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 Sullivan Sénéchal!

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

I am a 26 years old web development expert working at a hosting company in Roubaix, France. I also do some freelancing.

I work a lot with the open-source world in parallel to my work, either with my own creations, or by participating in others like yours! :-)

I mainly use the Symfony framework, and am part of the Sonata Project open-source team.

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

I started contributing as much as I could to your project a few months ago.

Firstly, for a personal development need, for which Prestashop wasn’t not quite compatible enough. The fact is, I mainly use Capistrano for project deployment, and Composer for dependency management (library, plugins, etc.). I take care of updates (and SQL migration) mainly using the command line.

With PS 1.7 being based on Symfony and Composer, I wanted to get into the project. I still encounter several difficulties and I spot some points that can be improved. I hope to have time to propose improvement for them one day.

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

What I will say to all contributors to projects for which I am responsible: Read good practices and rules of contribution, verify that the issue / PR does not already exist and … be not afraid. Mastering Git mastery and open-source tools are not something you’re born with, the community is here to help! ;-)

Also, my golden rule: Never modify the vendor code, do an extension or suggest a PR instead!

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

The most important thing to me is reliability and maintenance, made possible through a strong community. This is one thing that is unfortunately not guaranteed with a paid and / or private product.

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