An In-Depth Interview with Dries Buytaert, Drupal Founder

By Jeremy Andrews May 11, 2011

The Drupal (news, site) open source web content management system is developed by thousands and used by millions of people around the world, powering a diverse range of websites. In this interview, I visit with Drupal's creator, Dries Buytaert, who explains how Drupal evolved over the past ten years, out of a simple message board written in a college dormitory in Belgium. He discusses how his company, Acquia (news, site), has impacted his ability to focus on Drupal, weighs in on some of the new features in Drupal 7 and looks toward the next decade of progress.

When we began this interview, Dries was on a Drupal tour in Australia, calling from a hotel room in Sidney. For Dries, trips like this are becoming more and more common, allowing him to meet an increasing number of the people all over the globe using and developing Drupal.

He listens to success stories and challenges faced in adopting or migrating to Drupal. “It helps me as the project lead to talk to as many Drupal people as I can”, he explained. Later this year he's planning an around-the-world tour, literally flying around the world visiting as many countries as he can to talk about Drupal.

Personal Background

Jeremy Andrews: What were you doing before you started the Drupal project?

Dries Buytaert: As a high school student my first job was making hamburgers at “Quick”, a European fast food chain. In college I studied Computer Science at the University of Antwerp. I spent my time studying, but like any student I also enjoyed having a good time. I was fortunate that my parents paid for the basics like tuition and books, but I got a job at an ISP so I could buy gadgets and pay for other fun things. I was one of their first hires, and running the service desk and doing outside sales was good training for my work today at Acquia.

In the few years I worked at the ISP I saw it grow from 5 to 60 people. It was very educational to see an organization grow so rapidly. In the early days, I had to sell Internet subscriptions when there weren't enough support calls coming in. Unlimited Internet access was very expensive back then, especially for a student, and one of the perks of the job was a fast, 10Mbit connection. This is where I begin to learn about the Internet.

JA: I'd like to talk all about Drupal, but first let's jump to the present and learn more about who you are outside of Drupal. Before Drupal you were flipping burgers; what do you do these days when you're not focused on Drupal?

DB: I have two wonderful kids and an amazing and very supporting wife. I greatly enjoy the time I spend with them. We get outside as much as possible, taking day trips to the park or zoo, or going hiking. I usually bring my camera as I also enjoy photography.

JA: You have an extremely busy schedule; do you feel you get enough personal time to spend with your family?

DB: I make as much time for them as I can on the weekends. I do work some on Saturday and Sunday, but I make sure I'm there doing fun things with them when the kids are awake. For example, Sunday morning we make croissants together. This past weekend we put skis on my son Axl and started teaching him to ski.

JA: What do your parents think of Drupal?

DB: At first they'd get upset because when I was home from school on the weekends I was always online. They were not happy with my huge telephone bills, so there was some tension there. They're very proud of Drupal now.

Drupal History

JA: There are plenty of reasons to be proud of what you've accomplished with Drupal. It's already been a decade since you started the project. What inspired you to start writing Drupal in the first place?

DB: I'd already built websites with Perl and CGI, but PHP and MySQL were new technologies back then and I wanted to learn about them. I was interested in working with a database instead of writing data to flat files.

I also had a need for a private message board, so I worked on it for a year or so before it actually evolved into a Content Management System, or CMS. During that time it didn't even have a name, but that was the foundation that evolved into Drupal. I was hooked on all things Internet, and the message board was an experimental platform for me. For example, RSS or RDF feeds had just been created, and I was one of the early implementers of the specification. Same thing with “public diaries”, which later became “blogs”.

I was always looking for early signs of cool new things to try and include in my message board. It had no module architecture in the beginning, so I had to rewrite the software several times. I learned about modular design in my computer science studies, as well as from experience; I modeled later versions of the message board somewhat after the Linux kernel.

As I looked around at other systems like PHP-Nuke, I felt what I'd written had a better architecture, both in design and performance. When I eventually moved the message board from our private intranet onto the Internet I also started writing more about the future of the web. I wrote about things I was doing, and it attracted an audience. Some people would write to ask for the source code. Other people would write to suggest I might change an algorithm to work differently.

It finally got to the point that I was proud enough of what it did My message board had become a modular CMS and I felt it was actually something that would be useful to other people, so I released it as open source.

JA: How did you first become aware of open source software?

DB: I picked up a copy of the Slackware Linux distribution my first year in college. It took me a day to install, and then another week trying to get X-Windows working. I fully switched to Linux in '97 or '98. I was an open source user for a year before I got involved in development to get a wireless network driver working.

Wireless cards were still very expensive in those days, and the software drivers were relatively immature on all operating systems, even Windows. I ended up writing a FAQ for the Linux WLAN project, which I maintained until 2000. I still have a copy of the final version on my website at http://buytaert.net/files/wlan-faq.html.

This is all related to Drupal. At the time I lived in a really tiny room with just a desk, a bed, a sink, and a microwave. One of my best friends lived across the street and signed up for a beta testing program for high speed Internet that a company in Antwerp started. He was one of the first to get ADSL in Antwerp. All of a sudden he had super fast Internet access, but had to sign an agreement not to share it, the connection was only to be used by one person.

Being college students, we decided to build a wireless bridge to share the connection. We looked for wireless network cards, and back then we found them for $20,000! We kept looking, and finally found a small outlet in the UK selling more affordable wireless cards. They were still expensive for us students, probably around $1,000. I was using Linux, and it was hard to get the drivers working. I documented the process and finally got them to work. That was great!

Now that we had a wireless bridge, I decided to connect other people too. We drilled holes in the floor to connect people below and at night we'd run wires to the people next door. All of a sudden there were a bunch of people connected to my friend's ADSL connection, all over the wireless bridge. So we needed a private message board. If the beta ADSL connection dropped, or if I turned on the microwave and the wireless disconnected, I'd post a message on our intranet letting people know. We also used it to share stories or interesting things we found online, like our own little Slashdot, and to coordinate things like dinner plans.