Looking back on 6 months of Drupal Search API contribution

Last November, my colleague Lara and I visited Drupal Europe in Darmstadt (Germany). While there, we attended many interesting talks and discussions. I wrote some LinkedIn articles during that event, in the first article I mentioned that I had attended a discussion about integrating the Search API module into Drupal core. I also mentioned that one of the conclusions of that discussion was that there are just too few maintainers for too large of an ecosystem and that I was looking for ways to help address that specific issue.

Fast-forward 8 months we are now at the end of a contribution effort I started at Ordina Digital Services. In December of last year, we committed to start contributing 8 hours per week to the Search API ecosystem for the duration of 6 months. A promise we kept and that effort payed off in several ways I’d like to discuss in this article.

Direct impact

• Cleaned up the backlog by closing 750+ old, outdated and inactive issues;
• Provided patches for 47 issues spread over 4 modules;
• 40 of those patches have already been committed, fixing issues that had been open for up to 2,5 years. These include:
• Several already committed performance improvements and Improve performance of the Highlight processor which is still in review, but potentially speeds up highlighted searches by 1000%;
• 6 new features;
• 20 bug fixes;
• More developers with knowledge about Search API and it’s ecosystem modules.

We can conclude that our efforts have been impactful for the Search API ecosystem and are a sign of what can be achieved with a relatively small, but focused effort. The community is not the only beneficiary of this effort though, because we’ve also noticed some indirect impact within our development team.

Indirect impact

One of my responsibilities as Competence Lead is to stimulate the continuous improvement of the competences of my colleagues. Not just their hard-technical skills, but also the myriad of soft skills that benefit software development. I’ve had the unique opportunity to see the growth of my colleagues over the last 6 months and I’ve made the following observations:

• They gradually started communicating more, even though they already discussed the things they were working on quite often. It seems like they became more receptive to other insights than they did before;
• Their peer reviews became friendlier and better explained why/how things could be improved;
• As a result, they started creating more pull requests with fewer changes in an effort to optimize for reviewability;
• Which in turn allowed them to make more changes more quickly and increased their productivity;
• And most importantly, they seemed to find more enjoyment and fulfillment in their work.

When asked about these observations, they hadn’t really noticed these changes themselves, but after further questions actually did recognize these observations and attributed them to the excellent reviews they received from the maintainers and other participants in the Search API module(s) issue queues. It turns out that you really can receive while you give.

Thanks to the maintainers

Joris already thanked us for our efforts in his blog post but I think that the Search API Module(s) maintainers also deserve our thanks in return. We couldn’t have made such an impact in the ecosystem without their excellent reviews and quick responses. So, thank you Joris for always responding within several hours and thank you Thomas for picking every nit.