Ezra Gildesgame

After an incredible three years, eight months and 23 days with Acquia, I’m  starting a new role next week as a Product Manager at SeatGeek. The SeatGeek apps and website make it easy to find and compare great deals on great seats for concerts, sporting events, Broadway and more. I’m extremely excited about joining SeatGeek but wanted first to take some time to reflect on my time with Acquia and Drupal.

GVS

I joined Acquia when we sold our five-person company, Growing Venture Solutions to Acquia in the summer of 2011. Despite the fanfare that sometimes accompanies acquisitions, selling GVS was not a primary goal for us. I suspect that if you’d asked us in 2009 about the prospect of GVS being acquired, we might have laughed off the idea. We were happy, our own bosses, funded entirely by work on a diverse and exciting range of clients including the Economist, Intel and a range of smaller organizations, and above all we were a small team of close friends.

2011 was an inflection point for GVS. In our earlier years, we offered a broad range of consulting, software development and training services around the open source Drupal project. This approach worked well enough, keeping us busy with a steady stream of work from past client referrals and new customers who found us through our open source work. Eventually though, we began to narrow our focus to two main areas: software powering interactive conference and event websites, and security review services for Drupal-based websites. We continued our strategy of focusing on overlap between customer needs and sponsored enhancement to open source projects, only now we channeled an increasing percentage of our overall work towards projects within our focus areas.

Months after starting conference and security review work and publicly declaring these focus areas, our stream of incoming work grew and we raised our rates. We launched the Drupal Scout security review service, and adoption of COD (the Conference Organizing Distribution of Drupal) continued to gain traction outside of the Drupal world, bringing in new clients as well as a diverse range of conferences in the United States and internationally. Attendee counts on conferences using COD ranged from 100-10,000 people and spanned causes such as political action and grassroots radio in the United States, oncology in the UK, entrepreneurship in Australia, and of course, the majority of Drupal-focused conferences whose websites launched when Drupal 6 was in its prime.

So, why sell a company we loved? A big part of the decision was scale: at 120 people, Acquia was one of the larger organizations with expertise in Drupal and had plans to expand further.  Struck by that scale and the uniqueness of the opportunity to join relatively early and help shape the company, we joined Acquia in 2011. Indeed, we found scale.

Acquia: From 120 to 600+ People in < Four Years

Acquia has grown rapidly by many metrics. When I joined Acquia, we were approximately 120 employees. Less than four years later, we’re over 600 people. Acquia was the fastest growing private software company in the Inc. 500’s list of companies in 2012 with three-year revenue growth of 10,461%, making it the eighth fastest growing company in any category on the list, and was the eighth fastest growing private software company in 2013. And while revenue is not the only way to measure success, it is a reasonable proxy for growth. Earlier this year we disclosed that we hit the $100 million/year revenue mark. All of this growth is for a business that is based around enabling organizations to succeed with free software and would not have been possible without Acquia’s team of many smart, talented and hard working individuals.

Drupal Commons

I spent most of my time at Acquia working on Drupal Commons, another distribution of Drupal. Commons is a “fully featured collaboration website in a box.” In my first year at Acquia, I led a redesign and relaunch of Commons, and despite our relatively small product team size (we scaled from two to roughly eight people depending on how you count), we were directly competitive with proprietary vendors like Jive and Yammer - Companies with millions of dollars and a strong focus in what industry analysts call the “social collaboration” space.

Because Commons is free and 100% open source, only a subset of the roughly 2,000 individual Commons websites across the web are Acquia customers. This puts Acquia in the position of truly having to prove its value in order to make money, since anyone is free to run Drupal Commons on any web host without paying Acquia a single cent. I’m proud that the Grammy awards is an Acquia customer and uses Commons to power their community of Grammy voters and submitters, but I particularly enjoy seeing when organizations without large budgets used Commons. For example, the Well Project is, to quote their website, a non-profit organization whose mission is to change the course of the HIV/AIDS pandemic through a unique and comprehensive focus on women and girls. You can read more about the Well Project on their website, their “a girl like me” blog series, and on their Facebook page.

On Drupal

According to my Drupal.org profile page, I’m a few months away from my ninth Drupal birthday. Drupal, and specifically the people who make up the Drupal Community, has been an extremely powerful positive force in my life, fueling my career growth and introducing me to an international group of diverse contributors to the project. I’ve met some extremely smart and kind people through Drupal. My experience has been that every bit of effort that I’ve put towards learning more and participating more actively in Drupal has been repaid many times fold. I started out nine years ago asking dumb questions and through a mix of great mentors and a lot of effort, I eventually became a module maintainer, and had the privilege of sharing what I learned at dozens of conferences.

If you’re considering participating more actively in Drupal, do it! If you’re not sure how to get started, ask me and I’d be happy to point you in the right direction.

If you’re an organization considering getting more involved in Drupal, you should do it. Drupal’s value comes from a thriving ecosystem of providers with diverse areas of expertise. Scratch your own niche and prosper.

In sharing the news about departing Acquia and joining a company that doesn’t use Drupal, folks have asked me whether I’m “leaving Drupal.” Not exactly. I have stepped down as the primary maintainer for Drupal Commons, and next week’s DrupalCon LA will be the first North American DrupalCon that I’ve missed since I started attending in 2007. And while I’ll likely be less active as a day-to-day maintainer of my contrib projects, I plan to stay involved where I can. I hope to continue to present at Drupal events and to provide advisory input where my historical knowledge can be useful.

SeatGeek

So, why the move towards a company that’s not involved with Drupal? I’ve always been excited about technology, but even more excited about the people using technology. Who are they? Why are they using a given product? How does it fit into their day?

Thinking about my future as a product manager, it seemed clear to me that there are a wide range of exciting product challenges to tackle and that many successful consumer product companies are built on technologies other than Drupal. That’s not a knock against Drupal - Qualified Drupalists will readily admit that Drupal isn’t the right tool for every job.

Technology varies from product to product, but there’s a bit of a constant in many of the other skills associated with product management (eg, design, user research, solid understanding of engineering concepts etc). For me, Drupal was a powerful way to build my skill set as a software engineer, and offered me an early taste of product management as a project maintainer for software powering tens of thousands of individual websites, and on client projects at scale.I’m ready to work on an a new challenge, and as a frequent concert goer, SeatGeek is an extremely appealing opportunity.

I was already a user of the SeatGeek app before I joined the company. I was even more impressed when I spoke to members of the SeatGeek team. It’s immediately apparent that the SeatGeek folks are smart. Really smart. The company is nimble, and SeatGeek has a culture where where  “Red tape, office politics and buzzword-driven development are not allowed” and where “product is king.” This is not just lip service: When you use the SeatGeek iOS or Android apps or visit SeatGeek’s website, you’ll see that it’s extremely easy to find and compare deals on tickets to your favorite events.

This focus on product quality for end users has been rewarded in the company’s growth. SeatGeek did $115 million in ticket sales in 2014 and has raised $103 million in funding overall, with $97 million coming in through the last 12 months alone in B and C funding rounds. SeatGeek has also partnered with Telecharge to sell first-hand tickets to hundreds of Broadway and off-Broadway events.

Last year I took on a new hobby: Misinterpreting signage and sharing those misinterpretations on Instagram. For example:

Use caution while breakdancing.

Do not drink mustaches.

The Fun in Misinterpreting

Misinterpreting signage is a game that’s always in play at the periphery of my attention and allows me to inject a bit of wonder into everyday life. It’s particularly exciting when I’m traveling and unfamiliar signs are plentiful. Some signs, such as “Caution: Wet floor,” are ubiquitous even internationally and give me a reason to smile on a regular basis after misconstruing them.

 I enjoy the constraint of the project: It would be difficult to look for funny things in the environment when there’s no limit on what I’m looking for. By becoming more attuned specifically to signage, it’s become more automatic and amusing signs and interpretations often jump out at me when I'm not actively looking for them. This post contains a selection of my favorite signs from last year.

Strategies for Misinterpretation

There are several strategies for misinterpreting signage and trying different strategies on a particular sign helps to keep the game engaging in situations where something amusing about a given sign hasn't already made itself apparent. For example:

Misinterpreting context

It is dangerous to ride a bicycle on top of a truck on top of a motorcycle.

Misinterpreting symbols

Designated Human-Whale makeout zone.

Use of cat toys with non-felines is prohibited.

Misinterpreting text

IM GOING TO WIN SO MUCH CANDY

Sorry that I made things awkward. Can we still be friends?

I try to acknowledge every element of a sign in my misinterpretations. Sometimes this leads to elaborate captions:

The hand of God will strike down your dog and give life to a snail

Do not perform the Macarena in front of the crouton bird.

Even as a robot I am aware that your breath is terrible. It is cruel of you to mock the objection I am expressing through my displeasure indication light.

And sometimes they're much simpler:

Refuse magic.

Push to dispense eyes.

Sound of one hand clapping.

Signs in foreign languages are ripe for misinterpretation:

Ring bell for omelettes.

It's just having its coffee.

Speaking of language, I've found that people don't always agree on the meaning of words they use in their signs. For example, I thought everybody agreed on what a sandwich is:

Finally, those days of painful ambiguity are behind me.

But it turns out that people don't always agree!

Nope.

Of course, where there's transportation, there is probably signage to misinterpret:

Your checked bags are probably f@#%^ed.

I'd like to read you a poem I wrote about this seatbelt.

Levitating luggage is forbidden from following passengers.

Caution: Submarines surface below road.

Mortality contemplation area

Please cleanup after your giant dog.

We will key your car.

Disrespect the letter 'C' over there.

This is where babies are made.

Sometimes it’s fun to hone in on subtleties in the postures of people depicted in a sign:

Zombies, please exit to the left.

It is rude to tell people to "talk to the hand."

My friend Brant Wynn posted a great misinterpretation of this NYC subway sign - one which millions of people see on a daily basis. I hadn’t been able to come up with a  caption for this one.

No James Dean impersonators

Nice job, Brant!

Some signs are ambiguous.

Let's not be friends.

While others are overbearing:

OK, but what I *really* want is a sale.

Some signs just scream hypocrisy:

HI IM CALLING TO REPORT THIS SIGN

Except this sign.

Inspired by Ze Frank:

I became interested in misinterpreting signage after watching “The Show with Ze Frank,” a daily video blog that ran from 2006-2007 (spanning Google’s acquisition of Youtube and before both Youtube and Vimeo were the de-facto places to post video online). The original videos from the series are offline, but Ze Frank rereposted some of his videos inconspicuously on YouTube. Three episodes in particular stand out to me as including some great (and possibly NSFW) sign misinterpretations.

Let's Misinterpret Together!

This misinterpreting signage game would be a whole lot more fun if more people could share their own unique interpretations. Going forward, I plan to tag my Instagram signage posts with the hashtag #SignageFun and I invite you to do the same. I hope to misinterpret with you soon.

If you’ve been in the market for a digital camera, you know that choosing one camera from all the competing brands and models can be a challenge. Many people like to research before they make a major investment, and there are some great resources to help guide you with your purchase. This blog post is mostly about a tool called Snapsort, but to more fully appreciate that tool, it’s worth briefly mentioning a few other resources that are available.

Flickr Camera Finder

A camera’s specifications are important, but so are the photographs that it can produce. The Flickr Camera Finder is a great tool for looking at photographs taken by a specific model of camera. Flickr makes it easy to filter by the content of the photograph (such as portraits, landscapes and night shots), as well as photographs that other Flickr users found interesting. Flickr also lets users post their photos into groups that are specific to a camera or even a camera and lens combination, and these groups are another way of finding sample photos for a particular camera.

Of course, product reviews are important, and while there are many camera great review sites, two in particular stand out as my personal favorites: DPreview.com and DCResource.com.

Update: You can vote for Flat World Knowledge here.

From Spring 2008 through the Winter of 2009, I consulted independently for a budding startup called Flat World Knowledge.

FWK is a website/web application that pays authors to write textbooks and makes those books available online for free for anyone to read. FWK also makes it possible to copy and then modify the textbooks, allowing people to create their own distinct, personalized version of a book. Books and study aids are produced via print on demand and can be purchased for a fraction of the cost of a typical textbook.

The end result is that textbooks are more financially and technically accessible to students, more personalized to specific classes, and the typical textbook market is disrupted.

It's been exciting to see FWK develop both in terms of the recognition they've been getting -- $8 million in new venture capitol this past fall -- and the many schools who are now using FWK for their classes.

I played several different roles throughout the project, doing module development, architecture, performance tuning, implementing wireframes in a Drupal-friendly way, and providing some education about different approaches with Drupal.

It was truly a pleasure working with Brad Felix, Flat World's CTO, and I was also very fortunate to work with well-known experts and contributors in the Drupal community including Ryan Szrama (Ubercart), Zivtech and FunnyMonkey.

Flat World is open-source friendly not only in their product, but also in they way the went about building it. Several Drupal modules were created as part of the project, including Vocabulary per-book, Ubercart Node Access, Ubercart Restrict Quantity, Book bridge and Vocabulary per-book.

I participated in building the site from concept to public Beta to their first official release, before transitioning from working independently to joining the Growing Venture Solutions team. It's been exciting to watch Zivtech run with the project since then.

I'm so thrilled to be able to play a part in disrupting the textbook and education market, and to see FWK taking off!

Note: This article was originally published on the Growing Venture Solutions website.

When a form protected by spam prevention measures such as captcha or Mollom is submitted with drupal_execute, validation can fail unless the spam protection is properly suppressed.

This blog post describes the background and solution to a bug that previously existed in the Signup Integration for Ubercart module (uc_signup), and explains the techniques used to fix the bug. It is written with developers and aspiring developers in mind, though other people interested in how Drupal works might also find it interesting.

Gabe "Gabbers" Witcher and the rest of the Punch Brothers did a fantastic job on this Roger Miller song at last night's concert at the Living Room.

Fleck to Answer Questions at Select Screenings (Heck yes)

Banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck recently released an album and companion film containing highlights from his six week trip around Africa where he played with musicians from Mali, Uganda, Tanzania, the Gambia, Madagascar, South Africa, Senegal, and Cameroon. The album, Throw Down your Heart: Africa Sessions contains 18 of the 40 tracks recorded on this trip, which had been an idea of Fleck's for years.

“I developed the suspicion that some of the greatest acoustic music on earth is hidden in the small villages in Africa. Somehow it didn't seem to be making it out into my world, and even when amazing field recordings were made, how could I find out about them?”

The CD liner notes contain additional information about the project as well as each track, and make the album well worth purchasing in hard copy rather than as an Mp3 download. In the liner notes, Fleck tells how he was skeptical of a proposal that the trip be about him teaching the banjo. Instead, displaying genuine curiosity, Fleck responded that,

“..[I]f I finally got over there, I would be all about playing with and learning from the local musicians, not necessarily teaching.”

The project features musicians who are well known as well as many who are obscure or relatively unknown on the wold stage. Fleck and crew held auditions for the project in several of the countries visited.

Toumani Diabaté, the virtuoso world-class badass powerhouse Kora player from Mali, plays on one track. Known for exploring beyond the caste restrictions of Malian griot music, Diabate has collaborated with musicians from various “world music” traditions. He partnered with blues guitarist Taj Mahal in the 1999 album Kulanjan, which also highlighted connections between blues and folk and their roots in African musical traditions.

As if out of some weird musical fantasy of mine, Diabaté and Fleck are scheduled to perform at this year's Telluride Bluegrass Festival. (Perhaps more of my musical fantasies will come true, like Henry Butler and Derek Trucks playing together.)

The project also calls attention to the fact that despite the strong association between the banjo and bluegrass music, the banjo is widely thought to have originated from West Africa instruments such as the akonting and the ngoni.

Thanks in large part to Nashville sound engineer Dave Sinko and documentary sound man Wellington Bowler, the sound quality on Throw Down your Heart is excellent, despite the fact that some of the tracks were recorded in somewhat remote locations.

It's hard to chose a favorite track, but here are three that stand out to me:

Throw Down Your Heart was released on March 3, 2009 and the film can be seen on different dates around the Country. Fleck and filmmaker Sacha Paladino (Fleck's brother) will be present at select screenings to answer questions. The New York City screenings run April 24-30th at the IFC Center and the movie's website indicates that both Fleck and Paladino will be present at select screenings to answer questions. The film comes to the Denver Film Society from June 18-25, overlapping somewhat with the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. Check the film's website for show times in your town!

PS: One track on the album was taken from a live duo with Vusi Mahasela at the Boulder Theatre on the E-town radio show. Colorado, represent!

From the 1959 album "Uncloudy Day" which was re-released with "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" as one album in 1991. This is actually more like the "track of last Monday."

Last Saturday, over 130 people gathered in Brooklyn for DrupalCampNYC6, and the event received a bit of coverage in the New York Times. This was great precursor to the 1,400 person DrupalCon this week in Washington, DC. Make sure your sound is on for this video!

This January I'm headed out to scenic Denver, Colorado to co-teach two of three sessions of an Intro to Drupal 6.x class with Growing Venture Solutions. The course is targeted towards people who are new to Drupal and covers several levels of site administration as well as using essential Drupal modules such as Views and CCK (Content Construction Kit), image handling with Imagecache, and creating sophisticated landing pages using Panels. Then we'll cover theming/templating and finally module development, performance and security best practices. The course happens over three Saturdays, so students can go home (or back to work), tinker around and return brimming with questions and enthusiasm about turning their Drupal sites up to eleven. If you're thinking of attending, it's best to secure a spot at the pre-2009 discounted rate. You can read more about the course on the GVS website.

Ultra Light Startups, a New York-based tech entrepreneur's group, is hosting a panel discussion on Open Source content management systems on Thursday, December 4.

I'll be speaking about Drupal along with experts from Joomla (Donna Vincent) and WordPress (Steve Bruner). People often ask for comparisons between these projects but it's uncommon to find people who have a depth of familiarity in all three systems together in one place, so this promises to be a unique discussion. The panel will be videotaped and made available online.

In order to facilitate a valuable discussion, I've started a list of suggested discussion questions. I'd like to ask you, fellow Drupalers (and any non-Drupalers), to suggest questions that you think will help highlight the differences between these systems and add value to the discussion. Below is my list of suggested questions, starting with ones that seek introductory information to the platforms:

What kinds of websites/web applications have been built on your platform?

How large is your development community? Approximatley how many installations are there? How many modules/plugins and themes are available?

What license covers the code in your project?

What is your project's greatest asset?

Is your platform aimed towards developers, casual site builders, or both?

Making your site's content externally available via an API adds value to your product/service and is important to staying competitive. How does your platform facilitate - exposing this data?

What major companies have invested directly in the development of your platform?

Are there many service providers for your platform?

What has your platform done to improve scalability/performance since its last release? In general?

What are the key features that your project provides to improve the efficiency of developing advanced websites/web applications?

How does your project stay up to date on security of the platform?

In an open source project, it's important to carefully vet code changes. How does your project make sure that code is well maintained?

What organizational steps has your project taken to ensure that it is around two years from now?

I tend to be skeptical when I see food that's advertised with phrases such as  "100% natural" or "exactly the way nature intended." That's because the word "natural" is often abused and overextended to include methods of producing (and distributing) food that are anything but natural.  Examples that come to mind include produce that is grown with industrial fertilizer and products from animals who live in inhumane conditions at factory farms where they are mutilated (their tails and beaks removed) and forced to eat foods that cause them digestive problems while they live literally in their own waste -- which becomes a major pollutant instead of being used as a natural fertilizer.

  When I think about an “ultimate standard” for natural agriculture, I usually think of Polyface Farms. Polyface was discussed extensively in Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma,  a book that inspired major changes in the way I think about food. 

   I learned via Greg Knaddison's post on Chipotlog (see file photo) that burrito chain Chipotle is partnering with Polyface Farms to exclusively use Polyface pork at the Chipotle store in Charlottesville, Virginia.

   Chipotle seeks to provide "food with integrity" and their approach involves incrementally increasing the amount of organic or natural foods that they purchase. As the Chipotle chain grows, the market for natural food increases along with Chipotle's ability to stock the chain with a greater percentage of natural ingredients.

  Partnering with Polyface is great step in that direction. It reflects considerable thought on the part of Chipotle and is likely to promote brand awareness of Chipotle as a “natural” food supporter.

Congratulations to the Salatin family and Chipotle. 

The sections of this tutorial are as follows:

Brief background on ApacheBench and performance of Drupal Anonymous vs Authenticated Users

Accessing the cookie containing the Drupal session ID

Passing the session cookie to ApacheBench

Verifying that the Drupal installation being benchmarked recognizes the cookie and is serving authenticated Pages

    ApacheBench, also known as 'ab', is a command line program bundled with the Apache Web Server that measures the performance of web servers by making HTTP requests to a user-specified URL. ApacheBench displays statistical information, such as the number of requests served per second and the amount of time taken to serve those requests, that is useful for evaluating (benchmarking) and tuning the performance of a webserver. ApacheBench does a decent job of simulating different types and levels of load on a sever.

Sam Bush, Bela Fleck, Mark O'Connor, Edgar Meyer and Jerry Douglas. Apparently they formed a group called "Strength in Numbers." This is from Austin City Limits and captures Jerry in the pre-goatee phase.

"You also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture or production of missiles, or nuclear, chemical or biological weapons."