John Kennedy

I am a passionate Drupal distribution product manager trying my hardest to work out how Drupal will continue to be awesome for the next 5 years.

I haven’t written a module, documentation page or theme in the last 4 years, I still have trouble describing why dependency injection is a better pattern than hook_ and on top of that I come from Australia, literally the end of the earth, so why should I sit on the board of a global non-profit organisation that affects the lives of tens of thousands of contributors, millions of users and billions of people who visit Drupal sites?

Well, I love Drupal. That’s not to say I love every line of Drupal code or every user interface, but I love the philosophy that is Drupal. Massive scale collaboration within a community of people dedicated to quality, open communication, inclusion and fun. An open-source movement that values not only its developers, but also its site-builders and authors. An extensible, modular framework that can be used to build incredibly complex systems and integrated architectures.

Since I started my journey with Drupal in 2006 I have been continually enthused by the people who I have met and their passion for Drupal. Some of my favorite arguments have been after 3am at DrupalCon, with some mild liquid encouragement, between myself and wildly rambunctious geniuses from three different continents.

I first started working with Drupal when a non-profit youth news organisation called Vibewire asked me to look at their website. They had a Drupal 4.7 installation weighed down by a ton of modules. It was giving them terrible problems, it wasn't scaling, it was breaking all the time, lots of bugs. I looked at this thing, decided it was awful and promptly migrated them to Plone. Since then I've had some better experiences with Drupal.

I've had my own Drupal shop and built some really interesting sites for customers.  I've been Regional Director, leading the UK operation for Commerce Guys, I have headed up Solutions Architecture in Europe for Acquia, I’ve worked on some of the largest drupal projects in the world, but I consider my most exciting role in Drupal to be what I am doing right now.

I am currently working for Acquia as Product Manager for Lightning, an enterprise authoring distribution of Drupal and as Program Manager for Acquia's D8 Module Acceleration Program (D8 MAP), $500k of funding being allocated to projects lead by community contributors speeding up the porting of critical modules to D8. I feel very privileged to be able to affect change directly in Drupal and the module eco-system on a daily basis and to be able to work with the most talented Drupalists in the process.

Apart from this I’ve spoken about Drupal at events in Boston, Helsinki, London, Manchester, Melbourne,  New York and Rome. I’ve helped organise DrupalCamp London 3 years in a row, I’ve run BOF sessions at DrupalCon, numerous Drupal trainings, I’ve advised Drupal startups and hired tons of Drupalists. Outside of Drupal I have written my own PHP applications in other frameworks and helped to build core internet infrastructure using open-source software at APNIC, another large non-profit.

Over the years I’ve come to know a lot of people in the community and have been a regular DrupalCon attendee. I've only missed a few since Chicago. My son was born 16 months ago and he had strong opinions about me attending Amsterdam and Los Angeles.

But enough about me….