I think I have not installed any fresh Drupal setup in the past 2 years. What a shame! I used to love Drupal. For the past 2 years I am 100% focused on Atlassian tool set, which I thought is a wise decision. You can't do everything at the same time and it is nearly impossible to get really good in one thing without letting go the other. I like JIRA as well, it is amazing tool and the Atlassian ecosystem is amazing. I first got the opportunity to work on JIRA when I was working for Alcatel-Lucent. It has been 8 years I think when I first worked on JIRA. I was given a task to manage users in JIRA. I used to hate it and the the interface was not really great. At that time I was totally into Drupal and I was making comparisons. Of course both are for different purposes but when you have a decent level of expertise working on a web based tool that can be configured, you draw comparisons. My initial work was just to manage users and nothing much. Later on I was given some tasks to make some configuration changes in JIRA. Like creating new custom fields, adding them on screens, attaching it to the projects. At that time I was managing www.ggsipu.info which was one of the biggest and only source of information for students seeking information about IP University Delhi. I used to spend hours making that site better and more useful. I learned working on Drupal on that site and when I started diving more into JIRA world I realised that JIRA is actually a very smart tool. The way things are configured in it is really powerful.
I love building solutions. When I used to work on Drupal I was not really making websites. I was building a solution around it. I understood the architecture of Drupal and how it works. That knowledge along with my passion to build solutions was my plus point. After few months of working JIRA I was liking it. In the year 2009 - 2010, JIRA was not that mature as it is now but I think the fundamentals and the concepts were same as today. I have to admit that I tried JIRA only because it was part of my job, otherwise I was mostly into open source tools. I tried several open source applications and could never find one that can satisfy my needs. Project Management has always been my core interest. I used to work as Project Coordinator in Alcatel-Lucent and also in Kaplan, my company prior to Alcatel-Lucent. I am a certified Microsoft Project Server Administrator, I set it in the company, then I also build a very powerful tool in Excel with the help of VBA to do some project management. Later in the company with the help of 6 interns we build a custom project management and competency management tool. Later I was also managing my own projects in Sparxsys. At the time when I was learning JIRA I was well versed with what is expected from any project management tool.
I loved the way JIRA can be customized and any process can be mapped on top of it. The idea of add-ons was something that excited me. Just like Drupal. The only bad thing was that everything was paid but I realized later in life that you can't always get the best things for free.
In the past 2 years I have been doing more and more Atlassian Consultation work and I will be honest. Money wise it is far better than Drupal. However I do miss working on it. Just because of Drupal all of it was possible, even before Drupal I was doing freelancing services on various things but none of it was good enough to give me enough leverage and courage to start your own company from absolute zero. I am little biased towards Drupal and these days my bread, butter and beer is coming only from Atlassian tool but I have decided to get back to Drupal. To start with I will probably upgrade this site to Drupal 8. In fact most of my sites are still running. I will make it my weekend project to upgrade them to Drupal 8 or to the latest Drupal 7 at least.
Weekend is almost here and I will surely work on it.
Bye
