Drupal Changed My Life - Will You Take My Drupal Commit Challenge

I want to share two stories with you.

I started with Drupal in 2005. I started my first Drupal job in 2006 at $40/hr which was a pay cut. I quickly got a raise to $50/hr. I released Coder module in late 2006 and talked at OSCMS (the predecessor to DrupalCon) in 2007 and I began to be known in the Drupal community. Sometime in 2008 I started working on search. And because of my contributed work and reputation I was offered a 2 week job. I was asked how much I wanted. I remember I was making $50/hr. I said I'd like $100/hr. The client was the New York Observer and the person hiring me was Jeff Robbins of Lullabot. He knew my ask was low. He said, how about $110? Wow!

The second story is from DrupalCon San Francisco. In Dries' keynote he said, "if Drupal has changed your life, please stand up." I stood up and so did hundreds of others. I felt chills. Drupal changed my life because of this great career I now have. I work from home. I work with teams of smart, kind, diverse people. I work for interesting and great clients. And I make a nice paycheck.

So here I am to say something about Drupal 8 and make a challenge to you. Through the Drupal Association the community is trying to raise $250,000 to use as grants and bounties to help finish Drupal 8. I've worked many years full time with Drupal 7 and made a nice paycheck during that time. I also contributed heavily to Drupal 6 and Drupal 7.

But here we are in 2015 and I have contributed very little to Drupal 8. I want D8 released for selfish reasons. I want to start using it in my day job and secure the next several years of work. So I contributed $1000 and have challenged others that are like me, that work in Drupal full time, who make a good paycheck from Drupal, and who have contributed less to Drupal core than I have to contribute one day's pay to #d8accelerate. Will you stand up with me and take my challenge?

Donate here.