Chris Pliakas is a solutions architect at Acquia. He works closely with the Acquia sales representatives and potential clients "to help people who might not know about Drupal or might be considering a proprietary solution see how Drupal can help them. It's really great to be out on the front lines helping people to see Drupal the way we do."
Read the full post at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/63-meet-chris-pliakas-open-software-and-open-data-make-better-decisions
Michael Hofmockel is a technical consultant at Acquia, based in Ames Iowa. Like many Drupalists, Michael's background wasn't in computer science, but led him to Drupal nonetheless. As he puts it, "Drupal's great because you can come at it from almost any angle ... and we do!" Michael was building databases as a soil chemist at Duke University. When he needed a web interface for a database, "I decided not to build it for myself, tried Drupal and I never needed anything else again!"
Read the full post at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/62-meet-michael-hofmockel-getting-speed-drupal
Sam Lerner is an Acquia Client Advisor with something of a specialty in search technologies; he is the co-maintainer of the Google Search Appliance and Apache Solr Drupal projects. His job is to use his own knowledge and take advantage of Acquia's "deep bench" in all things Drupal to help clients make their websites successful. He calls working at Acquia "fuel injected knowledge".
Read the full post at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/meet-sam-lerner-acquia-fuel-injected-knowledge
Hernâni Borges de Freitas, a Technical Consultant at Acquia, specialises in "Doing lots of things with Drupal at scale: training and helping people go the right direction in Drupal. Acquia is bringing Drupal to different markets and perspectives, to big companies who want to use it to achieve better results. We make sure they go in the right direction. When they choose Drupal, we help make sure they choose the right solution, adapted to their needs, and that can grow with their business, instead of some closed solution that dies after a while."
Read the full post at the Acquia Developer Center: :https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/meet-hernani-borges-de-freitas-drupal-scale
As Senior Director of Solutions Architecture at Acquia, Christian Yates makes sure that Drupal is able to compete head-to-head with any and all competing technologies. He translates organizations' business needs into a vision of how Drupal can solve the large-scale, complex problems that large organizations face. Since showing and doing is always better than saying, he also builds proofs-of-concept in working code to help get them on board with Drupal.
Read the full post at the Acquia Developer Center: :https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/meet-christian-yates-heres-how-drupal-can-do
Kent Gale, Senior Director of the Client Advisory Team is on the front lines of keeping Acquia's clients happy and productive: "Every day is a pretty intensive exercise in making customers successful ... one way or the other ... either helping them develop, or deploy or maintain and manage their site."
Read the full post at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/meet-kent-gale-making-drupal-successes
Kenny Silanskas, Acquia's Tier 1 Team Manager, has a passion for getting Drupal right that rubs off on his team – Acquia's crew of frontline Client Advisers. They are in the happy position of being able to train client-developers in best practices, choosing and using the right Drupal modules, how to use the open source process, and more. Kenny says, "The Support Department gives Drupal sites the TLC they need." All of this results in happier and more successful Drupal users and a healthier Drupal project.
Read the full post at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/meet-kenny-silanskas-fire-drupal
In 2004, Peter Wolanin, then a full-time scientist, discovered Drupal while volunteering on a political campaign and building its website. As he puts it, the road to becoming a full-time software engineer at Acquia started when he discovered that "pretty soon, I got more interested in fixing the bugs than building the site ... "The satisfaction of fixing things sort of drew me in."
Read the full post at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/meet-peter-wolanin-we-are-changing-world
As a result of Randy Fay's blog posts and Drupalcon Denver core conversation on Drupal governance (see show notes for links), Dries Buytaert convened a working group to define the first steps in the refinement of Drupal governance. In this episode, I sit down with the working group members to talk about what they have been working on, what they have accomplished, and what the next steps are in defining what governance in the Drupal community should look like.
Read the full post at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/improving-drupal-governance
Michael Cooper, Engineering Director for the Acquia Network ("If it's broken, it's probably my fault."), brought a vision with him when he came to Acquia: a tool to manage, optimize, and secure large numbers of Drupal websites easily. This has turned into one of the Acquia Network's crown jewels, Insight, which monitors hundreds of metrics on live Drupal sites and offers not only alerts for more than 170 kinds of potential problems, it also proactively suggests ways you can improve your site' performance, SEO optimization, and more.
Read the full post at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/meet-michael-cooper-insight-improving-drupal-performance-and-security
Katelyn Fogarty, Manager of Online Marketing at Acquia, is a great example of the kind of Acquian who brings a variety of skills and experience to the table – in her case Drupal development and configuration, online marketing, and management – and combines them to perform a unique function uniquely well at Acquia.
Read the full post at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/meet-katelyn-fogarty-i-speak-marketing-and-engineer
Alex Bronstein talks at DrupalCon Denver about how his job in the Acquia OCTO (Office of the CTO) lets him make a difference to the development and ongoing improvement of Drupal 8.
Read the full post at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/meet-alex-bronstein-open-source-mind-shift
The Finnish national broadcasting company, YLE, must be one of the earliest institutional adopters of Drupal. They go all the way back to 2004 and Drupal 4.3! At the time, the YLE wanted community websites and commissioned Carl-Magnus Dumell, through the IT company he was working for at the time, to find a PHP-based product to launch their social web presence.
Bonus in this episode: the Organic Groups origin story!
Read the full post at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/meet-yle-drupal-finnish-national-broadcaster
Before Drupal, Chris Strahl had a successful career running his own company, doing multi-million dollar implementations with proprietary software, but he always had a private fascination with open source. Finding himself unwilling to sell an "antiquated, technically unsound, incredibly expensive" SAP eCommerce product to his clients, he and his colleagues developed and sold a Drupal-based platform solution.
Read the full post at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/peddling-lsd-meet-chris-strahl-and-large-scale-drupal-project
Ezra Barnett Gildesgame is the Technical Lead of Acquia's Distribution Team. He is in charge of maintaining and developing Acquia's two distributions, COD (Conference Organizing Distribution) and Commons, the social business and collaboration distro. His work goes into maintaining and improving these two Drupal products. The direct improvements made to the code go back to the repositories on Drupal.org, of course, but Ezra's work also helps the Drupal product landscape by helping other people working on other distributions.
Read the full post at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/making-drupal-products-meet-ezra-gildesgame
Closing the Drupal talent gap 2 ... with Addison Berry, Director of Education at Lullabot. Addison is also the Product Manager of Drupalize.me, a video training portal that offers training resources for helping folks improve their Drupal. Some companies are using these resources to hire junior developers and help them get up to speed faster and more efficiently. A theme Erich Ludwig also addressed in Acquia Podcast 46.
Read the full post at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/closing-drupal-talent-gap-2-meet-addison-berry
In this podcast, I talk with Peter Wolanin and Thomas Seidl, the primary maintainers of the two primary suites of modules for Solr search: Apache Solr Search Integration and Search API modules. We discuss the history of the modules, their different approaches, and recent enhancements that make them more powerful than ever.
Read the full post at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/apache-solr-drupal-nuts-and-bolts
Erich Ludwig, Acquia's Director of Learning Services talks about his road to Acquia and Drupal, community building and the importance of hiring and training new Drupalists.
Read the full post at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/meet-erich-ludwig-closing-drupal-talent-gap
At the European Drupal Business Days 2012 in Vienna, I spoke with Josef Dabernig (dasjo), Nico Grienauer (grienauer), Christian Ziegler (criz), and Wolfgang Ziegler (fago). These good people are part of the team running the Drupal Austria Road Show, a promotional tour for Drupal conceived and run by the Austrian Drupal community. They've got some great and inspiring ideas that we can all learn from for promoting Drupal wherever we are in the world.
Read the full post at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/meet-drupal-austria-roadshow
Drupal is a major presence at Stanford University, one of the world's premiere educational and research institutions. Since the creation of Stanford Web Services and its in-house Drupal hosting platform in 2011, the number of Stanford Drupal sites has more than tripled and 2-3 Drupal sites are created there every day.
Read the full post at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/drupal-tool-building-tool-drupal-stanford-and-beyond-zach-chandler
Chris Porter talks about the satisfaction of helping people solve the hard problems that will let them run their Drupal installations and their businesses better.
He says he feels like a hero sometimes, because he's welcomed by people who have invited him to come and help, rather than being the consultant who shows up because someone is forced to buy help for a proprietary system.
Read the full post at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/meet-chris-porter-drupal-hero
Bryan Hirsch comes from a background of software engineering and political activism. He originally joined Acquia as an engineer on the Drupal Gardens team thanks to his expertise and interest in software-as-a-service products. His new position at Acquia as Senior Technical Consultant Acquia Government Practice Department allows him to leverage his longstanding interest in using open source software in government to save taxpayer dollars, improve civic engagement and government services.
Read the full post at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/bryan-hirsch-helping-federal-government-solve-public-sector-problems-drupal
I just got back from a fantastic weekend with a couple hundred members of the Bulgarian Drupal community at Drupal Camp Sofia 2012. There was a lot of Drupal going on all weekend; some great sessions, lots of hallway track and an evening with the best-dancing Drupal community I have met so far at a little place called Veseloto Selo. A seemingly calm taverna-stye restaurant basically exploded from family-style eating to people dancing on the tables ... well, standing on the chairs at least.
Read the full post at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/acquia-podcast-41-drupal-camp-sofia-2012