Hi! I'm Jen Lampton, and I am one of the Co-Founders behind Backdrop CMS.
I make websites.
I have been actively building websites since 1997. I run a web development company named Jeneration Web Development, where I get to collaborate with a handful of wonderful contractors on larger projects. My day-to-day work involves building websites for local government, non-profits, educational institutions, and local businesses.
I improve the software I use to make websites.
I have been an advocate for Open Source software since 2005, and today I am a passionate contributor to both the Drupal and Backdrop CMS Open Source projects. I maintain existing modules and themes as well as contributing to core for both projects.
Many of the websites I work on require new modules to be written, old ones to be ported from Drupal to Backdrop, or bugs to be fixed. It's built in to my process to contribute all of this work back to the communities that generated the code I am using on these websites.
I run events to support the communities that create the software.
From 2007-2017 I served as one of the lead organizers for the largest free Drupal event in the world, the Bay Area Drupal Camp (also know as BADCamp). These events were held annually and usually had more than 1,000 attendees from the bay area and around the world.
In 2010, I was also on the organizing committee for the final independently-organized DrupalCon, held in in San Francisco. This event had the highest number of registered attendees, and the lowest ticket price of all previous DrupalCon events.
I'm one of the organizers for the wildly successful Backdrop LIVE events that are held online, 2-3 times each year, in a 24-hour around-the-globe format. These events follow an un-conference format where everyone is encouraged to participate in every discussion, rather than listen to one person lecture about a specific topic.
I believe software should be self-evident.
I want software to be both easy to use, and easy to learn. I have spent years teaching people how to use this software. In that time I have watched students of all experience levels struggle with complicated user interfaces, and code patterns that weren't intuitive.
In the fight to make Drupal easier to learn, I served as the Twig "initiative" lead for Drupal 8. I had the pleasure of working with dozens of fantastic contributors to get the Twig template engine into Drupal core.
I also volunteered my time to the Drupal Usability team for several years. We conducted several usability studies, and helped implement usability improvements as a result of those studies.
I now serve as a usability constituent on the Backdrop Project Management Committee. My position there is to ensure that our CMS is easy to use for editors, site architects, and developers alike.