portfolio.joshnliz.com / v1 · May 2026
currently: shipping MCP for Drupal updated May 2026 · Washington, DC

Josh Miller

Drupal contributor since 2007. Director of Web at the Urban Institute. On the core team for the official Drupal MCP module. Spoken at most DrupalCons since 2014. Maintainer of about thirty contrib modules — most in Commerce.

Josh Miller demoing the Drupal MCP module at the Pantheon expo booth, DrupalCon Chicago 2026
▸ Live MCP demo · Pantheon booth · DrupalCon Chicago, May 2026
§ 01

Right now

three live threads — not a roadmap, not a wishlist
this quarter

Drupal MCP module — core team

On the team shipping the official Model Context Protocol module so AI clients can read and write Drupal sites through Anthropic's protocol. First release lands this summer.

this month

DrupalCon Chicago 2026 follow-up

Following up on the Tim Lehnen fireside, the agentic interfaces breakout, and the MCP live demo at the Pantheon expo booth. Writing up the demo for those who couldn't attend.

ongoing

AI governance, in public

Posting on LinkedIn about MCP adoption, agentic UX for content systems, and what 'AI governance' actually means for editorial teams who can't afford to get this wrong.

§ 02

DrupalCon, 2014 → present

every cycle I've spoken at · breakout, summit, and expo-booth sessions · ★ most recent
2014
Austin
Commerce By Example
2015
Bogotá
Conversion Rate Optimization
2017
Baltimore
Decode and Reload: Personality Gaps in the Workplace
2018
Nashville
One Entry Point — Commerce for online and real-world transactions
2020
Minneapolis · virtual
Let's get real about work/life balance
2023
Pittsburgh
Urban Institute: 24 research websites, one platform, three-person team
2025
Atlanta
Accessibility and inclusive design
Note: summit sessions at DrupalCon are typically not recorded; the session links above point to event pages where available.
§ 03

Podcasts & conversations

five Talking Drupal episodes · filter by topic
§ 04

Writing, in full

recent LinkedIn essays — pull quote up top, click to read the rest in place
2026/LinkedIn/1,507 impressions

MCP vs. Markdown: feeding the web vs. participating in it

"
MCP gives organizations a way to build a web that does more than serve markdown. It enables a back-and-forth — your site can expose functionality, capture intent, and participate in the agentic ecosystem rather than just feed it.
↗ on LinkedIn
2026/LinkedIn · on Roland Obermair's SDC toolkit proposal

What AI can't do that open source has always done

"
AI is going to be a multiplier of these kinds of efforts, but it will never replace community-based conversations that happen amongst agencies and practitioners. The human connections and the ability to work together — even when that means having a long view of the value of such work — are things our LLMs can articulate but would never execute autonomously.
↗ on LinkedIn
2026/LinkedIn · ahead of DrupalCon Chicago/281 impressions

On the DrupalCon Nonprofit Summit

"
Having gone to enough DrupalCons now to lose count, hear me when I say: the Nonprofit Summit is the single most impactful event I have ever attended during one of these conferences. See you there.
↗ on LinkedIn
2025/LinkedIn/408 impressions

The interpretability problem is baked in (and why that matters for nonprofits)

"
Researchers added imperceptible noise to medical images. A healthy retina becomes diabetic retinopathy. A normal chest X-ray becomes pneumothorax. The images look identical to us. The AI sees something completely different. The model found patterns that work — not necessarily the patterns we assume it found.
drop the adversarial-medical-image diagram here
↗ on LinkedIn
2025/LinkedIn · on Bostrom, Goodhart's Law, and nonprofit governance/160 impressions

The alignment problem isn't hypothetical — Wells Fargo already ran the experiment

"
Wells Fargo's CEO wanted 8 products per customer. Why 8? 'It rhymes with great.' Employees were rewarded for hitting the number. Result: 3.5 million fake accounts, $3 billion in fines, 5,300 employees fired. That's the alignment problem showing up for humans without AI like we have it today.
↗ on LinkedIn
2025/LinkedIn · reading Melanie Mitchell/248 impressions

We're building systems that work but can't be read

"
Like a river seeking least resistance, modern AI found a different path — neural networks consume massive data and patterns emerge through backpropagation. Powerful, clearly. But it costs us something. You can't open the hood and trace the logic anymore. This is a new kind of technical debt — one that is very, very opaque.
↗ on LinkedIn
2025/LinkedIn · sprint analytics, KDD process/1,138 impressions

When the 'problem' in your data is the actual insight

"
About 66% of our sprint work was 'invisible' — unpointed tickets that were diluting the signal. Once I filtered to pointed work only, a different picture emerged: our core dev team is running at 91% completion with stable velocity. The apparent decline was a data visibility problem.
drop a screenshot of the sprint dashboard here
↗ on LinkedIn
2025/LinkedIn/985 impressions

What I built when I finished Anthropic's MCP course

"
Built MCP servers and clients using the Python SDK — tools, resources, and prompts. Resources and prompts were standout concepts: despite generic names, they enable powerful patterns for controlled data exposure and standardized workflows.
drop a screenshot of your MCP server in action
↗ on LinkedIn
earlier writing
§ 05

drupal.org

modules · documentation · mentorship — drupal.org/u/joshmiller
docs
guides on
drupal.org
Setting up Drupal Commerce for B2B
drupal.org documentation
Recurring billing patterns in Commerce 2
drupal.org documentation
Adding MCP server endpoints to a Drupal module
drupal.org documentation (in review)
mentor
DrupalCon
since 2014

DrupalCon mentor every cycle since 2014. First-time speaker coaching, contribution-sprint onboarding, and pairing newcomers with established maintainers. Twelve years and counting — this is the part of the job I would do anyway.

§ 06

Credentials

20 active certifications · weighted toward AI governance, MCP, and federal-compliance work

AI & MCP

Anthropic
Dec 2025
Purdue University · microcredential
Jan 2026
Purdue University · microcredential
Jan 2026

Security & Compliance

LinkedIn Learning
Sep 2025
AWS Certified Security · Domain 1: Incident Response (SCS-C02)
Amazon Web Services
Sep 2025
LinkedIn Learning
Sep 2025

Data

LinkedIn Learning
Jan 2026
Data Analytics for Decision Makers
Purdue University · microcredential
Dec 2025

Drupal & Project Management

Instructing.com
May 2026
Project Management Institute
Mar 2026 → Mar 2027
LinkedIn Learning
Jan 2025
Protecting Human Research Participants
PHRP Online Training
Jun 2021
The cluster pattern is intentional: Anthropic MCP → Purdue AI policy → NIST/FedRAMP/GRC. The Acquia Backend cert from 2018 anchors the Drupal side.
§ 07

Archive

work that existed publicly but no longer does — included for completeness
▲ no longer publicly available

Drupal Commerce video series · Commerce Guys (2012–2016)

During my four years at Commerce Guys — the company that originally built Drupal Commerce — I produced a substantial body of training video on Commerce installation, configuration, theming, and payment-gateway integration. By view-count it was the most-watched work I've made, by some margin.

The videos were taken down when Commerce Guys was sold. I don't have a working link, and I'm not going to fabricate one. What existed:

  • ~40 screencasts on Commerce Kickstart 1.x and 2.x
  • A short course on building custom payment gateways
  • Conference recap recordings from Commerce-track DrupalCons
  • Drupal Commerce on YouTube · youtube.com/commerceguys/videos
Mentioned here because it's a real part of the record, not because it's a live asset. Happy to talk about specific episodes during interviews — I remember most of them.