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Contributor Spotlight: samcarter, Power [Users] Moderator
It's time for the next edition of our Contributor Spotlight series, in which we highlight community members who contribute to various aspects of our project, as a way of showing appreciation and recognizing the hard work that people are putting into this project. In this round, we're spotlighting samcarter, a moderator on Power Users.
samcarter, who hails from Germany, and describes herself as a "physicist who likes to solve puzzles and create stuff", first heard of Codidact way back when it was still theoretical and being discussed in a Discord server, while she was looking for a place to have Q&A about LaTeX and similar tools. At that time, the plan was to build a new system from scratch in C#. Along the way, there was a need to spin up a new community as soon as possible, and we ended up creating our first community using QPixel, which was existing software (albeit in a much less advanced state) at the time. After that, it was decided to continue to adapt QPixel rather than continue with C#, at which point, since Codidact was no longer just theoretical, samcarter noticed that we were up and running and decided to get involved.
During that period of time between the discussion about creating Codidact from scratch and actually getting off the ground with QPixel, samcarter got involved with our sister site TopAnswers.xyz. TopAnswers is a similar project to Codidact, in that it is an open-source Q&A platform run by the community; there are, however, certain differences in implementation, such as TopAnswers being much more chat-focused. We enjoy a good relationship with TopAnswers, we share contributors, and we both cross-link our communities so that people can more easily find where they're most comfortable.
When samcarter isn't programming, being creative, or working on her collection of rubber ducks, she can be found contributing to our Q&A communities. She's contributed Q&A to several of our communities, and moderates the Power Users community. On a personal note, I monitor flags across the Codidact Network through the use of our dashboard, and maybe 75% of the time I see an active flag, it was raised by samcarter. Or if there's a spam post, and I notice it through the Discord feed of new posts, I'll usually find that she's gotten there first and raised a flag already. It's actually quite impressive.
With her contributions to our Q&A network, samcarter is contributing to a library of knowledge and having fun along the way. She considers knowledge to be the most important commodity that humans have available, and Q&A sites in particular to be an excellent way of sharing and increasing that resource. Writing a question or answer is much less of a time commitment that writing a longer-form text, such as an article or book (although, I'd note, we do have support for articles for those communities who find them useful), which lowers the barrier to entry for contributing knowledge.
By lowering that barrier to entry, the compilation of knowledge contributed by many different people is going to be much more comprehensive than relying on everyone to write articles or books or similar in order to put their knowledge out there.
samcarter's favorite aspect of the Codidact Project is that it is created by the community, for the community. Developing a platform community-first means that the needs of the community and users are always going to be the top priority. She's also appreciative that everything is open-source, having been involved in many open-source projects in the past, including many related to the LaTeX typesetting program. (She's a maintainer of the LaTeX beamer class and has written several of her own packages, such as TikZducks.)
While she doesn't have a favorite post to highlight on the network, she would like to highlight the design of the project, commenting that it looks very modern, and that logos such as the smiling book (our Friendly Blue Monster) are cute. The design that we use is actually our own design framework called Co-Design, which can also be found on GitHub.
On behalf of the Codidact Team, I'd like to extend my thanks to samcarter for the work that she puts in to our communities. It's not taken for granted, and we appreciate the time and effort that you dedicate to contributing to the library of knowledge and the platform to support that library. Thank you, and hopefully I'll keep seeing your name pop up around the network for a while yet.
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