When Drupal friends become family

Many of my longest friendships were born in the Drupal community. I’ve been attending DrupalCons, Drupal Camps, and other events since DrupalCon Barcelona 2007 and centered most of my professional life around contributing to the project as a developer and a teacher. In 2010 that included serving as a mentor in the Google Summer of Code program for a new contributor who wanted to work on Drupal Commerce’s affiliate module, bojanz.

Bojan Živanović and I got to know each other that summer through many IRC chats and coding sessions. After he completed his project successfully, we met at DrupalCon Copenhagen and celebrated at McDonald's. I sure knew how to treat a friend!

I later convinced him to join Commerce Guys’s development team based in Paris. He served on our client services team before diving head first into Commerce Kickstart 2.x development and then creating a whole suite of modules to support usage based billing for subscription services like Platform.sh.

Around DrupalCon Austin in 2014, it appeared Bojan's mission with Commerce Guys might be complete. However, I saw an opportunity for him to develop further as a leader in our company and community. I was already busy leading client services with our U.S. team and then with acquiring and refocusing Commerce Guys around Drupal Commerce. It made perfect sense to me to appoint him to be project lead for Commerce 2.x.

That decision has served Commerce Guys and Drupal Commerce well over the last several years. Bojan brought renewed vigor to the project and discipline around competitive research and automated test coverage that far exceeded my own. He's also proven to be an able mentor in his own right, helping dozens of contributors and whole agency teams learn Drupal 8 development in general and Commerce 2.x development in particular.

Today is Bojan's birthday, and reflecting on our almost 8 years of friendship has obviously made me sentimental. At our first meeting in Copenhagen, my daughter Éowyn was just taking her first steps and wouldn't ever remember meeting Bojan. Today she sees him regularly during company Zoom calls and his occasional visit to our home in Greenville, SC. He's not just some random person from daddy's work, he's Uncle Bojan and a trusted friend.

We're all wishing you a happy birthday, Bojan, and we're grateful for your years of contribution and leadership in our midst. I'll have to hit the 2.x queue this evening to send you a birthday present disguised as a patch.