Various people have prodded me to explain my recent involvement in Drupal, or rather the lack of it. Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to do so in a way that is constructive and tactful, especially not when it comes to other contributors. Like Soylent Green, Open Source is made of people, and it's these people who are at the basis of a mountain of frustration that has driven me off.

8 tips for the aspiring Drupal developer

Open source is really great. You get to cherry pick from some of the best software out there and build neat stuff with it, fast. Most open source projects will also encourage you to contribute your own work back to the project. Supposedly, so others can benefit from your work.

While that's often an easy, karma-scoring move, it can have some unintended, annoying consequences. For example, people might start sending in bug reports for your code or may offer suggestions on how to improve it. Even worse, meddling know-it-alls may even offer to 'help' with development and do things with it that you never intended. Some projects, like Drupal, even trick you into such forced participation, by automatically supplying issue trackers, RSS feeds, revision control and other, undesirable community interaction.

Luckily, there are several things you can do to keep those pesky contributors away altogether. You can participate in open source without suffering any of its extended effects. Here are some concrete tips for the aspiring Drupal developer. Of course, a true creative will find novel ways of keeping their open source involvement to an absolute minimum!