Contributor Spotlight: Taeir, open-source dev

This is the next installment of an ongoing series of blog posts highlighting individual contributors to the Codidact Project, as a way of drawing attention to the hard work that people are putting in and saying thank you. This time, I'm directing the spotlight at Taeir, who started contributing recently to our codebase.

A self-described "problem solver, teacher, programmer, heavy discusser, perfectionist and a little bit of a psychologist", Taeir is originally from the Friesland province of the Netherlands, a less-populated area where people insist on speaking a different language than the rest of the country. As a result, he was taught a whole bunch of languages, such as Frysian (also spelled Frisian), Dutch, English, German, French, Latin, and Old Greek. These days, he's still in the Netherlands, although he moved out of Friesland and to a different province over a decade ago.

Taeir loves explaining and analyzing things, and thinks it's the best feeling in the world when you can help someone learn and explore new things while gaining a new perspective on the world. This makes him a perfect fit for the Codidact Project, where helping people learn is what we're all about, and we're perfectly happy if someone likes to talk a little too much, as apparently some people think he does.

Taeir discovered the project through our open-source QPixel platform, which powers our network of Q&A sites. He was looking for a low-cost option for a Q&A instance to be used by the university where he works, and came across QPixel as an option. After checking it out, and making a few tweaks so that the software would work better in a private school-oriented context, the university decided to use QPixel earlier this year and it's been in use ever since.

As a continuation of that, Taeir's main contributions to the Codidact Project are in the realm of software and open-source, where he has rapidly become a trusted contributor to the codebase. He has submitted numerous pull requests (over 30 when I last checked) to QPixel, and has recently agreed to be one of the reviewers for the repository. He's mainly contributed changes to improve the process for setting up new communities and networks, but also works on features that directly improve our main network of communities hosted at https://codidact.com. He can also be spotted sometimes trawling through the open list of issues to see if there's something he can solve.

Because Taeir's involvement is more on the side of the open-source development of the platform, he's less involved with some of the day-to-day Q&A on our various communities. That doesn't mean he's detached from the community of people here, though; he will sometimes post here on Meta and on Collab (our community for people using the Codidact software), and can often be seen in our Discord server answering questions or discussing improvements to the software.

When asked what his favorite aspect of the Codidact Project is, Taeir said: "The sense of community that Codidact has created, both in terms of the actual communities, but also in terms of the community of contributors to the project. It's amazing to see the time and effort everyone is putting into this (for instance the person who is writing this blog post!) and what can be done when people do 🙂", which is a statement that I think we can all get behind^[1].

As a bonus, Taeir has actually set up a collaboration at his work to do some research on how well QPixel works in terms of creating communities, helping people, and sharing knowledge. They hope to use the insights from that research to make some cool features such as better recommendation of posts, better searching, and other features that can help people get the answers they are looking for, which is a very nice effort that can only benefit everyone involved.

While he doesn't have a specific post on the network that he'd like to highlight, Taeir decided to turn the spotlight around and face it in the opposite direction, declaring that the team behind the Codidact Foundation deserves a spotlight as well. On behalf of the Codidact Team, thank you for the sentiment, and thank you for everything that you do. It's not a guarantee that someone who happens to be using the open-source software will contribute and give back to the project behind it, and we're grateful that you did and continue to do so. We hope to see you around for a while yet. Thank you!

posted over 1 year ago

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Mithical‭ staff

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