Community Connection - Susanne D. Coates
We’re featuring some of the people in the Drupalverse! This Q&A series highlights individuals you could meet at DrupalCon.
Every year, DrupalCon is the largest gathering of people who belong to this community. To celebrate and take note of what DrupalCon means to them, we’re featuring an array of perspectives and fun facts to help you get to know your community.
For our next connection in this series, we feature the insight of Susanne D. Coates.
Susanne (susannecoates) began working with Drupal during her doctoral research in Neuroscience when looking for an open source CMS more than 15 years ago.
She currently works as a multimedia specialist and Senior Web Developer (Drupal/PHP), and is an active documentary filmmaker through her production company ArsMeta Films.
At DrupalCon, she volunteers as the Photography Coordinator, which she began in 2017.
Why was it you continued down the Drupal path, and how does it shape what you do?
In my research, I was developing a neural interface between peripheral nerves and computers. At the time there was not a good online resource for information on nerve-to-machine or brain-to-machine interfaces. So, as I was completing graduate school—circa 2000—I decided to create one. In the beginning I wrote a custom CMS running on a LAPP stack (Linux, Apache, Postgres and Perl) as none of the CMSs at the time were a good fit for what I needed. Maintaining all of this—in addition to curating the content—became quite onerous and a few years later I revisited using an open source CMS. By that time Drupal had been released in version 5 or 6 (I forget) and and it was a reasonably good match for what the site had evolved into during the intervening years.
The site was powered by Drupal until it was taken down around 2008. Drupal is a very flexible platform for implementing custom sites, and since then I have been using Drupal for my personal sites and well as sites I build for others.
What is a piece of advice you received that influenced your career?
Work hard, play hard and stay hydrated.
What book or piece of writing have you read that impacted the way you approach your work or colleagues? Why?
The four most influential books I’ve ever read are: 1) Object Oriented Analysis and Design (by Grady Booch), which is as much of a philosophy of problem solving as it is an approach to building computer software, 2) The Art of War (by Sun Tzu) whose timeless wisdom regarding strategy—in battle or in business—is as valid today as it was 1,500 years ago and 3) Logic (by Immanuel Kant) which taught me to look at the world as a rational and orderly system; and, 4) the Tao Te Ching (by Lao Tzu) which inspired me to look at the world as a dynamic, ever-changing system that’s not always orderly.
What is one thing you think people of today will miss in 20 years?
With regard to technology, I’m not nostalgic. There’s nothing that I really miss from 20 years ago. Computers are smaller and faster, software development tools are better, cameras are lower cost and higher resolution, etc. Some people get nostalgic about doing wet photography - I did that gig and I don’t miss it at all, digital cameras are far better. Analog music synthesizers went away for a while when digital synthesis made its debut, but have since made a comeback because nothing digital can sound like an analog synth. So, if something is good it sticks around, otherwise it gets relegated to the dustbin of history. I doubt that there will be any technology that I truly miss in 20 years hence.
What are you most looking forward to for DrupalCon Seattle?
What I most look forward to about DrupalCon every year are the people, the community, increasing my fund of knowledge about Drupal, and shooting the Con!
Join us April 8 - 12, 2019 for DrupalCon Seattle!
