About Me: 

With over 18 years’ experience as a Software Developer with the last Nine years in Web design and development, I have Launched My Own Company WebKings.ca using some of the skills I have learned throughout my Career. Some of these Skills include:

• The ability to work independently as well as collaboratively within and across teams to promote improvements in programming practices.

• Innovative problem-solving skills and ability to analyze programming code without documentation and efficiently modify it to achieve project goals.

• Solid interpersonal and communication skills, which resulted in efficiently integrating and coordinating work done to support my projects.

• Positive attitude to adapting, and learning new technology and ability to assimilate information quickly and effectively.

• Highly self-motivated to keep improving myself in my field by staying up to date with the latest and newest technologies and innovations in web design and Development.

In addition to my experience and personal qualities, I have a solid educational foundation and a passion for web design.

My Goal is for my company https://www.WebKings.ca to be known for Quality and efficiency in the Web Design Market

Board meeting attendence: 
none
Have you served on a board or committee?: 
No
If so, tell us about it.: 
n/a
What perspective will you bring to the board when discussing strategic topics?: 
I believe the best strategy is to think long-term rather than short-term goals. This can be done by always staying in touch with the latest new and emerging technologies in Web design and development. Whenever a specific new idea or trend seems promising, we would need to investigate and research it a bit further to see if it's viable to be implemented with latest or upcoming Drupal Versions. As far as naming such a role, would consider myself an experienced forward thinking Web developer and an attitude of always learning and sharing knowledge. Also, I believe that a culture of always being open to new ideas and not shooting down ideas due to the saying "it's always been done this way" or "this is the process that we have always followed". To be successful always, you need such an open culture.
What existing board topics are you most passionate about? and why?: 
I would be most interested in the current and future strategic direction of the Drupal Project.. I love learning & have been a Software Developer for almost 20 years.. From all of these years of experience I have learned especially in Tech field that you have to stay current with your knowledge so that you can spot that one trend that can provide long term improvements to the Drupal project.
What additional strategic topics would you like to introduce?: 
Topics like; continuous learning, researching new technologies and testing out these new technologies to see if they are a fit to the Drupal project and if they are, at what capacity would these new technologies be helpful to the Drupal project
What unique skills would you bring to the board?: 
I personally shy away from bragging or giving the usual "Sales Pitch" just to secure a position, but, since mentioning some of my skills is relevant to be considered for this position.. I would say I'm a real hardworking person with high ethics, Integrity and moral standards. I would bring honesty and transparency if i'm considered for this position since I believe having an honest, transparent and open minded approach to other peoples ideas is essential to drive true innovation.
How have your past contributions to Drupal prepared you for board candidacy?: 
I once posted on Linkedin on an article that Mr. Dries shared.. I think it was about making Drupal users to migrate to Drupal 8. Dries then indicated that if I can help in that regard... So I commented that I will take on the project and it should be done in 2 weeks. I put aside 2 weeks for working on this side project and it was fully completed and tested within less than 2 weeks. This project tackled the many issues Drupal 8 users faced when upgrading to the latest version of Drupal 8 whether they have installed Drupal 8 Initially from a zip file, drush or composer. To solve this, I created the GoComposer plug in that converts any of the above 3 scenarios into the latest and greatest Drupal 8 composer based site.
Why should we vote for you?: 
I would bring with me years of technical knowledge and a fun and fresh personality.. The main thing I would say to vote for me is that all of my work is based on my beliefs of honesty, transparency, open mindedness and a high degree of morals & ethics.

Questions for the Candidate

rachel_norfolk’s picture
Comment: 

As Dries stated in his Driesnote at DrupalCon Seattle 2019 (https://youtu.be/BNoCn6T9Xf8?t=2149), work on diversity & inclusion is a key priority of the project (https://youtu.be/BNoCn6T9Xf8?t=5793).
How can your knowledge or experience of diversity & inclusion help the Drupal Association meet Dries' call to action?

webkings.ca’s picture
Comment: 

Inclusion:
Essential for all employees to feel valued by their employers. Why?
- This will greatly enhance their team collaboration performance since by feeling valued by other team members this will create a feeling of ‘openness’ where every ones ideas or suggestions are as important as the other even if the idea is something new that’s different from the companies’ usual process. I believe this is a major attribute that if an employer implements will foster a real culture of innovation..
- Feeling valued at work, makes employees love their job so that they don’t have to be ‘managed’ to do their duties… They would have their own ‘personal desire’ to perform at their very best not to for the purpose of solely impressing ‘management’ but because they love what they’re doing.. They would do their job to the fullest even when no one is looking…

Diversity:
From my personal experience in being a middle-eastern person and working in a couple of Canadian companies, I feel that a company culture that really implements diversity ‘practically’ not as just another policy ‘on paper’ will reap many benefits such as:
- All the benefits I mentioned above for inclusion
- They would bring their own ‘unique’ perspective due to their different backgrounds & experiences from working & living in different countries, cultures and companies.
- It will greatly improve the culture of a company by learning about different ethnicities values, morals and history.. Which will create an atmosphere of greater acceptance, tolerance and mutual respect in any company in that we are all humans and we all deserve to be treated ‘Equally’.

mherchel’s picture
Comment: 

As a board member, you would be responsible for directing strategies for the DA. What changes would you like to make? What strategic initiatives would you like to start/continue/discontinue?

webkings.ca’s picture
Comment: 

Personally, I’m interested in the following initiative: “Proposal: Composer Support in Core initiative” which can be seen in the following link:

https://www.drupal.org/project/ideas/issues/2958021#comment-12916310

I was working on a Drupal 8 project when I faced a lot of issues upgrading it to the latest Drupal 8 version with composer. I found this also part of the initiative in the link from the above initiative, especially point #5: “Provide an upgrade path for any existing sites to turn them into a composer ready site, so that the site behaves as if it were built with composer in the first place. This would ideally be a core-native tool so it tests alongside core. Note that there are existing tools to provide this: Composerize and drupal/console, among others.”

Since I believe the above initiative is important as an innovative addition to Drupal core since having a composer based site would bring the features that composer brings from managing all dependencies to easily install library packages with the right versions. In my opinion, adopting a fully composer managed solution is so beneficial feature wise and thinking long term for future releases of Drupal 8 & 9.

I have created the GoComposer plugin to solve point #5 of this initiative… Plus, I went even further by adding to the plugin a feature to automatically converting your existing site to the template found in: https://github.com/drupal-composer/drupal-project

As far to my interests, it's in my view this initiative is important and should be implemented fully. You can see the full blog I made on how to use the GoComposer plug-in in the following link:

https://webkings.ca/blog/having-trouble-updating-your-drupal-8-website-t...

rivimey’s picture
Comment: 

I am concerned for Drupal in two ways at present:

- that the project is becoming "enterprise only" (the small users and SME users are being forced out by Drupal's development costs c.f. Wordpress / Wix / ...)

- that contrib projects, even "important" ones, are being left unmaintained far too often, usually because the maintainers are busy earning money elsewhere. This is perhaps a symptom of the first point.

How would you meet these challenges?

webkings.ca’s picture
Comment: 

I believe to tackle both issues fully we have to tackle the issue of SME users being forced out due to Drupal’s development costs. If this issue is tackled then:
Contrib projects will be better maintained
More of the Contrib projects that have not yet been ported to Drupal 8 (From Drupal 7) will be completely ported.
The creation of new original Drupal 8 contrib projects would also increase.
I believe then if those are implemented then Drupal 8 will be as easy to use as Drupal 7 and as versatile, driving down the cost of building a site with Drupal 8 and encourage small users to adopt Drupal 8 which will have all the ‘Goodies’ of Drupal 7 plus the much more advanced features Drupal 8 comes with out-of-the-box.

webkings.ca’s picture
Comment: 

As far as attracting SME users, We could create a merit based system where incentives would be given to Companies or individuals who contribute to the Drupal community. Also, Having a system shortlisting Groups, companies or individuals into specific technical categories with the best contributing members on top of that list. This way we directly correlate incentives with the actual contribution of each entity.

sami-an’s picture
Comment: 

بالتوفيق يا سيد أحمد

webkings.ca’s picture
Comment: 

Thank You!
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