The past year has continued to present significant challenges to everyone, across all sorts of industries and activities - professional, and personal. As people, companies, communities, and governments continue to strive to meet the challenges posed by this exceptionally difficult year, we continue to work together to complete common goals. Here at Tag1, we keep working to face the issues our customers, and the world have to take on. We’ve covered a lot of topics in our blog this year - from the changes we’ve all had to make to revisiting the history of Drupal, and pressing forward in our continued support of Open Source Software.
Open Source Software
This year, Tag1 became the first Silver Sponsor of the Rust Association. Just as we sponsor team members and other work for the Drupal Association to continue to promote Drupal, Tag1 sponsors Rust to help ensure its continued success. We build our websites on Drupal, and we can test them with Goose, our Rust-based software testing suite.
Open Source Leadership
We’ve also been fortunate enough to talk with several leaders of open source projects, Marijn Haverbeke of Codemirror and Kevin Jahns of Yjs gave us a view into how their worlds are different from large scale projects like Drupal.
Our biggest interview this year with an open source leader was unquestionably Linus Torvalds. Tag1 CEO Jeremy Andrews conducted a long interview with him (part 1, part 2), which was ranked #1 on The New Stack’s list of top Open Source stories for 2021. Linus is unquestionably one of the biggest names in open source, and Tag1 is thrilled to have had this opportunity.
20 Years of Drupal
It’s even harder to believe that Drupal has been around, and a central part of many people’s careers, for over 20 years! Being unable to hold in-person Drupalcons put a bit of a damper on what should have been some major celebrations. But never fear, the Drupal community always steps up to meet and solve crises head-on. With so many long term contributors, Tag1 has been proud to conduct a long and ongoing series of talks with a variety of contributors - from designers to developers and business owners, as well as many of our own team members.
Drupal 8 End of Life
Drupal 8 reached its end of life in November 2021. Here at Tag1, we’ve talked extensively about Drupal versions and their end of life cycle. Drupal 8’s end of life tied to the EOL of Symfony 3, and while its predecessor Drupal 7 is still supported, we're less than a year away from its EOL as well. While Tag1 is a Drupal 7 Extended Support vendor, Drupal 8 laid the foundation for future versions of Drupal.
DrupalCons
The global coronavirus pandemic affected many things, and conventions were one that nearly completely shut down. Convention organizers pivoted to online platforms - making it safe for attendees to be together and accomplish things, while also making conventions more accessible for those who would otherwise have been unable to travel, pandemic or not.
Tag1 continued participation in DrupalCon by giving talks at the conventions, premium sponsorship of US DrupalCons and dedicating resources to the Association to ensure their work continues.
Tag1 Team Talks
We continued to produce our Tag1 Team Talks podcast series, with 52 new editions! Managing Director Michael Meyers took the helm for many of these talks, chatting with the previously mentioned open source project leaders, to Tag1 customers, to developers and designers. Preston So also continued to bring his exuberance and expertise to our podcast with his own talks and interviews. We’re proud of the perspectives, experiences, and work we’ve been able to showcase. To bring your perspective to our podcast, contact us at tagteamtalks@tag1.com
Moving forward
We look forward to the return of in person events at Drupalcon Portland 2022! One of the greatest aspects of Drupal is its community - and the achievements the community makes when it gets together. We hope to continue our introspective on 20 years of Drupal, and we’re excited to interview more people for our Team Talks - especially those who continue to support and contribute to open source projects and communities.
Photo by David Boca on Unsplash