Talking Drupal #565 - That Geerling Guy

[00:00:00] Nic: This is Talking Drupal, a weekly chat about web design and development from a group of people with one thing in common: we love Drupal. This is episode 565, That Geerling Guy. On today's show, we are talking about open source sustainability, becoming your own content creation machine, and how Drupal influenced some of that with our guest, Jeff Geerling.

We'll also cover AI metering as our module of the week Welcome to Talking Drupal. Our guest today is Jeff Geerling. He's built and scaled large enterprise deployments on private and public cloud infrastructure. He's deeply involved in open source communities, especially Linux, Ansible, Raspberry Pi, and Drupal.

He writes about his experiences on his blog and shares projects on YouTube. Welcome back, and thank you for joining us again.

[00:00:50] Jeff: Yes. It's, it's been a while. Five years, I think. Six years.

[00:00:53] Nic: Six years. Yeah, six years. Episode 261. 300 episodes.

I'm Nic Laflin, founder at nLightened Development. Today my co-hosts are, joining us again, JD Flynn, senior software engineer at Drodev.

[00:01:11] JD: Hey. Great to be back. Thanks for letting me.

[00:01:16] Nic: Also joining us in place of John this week, Mike Anello, co-founder and vice president at DrupalEasy. Thanks for joining us. Oh, no.

Y-

[00:01:22] Mike: y- you're welcome, and I'm a shallow replacement for Mr. Driscoll. I'll do my best, though.

[00:01:30] Nic: And joining us again, Bernardo Martinez, senior front-end dev at Valtech.

[00:01:34] Bernardo: Hey.

[00:01:37] Nic: Awesome. And now to talk about our module of the week, let's turn over to Mike Anello, co-founder and vice president at DrupalEasy, and maintainer of a number of Drupal modules of his own.

Mike, what do you have for us this week?

[00:01:48] Mike: Thanks, Nic. Uh, so this week I'm, I'm filling in for, I guess John and Martin this week, so I'm doing the, the two roles today. Um, the module I picked is AI Metering. So I have been, uh, developing a, a Drupal AI course, um, focused on inside AI, so all of the Drupal, um, AI modules and the AI module ecosystem.

And one module I ran across that I really liked is called AI Metering, and it basically from within the Drupal interface keeps track of usage, um, AI usage, LLM token usage, um, for, uh, individual users and roles. And I think we all know that right now there's a lot of folks who are just, it's kind of YOLO with AI.

They're paying the 20 bucks a month or the $200 a month, and they're just using the best model they can for everything, and I think we all realize that's not really sustainable. And over time we're gonna have to start, kind of, you know, keeping an eye on things a little bit closer and, and, and, you know, sticking to AI token budgets and things like that.

And, um, from the Drupal side of things, the AI Metering module's off to a great start in kind of helping to not only expose, you know, what the costs are, um, and what the usage is, but also, um, to, you know, help, um, m- you know, uh, mitigate it in, in a certain way. Um, so first some basics. Uh, module's relatively new, um, only a couple months old.

Uh, created on June 1st of, of this year by, um, I think, uh, Jeroen Tach- Tachania. Apologies if I, if I pronounced your name wrong. Uh, codeitwisely is, uh, the, the Drupal.org username. It has a 1.0.1 version available. Um, co-maintained with someone who's been on the podcast before, Carlos Espina. I think most of us know who Carlos is.

Um, username C- camilla on Drupal.org. Um, the module has security coverage, test coverage, some documentation. Um, relatively new module, so only nine open issues, four of which are, are, are categorized as bugs against a current branch. Um, only 78 sites are reporting it us- uh, using it right now, which, you know, it's a relatively new module.

But, um- I think this module has a lot of upside. The maintainer has been very, um, or the maintainers have been very communicative and very responsive to the issues I've opened. Um, and I think it's one of those modules that as time goes on and more and more people implement the Drupal AI modules, um, they're gonna need or, or want some type of, uh, feedback like this.

Um, a couple of other features, um, is it actually estimates the, the, the token cost, um, based on, uh, token prices that it downloads periodically, I believe via cron from LightLLM. Um, you can set limits, per-user limits on token usage, um, and it automatically, uh, you can configure it to automatically send an email when those token budgets are being approached.

Um, and then it has some, some really nice reporting. Um, so, you know, I really like it, um, um, for teaching especially, 'cause it does provide insight, um, into... I mean, quite frankly, I use it to show the difference between a simple LLM call and then running an agent and how it's night and day and how y- you know, when you're designing an agent, you wanna think about, uh, you know, uh, token efficiency and, and, you know, context control and things like that.

Um, so I would recommend to check it out. If you're using the Drupal AI module on a live site, this kinda feels like a no-brainer to me. The URL is drupal.org/project/ai_metering

[00:05:45] Nic: Yeah, I thi- I think in order to... I, I think the future is gonna be measuring usage, you know. Um, so I think this is a, you know, one of those things that will become standard, especially if you're looking at comparing different models or comparing different providers. I think, I think that's a, a good thing to keep in mind.

[00:06:07] Mike: And I just, I just remembered one of the, one of the other main features, let's put it in the show notes, you probably heard me clicking it there. Sorry about that, very clicky keyboard. Is if, um, you can configure the module so that if the token budget is reached, it can automatically fall back to a local Ollama model.

[00:06:26] Nic: Mm-hmm.

[00:06:26] Mike: So, you know, probably won't get nearly as good results depending on what the application is, but, you know, you're not gonna be completely dead in the water.

[00:06:38] Nic: Awesome. Well, thank you, Mike, for, uh, filling in for Martin. I mean, I kind of miss Martin. I, you know, Jeff and JD who don't know us, it's been like five weeks I feel like since he's been on. Uh, so looking forward. I think he'll be back next week. Looking forward to catching up with him after his vacation.

I'll- He

[00:06:55] Mike: asked me to set the bar really low so that when he comes back, everyone's like, "Yay, Martin." So. I did my best to.

[00:07:04] Nic: Looking forward to seeing him. And if our listeners want to suggest a module of the week or want to discuss this, they can always reach out in the Talking Drupal Slack, um, or they can reach out to mandclu and send their suggestions.

And one more housekeeping thing right before we jump in. We have NedCamp coming up, and we have Aloysia here to talk about the session submissions.

[00:07:25] Alozie: Have something to share with the Drupal community? We'd love to hear from you. The call for sessions for New England Drupal Camp 2026 is now open. Whether you've built an innovative Drupal solution, solved a challenging problem, discovered a new workflow, or have lessons learned from a recent project, your experience could help others in our community.

We're looking for sessions for all experience levels and interests, from site building and development to design, accessibility, content strategy, DevOps, AI, higher education, and everything in between. Whether it's your first presentation or your 50th, we encourage you to submit. Session proposals are due by September 18th, so don't wait.

Join us November 13th and 14th at Rhode Island College as we come together to learn, share ideas, and strengthen the Drupal community throughout New England and beyond. Visit nedcamp.org to submit your session and learn more. That's N-E-D-C-A-M-P dot org. Share your knowledge, inspire the community. Submit your session by September 18th.

We can't wait to see what you have to share at NedCamp 2026.

[00:08:47] Nic: All right, Jeff, I have a very important question for you What time is it?

[00:08:53] Jeff: Ha. Well, let's see. According to PTP, NTP, GPS, and my, uh, well, I won't talk about this clock yet because I'll show it on the video soon. It's 10:51:37 in Central Time. But, uh, I don't have my, uh, UTC down there. I don't have it set to UTC mode, so I can't give you that time.

Sorry.

[00:09:13] JD: I appreciate it. Uh, waiting for people watching live to try and guess what that clock that you're not gonna mention here is gonna be. Yeah, we can keep an eye out.

[00:09:22] Jeff: I posted about it on Twitter and Bluesky and Mastodon and Threads- ... and Instagram yesterday, so.

[00:09:30] Nic: So, so it should be out there.

[00:09:31] Jeff: Yeah.

[00:09:31] Nic: Uh, so y- you have some history with the Drupal community.

Can you fill us in? I know Stephen mentioned, we were talking about before the show, you were a keynote at NetCamp. Uh- Yeah ... but what's your Drupal history?

[00:09:44] Jeff: Yeah, so I, the, the first thing I ever did was I, I, in college I was in charge of, like, recording talks and, and putting them online. Uh, and what we had been doing was just an FTP server, but people didn't like that.

They wanted to be able to play the video in their browser. This was like 2005, I think. And I was looking for, like, what's a good way that I could make it so that people could... I didn't wanna do everything, so how could people do this? Uh, like, record a thing and then import the footage from the camera, and then upload it to a thing.

And Drupal was, like, the only solution for that, at least that was open source. E- even the ones that I saw that were paid were not that. And so I, I was not looking for anything open source. I wasn't looking for anything that was, like, uh... I, I just wanted something to solve that problem, and Drupal was the thing that I found 'cause I think, I don't know if it was the media module or whatever module was out there, this was in Drupal 5, Drupal 5-point something.

Might have been 4.7 and then 5 came out while I was setting this up. And, uh- Right ... it just solved my solut- it, it solved my problem perfectly, and it had, like, user privileges, so I could set it so that people could upload videos but not change other things on the site, which I liked because I didn't want them breaking the website.

So, I got into it then, and then, um, a- as that went along, it was like all of a sudden I was the guy who did the web stuff. So I helped with other web projects. And then I, I, I built probably 30 or 40 different Drupal 5 websites. Got into theming, got into all these different things, and then I went to my first DrupalCon, which I think was Chicago maybe.

This was- Okay ... I, I can't remember. And I, I don't remember what year it was, but it, it was like, I s- that, that was, I switched from being a college guy to being a professional web developer. Oh, nice. And, uh, that, from then on, it was like I loved the comm- they, you know, the, the tagline was, "Come for the code, stay for the community," and that was exactly my story.

And, uh, it, got to meet so many people in the open source community. Uh, the philosophy of the Drupal project was perfectly in line with my idea of, like, we have these skills and we have this knowledge. Let's share it and make the world a better place. A lot of other portions of the open source world were a lot more corporate driven, like, let's take other people's labor and use it to make money.

Like I- that was not the Drupal way. It was more like, let's find ways to make things better for everybody. Like a rising tide lifts all ships, and that, that's, that was in line with what I wanted, uh, in all things, uh, open source And so from there it just went on and on, and I, I, I ended up working eventually for Acquia after a bunch of large projects.

And, uh, after that I, I went, uh, I worked with Red Hat for a couple years doing consulting and- Oh ... uh, it, it, it went from front end to, uh, back end to infrastructure to infrastructure automation, and now with my YouTube stuff, and, like, hardware's kinda cool. And, uh, one of the, one of the few things also that AI has not completely changed yet.

Uh, but, you know, it's coming for everything. Well, I think- But, uh, yeah, that's, that's my journey.

[00:12:46] Nic: I think the first time I met you was at a Drupal meetup that was at Acquia, and you were showing, you were hosting... This might've been one of your first forays into Raspberry Pi. You had set up a Raspberry Pi cluster or maybe just a Raspberry Pi, a single Raspberry Pi, and you were hosting a Drupal site on it.

[00:13:02] Jeff: I think I had- Aren't it? ... four or f- four or five at that point. Yeah. Yeah, that, th- with the Raspberry Pi 2 it was just fast enough to run Drupal. The Pi 1 could do it, but the Pi 2 came out, and I was like, "I can run Drupal on this." And then I became, like, the guy who knows how to get Drupal running on any little piece of junk.

And, uh, but it, it was fun because there was, there was a couple bugs that I hit on the large scale infrastructure projects that I could only reproduce reliably on the Pi because they were so slow. Oh. Like, it was a problem where if- Fun ... if some of the Amazon EC2 instances would get slow networking for some reason, it would hit this weird bug with the file module.

And, uh, I could replicate it on the Pi, and I was like, "So there's actually a good reason for this besides just the torture of running Drupal on a, a system that's really not meant for it." But, uh, yeah. So

[00:13:48] Mike: how, how many years were you, were you focused on Drupal after college?

[00:13:53] Jeff: Uh, until 2021 or so I still did a lot of Drupal consulting.

Okay. I think the last big project I did was, uh, uh, a couple Kubernetes integrations for Drupal, like building out Drupal infrastructure- Right ... automated so somebody could just, like- Well, like six- ... hit a button and they get a new site.

[00:14:10] Mike: Six, seven years? Is that what we're talking? More?

[00:14:12] Jeff: Uh, 2000... Well, I started 2005 to 2021, but it was- Oh

professionally probably 2008 or 2009 to 2021. Oh, okay. It's, it's funny. The first, the first big project I worked on was actually Joomla, and I went back to Drupal because I was like, "This is not as fun doing

[00:14:30] JD: Joomla."

[00:14:31] Mike: Good choice. Good choice. All right. Well, enough about Drupal. I think, you know, we, we've fulfilled the, the name of the podcast, so let's, let's move on here.

Uh, so what are you working on these days? Do, do you... You mentioned before we started recording you do basically one project a week, I assume for your channel. Um, so what are you working on this week? What'd you work on last week? Uh, what... And, and I also am curious, like, how do you decide? what your projects are.

Uh, I, I, I might have ADHD.

[00:14:57] Jeff: I'm not sure. I've never been- Sure ... diagnosed with it, but I, how do I decide- Yeah ... is, like, I have a pile of things, and I grab one of those things, and I'm like, "This is the thing." The, the funny thing is, like, like right now, this, this week I've been testing these air quality devices. This is called an AirGradient Go.

Oh. It's, it's on pre-order right now. Uh, but I've been testing tons of air quality measurement devices because, uh, one thing that I remember very distinctly in one of my jobs was this little meeting room. We'd pack five people in there for our little scrums every morning, and scrum is supposed to be very quick, but these were an hour or two-hour sessions.

And I just remember every day feeling so drained in the morning. Like, we'd come in, we'd go into this meeting, and then by the end of the meeting I'm, like, dead. And, uh, I'm pretty sure at this point that the problem was we d- had, like, no ventilation in there, and we were all just breathing in our own breath and like- Mm

s- slowly dimming our brains for the morning session. And, uh, I think if I had one of these things, I would've seen the numbers go up because I've tested this at my house, here at the studio, in my car, and all these places. So it's like one of these things comes up and I, I test it, and that's been, like, a month or so of testing already.

I'll probably do another month or two here and there. It's not all day, of course. But, uh, you know, that will be a video at some point. And whether that's- Yeah ... in a few weeks or a few months, I'm not sure yet. But- ... it's like every week is one video, but a lot of those videos are months or a couple times it's, like, years of planning.

Like, I'm working on this time stuff. I now have nine clocks in the studio that are all based on GPS- ... in some way or another, and I'm trying to learn how to compare clocks together, how to, uh, transfer time wirelessly and wired, how the history of that works. And it's been now two years into that journey, and I have one video- Yeah

that I really did on that specifically. So I need to do another video to justify- Oh ... all this time.

[00:16:47] Nic: Well, I, I have to s- nice point. I, I have to say I, one of the struggles when I wa- I en- I always enjoy your videos, but one of the things I struggle with is, uh, we have similar interests, and I have to resist the urge to immediately get involved in the same, uh- Uh-huh

sa- same veins, 'cause I could see myself going off on that same time tangent. Yeah.

[00:17:09] Jeff: Um- It, it's, it's the problem with, so if you have, like, a hack- hacker mentality, you just, you always wanna be tinkering with something. You wanna... Like, a lot of us have a shelf of stuff that's like you bought it 'cause you really wanna do it, but it's just sitting there.

I have three shelving racks full of those- ... projects now.

[00:17:24] Nic: Yeah,

[00:17:25] Jeff: my, my current- And sometimes

[00:17:25] Nic: I pull a project

[00:17:26] Jeff: off of there.

[00:17:27] Nic: My, the viewers can see this, my current is the, uh, synthesizer.

[00:17:32] Jeff: Uh-huh.

[00:17:33] Nic: I think the modular synthesizer kind of fulfills that same- Niche

[00:17:38] JD: Yeah, I've been playing with, uh, ESP32s quite a bit, and I have six or seven of those.

Thanks to somebody in, in the chat saying six, seven. That number's now in my head. Um, uh.

[00:17:52] Jeff: Nice.

[00:17:53] Nic: Uh, I also wanted to give a shout-out to Martin, who's our, our normal module-of-the-week, uh, correspondent. He, he does, uh, you... I don't know if you've met Martin, but he's also running his Drupal site on Raspberry Pi-

[00:18:03] Jeff: Yeah

[00:18:04] Nic: right now. Has been for years.

[00:18:06] Mike: I'm gonna mention real quick, there is a SpaceX launch happening right now, and my whole office is shaking. I was wondering what was going on. I looked out the window. I was like, "Oh, no. Must be, uh, must be-" There's a

[00:18:17] Jeff: rocket going up there.

[00:18:19] Mike: Yeah.

[00:18:20] Jeff: Nice.

[00:18:22] JD: So I've got a somewhat related question to that before I get to the next question that I have.

Uh, so I, I create content too. I do a lot of Twitch streaming, uh, s- occasional YouTube stuff. How do you keep motivated to keep cranking out this content? I mean, you're, you're, you're putting out new stuff frequently, and it's all interesting. It's all stuff that people are watching, and it's good. It, it's not just people are, "Oh, there's Jeff.

I feel obligated." No, we wanna watch this stuff. How do, how do you stay motivated to create that new stuff, to come up with these new projects?

[00:18:54] Jeff: Well, one thing that helps is that my income is now tied to this. I told my wife- ... getting into YouTube that I was never gonna make YouTube, like, be a primary source of income, and then that kind of organically happened.

So she's always like, "You said that you'd never do that," but, uh, it, it happened. Uh, so that's... I mean, for me, it's having an income is a good motivator. But the, the main thing is, like, I have a list of probably 200 or 300 projects at this point in my Trello board, and I just, I literally have to do, doing, and done.

Those are my three, my three work lanes. And doing is limited to three. Sometimes it goes up to four. But, uh, I just put everything in there, and I... E- every single one of those is something that I could spend months on. Usually I only get a week or two, but, uh, i- it's, it's like I was just doing portable gaming handheld stuff.

Like, there's... It, it fascinates me from the electronics engineering part, restoring an old, uh, hand- handheld console or running a new one, and what limitations do you have? Like, there's so many different things that I could approach, and I d- I really have to limit myself to be able to do that. But it's like e- every time I look over at those carts full of projects, it's like every one of those, I wanna do it.

So I'm always excited to try out something new. And then the sad thing is every, every week now I get two or three emails of something that I really wanna do also, and so I... Saying no to those things is actually the hardest part of it. Like, there's so much that I want to do that I know I can't, and I don't...

Uh, the, the worst thing is I don't ever wanna give somebody a no, uh, or say yes to somebody who thinks, like, he's gonna try my thing, this is gonna be a breakthrough. 'Cause there have been some projects where it's like just mentioning them is something that changes their game. Like, they, instead of having 200 people follow their project, now they have 2,000.

Right. And that makes it like- Yeah ... takes it from, like, here's my little hobby project, to I could make a business. Mm. So that's something I never thought I'd have the ability to do, but it's like having that ability now, now it's also kind of a responsibility. Yeah. And so I, I try to find projects that I think will, A, be just generally cool.

I always have to think about if people will click on it on YouTube, that kind of thing. But then also, can I help this person, like, go from this is my little hobby thing, to, like, this is something that could make some income, or this could change their career. Yeah. 'Cause for me, the Raspberry Pi stuff that I did I was a front end developer, the back end, and then I could have been infrastructure, and that was kinda...

I was okay with that, but I wanted to do more with tinkering, and the Raspberry Pi got me into that. But it was completely a shift. Like, I, I don't, I don't know as many infrastructure people that went into content creation or full-time writing or anything like that from this. Um, it, it's rare to get that opportunity.

So I don't know. I'm just, I'm happy about it, and I'm also trying to, uh, do that well, and sometimes it's, it's harder than others. But usually it's pretty easy with how many cool things there are in the world.

[00:21:47] JD: Yeah. Awesome. Thank you for that. Um, so before the show, we were talking a little bit about Open Sauce.

You recently attended that, right? Um-

[00:21:54] Jeff: Yeah.

[00:21:57] JD: If, as somebody who goes to those types of events, what could we as a Drupal community learn from those events to drive excitement, to, to get people to show up, uh, to, to increase attendance, to increase ex- excitement at, you know, from the, the, the huge national level DrupalCons down to meetups and, you know, local, regional events, everything in between?

What excites you? I

[00:22:25] Jeff: think, I think for every event that I do, it's, it's about the people at the event. And you could... I don't... I think some people care about the headline, like the keynote and the, the this and that, and who, what the vendors that are coming or whatever. But, um, the reason why I still, every time I see the DrupalCons, I'm like, "Ah, I, it'd be fun to go to that."

But it's not, it's not because of whoever's talking at it or whatever. It's because people like you, who I remember from all the times that I went to DrupalCons, like you're gonna be there, and we're gonna have conversations. We're gonna have dinner and, and talk about some cool stuff. It's the people that go to it.

And like Open Sauce still has, uh, it, it, it's dangerous with a, an event like that where there's a lot of celebrity type people, where it can become more like a VidCon thing, where there's like the celebrities and the people seeing the celebrities. It's like to me, Open Sauce is a bunch of people interested in tech, interested in, uh, like hacking on projects, interested in making things.

All those people come together, and already there's two or three projects that I'm gonna be working on this year, uh, that wouldn't have happened if I had not gone there and talked to some people. Ah. Uh, one of them will be a visit, hopefully, fingers crossed, to, uh, NIST, where they make time- Oh ... with some other YouTubers that these YouTubers- Exciting

will be, will be, uh, it'll be very fun I think for everybody involved. Where they

[00:23:43] JD: make time. I, I

[00:23:45] Jeff: Basically. They're one of the many organizations on earth that gets together and actually makes UTC happen. And, uh, and it just exploring that, just having the connections there, like that's the biggest thing.

And, uh, like last year, we, we did a video at the radio tower touching the hotdog to it and making the hotdog, uh, burn. Uh, that, uh, I got, uh, Gavin from Slow Mo Guys. He came out, and we did a slow mo video of the hotdog being, uh, tortured on the radio tower. And he, it, it, it helped to see, like we, we were just doing this for fun, but he actually found some interesting things with h- the way the plasma interacts that we would've never seen if you didn't have 100,000 frames per second high-speed camera- Yeah

on the hotdog, you know? So things like that, it just, it, it makes your brain, it expands your brain a little bit, and, uh, I think that DrupalCon has had that in the past for me based on my interactions. And there's some, there's some good sessions here and there too. Um, I, at, at every conference, I, I find one or two sessions that I'll actually go and sit, sit in.

But most of them, it's like if they record it, I could watch it afterwards. Or nowadays, probably people just do AI summaries of it afterwards, but But, uh, but it's, it's the people. So that, that's what excites me about every conference I've attended

[00:24:58] Bernardo: So along those lines, I wonder about, like, places like All Things Open, Open Source Summit, and RenderATL.

Being that you're a media personality, you ever thought about attending or, um, speaking there as part of increasing your reach or potentially just finding ideas? Yeah,

[00:25:19] Jeff: I mean, the funny thing is for, for, like, for me, I don't care about extending the reach 'cause I'm at a point in my YouTube setup where it's like, uh, uh, I, I, I could live like this the rest of my life and I'd be happy.

Although, with YouTube always changing, you have to adapt and, and things. But, um, it's, it's more about if there's an opportunity to see some cool people or talk about a cool project or whatever. Like, there's actually a timing conference that I want to go to, but I can't this year, where we're gonna p- um, one of the guys who's been working with me on this little, uh, Raspberry Pi timing switch, he's gonna present on it, and I wanted to go there.

It's in Italy. That would be so cool, especially if I could take my wife, who she's half Sicilian. Um, but anyway, that, that's, that's not gonna happen. But, like, that's the kinda thing that I'd love to see. And, um, there's also a few conferences over in Europe that I want to get to at some point, and I probably will in the next 10 years.

Uh, but I have to balance that with, like, I have a family, and they're all in elementary school. They're doing sports and stuff. Like, it, it- Yeah ... leaving, leaving my wife with them, or, you know, we've talked about taking them all with us, but that's kind of a, that's its own ordeal. And if, if we all go as a family, and then I'm gone all day, that, that's also more pressure on my wife when she's traveling.

So I know DrupalCon had, um, I don't know how it is nowadays, but in the past, there were some times when there was, like, the, there was some, some, uh, like, family-based activities and things that would be highlighted. That's, that's a cool thing that helps, uh, for people like me who are considering whether to bring a whole family along with them.

Um, but yeah, it's, uh, the, a lot of the open source conferences, I would wanna go to talk to people about the challenges of developing, the challenges of funding, all that kinda stuff. And, uh- Yeah ... I've thought about All Things Open and a couple other conferences. I've, I've been invited to a couple of them over the past few years.

It's just I have my limited time budget. I try to do five or fewer trips a year. Ah. Just 'cause when I worked for Acquia, I did, like, 25 trips a year, and that was way above what I could handle. Yeah. So one of the reasons why I stopped doing that was I, it, it was just so much travel, which every trip was amazing, but it's also, for me, it was a, a kind of a drain.

And then- Yeah ... back then, I only had one kid, and then two, and then three. You know, as you have more kids- Yeah ... it gets more pressure. S-

[00:27:36] Nic: s- speaking of somebody who travels a lot, uh, Kevin Thole, who's kind of in, in charge of the Drupal Recording Initiative, I think he said one year you went to 40-something-

[00:27:45] Jeff: Yeah

[00:27:46] Nic: uh, camps and yeah. I

[00:27:47] Jeff: think I saw Kevin at every camp that I went to for a couple years.

[00:27:51] Nic: Yeah. Yeah, and just wanna really quickly say hi to, uh, Tim Sharp, who's a, a new listener saying hi. Um, before we move on from kind of the conference speak, are there, are there any cherished memories from any Drupal conferences or events like that, that you, listeners may not know about?

Um, 'cause like you said, you've been to a lot.

[00:28:10] Jeff: I, I think the first time I met Dries was with, uh, uh, I don't remember who mentioned it, Nic or JD or, or whoever, um, with that little Raspberry Pi cluster that I had. Uh, I brought it to set it up and, and work on that one issue on drupal.org. It was an issue that probably affected, like, 25 people ever, but it was the, all those 25 people were, it, it's like, "Where, where is this coming from?"

So I brought it and I talked to Dries about it. That probably also led a little bit to the, uh, whole Acquia opportunity at some point, but-

[00:28:38] Nic: Yeah ...

[00:28:38] Jeff: um, but it, like, that was a cool interaction. And the best thing about it was I realized at that point, like, sometimes you hold people up on a pedestal like, oh, Dries, he's this, he must be, like, way more super intelligent.

And some people have a lot more intelligence about a lot of things than I do, but I realize, like, he's another person. Like, he's, he talks, he's, he, he has the hacker mentality. He loves open source. He has his own passions. Yeah. He liked photography and, and so you, you, you find out, like, he's j- he's a guy.

He's a, he's another person that I can talk to. Yeah. And he was just sat at the table, and we had a bunch of, a bunch of the core maintainers were sitting up there because he was up there, and so I got to meet all of them. Yeah. And it's like that was a cool opportunity. And like I say, it's about the people.

I, there were some cool sessions at that DrupalCon, but that meeting and, and that ability to say hi, uh, kind of led to a lot more things in life, and, and it built up friendships. It, uh, Angie Byron Webchick, you know- Yes ... she, I met her at, I think it was DrupalCon Chicago. I met her there. Okay. And her whole perspective on things, uh, was, was great.

To be able to talk to her and, and learn about, like, why, why is open source so cool? Like, she and a couple other people really guided me on that path. I didn't realize some of the things. This was, you know, 2008, '9, something like that. I, I don't remember what that DrupalCon... Maybe it was 2011. I don't remember

[00:29:59] Nic: when.

2011 was Chicago, yeah.

[00:30:01] Jeff: Okay. It was 2011 then, 'cause I had gone to a couple Drupal camps before that. And I think Chicago Drupal camp, I went up there because I was working with, uh, George DeMet and Palantir. Ah. Um, not the bad Palantir, but the good Palantir.

[00:30:14] Nic: Yes.

[00:30:15] Jeff: And, uh, and they, they were helping with that project m-migrating- I've met

from Joomla to Drupal, and it was, like, just I dove into the community after that

[00:30:26] Mike: Let me ask you, Jeff, I, I, I have the, uh, the honor of asking you the most awkward question. Why, why did you move your blog off of Drupal to Hugo? What, what did you see in Hugo that you saw as a big advantage, and what would it take to...

What would you need to see in, in Drupal to reverse that decision?

[00:30:44] Jeff: For me, there were two- There were two driving factors. One was maintenance, and the other one was- Mm ... uh, scaling for, like, uh, I don't know what you call it, like the, the, the slash dot effect. Uh, that's not- Ah ... I guess the, the Reddit effect or it...

Reddit doesn't even do it as much anymore. It's, like- Yeah ... there's not as many sites, and with AI, the, the traffic has died down so much. Hm. We used to get a lot more Google traffic. It's

[00:31:07] Nic: the, it's the AI effect- Still ... though, 'cause AI bots are now the ones slamming- Yeah ... your servers.

[00:31:12] Jeff: Yeah, but it... Yeah, exactly.

So it, it's like the ability to scale up, uh, quickly on cheap hosting. Like, I, uh, I have run some pretty exotic infrastructure in the past, and I've set up things with, you know, million dollar plus a month for one website types setups. And I know what it takes to, to build that out, and I also know what it takes to maintain that well.

And d- e- even with auto updates and things, Drupal is always, like, there was one little thing that I- would, would be a persistent annoying layout bug, or JavaScript would stop rendering correctly, so I'd have to turn off aggregation, or one of the modules would have one little annoying bug that would cause the XML sitemaps module to barf.

Like, there's always one little thing every year that I'd be hitting. And I was like, if I just move it to Hugo, comments are a lot harder, but I've solved that with Remark42, and, uh, being able to quickly edit something is harder. Those were the two things, but I, I decided, like, the ability to not have to worry about maintenance at all, and the ability to say, yeah, 2,000, uh, visits in less than a second.

Oh, hello there. Somebody got an Amber Alert or something.

[00:32:20] Nic: Yeah.

[00:32:20] Jeff: Um, but, uh, yeah. The, those, those two things were the drivers for me. I think to get me back on Drupal, it would have to be finding a way to make it so drop-dead simple to maintain. And, uh, Drupal was never... E- even back in the five, six, seven days, it wasn't easy to maintain.

It, it was easier in some ways. Uh, but it, you know, 8, once Drupal 8 came out, and then 9,

[00:32:44] Nic: 10,

[00:32:45] Jeff: 11- Yeah ... it, it's, it's harder. And, uh, I think it- Yeah ... it drove it up a little bit from, like, personal blogs and nonprofits that only have a s- tiny budget every year. Uh, it drove it up out of that market a little bit more.

[00:32:58] Mike: So easier- Um- ... maintenance. That's weird, 'cause I don't think we've heard that in the Drupal community before.

[00:33:05] Jeff: Never.

[00:33:06] Nic: Breaking

[00:33:06] Mike: news.

[00:33:06] Nic: I, I, I will say, um, by the way, uh, for me- I, I solved it similar. Now I didn't have to have comments. You could probably still solve comments, but what I did is I just, um, I used the tome module- Yep

which exports it as static HTML. So you get kind

[00:33:25] Jeff: of a built-in- That, that was one thing that I had, I had been testing, but it's like I wanted the comments and I wanted easy editing. Those were the two things I wanted with Drupal, and it was... The, the easy solution is just throw Disqus in there, but then you get ads and third-party stuff.

Like, one of the set requirements was I don't want any third-party stuff whatsoever. No Google Analytics, no third-party comments, no trackers, nothing at all, and keep my website loading in less than 200 milliseconds at most points on Earth. And, uh, those requirements are very hard to meet when you have anything dynamic or anything third party.

So for analytics, I use Fathom Analytics, and it just, it gives me very basic stuff, and I've thought about removing that even because I can get most things out of NGINX. Uh, but then there's Cloudflare in the way because I've had DDoS attacks and, uh-

[00:34:13] Nic: Yep ...

[00:34:13] Jeff: so now Cloudflare kind of complicates that even more.

[00:34:17] Nic: Uh, let's take a, a quick diversion 'cause this is a, a perfect time for a PSA. That was, uh, JD got a tornado warning. Um-

[00:34:24] JD: Yeah.

[00:34:25] Nic: That is, that is- Yeah, warning- Yeah. People should know that warning means you need to take action immediately. It's not like, "Hey, be aware." Warning means get into the basement, and, and JD is for sure Yeah.

[00:34:36] JD: So- ... doing that ... fortunately, I, I, I basically live in my basement, so I'm already here. Uh, but yeah.

[00:34:43] Nic: We have it.

[00:34:44] JD: The conditions are ripe for the po- possibility of an event, but warning is, "Hey, somebody saw this. Do something."

[00:34:52] Nic: Yeah, immediately. So, uh, some of you... I think, Jeff, you're in the Midwest too, so you-

[00:34:56] Jeff: Yep.

We get, we get those plenty of times, although Chicago's gotten a lot more. The Chicagoland area has gotten so much this year. It's kind of crazy.

[00:35:03] JD: Yeah. It's been pretty rough. I've had to replace groceries, uh, because of power outages more than once this year. Oh, no.

[00:35:12] Jeff: Yep.

So there you are

[00:35:16] JD: Yeah, yeah. Sorry about that, uh, little detour there So back to Drupal. Have, uh, Jeff, have you been keeping watch on any of the new developments? I know you said that there were some features, some, some bugs, some things that made you jump over to Hugo. But have you been keeping an eye on, like, the Drupal Canvas, Drupal CMS, Recipes, things like that, easy, making it easier for somebody maybe not technically, uh, or as technically adept, or somebody who's just looking for that really quick solution?

It, um, and if you're not, you know, we'd be more than happy to tell you about them. But

[00:35:51] Jeff: Yeah. I, I follow along with Drupal CMS. I kn- I know, like, there were a few different initia- initiatives that I enjoyed in my time when I was more involved in the Drupal community. One was the, uh, minimal core. Like, how can we get core down to something that's easier to maintain and easier to set up?

And, uh, the, my previous version of the website that I got up to Drupal 10, and, uh, I was gonna do either the Drupal 11 upgrade or migrate to Hugo, and I migrated to Hugo. Uh, I, I was trying to get it down to only core and, like, one or two extra modules, and I had gotten it to that point in Drupal 10. But it, uh, the, the other problem that I had was that was also still in that transitional time from Dropan- Drupal 8 to 11.

I was using a theme that was supposed to be, I forget which one it was, like, the minimal or, one of those themes that was like, it was barely, it was stripped down to nothing, and I added my own CSS and stuff on top of it. And then they deprecated that theme and put it into contrib, and I was like, "Well, this was supposed to be my forever theme."

Like- ... it was only the, only the raw templates and stuff. So that was the- Right. Uh, i- yeah, Stark. I was on Stark, I think. Yeah. So just little things like that. It's like all the little, it's, it's a thousand paper cuts for me. And if, if I was, if it was my business site, it probably would not have, um, affected my decision.

Like, I would've stayed with Drupal. But this was my personal site, and it's like, this is what I work on on the weekends, and, uh, as time goes on, I have less and less time, and I, all I wanna do is write blog posts and publish the blog posts. And I, but I, I still have a ton of value in having my own website.

I don't wanna write for X or Twitter or whatever. I don't wanna put my posts up on Blue Sky. It's like those are not in my control. Even if I control, like, the server that has the data, it's not, that's not my domain and my, my thing. I, I wanna have my own thing. So Yeah.

[00:37:42] Mike: Well, I think you'll be happy to know that I don't think a week goes by that I don't see a core commit float across my screen that something else is being removed from core.

[00:37:54] Jeff: Yeah.

[00:37:54] Mike: Like c- you know, there's configurations being removed, like tabs are gone, and, you know, basic content types are gone, telephone module. I mean, there's all kinds of stuff that's just... You know, core is... There's a lot of talk about a few years ago- Yeah, I saw the telephone module went away, and I was like, "Wow, that's an oldie."

Yeah. There's- Yeah ... like a few years ago, there was a lot of talk, like you said, about small core. Mm-hmm. Um, but now with CMS, um, I think we're starting to, not s- I don't think we are, but core is getting just more core-ish.

[00:38:21] Nic: Yeah. Yeah. The, the idea, the idea is the discussion behind the scenes from the core maintainers is that CMS provides that out of the box functionality that typically core used to provide, and we don't need that.

So th- like search, like when they f- we first started talking about removing search, it was like how can you remove search? But like nobody uses search API. Yeah. Nobody uses core search. Yeah. And contrib. So if they n- want core search, they just enable the contrib module. And so, yeah.

[00:38:49] Jeff: Yeah.

[00:38:49] Nic: Toolbar is being removed.

Like, I think there's like 13 or 14 modules being removed this round, so we're- Yeah ... paring that down.

[00:38:58] Bernardo: So Jeff, I know, um, you have to do plenty of marketing and think about that as a content creator. How do you think, uh, the Drupal project could significantly improve their strategic marketing and try to reach out to more hackers, geeks, and some of the communities that it left behind as it transitioned into Drupal 8, 9 and 10?

And, uh, what could we do about it so you'd be like, "Oh yeah, that sounds pretty interesting"?

[00:39:25] Jeff: I th- I think one of the things is, like, PHP for some reason is still seen as this, like, backwards programming language, and you're never gonna get some of those people. But I, I think, like, i- over the course of PHP 8, a lot of people realized, like, yeah, there's a lot of bad code out there, but PHP itself is actually pretty robust.

Um, on the flip side, if you turn it into Java, which was, I saw, like, a lot of things with Symfony, and a lot of people were like, "I'm a Java developer, and now I'm doing PHP." It's like, yeah, but if you bring all your Java-isms, the people who like to hack on stuff, and front end developers especially, they don't want to be formal programmers doing this stuff.

So I think that, uh, that, that's a weird balance you have to get. Like, you have to say, we're good, well-structured code, but we're also not like only corporate people can apply, people who went to CS school and stuff. I think that was one of the hard things. Like for me, I, I came into it through the, I need, I had a problem to solve with the media upload, and the front end theming was not too hard.

The, the tipple flips that I, uh, did, I, I could figure out, like, to just grab the PHP file and modify stuff. That kind of hacking on it was approachable, and nowadays making it so that a lot of people are throwing AI at the, at the ecosystem, if it's easy enough to, to modify a thing and e- everything looks like Claude nowadays, all the UI interfaces.

But if you can make it easy for people to modify it and get it going quickly, I think that's key. And one of the initiatives I worked on, uh, a lot was trying to make it so that when you wanted to build a Drupal site, you could, like, five minutes after you clicked on a button, you'd have a Drupal thing going.

That was a big thing that was hard for a long time, was just having an environment set up. So I worked on Drupal VM, and then I, I worked on sunsetting Drupal VM, but helping with some of the other Docker based things. And, uh, it, it, at, at, a certain point in that Drupal 8 era, I think this is an, an area and a part of Drupal's history where a lot of people did leave because it would take you a day or a week just to get a Drupal site going, whereas you could download WordPress and download MAMP or WAMP or whatever and have it going.

Drupal required more tweaks and more things and more whatever, and newer versions of, of MariaDB and, and all this stuff all of a sudden that it kind of threw people off. So I think, uh, making it approachable and probably at this point, uh, easy to, to hack on with AI tools would be a, a huge, a huge win

[00:41:55] Bernardo: You're muted ...

[00:41:56] Jeff: oh, yeah, Nic is muted.

[00:41:57] Nic: He- thanks. Sorry about that. Uh, y- I chuckled because you reminded me that one of my first, like, optimizations in, in quotes, uh, for building Drupal sites was realizing that I could upload the tar-zipped or gzip versions of the modules- Uh-huh ... and extract them on the server.

Yeah. 'Cause I used to, like, download views, extract it, and then use FTP to upload it. Like 300

[00:42:19] Jeff: files.

[00:42:19] Nic: Y- and it would take like, yeah, an hour and a half or two hours- Uh-huh ... or something. Um, but yeah, it, making it easy I think for the non-developers, but also having a pipeline so as people grow, they can, they can onboard developers and get the more complex features that Drupal enables.

[00:42:36] Jeff: Yeah.

[00:42:39] Nic: We're, we're gonna ping-pong a bit, so switching back to kind of content creation, I, I'm curious about what, what was the transition like for you? When did you realize that kind of YouTube content creation, all this could become more than just a hobby, more than just a, a fun side project?

[00:42:55] Jeff: That was in COVID, basically.

And it was, it was funny. Like, the... A lot of people know me on YouTube from Raspberry Pi stuff, and some people from Ansible and Kubernetes things. But actually, the first, the first time I saw, like, this could become more than just a little side thing was my Drupal, uh, migrating my website to Drupal 8 or 10, I don't remember.

It was 2020. I guess 10. Migrating my website to Drupal 10. I did a live stream series, and that was just like a, "I wanna do this," and, um, it wasn't COVID yet, but I started that live stream series. And then COVID came up, and then I realized, like, there's a lot of people sitting around at home doing nothing, uh, because their businesses weren't set up for remote work.

And so they just popped onto Twitch or YouTube and sat there and watched stuff for six to eight hours a day. And so I, I did a live stream every week for Drupal, and then I was like, I could also do my Ansible stuff, 'cause I had finished writing my book. Yeah. And it was well-structured for a live stream series, so I, I did both of those in tandem for a while.

The Ansible one really kicked off because the community for that was much, uh, broader than- Yeah ... the Drupal community. But the Drupal one was the one where I got my camera set up, I got my OBS set up going. I got- I learned about live streaming and all that, 'cause I hadn't done- Yeah ... live ever before. And so it's kind of, it's kind of fun.

Um, but at that point, after I went from, I think I had a few thousand subscribers, because I had my channel since 2006. Went up to 10,000 subscribers, and then it, after 10,000, 20,000 was not that long after that. And then I'm like, the, the amount of AdSense revenue went from a few pennies to, like, 30 bucks a month.

It wasn't much, but it was like, 30 bucks is a lot more than a few pennies. And then I had started doing my, like, how does this progress? Yeah. And, um, I, so I set up my, like, here's the business plan. If I can reach these numbers, then I can start rolling off of this thing, and that's when I decided to move on to, uh, consulting for a couple years.

And then after the consulting, I said, "If I can hit these numbers, then I can do YouTube full time." And that was 2022 or... It was around the time when I d- built this studio here. Okay. That, uh, that I, I decided, like, this is gonna be full time now, and I rolled off the last consulting job, and I just did YouTube.

YouTube and writing my blog full time. Hm.

[00:45:10] Nic: Very, very cool.

[00:45:12] Mike: W- I'm curious about, you mentioned your, your three lanes. The, uh, I forget what they... One of 'em was to do, doing, and done.

[00:45:21] Jeff: Mm-hmm.

[00:45:21] Mike: So when you move one from doing to done- And then you look at to do

[00:45:27] Jeff: Uh-huh ...

[00:45:29] Mike: how do you, like, how do you pick just one to move into the next column?

Like-

[00:45:35] Jeff: I

[00:45:35] Mike: have- Is it just based on how you're feeling that day? Is it based on- Yeah ... you know, l- you know, your, your followers' comments or, you know, maybe, you know, m- maybe someone has sent you something that, you know, that, that's- Yeah, there's- ... interesting. Like, how do you d- how do you f- that seems like that's a- an impossible choice.

[00:45:53] Jeff: Yeah, it, it is impossible because it probably- Yeah ... what I, I have, like, the Jeff Geerling brain bubble sort is what I call it. Things that I'm- ... more interested in, I keep dragging up towards the top. Yeah. And if I see something has been at the top for a long time, it's like, "All right. I need to make the time."

Usually, those ones that I don't do right away are ones that take a lot more effort. Mm. So eventually, I just start working on it and, and, and get it done. But, uh, eh, the, the top, like, 50 or so are all things that I think would be on my main channel, like a big video, like 300,000 plus views. Uh, uh, there are some things in there that I know will, will be, like, 50,000 views or less, and those I usually tend to move to my level two Jeff second channel because I wanna still do them.

I think they're cool, and for someone out there it's gonna change something for them and spark something, so I wanna get that done. Uh, but those are usually the, the ones that kind of float down a little bit. So I'll drag one or two up because those are usually also a little bit easier projects. But I don't know.

I, th- there's a few vi- there's two videos on there in particular. One is, uh, rebuilding the, the petabyte server- Yeah ... that has 60 hard drives in it. I have all the parts for it, and I've had them for two and a half years sitting there- ... and rebuilding it with a newer setup that's faster and actually practical.

It's just a project like that is gonna be a couple weeks at least, taking up an entire workbench and all of my time. So it's just been sitting there floating in that- Yeah ... space, and someday I just need to do it.

[00:47:17] Nic: I, I

[00:47:18] Mike: thought,

[00:47:18] Nic: I think-

[00:47:19] Mike: The th- oh, go ahead Nic. I'm sorry. S-

[00:47:20] Nic: sorry, Mike. Yeah. Uh, the thing that I struggle with, eh, as someone who's not doing these things for content creation is the, uh, is the, the ma- like, the building part is the fun part.

The hacking part is the fun- like home assistant. I have- Mm-hmm ... an extremely extensive home assistant set up- And I spent probably a year and a half tweaking it and monitoring it, getting it just right, but then it became maintenance.

[00:47:46] Jeff: Yeah.

[00:47:47] Nic: Went to automate my whole house. It's like Drupal. Yeah. It, it went to maintenance.

Like, but I-- that must happen to you at a much higher rate 'cause you have-- you're tink- every week you're tinkering. Do you, do you decommission things, or do they just kinda sit around, or?

[00:48:00] Jeff: It's, it's half and half. Most of what I do, I try to do projects that are solving a problem for me for the long term.

Like at home, I needed to monitor our garage door because we kept leaving it up, and we're not in a dangerous part of town or anything, but I-- like, my wife just wants it down, and she gets flustered when it's been up for three or four hours. So I built a little garage door monitoring thing. It's still running exactly the way that I left it at the end of that video.

I always intended to, like, clean it up and put the cable in a channel- Yeah ... or whatever. But it's like, it works, and it's worked, and I updated it with ESPHome one time or two times since then. But, uh, I try to make things as simple as I can to get a job done, and a lot of those things just end up staying that way.

And, uh, a-and like I s- like, this is part of the thing with Drupal, like, if I can maintain it by not having to do anything, that's the best. Second best is clicking one button every few months. That's great. Things where you have to go through a firmware update and a thing and then fix a bug, like, those things start getting harder.

So most of the projects I do, I try to make them approachable, easy enough to do if you have a week or two of time, and then also maintainable, and that helps a lot. But there are some things, like all the clusters I build. Uh, there are some people, I think, who watch my videos and think that I just have hundreds of Raspberry Pis sitting around.

I have, like, 25 of them that I use in all my projects, and I've bought them over many years. And I, I'll build a cluster, I'll do a bunch of things with it, then I'll take all the Pis out of it because those things nowadays are ridiculously expensive. So like I, I, I put them in each project, and then I decommission everything, and that, that does take time.

Like, after I finish a video, a lot of times it'll be three to five hours of just taking things back apart, uh, cleaning up the desk, doing all that stuff. Yeah. But if I don't do that, then I will end up with no work surface anywhere. Mm-hmm. Which happens sometimes, but then, then I s- I actually set aside one or two days a month where I will only do cleaning.

Like, cleaning stuff up, putting stuff away, reorganizing, labeling things, and, uh- Yeah ... it helps, it helps with my brain at least.

[00:49:58] Mike: So real quick, I'm gonna apologize for the regression 'cause I wanna go back real quick to- Okay ... how you decide what project is next. And you can-

[00:50:04] Jeff: Uh-huh ...

[00:50:05] Mike: the short answer is fine, but it sounds like that most of your decision-making is, like, internal.

It's like- Mm-hmm ... your brain as opp- internal as opposed to external factors driving what's next. Yes. Is that a, is that a fair assessment?

[00:50:18] Jeff: Yeah. I, and I think that's why I'm so, like, going way back to the beginning of this conversation, I think that's why I'm excited and can do this. Like, uh, that was one of the big drivers for even though I, I still don't make nearly as much as I did consulting, but- Hmm

it's so worth it for me because I can choose things to work on and, uh, sometimes it's something that might not be making the world a better place, but maybe it makes, it, it just resets my brain for a week or two, that kind of thing. Sure. That has been so helpful for me, especially since I have, uh, Crohn's disease.

Like, sometimes I have a week or two where I'll have these medical issues or I have to go to a couple doctor's things or whatever, and, uh, being able to not have those external deadlines put on me has helped a lot, and I, I know that's a huge privilege that I have that a lot of people don't have, and I didn't have it until I had this YouTube gig.

And so I'll always be thankful for that and, you know, someday I might be back in a full-time job somewhere where I do have those again. But, uh, but yeah, that is, that is a huge, uh, blessing that I get that I know not a lot of people have that. And on, on the flip side, if I don't make a video, I'm not gonna g- be getting revenue, and I'm not gonna be getting views that leads to being able to talk to somebody and say, like, "Can you send me this product?"

Or whatever-

[00:51:31] Nic: Yeah. And- ...

[00:51:32] Jeff: for a review.

[00:51:33] Nic: And the landscape is changing, right? I, a lot of- Mm-hmm ... the bigger YouTubers I follow have, like you s- you mentioned your second channel. A lot of bigger YouTubes don't post to the main channel anymore. They only post to their second channel. Yeah. And, and they've meant... I, I just saw, um, a post by Real Engineering, uh, a week or two ago- Mm-hmm

where he talked about the fact that the algorithm is penalizing him for using AI, and he's claiming, I, I mean, he seems like he's telling the truth, but he's claiming he doesn't use it, and there's channels taking his voice and likeness, and I know you've done some videos on that.

[00:52:07] JD: Mm-hmm.

[00:52:07] Nic: Yeah. Um, and so his, his income stream is being impacted.

I mean, so, so yeah, it's a privilege like you said, I think, but there's also a lot of fear and uncertainty I'm sure- Yeah ... in such a changing landscape.

[00:52:19] Jeff: Yeah. They, YouTube has changed a lot in the past couple years. This year everyone I talk to, whether they're millions of subscribers or a few hundred thousand, whatever, if, if you have enough subscribers and enough views, you can see the trends.

And this year things have changed, and channels that work on intentional, good, like human curated content, projects that matter, that kind of stuff, a lot of them have been punished for one reason or another. We don't know what's going on, but it, it has been a little bit scary because, like for me, I, I intentionally, I keep my costs extremely low.

I've bootstrapped everything. That's my philosophy. I don't, uh, the, I've had offers for people investing in Jeff Geerling and all that kind of stuff. I don't do that, uh, because I, I want to have a long-term horizon of like the entire stock market could go kaput tomorrow, which maybe it will, maybe it won't.

Uh, but I would be able to at least carry on for some amount of time. But a lot of people I know have gotten, you know, they have two editors, and a camera person, and a- Yeah ... a storyboard editor, and a production manager, and, and a thing, and a salesperson. Like when you have a team of six to 10 people, it gets a lot harder.

Uh, and when you have a, when you're in an industry with no long-term outlook, like YouTube it's, next month could be completely different and you have no control whatsoever. At least with a Drupal marketing agency you have contracts and you have clients that have, uh- Right ... you know, y- you're working on a six-month project or whatever.

You get none of that with YouTube. And if your views fall off, your rates fall off. So- Mm ... if next month YouTube decides, "Jeff Geerling, we hate you," then my views fall off and I couldn't, like for the few sponsorships I do, my rate would go down substantially the, the month after that. And that's, so that, that can be a bit alarming for people.

[00:54:02] Bernardo: So, um, besides the air quality project, what's another project that you have in mind that you're especially excited to maybe move or, uh, finish up, and what can you tell us about it? 'Cause I imagine some of those, uh, they might be coming out soon, so it might be like, um, yeah.

[00:54:19] Jeff: There, there's one thing. So talking about events, I am going back, uh, this year to VCF Midwest.

It's, uh, the Vintage Computer Festival Midwest. Tons of people there with tons of old computing equipment, whether it's Macs, PCs, Amigas, Commodores, uh, older stuff, tape-based systems and broadcast systems. All these cool things. And, uh, you, you get together for a weekend and just talk about old tech and, and stuff.

For this year, I actually got a table so that I can set up, I'm gonna set up my old G5 Xserve, you know, big, big old server. I'm gonna set that up as an NTP time server, getting its time from a GPS antenna that we're gonna install outside the building, and I'm gonna serve time to anybody on the show floor who wants to have the best time.

So- ... at Open Sauce, I had the best time at Open Sauce. Here, I'm gonna provide everybody the best time at VCF Midwest. So that's a fun project, and I get to... I'm, I'm working on an old, uh, time server chassis. I'm gonna rip the guts out and put a Raspberry Pi in, because old, old GPS time servers have so many bugs because of the way GPS has evolved.

So that's a fun thing. And, uh, and speaking of events, again, I'm actually, this, I don't, I haven't talked too much about it publicly, but I'm gonna be running an event next year called Home Lab Fest- Oh, cool. Fun ... here in St. Louis. And, uh, it's, I- I'm learning very quickly why nobody who has any sanity runs an event, because

[00:55:41] Nic: it's-

[00:55:42] Jeff: it's a huge challenge. But

[00:55:45] Nic: we'll get there. Yeah. I'll, I'll say as somebody who helps put together the NED camp, although this year, I don't know if I've made a meeting. I, I feel kind of bad. But it's, it's been 10 years. Uh-

[00:55:57] Jeff: Yeah ...

[00:55:57] Nic: it, it gets, it gets both easier and harder as you do it, 'cause you, but there's a, there's a lot of things to learn.

Um- Yeah ... getting a team that can help you is very important. Um, you know, and getting a team that can break it up by responsibility is very, very important, too. But yeah, if it, if it was a little bit closer, I'd love to attend something like that. Sounds like- Yeah ... it sounds like a lot of fun.

[00:56:18] Jeff: Yeah. My, my hope is that we can make it to be something that could be a regional thing, but uh, for now it's just, I just wanna do one, see how it goes.

I'll probably lose a lot of money on it, but you know, it's, I, I, like I say, it's, it's about the people, like building the event to get people together- Yeah ... in a certain niche. There's nothing like it for home labs or people that wanna run their own infrastructure and take away control, like take some control back for Home Assistant or for- Yeah

a local AI models and things like that. So there's a lot of cool stuff I think that's unexplored that, uh, just getting the right people in the room together can, can make a dent.

[00:56:53] Nic: Yeah.

Uh, what, what's your best advice for a developer who wants to make some content? So, uh, a- and I'm, I'm not even asking necessarily, like, you know, "Hey, I'm, I'm a developer. I wanna become a famous YouTuber or content creator." Like, I'm just a developer that wants to share, um... So I'll, I'll talk about myself specifically.

Like, I've become, uh, pretty passionate recently about hooks in the Drupal ecosystem, and kind of getting rid of some of the legacy code. Um, I've been on a mission. In fact, we just deprecated, speaking of themes, we just deprecated the .theme extension-

[00:57:31] Jeff: Uh-huh ... uh,

[00:57:32] Nic: entirely, so everything is PHP. I'm working on modules.

If I wanted to write about that or make some content about that, do you have any advice?

[00:57:41] Jeff: I, I mean, the first thing is always do something you care about, and, you know, I, you, I, I guarantee you care about getting rid of hooks finally. I know that that was like... I was thinking, like, there's gonna be hooks until 2090 or something.

That's what-

[00:57:55] Nic: Oh, I don't

[00:57:55] Jeff: wanna get rid of it ... Drupal they were in.

[00:57:56] Nic: I just wanna, I just wanna get rid of the procedural version. Yeah. I, I'm more than happy to preserve the object-oriented-

[00:58:01] Jeff: Yeah, yeah ...

[00:58:01] Nic: with the, uh,

[00:58:02] Jeff: actual- Yeah. Well, like, like your, your theme having a module file that's actually a theme file, like that just- Yeah

it, it didn't make sense after, after Drupal 8 at least. Uh- Yeah ... but, but, uh, yeah, it's, I think having something you're passionate about, because nobody wants to listen to somebody talk about something that they don't care about. So for me it's, it's easy, because I have all these things I really wanna do.

Um, and if I didn't have that, the content would not be fun. Like, it, it's really hard to fake excitement. And if you do, some people can do it. I've, I've seen some people fake excitement about things, and they, they're okay with it. But, uh, eh, especially in tech, most of us are not that kind of, like, we're not super extroverted.

We're not marketing and salespeople typically, so it's hard to do that. So I, I wouldn't do something that you're not excited about. And second of all is have a good microphone before anything else. Uh, whether- ... you could even grab your iPhone and just set it in front of you. That's a better microphone than most people have.

Uh- Yeah ... and, uh, uh, 'cause nobody wants to, nobody wants to hear somebody talk about something they don't care about, even if you're monotonous, even if you're droning on. And nobody wants to strain to hear that. Even worse. Uh, but even if you're excited about it, if, if you have your camera microphone, it's not gonna pick you up very well in most rooms.

So s- you know, set your iPhone down in front of you or something. Uh- Yeah ... video is a lot less important. Um, it, it's, it's more about hearing people talk about something they care about. And then after that, after you get the baseline stuff, for me it's, it's just trying to focus, because I can ramble on and on.

So I, I, I actually, when I do a live stream, which I don't do as much anymore, I put notes up, like, uh, check your outline, you know? 'Cause I'll, I'll just go way off on a tangent for five or 10 minutes. And if you look, if I looked back at my live streams, I can see the parts where people tail off. So that was- Yeah

super helpful for me.

[00:59:51] Nic: That's all good advice

[00:59:53] Mike: Nic has thrown me a, uh, a curve ball- Sorry ... by ch- changing up the outline like- ... in the middle of all this. But let me, um Let's talk about open source. I mean, you maintain a bunch of projects on GitHub. Um, I'm not even gonna say how many or how, how many repositories are there, but, um, you know, when it comes to maintainers, you know, i- is there a message or is there, i- is there something that you want to, that you can communicate to ordinary users on supporting open source maintainers?

This has been a lot of discussion in the Drupal community about there's, you know, there's a lot of big businesses built on Drupal on top of all of these contrib modules that are maintained by people who are volunteers.

[01:00:40] Jeff: Mm-hmm.

[01:00:41] Mike: Right? And now there's this kind of, there's a lot of thinking and a lot of machinations going on about, okay, well, how can we, you know, ensure that they stay engaged in the project?

And a lot of times that answer, you know, for the maintainers is, "I just don't have time. I've gotta, I need to put food on the table." So- Yeah ... I mean, what are your thoughts about, like, open source, you know, uh, project maintainability?

[01:01:03] Jeff: I, I think looking back on things, like, a- at this point, I earn enough money through, uh, I have GitHub sponsors, and a lot of those people are sponsoring for open source stuff that I've done.

Mm. But it's mostly because of my, uh, I guess the, the image of me on YouTube has probably helped a ton with that. So it, money is probably not the easiest thing to say, like, will help, because it, it's also not the main motivator for me. If I earn enough money to be able to provide for my family, I'm happy.

Uh, for me, also, the medical stuff, which is insane. But, uh, it, I think for a lot of people, it's just the respect that they have from people who are using their content is even, an even bigger motivator. Not like, "Oh, this guy is so cool or awesome." It's more like if you file a bug report, don't make it accusatory.

Or if you see a new problem with a new version of something, it's not like, "This module's terrible." It's like the, the person who's doing this is trying their best. Like, being respectful- Yeah ... being kind. Yeah. And I've, I've seen that, uh, it, the Drupal community's been pretty good about that stuff. Um, but, uh, people who come into the Drupal community from elsewhere is usually where I see a lot of that culture change.

And, um, th- Mm ... there are some other communities that, it's like you don't get open source. Like, these are people who want to do good things. Yeah. And you come in and- Yeah ... and make them feel bad. Like, that's not how this works. Like, d- you always have to be respectful and kind. And, uh-

[01:02:28] Mike: It's the gold- golden rule is what you're talking about.

[01:02:30] Jeff: Yeah, yeah. And, and businesses especially, like, I, I've noticed that, uh, one of the, some of the worst interactions I ever had would, would be somebody saying, like, "We built our thing on this, and you broke it." And it's like, "I didn't break this." "You, your process, whatever it is, didn't test my stuff correctly."

And the, the other- Yeah ... the other thing that was, uh, I specifically remember is somebody sending in security reports where they run their little fuzzing scanner thing, and nowadays there's AI tools that do this stuff. They just throw you a, a wall of bugs. And Yeah Who knows if any of them apply or not, but it's like, I'm not gonna read that.

But then they start getting demanding about it, and it's like, that's, that's not... It's a quick way to burn out a maintainer very, very, uh, y- you know, aggressively. Yeah. And I think- And this, this- ... that, you know, fu- funding helps, but I don't think funding is the, the main answer. It's, it's the respect and, and being able to have other people in the community, like if that does happen to somebody, immediately saying like, "Hey, this, this is out of line.

You know, stop, stop doing that." Yeah. And then supporting that maintainer, sending them a direct message. There are so many emails that I get that are so uplifting on the flip side of that, where it's like- Hmm ... "Hey, thanks so much for making this thing, or building this thing, or showing me this thing," or whatever.

Like that, that helps so much. You, you wouldn't, you know, just email somebody when, when you see something or when you use a module that, that changed your life. Or like that AI module we mentioned, like sending a quick message off on whatever social media network or something like, "Hey, thanks for that."

Yeah. That's a big boost

[01:04:00] Nic: That's all, that's all good advice. I, I mean, I- the thing that you mentioned too, uh, you didn't use these exact words, but the, the signal to noise ratio right now is getting pretty out of Out of control. I mean, before when people had to manually write those, uh, mean bug reports- Mm-hmm

it took a lot more. You know, I, I think it reduced them some, and I think because Drupal, I- I think one of the benefits, too, is Drupal maintains its community on drupal.org. They have a lot of control. If this was on

[01:04:29] Jeff: GitHub, it's even worse.

[01:04:29] Nic: Yeah. Yeah. They, so, so there's a lot of control with the terms and conditions.

There's a lot of control with the community working group and the health group, and just the community is very strongly coalesced there, so they can help reinforce the good, the good community behaviors. Um, and like you said, if, as it moves to more external tools, it'll be more exposed to the wider external world.

[01:04:53] Bernardo: As a side subject, I was wondering if you're currently working on any new tech or non-tech books. I know you had a few there, a children's book and a couple- ... of the ones that were pretty popular.

[01:05:07] Jeff: Yeah, yeah. I, I'm actually... So the, the book that I'm writing, uh, that I'll probably finish next is The Joy of Crohn's, about my experiences with Crohn's disease.

Mostly because I, I've met a lot of people, like Crohn's disease is not super fun and ulcerative colitis and other, uh, eh, generally any of the, uh, the autoimmune diseases. There's a whole family of them, not just the intestinal and, and, uh, GI diseases. And a lot of people can get pretty quickly depressed about it because you don't...

You know, it's like it's chronic. It's always gonna be there. You're always gonna be dealing with things. Yeah. Some people have it much worse than others, uh, but I've always been more of an optimistic person, and I see, like, there's all these bad things, but there's also some good things. And, uh, like having, eh, again, it goes back to the people.

Like, when I go to the hospital, the nurses have always been so amazing, and being able to have those interactions and share some of those stories of, like, how, how to make your time in the hospital better or those kind of things. So I, I've been working on that, but the problem is that I'm, most of the book has been written when I've been in the hospital for long periods of time, and knock on wood, I have not been in the hospital for a long period of time for, like, three years now, so I haven't finished- Oh

that book. So at some point I need to just, like, sit down for a, a week or two and finish writing that book so I can publish it. But I have a couple other, uh, other book ideas that have been ruminating and, uh, the, the trouble is, especially with the AI stuff going on, it's like writing a book and not being accused of using AI is getting harder.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And, uh, writing a book and actually having anybody get it, especially a technical book, would be nearly impossible now because it's like, oh, I just, I ask Claude these things, and it, it tells me everything. So. Yeah.

[01:06:47] Nic: Yeah. That, that's difficult. I mean, I, I've always wanted to write a book and I've thought, one of the things I've thought about doing it is doing it in the open, like on GitHub- Yep

almost.

[01:06:55] Jeff: Yeah. Except- Or even, like, live streaming on Twitch or something- Yeah ... while you're writing.

[01:06:59] Nic: Oh, that might work. It, yeah- Yeah ... 'cause the thing is the, the idea is to show the process and have collaboration. Mm-hmm. But pro- prose doesn't lend itself to get- diffs very well.

[01:07:07] Jeff: No. Yeah So I, I actually wrote my book in a Git repository, and I finally published it.

I don't remember if I have the whole history or not when I, when I put it on GitHub, but the Ansibl- for, Ansible For DevOps book is all up there. And I actually had a tool that would also show, like, the word count per day, so I could see, like, months where I just slacked on it completely. Uh, but it, it is cool when you do that, and, uh, like I have thought about just setting up an old computer with no internet and sitting there and hammering out the rest of that book live on Twitch or YouTube or something, just for the fun of it, and, uh- Yeah

making it more of a community thing.

[01:07:41] Nic: That could be fun. Are there, uh, what's an underrated technology or trend that you think more people should be paying attention to?

[01:07:49] Jeff: Uh, uh, it's not... I think in a lot of places, not underrated, but, um, the ability to do your own stuff is all of a sudden a lot underrated. I, I see a lot of people that just dump everything they do into Gemini or Claude or, or OpenAI or something, and there's tools out there that, uh, the, the problem is the, the frontier level AI tools are, are very good, and, uh, I, I admit that.

But being able to have control over the things that your content is going into and the way this, that it's used through using local, uh, stuff, I think that that's... A lot of people don't see as much value in that, but some people are starting to see that because of when models just go away, and then their work- Yeah

is different because the model that they built everything up on is gone. Um, but the, the flip side of that is it's so much harder today than it was last year to build your own- Yeah ... local AI solution because of RAM and, and all that. So I don't know. I- Yeah ... I think that, uh, I don't know. It's, it... That's a tough one.

I think all of us struggle in our own ways with what's happening in the tech world with AI and resources and, and all that kind of thing.

[01:08:57] Nic: I, I, I was gonna say DVDs and CDs because, you know-

[01:09:01] Jeff: Physical media ...

[01:09:02] Nic: especially with the announcement of Sony getting rid of physical- Yeah ... medias, I mean, people I think are starting to realize the value of having your own.

[01:09:08] Jeff: Yeah. I, I, I think the whole, the whole idea of the enshittification of everything is, uh- ... uh, it's, ev- every industry has its own thing, and if... Like, I, my dishwasher, every week or two there's another thing where it's like, i- if they had just used the physical buttons, I wouldn't have this problem where I have to reset-

my dishwasher every three or four nights. And if I didn't have to use Wi-Fi to turn on a rinse cycle or to check how much time is left- Oh my God ... that'd be great. You know, so, but- I'm so glad I

[01:09:32] Nic: didn't get that model.

[01:09:34] Jeff: So many different things are hitting that, and I th- I think that people are starting to wake up to it a little bit, but the big, the big problem is, like, when is it too little too late?

Like, when- Yeah ... when all these companies just have completely wasted all goodwill. Uh, I don't know. Uh, uh, i- in, in the Drupal sphere, it seems like people are more positive and, and kind, but th- that rot can come in everywhere, you know?

[01:09:58] Nic: I, I saw an interesting, um... I'll see if I can dig it up. I saw an interesting article that talked about kind of the erosion of- community and trust.

And it, it's accelerating in the world of AI because people are talking to AI for interpersonal things, but it started 20 years ago in the world of social media. The, it's very y- it's something that you mentioned, like the emails that you get generally are more positive because it's a little bit less anonymous.

The less, the less anonymous you are when you're talking to somebody, more likely people are to be polite, or at least e- even if they're coming across with a negative question or comment or something, to your face, they're generally gonna be more polite about it than if it's like on Twitter. Mm-hmm. Um, and, and how preserving that sense of, or regaining that sense of community is gonna be something that-

[01:10:48] Jeff: Yeah.

I mean, that's why I love these open, these, these events where people get together. Like, that's, for me, it's a, it's a goal of mine to get to at least three or four every year because that's, that's where community's built and that's where personal relationship is built. It's not, uh, there's no way social media can replace any of that.

Yeah

[01:11:07] Mike: So I'm not sure. I've been trying to figure out based on, you know, you've mentioned AI a bunch in the past hour or so, um, and I don't, I don't think I've been able to figure it out. Are you using AI in production of your YouTube videos at all, or in, you know, uh, any of your GitHub repositories? Like, what, what's your relationship with AI?

[01:11:27] Jeff: For, for a few things I've used it, mostly as an experiment. Like, the Open Sauce project- Yeah ... was the first time I ever started with nothing and used Claude to vibe code something. I wanted to see how Claude would do. Mm-hmm. And I used it to vibe code the, uh, badge time thing that takes- Mm ... GPS signal input and puts it on the badge, mostly because I only had a week left and I didn't wanna learn h- the, the Pimoroni's Badge OS software and all that.

So I just dumped it all in and said, "Give me this thing." And it still took... It probably took, like, uh, 14 or 16 hours total to get all the bugs worked out and all the features implemented that I wanted to. Mm. And I, I meant to do a video about that process, and I never did, so oops. But, uh, but I, I've used it...

The main thing I use it for is, uh, like, uh, rclone and rsync. Those two utilities on Linux, I always have to look up the documentation for them. So the main thing I do is, like, nowadays if I need to figure out how to run a weird command or something, or make a little Bash script- ... to rename 1,000 files and do this thing to it, I usually...

Or FFmpeg, that's the other one. I use it a lot. Oh, yeah. And it's like, I used to sit there for an hour or two to get a command to work. Yeah. Now I just say, "I want these three things to happen," and it just spits out the command and it works.

[01:12:41] Mike: I

[01:12:41] Jeff: literally- So the way that- ...

[01:12:42] Mike: was doing that this morning. Oh my gosh.

I found it.

[01:12:44] Jeff: Yeah. It's like, those are the things where for me it impacts huge. And, um, uh, the flip side is I, I wanna be able to do all these things on local models. Luckily, I have a machine that I got a couple years ago that has 128 gigs of, of RAM in it. Uh, but not everybody can do that, unfortunately.

Right. But some of the local models are good enough that I can get those scripting things done. Um, I've never allowed it to touch anything near script writing. I, I have used it for, um... Like, I use Claude and Google Gemini a couple times a month probably. When I'm, when I'm working on an idea, like, I'm like, "I have this timing thing, and it's kind of a complicated concept.

Uh, here's, here's the things that I know," kind of push back and give me, give me things that I'm not seeing or, or try to reframe it in a way that will make me think differently. That's helpful, but it's also a, a crutch that is, it's a little rough. Like, right now I'm reading three books on time. Two of them are more dense than almost any book I've read since college.

But what I'll do is I'll, I'll be highlighting parts of the book, and then I'll take those terms and be like, "Here's three things that I didn't really understand. Can you, like, tell it to me three different ways?" And that's, that's helped a lot, um, just some concepts that I can't get. But I know some people, like, put all their scripts into the tool and they, they say like, you know, "Give me a script and I'll brush it up."

It's like I don't, I won't, I will never do that because that's, I love writing. Like- Yeah ... why are you taking away the one thing I love doing about this whole process? Yeah. I don't mind the editing, but, uh, AI tools have not gotten that good at editing good content yet, so you know.

[01:14:16] Mike: Yeah, when I w- write curriculum, I'm the same way.

I like, I, I write it. Mm-hmm. But I, I will, especially when I'm, I always do kind of like a, an introduction or a just like a concepts section. Um, after I'm done writing a lot of times I will put that in Claude and say, "Okay- Do I have this correct?

[01:14:36] Jeff: Mm-hmm.

[01:14:36] Mike: Am I saying anything incorrect? Are there any, uh, is there anything I'm missing?

[01:14:41] Jeff: Yeah.

[01:14:41] Mike: So for me, that's very helpful, um, 'cause it will give me information, but then it's, it's basically giving me homework that, okay, I gotta go fix this, this, and that, so. Yeah.

[01:14:49] Jeff: Yeah.

[01:14:50] Mike: Also, are you building a time machine? I've always wanted to ask you this. Like, you're gonna be the first guy to, like, jump back in time or forward or something.

I feel like

[01:15:00] Jeff: this is what it's all building. The, the funny thing is I, the last clock that I bought is actually from a company called Time Machines. But it's not a time machine. It, it just shows you the time.

[01:15:07] Mike: Nice.

[01:15:08] Jeff: Yeah. But, uh, no, it's, it's fascinating to me just learning about time, how we measure it, how it's transferred, and- Yeah

uh, the history of it is fascinating, too. Reading about where, where clocks evolved from in different regions of the world and the reasons why clocks evolved. And nowadays we're hitting things like planetary scale telescopes and planetary scale neutrino detectors. Like, the challenges involved in getting picoseconds or even femtoseconds.

Oh, yeah. It's like, it's crazy. Yeah. And I'm, I'm still, like, in the tens of nanosecond realm, which is better than a lot of people, but it's still pretty piddly compared to... Like, I wanna be- Yeah ... like, NAS- NASA grade timing at some point.

[01:15:48] Bernardo: Before we run out of time, if you could think of one piece of advice that you will give the Drupal community today, what will that be?

[01:15:57] Jeff: I think be kind and be personal, uh, especially with AI stuff and social media being so divisive and everything. That, that was, like, the best thing for me about the Drupal community, I think what brought me back after, uh, DrupalCon Chicago was the first time I went to the big community, was everyone was being helpful and kind.

It di- didn't matter if you were w- whatever, you know, race you were or whatever experience you had. That was the biggest thing for me. Like, I was totally new to this stuff, and I didn't know much. I, I was an expert beginner, so I thought I knew more than I did, but instead of somebody trying to knock you down a peg, it was like, "No, that's, that's not quite right.

Let's, let's talk about why that, you know, this doesn't work." And, and that was super helpful for me, and I, I got my first patch done, I think, a week or two later. Uh- Wow ... it was on the node, the node tipple tip. Uh, and- ... so it, it, it was, it was such a different experience because everybody was trying to do good.

Like, that was, that was the big thing. Yeah. And I think if you, if, when you show that to people, people wanna come back to it because there's so many parts of the world today that don't want that. Like, they don't wanna show good. A lot of social media platforms reward divisiveness and reward people for hating each other, whatever, or just being negative.

Like, uh, trying, trying to be positive, trying to make the world a better place, that attracts people, I think.

[01:17:13] Nic: Awesome. Well, Jeff, thank you for joining us. Let's, uh, it's been a long time. Let's try to make the next time not- ... 300 episodes from now.

[01:17:20] Jeff: Maybe we could just make that a mark every 300 episodes I come on.

Hey.

[01:17:27] Mike: So, um, if anyone has, uh, questions or feedback, uh, reach out to Talking Drupal on the socials with the handle TalkingDrupal, or you can always contact us via email at, um, [email protected]. And you can also connect with our hosts and other listeners on the Drupal Slack in the #talkingdrupal channel.

[01:17:49] Nic: And if you would like to be a guest on Talking Drupal or our new show, TD Cafe, you can click the Guest Request button in the sidebar on talkingdrupal.com.

[01:17:56] Mike: You can also promote your Drupal community event on Talking Drupal, much like NetCamp did earlier today. Um, just y- learn more about that, go to talkingdrupal.com/tdpromo, all together, no spaces.

[01:18:11] Nic: And you can get the Talking Drupal newsletter to learn more about our guest hosts, show news, upcoming shows, and much more. You can sign up for the newsletter at talkingdrupal.com/newsletter.

[01:18:20] Mike: And as always, thank you to all the patrons for supporting Talking Drupal. Uh, our support is greatly appreciated, and you can learn more about becoming a patron at talkingdrupal.com.

And there's a link there that says, guess what? Become a patron.

[01:18:37] Nic: And Jeff, if our listeners wanted to get in touch with you, had any questions about time or anything we talked about today, what's the best way for them to do that?

[01:18:44] Jeff: Jeffgeerling.com or geerlingguy on almost any platform.

[01:18:49] Nic: Awesome. And I think JD ended up losing power about halfway through the show.

We will check in with him and make sure he's doing okay. Uh, Mike, how about you, if people want to get in touch with you?

[01:19:00] Mike: I'm ultimike on all the places or drupal easy.com. And I do wanna mention the new AI class. Uh, the, the first official semester begins August 31st, so check that out at drupaleasy.com.

[01:19:13] Nic: Awesome. And Bernardo, how about you?

[01:19:15] Bernardo: For me, it'd be Bernardo Martinez on LinkedIn or bernardm28 on Drupal Slack.

[01:19:22] Nic: And you can find me pretty much everywhere at nicxvan, N-I-C-X-V-A-N.

[01:19:28] Mike: And I can't believe I get to say this. I don't think I've ever had the honor. But if you've enjoyed listening, we've enjoyed talking.

[01:19:37] Nic: Awesome. Sounds good. Thanks everybody. See you next week.

[01:19:41] Jeff: See

ya.