Liveblog: Dries Buytaert's Drupalcon Keynote

Dries says that when he started to write his presentation he didn’t know what to say - we’d just had Drupalcon SF, and Drupal 7 wasn’t ready to launch. But when he thought about it, he decided this was the perfect time to take a step back and think about the big picture.

He starts by talking about the slide he showed in his last speech ‘The Elephants are Coming’. Capgemini recently started a programme called ‘Immediate’. They have 95,000 employees, 9 billion Euros in revenues, and are signing up major clients to use Drupal.

In the last two weeks Dries has been travelling a lot, and met large enterprise users as well as small local meetups of small local user groups.

One company he met was Turner Broadcasting - owners of CNN, Cartoon Network and more. Their server team is 200 people strong. They are deploying a lot of Drupal sites.

Another company he met is REI Systems who work with the government. They have 80 Drupal developers, but no-one in the Drupal community has heard of them.

But the momentum is behind Drupal, in government and enterprise. Dries says ‘Drupal is unstoppable’.

He points to the trends in the Drupal job market, and the demand for new developers.

Drupal, he says is becoming the dominant web platform, and is uniquely positioned. He says we need richness and reach, and he believes we do. But the project has a lot of growing, and growing up, to do.

With Drupal 7 and the redesign around the corner this is even more important. He says Drupal 7 still has 20 critical bugs. He believes it will be released before 2012 ‘just in time for the world to end’.

He says he feels really good about Drupal 7. It’s more stable than the initial 6.0 release - thanks to the auto testing framework etc. Examiner.com launched recently using Drupal 7. It’s a stable platform.

Drupal in 2020

Drupal is almost 10 years old, Dries wants to imagine 10 years down the road. He believes we’ll be at Drupal 11 by then.

On drupal.org there’ll be nearly 7 million posts by then. Assuming we scale by a factor of ten in ten years, possible at current rates, there’ll be 60,000 modules. ‘That’s a terrifying thought’. Autmated testing will be key - not just code testing, but also performance testing and more.

There’ll be 30,000 people at Drupalcon. There’ll be 9 million users on Drupal.org, and Drupal will power 10% of the web.

Dries says the Drupal community is awesome. Sometimes he thinks of it and the phenomena of being part of something so big - something that happens only once in your life.

10% market share is a great goal, Dries says, but we should work on stuff that matters. Even if we have some number, we can use it in a way to make the web a better place.

In 2020 Dries believes there will be a print magazine dedicated to Drupal - and jokes that maybe DrupalRadar will even set it up in the next few days. :)

He also says that Druplicon will be involved in a sex scandal by 2020 - and gets a big laugh.

He wonders whether even a retail site the size of amazon could be on Drupal - but that Commerce guys would have a lot to do. Could Apple.com move onto Drupal?

But it’s key, says Dries, that we move beyond just having tech people in the community. We need to figure out how CIO’s and CTO’s can learn about Drupal - we even need to get our mothers’ to understand Drupal.

He puts some words on the screen - marketing words used by Apple to promote the iPad, and not one of them was a technical word.

Dries says that by 2020 there will be far more Software-as-a-Service Drupal websites than self-hosted Drupal sites. Sytems like Buzzr or Drupal Gardens. A key way to accomplish this is Distributions, which Dries believes will be downloaded more than core. People can make money building distributions, with quality and polish of commercial solutions. Then you will be able to hire specialists in these different platforms.

In 2020, Dries believes 25% of all Drupal modules will originally have been written in Chinese. How do we review that code? The Arabic speaking web grew 1,908% from 2008-2009.

Training is going to be important. In 2020 we’ll have weekly, instructor led, multi-led, multi-day Drupal trainings in every major metro in the world. Universities will teach Drupal.

Managing rich media in Drupal will be as easy as managing text by 2020.

A drupal that is adopted by enterprise will need:

• Configuration Management
• Code Staging
• Content Staging and Workflow
• Content Federation

This will make the whole ecosystem look different by 2020

Also, by 2020 the Drupal Association will have a physical office and 10 full-time employees. In 2020 there’ll be a lot of young people in the Drupal community. There’ll be a huge influx of new people to the community. That also means there’ll be a “huge influx of barely competent morons who have no interest in Drupal other than making a fast buck”. He quotes Paul Graham saying “once you have bad programmers, you’re doomed”.

Dries says “It’s the Drupal community that will ultimately make this work”. People self-organise and make things happen. We have a culture of innovation, and execution. This means we have new ideas and features first.

He finishes by saying: “If we continue like this, awesome happens”.

Questions

Where does Dries see himself and Acquia in 2020? Dries says: I hope I’ll still be involved. He has no intention of stopping. He loves what he does. As for Acquia, his hope is to grow it and have it be a part of the Drupal community and an active contributor.

In 2020 will Drupal be Object Oriented? Dries says it’ll probably be a lot more OO, if not entirely. That’s the direction we’re heading in.

How can you make sure contributed modules are good quality?. He thinks the solution is in automated testing, but there is definitely room for reviews and statistics. A good example is the usage statistics on drupal.org.