After four-and-a-half years of development, Drupal 9 was just released, a milestone in the evolution of the Drupal content management system. The Drupal Association has long played a critical role not only in supporting the advancement and releases of one of the world's largest and most active open-source software projects; it also contributes to the Drupal roadmap and drives its forward momentum in other important ways. In addition to maintenance releases for Drupal 7 and Drupal 8, the Drupal 9 release not only promises an easy upgrade for Drupal 8 users but also ushers in a new period of innovation for Drupal.

But that's not all. Drupal 9's release also means long-awaited upgrades to Drupal.org as well as some of the most essential infrastructure and services that underpin Drupal.org and its associated properties, like localize.drupal.org, groups.drupal.org, and api.drupal.org. Releases in Drupal have also garnered greater scrutiny from nefarious actors who target launch dates to seek security vulnerabilities. The Drupal Association works tirelessly to buttress all of these initiatives and responsibilities, with the support of Tag1 and other organizations.

In this Tag1 Team Talks episode, part of a special series with the engineering team at the Drupal Association, we speak discuss Drupal 9 and what it portends for Drupal's future with Tim Lehnen (Chief Technology Officer, Drupal Association), Neil Drumm (Senior Technologist, Drupal Association), Narayan Newton (Chief Technology Officer, Tag1 Consulting), Michael Meyers (Managing Director, Tag1 Consulting), and Preston So (Editor in Chief at Tag1 Consulting and author of Decoupled Drupal in Practice). We dove into some of the nitty-gritty and day-in-the-life of Drupal core committers and how Drupal is taking a uniquely new approach to tackle technical debt.