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 Šarūnas Jonušas!

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

Hi! I’m a 23 year old IT student at Kaunas University of Technology and a web developer at Invertus - Premium PrestaShop Partner agency. I’ve been developing PrestaShop for two years now and recently had a chance to collaborate with PrestaShop team to migrate a small part of PrestaShop to Symfony framework. It was a very exciting and unique experience for me!

On my free time, I’m building side projects using Symfony framework, learning new technologies and tools. I also enjoy solving real world problems, that’s why I do some freelancing on projects that look challenging to me.

Besides development, I read books, watch Netflix and do some sport activities. Some of my favorite ones are ice skating, biking and running. My longest trip riding a bike was more than 110 km in a day and I hope in the near future I’ll beat this record of mine.

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

Since I started working at Invertus I dived into PrestaShop development. I spent some of my free time investigating core concepts of PrestaShop, reviewing code and improving my knowledge of codebase. As a result, I found some bugs, so I decided to make a PR to fix them, that’s were my first contributions to PrestaShop began, and they were merged!

Furthermore, I made some open source modules like Paysera payments for PrestaShop 1.7, which now is being used as an official Paysera module. Another one is the Customers Loyalty module, which got some really good feedback from community and merchants. Anyone can check those modules at my GitHub.

The biggest motivation to me is knowing that those contributions help to improve PrestaShop and solve some real world problems.

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

My advice would be: don’t be afraid to contribute. Don’t worry if you make mistakes, PrestaShop has a very friendly and open-minded community, core members and other contributors will be more than happy to help and advise you. So if you have found an issue or have an idea for improvement - don’t hesitate to make a PR.

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

I learnt that there are a lot of great people in PrestaShop community who are always willing to help you. At the end, it’s a community driven project and we can all learn new things from one another.

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