Dries Buytaert's website

There has been a lot of discussion around the future of the Drupal front end both on Drupal.org (#2645250, #2645666, #2651660, #2655556) and on my blog posts about the future of decoupled Drupal, why a standard fram

Last week, a member of my family died in a car accident. Jasper was on his way home and was hit by a taxi. He fought for his life, but died the next day. Jasper was only 16 years old. I was at Davos and at one point I had to step out of the conference to cry. Five years ago, another family member died after she was hit by a truck when crossing the road.

Last month, my blog post about whether a client-side framework is right for Drupal stimulated some excellent insights into how the future of the Drupal front end might look. There was broad agreement that incorporating more JavaScript into Drupal's administrative interface is important for a future-ready user experience.

The rapid decline of oil prices have dominated the financial news the second half of 2015. Each time you turn on CNBC chances are a Wall Street analyst is discussing the latest movement in oil prices. Just the other day one proclaimed "I believe we hit the bottom!".

As user experiences evolve from static pages to application-like experiences, end users' expectations of websites have become increasingly demanding. The Facebook newsfeed, the Gmail inbox, and the Twitter live stream are all compelling examples that form a baseline for the application-like experiences users now take for granted.

One thing that is exciting to me, is how much we appear to have gotten right in Drupal 8. The other day, for example, I stumbled upon a recent article from the LinkedIn Engineering team describing how they completely changed how their homepage is built.

We just released Drupal 8.0.0! Today really marks the beginning of a new era for Drupal. Over the course of almost five years, we've brought the work of more than 3,000 contributors together to make something that is more flexible, more innovative, more easier to use, and more scalable.

I don't usually write about the topic of investing, but it is something I enjoy, so I decided to take the jump by sharing some thoughts on MasterCard, one of my favorite companies. Although it's not an obvious technology disruptor, MasterCard is a successful technology company. When it comes to investing, boring can be beautiful. Mastercard is relevant in the context of my blog, where I often write about the digitization of the world.

The Industrial Revolution, started in the middle of the 18th century, transformed the world. It marks the start of a major turning point in history that would influence almost every aspect of daily life. The Industrial Revolution meant the shift from handmade to machine-made products and increased productivity and capacity. Technological change also enabled the growth of capitalism. Factory owners and others who controlled the means of production rapidly became very rich and working conditions in the factories were often less than satisfactory.

The explosion of content continues to grow. With more and more organizations managing multiple sites and digital channels, the distribution of content is increasingly difficult to manage. Content can easily become siloed in different sites or platforms. Different data models make it challenging to access, update, and replicate content changes across your sites.

I feel lucky to be a part of creating and building Drupal. According to BuiltWith, Drupal powers 2.8% of websites in the top 1 million. That translates to 1 out of 35 websites. I've been thinking about what that means in terms of real impact: if any of the 3.2 billion internet users today have visited 35 or more of the top 1 million websites, they've "used" Drupal.