Interview with kiwi GHOP contestant Simon Welsh

A few weeks ago Simon Welsh, a local (Wellington) contestant involved in the Google Highly Open Participation (GHOP) contest popped up to our office to introduce himself. It was great to put a face to a name, and to a hard worker who is one of the most hard-working contestants. He answered a couple of questions I put to him...

How did you find out about SilverStripe and the GHOP08 contest?

Over a year ago my brother and I were searching the internet for the appropriate tool to build a website for our church, and we came across SilverStripe. In the end, we never made that website,  but we kept monitoring SilverStripe's progress, and when the blogpost about GHOP was added, it came up in my RSS reader and I was quick to sign up--I was keen on the Google money, T-Shirt and the trip!

What have your experiences with GHOP been?

It's been really fun, and the people who volunteer their time in the support channel have been great, especially Matt Peel who I know also has University and his job at SilverStripe to keep on top of. While I do have a laptop, I can't get on the internet all the time. This prevents me from  consulting the SilverStripe documentation, making it slower to figure out how to do my work. It's also been rather rewarding to find bugs and submit patches to SilverStripe as I know I'm making a real improvement to the package.

What tips do you have to improve the contest?

In general I think the contest is already great, and possibly the only improvement would be expanding the prizes to include tools for students like hardware and software to let you explore and learn more geeky stuff. This is because as a highschool student its unrealistic to afford the expense of your own fast computer or commercial software. The ten projects the contest currently includes are fine, but if GHOP were to repeat and include other projects, it would be important to ensure the extra projects are ones that highschool students use already, so that it is relevant and attractive.

How did you get into programming?

Back in 2001 I entered the Television New Zealand Web Challenge and before long I was on the path of making websites; first static, then quickly into increasingly complicated dynamic ones using PHP. My brother found a PHP game called Legend of the Green Dragon which really interested me and I put my newly formed PHP knowledge to use and moved my way up to be a core developer for it.

In New Zealand, highschool only teaches computing at a complete novice level, so to get anywhere you need to be really proactive and learn most of it yourself: its great that the TVNZ and Google contests exist! 

What are your plans after school?

I'm really keen to increase my involvement with open source, such as being a regular and useful contributor to the dragon game and SilverStripe. I'll probably study computer science and hope to find a fun and challenging web development job.

Thanks Simon for popping by!

No problem, was great to visit the SilverStripe offices!