All the way from Auckland, New Zealand, Maxime is a long-time user and improver of Silverstripe CMS. Maxime has written 3 repositories in PHP, CSS, and JavaScript. Maxime has extensive experience in Web development. Look what Maxime’s core responsibilities are in managing the Silverstripe CMS Squad to deliver value for Silverstripe CMS users, he is also a content author, developer, and product owner.
Shahzeb: Hello Maxime, thank you for talking to us today! Before we start, how about you tell our readers about yourself?
Maxime: I’m the CMS Squad Team Lead at Silverstripe. Silverstripe is the company that develops and maintains the Silverstripe CMS open source project. The CMS Squad is the team at Silverstripe that looks after the Silverstripe CMS.
I’m also a Core Committer on the Silverstripe CMS Project. The Core Committers are a group of developers from inside and outside Silverstripe that shape the broad direction of Silverstripe CMS.
Both of these roles lead me to contribute to Silverstripe CMS and to support the Silverstripe CMS community. That can take the form of producing new features, fixing bugs, drafting docs, answering questions, presenting at conferences, etc.
Shahzeb: When and how did you start your career with Silverstripe? Any interesting stories you’d like to share about your journey? What were some challenges you faced in the beginning, and how did you tackle them?
Maxime: I started working at Silverstripe in 2018 as a Senior Product Developer. However, I had been working with Silverstripe CMS for 4 years prior to that.
Going from being a user of Silverstripe CMS to a maintainer was an interesting experience. When you’re building a Silverstripe CMS site, you’re just trying to solve one problem for a specific client. However, when you’re working on Silverstripe CMS directly, you’re trying to solve problems for thousands of clients with varying situations. You’ll never meet most of them, but still have to account for all the weird and wonderful ways developers interact with Silverstripe CMS.
It requires quite a shift in thinking and approach. But it also exposes you to an entirely new class of challenges and really forces you to grow as a developer.
Shahzeb: You currently work at Silverstripe as a Senior Principal Product Developer CMS Squad Team Lead, What does a typical project look like? Could you share any interesting stories?
Maxime: We have an interesting mix of work. Obviously, when working on a mature platform that thousands of other projects rely on, a big chunk of your time will be spent on making sure things don’t break … and fixing them when they do.
Working on a widely used open source project also means that there’s lots of users out there competing for your intention. That can take the form of questions, bug reports, feature requests, pull requests, etc. A big part of my job is prioritising things and
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This article was written by Shahzeb Ahmed and originally published on The Official Cloudways Blog.