Building my career, thanks to the opportunity of open source

This year, I have the honor of being one of the featured speakers at Florida DrupalCamp (February 23 to 25, 2024.) I will be speaking about the opportunity of open source. Working with open source has created tremendous opportunities for me and led to a fulfilling career and life — beyond what I could have ever imagined.

I’ve written about my journey from delivering beer to becoming a software engineer previously, and I was able to keynote DrupalCon London 2017 about how open source is a community and provides opportunities. This time, I want to focus on the impact of so many individuals on my career path. I met these individuals by working with Drupal and open source software. I want to inspire newcomers to leverage our open source community to help build their skills and career opportunities. I want to inspire existing community members to foster our open source community and realize the impact their actions can make on others.

It is extra special since Florida DrupalCamp 2014 was my second Drupal conference and the first time I had spoken at a conference. I had spoken once at Drupal 414, a Drupal user group in Milwaukee run by David Snopek, before that. If you’re curious about that story, I wrote about it back in 2018 when I got to go back to FLDC a second time.

When I think back to 2000, in middle school, when I was first exposed to HTML via Dreamweaver, thanks to an extracurricular program at school, I would never have thought this could happen.