At DrupalCon Chicago this past week, Dries (the founder of Drupal) borrowed an idea from Fred Rogers. When Rogers received a lifetime achievement award at the Emmys, he stopped the show and asked everyone in the room to pause for ten seconds. Just ten seconds to think of the people who helped them get to where they are. Not gratitude in the abstract, but a chance to mentally say thanks to specific people.
Dries did the same thing with 1,300 people in Chicago. For ten seconds, the focus shifted away from solving problems or darting off to the next session. It was just ten seconds, but it felt like more. Dries got choked up afterward.
I spent eight years working at Wisconsin Public Radio, so I have some experience inside a community that Fred Rogers helped shape. Public media people don’t talk about ratings the way other commercial broadcasters do. They talk about trust, and helping people in need. Rogers built his career on the idea that pausing to pay attention to someone is the most important thing you can do. Watching Dries channel that same instinct at a tech conference, in front of people who spend their days writing code and shipping features, made me think the message still resonates when people are willing to hear it.
The speed of everything
I came home from DrupalCon with a mind still racing. For most of the 17 years I’ve attended, something similar has happened to me after returning home. The conference creates conditions that my normal week does not. In previous Cons, it was easy for me to go an entire day, from breakfast to late at night, constantly talking, listening, or coding. There’s a reason people come back with “Drupal Flu.”
This year it felt like the speed got cranked up even higher. Alexandra Bell’s keynote on the security implications of AI covered nuclear close calls, ethical failures, and the dangers of moving fast with powerful tools. She talked about Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet officer who ignored his own missile detection system when it told him the US had launched nukes. It turned out the system was picking up sunlight reflecting off clouds. Petrov paused instead of reacting. The world kept going because one person chose not to move fast. Bell was making a point about AI: “Garbage in, garbage out.” She also warned that “move fast and break things” doesn’t work when the things you break include people. She delivered all of this, in person, at a pace that left me checking whether the playback speed was set to 1.5x. It wasn’t. She just talks that fast.
The hallways were the same way. People seemed to talk faster and move faster than previous years. I had the luxury to attend many sessions across multiple tracks, and AI dominated most conversations. The energy around AI swung between dread and excitement, sometimes in the same sentence. As Dries acknowledged in his keynote, “AI is the storm and the way through it.” He talked about how the whole foundation of the Drupal ecosystem, the platform, the agencies, the open source community, is under pressure from AI all at once. He didn’t sugarcoat it. He also didn’t panic.
What happens when you don’t pause
Earlier in the Driesnote, before the product updates and the AI demos, Dries told a personal story I hadn’t heard before. He showed a photo of himself right after defending his PhD. Big smile, ready to work on Drupal full time. But six months before that photo, he’d collapsed on a street in Belgium. He was walking his dog at night and couldn’t get up. The pressure of finishing his PhD while scaling Drupal as a side project had broken something. He described himself as an accidental leader who had no training for what the community needed from him. His mom asked if Drupal was the right path. He considered taking a safe job at a bank.
Instead he took a month off. He wrote to people like Tim O’Reilly and Linus Torvalds and asked if he could visit them. They all said yes. Linus wrote back a long email that included advice like “not worrying too much about ‘making it big’” and “pick the interesting stuff you actually want to do, and make a conscious decision to let others take over the rest.” Dries came back from that trip and decided to stop being an accidental leader and become a deliberate one. He went all in.
Dries hit a wall because he didn’t have a way to stop. The community didn’t have structures for rest built into it yet. Now it does, and one of those structures is a room at DrupalCon with just a table, some chairs, and silence: the Quiet Room.
The room
Most days at DrupalCon, the morning email had a line like this: “If you need a quiet moment away from the buzz, the Quiet Room is available all day at Continental North Office.”
DrupalCon has offered a room like this for years. Many years I walked right by it every day. This year I made an effort to stop in. Sometimes I sat. Sometimes I still walked past on my way somewhere that felt more pressing. Did I need to stop right then? Not always. But it was nice to have a place to pause.
Sometimes when I paused, I found clarity about some idea I’d been carrying around. But I didn’t stop because I wanted to be “productive.” I wanted to give my mind and body a rest. I wanted to walk into the next session fully present, instead of already three steps ahead of where my body was sitting.
I’ve cared about this kind of thing at DrupalCon for a while. In 2021, I taught Gentle Yoga and was pleased that 20 people showed up. In 2022, DrupalCon Portland offered Chair Yoga and Mindful Meditation, and I went every day. Those sessions drew smaller crowds. That makes sense. People pay for DrupalCon to learn and connect, not to sit with their eyes closed. An $850 ticket doesn’t exactly encourage people to spend the afternoon in a chair doing nothing.
I appreciate how the Quiet Room fits into DrupalCon. You don’t have to miss that talk you want to see on Drupal CMS. The room is just there, open all day. The barrier is about as low as it can get. And sometimes a few minutes in an empty room can do more for you than the session you were about to attend.
Bringing it home
The Drupal Association gave everyone lucky enough to attend DrupalCon the chance to pause. The room was listed in the daily email. Someone put it on the schedule. Back home, you probably don’t have anyone to do that for you. So here are some things to try at home.
Pause. Before you catch up on email or write your conference recap, block fifteen minutes on your calendar for today. Don’t wait. Label it whatever you want. Just don’t schedule anything else during it. The goal isn’t productivity. The goal is to sit somewhere without a task. Try QuietKit or one of my meditations if you’d like some guidance.
Start with a morning question. Not something from your TODO list. Just ask a simple question like, “What do I need right now?” This might sound small, but pauses add up. Dries mentioned that he starts his day with two questions: what big problem can I help solve, and who can I ask for help? You don’t need questions that ambitious. Just pick one that points inward before the day pulls you outward.
Notice when you’re zoning out versus resting. There’s a difference between sitting in a chair doing nothing and sitting in a chair replaying a conversation. The first one can restore you, while the second one probably does not, even though they look the same from the outside. When you catch yourself in the second one, you can just stop. You don’t have to fix anything. Just stop replaying and sit with whatever’s there.
Put something on your phone or laptop that interrupts your day. I wrote about one approach I use to create reminders with free software. It won’t change your life on its own, but a well-timed nudge to stop can open a gap for a pause and a break for your mind.
Ten seconds
Fred Rogers asked a room full of TV executives to stop and think of the people that supported them. Dries asked a room full of developers, designers, project managers, and Drupal lovers to do the same thing. Both times, the room changed. Not because ten seconds is a long time, but because ten seconds is enough to remember that you’re a person sitting in a chair, not just a role filling a schedule.
I am glad for whatever committee decided the Quiet Room mattered enough to put it on the schedule. You can do that for yourself, too. Not every day, and not perfectly, but enough to keep the habit going between now and your next DrupalCon.
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