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 Nick Zampieri!

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

I have been an IT Professional for more than 20 years, primarily with large global enterprises. Most of my background has been in the Operations and Support of Production Critical systems and primarily with the Microsoft stack of products. I have always had a passion to automate, integrate, and continuously improve IT processes and systems. I have always loved to tinker with programming and building apps.

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

As a Quebecer from Canada, we have some strict language laws that require us to provide websites in the official language of Quebec, which is French. As such, when I was tasked to find an online solution that supported French and English, PrestaShop was one of the top contenders out there.

Out of the box, my client was very pleased with the look and feel of the Classic theme that came with the 1.7 version.

We also needed to find modules that could easily be added as the needs change over time to support “memberships”. We wanted an open solution that allowed the client to move from a non-existent online store to one that they could easily manage as well as ensure that data was consistent. So we needed a solution that would allow us to sell virtual products as well as physical products.

There was also a component to the solution that required physical access to the building. As such, having the open source DB (MySQL) made it much easier to integrate a customized solution to provide physical access based on the membership virtual products being sold.

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

Most of the tickets were based on all the testing that we performed during the testing of the solution over a 5 month period.

With respect to suggesting bugfixes using Git/Github, I have thought about it and have even suggested fixes within the Forge system, however, actually contributing to the code was not something that I had time to perform.

My contributions have primarily been to translate most of the texts found in the Crowdin translation solution so that both front office and back office would benefit from having both an English and French translations.

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

The best advice I could give is to get involved in any way that you can. Helping out benefits all in the long run… so don’t wait for others to do it. Just jump in and help.

What are your favorite things about version 1.7 of PrestaShop? And what do you think would make it even better for merchants or developers?

I like knowing that the product is continuously improving and evolving on a regular basis. To make things better, I think it would be great to share a roadmap of when certain features are available to the merchants and developers.

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

There are a lot of people that are willing to help and teach if you ask questions and are willing to learn.

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