Savvy Spotlight: Alec Reynolds
This is the transcript from a Spotlight interview Nicole did with Alec Reynolds (Kalamuna) from The Bay Area in California. You can view Alec’s On Savvy profile here.
Nicole : Can we start by you telling us a bit about yourself Alec?
Alec : I am one of the co-founders of a consultancy called Kalamuna. We do exclusively Drupal work. We’re actually a group of Drupal freelancers that got together through a developer collective. We’d done a couple of projects together and decided we wanted to start working together and do something a little different with Drupal. We’re really excited about that and have been having a lot of fun with it. That’s a lot of my life, aside from that, before talking with you, I’m a runner, a musician, and I do a couple of other things on the side to keep myself sane and expand my attention span, because programming has a tendency to shrink my attention span. I’m trying not to become attention deficit or something.
Nicole : So how long have you been developing with Drupal?
Alec : I started developing with Drupal about 2 / 2-and-a-half years ago, so I’m relatively new to the game. I managed only a handful of Drupal 5 sites. That’s kind of, I think for most Drupal programmers I talk to, what version they got involved with, it’s the landmark. So I was in heavy with Drupal 6, and now I don’t even deal with Drupal 6 sites, I’m all Drupal 7.
Nicole : And was that transition fairly easy to make would you say?
Alec : It was actually really fun, because I did the transition just right, I think a lot of people got forced into it too quickly, they got into 7 when it wasn’t mature. I really got into 7 right when it was reaching maturity, and had a great time with it, I love it. There’s a lot of things I can do in Drupal 7 that you just can’t do in Drupal 6.
Nicole : What would you say you love about Drupal? Do you have a couple of things that come to mind that you really appreciate about it?
Alec : I think the top thing, the thing that got me into it really, was the community. I went to the local San Francisco users group, the community that organises BAD camp. They really opened my eyes. There were so many different, exciting things going on, people really loving what they did. People that weren’t necessarily hard-core programmers, which when I was first getting my start, working for a lot of non-profits, I worked with a lot of people that weren’t experienced programmers, and seeing that, people that could actually engage with the software without having tonnes of programming knowledge, that was really exciting. So that the first thing I think that got me attracted to Drupal, was that community.
Nicole : The next question on my list was do you have any involvement in the Drupal community, which segues quite well. Do you attend meet-ups?
Alec : Yeah, in-person meetings excite me a lot more than chatting on IRC, so yeah I’ve presented at a couple of different camps in the California area and will probably be doing a presentation with one of my founders up at Drupal Con Portland in mid May. Aside from the DUGs (Drupal User Groups), we're always contributing patches online, we definitely do get down to the nitty-gritty.
Nicole : What would you say are your strengths as a developer?
Alec : I think one of the strengths that I have is one of the reasons I actually teamed up with my two co-founders : looking towards the frontiers in Drupal. We use Panopoly, which is made by one of the guys that is a partner in Pantheon Systems, which does a Drupal hosting solution, which we use exclusively. It’s a great distribution that’s built using panels for doing layout, and I guess my strength as a developer is using Panopoly to do rapid prototyping. I can spin up a new site for a client very quickly and put it together to give them an idea of what the user experience is going to be like before they’ve laid out too much budget on something they don’t know is going to work.
Nicole : That’s a very important stage of a project. It’s even helpful for us right, as a designer or developer, helps improve that process. That’s great.
Alec : Yeah, sometimes when a client says something and they’re like ok, is this possible or is it not, it’s like, ‘let’s try it out’. With Drupal, it’s pretty easy.
Nicole : Do you have any tricks or tips that you could suggest for other developers?
Alec : Yeah, check out Panopoly. It’s awesome. A lot of people are using it, it’s getting a lot of traction, and I think it’s a great preview of hopefully what laying out content is going to be like in Drupal 8. Either that, or Spark, those are the two things that are going on right now. I hope that’s the future.
Nicole : Would you describe for us what you would say your ideal client would be? Or if you could put a few characteristics together of a perfect project or job, what would you say those are?
Alec : You know, they come in all different shapes and sizes. I think your initial question, about the ideal client is, who that is, that’s probably the most important part to me. I have a person I really respect in the consultancy space once told me that she never has a client that she wouldn’t go out to dinner with, and I think that’s actually a great rule of thumb. To be able to work with your client and be able to communicate at the same frequency.
Nicole : That’s right, you spend a lot of time with them, it’s important you get on.
You mentioned you’re a musician. Tell us more about that.
Alec : Musician is probably a stretch. Everyone can sing, right and I probably fall into that category as a musician. Everyone can sing, and everyone should sing, but not everyone should necessarily be heard singing. I have a house full of instruments and everything, but it doesn’t necessarily make me a recorded artist.
Nicole : What would you say is the biggest challenge that Drupal developers will face in the next 12 months? Do you have any prophecies there?
Alec : One of the things I personally worry about, is that it feels like the Drupal space, and there’s a lot of good things about this, but the Drupal space is getting more crowded and more competitive. The community that I got involved with, has changed. People that have been in the community longer than I, I think have noticed it more. It’s become a lot more corporate, there’s bigger projects, the guys that you once thought of as your friends are now maybe your competitors. Competitors is kind of a new word in the Drupal space. And I’m a little worried about that for myself and for people that are just starting to get involved with Drupal.
Nicole : So there’s a lot more work then? And a lot more people looking for Drupal developers, and a lot more developers coming through right?
Alec : I hope so. That’s one of the reasons that sites like yours, and I’ve seen a couple of others that don’t really fill the same need as your site, but are trying to help developers gain the skills they need and to connect the clients, and I think that’s actually the part that I really like about the eco-system maturing, is that, you know, there’s better options. There’s more people, it’s a vibrant space to be.
Nicole : Have you seen anything made with Drupal that you were impressed by recently that you could point us towards?
Alec : There were some really cool commerce sites I was looking through, Ryan, I can never say his last name, but he the core maintainer of Drupal Commerce, he’s always tweeting different commerce sites that were built with Drupal Commerce. There’s been a couple that were really cool, I don’t remember what their names were. I think one of them was a men’s fashion thing which was pretty cool.
Nicole : Can you tell us, what is your biggest Drupal mistake?
Alec : I don’t know, I think the biggest mistake I ever had was probably not using some of the tools that I use now quick enough. I think when I was first starting with Drupal, I had a tendency to not think like a programmer when using it. Now when I think about things that I do in Drupal I try to automate things as much as I can, and at the very least, even if I’m not creating programs to automate, at least create better procedures. And if I’d done that, employed testing on a lot of my projects from day one when I first started, I think everything would have gone quicker. I would have a script I could run to do mundane tasks that take up my time and don’t let me focus on the things that are actually important to my clients. So that’s what I would do, automate and create procedures, when I first started instead of looking at it now.
Nicole : It’s good to look back and compare with where you are now and see the progress in between.
Alec : Definitely, always try and save yourself more time as a developer no matter who you are. That’s a good idea.
Nicole : So what did we miss? Is there anything you would like to add?
Alec : I don’t think so, I would actually like to hear a little more about On Savvy and how you guys are doing?
Nicole : Excellent, sure. We’ve been working on Savvy for a good couple of years now. We launched the beta in the summer of 2012. It’s been steadily growing in numbers and we’re getting a community of developers together. We have a backlog of functionality we want to implement, which we’re trying to order by the things that are going to be most beneficial. So it’s prioritising these tasks, which is another reason it’s really great to speak to people.
We really value these interviews because we’re listening out for what’s going on and what people need. We have our overall goal, to show the communities passion and dedication. We want to expose people that are really passionate about what they do and go more behind the scenes to reveal more depth about them. We plan to implement functionality that allows you to show what events you’ve been attending, what you’ve been reading, what you’ve been ‘liking’, any code contributions, a way to follow people and bookmark key developers & companies, update your availability status… these are things that are all coming.
Another part we want to develop as well is interaction between projects, there’s so many different elements to a Drupal - site builders, themers, architects or consultants. We don’t want to build something really generalized, we want to make sure we are catering to the specifics of Drupal development. And then we will extend across other communities, other eco-systems.. PHP, Ruby on Rails, design side even.
Alec : I’m glad you guys started with Drupal, we really need it.
Nicole : A lot of developers don’t have their own web presence so hopefully we’ll help with that too.
Alec : Cool, a lot of the stuff you are saying resonates a lot. Prioritisation with a couple of start-ups that I’ve worked with, it’s like ‘we need everything’, but we don’t know what our users need, and finding that out is always fun, it’s part of the gig.
Nicole : It does take the time, but it’s worth it. Great, it’s been so nice talking to you and I hope our paths cross again one day.
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