Pain Points of Learning and Contributing in the Drupal Community

At Drupalcon L.A. I’ll be co-leading a core conversation about the, “Pain Points of Learning and Contributing in the Drupal Community.” A core conversation is not a teaching session, it’s format is a little different and let’s the speaker engage with the audience.

So what is this conversation all about?

I’d like to start with a story. I started contributing to Drupal 8 core just before DrupalCon Portland in 2013. I was listening to  a live hangout with different initiative leads in Drupal 8, and Larry Garfield (crell) was talking about how he needed help with the hook_menu conversion. I asked Larry how can I help and he pointed me to some documentations he wrote on Drupal.org. At this time I took my first steps into core with a normal issue, and I’ve been contributing ever since. This year I’ve been slowly climbing up the contributor list on drupalcores.com.

As someone who puts a lot of energy into contribution, I hope it means something when I say: it’s too hard to contribute to major/critical issues in the Drupal 8 issue queue.

I ran into a great example recently, when I picked up issue 2368769. I figured that after 5 years as a Drupalist, I must be able to make some meaningful contribution to this critical bug. Boy was I wrong! What did they mean by “lazy-loading route enhancers”? I searched the codebase and Drupal documentation, and couldn’t find any example to work from. I found generic Symfony documentation on the subject, but it still wasn’t enough.

What’s going on in the issue queue?

This story reveals a bottleneck in the Drupal 8 development process: the top contributors. There is a group of 50 – or perhaps fewer – who understand and are current on the ongoing major/critical issues with Drupal 8. We all appreciate their incredible hard work, especially since most of them are contributing in their personal time. But in my case, even as an experienced Drupalist and core contributor, I was stuck! Asking top contributors for help in IRC is always an option, but it distracts them from their own work/concentration/thought process  – we don’t want to see top contributors spending 90% of their time answering questions!

So how can we make it possible for non-top-50 contributors to help out on major/critical issues? How can knowledgeable Drupalists who want to contribute to major/critical issues make life easier for top contributors, instead of harder? What are some ways to get knowledge transfer outside of that group?

With just a little more guidance, people outside that “top 50” group could do so much more than the “novice” and “normal” issues we presently tackle. We talk about “continuous contribution” in Drupal 8, where a contributor doesn’t hesitate to work on the issues, and if you’re eager to learn every day, nothing should stop you from contributing.

How will the Drupal world look with our new ideas adopted? What could be possible?

In the Drupal community, we always say “if you don’t like something, make it better.” This session is that first step to make this better.

I’m excited to hear suggestions from the community. How do we break the “top 50” limit, and let the next 100 contributors contribute to major/critical issues? This conversation is where we can work on this problem together, to encourage more contributors to stop limiting themselves and get involved on a deeper level. Maybe we’ll even see the benefits as soon as big sprint day on Friday, May 15, 2015. I hope to see more contributors working on critical major bugs/issues. Let’s break the barrier together!