Community Spotlight #3 - Pouya Miralayi

We love Strapi because it is 100% open source. Thanks to that, we are grateful to have the chance to meet awesome people and contributors to this project. Some will fix bugs, others will improve the code or add new features. We are lucky enough to have met someone that does all of these. And who also takes the time to explain to the community how he did, with tutorials.

The Community Spotlight of this month is showcasing Pouya Miralayi, a community member who has been contributing actively to the main repository (4 merged PR so far). He has also been creating a plugin, allowing to import your content in Strapi via a file, external URL, or just with raw text. Then, he wrote a tutorial about how to create a plugin! (the tutorial has been removed since the way we create plugins in Strapi has changed a lot but thanks a lot to Pouya, for this awesome blog post)

Pouya is the kind of person in our community that shows so much enthusiasm that we would be ashamed to disappoint him. He, like many others in the community, gives us the energy to try and do the best we can every day.

Here are his answers to our questions.

What was your educational background?

I have a Bachelor's degree in Information Technology; I was not really interested in staying on the academic road, and I decided not to continue education for the sake of becoming a software engineer!

When did you start using Strapi, and why?

Well, it was at the beginning of 2019. I had a project to build an admin dashboard pushing contents for the people that use the front panel. But the contents were actually Excel files, which I had to parse manually and turn into separate records of data! The deadline for the project was only 7 days, and I had to find something for the rescue!

I decided to look for some of the frameworks out there and see which one of them helps me build up the API as fast as possible and provides me with an already usable admin panel, so I don't have to put the time for actually building one! I tried some of the CMS's out there, but none of them was covering my whole needs! They all came with good stuff, but they had some of the essential things missing! I was looking for a comprehensive solution that, besides a beautiful admin panel, also gives me a solid and easy structure on the API side, a helping hand on the DB side, file uploads, authentication, etc. So I should not have to do the extra work by myself.

After a while, I finally found Strapi and as I looked deeper into the features, I realized that Strapi is what I was looking for the whole time! I was surprised by the fact that there was a project like this out there, and I wasn't using it already! The project did go well, and whenever my boss came to me with a new feature request, I was not scared anymore! Steps by steps the project started to grow up from a simple file upload into a portal with thousands of android & web users, different levels of access, multiple authentication providers, GraphQl consumers &, etc. During all that time Strapi got my back, and I always said to myself if I had decided to start this project on my own ground, the project would definitely reach a point where I would give it up and announced my failure! ;)

What is the thing you built with Strapi that you are most proud of?

​ I have a daytime job as a software developer in a security company. Back there, we were working on a project which was about crawling thousands of mobile apps from different mobile markets, performing security analysis on the applications and commit the result of the tests into a database for future references.

The challenge was that the crawling process was periodic, and we needed a robust backend that can handle thousands of requests per minute! Besides that, we had a mobile application that would connect to this backend, retrieve security reports for an app or upload it for performing the analysis in case we did not already have it in our database. Now we needed a solution that can tolerate the crawling requests and analyzing process and also respond well to our mobile users! As you can guess, we did it all using Strapi! And even further, we defined multiple user access for our premium features. We recently used the Webhooks feature of Strapi to notify our admins & premium users of newly performed tests that were on the queue or were requested by our users! ​

You already build a handy import content plugin, what is your next move?

Well, the plugin you mentioned has some new features on the way (export feature, support for xlsx extensions, etc.), but the thing I am really excited about is the Single Type feature, which I was waiting for a long time.

I have been an active member of an open-source project named Grapesjs for a long time (if you open up an issue there, you would probably see me! ;) It is a template builder for web pages, and the thing I wanted to achieve since the beginning was to see this project integrated with a CMS like Strapi. Now with the new "Single Type" feature, it is possible for users to define their "Single Types" as a backbone structure for their web pages and link the defined content with the UI elements they want, all happening inside Strapi and Grapesjs as a plugin!

This will allow users to easily design their pages using D&D, link them with data, generate a slug for each page using Strapi "UID field", and publish them at the end! This is the plugin I am currently working on, and I will publish it as soon as it reaches a stable point.

What will the future look like for you, and will Strapi be part of it?

Well, since I have met Strapi, I have gained some sort of a recipe for my projects with Strapi functioning at the core! Most of the projects I work on usually need a backend and nothing but Strapi would make me satisfied with every aspect of the project. So YES! Strapi would definitely be my number one choice, and I am always looking forward to using it whenever it is possible!

Cheers!