Norman Kämper-Leymann Drupal Developer

Profile

I got into web development as a student assistant at university, back when Plone and MODX were around, CSS preprocessors did not really exist, package managers were not part of the daily routine, and !important was used a little too often.

Eventually I discovered WordPress and wrote my first PHP templates. During a traineeship I got to know Drupal and was immediately impressed by how versatile it is. You can actually build your own CMS with it. I started following issues on drupal.org and eventually submitted my first patches. I really liked the idea of people from all over the world working together on the same project, and I wanted to be part of it.

Drupal has stayed with me ever since. Of all the job postings I come across, the ones with a focus on Drupal are still the ones that interest me most. Drupal never really gets boring, and while web development keeps moving at an unreasonable pace, Drupal has managed to evolve with it. These days it can be combined with pretty much any frontend you want, which makes it a very different beast from the Drupal I first encountered.

These days my focus has shifted from writing code myself to enabling others to write it well: I write the issues other developers solve, review every merge request before it lands, and maintain 1xINTERNET's own internal tooling, including 1xinternet.com (link) and our Intranet. Claude and other AI agents have become my everyday go-to tool, and 1xINTERNET's own involvement in Drupal's AI initiative keeps me close to where the ecosystem is heading next.

Skills

Communication
Teamwork
Supportive
Open Source
 
PHP
Drupal
Symfony
Twig
 
DevOps
Playwright
Behat
Tailwind
 
AI Agents
Claude Code
MCP
Prompts

Experience

  • 1xINTERNET (Jan 2021 – current)
    Senior Full-Stack Developer
    1xINTERNET is a leading Drupal agency in Europe, and lately a big part of Drupal's AI initiative. Offices in Germany, Spain and Iceland. Colleagues from many different countries and diverse backgrounds. Remote-first working everywhere. These days I'm doing a lot of what you'd call solution architecture: I write the issues other developers solve, review every merge request before it gets merged, and maintain our internal tooling, including overseeing 1xinternet.com (link) and our internal Intranet. Claude and other AI agents have quietly become part of my everyday toolkit. I still jump in hands-on when it counts, supporting front-enders on deeper Drupal tasks or the DevOps team on go-lives and pipelines.
  • IBM iX – Aperto (Jan 2020 – Dec 2020)
    Senior PHP Developer
    Aperto is a digital agency owned by IBM. They realize huge enterprise projects for really interesting clients using numerous technologies and methodologies. Most of the time I worked on a rather complex Drupal-based business tool for a big German health insurance company. Most of my work was backend-heavy but I also built a new base theme for the application.
  • Ayusa-Intrax (Apr 2017 – Dec 2019)
    Lead Web Developer
    Ayusa-Intrax is the German branch of the US-Japanese Intrax Corp. which sells worldwide student exchanges. I coordinated a number of Drupal 7 sites to be relaunched as one Drupal 8 multi-site together with a front-ender and another back-ender. I led the team into contininous integration, pull requests and code reviews. Together we also redesigned and relaunched the completely refurbished WordPress blog (link) with a beautiful new theme based on Bootstrap.
  • CB.e AG (Jul 2016 – Mar 2017)
    Web Developer
    Back again at CB.e. This time I started the job with a front-end focus. But soon took over my first Drupal 8 projects. I loved this team. Some of them are very skilled and engaged people to learn from, always aiming to make things work smoothly.
  • b-connect (Sep 2015 – Jun 2016)
    Web Developer
    A small Berlin-base Drupal agency with some interesting projects to learn by. I mainly worked on a huge multi-language Drupal marketing multi-site to implement quizzes and gamification.
  • Affinitas (Mar 2015 – Aug 2015)
    Web Developer
    Rocket Internet, yeehaw. They had an online dating platform implemented in multiple markets around the globe. And they had a huge Drupal multi-site running for marketing and customer care purposes. Multi-language, multi-design, multi-content, multi-everyting. Here I learned to love planning pokers and sprinting.
  • {berlin-coding} (Sep 2014 – Feb 2015)
    Web Developer
    I wanted to freelance for a while together with some developer friends. Being your own boss is a nice thing. But after a while I missed working in bigger teams with more dedicated roles and project management.
  • CB.e AG (Mar 2013 – Aug 2014)
    Junior Web Developer
    CB.e is a full service agency in Berlin. This is where I finally started to work with Drupal after I graduated from university. I was looking for a job that let me take up the IT work I did as student assistant. I started as trainee and became a junior web developer thereafter.

Education

  • Bachelor's Degree (December 2011)
    Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
    I have a bachelor's degree in Area Studies focusing on Asia and Africa, and in the subsidiary field of Gender Studies. Two quite interdisciplinary academic fields, which enable you to look behind so many curtains. Post-colonialism, lingustics, cultural studies, Japanese language were some of the subjects I studied most intensively.

Projects

  • Rebuild Cache Access (Link)
    Rebuild Cache Access was my first project on drupal.org. It solves an age-old Drupal problem where you sometimes need to give other roles than the ones with the administer site configuration permission the ability to simply flush all caches. The module provides its own permission and a nice toolbar button to trigger drupal_flush_all_caches(). As simple, as effective.
  • Drupal CircleCI Behat (Link)
    Drupal 8 with Composer and configuration management made Drupal DevOps much easier. At the time I initiated this sample project there where not many useful samples on automated Drupal deployment. I chose CircleCI to have a Drupal instance built in containers and then run automated tests against it. Selenium controls a headless Chromium browser and Behat clicks through the site and takes screenshots as soon as something goes wrong.

Community

  • Drupal User Group Berlin (Link)
    Organizer
    Together with 3 other Drupal enthusiasts I organize the Drupal User Group Berlin meetup. Every first Thursday evening of the month around 10 to 20 Drupalista get together in Berlin to exchange their Drupal experiences, opinions and ideas. As organizers its our job to host the event, call for talks, do the moderation, or to simply keep things rolling.

Badges

Acquia Certified Developer Drupal 8
Drupal Association Individual Member badge

Contact

City Berlin, Germany
Email lol@norman.lol
Telegram t.me/normanlol
Website norman.lol