Derrick Mehaffy is the most active member of the Strapi community. A few months back he shared with us his story of how we went from a simple Strapi user to a community expert. Today we are more than happy to welcome Derrick to the Strapi family!

Why did you join Strapi?

I wanted to push myself outside my comfort zone and into a field that I only really started to dive into over the past few years after using Strapi on personal projects. Over that time frame, working with and around the other users as well as the Strapi team I really started to feel welcomed into the Strapi ecosystem.

At some point, people began asking why don't I apply for a position, and I never really had a good answer to that question. I think over the years, finding myself spending more and more time talking with so many people, helping others, and solving problems I started to feel like I was already a part of the Strapi family and I decided why not give it my best shot and apply for a position.

What will you be working on?

My primary role within Strapi as a Solutions Engineer will be just that, engineering solutions. Be that answering community questions on our various platforms, working with enterprise customers, or working with all the various teams within Strapi to help unify us as a company, a community, and an overall family of like-minded developers, content creators, and business owners.

What advice can you give to community members who want to get involved with Strapi?

The absolute must for getting started with Strapi would be the documentation, as someone coming from almost no development background, the documentation has been my key tool while troubleshooting.

Once you have a good understanding of how key parts of Strapi function at the logical level, my suggestion would be to just dig into the source code. There are parts you may not fully understand from the start (I myself was in that position) but as you continue learning about how Strapi functions you will begin to see just how powerful of a tool it can be for many of your projects.

If you are new to Strapi, just give it a try!

Take a look at the Getting Started guide to jump on board, or get started with the following command line:

yarn create strapi-app my-app --quickstart

or

npx create-strapi-app my-project --quickstart

Get involved

Check out our public product roadmap to see what features we’ll be working on next. Don’t see a feature you’d like in the backlog? Feel free to submit new feature requests or even better, start contributing to Strapi on GitHub. All contributions and users are welcome!