Notes from platforms that aren't allowed to break
Mostly about decisions that get made once and then live for a decade: what to own, what to rent, and what a compliance obligation actually costs.
-
25 July 2026Platform
Twelve years in, and I'd bet my career on it again tomorrow
Almost every criticism of Drupal I've read comes from someone who bounced off the learning curve in week one and called it a verdict.
-
23 July 2026Platform
Drupal turned 25 this year
What shipped in Drupal in 2026, and why the European Commission runs 770 sites on it.
-
20 July 2026Vendor lock-in
A six-figure quote for one approval flow
A client was quoted six figures and twelve months by their SaaS vendor for a single approval workflow. It took six weeks on Drupal.
-
19 July 2026AI
When AI hit, part of me was devastated
Twelve years building content systems that don't break, then everyone started cheering about generating a thousand pages before lunch. What changed my mind.
-
13 July 2026Vendor lock-in
The renewal came in at 3x, and nobody had read the invoice in two years
An enterprise SaaS CMS managing four content types. What it cost, what it did, and what replacing it took.
-
6 July 2026Maintenance
Everyone builds the cool thing. Nobody maintains it three years later.
Drupal is boring in the way a bank vault is boring, and that's the entire point.
-
28 June 2026Career
I broke production within an hour of my first day
Twelve years later, I owe that software my career.
-
26 June 2026Security
Security is either in the foundation or it isn't
Coordinated disclosure since 2005, severity scores, CVEs and a release window communicated before the patch drops.
-
22 June 2026Vendor lock-in
What vendor lock-in actually costs the CFO, legal, and the board
Proprietary CMS contracts look good on signing day and different in year four. The cost, broken down by who carries the risk.
-
18 June 2026Public sector
The EU just made open source a procurement default
The Cloud and AI Development Act requires public administrations across Europe to prefer open source. What that means if you already run Drupal.
-
28 May 2026AI
Your content was never structured. AI noticed.
AI doesn't read your website the way a human does. It needs to know what things are, not just what they say.
-
24 May 2026Platform
Read past the headline on the market share chart
Drupal is losing small sites and holding the large ones. Why the top-10,000 figure tells a different story from the overall one.
-
20 May 2026Community
I'm pissed at the people confidently hating on Drupal
The community lets the narrative win. I'm guilty of it too.
Nothing filed under that topic yet.