Dev Profile: Angie Byron

Talking with Angie Byron is electric. She has an infectious passion for her work, a hilariously smart wit, and great experiences to share. It was great to have the chance to speak with her about her work, specifically how she got her start in the tech industry and the progress of Drupal.

What are you working on?

“So, I kind of have two full-time jobs at the moment. The one I get paid for is as a consultant for Lullabot, an open source training company specifically focused on Drupal. We do development consulting, training, and other stuff around bringing more people onboard with Drupal. We also do really big name Drupal sites like Grammy.com, Mtv.co.uk, and Sony BMG’s artist platform powering sites such as http://www.michaeljackson.com/.

“My other full-time job that I don’t get paid for is I act as the Drupal 7 Core maintainer. It’s basically the release manager of Drupal 7. I work alongside Dries Buytaert, the project lead, to work with the core-contributor team to prioritize initiatives, set boundaries on what’s allowed during release, and encourage people to work together. The community does the development work and innovation on Drupal 7, then Dries and I go in and funnel that energy into an end product that has the best ideas in it. Drupal 7 is in beta right now, hopefully to be headed into release candidate very soon. We’re hoping it comes out end of this year, early next year.”

*Editor’s Note: Since this interview, much progress has been made on the Drupal-front. Drupal 7 is *now* at RC1!

How did you become Dries’s right-hand woman?

“I got my start in the Drupal community as a Google Summer of Code student. I heard about Drupal because I’m one of those people who goes around viewing source on all the web pages I visit. There was this webpage called Spread Firefox that was this grassroots marketing campaign I thought was cool. I saw their name on the list of projects for Google Summer of Code and I was just graduating so I thought I’d apply. I didn’t expect to actually get accepted because I was just in community college; I wasn’t a computer science grad or anything. But they did accept me and I got to work on the project.

“So, I hadn’t installed Drupal or anything until the day I was accepted. I found the learning curve like really, insanely difficult and the only way to overcome that was to get involved with the community by helping write handbook pages, review patches, and answer support requests. I’ve always had this perception that to contribute in an open source community, you have to be Einstein or something. I came to find out that if you just want to fix things and make them better, with a little skill and drive you can totally go and do whatever you want. It was awesome. So, I went and got involved in Drupal in whatever ways were possible. This raised my profile in the community and I just kept up that momentum.

“I don’t know what Dries’s selection process is. He basically puts out a call asking a few people to sort of apply for the job. I told him I was going to prioritize usability and quality assurance. Once Drupal becomes more foolproof, we can develop much faster. He had the same priorities for this release and as a result, Drupal 7 has a totally revamped interface with stronger admin and front-end separation. We also have a totally automated testing framework that does integrated testing on every single patch in the queue. This is a really big accomplishment because Drupal is a 10-year-old project that had a lot of legacy functionality that we needed to go back and test. Anyway, we pulled it off and now that we’ve addressed some of these fundamentals, I think the community is really set to explode.”

As an influential woman in the Open Source world, do you have any tips for women who also would like to get involved?

“Sure! Well, the first pit of advice is that not all open source communities are created equal. There are definitely communities where diversity is not one of their mandates, so you get a sort of locker-room mentality. What’s bad is if women try to go into a project and that’s the first experience they have. Women can kind of extrapolate on that and think, ‘Well, open source is a bunch of guy and women aren’t welcome, so I’m going to do other things.’ That’s totally not the case and that wasn’t the case in my experience with the Drupal community at all. So, it’s important, when you’re looking to work on an open source project, to look for a community that advocates mutual respect from the top down. That’s the first thing.

“The other thing I would suggest is be visible. There’s a lot of women who go onto the Internet with a neutral or male-sounding handle just so they can avoid detection. I go under the handle of ‘webchick’ and I do that on purpose because I think that it’s important if you’re doing good stuff to be out and proud that you’re a woman. Not only does it tell the guys that we know what we’re talking about, but it also shows other women that women on the project that are doing kick-ass things. The Drupal community is great for this – we have tons of women doing high profile things.”

How did you first become involved with the Microsoft Open Source team?

“Well, I was introduced to Julia through my friend, James Walker. We met at PNW Drupal Summit in Vancouver about a month ago. I had a chance to talk to her about some of the different projects Microsoft is trying to do. She mentioned some of the events that bridge the open source communities, which is great because we tend to be sort of insular because we’re all so busy! She had ideas to bridge the gaps between these projects and get them working on protocols and commonalities that we can use to increase interoperability. So, I’m not terribly involved with the Microsoft open source team at the moment, but I know Julia and everyone I’ve met over there is cool.”

What’s your favourite experience working with Microsoft (technologies or employees)?

“We have an Xbox 360 that we love very much.

“Seriously, I don’t have a lot of direct experience with this, but Microsoft has done a lot. I mean, they routinely show up as gold and platinum sponsors at a lot of our Drupal events. Those are really critical because our community is so diverse and geographically distributed that getting everyone in the same room is really important. Every time we do that, it just propels a whole slew of innovations. I’m very grateful for the work Microsoft does to facilitate those events.

“The other thing, and I don’t know if this is well-publicized, is they’re working to get Drupal working better with SQL Server. There are also people on the Microsoft side working to get Windows servers with IIS so we can try our testing framework on it. I appreciate this support role Microsoft has played in the Drupal community.”

What sources influence you on a regular basis?

“I’m one of those people whose life has been absorbed by Drupal. So, I tend to get all my news from the Drupal community in a roundabout sort of way. Some of it is word of mouth, some of it is on Twitter, or I just come across it randomly. I really depend on my community of friends, which has grown huge because of Drupal, to inform me of what’s going on.”

If you were stranded on a desert island, what 3 things would you bring?

“Things I would bring with me would be my Nintendo DS; a very, very comfortable pillow; and my wife. We’d make a day of it!”