Coffee Talk #1 with Aurélien Georget, Strapi CPO

We are very excited to announce that we published our first Coffee Talk, a Q&A session video with Aurélien Georget, Strapi CPO.

The community has been asking questions on social media and on our slack and we felt that they would like to know a bit more about the people behind Strapi. This is how we came up with the idea of the Coffee Talks. We thought we would do our own one but with a little spin on it.

This idea is to reply to all the questions you ask us, one Strapi member at the time. Because some of you are wondering which directions Strapi is going, we thought Aurélien Georget, that is leading the vision, would be the first to be interviewed.

So here is the video and you can find below the transcript of the questions he answered for you.

How old are you, can you describe your background and how you came up with this idea?

I'm 25, I started coding when I was 13-14, at the beginning just as a hobby and my first project was to build a CMS, a game CMS for one of my customers and I never left the world of CMS since then.

What is your role within Strapi?

As a CPO, my main goal is to lead the vision, I'm getting a lot of insight from the community, from our productboard. I try to align them with our vision, and with our roadmap even if sometimes it's a little bit tricky to do it, but we try to accept all the insights we have.

How do you make long term decision regarding the framework?

The developer experience is the most important thing for us. We know exactly how Strapi should look like in 2 or 3 years. So we are trying to build a product as developers because we are developers. And sometimes we prefer to promote the user experience over the right way to do it as a developer. I think Strapi has a great balance between both. We have a pretty good developer experience but also the user experience in the administration panel is very important, and I think that's one of the thing that is making a difference right now.

How often do you stumble over existing parts that need reworking that do not fit in your todays vision of Strapi?

Very often. Because right now, I'm pretty sure you know it, but we are currently rewriting the administration panel and all the plugin framework. There is a lot of parts of the code base that did not change since the beginning of Strapi. I think we have pretty solid bases, but we can do far better and we can improve a lot the codebase and specific parts of the projects.

Is the vision clear? Is it becoming clearer every day?

Yes, the vision is clear and it's becoming clearer everyday. As an example, the roadmap is defined for the next 12 months and more. The main issue we are facing it the lack of human resources and contributors in the project. We have a lot of feature to make and we are looking for people and we are hiring so you can apply on our website, if your want.

What are some of your current short term and long term plans with regards to the Strapi roadmap?

The next big challenges we have is to rebuild all the plugin framework we have. We plan to have a new hook system to let plugins connect together and have better interactions together. The next feature we are going to release is the repeatable fields. It's one of the missing features, it's asked a lot by the community. We have a lot of feedback and insight on it so thank you again. The next feature after is the translation plugin. A lot of people wants to translate their content in several languages, so this is the next plugin. This plugin won't be free but I'll talk about it later.

Why @strapijs over @storyblok?

So for this video, when I saw your question on twitter, I tested Storyblok again. They have a visual approach which is great, I think, for building websites. But as a headless CMS, when you want to build a mobile app, or if you want to connect your API with connected objects, I think this approach can be limited. Also, Storyblok is a cloud based solution, so you cannot customise the administration panel, you cannot customise the API, you don't know where the data is stored, you don't know the owner of your data. Whereas when you are using Strapi, you own everything. You own your data, you own your code, you own your API, you can customise everything, so that's why I believe in the Strapi approach but yeah, it's a great product, but it's not the same, they are cloud-based and we are open-source.

Given your work done on the graphQL plugin, do you feel it is better/worse than REST or do you feel both should be used?

Great question. I think both approaches are great. GraphQL is a super technology and REST as well. I really do love GraphQL, but both approaches are great and you can use what you want.

Windows support? 😁

You should use a Mac (haha). Yes, we have to admit we weren't perfect on Windows but we focused a lot of our efforts improving Windows support during the last month, so you should go check it out and I hope you will like it.

Would you mind sharing some business cases that uses Strapi? That would be really cool to have some great integration best practice. Thanks

Yeah, we have a lot of big companies which are currently using Strapi. If you go on our website, you can see that we have IBM, we also have Asos, Discovery Channel and a lot more that we cannot share with you. You can use Strapi to build a mobile application, you can use Strapi with Gastby to build a frontend website, you can use Strapi to build a connected object or whatever you want. If you want to share content on any kind of devices and platform, Strapi is the product to do it.

What are your thoughts on getting Strapi profitable?

As you might know, Strapi is an open-source project. It's free and will always stay free. But this summer, we plan to release for example, the translation plugin and this plugin won't be free, you will have to pay to use it. So this is our main business model. We also plan to do support and even hosting in the long term. So, yeah, that's the main points of our business model.

Will you offer a SaaS version of Strapi with 3 environments in the future, like Directus?

Yeah, it could happen. Not in the near future, but yeah, it might happen in more than 2 or 3 years, sure.

Are you single?

Yes, I am single. (laughs) What is that?? (clap) This is the end.

Thanks everyone for watching this video. Please leave a comment below and subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you have any questions, please ask us on twitter, Slack or Github, and see you soon bye.

Here are the questions that also have been asked on twitter:

Will Strapi come up with a framework for creating large-scale API solutions, competing with express, mongo or other powerful languages to create APIs?

Strapi is currently based on top of Koa. We don’t plan to create our own framework for now. I cannot see any advantages by doing it. It scales pretty well and Koa does the job 👍

When are you planning to release Strapi 3 Stable? You are already in alpha for a very long time...

We made the choice to stay in alpha for a very long time for many reasons. The #1 is that the architecture is going to change, and we know it since the beginning. Then, it allows us to make breaking changes, even if we try to avoid them as much as possible. Building an ecosystem like we are doing is not easy and we want to take our time to make the best choices. However, releasing the stable version is one of our main goal this year! The beta is planned at the end of April and the stable version should be available in August.