Our journeys to Neos
Simon Krull:
I became aware of Neos in 2019 through a presentation by Sebastian Kurfürst about the Neos basics. I have always been interested in web development and open-source, but at that time I was still working in my old job as an industrial mechanic. However, that hasn't stopped me from getting involved in the Neos community in my spare time. Overall, Sebastian Kurfürst's talk motivated me to join the Neos community and participate. And since September 2021 I work professionally with Neos, which makes me very happy and proud every day!
Marc Henry Schultz:
In 2019 my cousin told me of this professional CMS because he worked already with Flow and teased me to use it instead of WordPress. I tried setting it up and failed miserably. But I was already convinced by the editing experience. After school I got more into tech and experimented with Neos again in March 2020. During that period I started learing many things like PHP, JS - essentially everything - and Neos.
Anke Häslich:
My journey to Neos started when it was still the expected TYPO3 v5 release. While I kept an eye on the progress, I stayed with the "old" TYPO3 for the next couple of years. After parting ways with TYPO3, I specialised in frontend development until we decided to build our company website with Neos in 2019. Today I consider myself lucky to work as a full stack developer with Neos and enjoy introducing it to my colleagues.
What amazes us about Neos?
- The welcoming community with its local origin
- The editing experience with its workspace feature and tree like content structure
- The architecture behind Neos and the extensibility
How did you get in touch with the community and THE team™?
Anke Häslich:
After co-hosting NeosCon this year, it's quite fitting in retrospect that my first contact with the community was actually the NeosCon 2019 in Dresden. Later that year, our company asked Sebastian Kurfürst to host workshops for us to improve our knowledge of Neos. Since then, Sebastian and I have stayed in touch.
Simon Krull:
I had my first contact with the team when I started getting involved in the Neos Marketing Guild. My first task was to translate the neos.io into German and record new short clips in English and German showing how to work with Neos.
Marc Henry Schultz:
I started experimenting a lot with Neos while also answering questions on Disucss and Slack - so naturally I got in touch with the community. It always made me wonder who was behind Neos and I wanted to get to know the team. Somewhere it was said that you could join the weekly, so I sheepishly asked to get a look behind the scenes.
What led to you joining the team?
Marc Henry Schultz:
In November 2021 I joined the sprint online after workhours. At the first day I showed Christian and Martin my latest experiment: a rewritten Fusion parser. The next few days I also tried to participate at the sprint - talking along during a break in a windy walk didn't work so well. But before the last day, on 11 November, during another later huddle session, I was asked by Christian if I wanted to join the team.
I didn't expect this out of the blue. But YES.
Anke Häslich:
After several failed attempts to participate in Neos Sprints, I finally managed to join the October 2022 Sprint. I didn't know what to expect, but even so, I never really felt like a guest there. For example, I was an active part of the Neos Team Retrospective although I never intended to :D. At the end of the second day, to my own surprise, Sebastian Kurfürst asked if I would like to join the team. ... It didn't take long before I said yes.
Simon Krull:
I have been passionately involved in the Neos Marketing Guild since 2019. Then at the sprint after NeosCon 2022, I was asked by Sebastian Helzle if I would like to join the Neos team. I didn't have to think about it very long.
Any specific areas you like to focus/work on in the future to take Neos to the next level?
Simon Krull:
In the future, I would like to be more involved in the Neos Core and the Neos UI, but also continue to be active in the Neos Marketing Guild.
Anke Häslich:
Bringing people together to share ideas and knowledge has become an ongoing concern for me. Therefore, I would like to focus on the organization of the NeosCon, at least in the near future. I would also like to help revive the regular Neos meetups. However, in the long term, I do want to work on the Neos Core.
Marc Henry Schultz:
My goal is to improve Fusion, the Neos user interface and the overall code.