Community Spotlight #6 - Mattias van den Belt

He will surely be one of the first to answer you if you have a question on our public slack. Mattias van den Belt, a student in the Netherlands, tells us a little more about him, his background, his experience with Strapi, and his presence for the community.

What was your educational background, and what are you doing for a living?

I'm still a student, but I'm doing this part-time. I work part-time as a software engineer at TaskHero and follow the fourth and last year of my Bachelor's degree in Information and Communication Technology in my evening hours. TaskHero is an Employment Agency in The Netherlands which is specialized in helping SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) with short/flexible jobs to fill.

When did you start using Strapi and Why?

In June 2018 my neighbor asked me if I could help him realize an idea that he had been thinking about for a long time. He's a shoemaker and he was convinced that a platform could greatly help his industry in difficult times, a platform to share knowledge on, that could be found by customers, and provide the small businesses with some practical tools. So I needed an application that on the one hand could help me to make a website with dynamic content and on the other hand be a powerful back-end for functionalities such as inventory management, cash desk, calendar, and an internal marketplace/community. For my angular front-end, I was looking for a suitable API framework (or headless CMS).

Looking around I found Strapi and it provided me with a quick setup of my data model and also gave me the possibility to fully customize it to my own needs. It also provided me to go full-stack JavaScript in which I became more and more interested. All in all, I got caught up in discovering Strapi and its possibilities. Because Strapi is open source, and my questions went beyond the documentation, I soon ended up looking up the source code, to try to figure out how I could make things work even better. To be honest, the shoemaker platform is still in development. It has been quite busy for the last couple of years. But hopefully, by the end of September, we finally can go live with the first features.

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

Over the last two years, I have built a couple of different projects with Strapi, projects concerning data collecting and open-source intelligence, projects for my study, and lately a project to automate some processes at my work. But the thing I'm most proud of is the strapi-hook I built for Algolia. Algolia is a hosted search engine capable of delivering real-time results within milliseconds. We use it for the, earlier mentioned, shoemaker's platform, to direct visitors to the nearest shop or the right information they are looking for.

It wasn't hard to create the integration, after exploring the docs, I found a way to add a service to Strapi that can be used in the Lifecycle Hooks. But what gives me the most satisfaction is the fact that other people are actually using it and willing to contribute by creating issues or submitting pull requests. The almost 1000 downloads are almost nothing compared to the almost two million for Strapi, but for me, it is more than awesome!

You are here to help the community and ready to contribute, why is it so important for you?

In short; I just love Strapi. I see a lot of potential in Strapi and I want everyone who could use it to know about it. I also want to help people if I think I have an answer to their question or problem. By helping people in Slack, answering a simple question, but also by reading most of the discussions, issues, and pull requests on GitHub. It often happens that I just jump straight into the source code to figure a way out to make it work. This way I'm helping others but also learning a lot of the framework itself. And if I find an error or improvement of course I will submit a pull request about it.

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

First of all, I will finish my bachelor's, then I want to develop myself into a full-stack JavaScript developer with of course using Strapi to develop my back-end. Lately, Strapi has been presented a lot as a headless CMS, I fully agree that it fulfills that role completely. But for me, Strapi will always be a powerful API framework, in my role as a developer I will certainly continue to use Strapi as my go-to back-end API. I also have some plans to develop a Strapi plugin for Algolia, to add more possibilities and to add a GUI to make the integration with Algolia a simple experience. Next to that, I'll keep helping you guys with any question on Slack and GitHub, even if I have to dig in the source code to find the right answer.