Drupal 9 is planned to be only 18 months away now, wow! It is already being built in Drupal 8 by marking APIs to be removed in Drupal 9 as deprecated and eventually upgrading some dependency version requirements where needed. Once the Drupal 9 git branch will be open, you will be able to test directly against Drupal 9. That should not stop you from assessing the compatibility of your module with Drupal 9 now. To prepare for compatibility with Drupal 9, you need to keep up with deprecated functionality and watch out for upgraded dependencies (when we know which are those exactly). Of these two, automation can go a long way to help you keep up with deprecated APIs.

(Disclaimer: Dries did not ask/order/suggest/request me to post this neither to make any changes whatsoever.)

I was reading Drupal Confessions with great interest, because my primary job for quite a while now is to help enable the best efforts in the Drupal community to work together to reach new heights. I am really privileged to be able to do this and make a living out of it, it is the job I always dreamed of. I also hope that I am being useful to the Drupal community in doing so. I kept nodding in agreement with the open letter's statements on diversity so I could not get rid of my cognitive dissonance on their connection with reality for several days now. The open letter says "We ask you to fight for us, Dries, to protect us from intolerance, harassment, smearing, bullying, and discrimination, no matter why or where it originates from."

As someone who is getting a paycheck at least indirectly from Dries in the past 10 years, and working as directly with him as possible in Acquia's Office of the CTO for the second half of that period, I have the opportunity to look at his practices in terms of diversity. Which would be the most observable group to learn more from if not his personal department where he directly appoints people?

In the past 5 years I've been closely working with Dries as a remote employee in the Office of the CTO at Acquia, which consisted of 15 people at most at any given time. In this time I worked with at least the following types of people directly in this group (in random order): blind, stutterer, person with ADHD, person with serious sleep problems, person with even more serious sleep problems, divorced, gay, bi, lesbian, asexual, polyamorous, gospel singer, BDSM, religiously raised, atheist, clinically infertile, cosplayer, very tall, short, people from Eastern Europe, Western Europe, US and India, native-borns, immigrants, people in offices, people always working remotely, capitalist, socialist, pacifist, people from a military family, adopting parent, transgender, people with tics, people who don't drink alcohol, etc. The teams I worked on usually had relatively high percentage of women in technical roles. My current team is 50% female, and 1/3rd of the department overall is female. This could not happen by accident.

While none of this represent the whole rainbow of humanity, and it could definitely be further improved, our limited group of 15 people already covered outstanding diversity in my view. Also this is a group that cares, we discuss and live through our struggles and support each other on every step where we can. I would challenge many of those signing the open letter to practice this kind of diversity in their teams. I for one really enjoy the varying values that people brought in and am sad that some of those great people have left to pursue other technical challenges.

In this five years, I never experienced that when hiring people either of these things were considered as a negative or that any person was treated or felt treated badly for any personal life matter. Neither that any of the amazing people who unfortunately left and are covered in the list left because of any of those.

Given that I just cannot get over my cognitive dissonance. Who are being convinced of what?

We started regular Drupal usability meetings twice a week almost a year ago in March 2016. That is a long time and we succeeded in supporting many key initiatives in this time, including reviews on new media handling and library functionality, feedback on workflow user experience, outside-in editing and place block functionality. We helped set scope for the changes required to inline form errors on its way to stability. Those are all supporting existing teams working on their respective features where user interfaces are involved.

However, we also started to look at some Drupal components and whether we can gradually improve them. One of the biggest tasks we took on was redesigning the status page, where Drupal's system information is presented and errors and warnings are printed for site owners to resolve. While that looks like a huge monster issue, Roy Scholten in fact posted a breakdown of how the process itself went. If we were to start a fresh issue (which we should have), the process would be much easier to follow and would be more visible. The result is quite remarkable:

Starting with Drupal 8, we decided to make more rapid innovation possible by releasing minor versions every 6 months that may come with new features and backwards compatible changes. Now that we released Drupal 8.1.0 and almost 8.2.0 as well, how did we do? Also what else is possible and what is blocking us to make those moves? What do all the changes mean for how might Drupal 9 unfold?

Dries Buytaert posted last Wednesday The transformation of Drupal 8 for continuous innovation and on the same day I presented Checking on Drupal 8's rapid innovation promises at DrupalCon Dublin. Here is a video recording of my session, which should be good for those looking to get to know Drupal's release process and schedule, as well as how we made it possible to experiment within Drupal core directly with Drupal 8. While I did hope for more discussion on the possibilities within Drupal 8 with the participants, somehow the discussion pretty much ended up focusing on Drupal 9, when it should be released and how much change should it come with.

In my previous post I explained why there will be a Drupal 9 even though we have previously unseen possibilities to add new things within Drupal 8.x.y. Now I'd like to dispel another myth, that initiatives are only there to add those new things.

Drupal 8 introduced initiatives to the core development process with the intention that even core development became too big to follow, understand or really get involved with in general. However because there are key areas that people want to work in, it makes sense to set up focused groups to organize work in those areas and support each other in those smaller groups. So initiatives like Configuration Management, Views in Core, Web Services, Multilingual, etc. were set up and mostly worked well, not in small part because it is easier to devote yourself to improving web services capabilities or multilingual support as opposed to "make Drupal better". Too abstract goals are harder to sign up for, a team with a thousand people is harder to feel a member of.

Given the success of this approach, even after the release of Drupal 8.0.0, we continued using this model and there are now several groups of people working on making things happen in Drupal 8.x. Ongoing initiatives include API-first, Media, Migrate, Content Workflows and so on. Several of these are primarily working on fixing bugs and plugging holes. A significant part of Migrate and API-first work to date was about fixing bugs and implementing originally intended functionality for example.

The wonder of these initiatives is they are all groups of dedicated people who are really passionate about that topic. They not only have plan or meta issues linked in the roadmap but also have issue tags and have regular meeting times. The Drupal 8 core calendar is full of meetings happening almost every single workday (that said, somehow people prefer Wednesdays and avoid Fridays).

If you have an issue involving usability, a bug with a Drupal web service API, a missing migration feature and so on, your best choice is to bring it to the teams already focused on the topics. The number and diverse areas of teams already in place gives you a very good chance that whatever you are intending to work on is somehow related to one or more of them. And since no issue will get done by one person (you need a reviewer and a committer at minimum), your only way to get something resolved is to seek interested parties as soon as possible. Does it sound like you are demanding time from these folks unfairly? I don't think so. As long as you are genuinely interested to solve the problem at hand, you are in fact contributing to the team which is for the benefit of everyone. And who knows, maybe you quickly become an integral team member as well.

Thanks for contributing and happy team-match finding!

Ps. If your issue is no match for an existing team, the friendly folks at #drupal-contribute in IRC are also there to help.