Introducing the Strapi Community Stars Program

Today, we're super pleased to be sharing the fruits of something that we've been putting together for a few months. Today we're proud to announce the Strapi Community Stars Program.

We're starting out with 9 Community Stars - all of whom you'll get to know more about in this article. Being an Open Source Headless CMS, Open-Source values are deeply embedded in us and the Strapi community. A community which means the world to us. From our first commits in late 2015 to our stable release in mid-2020, the community has stood firmly by us and given us the direction and contributions that have made us what we are today.

Contributions come in all shapes and sizes and the actions of the community speak to that.

Pull Requests and Issues

We've had community members open some major Pull Requests (PRs) and Issues on the Strapi project repo. Here are a few noteworthy examples of PRs submitted on the Strapi GitHub repository:

• Improve admin's initial load time

• Add support for brotli compression

• Implement Graphql Aggregation Feature for Bookshelf

• New auth Provider 'Apple SignIn'

Meetups & Events

Pre COVID, we had a nascent Global Meetup Program and an enthusiastic group of community leaders willing to help bring local user groups together. . Regardless, our friends at Strapi Cz have seen the pandemic through and with the help of Ondřej Janošík have held 2 events virtually with more to come ;) Here is a list of the groups that were recently started:

• Strapi San Francisco

• Strapi Paris

• Strapi London

• Strapi Toronto

• Strapi Sydney

• Strapi CZ (Brno + Prague)

• Strapi Melbourne

Forum and Slack

We've recently moved from using GitHub Discussions to having a dedicated forum for the Strapi Community. Community members like Mattie and Marin have gone above and beyond on the forum making sure the transition was seamless. Here are some popular topics:

• Multi Tennant SaaS

• Internationalization

• Roles and permissions not showing after clear installation

Articles and Tutorials

Just over a few months after launching our Write for the Community Program, we've seen the Strapi community's ability to create and submit educational content skyrocket with amazing writers like Cretu Razvan, Nirmalya Ghosh, Ryan Belke and Precious Luke. Since its launch, we've had community members put together more than 15 amazing articles. Here are a few worth looking at:

• Adding Idyll Support to Strapi

• Strapi Authentication in Nuxt.js

Videos and Talks

Active Strapi community members also record high-quality videos too! With channels like Pragmatic Reviews, Chris Sevilleja, Dr. Shahin Rostamim, and Alex the Entreprenerd producing content and giving talks at meetups. You can find video content on Strapi all over the internet. Here are some examples.

• Strapi headless CMS for the JAMstack

• Build an Event App with Vue.js, Gridsome & Strapi.js

• Build an Inventory Management System Prototype with Strapi and React

Program Goals

At its core, the Strapi Community Stars is an initiative to empower and enable active and resourceful Strapi community members who go out of their way to serve the community. We want to recognize them as leaders (read Stars) in their different disciplines as well as provide them with resources and opportunities to grow as professionals.

Program Benefits

The program comes with various benefits which we believe will help us achieve these ambitious goals. Besides insights into a top open-source project and roadmap, the Community Stars will have a larger role to play in the feature development and testing of the project. We also, where applicable offer help towards becoming a Strapi contributor or even maintainer.

What is a developer program without Swag? The Community Stars will have an Exclusive Swag Pack, Recognition on Strapi’s website, Twitter & Online Channels and opportunities to mentor hackathons & attend conferences for free. All steps towards recognizing them as leaders in their fields.

We want to empower the Strapi community, part of that is us giving the Community Stars resources and support in their areas of interest and we’ll offer them professional recommendations for the amazing work they put into their community activity.

Our Founding Members 🤩

Catan Marin Aged 28 and born in Moldova. Catan was invited to Bucharest to work for an international fintech corporation with multiple brands. He has been working with them for more than 5 years now. He mostly does backend development (but not limited to it) and loves programming, automation, and cars. LinkedIn | Twitter

William Bautista-Romero William is a JavaScript enthusiast always looking for best ways to do his work more effectively, an advocate for A11Y and good practices, and a Linux nerd convinced that we can do any sort of frontend work using it. His motto is "Knowledge is power". LinkedIn

Vanessa Pasque Vanessa is currently the Co-Founder and CTO at RiderClub.fr. She has been an open-source addict for more than 10 years and loves to share and discuss with others about new technologies - a passion that began with her first experience at Mandriva, and continues today. They developed their business with the Strapi solution about two years ago, and continue to improve and create new components and plugins, and share many of them with the community. She has some hobbies: music, video-games, cooking, sleep... and her children (but they are not really compatible with her sleeping passion). LinkedIn | Twitter

Scott Agirs For Scott, creating new products has always been his one true love. For over 5 years now these products are digital and all JavaScript. Gotta love JavaScript. LinkedIn | Twitter

Jelmer Visser Jelmer is a Lead developer @ Blue Flamingos & weflycheap. He enjoys Tech, music and coffee. LinkedIn | Twitter

Rami Shashati Rami is a software engineer and technical writer from Portugal. On the tech-side, his main interests are JavaScript, Vue, Nuxt, Jamstack, software architectures, and dev workflows. In his free time, he likes to practice sports, go to the beach and country-side. LinkedIn | Twitter

Michael Fatoki Bello Michael is a UI Designer, UXer, and Jamstack enthusiast and ex Creative Director for 8 years managing and building projects for celebs, SMEs and global brands, the hard way (before Figma, Strapi, Vercel or Netlify). He is currently innovating in the Fintech space, eager to solve problems and make awesome and once complicated experiences in a simple and pleasing way. He is always eager to learn and share knowledge and experiences while finding more cool ways to leverage the power of Strapi and the Jamstack to improve UI / UX anywhere content can be served.

LinkedIn | Twitter

Mattias van den Belt Mattias is a full-time software engineer from The Netherlands, he works at TaskHero and he hopes to finish his Bachelor's degree in Software Engineering, which he follows in the evening hours of the day, in June 2021. He is a young father of one and has a passion for ants and nature. You are most likely to find him in the Community Slack or on the Forum helping others with almost any question about Strapi. If he doesn't know the answer he'll probably jump into the source code to figure something out. LinkedIn | Twitter

Adegbenga Agoro Adegbenga Agoro loves working with budding entrepreneurs in formulating their technology and business strategy plans. With over 17 years of practical experience in Software Design & Development, Business Development, Product Design, Ideation & Management, Business Process Re-engineering, Graphic Design and Design Thinking, Adegbenga seeks to consistently help institutions find the solutions that aid in the achievement of operational and financial improvement and growth. He does this by providing the right tools for the situation per time, optimizing existing business processes and operations and by managing/implementing ground-breaking and innovative solutions and/or products. LinkedIn | Twitter

Program Guidelines

The program is currently invite-only. Like we mentioned, consistent activity from people going above and beyond for the Strapi Community warranted the program's creation and thus acts as a prerequisite for an invite into the program.

Putting together and inviting the first set of Community Stars took a huge log out of our eyes, we realised that the Strapi Community could be more diverse. Some would argue that it is a reflection of the state of technology in general but we don't want to make excuses. We've released that there's more we can do and we're choosing to start that journey now and will be sharing more on that in the coming weeks. Our first step on that journey is to make sure it is easy for anyone to contribute to the project. We've put together a community resources repository that tackles many areas (usually underappreciated) that people can use to contribute to open source. If you've been wanting to contribute but feel you don't know how to. This resource is for you ❤️

Speaking of getting involved, we have a couple of ways you can do just that :)

• Become part of the Strapi Meetup Program

• Contribute the Strapi Project or FoodAdvisor App

Check out also our Meetup Kit.

If you have any questions about the program, please reach out to Daniel daniel.phiri@strapi.io from the DevRel Team or Derrick derrick.mehaffy@strapi.io from the Community Team. Stay safe and take care.