Community Connection - Everett Zufelt

We’re featuring some of the people in the Drupalverse! This Q&A series highlights some of the individuals you could meet at DrupalCon. Every year, DrupalCon is the largest gathering of people who belong to the Drupal community. To celebrate and take note of what DrupalCon means to them, we’re featuring an array of perspectives, insight, and some fun facts to help you get to know your community.

First up, Everett Zufelt. 

Everett Zufelt photo
Photo provided by Everett Zufelt

Everett Zufelt (@ezufelt) is the Director of Technology Services at Myplanet, a software studio. His Drupal experience dates back a decade, when he was a member of a mailing list for blind software developers and partnered with a researcher from the University of Toronto to assist with the delivery of a community site based around her research project. He began working with Drupal 5, and moved on to work for a small Drupal agency in Ottawa. The majority of his time was spent working with the community to make improvements to the accessibility of Drupal 7 before it went to market; he learned about how both Drupal the software and Drupal the community functioned.

 

 

 

 

 

Why was it you continued down the Drupal path, and how does it shape what you do currently?

Over the past 7 years, through my work with Myplanet, I have used Drupal to deliver traditional web/mobile, and headless IoT solutions for our customers. I’ve enjoyed the Drupal community, and the ease with which Drupal can be approached by beginners, while remaining a robust framework for experts. In the past few years we’ve been focusing on how Drupal can be used as an intelligent and personalizable content repository to power mobile, wearable, large screen, and conversational user interfaces.

What is a piece of advice you received that influenced your career?

"It is better to be productive than to be right.” Collaboration—being open-minded and approaching new situations with a growth mindset—within the Drupal community, with colleagues, or with customers, is essential to productivity. I've shared more about my continual journey in an article I published about a year ago, Developers Are People, Too: My Five Year Path To Personal Growth.

What book or piece of writing have you read in the last year that impacted the way you approach your work or colleagues? Why?

I’m going to cheat here and list four, as I believe they all provide an interesting perspective on the same theme: keep examining yourself, growing, and improving how you relate with and engage with those around you. You are almost certainly showing too little empathy, and contributing to relational difficulties that create friction for productivity.

  • “What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful!” by Marshall Goldsmith & Mark Reiter
  • “Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity” by Kim Scott
  • “Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High,” Second Edition, by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler & Laura Roppe
  • “No One Understands You and What to Do About It” by Heidi Grant Halvorson & Eliza Foss

What is one thing you think people of today will miss in 20 years?

PHP!
Seriously though, 20 years ago my grandmother had a rotary phone in her home. My daughter has never lived in a home with a landline phone. I think there are some simple things that we can hopefully do away with:

  • Wallets full of plastic cards
  • Physical house keys
  • Headphone cables
  • Combustion engines in the majority of automobiles

Although over the next two decades content will continue to be delivered through more new contexts—using Alexa, Google, augmented reality, and other emerging technologies—I don’t think we’ll do away with paper books or devices with screens from which we can read. Content experiences will become more personalized, and content will be pushed to us based on context (time of day, location, simultaneous activities), but reading will remain part of who we are for a long time to come.

What are you most looking forward to for DrupalCon Seattle?

Great food, meeting up with colleagues in the community, learning about how Drupal 8 is being used to deliver smarter experiences, and learning alongside the participants in the Front-end Accessibility Summit on April 8

Any additional thoughts you’d like to share?

Over the past decade my involvement in the Drupal community has changed. From a user, to a Core developer, to a technical lead, and now a Director in a software studio. I love the way the software and the community has evolved over the years; whether through bringing in more governance to the product management process or bringing in the Community Working Group, Drupal is anything but a stagnant product.

I also love that as a completely blind participant in the community that there has always been a low barrier to participation. My feedback on the software has always been appreciated, and organizers of local and regional events have been more than accommodating to my disability. I have been fortunate to speak at a number of DrupalCons, including: San Francisco, Munich, Portland, Baltimore, Vienna, and Nashville, and will be co-leading the Front-end Accessibility Summit in Seattle.

 

Join us April 8 - 12, 2019 for Drupalcon Seattle!