The Making of DDEV: Past, Present and Future in Focus

Luke McCormick in Conversation with Randy Fay
The Making of DDEV: Past, Present and Future in Focus | Luke McCormick in Conversation with Randy Fay

DDEV has become an essential tool for web developers looking to streamline their local development workflows, particularly within the Drupal ecosystem. As an open-source project, it provides a powerful, flexible environment for PHP-based projects, making it easier for developers to set up, test, and deploy applications with consistency. But what goes into maintaining and evolving such a critical tool? To find out, The DropTimes, through Drupal consultant, Luke McCormick, sat down with Randy Fay, the Project Maintainer of DDEV, for an insightful conversation.

Randy, a seasoned technologist with decades of experience, shared his journey into open-source development, his early involvement with Drupal, and how he eventually found his calling with DDEV. From his initial experiences manually configuring web environments to embracing modern tools like Docker, Randy offers a unique perspective on the evolution of local development. He also discusses the importance of community support, the evolution of DevOps practices, and what lies ahead for DDEV.

In this engaging interview, Randy and Luke explore a variety of topics, including DDEV’s role in the broader CMS world, the impact of automated testing, and the project's sustainability.  Whether you're deeply familiar with local development or just beginning to explore it, this interview sheds light on DDEV’s ongoing evolution, its impact on developers, and what the future holds for the project and the broader open-source community.

Luke McCormick [1]: Now, I'm familiar with some of your history, but let me give you a chance to share it with your viewers if you can. I know you have a particularly interesting story about your introduction to the world of technology.

Randy Fay: Well, these days, I’m the lead maintainer of the DDEV project. DDEV is a local development environment for mostly PHP projects and web projects. Drupal uses it quite extensively along with many other CMSs. For example, Typo3 uses it as their default in their docs, as does Craft CMS and several other CMSs. That’s what I spend all day doing—working on DDEV, supporting it, and improving it.

Angie Byron (webchick)
Angie Byron (webchick)

I’ve worked with lots of tech over the years and done all kinds of things. I have 30 or 40 years in the tech world, and I've had lots of fun with lots of things. After having done some PHP in the early days and worked with very old PHP versions like 4.5 and 4.6, I maintained some projects during a two-and-a-half-year bike trip my wife and I took. When we came back from that and were starting over, I really wanted to understand open source and get involved with it. I dived into the Drupal world and tried to figure out how to make contributions to an open-source project.

It was pretty intimidating, but I really wanted to do that. I made my first core patch, which was something about CSS aggregation. Angie Byron (webchick) insisted that it have a test, and nobody understood how to do a test for CSS aggregation. So, I got sucked into building a technique on how to do it. I started to learn how to get attention when you want to fix something and how to find the people who should help. I got sucked in pretty fast, and within a year or two, I was totally burned out. But it was way fun, and it was an amazing introduction to open source.

So that’s how I got into the Drupal world.

Luke McCormick [2]: What version of Drupal was active at the time?

Randy Fay: Well, when Angie was insisting on tests, it was 2009. So, Drupal 7 must have been in development. There weren’t any tests until Drupal 7, and she insisted on tests for every new patch in Drupal 7. This was an astonishing improvement in methodology and made an astonishing difference in my life. I had always poo-pooed tests. I thought they were too much trouble and couldn’t be done correctly, couldn't be done enough, couldn't afford it, didn't have a way to do it. But now, in DDEV, we have tests that run on six different platforms and take hours to run. It’s a lot of electrons and carbon being used, I do feel about all the carbon footprint we are leaving behind but we generally discover problems very early because of our extensive test coverage. So, I am a convert because of Angie doing that back in the day during Drupal 7 development.

Luke McCormick [3]: It sounds like you’ve had a lot of conversions in your career. You started out as a teacher, right?

Randy Fay: Yes, I was a teacher for a year and a half. I was in my early 20s, and I looked like I was about 17. I was trying to teach high school kids who were 17, and they saw me as bait. They ate me alive. I thought I would be great because my dad was a history professor and he was one of the world's greatest teachers, but I went down in flames. I escaped and somehow got a job doing documentation and development on a home automation system in the early 80s called CompuHome Systems. Imagine early 80s home automation with an Apple II hooked up to a house. It wasn’t an economic success, but it was amazing for me to be involved with.

Luke McCormick
Luke McCormick

Luke McCormick: What kind of things did you control in the house?

Randy Fay: We controlled lights, heats and doorbells. For jokes, we wired the doorbell to ring when someone flushed the toilet. It was all in the house of the project leader, not even in a garage.

Luke McCormick: And you got pretty deep into programming too, right? Assembly language?

Randy Fay: Yes, I used to be able to spit out 6502 Assembly Language without trouble. I got to work on another fantastic project which was the early cellular data, CDPD (Cellular Digital Packet Data), the very first round of what’s now 5G. I worked on Solaris, a variety of Unix from Sun Microsystems, and debugged kernel modules for small packet transfers. It was an amazing team and a highlight of my career.

Luke McCormick [4]: When did you first intersect with DDEV?

Randy Fay: I kind of burned out on Drupal because I tried to take on too much and ended up doing some DevOps work. Tag1 Consulting was very kind to take me on, and I was doing DevOps-related work with them. I've always known how to spin up a web environment just fine using whatever tools are available on the machine. On Windows or Mac, you can run Apache or Nginx, run PHP, and do all the things that tools like DDEV handle today in a straightforward way. However, doing it in a way that mirrors how a host does it is a different challenge.

Tag1 had me working on a project where we used Puppet and VirtualBox to bring up a machine identical to the client’s production environment. I worked on that for about two to three years, and it was really interesting. However, it was slow to build, painful to set up, and not that fast to run. But the same Puppet recipe used for the production machine was also used for local development, making it an exact replica. It was quite a learning opportunity.

Randy Fay
Randy Fay

VirtualBox, VMware, and similar tools would build a complete Unix machine running in a container-like environment. They allowed precise modeling of production environments, which was helpful when deploying to large systems. However, they were slow, required significant memory and resources, and were quite demanding. Some of those tools are still around today. I tried using VirtualBox recently, but it didn’t work out well; it feels obsolete in the era of Docker.

As things slowed down on that project, I started looking around for other opportunities. I tend to get anxious when I don’t have a project to work on. I love having something meaningful to do—something that others depend on. People often ask why I haven’t retired yet or why I’m not spending more time on hobbies like cycling, but I genuinely enjoy working on projects and helping people.

I tweeted about looking for work, and a new company called Drud reached out to me. They were working with the Go programming language, and at the time, I had no idea what Go was. I also didn’t know about Docker or Kubernetes. They hired me even though I had no experience with Go, Docker, or Kubernetes, which was quite an experience—like drinking from a firehose.

This was around 2016, and their goal was to build a competitor to platform services like Platform.sh or Pantheon, but using a Kubernetes-based environment. Kubernetes is like Docker on steroids, running a massive number of containers simultaneously and managing them. It's widely used in various environments but is incredibly complex and difficult to manage.

Drud went through several iterations trying to build their hosting environment with Kubernetes, but I didn’t find the hosting aspect very appealing. It was challenging to manage, and with a small, underfunded team, the project faced significant hurdles. However, they let me focus on the local development component, which quickly evolved into DDEV. DDEV took shape early on in the process and became my primary focus.

View of Mount Garfield above Palisade, Colorado on my walk to work today, January 6, 2025 | Randy Fay
Randy Fay published this photo in the January 2025 issue of DDEV Newsletter with the caption, "View of Mount Garfield above Palisade, Colorado on my walk to work today, January 6, 2025" | Randy Fay

Luke McCormick [5]: Was it called DDEV when you first started?

Randy Fay: It was a component of the Drud system but was named DDEV very early on itself.  It got its name very early on—possibly at the moment it was split into its own repository. I don’t think anyone knows for sure what the name means. The 'D' might stand for Drud or even Drupal Development Environment. But it was a great name.

The Drud team was kind enough to let me focus on maintaining DDEV while only needing to give minimal attention to other aspects of the project. I worked on it for nearly five years. Eventually, Drud lost its funding, and the company shut down, but I continued maintaining DDEV independently.

It was a great experience working on DDEV and keeping it going. That transition—from working with Drupal to DevOps and eventually focusing on DDEV—was made possible by the generosity of Drud, allowing me to dedicate my efforts to something I was genuinely passionate about.

I have a deep interest in local development, and over time, I’ve gained considerable expertise in that area.

Luke McCormick [6]: Did you ever use other local development environments?

Randy Fay: It has been a long time since I've deliberately done extensive web development, except for testing, which I do all the time. I've absolutely used Lando and its predecessor Kalabox, and I often try out different tools. All the Docker-based ones are similar in concept, and it's always interesting to learn from them.

Early on, I was actually quite a skeptic about DDEV and Docker. I was one of those people who always knew how to run Nginx or Apache with PHP and MySQL on whatever environment and make it work. Being one of those people, I thought, "Why do this? What is the purpose?"

But then I realized that even though I could bring up my current project just fine using any of those traditional tools, I couldn't run two, three, or more different projects with different requirements. I might have been able to figure it out, but I wouldn't have been able to maintain it if I did.

Running different versions of MySQL or MariaDB on the same machine is a lot of work, and even handling different PHP versions is an enormous amount of work. That’s when I started to see the value—being able to run multiple projects with their own configurations, with everything managed and running at the same time without issues.

That’s when I was sold on the whole thing.

Luke McCormick: DDEV is a layer on top of Docker. You could open a Docker container and install PHP, MySQL, and Nginx yourself, but it would take all day. DDEV does it in minutes. I often create a dozen new DDEV environments a day because I’m testing different things. It’s a huge time-saver.

Luke McCormick [7]: Let’s talk about the communities you’re involved with. The BackDrop project leaders told me they love you. They’re inspired by your support, documentation, and responsiveness. How do you approach community interaction?

Randy Fay: Stas Zhuk, my co-maintainer and I both just love supporting people. We love knowing that people are using it, finding out how we can help them, and learning from their questions. We just love it. It is a characteristic of DDEV that we try to give the best support in the world, and we actually provide better support than any commercial project I've ever known about. We love it; we just love doing that. Of course, we love the Backdrop folks and all the communities that have been involved.

We implemented Backdrop support way back at the beginning of the work, I think. I believe more users of Backdrop have started using it recently, which we’re very happy to see. We think very highly of all these different communities. For example, Craft CMS adopted DDEV as their standard maybe two years ago, and I spoke at their DOALL conference that year or the next. Typo3 adopted us as a standard years ago.

Some of the other communities are newer, like K PHP and Kow (if that’s how you say it), and they’ve been putting us in their docs as their standard way to do local development. Even Drupal has made a decision to specify or name DDEV as default. For Drupal to make a decision like that is very unusual. Drupal never wants to offend anybody and never wants to make a particular decision, so for them to say something like this is very impressive, given the community’s avoidance of specifying things.

Stas Zhuk
Stas Zhuk, DDEV maintainer

Luke McCormick: I was initially very much against that. I protested when I heard about it, and at least part of that was because Mike and Alec, who run the Lando project, were in the Drupal users group I ran in Oakland. I was there on the very front line as Lando was born, and I felt sort of disloyal.

I meant to say this for the purpose of our audience—I met Randy at DrupalCon this past May. We just happened to be standing in line at an espresso machine at a booth, and we got to chatting. As I was already talking to him, I saw his badge and thought, "Oh, you're Randy Fay! I've heard of you."

So now, you're a friend of mine, and I can comfortably use DDEV without feeling like I'm betraying my friends or having to choose between them.

Randy Fay: We've never had any feelings other than companionship with projects like Lando or Docksal. They encounter the same challenges and solve the same problems. We've always seen them as collaborators rather than competitors.

DDEV has been growing in its usage, and we're happy to be working with everybody. Lando has gone out of its way to ensure it doesn’t conflict with DDEV, and DDEV has done the same to make sure both can run on the same system—preferably not at the same time, of course, meaning you should stop one when using the other.

Luke McCormick [8]: How do you see AI interacting with what you’re doing?

Randy Fay: I find AI very useful and very stupid at the same time—and very hallucinogenic. They keep saying they're going to solve the problem of hallucinations, but I find that it makes up answers far more often than I would appreciate. In tech, it seems to just fabricate an answer as if it were a developer. Like, "Yeah, there's this environment variable called blah blah blah," and in reality, it doesn’t exist. Maybe it's a great idea, but it doesn't exist.

As far as DDEV, I have no idea how it would relate to DDEV. We've talked about making an AI agent that would answer people's questions. We've made one or two, and they worked a bit, but they also gave stupid, incorrect, or outdated answers. Our Discord channel isn't so busy that we can't just provide the correct answer with a real human being. So, we try to keep our docs up-to-date, maintain the Slack Overflow channel with real human answers, and respond on Discord.

AI is interesting. At least 50% of the time, I get something useful or learn something new when I ask ChatGPT. That’s fantastic—when ChatGPT suggests an approach I wouldn’t have thought of, it's great. But when I’m dealing with an actual technical problem and ask a question, it sometimes fabricates an approach, and that’s really annoying.

That’s how it’s going to bring down the world, I guess—by people believing what it says.

Luke McCormick: I've actually found in my experience that AI is particularly helpful for computer-related tasks because you can test it. If you ask it a question about history, it might tell you something, but you’re left wondering—"Is that true? I don't know." However, if you ask it to write a piece of code to do something, you can run the code right away. If it doesn't work, you know immediately that it failed. And if it works, you're good—problem solved.

Randy Fay: If you're smart enough to understand how to test what it says and to evaluate its responses, you're in a great situation. But think about how many people are using ChatGPT who aren't smart enough to do what you just described. They just take its output and plug it into something critical—like a nuclear system—and that’s a catastrophic problem.

When ChatGPT learns how to test its own answers, then we will really be somewhere. That would allow it to control its accuracy and try things itself instead of forcing you to test them.

When Randy Fay was felicitated with Aaron Winborn Award during DrupalCon Pittsburgh 2023
When Randy Fay was felicitated with Aaron Winborn Award during DrupalCon Pittsburgh 2023

Luke McCormick [9]: How do you manage communication and collaboration effectively when working with people across different time zones?

Randy Fay: An enormous number of DDEV users are in Europe, so when I wake up in the morning, I usually have several questions waiting, especially in Discord or Slack.

I have a tendency to answer the question I thought they asked instead of the one they actually asked—just a knee-jerk reaction—and that’s something I should work on. But the great news is that my co-maintainer, Stas, is in Ukraine, so by the time I wake up, he's already been up for hours and has usually responded. He loves doing support just as much as I do, and he typically provides outstanding answers.

Since Stas is a real PHP developer—while I once was a PHP developer—he often has a better technical context for users than I do. I have years of Drupal experience, but his home territory is Laravel. As a professional PHP developer, he brings deep insights into Composer, PHP, and the web, often tackling things I wouldn’t have known. I'm constantly blown away by his knowledge.

Both of us genuinely love doing this—helping people, figuring out their challenges, and understanding why they ask the questions they do. It’s amazing to work with someone who shares that passion; it's a real delight.

Luke McCormick [10]: From your experience working with users across different technologies, how do various technical communities compare? Do they have distinct personalities, or are they more similar than we might think?

Randy Fay: Different communities definitely have distinct personalities. As you know, Drupal is a very large community with a strong culture of tolerance and inclusivity for everyone. One of Drupal’s key characteristics—though it has moderated over the last decade—is its historical inability to make decisions efficiently. Any person, especially one with history or influence, can interrupt the decision-making process by expressing disagreement, which can sometimes stall progress.

For a long time, this was a significant challenge, and it remains an issue to some extent. Drupal as a community is very gentle, and that gentleness is reflected in its leadership. For example, the project lead, Dries Buytaert, is an incredibly gentle person, even as he transitions out of his leadership role in the Drupal CMS project. This culture of gentleness has some dramatic side effects, such as an inability to push forward initiatives that some individuals or groups may wish to pursue.

On the other hand, TYPO3—a major CMS community, especially in Europe—seems to have a better ability to move forward without similar challenges. They may not have a strict top-down structure, but they might be more agency-led, or perhaps I don't perceive their internal processes in the same way I do with Drupal.

Craft CMS, on the other hand, is a company-led open-source project. The company maintains control over its direction, which helps it avoid the same kind of decision-making hurdles seen in Drupal.

As for WordPress, it is such a massive ecosystem that it’s difficult to talk about it as a single community. We have many WordPress users, but we haven’t figured out how to be directly engaged with the broader WordPress world. Despite the recent controversies and internal struggles within the WordPress community, their ability to make technical decisions and pursue future directions is impressive. It has played a significant role in their success and their dominant position in the market today, despite the position they are in right now.

Luke McCormick: I'm more sympathetic to WordPress's position than a lot of other Drupal people are. While we have a front-row seat to the kind of inter-tech squabbles—such as the "makers vs. takers" debates that WordPress has been discussing—I've always found their approach quite interesting.

I think a large part of WordPress's success comes from the fact that Matt Mullenweg, when he started the project, was not at all technical—he was a blogger. Because of that, I feel WordPress has always been very cognizant and sympathetic to new users who don't have a technical background. It treats them with more respect and helpfulness than many other platforms do.

Randy Fay: I think Craft CMS is like that as well. Interestingly, it’s also a company-led project.

It’s fascinating to see the differences. Drupal, up through Drupal 7, was a bit friendlier—you didn’t have to understand Composer or a lot of other complexities. Backdrop CMS, which I know you're involved with, is a continuation of that approach, and it's a great thing.

Randy Fay and his spouse Nancy is not afraid of taking the lonely path on a bicycle
Randy Fay and his spouse Nancy is not afraid of taking the lonely path on a bicycle. Pictures from Chile bikepacking last year.

Luke McCormick [11]: Let’s talk about DDEV’s future. What’s on the roadmap?

Randy Fay: We have a number of things on the agenda that we're actively working on. One thing I should have been working on this week—but didn't—is related to our strong focus on support. We have a tendency to be so support-oriented that when a problem arises for anyone, we drop everything to try and solve it immediately.

With a big project like this, there are always plenty of such issues, and if they're interrupting or annoying users, both Stas and I feel compelled to jump in and fix them right away. This approach is really beneficial because it's part of why DDEV offers such a great user experience and ensures consistency. However, it also means that we don't always focus as carefully as we should on long-term planning and future features.

That said, we do have a few major initiatives in the pipeline. One of the big ones is our ongoing support for Node.js. We've been supporting Node.js quite successfully, though it's been more of a side feature.

Currently, you can run one or multiple Node daemons inside the web container with very little configuration. It works nicely and is useful when there's a Node backend. However, some users want to use Node as the frontend. They want it to sit behind Nginx and run on port 443.

While it's not too difficult to set up right now, it does require some manual tweaking of the Nginx configuration. Our goal is to make Node.js an official, first-class project type and web server option to simplify this process.

Luke McCormick: Would it be accurate to say that this approach supports headless implementations?

Randy Fay: That's a good way of doing headless, although you can already do headless just fine if Drupal is the main project. If you're doing headless Drupal, Drupal would be the main project, and you would run the head on a different PT. This approach, however, would allow you to run Drupal on a different port and the head elsewhere. Both approaches will work, and we'll see how it goes—it'll be experimental.

That's one project. A second project, funded by TYPO3's contribution initiative, involves integrating XHGui into DDEV. XHGui is a wrapper around XHProf, which is a great performance profiling tool. DDEV has supported XHProf for quite a while. Tag1 funded the original development of XHProf, and their developers have used it extensively.

However, XHProf can be complex to use in some scenarios. XHGui simplifies this process. A DDEV community member, Tyler36, has maintained a DDEV add-on for XHGui for quite some time, and it has become an official add-on. Still, it was a bit complex to use. TYPO3 is funding this project to make it mainstream and easy to use for everyone. Work has already begun, and we'll continue throughout this quarter. We are very thankful to TYPO3 for the funding and to Tyler36 for maintaining and improving the add-on.

The third thing is that our add-ons have gotten out of control. We have more than a hundred add-ons that people have built, and I think there are over 20 official ones that we actually monitor and maintain—or that are officially maintained. But if you run a 'DDEV add-on list --all,' it's a bit overwhelming and hard to figure out what you need.

So, we're working on a registry for that, probably web-based. Right now, we just search GitHub for things with particular tags, but what we want to do is provide a web-based registry. Ideally, this registry would allow people to add comments and rate add-ons, so you can easily see which ones are most useful.

Live commits to DDEV during a contribution workshop
Randy Fay during a Birds of the Feather session at a DrupalCon working on DDEV Git

Luke McCormick [12]: Let's talk about resourcing. Platform.sh has wonderfully supported you for a while, but they're changing that support a little bit, right?

Randy Fay: There have been a lot of positive moments in the history of DDEV. One of them was when Drud lost its funding and Tag1 stepped in right away to find ways to support the project. They did this by funding specific initiatives, like the XHProf integration. They also funded Mutagen, which was a huge help for Windows and Mac users.

For about a year and a half, there was casual funding from various sources, but some significant challenges arose when Drud sold its assets to an agency that planned to continue its hosting project. They owned the trademark and wanted control over the DDEV project, but it wasn’t going to work out.

At that time, Platform.sh stepped in. They had previous discussions about trademarks and intellectual property and worked out a deal to acquire the DDEV trademark and domain names. To further support the project, they hired me as an employee, which solved many challenges. Without their support, the project would have needed a new name, which would have been confusing for users. Platform’s support over the past few years, by funding me as an employee, has been an incredible contribution to DDEV.

However, like many companies, Platform.sh is looking to optimize their expenses and has decided to change their approach. Instead of funding me as an employee, they have reduced their support but will continue as a partner-level member. They will contribute €3,000 per month to the DDEV Foundation.

The DDEV Foundation is the fiscal entity for the project, registered as a U.S. nonprofit 501(c)(3). This new funding approach provides the foundation with more flexibility in how the money is used. While it requires some adjustments on my part, the support remains significant and valuable.

We recently discussed this in an Advisory Group meeting, and it could potentially provide funding for Stas’ work as well, which is a positive development. Both Stas and I are constantly working to ensure that users have a great experience, that their issues are resolved, and that we stay up-to-date with changing technologies.

We want individuals and organizations to recognize the value of DDEV and support it accordingly to ensure its sustainability. CMS platforms, hosting providers, and agencies should evaluate how much DDEV is worth to them and contribute accordingly. We offer flexible payment options, including invoicing, to make the process as easy as possible. While it may be difficult to part with the money, it’s also challenging if DDEV doesn't receive the necessary support for the future.

In love with the dreaded mountain path! Randy Fay on a hillside.
In love with the dreaded mountain path! Randy Fay on a rock at the top of the Angel’s Landing hike in Zion National Park.

Luke McCormick [13]: How can people support DDEV?

Randy Fay: There are two easy ways to support DDEV. One is through ddev.com/support, which provides all the details on how to contribute. The other is the GitHub Sponsors page, which outlines various ways to support us. It’s not just limited to GitHub sponsors—we can invoice you, you can send us a note, and we accept PayPal, GitHub sponsors, and more.

DDEV is a mature project in many ways. While our marketing may not be the most sophisticated, we are well-established with a 501(c)(3) nonprofit status, a bank account, and various ways to engage with communities around the world. Everything works smoothly.

But don't forget—DDEV is an open-source project, and it relies on the entire community. We love providing support, learning from your experiences, and seeing your contributions.

Contributors like tyler36, and many others, have made significant improvements to the project. They maintain add-ons and contribute fixes when they encounter issues, submitting incredible pull requests that have enhanced DDEV over time.

Supporting DDEV isn’t just about financial contributions—it’s a community effort. We appreciate all levels of support, whether it’s financial, contributing code, or providing feedback. Our goal is to be a sustainable organization, and making sure the finances work is an important part of that.

Luke McCormick [14]: What about volunteering?

Randy Fay: You can visit the project at github.com/ddev/ddev, where the entire open-source project is available. The documentation contains all the information you need, including how to test a pull request, how to create one, how to understand the code, and how to run it.

We've also done several contributor training sessions, which are available on ddev.com as both videos and blog posts. These resources explain how to get started with contributing to DDEV. We've done quite a few of these, and I’m happy to do more. If there's anything you need to learn or if you're facing any challenges, we’re here to help—whether through Discord or other channels. If there's a specific learning need, we'll schedule and conduct a contributor training session.

We’re always excited to have people contributing. And by the way, even though Stas is an incredible maintainer—really one of the best—he's also the future of DDEV, even more than I am. I’m getting older, and while we're all finite, I'm perhaps more finite than some of you.

That said, one or two maintainers alone won’t carry this project into the future. We’re always looking for new contributors and, ideally, additional full-time maintainers. The future of DDEV depends on the open-source community, and we’d love to have more people involved, whether as contributors or even as paid maintainers down the road.

Randy Fay and wife cycling
Randy Fay and his spouse Nancy, in one of their cycling trips

Luke McCormick [15]: Lastly, let’s talk about sustainability. You’re known for your biking adventures. Tell us more.

Randy Fay: My wife, Nancy, and I have done an enormous number of bicycle touring adventures. The longest one we ever did was a two-and-a-half-year journey from the top of Canada down to Puerto Montt, which is in the northern part of Patagonia in Chile. That trip lasted from 2006 to 2009.

It was truly a trip of a lifetime. The only thing is—we've had several trips of a lifetime. That adventure was amazing, and it was during that time that we started thinking about changing up our lives. That experience eventually led me to Drupal because when I came back, I wanted to do more than just use Drupal—I wanted to contribute and truly understand open source.

We've done many other trips as well. Bike touring has been a big part of our lives. These days, we usually ride a tandem, but back then, we rode separate bikes. Just last year, in December and January, we returned to Patagonia, to the place where we ended our trip in 2009. We put together our tandem bike, packed our panniers and camping gear, and started riding south on the Carretera Austral, the road that runs down the Chilean side into Patagonia. It was a two-month trip. We faced some challenges—some things were easier than expected, and others were much harder. But we completed it last year, and we still do a lot of bike riding.

We likely have something on the agenda for this year as well. I'm talking with a friend about riding the New Mexico section of the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, starting in late May. That trip would take about a month and would be self-supported on mostly dirt roads. I actually rode it in the other direction back in 2003, but there were parts we couldn't complete because of impassable mud. So, it's on the possible agenda for this year.


Thanks to Luke McCormick for agreeing to do this interview on our behalf. It came out better than we wished for, all credit to Luke's conversational skills. The video version of this interview will be published soon on The Drop Times YouTube channel - Editor

Alka Elizabeth helped with the interview production and editing. 

Disclaimer: The information provided about the interviewee has been gathered from publicly available resources. The responsibility for the responses shared in the interview solely rests with the featured individual.

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