Agiledrop is highlighting active Drupal community members through a series of interviews. Learn who are the people behind Drupal projects.

This week we talked with Renato Goncalves de Araújo. Read about what are the two things he loves about Drupal, what he thinks the future will bring for Drupal, and what are projects he is involved into. 

 

1. Please tell us a little about yourself. How do you participate in the Drupal community and what do you do professionally?

About me:
I have been a software developer for eleven years now. I studied Computer Science at the University of Campinas (Unicamp).

About Drupal Community:
The Drupal community is a group of passionate and like-minded people who aim to help one another and that’s what I love about it. I enjoy getting involved with the Drupal community and seeing how people help each other. When I get the chance, I try my best to contribute to official projects since I know how these projects greatly help in our day-to-day. 

I currently work for CI&T's Drupal Competence Office (DCO) which is involved with several Drupal projects, includes training; certifications; participation in events like a DrupalCon, DrupalCamp, Drupal Global Training Day, and others. I’m also a member of the group ADB - Associação Drupal Brasil (Drupal Association Brazil).

 

2. When did you first came across Drupal? What convinced you to stay, software or the community, and why?

I first came across Drupal when I was in University in 2008 and again when I started working at CI&T. I decided to stay with Drupal for two reasons. Firstly, because it is open source. I really like the free software philosophy. Secondly, because I noticed that the Drupal community is unmatchable when it comes to talent and projects. 

 

3. What impact Drupal made on you? Is there a particular moment you remember?

I believe that Drupal has transformed my career for the better. I started to get involved with the free software community and today I consider myself a much better professional.

I have created projects for the community like  Modal Page, Janrain, Forms to Email and Parameter Message. I have been gaining people's trust, and today I maintain more than 40 official projects, including projects like Views that is used by almost 800,000 sites.

One particular and special moment was when I came in 3rd on Dries Buytaert’s (founder of Drupal and Acquia) list of 2017 contributors: https://dri.es/who-sponsors-drupal-development-2017

 

Another memorable moment was when they released our Janrain project in the Newsletter of the Drupal Association.

The last was the launch of the CI&T website made with Drupal 8:
www.drupal.org/case-study/cit-thoughtfully-fast-in-drupal-8

 

4. How do you explain what Drupal is to other, non-Drupal people?

I always say that Drupal is a powerful framework for creating systems and websites.
All you have to do is find a module that best aligns with what you’re trying to do, and if you can’t you can create it yourself. Much more, you can create a module that also potentially help others. Drupal is both intuitive and a system that has plenty of benefits that I can’t imagine creating a website with any framework other than Drupal.

 

5. How did you see Drupal evolving over the years? What do you think the future will bring?

I see Drupal evolving to something even better over the years-more performant framework with modern technologies such as Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) and Symfony, to compete with other frameworks in the market.

I think the future will bring new possibilities within Drupal like an Alexa, Chatbot, Composer (Drupal Plan) and many others using Drupal Decouple. This is already happening and I'm sure it will continue. 

 

6. What are some of the contribution to open source code or community that you are most proud of?

I would say that the three contributions I’m most proud of are:

1. First, I'm very proud of the Modal page project, which I created from a simple idea and is currently used by almost 50 sites in production.
2. Second, I'm proud of the project that I created together with my team called Janrain.
3. Lastly, I'm significantly proud of the Views project, which is one of the largest in the community. 

 

7. Is there an initiative or a project in Drupal space that you would like to promote or highlight?

Yes, Modal Page and Janrain.
Modal Page is a project that came up with the idea of facilitating the creation of models for Drupal in a simple and an effective way. Several sites in production are using it and all the help is welcomed.
Janrain is the official project for Drupal 8 with a stable release.

 

8. Is there anything else that excites you beyond Drupal? Either a new technology or a personal endeavorment. 

What excites me is the "Drupal Decouple" or “Headless” Drupal way of working. Where the backend plays the role of the web service and is responsible for processing the information and returning it in JSON format for example, and in this way it is possible to use the front end with other technologies.