Developer Spotlight: Meet Kyle Taylor

Every now and then we like to stop and take a look at the developers that are using the Pantheon platform. This time, we get to talk with Kyle Taylor. Kyle is a developer in Denton, TX. (The home of happiness) His bio stresses that he "eats tacos and watches Steven Seagal marathons". That should tell you a lot about him right there. 

First question, how did you get started in programming?

I've been interested in computers since I was a kid, and while I was in highschool I took Cisco classes and became really interested in IT and networking, so I went to the University of North Texas to get a degree in Information Technology. Prior to college I really had no programming experience at all, and to be honest, I didn't understand my Java classes until my second semester final exam. Oddly enough, the summer before my senior year of college I had an IT internship in a corporate company for about 4 months and after that I realized… man, that's pretty boring, I don't think I can do this for the rest of my life.

Going into my senior year, my best friend and I started our Capstone (senior) project, and decided we'd build this public transportation tracking system powered by smart phones. He did all the Android work, while I worked on the server, setting up our PHP backend, and building a JavaScript dashboard to play out our tracking logs. At that point I realized, "I could totally do this as a career" and decided I wanted to be a web developer.

Very cool. Now, how did that lead you to get involved with Drupal?

While I was going to school at the University of North Texas, they were using Drupal internally for department sites, especially pretty heavily in the engineering building, so I used Drupal a bit while working on my senior project. I went to an AT&T hackathon and attended a session that was more formal "Intro to Drupal" that was run by LevelTen. Shortly before graduating I started looking for a development internship and remembered LevelTen, so I looked them up and they had an internship available. I applied, charmed them over in my interview with my dashing good looks, and now I've been working with them, and Drupal, for a few years now.

Awesome. Why do you like Pantheon over other platforms or shared hosting?

Working at LevelTen Interactive, I've used multiple platforms for hosting Drupal sites for clients. These ranged from shared hosting to Rackspace Cloud servers up to Drupal cloud hosting such as Acquia® and Pantheon. For the past few years we've always talked about what kind of hosting we should suggest for our clients, and it basically came down to the fact that we don't want to be in the hosting business; that's not what we do.

Small confession - I love data. I love researching, gathering data, building charts, and comparing things. Last summer while we were talking about which hosting platform to use, I decided to conduct my own research on Drupal hosting platforms, specifically ones that were free. The idea was that the data on a free platform could give you leads on a production platform, while also taking a look at the platform as a whole including the development tools. After a week or so worth of research, the data said Pantheon came out on top across the board. Fast response times, awesome caching, and their administrative dashboard is just incredibly snappy to work with. Whether you're just navigating around to find your most recent backup or checking the status of each environment - it's fast. We've also been working with Pantheon One for Agencies, and I have to say, it's pretty cool.

Pantheon not only is a great company on a technical level, but also on a personal level. Every time we've worked with them, they are just incredibly compassionate towards your needs. I've vented hosting frustrations on Twitter from time to time, and one day Brent at Pantheon tweeted me back, "Hey, let me know if I can help." I gave him a call, we talked about some hosting issues for one of our clients, and he laid out some options that could help us. He never asked for money, or contracts - he only wanted to see if there was anything he could do to help. As long as I've been working with Pantheon, they have always been about helping us build better products. If we have a slow site, their answer is never to just throw more money at it, they help analyze New Relic reports, find our bottlenecks and improve those first.

On the job, you actually built tools for use with Pantheon and shared them with Pantheon. Tell us about the tools, and your experience working with the Pantheon crew at that level.

Last year when we first started using Pantheon, one issue we were running into was using sql-sync in Drush to pull databases down from Pantheon. One of our ex-employees, senior themer and Bootstrap maintainer Mark Carver, started working on a Drush plugin called Sql Sync Pipe to help improve the speed of sql-sync in general. It turns out that his new plugin actually worked with Pantheon in pulling down a database. Mark had contacted Josh, and some of the Pantheon engineers hopped in IRC and started helping Mark improve the plugin. And now currently, sql-sync-pipe is the best way to export a database through Drush on Pantheon.

In my experience, Pantheon has been very receptive to their customers, especially on the technical side. They listen to our needs as agencies and end users, and then work with us to make the platform better for everyone. Anywhere from bug reports to early testing of Terminus (Pantheon Drush suite), up to integrating tools like sql-sync-pipe. While I was researching the platform performance comparison, Josh and Zack set up a short interview to ask them about Pantheon and how things worked, and Josh told me something that has always stuck in my head. He said, "Whenever we get a bug report, we don't just do a quick fix for that customer. We want to fix that bug so it never becomes a problem for any of our customers ever again." That's the kind of company I love working with.