The Western NY Drupal User Group Quarterly Virtual Meetup is on hold. . . .
Buffalo, NY is amazing in many ways. It’s my adopted home for a lot of good reasons. The food and culture. The architecture and the friendly people. The Buffalo Bills and Dyngus Day. The Buffalo Pride Festival, and of course, the nearby MTB trails.
Buffalo builds plenty of software, don’t get me wrong, just for some unfathomable reason, not with Drupal. I have had the honor and privilege of working for several local software companies since I located here full-time, and I learned a lot and met some really nice people.
Buffalo is a peaceful place to live. Although our population is very diverse in many ways, there is good camaraderie among everyone I meet daily. We come together on football, on food, on taxes and urban sprawl. We are invested and involved in our community. That means being invested in each other.
People go out of their way to be courteous and polite to each other in general, which is something I have rarely experienced. Because of this fabric of everyday life, commerce and technology have evolved here into an economically sustainable model, for better or for worse.
One experience I had recently in Buffalo during a job interview at a local company brought it all home. During my interview I asked the lead dev, “What makes this pile of code better or different than any other pile of code sitting around on the internet”?
The man’s answer was; “Because I wrote it.”
No talk about a feature he created. No mention of how his team deserves some of the credit. No security buzzwords. Just authentic ownership of the product that he built. All of it.
Pride.
Instantly, there in the meeting room, watching the hiring manager stifle a yawn for the third time, it hit me like a brick of nostalgia wrapped in a slice of lemon. I saw, in my minds eye, factories filled with men and women producing automobiles. I saw the Wright brothers’ airplane. My mind flashed to revolutionary digital technologies like the microprocessor and the Internet. The zipper, frozen food, the atomic bomb, and medical advances like the pacemaker and artificial heart. I saw America.
I did not end up getting the job, but it did make me think a lot about why Drupal never got big here. I have tried on various occasions to get consideration in the workplace for building projects in Drupal. One of my managers here once told me about Drupal: “I’m not putting model view controller into my enterprise”. That guy works for Meta now, doing stuff with AI. Go figure.
The biggest two complaints I’ve heard about Drupal in the last 10 years in Buffalo are mostly expressed as conflicts between philosophies, rather than a discussion of the code. Therin lies the crux of the matter.
The lead dev from the interview was building out their enterprise in Laravel and React. It was amazing work for a small team captained by one person with a strong right-hand person to assist. Buffalo builds websites like Chevrolet builds cars. We love our Bootstrap and our PHP. We like Vue JS and Golang. Buried under the City we have a remarkable data center.
So why not Drupal in Buffalo?
Reason 1. The platforms.
Most websites owned and used by Buffalonians are not made in Buffalo. It’s cheaper for people here to use platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google for their business needs. From what I have seen there are one or two agencies who set the pace and a lot of freelancers here. The local colleges supply a never-ending stream of untrained tech labor to add to the mix. Local corporations usually have tech departments who shoulder the electronic portion of their day-to-day operations. All this boils down to two delimiters, time and money.
People in Buffalo are generous but also thrifty. They want value for their dollars, and the platforms provide low-cost and scalable services that get the job done. America does not mind mass-produced so much as it abhors things that break down or are expensive to maintain. Reliable, affordable, quality. That’s the mantra here. In this environment Drupal can not exist, mostly due to the cost in building out a Drupal site with hosting. It’s more expensive than the available alternatives like managed WordPress hosting. I strongly feel that Drupal is superior to any other solution for medium to large applications, but here in Buffalo they are not convinced. I can summarize and condense sentiments from conversations I have had with other technologists over the years here. “When you finish setting up the site you still have so much to do. It’s a money pit”.
Reason 2. Political whatever.
Buffalo has peace because we have boundaries built on respect. We believe in equality. We are not perfect, but I have lived several places and this is my favorite so far because of the peaceful atmosphere that exists here. Politics in Buffalo during the last Presidential election were quite heated, and it’s traditional here to obtain a permit and have a demonstration of support of a candidate on the sidewalk near a busy intersection. When people drive by they show their support by honking their horns.
During the last election in my neighborhood the Republicans and the Democrats set up on opposite sides of the road and the effect was hilarious as people were constantly all honking together…
That’s how we do. We are all different and coexisting just fine here. We understand that polarization only goes as far as your fence. Next door your neighbor might have different views, but nobody is going to let it ruin the barbecue on Saturday. That’s no fun.
For better or worse, Drupal in the past espoused a political philosophy that matched and was associated strongly with one American political party (during a past political era). American politics are complex even to we Americans! I believe that Drupal’s strong left leaning philosophical and political stance is also polarizing to many Americans these days. Although Drupal is pivoting from their past image the American peoples brand memory is long indeed. Let’s face it, when you think of Drupal you visualize international cooperation in the spirit of the United Nations, When you think of Laravel you think of… Code. Buffalonians can be very principled, but I think we also avoid things that are polarizing. The hysterical yoga pants analogy by Chris Rock during his performance of “Selective Outrage” in 2023 sort of sums up what I’m trying to articulate.
Don’t get mad at me! I love Drupal and I happen to think it is the most secure and scalable CMS that exists, but I am just a part of a small group in a large technology community. I try to influence as much as possible, but it’s a hard sell when folks ain’t buying.
Just sayin’
