Drupal's future is now

Every Friday at every DrupalCon is marked by the massive mentored Drupal core code sprints at the conference venue. For an entire day, dozens of experienced Drupal core contributors—volunteers—guide contributors-to-be through the process of finding, documenting, fixing, and reviewing issues in Drupal core's issue queue.

At the end of the day, most attendees have completed this process, resulting in fixed bugs, improved documentation, and added features. But, most of all, this day serves to onboard people who wish to contribute to Drupal in the future, improving its ever-evolving code base and community.

Mentor briefing: @YesCT is a 9th-dan mentor. #DrupalCon pic.twitter.com/gO11UzLyyd

— Kevin Kaland (@wizonesolutions) September 30, 2016

That future is important to Drupal, and therefore to Druid. That is why, on a rainy Friday evening in Dublin, we sponsored a dinner to thank those mentors for their hard work. For working on Drupal's future. Not through code, but through teaching others.

Teaching others invariably means learning about yourself, and those you teach. As such, the mentor thank-you dinner isn’t just an occasion to wind down after a hard day’s work, but also a retrospective, a place to reflect on the things we’ve learned and enjoyed while helping others.

The mentored sprints were run by a team of dozens of volunteers, but I’d like to extend a special thanks to Rachel Lawson who, as a first-time mentored code sprint Lead, taught and learned perhaps more than most of us.

We hope to see you again in Vienna!

Header image: "DrupalCon mentors – DrupalCon Dublin 2016" by Michael Cannon is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0