yesterday marked the end of life support for #Drupal7.

on a Sunday, after the year had already been booted, but before being properly bootstrapped. and it was Ivan Zugec who reminded me of this on a very emotional LinkedIn post.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that framework helped redefine my carreer. before #Drupal, I was a web designer¹ who was only dabbling in PHP, writing clunky code to achieve basic functionality.

but with Drupal, and all of its modules and features and resources and community, I was able to supercharge my development, find jobs, connect with people.

and that gave me purpose as a programmer¹.

when the maintainers decided #Drupal8 would be built on top of #Symfony, at first I was surprised. but I reminded myself, "that's a lot of very smart, accomplished people taking a big decision, so naturally go with the flow".

and go with the flow I did.

I studied the new version and developed an example module from scratch, Lorem Ipsum; some time afterwards, upgraded the other one I had created for Drupal 7, TARDIS. all of it with some docs too, because I'm nothing if not a guy who writes things down.

it would still be a few years until I was given the opportunity to work with Drupal 8, then 9 and eventually 10 (I'm now experimenting with 11 on my own time). and it felt great to be working with code that collaborated more closely with what the rest of the web was doing.

but saying goodbye to D7 was akin to moving out. you're excited to be in a new place, yet still miss the good ol' days.

and for me, D7, with its quirky Druplicon wearing infinity goggles, will always be a fond memory.

thanks, Dries Buytaert (and the whole gang). for everything.

now let's go open the floodgates!

¹ kids these days, they wouldn't understand.

Originally published at https://linkedin.com on January 6, 2025.