From Treehugger To Debugger: How I Became A Drupal Developer In 3 Months
Knowledge Level of Attendees: Beginner
After graduating from George Mason University with a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Science, I worked in the field for a year. However, I felt as if I wasn’t making enough of an impact. Working to protect the environment around me was rewarding but I wanted to make an impact worldwide. One day, a good friend of mine suggested that I look into a local Drupal Development course offering to teach people with no prior programming background the skills necessary to become Drupal Developers. I had never heard of the word “Drupal” before. I did extensive research and learned that Drupal was a Content Management System (CMS) being used to power popular and powerful websites like whitehouse.gov, weather.com, doctorswithoutborders.org, and much more.
As I was researching and considering a new career path, I found that websites, applications, and software were increasingly being used in areas of nonprofit work, disaster relief, refugee aid, and other great causes. I thought to myself, what if I could help build websites that would help people all around the world, all while staying in the Washington DC Metro area? I looked up existing Drupal websites and found that they were being used to promote causes such as ending energy poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa (se4all.org), suicide prevention (sprc.org), and helping refugees flee warzones (arcsyria.org). As a relative of refugees, I was ecstatic to learn that I could pursue a career that would allow me to help the ongoing refugee crisis. After building up this newfound motivation and consulting Drupal Developers, I decided to take a plunge that would potentially allow me to change careers.
While working as a full time Environmental Scientist, I enrolled in an intensive 3-month in-person Drupal Development course. After a full day of collecting and analyzing water and soil samples throughout Northern Virginia forests, parks, and streams, I would go and attend the Drupal course where I would learn Git, Drush, PHP, HTML, CSS, and how to create subthemes and build Drupal sites.
After completing the course and passing a pre-interview technical assessment, I accepted my first position as a Drupal Developer with Taoti Creative (www.taoti.com). I have been a Drupal Developer for the last year and have worked on many Drupal 7 and 8 websites ranging from commercial to government and nonprofit clients.
In this presentation I will discuss how and why I decided to become a Drupal Developer and what motivates me to strive to be the best developer I can be. Moreover, I will examine the challenges entry level Drupal Developers will face when learning Drupal and developing Drupal websites during their early months on the job. I will delve into the Drupal learning curve and go over challenges that new Drupal Developers will experience in the areas of Version Control (GIT), pulling/pushing/merging code on multiple environments, exporting/reverting features, and setting up local environments.
One of my main reasons for becoming a Drupal Developer was that I wanted to make an impact worldwide. I wanted to help build websites for health organizations, nonprofits, charities, and more. I’ve been able to do just that while having fun along the way. Additionally, I have found the Drupal community to be a passionate and inclusive one. By describing my experiences with Drupal Development and the Drupal community, I will encourage the audience members who are not versed in Drupal or considering becoming Drupal Developers that they too can join the community and gain a lot from it all while benefiting humanity.