How Kwinten Solved the Source Provider Problem

The Strapi community is a real force of inspiration and motivation. The talented individuals around the world take time out of their day to contribute to the code, solving complex (and simple) problems using insights from their personal experiences.

A few releases ago there was an amazing story of someone from the community who helped the Strapi team move faster on a feature. The story starts with how setting up Strapi on Heroku was generally pretty easy and generally ran pretty smoothly.

There was just one small hiccup that was pretty noticeable. Once in "sleep mode", all images are lost when the server restarts.

However, with a relatively simple function it's easy to upload the images on Cloudinary (or other providers), safely saving the images so they're all still available every time the server comes out of "sleep mode".

That's the simple solution Kwinten first created that helped solve the issue and made setting up Strapi on Heroku all the easier and smoother.

Discovering Strapi

Kwinten first came across Strapi while looking for a specific tool for a freelance job. His search led him to stumbling upon an open-source headless CMS he hadn't heard about before, and he immediately wanted to take it for a test drive.

While reading about the features and use-cases, he noticed that while there was a lot of information around creating blogs with Strapi, there seemed to be a few issues with deployment.

So he created a repo for people like him that wanted to quickly deploy Strapi and try everything out with minimal hassle, choosing to focus on Heroku since it comes with a built-in feature for implementing single-click deployment buttons. The fact that Heroku has an easy-to-setup free option as well made it all the more suited for people looking to easily test out Strapi.

Kwinten then made a pull request and the rest is history in the logs.

Open-Source Community

Since Kwinten's initial solution there have been further changes that make it even easier to set up and use any upload provider you want, but his story is a nice reminder of how the community can always help move Strapi forward.

In Kwinten's case, he had worked on open-source projects in the past, but found himself struggling to muster up the motivation to join any new communities or add to any new repos. With so many projects falling victim to bitrot and slowly becoming outdated with fewer and fewer contributors, it's easy to understand why.

Finding the perfect balance of large-enough scale, a decent amount of activity, and simply feeling welcome is at the core of how many people decide if it's worth contributing to an open-source project.

Strapi checked all three boxes for Kwinten, making it easy to find the motivation to work on a new feature and exciting for both himself and the Strapi team to see something so useful come from his code.

We're always looking to welcome new members to the community. If you're interested but not sure where you can help, check out the product board or write for the community and see if there's anything you can pick up!

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