Mike Herchel (mherchel)

Mike Herchel is Lead Evangelist, Digital Marketing & Vibe Coding at Acquia and a founder of Dripyard premium themes. With more than 19 years in the Drupal ecosystem, he works at the intersection of Drupal, modern front-end development, AI, and developer advocacy, helping both technical and non-technical audiences understand what modern Drupal can do.

Mike is a Drupal Core Frontend Framework Manager and one of a small group of people entrusted with committing code directly to Drupal core. A long-time core contributor, he is the primary developer behind Drupal’s default Olivero theme, maintains Drupal core’s CSS subsystem, and helped lead the effort to bring Single Directory Components into core. His work focuses heavily on modernizing Drupal’s front end, improving accessibility and performance, and creating better experiences for both developers and content creators.

Over his career, Mike has delivered major Drupal implementations for organizations including the Syfy Network, U.S. Small Business Administration, IBM, U.S. Court System, and others. He has also led performance improvements to Drupal’s administrative experience, including work to improve first-paint performance and eliminate flashes of unstyled content.

At Acquia, Mike focuses on evangelizing Drupal, Acquia, and emerging AI tooling to audiences both inside and outside the Drupal community. He creates technical content, tutorials, and demos and speaks at conferences about Drupal, AI, vibe coding, front-end development, accessibility, and web performance.

Mike is also a former community-elected board member of the Drupal Association and has been a primary organizer of Florida DrupalCamp for more than 10 years. He has spoken at more than 10 DrupalCons as well as conferences including All Things Open, Front Conference, Frontend United, PHPVerse, and numerous DrupalCamps around the world. His writing has appeared in Smashing Magazine, CSS-Tricks, and .NET Magazine.

Through his work at Acquia, his contributions to Drupal core, and his work with Dripyard, Mike is focused on pushing Drupal forward and helping a much broader audience understand just how much the platform has evolved