An Open Source community is more than just PR made by faceless strangers. In order to better understand the people who contribute time and skills to the PrestaShop project, we’re launching a series of interviews with contributors of all ranges. This week, meet Andrej Staš!

Hi Andrej! First, could you tell us a bit about yourself?

Hi Xavier! I’m an IT freelancer working on several projects, and one of them is also PrestaBuilder.com which has been running since 2012. I also enjoy traveling, reading books, studying new languages and building a location independent business.

When and why did you get involved in contributing to the PS project? What motivates you?

My first bug was reported at the end of 2016 while I was building a new editor for PrestaShop 1.7 and my friend was developing several homepage modules. We submitted all the problems that we discovered or that we received from our clients.

We want to provide our customers with awesome themes, modules, and a great overall experience. We can only control part of the process since PrestaShop must work flawlessly. Helping to improve PrestaShop is, therefore, part of our agenda.

You are very active on the Forge, with several tickets to your credit. Have you thought about trying to suggest bugfixes using Git/GitHub?

Yes, I was also considering this option, but haven’t done so yet. I guess it will be the next step.

Do you have any advice for first-time PrestaShop contributors?

When you face any problem you always have two options: you can accept it, or you can try to change it. In case you have found an issue in PrestaShop, I suggest spending a few minutes to report it. It might help other people in the future and save a good amount of time.

How would you say contributing to PrestaShop could be improved?

I assume that the Forge is a suitable system for PrestaShop to track the bugs, but the user interface is not friendly for an ordinary user and looks rather intimidating.

Adding a new bug should be smoother and easier even for people who have barely any technical skills. Also receiving more feedback right after adding a new bug would be encouraging. At the moment a ticket happens to stay open for months without any particular reaction.

What’s the number one thing you’ve learnt by contributing to Open Source projects?

We are all one. When you contribute to an Open Source project, it might seem like you help developers thousand kilometers away, but in fact, you help yourself to have a better project in the future.

Thank you Nick, we hope to see you more from you as PrestaShop evolves! :)