An open letter to Joe Shindelar on why learning Drupal is hard
UPDATE: Joe and several others have reached out in a way I think is amazing. I really didn’t mean to create a shitstorm or be a whiny old geezer, I just couldn’t fit all my thoughts into a comments box at the bottom of his post. But I want people to know that Drupal and a lot of Drupal folk are great. I’m part of a niche group, the “older learner,” and I shouldn’t allow myself to be just a part of the problem. I need to be part of the solution. Those of us who are trying but with a different set of challenges than those who are younger and just starting out need to carve our own space and our own support. I can be part of that and so can some of you. In Wordpress I’ve reached out to volunteer. I need to do the same with Drupal, and need to do it in a way that helps my peers.
Hello @eojthebrave,
You and the drupalize.me team are terrific teachers. The addition of KNPUniversity is great. Addison, Amber, Blake, you’re all wonderful. And Drupal is a fantastic tool I’d love to have in my pocket.
But let me tell you why I think it’s really hard for a group of people the tech world seems to be leaving behind. I’m not going to over-think this, I’m not going to run it by other readers for sanity checks, I’m just going to say what I think.
In the mid-90s I started with Coldfusion (go ahead, laugh). It hit databases, it made forms easy, it had ways of adding security. I could make web pages that danced and sang. There was no CMS. PHP was a baby. With other technologies using a database was hard and maintaining it was harder.
The first Drupal user group I went to had some people who were willing to help, but they wanted to help with the problems they were interested in, not the problems of new people with basic questions. When some of them learned about Coldfusion their eyes glazed over and I became a second-class citizen.
I’ve heard there are better groups in the area, but I feel burned. A bunch of youngsters who don’t know shit about life looked down their nose at me because they happened to be born in a different time. They don’t remember when hitting a DB used a lot of REALLY complicated code, PHP was a youngster (or not even born), and no one had heard of CMS platforms. Let them tackle a PERL script.
So I tried on my own.
Drupal is wide and deep. Drupal has no problem taking left turns in how it works and how it’s made in new releases. Learning Drupal is freaking expensive, especially when you’re trying to reboot yourself and don’t have a job.
Less than a year ago I started learning Drupal 7. Then I was told 8 was around the corner and it was a complete reconstruction of both the developer and user experience and that I should wait. I stopped with Drupal 7. There’s only so many things you can learn at once when you’re just beginning.
Drupal 8 is here and NOW people are telling me I need Drupal 7. I’m not going to dive into the very deep and dark chasm of 7 when I know it’s going extinct. But I’m told 8 is changing too quickly to bother with.
So I went to Wordpress. Yes, Drupal loves to look down at Wordpress. But I have a few sites up, I have a few free clients I’ve served, I have my first client. It’s not great to be in this position staring at 60, but I accept it.
I would love to learn Drupal 8. My drupalize.me account expires in a few days. I’m debating what to do. Drupalize.me is costly.
So learning Drupal is hard. And you’re trying to address that. I’d like to help, and I’d like to learn Drupal while I’m helping.
Here are my thoughts on what would make learning Drupal less difficult for me:
- Knowing I could walk in the room and not feel like shit
Mentors. I would love to work with a 20-year-old who know her shit if I could. I’d do crap work like adding content, dumping the trash can, answering the phones, kicking the wifi router when it’s not working. I’d love that. - Affordable learning. I know people need to make a living. I know that tutorials are difficult to make. I know you and you’re comrades are struggling to find an effective, viable way to do this.
- Respect for the beginner. Wordpress welcomes beginners. When I last tried to learn where I could just hang with Drupal people I was pointed to IRC. Really? IRC? Why not telegrams? They’re about the same age and just as easy to use.
I know you folks are trying hard. I follow you and webchick on twitter, I read your articles, I believe you feel a desire to help people like me. This is not an attack. This is a plea.
Drupal is a great thing. Wordpress is also, but they solve different problems. I want both in my toolbox. I love the Drupal search system for modules, and hate the Wordpress version. I love Drupal’s ability to solve complicated issues and create things that would have taken me months in Coldfusion and for which I’d prefer not to use Wordpress.
We geezers might not be the cool kids. But we’ve seen the stupid shit people do in the workplace. We’ve made our share of mistakes. We have value the cool kids don’t understand — and won’t understand until they’re our age. We might not be PHP experts. We might not know Symfony and Twig and PHP 7 and Bootstrap and React and Node and Composer and git and Foundation and Docker and all the other technologies of the moment, but we’re learning. We just want to be accepted, we want to be able to afford learning resources, we want to know WHAT to learn, and we’re willing to take part in making that.
Thank you. And I don’t mean that just to sign off, I mean that for your video tutorials, for your concern about the Drupal learning cliffs and deserts of despair, for your concern about the community.
Chris Estes
Wordpress guy
Coldfusion guy
Database guy
Geezer
