I’m Lauri. I’ve been building websites since 2002, and for more than a decade I’ve worked on content management tools, first as an engineer and now on the product side. These days that mostly means developers: the people who build components, extend the platform, and increasingly do it alongside an AI agent.
How I got here
I made my first websites in 2002, as a kid in school, long before I had heard of Drupal. While studying, I first built websites to friends, family, and neighbors. I got some good references and I started building websites and ecommerce sites to small companies. This is when Drupal became one of the tools in my toolchain. In 2013 I decided to go deeper into Drupal and worked few jobs in agencies in Finland, where I worked on large web projects and ended up leading small teams. In 2016 I became one of the maintainers of Drupal’s theme system. Over the next seven years I helped move it from templates to components and led a rebuild of the admin experience.
I joined Acquia as an engineer in 2018. During that time I was part of teams building a redesigned Drupal Admin UI, integration with CKEditor 5, as well as the transformation towards component based site building.
In 2023 I moved into product management. My first project as a Product Manager was Drupal Canvas, the visual page builder, which I led from the first discovery conversations to its 1.0 release. It now runs on more than ten thousand sites and is the foundation of Acquia Source CMS.
Since then my attention has moved to the developers who extend it. I want AI-assisted development to be a proper workflow rather than a bolt-on. I lead that work and a small team of product managers, and I still own parts of the product myself.