253: Mumbai Memories - meet Abhishek Anand

My trusty microphone, camera, and I recorded a few great conversations in Mumbai that have never been released until now. Today, talking about full-time contribution to Drupal 8 while building the Acquia Lightning distribution, passion for community and paying it forward in open source, and Drupal in India with Abhishek Anand.

At the time of recording, Abhishek had been a Drupalist "for seven years and two months." He started using Drupal to prepare for a job interview for an internship while he was still studying and said he wished he'd discovered it sooner. It would have saved him a lot of coding to make websites for his college. Later on, Abhishek even turned down jobs at bigger companies to stay where he was and doing Drupal, "I just loved this job. And seven years later this journey in Drupal has been exciting."

Though he is a capable coder, Drupal's toolset made his life and work easier, "For doing anything else, you had to write a lot of code, even for small things. With Drupal, I can sit with someone who knows nothing about PHP or coding and they can build a website. At the same time, the biggest thing was that I can also be a part of this community that's built this. Whatever I'm building, can go back to the Drupal community. Having code written by me on Drupal.org is exciting for me. Someone else will use my code ... When someone files an issue [on one of my modules], I know that they are using it. It's a great feeling knowing other people are using the code I am writing. It's an amazing feeling."

DrupalCon Asia Mumbai 2016 was almost exactly a year ago now. Of all the conferences I have been to, Mumbai was probably my favorite. I met an incredible, active, enthusiastic Drupal community that welcomed everyone with open arms, incredible food (!), and a LOT of selfies :-)

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See the conversation video at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/253-mumbai-memories-abhishek-anand

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