Jeremy Andrews
Sun, 01/06/2008 - 20:00 — jeremy
What is your motivation for being a member of the Drupal Association?:
I've been participating in Drupal for many years now, and am excited to see it continue to grow. I recently started a consulting company that is built around Drupal, and have a vested interest in seeing it continue to be a successful platform.
What are the primary goals you would like to work on?:
My primary interest is in seeing Drupal scale gracefully, allowing it to be picked up by larger and larger websites.
What strategy will you employ in order to accomplish said goals?:
I am a member of the "Drupal Performance Agency". Together we work to document best practices for scaling Drupal, and seek funding for improving the scalability of Drupal's core code. All of the information we collect is being written up and released under the Creative Commons License.
What yearly budget would you need in order to accomplish said goals?:
At this time, all of our work is paid for by clients utilizing our consulting services.
What strengths/experience you have to help you accomplish the goals?:
I've been working with large networking projects for well over a decade. In Drupal, I maintain KernelTrap.org. I've also built the backend for an ASP hosting Drupal and CiviCRM, designing and deploying the entire highly available architecture using Linux application servers, OpenBSD firewalls, and Cisco switches, My consulting company is a MySQL partner, and I've begun developing free Drupal-oriented webinars with them (the first should be available by the end of the month, updates will be on mysql.com and tag1consulting.com). I've written and maintained kernel code in C as well as application proxies in C and C++, understanding the TCP/IP protocol suite to the lowest level. I've also worked as a security expert, designing and deploying a secure VPN network for tens of thousands of employees for a large foreign corporation (also documenting it and training their support staff). Through all of this, my greatest pleasure was working with Drupal.
How long have you been using Drupal, and how'd you get your start?:
I started with Drupal about seven or eight years ago when Dries approached me because my website, KernelTrap, was repeatedly getting Slashdotted using PHP-Nuke.
Have you made existing community contributions, and if so, what?:
I wrote the core statistics and throttle modules. I've patched the sessions logic, the cache logic, and much more over the years. I've also written nearly two dozen contrib modules (only half a dozen of which I actively maintain anymore).
How much time can you invest in your Drupal Association work?:
5 hours/month
Apply for Board of Directors membership:
Apply for Permanent Membership only
Statutes:
I have read and understood the Statutes of the Drupal Association. I am prepared to participate by following those statutes.
Comments
Dev vs. association tasks
Your primary goal seems to be to develop code / scalability solutions. Perhaps you could talk a bit more about the "soft" tasks you intend to accomplish with the Association? Doing work on development isn't really within the mandate of the Association.
Tasks
As a Drupal Association Permanent Member I will help Drupal to find its way into larger and larger installations. By strengthening existing relationships and building new relationships with users who have large Drupal installations, I will help to evangelize Drupal's adoption by larger and larger websites. My role as a Permanent Member is not in any way that of a coder, but my experience as an architect, a programmer, and a systems and networking engineer is very beneficial to my role as a scalability liaison. I will draw upon my technical background to explain to potential Drupal adopters why Drupal is a good choice for them.
More specifically, as a Permanent Member I will help to organize Drupal events. For example, as a MySQL partner I will be giving a webinar at the end of the month on MySQL's web page focused on tuning MySQL for optimal Drupal performance. I will also focus on collecting and sharing performance and scalability knowledge, creating technically useful promotional materials such as these here. Finally, I will become more involved in helping to maintain and scale the Drupal project's existing and future infrastructure.
jandrews
I have only worked with Jeremy a couple times, but each has been a pleasure and he has shown a depth of knowledge that is incredibly impressive.