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 David-Julian Buch!

Hi David-Julian! First, could you tell us a bit about yourself?

I’m a 30 years-old Supaéro engineer in web development. I’ve created my own web agency in 2015. Before that, I worked freelance on e-commerce projects. A field of expertise which allows me to go with and advise more than 30 merchants in the short or the long term, such as fleursdedragees.com, phyto-one.com, huiles-et-sens.com, sobreal.fr, etc.

I’ve been working with PrestaShop since 2010 and its version 1.3. I also work on more specific developments in order to create custom-made tools/web applications for my clients, and for that I use Yii2 PHP framework.

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

I got involved in the PrestaShop project with version 1.4, mostly to fix bugs and make changes to the problems my clients ran into. Once fixed, I share my solutions with the community so that everybody can benefit from my little discoveries.

My goal is to help getting a more and more powerful, successful and scalable e-commerce solution, useful for me to offer my clients the best e-commerce websites.

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

Follow the golden rules enacted by PrestaShop, sometimes it is not that obvious but it allows everybody to contribute and create structured pull requests. Avoid making pull requests after issues that have already been solved. If you think you can get a better solution, leave a comment within the pull request to suggest improvement.

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

What I’ve learnt when using versioning tool GitHub is that it helps me contributing to Open Source projects as well as enhancing in-house development process.

Thank you David-Julian, we hope to see more from you as PrestaShop evolves!