Drupal is more than the code and more than a community, but is an entire culture. If your Drupal projects are consistently troublesome, and your team is often frustrated, you might be having trouble adjusting to the Drupal Culture.

Without becoming familiar with the entire culture of Drupal, one will never make a good Drupal developer. If you are from another culture, being forced into the Drupal culture can intimidating, scary, frustrating, and can result in feelings of absolute despair. This is a real problem. We have all seen people quit, I have seen companies lose their entire engineering staff in the middle of projects. We have all seen budgets and deadlines explode and disappear.

What makes the Drupal Culture stand out above the rest is the nature of the Drupal codebase itself (modularity, themability), the tools built to facilitate development (drupal.org, issue queues, free module hosting and release system, the IRC bot, the Project* modules, automated testing), and the philosophy (and the actualization) of a strong community (Centralized module development, cheap DrupalCons, Camps, and meetups globally, a supportive association).

This talk will discuss everything you need to know about the Culture of Drupal, and tips on how to adopt it without losing your mind or your wallet.

Based on the blog post Adopting the Drupal Culture. Slides in progress are available here.