December 2011
6:30pm, 9/12/11
Back at The Hive, Richmond. Been thinking about Journey. In relation to The Business of Drupal in Australia.
Seems to me we can consider that journey at 4 levels.
1. As technology.
The early adopters of Drupal in Australia began building sites onto the Drupal 4.? framework around 2004? Some of those early adopters most likely have some interesting tales of technological advances to tell. The journey at that level is along a pathway where the language of description is framed around PHP constructs, function calls, objects and arrays, modules and theme files. A journeyman at this level might tell tales of how particular hooks and API's and database entities came into being and went out of favour. Or how some guys got together on a weekend and thrashed out the architecture of a module that was slated to find its way into core but never quite made it. Or did. Or will. Perhaps for some, translation out of geek is needed at this level. We wish to establish pointers here at drupal.com.au to that history.
5:20pm 11/12/11
When we allude to the incomprehensibility, to many, of geek communications, above, we are really highlighting the difficulty many people have of sustaining the attention to detail and immersion in complexity and steady progressive grasping of constructive pathways - and delight in the unfolding of the seemingly impossible - that is at the heart of the geek mind. Tenacity, and stubborn persistence, and willingness to laboriously and rigorously test likely and unlikely scenarios, and above all to take pleasure and pride in creating recipe pathways towards a goal or vision, where none is apparent - these are the qualities needed to even begin to put together anything of the complexity and beauty that is the architectural and engineering marvel we call Drupal.
To translate is to lose specificity.
A technically-focused history of Drupal activity in Australia may then in its purest sense, where a bit is called a bit and a byte is called a byte and a word is called a word and all constructs above that level are called in the same degree of precision as a CPU will test them by.... at that level of precision a history will only be of interest to, or comprehensible to, a very small percentage of the intelligent audience wishing to more fully understand the success of Drupal.
As in all scientific pursuits there is sometimes a division of roles between those who do the science and achieve the outcomes, and those who have the gift of explaining such advances to the general or educated community.
We don't claim either gift here in the context of this particular writing. We merely wish to begin setting up a digital entry point into existing documentation focusing on the technical journey of Drupal in Australia.
As we consider and collate we keep in mind that without the kernel - the technical layer - of the Drupal behemoth there really would be nothing to document here, nothing accomplished in the Drupalverse, and nothing for Drupallers to do together.
The technical skills are at root.
But we consider that without the other three layers - community, business, and persons - the beast would be equally as dead.
And thus those three layers are equally of interest to a thorough examiner of The Business of Drupal in Australia
Coming up soon:
2. As community.
3. As business opportunities.
4. As personal stories.
(and then more detailing to come)
John Saward B.Sc.
