Drupal 20th birthday and the nostalgia from my engineering days
It was January 2001, exactly 20 years ago, when Drupal was released as version 1.0.0. And I still remember these engineering days back in Greece, working at nights between the new fancy CMSs, the Web Services, and the xCBL schemas. These enthusiastic days and nights…
I remember with nostalgia my software engineering days in Athens, working in cosmoONE. It was the beginning of what we now call Web Services, but then we were so fascinated about this new world of different technologies and the code itself. These were the days of wine and roses, the beginning of the new century, the wonderful world of eCommerce and the e-MarketPlaces, and the impressive world of fully integrated systems. We were deep concentrated then on Java world, the big systems, the ocean of the source code of Commerce One.
I still remember that night back in 2003 when I read about this new Content Management Framework called Drupal. I was impressed then by Mambo, PHPNuke, and later by Joomla! and WordPress, which were easy to use and flexible. But Drupal was something more: intelligent and promising. That was my new software engineering toy, to play and tweak.
I remember that the world was not ready for that drupy and its’ hardcore features. I still remember that Joomla and WordPress were more popular, more simple. Drupal was suitable for the nerds.
I liked the simplicity of WordPress, I liked the expandability of Joomla, but Ioved the hierarchical taxonomy system of Drupal (and TYPO3).
These were my software engineering days, the days of the Integrations, the opening to a new long and winding road…
Then I loved the web design, but that’s another story.
Happy birthday Drupal, you were always my intelligent friend, my gig alter-ego.