking at bug lists and the one thing I’d managed to do just got nixed straight away. “I cost £1000 a day,” said my interior monologue (actually I have no idea what my day rate is, but facts, schmacts, right?) “I donate a day of my time and this is what I get for it?”

I think we can all agree my interior monologue is sometimes kind of a dick.

Fast forward to… DrupalCamp (again)

We had DrupalCamp London a few weeks later. I went along. Amongst other things I went along to a session by @rachel_norfolk on mentoring and contribution. She talked about false starts, and even the great big unmentionable – that sometimes, especially early on, contributing might not be particularly rewarding. But she also talked about the responsibility to contribute. And about how all these people – all these organisations – are making whole careers off the back of this amazing, free thing. And if they’re not making the time to help build and maintain that thing, well, that’s pretty bad.

My inner monologue sulked a bit. “She’s right”, it said, grudgingly. “But still. Screw those guys. Let’s get a beer.”

Fast forward to… my first contribution

The following Monday morning, I logged into my Drupal.org account. And I saw that one of my issues from the Sprint day had a comment. “Chof,” said my interior monologue. “Probably just someone telling you you’ve done it wrong”. But it wasn’t. It was @xjm, closing an issue that I’d worked on and thanking me, specifically, for taking the time to document my test steps. It might not look like a whole lot, but it really felt like a big deal to me. And it made me decide to try to contribute again.

That evening when I got home, I decided to pick up another one of the issues I’d looked at at the sprint day. To be honest, I still didn’t really understand what it was about. But I tried my best to put my questions into a constructive form, and added them to the ticket.

Not long after, @wim-leers replied with answers to my questions. It moved me on just enough, and I resolved to carry on working on the ticket. Then, you know, life stuff happened and we went through a busy spell at work and I didn’t really have any time to do anything for a while. @vaplas jumped in and finished off a chunk of the work. Initially I was a bit annoyed – I’d been hoping that, having taken the time to understand what the issue was about, I’d get to complete the solution. My interior monologue was just getting ready to say something dickish when I spotted that @alexpott had credited me on the patch, and written a message saying that although I’d not written any code, I’d helped to clarify the issue.

And again, it felt pretty amazing. So I picked up another one of the tickets in the same group. Again, I didn’t have time to do as much as I would have liked, and @vaplas wrote a large chunk of the patch. But there were some bits missing, and I helped to fill them in, and @vaplas really helped me to understand what I was doing. All of a sudden, I was submitting a patch for review! Plus, I’d learned how functional tests work in Drupal 8!

And that, readers, is how I got to contributing my first core patch.

Conclusion

I guess I learned the following things:

There’s a fine line between being a help vampire and asking constructive questions

But if you try to show your working, it might help someone else, and that’s really what it’s all about. You’re also, I think, allowed to ask for help when you’re contributing in a way that maybe you’re not when you’re just looking for a solution to your own problem. In fact, I’ve learned recently it’s not unusual to upload incomplete patches, or patches that you know will fail, so that they can be discussed.

Even a small amount of acknowledgement really means a lot

Say thank you. It’s totally worth it, and it makes everyone involved feel good about themselves, and about contributing. The help and encouragement I got from Wim, Vaplas and XJM has been completely instrumental in getting me to come back and to keep on trying, and I’m very grateful to all of them.

The community’s focus on collaboration over competition isn’t just a handy, alliterative slogan

They really mean it. If you help even a little bit there’s a good chance you might get credited, and people are genuinely respectful of the effort you’re making, even if you’re just making the effort to understand.

Persistence is important

Don’t get downhearted if someone pushes an issue you’ve updated back down to its previous status. They’ve probably got a good reason for it. Don’t worry if you get too busy at work or in your life. Your ticket might move along, or it might get finished, but there will still be ways for you to help. And they’re always worth it, no matter how small they might seem.

You start to get into a rhythm

You think you won’t have time to contribute, but once you’ve found an issue or group of issues to work on, it’s quite easy to do half an hour here and there.

And lastly, if your interior monologue is anything like mine, you should probably learn to ignore it.