Community Contributor Spotlight - conversation with Anselm Christophersen

There are over 21,000 members in the SilverStripe open source community. They have actively submitted their code, fixed bugs, helped other members in the forum, built modules and hosted meetups - building up an awesome community to learn and share knowledge. Today, we put one of them in the spotlight to acknowledge their contribution to our community: Anselm Christophersen from Denmark.

Anselm is “a web designer and developer, and lover of tech and pleasing design”, as he describes himself on his website. He is based in Denmark but works for clients all over the world to help them in all stages of the web development process. Recently, he has successfully co-organised the second StripeCon - the SilverStripe European Conference - in London, UK. I caught up with him during the conference.

Photo: Anselm Christophersen - Greetings from the countryside in Denmark

What’s your involvement with StripeCon Europe?
I have been part of StripeCon since the beginning. I was always interested in StripeCon even before the first event because I wanted to push SilverStripe in Europe. Last year, I planned the first conference with Zauberfisch and Simon [other community members, also co-organisers for StripeCon Europe]. This year, my involvement was a bit less - I’ve just got married, but I have been participating in some of the planning, trying to put a structure on the entire workflow of the event.

Why did you decide to start StripeCon Europe?
It was a bit lonely working and not being able to get in contact with anybody else. Before StripeCon, I only met Thomas [another community member] once or twice and I think that was it. I didn’t meet anyone in person doing SilverStripe work. Ah... I once met a guy from Chile, Francisco, very randomly and he was just living next door (laughs). It’s hard to keep up with technologies, not knowing “is it working?”, “am I doing the right things?”. I wanted to meet other people to share experiences.

How did you first discover SilverStripe?
Way back in 2007. I was doing Business Studies - I was an exchange student in Singapore. I’ve always been doing web development and was doing my own CMS [Content Management System]. I wanted to find a good system, something that I could keep working on in the long run. I was looking everywhere and read about SilverStripe and did a start-up in SilverStripe with a few guys.

Apart from the StripeCon Europe, how else have you been involved with the SilverStripe community?
I have also contributed a few code lines to the SilverStripe community and open sourced the Calendar module.

Is there anything else you want to work on in the future with the SilverStripe community?
E-commerce module is something that I want to work on.

At the end of the interview, I asked Anselm a few random questions to get to know him outside his passion for SilverStripe.

What’s the biggest issue facing the world today?
I think we need to learn to treat each other and other species on this planet better.

Do you like Lego?
I used to like Lego. I’m not so interested anymore.

Star Wars or Star Trek or Dr Who?
Star Wars, I like Star Wars.

If you want to know more about Anselm, head over to his website or GitHub profile. His open source work is available  on GitHub and showcases of his work are available to see on his website as well.

Talk videos from StripeCon Europe will be available on SilverStripe Vimeo in the next few days, so keep an eye out for the announcement via SilverStripe Facebook and Twitter. A big “thank you” to our community members - Anselm, Zauberfisch, and Simon, who have spent many hours organising and running a very successful educational event to benefit other members in the SilverStripe open source community.