Drupal made my dream come true

Drupal

With DrupalCon Europe 2020 approaching fast we wanted to introduce our readers to our speakers at the conference. Who are they and what do they do at 1xINTERNET?  What can we expect to hear during their talk? Hristo Chonov is one of our Software developers at 1xINTERNET and at DrupalCon Europe he will be talking about Autosave and Concurrent editing in Drupal.

 

Communicating virtually can be challenging

Hristo Chonov, great name! Who is the man? I am originally from Bulgaria. I grew up in the beautiful Rhodope Mountains. In 2008 I moved to Germany to study Computer Science at TU Darmstadt. Since then, I mostly have lived and worked in 50km radius of Darmstadt and Frankfurt.

What is your role at 1xINTERNET? I'm a Senior Software Engineer and particularly responsible for the implementation of web projects based on Drupal, as well as further development of the technologies used in this context.

What are your most challenging tasks at work? It is not the technical tasks that are most challenging, it's rather finding the proper way to communicate with colleagues and accepting or being accepted by others, even if a person has an unconventional way of thinking. Another great challenge is achieving a balance between what solution I would prefer, and what solution I am willing to accept from others, in order to maintain a healthy work environment. It's important to not let discussions escalate because of different points of views, where both solutions would actually solve the problem. Sometimes this requires compromises to be made from both sides which adds another level of complexity to this challenge.

What is your work background? Before starting at 1xINTERNET this October I worked at bio.logis Genetic Information Management GmbH for six years. As a part of my work at bio.logis I did spend lot of  time on Drupal.org where I’ve contributed both to DrupalCore and the Contrib eco system. At the beginning of my career with Drupal I had the unique opportunity to concentrate a lot on the multilingual support in the Entity API subsystem in the Drupal Core, and later on more general tasks. Thanks to this opportunity I eventually became a Co-maintainer for the Entity API subsystem in Drupal Core. As bio.logis was my first employer I wanted to see the Drupal world beyond building a single product. At 1xINTERNET I get the opportunity to work on multiple projects and getting to touch different technology stacks, that was a great option for me and a great factor in my decision to change my work.

Joining new company during pandemic has been an interesting process

How do you organize yourself at work, any tips? I usually try to focus first on the tasks other people are depending on being done. If I submit a Pull Request for a review and it gets some comments I try to pause the work I've started doing in the meanwhile and immediately work on the requested changes. If there are only minor things that need to be addressed this allows me to ping the reviewer and ask for another review shortly after the previous one. In most of these cases this results in quicker task fulfillments. I call those quick resolving of comments when asking for a quick re-review “mini rapid iterations”.

How has working during a pandemic affected you? I've changed my employer in the middle of the pandemic. It has affected me mostly in that sense that I am not able to meet most of my colleagues to get to know them in person. It is not that easy understanding people and their way of thinking just by working on a couple of issues every now and then remotely, especially when working with people from different countries and cultures. Nevertheless the positive impact of working only remotely with so many colleagues would be the experience of getting more effective in building and maintaining healthy and joyful remote work relationships.

Autosave and Concurrent editing in Drupal

Now you are going to be talking at DrupalCon, what is your lecture about? I will be talking about Autosave and Concurrent editing in Drupal provided by two contrib modules for which I am currently the main maintainer.

“Autosave ensures that content changes will not be lost if a sudden power outage or network disruption occurs. The current state of each entity form is continuously autosaved, so that the user is able to always resume from the last autosaved state. The concurrent editing feature provided by the conflict module allows for the simultaneous editing of the same content by multiple users. Whenever possible automatic merges are performed. When conflicts occur the user is provided with a visual tool for resolving them.”

I’ve been selected with my session as one of the featured track speakers in the Users & Editors Track

What can we expect, who will benefit from attending? Me performing a brave live demonstration! Basically everyone who is either building or using editorial user interfaces based on Drupal, from developers to site builders as well as regular users can benefit from attending the talk. I promise it will be good! 

Why this subject? As a user of various online tools I personally consider a seamless “autosaving” functionality a must have feature for any serious editorial UI out there. Bringing people together to collaborate on a single piece of content simply makes it necessary to make “concurrent editing” possible in order not to have to throw away changes if somebody saved the content in the meanwhile. I am the main developer behind the Autosave Form module and I’ve completely rewritten the Conflict module (version 2)  which offers the concurrent editing feature so I am really passionate about this topic.

Dream came true, thanks to Drupal

Have you attended many DrupalCons? I haven’t missed a DrupalCon in Europe since I started working with Drupal in 2014. This will be my seventh DrupalCon and the seventh year of working with Drupal. While I studied at TU Darmstadt, I walked near the Darmstadtium Science and Congress Centre almost everyday. All this time I dreamt about speaking there myself one day. In 2018, at Drupal Europe in Darmstadt, I was able to fulfill this dream of mine thanks to Drupal. I will always carry this memory with me. 

What is the charm of a DrupalCon event? Learning new stuff is one of the great things, but the biggest benefit for me personally is getting to know some of the people I meet online. The personal touch makes a big difference. Also exchanging ideas with people when getting into a BoF event or a spontaneous conversation.

Meet Hristo At Our Office In Frankfurt

To sum it up

DrupalCon Europe 2020 

When: 8-11th of December

Where can I buy tickets? You can buy tickets on the event's webpage

When is Hristo's session talking place? Wednesday the 9th of December at 9:50-10:10 UTC

Name of the session: Autosave and Concurrent editing in Drupal

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