On this episode we talk with Dries Buytaert, founder of Acquia and creator of Drupal, the incredibly popular open source CMS. Dries covers how he got his start, Drupal's origins, how Acquia found its footing, and why people skills are important for open source projects. He also discusses the beginning of an architectural shift for the web, how he manages burnout, and much more.
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Show notes

Dries Buytaert: Blog, Twitter
Drupal: Website, Twitter, GitHub
Acquia: Website, Twitter, GitHub

Transcript
Alexis: Dries, thank you for coming on the show!

Dries: You’re welcome!

Alexis: So before we get to Acquia and Drupal, tell us a bit about your background.

Dries: Sure. I was born and raised in Belgium. I got into computers pretty early on in life – I guess I was about eight years old or something when my dad came home with a Commodore 64 along with some programming books for kids, so I always tried to get on the computer.

I wasn’t always allowed to be on the computer. Hey, mom. [Chuckling] I just grew up as a very nice youth, so to speak. And then when I finished high school, I went to study Computer Science at the University of Antwerp here in Belgium. I did that for four years, graduated with a Computer Science degree. I guess it’s sort of a Masters, although it wasn’t called a Masters at the time.

It’s also at the University that I started the Drupal project. I can go back to that in a second if you like.

Alexis: Sure.

Dries: Do you want me to keep going, sort of telling the history?

Alexis: A quick interjection here. When you went to study Computer Science, what was the original game plan? “I’m going to get my degree and then I’m going to get a job in __.�

Dries: To be honest, I didn’t have a game plan in terms of what kind of job I would land, but other than, say, I would be a software engineer working in a technology startup, I never really felt attracted to working for large corporations. I always felt like the smaller startup-style environments would be better. So I guess my plan to the extent that I had a plan was to go and work at a technology startup on a software or R&D team.

Alexis: Alright. How did that plan deviate?

Dries: Well, it kind of worked out in the beginning, I must say. When I did finish college, I went to work at a startup called ACUNIA at the time; it was a company in Belgium. When I joined there was about 30 people, maybe a little bit less, but it was early on in this company, and I was part of an engineering team that was building embedded hardware and embedded software.

The company itself built a telematics platform, so an in-car system for navigation software, but also downloading apps to your car. In many ways, it was 10-15 years ahead of its time, and I was part of the team that would port [clear 03:01] Linux to this embedded device, as well as built a Java Virtual Machine to run on this embedded Linux port.

I was specifically focused on the Java Virtual Machine aspect, where I worked on garbage collection and just-in-time compilations. Kind of low-level software engineering, so to speak, and a little bit of hardware design as well.

That was fun, and I did that for almost four years and saw the company grow to about 130 people, I would say, in over a course of three, four years, which at the time for me felt like amazing growth. It was a lot of fun.

Not only was it challenging technically, but it was also a lot of fun in the sense that it’s really where I got the startup bug, if you will. There is a sense of purpose and a sense of camaraderie and working hard and having fun and people would often come in on Saturdays to keep working – it’s really passion there, and I really, really like that.

Unfortunately, that came to an end shortly after the bubble burst.