Greg Dunlap  0:00  
Our guest today is Angie Byron. Angie is a Senior Director Of Product And Community Development at Acquia. But she's arguably best known for being a contributor and core maintainer for the open source content management system Drupal, where she and I often worked closely to affect change in Drupal, the Software and the community. So welcome to the show. Angie.

Angie Byron  0:18  
Awesome. Thanks, Greg. Happy to be here.

Greg Dunlap  0:20  
Sure. So I know you've told this story like 1000 times, but can you briefly describe how you found Drupal?

Angie Byron  0:28  
Yeah, sure. So I'm one of those people that's innately curious about everything. And so I go around whenever I visit a website and kind of view source and find out what's happening underneath the hood. And way back in the day, this was like in 2003, or something, there was a website called Spread Firefox and Spread Firefox was this really neat collaborative site that was set up to promote the Firefox web browser. And basically, any user could upload, you know, little graphics that they had made, or an event like a, you know, Install Fest, they're having it there, you know, university campus, or a poster that they did, that you could print off and hang up somewhere. And I thought, well, this is a really cool thing, like all these different people, you know, promoting open source, and I view the source and it was like Drupal. Okay, I'd never heard of that before. But that's interesting, kind of filed it away. And then as I was finishing up school, my instructor told me about a program called Google Summer of Code, where Google basically pays you over the summer to work on an open source project, and Drupal was in the list. And I was like, Oh, my God, well, maybe I'll give this a shot. You know, because I, to that point, had kind of major imposter syndrome about open source contribution, I figured you had to be a freakin genius to do it. And I was like, just this, you know, lowly Community College grad, whatever. How could I possibly, you know, that kind of thing. And when Google Summer code came up, it was like, Okay, well, I guess they know, we're students and we don't know everything yet. So I figured I'd try and against all odds, I got accepted. And then once I got on this side of the, you know, you must be this smart to contribute wall I had built in my head, I was like, oh, man, anybody could do this. They just need to be excited and like, collaborative with other people. And I got into everything Drupal there was to do like the core committing and docs team and everything. So basically these days, I spend my time trying to solve the biggest hairiest problems with Drupal and Acquia is nice enough to pay me to do that. That can range to anything from, you know, community empowerment stuff to direct engineering of the software to work with the Drupal Association on fundraising, or drupal.org, or whatever it is. So, yeah, it's been quite a ride.

Greg Dunlap  2:42  
I think it's pretty safe to say that at this point, there's very little in the Drupal community you haven't touched or done.

Angie Byron  2:49  
That's fair. I have not done translations. I really do not know other languages other than, you know, English very well. 

Greg Dunlap  3:00  
Just enough to read the French on the Canadian products in your store.

Angie Byron  3:05  
 Exactly. Yeah. Like lait that's milk. I got it. Yeah. But no, in every other respect. I have tried to get involved. As much as possible. I love the Drupal community. I love the people in it. And I love learning new things all the time.

Greg Dunlap  3:20  
What was it about Drupal and the Drupal community that really like sucked you in or made it so compelling?

Angie Byron  3:29  
I think from a technology standpoint, like I had tried open source content management systems back early in my you know, web development careers, like PHPNuke was a thing that people used for a while and like, CGI scripts back in the day for people remember that. And basically, my outcome of that was like, these are all terrible. And my cat could write better code than this. And so I'm just going to write my own CMS because screw all this, you know? And then when I found Drupal, it was like, oh, wow, right? Multilingual stuff? Oh, and filter XSS vulnerabilities. That's probably important. It was like all of these different things that it's like, yeah, okay, I can see the value of this thing. Because somebody who put a lot of time and effort into thinking about this did it and it was built in such a way to be modular so you weren't stuck with this monolithic thing that literally you had to go to a forum to find out what line and what file you had to erase and replace with some other line to modify it. It was all done in a kind of a cool, powerful way. So that's what drew me to the technology. But the technology as you know Greg got rewritten like 30 times in the past 10 years. So the people within the community I think were a huge draw and I my first ... a lot of that within Google Summer of Code I kind of did the thing where well shoot they think I'm smart, so I can't ask for help because then they'll know I'm not smart, and then almost failed out because I could not wrap my head around what the heck a hook was and these kinds of things. And I found that the people involved in the community were really like, approachable and had my back and they helped me get past that. And then my first DrupalCon, was OSCMS in Vancouver in 2006. And it possibly is part of why I've actually moved here now, because I was like, I love Vancouver and that was a chance to kind of stay here for a week and kind of see how it went. At any rate, I went there super shy. I didn't know anybody in real life, I just interacted with them IRC. So I kind of sat in a corner with my Google Summer of Code shirt and kind of hoped someone would notice me and say something and then they totally did they found me and were like, "Oh my god, it's webchick!" bla bla bla. And like, I wasn't, you know, it was such a welcoming and awesome place. For example, Adrian Roussow was a major contributor at the time, the guy is like a frickin mad scientist genius guy who invented the form API and multi-site and all these other capabilities of Drupal. And he was explaining something to me very excitedly. And I'm like, kind of deer in the headlights, because I had no idea what he's talking about. He was like, "Oh, oh, I can tell you don't know what I'm talking about. Let me try explaining it differently. Because it's super awesome. I want you to know what I'm talking about." You know, that kind of thing. And I just thought that was so cool. It wasn't like, "Oh, I get it. You're stupid. Okay, well, I'm gonna go talk to someone more of my level." And then there was a Sprint's that at the time, we were trying to get 4.7 out the door. And so Moshe held this code sprint in his hotel room. And anybody was invited in and he was just parceling out different issues for people to work on and it was like, I felt like there was no barrier, I could just jump in and get involved. And I was treated like one of the team. And I just loved that. So I left DrupalCon. That was like a really formative experience with all these new relationships with people and, you know, more insight into my own skills, because I went in there thinking I was a noob. And I left there like, oh, wow, I've contributed to core. Yeah, I guess I do know. So yeah, it was awesome.

Greg Dunlap  7:12  
It's always interesting to me how, you know, the Drupal community back then wasn't perfect by any means. But it did seem to me, especially when compared to other technology communities, to be so much more supportive than other than other communities, and to really attract a group of people who were passionate about the technology, but also kind of like .. you know, Jeff Robbins at the time wrote that article, "How Drupal Can Change The World." And I think I think a lot of us felt that way. Like we were doing something that was really going to have an impact on things. And I'm just like, I've always wondered how it is that that group of people came together? Like, what do you think it is that made that group unique?

Angie Byron  8:04  
Yeah, I think it I think, I mean, some of it was dumb luck, right? I think very early days in Drupal, Drupal very much was a tool by developers and for developers. It has shifted since then, to try to be a tool by developers and for, you know, at least slightly technical end user. I wouldn't say everyone because you definitely need to like tinkering a bit in order to like Drupal. And really nailing that and, you know, really encouraging innovation of the developer community. And one of the earlier Drupal sites was Kernel Trap, which was a blog about Linux, and Dries himself had come from a Linux contribution, background and stuff. So I think a lot of the early success was kind of attracting those technologists that liked working on the cutting edge of the web at the time, and a really rapid innovation cycle and getting all that stuff in there and turned around and people were building cool stuff. And anybody could contribute, like, back in the day. I don't know if you remember this, but like everybody who had a CVS account could commit to anything in the CVS repository.

Greg Dunlap  9:20  
Yeah. All they had, all they had to do was ask Derek.

Angie Byron  9:23  
Yeah, pretty much. So I had I, I have, I still have commits in my profile to the voting module, which I've never used. And I don't know how I managed to commit something there. But anyway, it was just like that. So it was very scrappy. And, you know, there was not a lot of barrier to entry, and people could just come in and they could do things and kind of feel powerful. But I think the second aspect that and in part because of that background of appealing to technologists trying to do cool and amazing things. The Howard Dean campaign back in 2005, was really the first, you know, major electoral campaign to try to harness the power of the web and so they set up different Drupal sites. You know, Howard Dean in Massachusetts or Howard Dean in Minnesota or whatever. And they could all share logins with one another because of the Drupal module, which, you know, is a terrible security vulnerability or whatever. But it was cool at the time, because all of these sites could work and collaborate interchangeably. And that brought a whole bunch of attention from like the US political landscape. And then I think that caused media companies to start paying attention and sort of snowballed from there. To the point where now you have major world governments on Drupal, you have, you know, billion dollar companies on Drupal. And you also have cat blogs on Drupal, and you have nonprofits like the ACLU on Drupal, and everything in between. And so I think it's, you know, sort of that initial appeal to people who like tinkering with tech, and then snowballing into a couple of really great use cases for the software that people can resonate with, and then kind of going off in there.

Greg Dunlap  10:57  
I think that's a really good point about how a lot of the passion in the community was driven by people who were passionate about their own causes, be it politics, or be it the nonprofit's they worked for or the higher ed institutions that they worked for, those groups constituted a lot of the early days of Drupal contributors, and bringing that passion to the project itself, because the project itself was enabling them to follow the passions that they had already brought into it in the first place.

Angie Byron  11:29  
Exactly.

Greg Dunlap  11:30  
Like I remember when White House happened, when White House during the Obama campaign when whitehouse.gov went on to Drupal. I remember personally, that being a really big deal for me, because it was the first time that I felt that anything that I had worked on was, was having an impact in politics, or in people's day to day lives and things like that. And that was a really heady thing for me.

Angie Byron  11:55  
Yeah. And We The People as well, which Trump took down, but it was this website where anybody could propose a new policy change, or that kind of thing and try and solicit votes on it. And if it got enough votes, and I forget how many It was ...

Greg Dunlap  12:11  
100,000, I think.

Angie Byron  12:14  
Then it would actually go to the floor of the house in order to have a discussion about it. And I thought that of anything that Drupal produced, that was just an amazing piece of technology. I felt the same way like, wow, this little scrappy thing that started as my hobby project is now actually changing the world in a material way.

Greg Dunlap  12:36  
So probably around 2011, or 2012, both of us were really at our peaks in community involvement. And like, I know that me and you and several others in the community was just like, constantly traveling to events, especially as we're heading into the push for Drupal 8, and things like that. We were just constantly traveling. What was that period like for you?

Angie Byron  13:10  
It was, I mean, okay ... it would have been great if my partner the time had been like, "Yay, travel!" but my paretner was definitely not yay travel and so that caused a lot of kind of strife in the home life. Because there was a lot of, you know, me having to go to this place, or the other places, that thing, and it was a lot of travel. And in the meantime, she would be home and particularly, we had a young baby running around, that would get particularly tricky. And I guess, one thing I found about that period of time is some some things you could understand. Like DrupalCon. It's like, fine, you have to travel there for work. But we were creating these sprints, which were smaller get togethers of people in person to kind of focus on one particular aspect of the software. And sprints are great. They accomplish a lot in a very short period of time. I usually say like, it's gonna take three months of back and forth comments in an issue queue, you could do it in three days in person, and you're much better off, right. But I think Drupal at that time, was trying to take on so much at once. You know, we had just released Drupal 7, it took three years to get out. And it was already sort of behind the eight ball in terms of what people expected in terms of capabilities, and look and feel and these other measures of software that we felt like we had to make up for the feature set, the architecture, the code base, all that stuff was all great. But the functionality that people expected out of the box, the sophistication of CMS that they expected had risen dramatically in the time that it took us to get Drupal 7 out. And so yeah, that period between 7 and 8 was really, really stressful and we got together In person a lot. And I think I felt extra pressure because I was the sole breadwinner for my family. And I had a young baby. And so I'm like, Well, I have to do this because Dupal's got to make it man. Meanwhile, had I kind of taken a step back and been, like, where are my priorities? What's the most important thing here? You know, I don't know that I would have made those same decisions, I think I felt uniquely responsible for Drupal succeeding, even though that doesn't make sense. It's like not one person, no matter who they are, is ever going to make or break a situation. It's a bunch of us coming together. In fact, the whole power of open source is that it is resilient, you know, and someone can take time away. And it's fine, but I guess I felt a lot of pressure to all these people were counting on me. And I had responsibility to my family, to my friends, to my co workers to my community. And, that kind of went into a kind of a dark place.

Greg Dunlap  16:03  
Yeah, it's interesting, because I know at the same time, I was in a similar place. I was in a relationship that was falling apart, not in small part due to my not due to my feeling internally to need to constantly go to these events, to constantly be contributing, in my spare time and at work, you know, giving so much of myself. But at the same time, it's weird, because it's like, it was hurting aspects of my life, but at the other It was like, such a heady and amazing time for me too, It was like this weird thing where we're constantly traveling all over the world to see all of these people who are really great. And everyone's coming up to you, because you're a leader in the community and stuff like that. I have really mixed feelings about that time, too, because of both of those things were happening. And it's hard, I feel like there's a lot of dissonance in balancing them.

Angie Byron  17:05  
I agree with that. Yeah, I think you really, you know, the people who come to Drupal and who come to those kinds of events, they're committed, and they're serious, and they're awesome. And they're brilliant people, and being in the same room with them and solving the same kinds of problems that they're solving and knowing that those problems that you're solving are not just going to go in some bug tracker somewhere, they're going to be solved for millions of people, you know what I mean? The impact of your work is huge. I think that that becomes, I don't know what the word is, but, you know, it becomes a draw, it becomes something that you really want to take part in, because it's fulfilling in and of itself.

Greg Dunlap  17:46  
Oh, yeah. It's a rush, actually.

Angie Byron  17:50  
Yeah. It's easy to hyper focus on that, especially when you you kind of have this background of like, I can see the forest for the trees. And I know that if we don't do these things, then we can't do those things we have to do. You see the whole thing laid before you and it totally makes logical sense. But it's easy to fall into a trap of, you know, I made it here and I'm responsible for this, I have to do it, and then let other areas of your life atrophy at the same time.

Greg Dunlap  18:24  
When did you start really noticing that you were kind of hitting the wall as it were? What were the warning signs for you that this wasn't sustainable anymore?

Angie Byron  18:40  
Well, it's funny. The first warning sign that it wasn't sustainable was back when I worked at my old company, Lullabot. They were awesome, and they gave me 20% time to work on community stuff. But I found I was struggling, because I couldn't keep it to 20 hours or 20% time. I would, you know, essentially be balancing two 40 hour a week jobs one at Lullabot because I didn't want to let any of my customers down because they were awesome, too, and my team and everybody else. Then I have this other 40 hour week job, you know, volunteer in the community, and try and do that. So my first attempt to make things sustainable was moving to Acquia, where I was paid full time to do the community management stuff, rather than also balancing that with client work. So that was attempt number one. So that was in 2011. And I feel like that did work to an extent and that it became, you know, there wasn't the constant context switching between client work versus community work, but then it also had kind of the effect of, well, now that this is my whole job, I got to do everything. So it had, it was well intended, but then it ended up kind of shifting it so that I took on even more responsibility than I was able to when I was doing this in my nights and weekends and spare work time. Where now that this was my job, it like became even more critical for me to excel at everything. So I think the second warning sign I had was towards the end of 2014. And into 2015. We had, it was like two bad things happening at once. Number one, we knew Drupal 8 needed to get done, it had been five years in development by then. And we knew we had to get it out the door. And we knew if we didn't get it out the door that could really hurt Drupal's future adoption and a million other things. So there was a threat, that I considered a threat, you know, from that side of things, we have to get the software done, which meant even more traveling, even more in person events to solve these hard problems to get it knocked out. At the same time, my wife is sitting here saying, you're traveling too much, I'm here with the baby, you gotta knock that shit off, you know? And I'm like, fair enough. And so then it became, I knew things were gonna go down a bad path, and I am trying to juggle all these, like, I need to go to 27 things. Okay, I can't do that I have to go to four things, how am I going to figure that out? You know, kind of stuff like that, and making a bunch of compromises in this area in that area, and basically, ultimately pleasing nobody. And then everything kind of came to a head at the end of 2015.

Greg Dunlap  21:26  
It's hard in a community where I think about, you brought a lot of skills to our community that I think were very much lacking at the time. Like, we had a lot of coders, but we didn't have a lot of people who were skilled at organizing a project, managing at gathering requirements. I think of something like when we migrated from CVS, and we were trying to figure out a new version control system, and you took on this project, you spent all of this time gathering the opinions, surveying people, taking arguments, working people through it in a way that I don't think anybody else could have. But, you know, over time, you know, we had this joke. It wasn't really a joke, in retrospect, but people would say, "Webchick got that done, but webchick doesn't scale" right? And so maybe you can tell me if you felt like one of the reasons that you felt so compelled to do those things was because you saw yourself solving problems in a way that nobody else really could.

Angie Byron  22:38  
I probably would not say that, because I don't have that good of a self esteem. So what I would say more that I was solving problems I didn't see anyone else solving that I found more critical to solve, right? So it's more of a do-ocracy mindset. No one else is doing it. Somebody's got to figure this out. Well, fuck it. Let's do it. You know? Am I allowed to swear on your podcast?

Greg Dunlap  23:00  
Absolutely. That's what the that's what the explicit checkbox on iTunes is for.

Angie Byron  23:05  
Okay, I'm sorry. G-rated up until that point. Um, but yeah, I would say it was much more. And I think a lot of people do this when they come into a project like this, they believe in the mission, and they believe in the people around it, and they see how it could be better, and they see that no one else is taking this on. So I'm going to become this person that does this thing. And then it's very easy once you've taken on a role for other people go like, "Ah, great, that role is filled, we don't need to worry about that anymore because so and so's got that role." But in the meantime, you were like, "Well, hold on, I didn't mean to take this role for the rest of my life. Like I was just trying to, solve a problem that we had" And we see this with a lot of different areas, like with the infrastructure when the DA took over the infrastructure, the volunteers backed way off. When I stepped in to start doing conflict mediation with a situation with a couple of my friends, now all of a sudden, I was Drupal's conflict mediation person, you know what I mean? So, one thing I do feel has been productive in the past couple of years, like since the kind of big burnout end of the marriage living on my own blah blah bad time of my life, um, is that they found webchick doesn't scale, and neither do lots of people, right? There's a lot of other people in the community and they don't scale either. And so we have made a lot of changes since then, in the governance of Drupal. So for example, like when Drupal 7 was a thing, there was one core committer other than Dries. It was me. Nowadays, we have like 15 core committers. And there are framework managers and product managers and release managers. They all kind of focus on different things. And that's great. That's great because then any given product manager can step away and they know that the other product managers will be in there to help. I think also bringing on the idea of provisional maintainers was really key. So there's a lot of people that they could be awesome, but we're not sure. And basically, the only thing to do was just to monitor them for a long time, which you know, requires bandwidth and overhead. A lot of people, you know, aren't proactive about building their replacement in, that kind of thing. And so, provisional maintainership provides the ability to be forceful about building out who's going to replace you, either when you hopefully don't burn out and you know, flame out, but when you have to get up and walk away, or if something happens with your family, and you want to focus on that for a while, or you get a new job that really fulfills you, or whatever it is. Making sure that that's there. And expanding things like instead of webchick being a conflict mediator to now we have a community working group that is a group of people that helps mediate conflicts and things like that. So I think a lot of really positive work has gone into making the community governance more robust and scalable. I just think that, unfortunately, we didn't start that sooner. Because this, you know, you described it as, like hitting a wall in terms of contribution. And that really was what it felt like. It was like, I can see that this is going to end in terror and horror and badness, but I can't stop. Because reasons. And then bam, eventually you hit that wall, and then you you're forced to deal with it at that point.

Greg Dunlap  26:25  
Yeah, I agree that the creation of team to replace what were previously only individuals was really was really key. One of the reasons that became key is because Drupal grew so far and so fast, right? And I think that's one of the reasons why a lot of us hit the wall is because that that growth happened so fast, none of us were really prepared for it. But on the other hand, if we had been kind of thinking about it earlier, then maybe we could have been a little more ready for it, too.

Angie Byron  26:56  
Yeah, it's interesting, because like, you know, if you look at a project, like Ubuntu Linux. It was a was a much bigger open source project at the time. And they had done a lot of thinking about their governance, and we kind of copied and pasted a few things from them back in the day. If we had looked at that in 2005, we'd have been like, that is way too much process and structure and oh my God. And then had to find out the hard way, you need process. So it's interesting, because everything I described earlier in this talk about what made Drupal initially successful, you know, when you add more layers of bureaucracy, and groups of people responsible for decisions that have individuals that you could just take aside, like, it does slow things down. And it does make it harder to know, all the key people in the community because there's so many of them. On the other hand, it takes a lot of pressure off any individual contributor to kind of have to be that person that's going to give their whole lives to this project. So I think, on the on balance, it's much better the way it is. And it also it codifies it, in a way. Randy Fay and I used to get into little spats about this where I was big on like, "I love Drupal, because everybody's just a blue nickname and we all treat each other the same." He's like, "Yeah, but you don't, because you know that chx is this big name programmer, but someone new to the community has no idea, and will talk to them in a in a certain way. And they get lambasted off the planet, because they were rude to a core developer. But how are they supposed to know?" It took me a while to kind of come around to that idea of like, the tyranny of structurelessness and things like that. That there actually is value in defining those roles and defining what the procedures are for getting into and out of those roles and things like that. So I think I've learned to appreciate good governance a lot more now than I had kind of in the earlier days.

Greg Dunlap  28:59  
Another thing that I've thought about a lot is is also that for a community that you know, purported to look out for each other and care about each other a lot, we were very, very bad at recognizing when we're pushing people too hard. I feel like there were a lot of times when we had much more of a tendency, if somebody volunteered to do something, to just say yes, and walk away, rather than thinking, or what we knew about them, or their ability to take more on or seeing the stress that they had in their lives. Like, I just felt like we could have done a lot better on awareness.

Angie Byron  29:40  
Maybe. I think I won't say maybe. You're right. I think factors that play into that are number one, all of us are kind of in that boat. And it kind of takes a certain amount of self care to like be able to have the forewithal to glance around and see how everybody else is doing. Take this pandemic, you know, I see some things like all your friends who are checking in on you, they're your real friends. And I'm like, that's not fair. You have no idea what people are dealing with right now, you know what I mean? If they're dealing with losing their job, or they're dealing with their kid being home all the time, whatever. All kinds of things that people are dealing with, it's not fair to put that on people who are already struggling, that they're not taking into account the struggling of others. That said, I think there needs to be structure to do that, you know what I mean? Because we should just acknowledge that people who are under a tremendous amount of stress are not going to be in a good position to be ... they're not even self aware let alone aware of other people. I think the other thing that plays into that, too, is that, I don't know if this is unique to Drupal, or if it's open source, or if it's communities in general, but Drupal really attracted the helper persona, the Savior complex kind of people. Or at least me, I would qualify as that. And people who are used to helping others are really super bad about asking for help for themselves, and in fact, will often mask what's going on to the best of their ability so that they don't cause concern for the people that they feel like are relying on them to be awesome. Does that make sense?

Greg Dunlap  31:20  
Oh, no, it makes total sense. I actually think that's very, very common in mission-centric communities. Our mutual friend Jeff Eaton did a talk once called You Matter More Than The Cause, which is basically about the fact that especially in passion or mission driven communities, people will push themselves to do that. And, you know, I don't necessarily think this was the case in Drupal, but oftentimes, those communities are centered around the fact that people will do that. They rely on the fact that people will do that in order to exist.

Angie Byron  31:58  
Yeah, I don't think that's the case in Drupal. I think the case in Drupal was, you know, a lot of well intentioned people with very poor boundary control. But I understand what you're saying that there, there's definitely that human tendency could definitely be harnessed and used for bad and to exploit people and that that is extra un-good. It's also un-good, though, even when it's just gross negligence, right. That people get hurt. But I do think that, you know, the, the overall arching plan or lack thereof does play into that.

Greg Dunlap  32:39  
We spent some time talking about how organizations can or have, or in the case of the Drupal community did see some of these issues and start to address them from a governance standpoint. But what also do you think that people who have those blinders on can do to recognize this within themselves or see when they are getting themselves into these situations? Because, you know, it comes from both sides. And both of us found ourselves there, and probably much later than we should have.

Angie Byron  33:12  
 Yeah, it's a really good question. I've been noodling on that one. This is gonna sound so cliche, the number one thing is self care, if you're not taking care of yourself, it's easy to feel like you're trapped, and you can't get out and nothing's ever going to get better. And you just have to kind of live with it until whenever, it's not logical at all, you're not able to think with your executive functioning self. If your amygdala is pinging out and trying to save you from what it perceives to be a threat. So get yourself to the point where you can, if you're in the red zone, at least get in the yellow zone. So you can have a rational look at what's happening around you. I think that's the first thing. I think another thing is, we can normalize situations pretty well, you know what I mean? Like, we can just kind of, well, this is just it is what it is, you know. Just get up and go into this flaming thing every day and come out with burns and scars. And that's just how it works. Try to get some objective measurements, either yourself or via a friend or whatever like to look at. So for example, I have a notebook that's like, here's how many days it's been since I cried at work, you know, that kind of thing. 

Angie Byron  34:35  
That's so sad. 

Angie Byron  34:38  
Well, I mean, I know. It can alert you. I had to reset that quite a few times. I should probably do something about that as opposed to you know, figuring that out much much later when it's almost like too late because by then you're burnt out and there's no coming back and these kinds of things. A friend can help you with that, too. Like I had a few people approach me prior to flaming out and be like, Yay. And again, just kind of falling in that trap of like, Yeah, I'm fine. And it's like you're not fine. Be honest with yourself. And I think that the last thing is just like be honest with yourself and ask for help because you'd be shocked. When everything did come down around me, and I was like, just destroyed as a human being. What I was struck by is how much these people that I worked with that I considered my co-workers or you know, my work friends, that kind of thing. They were my friend friends. And they had been friends with me for like a decade or more. And they just came out of the woodwork to support me. Like Shannon Vettes mailed me a little care package that had like an eye mask and some lavender relaxation kind of thing. And Katherine Senzee invited me to her house and cooked me pancakes and this kind of thing. And it was just like, it was amazing to see the outpouring of people. So I think, the thing is, I probably could have asked for help much earlier and gotten a much more realistic picture, and maybe had some strategizing about how to handle things before they went off the rails. But I was just in the thick of it. And I think I was too scared to be honest with myself about how bad it was getting before it was too late to do anything, if that makes sense.

Greg Dunlap  36:31  
No, I mean, it makes it makes total sense. I basically had to, like after I moved out of Sweden and moved to Portland, I just kind of like, locked myself away from everybody for a year and sorted it out. I don't know about you, I can say for myself that I came out of it a much better person, and much with much more in touch with myself and what's important to me, but that that journey was not easy.

Angie Byron  37:08  
Yep. I feel exactly the same way. I am a much better Mom, I'm a much better partner, I'm a much better worker, I now intentionally look for ways to empower others to do what I do. And before I, it's not like I would have stopped anybody, but I wouldn't have been intentional about creating that path and making sure I'm mentoring others so they can replace me. Yeah, it's one of those things, I've always been a person that learned things the hard way. So I don't know if I actually could have learned this any other way. But it was not a fun way to learn it at all. And so I feel like if there are ways for people who are in the current situation to kind of see this about themselves. I think the biggest thing for me too, is just like, it took this crisis in my personal life to really force looking at the entire issue and how it all played out and things like that. And I'm, in retrospect incredibly grateful for that. Because I was not in a good place, back then. I was in a place that I told myself was good, for a lot of different reasons. But it's clear now, with some time and distance that wow, that was not a good situation at all, either personally, or professionally, or whatever. And it's given me a much better picture on what I should be doing. And it's given me much better tools to know when things are not going well to try to intervene early.

Greg Dunlap  38:44  
I'm in exactly the same place. It's kind of like I said earlier, we had that very heady time when we were running around and doing what we thought was really important work. But what I came to realize in the time since is that what I was really doing was running away from a lot of aspects of my life that I didn't really want to deal with. And so, you know, it was an amazing time for the wrong reasons, and now is an amazing time for different reasons. And, you know, I think a lot of you know, one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you about this is because I think a lot of people get involved in these communities and face these situations and don't know how to get out of them, or feel like the communities that they're a part of are going to fall apart without them, or anything like that. And it's just it's not true.

Angie Byron  39:34  
Well, not only is it not true, but I think you said this, if the entire project, whatever it is that you're involved in falls apart, because you took some time to care for yourself, then hey, it deserves to fall apart. Nothing that you could work on in your life is worth that.

Greg Dunlap  39:55  
Burning through other human beings. 

Angie Byron  39:58  
I'm curious, like, what, what are the things that have worked for you? You talked a lot about stuff that works for me. I'm curious, do you have any insights? 

Greg Dunlap  39:58  
Um, well, let me think about that for a second. I think that one of the things that works for me ... in AA there's this there's this slogan, and It's "How Important Is It?" and it's meant as kind of a way for you, when you're freaking out about something because, you know, people with people with addiction tend to freak out about things and fall back on their substance of choice. And so one of the things that, this works well with people who have anxiety attacks and stuff like that too, one of the things that I think has been a big deal for me is to constantly be asking myself is this thing really as important as I think it is. If this feature doesn't make it into the next dot-release of Drupal is the world gonna end? And that ties into this whole thing of us doing passion projects, to where we always feel like we're responsible for the success of the thing that we care about. And I think this idea of coming to the point where I understood as you put it if you're burning through people, then your project is not doing its job in the first place. And so meinternalizing a lot of that was a really big part of that journey, for myself. But also, just like, taking some time off really gave me a ton of perspective. Like, I had a period there where I took just ... well, it turned into basically forever, but I took a year or two off and just sit and just pulled myself completely out. And then when I got to the point where I was thinking about, do I want to get involved again, it was nice, because all the stuff I was involved in had been taken over by very capable people in the meantime, which was awesome. But also, I just got other stuff going on in my life right now, you know? 

Angie Byron  39:58  
Yeah. And that's, that's fine. That's a great place to land. You know? Yeah. Realize that, that, you know, I love that. How important is it? Because it can, especially when you're in kind of crisis mode, everything feels critical, right? It's not, like you stepped away. And to your point, there's really great people in charge of the stuff used to be in charge of, and I'm sure if you were involved, it would be even better, but it's fine. And that's exactly what you got to do. And then that allows you to take time away, and do what you need to do. I think that's great.

Greg Dunlap  40:07  
So how would you say that your relationship with the project is now? Like, do you feel like you've landed in a better place? Is this still something that you struggle with? How are how are you doing these days,

Angie Byron  40:16  
I'm doing a lot better. And I think it's due to a number of factors. Number one, I think before, with the relationship structure I had, my wife was taking care of my child, so I would see my child, but it was more like almost like a babysitter capacity, which is not good. And now I am a mom, I'm a single mom, and I see my daughter 50% of the time, and when I have her I am on. That is the most important thing in my whole life. And so my entire life has kind of shifted around, where now, my child and my girlfriend, they're the priorities, and then work comes second to that. Work is still really important. I really do believe in what we're working on. I love my coworkers, I love the project. But it is no longer the thing that's kind of all consuming. It is now the thing that it's there, it's important, I'm going to do my best. But at the end of the day, I'm going to get off the computer because I got to go spend time with the people that matter to me. That was not a boundary that I had set for myself back in the day. I think the second thing is, is regarding the work, as I mentioned earlier, I try to be much more intentional about, I can see the warning signs a lot better now about being the single point of failure or you know, the bus factor, however you want to say it, and trying really hard to not be that person wherever possible. Unfortunately, my current project, I have not been so successful. But there's a plan to get it to the point where it there's a team, replacing what I'm doing, and all these kinds of things. So it helps to have gone through that experience in trouble. Because now whether in my personal life, or my professional life, or my volunteer life, any other lives that I have, I'm able to kind of spot the warning signs of "Oh, wow, this is going to start to become my sole responsibility. Let's break that up. And let's start parceling that out to other folks. And let's build a team where there isn't the team." These kinds of things.

Greg Dunlap  42:22  
I think that sounds really great. And I really appreciate you coming on and talking about all of this with us today. How can people find you and what you're working on on the internets and whatnot.

Angie Byron  42:36  
So I'm I'm webchick on Twitter and Facebook and most things. I currently work at Acquia on the Drupal Acceleration Team. That team basically just exists to make Drupal awesome. And so my job changes about once a quarter thereabouts, where sometimes I'll be working on, you know, problem x, problem y, whatever it is. It shifts around just to whatever makes Drupal awesome. So currently, what I'm doing is I'm working on a product called Acquia Migrate Accelerate, which is intended to be a much easier wrapper around the Drupal migration API by still using the power of the Drupal migration API, but making it so that you can move from 7 to 9 to a large extent, just by clicking around in the UI, and not learning all the complicated PHP object oriented Drupal 9 capabilities. And then instead, you can get somebody in there to do the really hard parts of the migration, but do a lot of the easier parts yourself. And the reason that's on my plate is because we've moved away from these big bang releases that, you know, take three to five years to put out. Now, releases are on a predictable schedule, every six months, you get something cool in advance when the major version is coming out, that kind of stuff. We're trying to get everybody from the old model to the new model. And so that's why I'm working on that. So it's kind of nice, because I feel like I brought Drupal 7 into this world, and I'm going to help people get off of Drupal 7 and on to the nice easy upgrade path version of Drupal and happily ever after. Hopefully. We'll see how it goes.

Greg Dunlap  44:19  
The Circle of Life.

Angie Byron  44:20  
Yeah, exactly.

Greg Dunlap  44:23  
Well, thanks a lot for coming on. I Really appreciate having you on today and you sharing your insights with us.

Angie Byron  44:30  
Thank you, Greg. I really appreciated the conversation. And it's nice to talk to someone else who's been through a similar situation. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai