Desire to teach and empowered by Drupal, I ended up creating a social learning community of 150K students.

Starting off as a teacher with a strong motivation to provide free education to as many students possible, I began in 2013 with free video lectures. I used a bunch of different tools to achieve all I needed. Youtube for video, facebook groups for activity, StackExchange sites for doubt discussion, twitter for my followers, etc etc. With growing student base soon I figured the students were finding it a challenge to communicate and the overall learning experience was not so cohesive.  

I had some site building experience with Drupal 6 but was not confident enough to try building a new platform altogether with almost no cash at my disposal to hire developers. I landed on Question & Answer installation profile “ArrayShift” originally developed by Jeff Eaton (eaton) from Lullabot. I started using it to launch techtud.com. Drupal 7, had already taken over and did not want to use an outdated system. With limited development experience & no money to invest, one day I started in the morning with vanilla Drupal installation and by early evening I was able to build a mini StackOverflow with NO coding. And in following weeks, I was ready with a fairly complex community and social learning website.

The Drupal community helped me to get this done quickly. An instance of which was, me reaching out for help with some fixes in a sandbox module and with the sincere help of the author Sunny Jhunjhunwala (sunnyuff), I was able to upload videos abstractly on youtube from my site. I was overwhelmed by the way I saw Drupal community worked and probably this pulled me into the Drupal ecosystem in a big way.

Now I run a Drupal Shop along with continuing my passion for teaching & sharing free knowledge on http://techtud.com where Drupal empowered me to self-help myself. Currently, techtud.com has 31K+ subscriber, 40K+ registered users and reach to more than 200,000 students of 2000+ colleges across the globe every month.

The community kept wowing me time and again and as a result, I started my bit in giving back to Drupal community with my contributions.

The Session will share a story of how Drupal has the power to change lives around us potentially to a large extent. It will uncover my journey with Drupal from a beginner to a fairly able Drupal professional.

The attendees may belong to any expertise level, but the key Idea of the session is to inspire beginners in the Drupal Community.