Giving Back to Drupal: Sandstorm Summit Contribution Day

SUMMARY

During our annual Sandstorm Summit, our entire team of developers, designers, marketers, and leaders dedicated a full day to giving back to the Drupal community. From improving modules and writing content to designing assets and planning event support, everyone made meaningful contributions. The day reflected our core values: warrior spirit, be curious, and create joy, and strengthened both our skills and the open-source ecosystem we rely on every day.

Table of Contents

• What Is a Drupal Contribution Day?
• Highlights from the Day
• How We Structured the Day
• Why This Matters to Sandstorm (and Our Clients)
• Thank You's and What’s Next

What is a Drupal Contribution Day?

On Friday, September 12, during our annual Sandstorm Summit in Chicago, we turned a full day into hands-on impact for the open-source community. From 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., our developers, designers, project managers, marketers, and even our executive team learned the ropes of contributing to Drupal and made real contributions across code, documentation, and community efforts.

Why did we invest a whole day in this? Because open source is at the heart of how we build for clients every day in Drupal and WordPress. Contributing back strengthens the tools we rely on, grows our skills, and lives out our core values: warrior spirit, be curious, and create joy.

A Drupal Contribution Day (often called a “contribution sprint”) is a focused, collaborative working session where people of all skill sets, not just developers, improve Drupal together. First-time contributor workshops, mentored tables, and open sprint rooms help folks find issues, learn the workflow, and make their first (or fiftieth!) contribution. It’s about pairing up, sharing knowledge, and making small, meaningful changes that add up across the ecosystem.

Highlights from the Day

Alma Meshes, Executive Assistant

“For the Drupal contribution day, I took a different approach. I read up on how to assist at DrupalCon 2026, which will be in Chicago. I saw there are lots of opportunities to volunteer, but I decided I would sign up to become a local ambassador for DrupalCon 2026. As someone who has lived in Chicago for over a decade, I'm excited to share my knowledge with other DrupalCon attendees who are visiting. I've been to DrupalCon in other cities, and local ambassadors helped with tips for getting around the city or recommendations for cool things to check out. After DrupalCon Pittsburgh, our group enjoyed a really cool ride on the local incline where we hit a fun local bar and had great views of the city.”

DrupalCon Chicago 2026 runs March 23–26 and has an official Local Ambassador program, perfect for Chicagoans who want to help visitors experience the city well.

Emily Kodner, VP of Client Delivery

“I went deep into finding non-code, non-issue-queue ways to contribute. I found several event-related efforts to sign up for. In terms of the summit overall, I love that it's an opportunity to spend time with everyone outside of a particular task or tactical thing.”

Emily’s point nails a big truth about open source: contribution isn’t only commits. It’s mentoring, event organizing, accessibility auditing, translating, and more. 

Sandy Marsico, CEO

“Janna Fiester, Vice President of UX and Creative, and I made a contribution on Friday! And I just checked the comments and someone wrote to me and said, ‘Sandy! Wow, very cool contribution to this :)’

What we worked on: Experience Builder has been renamed to Canvas, and what the community needs is a Canvas icon/logo mark for the project page. There were a few ideas that were all over the board, so we wrote a Creative Brief for the volunteer design community so the logo concepts would be strategic, thoughtful, and aligned with the Drupal brand and community ideas. It included background info, brand standards, and creative direction, so we all work from the same foundation.

Janna was a huge help - she provided brand standards, reviewed the brief, and spent the day exploring concepts. We’re excited to help the community align and create an incredible logo mark together.”

Experience Builder → Drupal Canvas is an official rename in the project’s move toward beta, and the community is actively organizing issues under the new Canvas project, including needs like a proper logo mark and design assets.
Sandy’s brief and discussion are referenced on the Canvas issue queue.

Laura Chapparo, Senior Account Director

“I made a contribution to Drupal!! It was a content task where I created copy for a landing page for Drupal AI for Higher Education. Drupal needs help promoting its AI capabilities across industries, so I picked Higher Ed based on my recent client work. Once I found the task, the instructions were clear and the brief was informative, so I knew exactly what to do. I even got a shout-out!”

This is a great example of non-code contribution in action, writing content that helps the community communicate value to specific verticals.

Developer spotlight: PCI SRI

Our engineering team also used the day to improve PCI SRI, a Drupal project we host on Drupal.org. PCI SRI helps sites meet PCI DSS 6.4.3 and 11.6.1 by integrating Subresource Integrity (SRI) checks for externally hosted scripts, an increasingly important requirement for e-commerce and security-conscious sites. 

On September 12 we published v1.1.0, which adds clearer messaging when generating SRI (so you know exactly what changed) and cleans up code formatting.

Andy Cullen, Technology Director

“Sandstorm backend developer Jay Silverman and I made some much-needed updates to our contrib module and learned the process of merge requests for drupalcode.org. We also put out a new release of the module.”

How we structured the day

• 9:00–10:00: Training by Sandstorm Product Owner Syd Hunsinger, which included onboarding: contribution workflow, how to find issues, and setting up accounts and tools.
• Mid-morning: Looking through the Drupal issue queue to find issues that matched our skill sets. Breakouts: first-time contributor workshop, mentored tables, and “non-code” lanes (documentation, event/ops, content).
• Afternoon: Heads-down contribution time with periodic check-ins and pairing.
• Wrap-up: Demos, shout-outs, and takeaways for what to tackle next.

This mirrors the common format at community events: first-time workshops, mentored sprints, and general contribution rooms that welcome all roles.

Why this matters to Sandstorm (and our clients)

• Better tools for everyone. Our fixes, docs, and design assets help the ecosystem move faster so our client projects do, too.
• Professional growth. Contribution days are cross-functional learning at its best; teammates try new lanes and build confidence.
• Values in action:
  • Warrior spirit: Shipping real improvements in a single day.
  • Be curious: Exploring new contribution avenues beyond code.
  • Create joy: Celebrating wins together and giving back to the community that powers our work.

If you’re new to contribution, Drupal makes it welcoming: you don’t need to be a coder, and mentors are there to guide you. Find opportunities to contribute over on drupal.org.

Thank you's (and what’s next)

Huge thanks to everyone who jumped in, asked questions, wrote, reviewed, designed, or shipped. If you’ll be at DrupalCon Chicago 2026, come say hi! Some of us will be helping as Local Ambassadors (another way to contribute to Drupal).