Robert has worked with Drupal, full-time, since 2004. He wrote the first book that was published about Drupal ("Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB and Wordpress"), and has been the technical editor of all three editions of "Pro Drupal Development". Through teaching and personal influences he has helped hundreds of people transition into careers as Drupal developers and service providers. In 2005 he led Drupal's involvement in the first Google Summer of Code program, and has been active as a leader and mentor ever since.
Robert has been a member of the Drupal Association General Assembly since 2006, and has actively participated in many Association activities, including the organization of DrupalCons and DrupalCamps. In 2008 he co-founded the Drupal-Initiative, Germany's non-profit for the promotion of Drupal. After 2-year tenure as the Vice President of that organization, he helped coordinate the election of a new Board and handed over control in 2010.
In 2007 Robert founded and built GoPHP5.org - an initiative to bring open source PHP projects and Webhosts together in order to speed the upgrade to PHP5. One result of this is that Drupal 7 relinquished PHP4 compatibility, allowing the core team to do things like add the PDO database drivers. Over 100 software projects and over 200 web hosts joined the movement and quite a bit was written in the press.
Robert's largest code contributions to Drupal have come in the form of the Apache Solr module and the Memcache module, both of which were started in 2007, and which he still maintains today.
Robert currently serves on the advisory boards of Commerce Guys and ICanLocalize, where he helps with business, product, and marketing decisions.
Skills
Robert is strong in Drupal site architecture, module development, coding best practices, performance and scalability. He is good at listening to the needs and concerns of various stakeholders in a project and developing solutions that accommodate diverse and even competing interests. He can also act as a communication facilitator between technical and non-technical audiences.
Employment history
Before joining Acquia as Senior Advisor, Robert worked for Lullabot (2006-2008).