Over the last nine years DDEV has grown from a tiny side project to a development environment and ecosystem that serves about 17,000 weekly developer-users and is critical to so many developers' workflows.

We love this amazing open-source world that we're a part of. It's astonishing when communities can work together and of course the fact that we all stand on the shoulders of such giants like Linux, Debian, and hundreds of other projects.

What Happens When a Community Loses its Maintainer?

What happens when a great project loses a key maintainer? A couple of years ago Bram Moolenaar, the maintainer of the Vim editor, passed away unexpectedly. Every project faces unexpected transitions, whether a maintainer steps back, changes focus, or, as happened with Bram, passes away. The Vim community did step up successfully, but that's not the only outcome possible for so many small projects.

What can we learn from Vim's experience, and how is DDEV positioned in comparison?

One thing that the Vim community discovered was that Bram's work was truly a full-time job, even with their incredible and active community.

Many people may think that DDEV is just a tiny project that could carry on without its maintainers, but that might not be true. Right now support, maintenance, and improvements for DDEV use the full-time and consistent effort of two full-time maintainers. That's why you get the level of support and responsiveness you do. Both maintainers are currently paid, but perhaps not at a salary level that you would accept.

The Good Stuff

• Distributed controls: DDEV has two main leaders, Randy Fay and Stas Zhuk, who both have full control of the GitHub ddev organization, and a couple of other people also have full administrative privileges. This is good; we're not dependent on one person. Both of us are fully trained and capable on all of the technologies and infrastructures used in DDEV's testing and release environments. (We would like to have more full-trained maintainers, unpaid or paid. If you love DDEV, come and join us and we'll train you.)
• Financial Organization: DDEV has its own fiscal organization, the DDEV Foundation, which is a US 501(c)(3) tax-exempt entity. The organization has its own bank account, and Randy and long-term collaborator Mike Anello are signers on the account, so it's not dependent on a single person.
• Financial Reporting: DDEV does track and provide financial reports at each Advisory Group meeting.
• Control of Communications: Both maintainers have full control of our social media accounts and Discord.
• Passwords and Other Secrets: We use a group 1Password setup to manage all of our secrets, so they're not known to just one maintainer.
• Accounts management: Thanks to great advice from Advisory Group member Andrew Berry and thanks to having a free Google Workspace account (for nonprofits) we are able to use Google Groups for key email addresses, and current maintainers can be added to those groups. That way changes to maintainership don't result in loss of access to key external accounts.

Vim had serious challenges in all these areas, as there was only one "owner" of the GitHub project, and financial setups were very much ad-hoc. Bram was truly the "owner" of the whole project.

Areas to Improve

We work hard to identify areas that are dependent on a single maintainer, and to resolve those. But it's a perpetual process!

• Governance: From the beginning of DDEV, Randy has been the leader, acting as what's commonly called a "Benevolent Dictator for Life", or "BDFL". While that's a common model in open source, it's not a great model for overall sustainability. The BDFL model means that leadership can be concentrated in one person, preventing the development of community decision-making capabilities. One of our key goals for 2025 is to at least start moving past that model.
• Regulatory: Randy has dealt with Colorado and US regulatory requirements, including getting the 501(c)(3) tax-exempt designation, changing the name of the organization to "DDEV Foundation", filing annual reports.
• Finance and Reporting: Randy does the bimonthly financial reporting, tracks invoices, corresponds with donors, sends thank-you notes to donors, pays maintainers.
• Promotion/Marketing: Randy seems to keep these roles year-in and year-out despite attempts to spread out the work
• Test Runner Maintenance: Although Stas knows everything and has full access to our extensive test runner infrastructure, many of the runners are in Randy's house, and when something has to be done physically to them, it becomes Randy's problem.

What Comes Next?

• Improved Marketing/Monetization: As discussed above, open-source projects generally have a hard time asking for money because people take them for granted. We do hope to move toward adding premium features and premium support options that will encourage organizations and individuals to step up to the plate and do their fair share of support.
• Financial: More than one person should know how to do (and have power to do) all the financial things, like paying contributors and other bills.
• Governance: Figure out how to move from BDFL to something that lasts beyond one person. A proposal is in progress.
• Write up regulatory and financial tasks: We have a good set of documents and a private repository that explain maintainer tasks. This all needs to be done for governance, regulatory, financial, and marketing tasks.
• You: DDEV is a collaborative open-source project. Are you interested in a role?

Current Financial Status

As of June, 2025, DDEV's monthly support is at the $7800 USD level. Our goal is $12,000. You can see this at any time on the top of ddev.com, and a full accounting updated daily is in the sponsorship-data repository. Our current bank balance is about $19,000 USD.

Share Your Thoughts!

Do you have additional ideas, suggestions, or insight into how DDEV's future could be more sustainable? We would sure love to hear from you! Or get active and join our DDEV Advisory Group.

Do you have questions or want to talk (about sponsoring or anything else)? Contact us! or join us in Discord.

Have you signed up for the monthly DDEV Newsletter? We'd love to have you.

Join us THURSDAY, June 12 at 1pm ET / 10am PT, for our call to chat about all things Drupal and nonprofits. (Convert to your local time zone.)

We don't have anything specific on the agenda this month, so we'll have plenty of time to discuss anything that's on our minds at the intersection of Drupal and nonprofits. Got something specific you want to talk about? Feel free to share ahead of time in our collaborative Google doc: https://nten.org/drupal/notes!

All nonprofit Drupal devs and users, regardless of experience level, are always welcome on this call.

This free call is sponsored by NTEN.org and open to everyone. 

Please note that, since the meeting was moved a week early due to the Juneteenth holiday, the Zoom link for this month's call is different. Please use the following link for June’s call:

• Join the call: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87657453970?pwd=naknkSONquhpyIAIR5zLaHcroNbQvi.1

  • Meeting ID: 876 5745 3970
    Passcode: 507410

• Follow along on Google Docs: https://nten.org/drupal/notes

View notes of previous months' calls.

This Pride Month, the Drupal Association invited community members to share their voice, story, and perspective through a short questionnaire, an open-hearted call to celebrate who we are and where we belong.

In a time when many in the queer community may not always feel seen or safe, we want to reaffirm that the Drupal Association is a space rooted in inclusion, care, and visibility. Our goal is to spotlight the strength, joy, and diversity within the LGBTQ+ community around the world. Through shared stories like the one below, we hope to reflect the beauty of our global community and remind each other: you belong here.

This is a space where all identities are respected, celebrated, and uplifted, not just in June, but always. As stated in the Open Web Manifesto, the open web thrives on inclusion: everyone in the world, regardless of background, identity, wealth, or status, has a home on the open web.

Today, we’re honored to share reflections from Fei Lauren, an inspiring human, community-elected at-large board member and a Drupal Diversity & Inclusion initiative lead. Their story explores moments of vulnerability, history, solidarity, and global connection, reminding us of the power in simply being seen.

How is Pride celebrated in your city or country?

West Coast Canada is known as one of the best places in the world to live for the LGBTQIA+ community. But it’s a very common practice here to include ‘2S’ before the other letters. 2S stands for Two-Spirit, and it goes first to acknowledge and honor that Indigenous Peoples were here first.

Otherwise, Pride celebrations in many communities are very family-oriented. Face painting is popular, and I’ve also seen things like bouncy castles. 

Can you share a moment when inclusion really stood out to you, a personal story or memory?

I am genderqueer, and when I was first exploring neutral pronouns, the idea of putting pronouns in our Slack profiles came up at work. I didn’t realize it at first, but one of the managers I really liked and respected also used they/them pronouns.

We talked about it privately, and then they added their pronouns just before I did. I’ll never forget the anxiety I felt, followed by an incredible sense of relief that I wasn’t alone. I always try to be visible now. Sometimes, it just takes one person to shift that sense of vulnerability and make opening up feel safer.

What’s your favorite Pride-related fact, tradition, or symbol?

I recently learned that until the AIDS epidemic, the commonly used acronym was GLBT. Many medical professionals refused to treat patients who were HIV-positive, but the lesbian community stepped up as nurses and caregivers to provide support.

Changing the order of letters in the acronym, and the many variations used since, is done to honor this act of care and solidarity.

Is there a queer voice, an author, creator, or activist who has inspired or supported you?

I love Ivan Coyote. They have a book of letters from fans and their responses. I don’t cry easily, but some of the letters are so raw it’s impossible not to.

Pride celebrations here can sometimes feel like we’ve lost touch with our history and the ongoing struggle for respect, safety, and equality.

It feels important and powerful to tell those stories and make sure we don’t lose sight of how much work there is still to do in this world.

What’s one thing you love about the queer community you’re part of (in or outside Drupal)?

In Drupal, I love that the community is so global. I have learned a lot about what’s happening around the world. It’s easy to only see your own community and the struggles you and your friends face, the violence and heartbreak right in front of you.

But I love getting to celebrate wins and hold space for people globally. I’ve learned so much from the Drupal community. It has changed my relationship with queer activism and reminded me what I have to be grateful for. It also makes me feel like we really aren’t alone, and that gives me an incredible amount of hope.

Thank you, Fei, for your vulnerability, care, and presence in Drupal community. Your voice reminds us why representation matters and how simply showing up as yourself can make space for others to feel safe, seen, and supported.

To LGBTQ+ and queer members of our community, and to everyone reading, if you feel inspired to share your story this Pride Month, we welcome you with open arms. Every contribution helps build a more inclusive and loving web, one story at a time.

Want to share your own story? Submit your response here.

We also invite you to get involved with the Drupal Diversity & Inclusion (DD&I) initiative. Join the #diversity-inclusion channel on Drupal Slack and say hello! Learn more at drupaldiversity.com/get-involved.

Struggling with repetitive code when using Drupal's AI module for chat operations? Discover how the AI Helper module simplifies your development by streamlining common tasks, letting you focus on unique solutions instead of boilerplate.

Having written a couple of Drush scripts that utilise the Chat operation of the Drupal AI module (e.g. see part 1 in this series of Drupal AI articles) it was clear that certain operations were repeated in each task. I wrote a module, AI Helper, to provide a service that would avoid the need for repeated code.

Code Stages

It made sense to me to separate the code into three stages, each of which will be explained below:

1. Pre-processing
2. Processing
3. Post-processing

1) Pre-processing

The first stage consists of converting the input into the format required for the Chat request and obtaining the Provider and Model.

1a) Prepare input

Working back from the parameters of the Chat request to the simplest input to the service, the logic was as follows:

• The chat() call...

The future of Drupal is AI-powered. Discover the groundbreaking initiative driving responsible, innovative AI integration to the Drupal ecosystem.