Web development

This fits with my understanding of what's happened to the Drupal community since D8:

Over my years working in the Drupal ecosystem, I've come to visualize its sustainability as a four-level pyramid structure. This isn't an official model, but rather a mental framework I've developed to understand the dynamics at play.

At the base of this pyramid, we find hobbyists, personal sites, and small businesses that would otherwise use platforms like Wix. Moving up a level, we encounter growing small business implementations and more complex small projects. The third level encompasses medium-sized projects and agencies, while the top tier consists of enterprise implementations with complex requirements and larger budgets.

This structure isn't just theoretical—it's vital for sustained growth. The broad base creates entry points for new developers and users while generating widespread adoption and brand recognition. It establishes natural growth pathways as projects evolve, cultivates innovation through diverse use cases, and provides a talent pipeline for the entire ecosystem.

When this pyramid is balanced, the ecosystem thrives. New users and developers enter at the base level, projects grow in complexity and move up through each level of the pyramid, and talent develops alongside these evolving needs. The entire structure becomes self-reinforcing, with each level feeding into the next.

The significant turning point in Drupal's evolution came with the shift from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, which introduced more advanced code practices and architectural requirements. This modernization brought powerful capabilities to enterprise users but simultaneously raised barriers for newcomers. As we continued to evolve through versions 9 and 10, the pyramid shrank even more, with fewer newcomers entering the ecosystem and the base continuing to narrow.

[…]

What we've experienced is a top-heavy pyramid—strong at the enterprise level but with an increasingly narrow base. This imbalance threatens long-term sustainability because it limits the influx of new talent, reduces community diversity, and creates fewer pathways for growth.

Standing at the helm of a 16-year-old startup, Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, took a trip down memory lane—a nostalgic revisit to a 16-year-old blog that announced his startup idea, Acquia. Little did he know that his fancy trip would occupy the front page of Hacker News, garnering a hundred comments.

[…] 

The discussion concerns the merits and drawbacks of using Drupal as a content management system (CMS) compared to alternatives like WordPress. Several users shared their experiences, highlighting various aspects of Drupal's functionality, including its engineering and backend customization capabilities, upgrade challenges, and suitability for different types of users.

   "I miss Drupal a lot,"

jolted an old Drupal user who wished Drupal would win the CMS battle with WordPress. They feel nostalgic for Drupal's earlier versions and its low-code capabilities for creating custom CRUD apps. They mentioned difficulties with the transition to Composer and the challenges of keeping up with security updates and upgrades, ultimately leading them to explore other technologies like Python.

Ours is a fast-moving industry. We measure our work in tickets, sprints, and projects. But that can make it hard to see the bigger picture sometimes. In this talk we’ll attempt to pull back and measure our progress in terms of decades. We might even attempt to gaze into the future…

This looks very good. (Of course it's very good; Jeremy Keith wrote it.) Just read the first part and I'm hooked. So little time…

The World Wide Web has been around for long enough now that we can begin to evaluate the twists and turns of its evolution. I wrote this book to highlight some of the approaches to web design that have proven to be resilient. I didn’t do this purely out of historical interest (although I am fascinated by the already rich history of our young industry). In learning from the past, I believe we can better prepare for the future.

You won’t find any code in here to help you build better websites. But you will find ideas and approaches. Ideas are more resilient than code. I’ve tried to combine the most resilient ideas from the history of web design into an approach for building the websites of the future.