Meet Susi Moog, TYPO3 GmbH COO, Germany (Application Podcast S02E11)

Susi first learned about TYPO3 during her time at university, in 2004. She was asked to create a website for the Alumni Club she was a part of, and she started sifting through content management systems to find one she liked. “The first few tries I had with content management systems that other people said I should use just didn't work out.” Susi says. “Everybody else was using TYPO3 at that point in Germany, so I decided to use it, too.” She disagrees with those who say starting up with TYPO3 is difficult. “TYPO3 is the first CMS I was able to install, and my technical background was pretty limited,” she says.

Susi’s Transition to Agency Developer and COO of the GmbH

Susi stuck with TYPO3 to create the alumni website, and as her experience and knowledge grew, she became a TYPO3 agency developer. Of that experience, she says, “In my opinion, it's a totally different job working as an agency developer than as a framework developer or maintainer because the things you use, need, and build are completely different. And working in the agency helps me to understand why things are needed, what kind of problems we're trying to solve. I like solving problems.” Susi’s adeptness at problem-solving as well as her communication skills would lead her to become the TYPO3 GmbH COO. Of her role, she says, “My job as the COO nowadays is mainly communicating with and listening to people and then telling other people what those people said.”

How the GmbH supports the TYPO3 community

The TYPO3 GmbH is arm of the TYPO3 Project, which provides support and services to TYPO3 professionals, agencies, and the community as a whole. Susi names a few:

• Infrastructure for hosting TYPO3 websites
• Online certification to enhance your TYPO3 skills
• Extended long term support for TYPO3

To support the agency community, Susi says, “The GmbH focus is on things that agencies can't easily provide. We are trying to spend our money in a way that supports the product as a whole, but we also do things beyond that. For example, we are also trying to bring TYPO3 to new markets, including expanding to other countries. The focus is always to bring TYPO3 as a whole forward.”

TYPO3 CMS for Beginners and Beyond

For those looking to get into TYPO3 for the first time, Susi recommends the official documentation and the TYPO3 Guidebook. She also looks to the documentation and other key resources to spread TYPO3 farther beyond Central Europe. She says, “I think we need some kind of educational materials, like video courses or trainings that are more guided than documentation.”

• Her one word to describe TYPO3 — “Powerful.”
• Her favorite feature — “Clipboard number 2.  I'm a lazy editor, so I’m always using it for multi-selection of content elements and copying a page to re-use as a template.”
• One little-known secret of TYPO3 — “You can use TYPO3 in Composer mode, even if you don't have Composer on production.”

Jeffrey A. McGuire   0:00
Welcome to Application the TYPO3 Community Podcast.

Susi Moog  0:06
Hi, my name is Susi. And this is Application the TYPO3 Community Podcast sharing your stories, your projects and the difference you make. Celebrate the TYPO3 community on application, the TYPO3 podcast meet the humans behind the technology.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   0:21
One, two. Welcome to Application, the TYPO3 Community Podcast. I'm Jeffrey A McGuire, you can call me jam. And this is where we celebrate the TYPO3 community sharing your stories talking about your projects and the difference you make in around and with TYPO3 CMS. It was my pleasure and privilege to finally get Susi Moog on the podcast. Today, we've been circling around each other trying to get this one booked for a really long time. And we recorded this late 2021 Susi and I have a chat about how she found TYPO3 and her career long mission to solve cool problems and help people solve their own problems. Whether by making the core better, or making the documentation better to help us then figure where we plucked ourselves what we did wrong and how we do it right the next. As well as working as a developer one day a week. Susi is the Chief Operating Officer of the TYPO3 GmbH. And we get a chance to talk about her view on the role and the position and then how the TYPO3 company enhances the CMS technology and supports the community and the agencies and the professionals within it. I hope you enjoy listening to this podcast, as much as I enjoyed talking with surgeons.

Susi Moog, tell us a little about yourself. Who are you? What do you do? Why are you in meetings all the time?

Susi Moog  2:01
I have no idea. I'm the last one. I'm still the COO of the TYPO3 GmbH. Since nearly a year now. And I work with TYPO3 for a long time. So mainly my job nowadays is communicating with people and listening to people and then telling other people what those people said.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   2:26
So your COO of the TYPO3 GmbH? You said yes. Now one of the things that I love about the TYPO3 communities structure is that you have this company, and an association and the community of of professionals and people who do TYPO3, and it seems to me to be a really balanced structure, how do you view? What is your sort of daily job look like? And I know talking to people, you already said it and listening to people, but um, you know, what is the GmbH? Do for TYPO3, the open source CMS?

Susi Moog  3:01
What are we doing for the TYPO3 community? I don't know a lot of things, a lot of little things. So we are providing some of the infrastructure, for example, if you are hosting and coding might have TYPO3.org, we have written the excellent tool where you can do your certification online, we are writing the clock extension and public publishing that if we answer support questions, we provide extended long term support for TYPO3. So the community provides the first few years of support and then the company takes over and provides another few years, if you don't manage to upgrade so fast. So we can use that to get a bit more value out of your TYPO3 installation.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   3:49
So having three years of extended support from the company on top of three years of the typical community support that is similar to what a lot of open source communities does. Gives people who want to use TYPO3 as a tool right? If you're considering if you needed CMS, for your agency, you need something open source. That means that TYPO3 is officially supported for six years because you are the representative of or the official vendor of TYPO3 CMS all open source all GPL but somebody very smart early on decided to get everybody to sign a contributors license so you can actually have a vendor and that's super cool in the times of GDPR needs compliance supported software and all that kind of thing. So as we look to getting more people to adopt TYPO3, I think that's a really really good selling point to keep in mind that it actually has an official vendor and official support. So all of that stuff adds up to providing enhancements in and around TYPO3 and and maybe would you say filling in gaps where other other service providers are not are not doing a particular activity or maybe there's a something that's not so easy to do profitably for an agency

Susi Moog  5:00
Our focus is on things that agencies can't easily provide, like the youth is one thing. But also like support for the community, we are trying to spend our money in a way that supports the product as a whole, this is not a thing that a single agency could do in the same way. But something bigger than that are more encompassing. For example, we are also trying to bring TYPO3 to new markets or to marketing and other countries. And this is something that one single agency wouldn't try, or we work together with, with some agencies, but you need someone to coordinate all that the focus is always to bring TYPO3 as a whole forward, which in turn then results in profits for the agencies. Because the more people that use TYPO3, the better for the TYPO3 agencies, I think

Jeffrey A. McGuire   5:51
it's really interesting, maybe you have, maybe you're like, a meta arm of the association, right, where generally the association makes decisions about direction and which things to support, but then still needs people to get stuff done. And in your charter, of course, it says that you're not allowed to do anything that competes with professionals, for agencies, with other companies in the ecosystem, which I think is incredibly smart and healthy to do any good stories about the GmbH making a difference and making something you know, Blossom, that wouldn't have been possible. Otherwise,

Susi Moog  6:23
I have a hard time with absolute Sue, I can't guarantee that it wouldn't have been possible without us anyway. But I think things like the myTYPO3.org platform, as we have it now, or the online certification in the amount of time it took us to provide that service wouldn't have been possible if we hadn't done that. And that's not to say that the TYPO3 community isn't able to do a lot of really, really cool stuff. But some things are more easily done if you work full time on them. So that's one of the main parts where I see us come in. So open source is great. But we need to keep in mind that people have lives besides open source, usually, yeah, there are tasks that better, or is it more easily done by people that can spend all of their time on them.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   7:19
That's a great point. And I think maybe that helps reduce the level of burnout in the TYPO3 community, I've been involved and observed other communities where everything is done by volunteers, on principle, and, and it gets really, really tough, and it gets really, really tough to stay motivated and keep doing it year after year and keep keep keep diving in there. So that's, um, that's a really good point. And I think training and certification, the certification is an ideal example of something that is a huge amount of work to organize and a huge amount of work to maintain. Yet the agencies and companies and the community very much benefits from it as a whole, whether you want to prove that you're good enough to get a job, whether you need some sort of indication of whether, you know, you can hire someone, all those kind of things, and frankly, especially in Europe, certifications, you know, having a piece of paper or a or an NFT. Now, that says you're qualified Haha, I slipped it in, um, then qualified to do something right is a big is a big help. Like, if if it's on paper and got a stamp on it, then then it's real in Europe, right? Yeah. And

Susi Moog  8:27
certification is a good example for another reason, because that's one of the areas where we work closely with the community team. So the certification itself is created by a community team that is deeply into the knowledge necessary for the certification. But we review the certifications, and we provide the tooling and the day to day support for doing the certification. So that's a nice example of how we can work together to get something done.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   8:57
How did you get involved in TYPO3? What was your first TYPO3 experience

Susi Moog  9:02
getting it installed in comparison to the other systems I used to use? It was during my university time where I was asked to create a website for our Alumni Club, which I was part of, even though I wasn't finished, but so they wanted to have a website and I found out that I should use the content management system that was 2004 or five, something like that. Yeah. The first few tries I had with content management systems, people said I should use just didn't work out. So then I use TYPO3, because everybody else was using TYPO3 At that point in Germany, where we were studying inflamm staff in northern Germany. At the cost, okay, yeah, economics and journalism.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   9:50
Nice. Nice. That's direct path to CEO of a technology company. Of course it is. Wait So so you just went through a series of where they open source CMS. And in TYPO3 was the first one you got installed.

Susi Moog  10:07
Yeah. But I didn't have any technical background. For me for years, it was so funny to hear people say that TYPO3 is so hard, because I was always thinking, what was the only thing I even got installed, everything else was harder for me.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   10:21
Which is, which is funny. I was complaining about the installation process up few years ago, to someone and it was actually at the TYPO3 conference, I was complaining about a couple of its quirks, like, you have to know when to reload the page, because it doesn't say to do it. And you have to know that the successful installation gives you an error message. And you know, a couple other things. And this guy looks at me says, why would you ever install it yourself? You're supposed to hire a professional?

Well, I mean, so open source has that old story of like, there's people with time and not much money. And there's people with budget who need it yesterday. And that's, that's how we do the service providing right so on the other hand, now, for our company website at Open Strategy Partners, it's TYPO3 and I use I'm in the backend every day, and I'm really enjoying actually touching this the stuff again, it's cool.

Susi Moog  11:21
And for the one thing, just for the error message that comes up when you install it, that was fixed. It's now a nice finally green message. successfully downloaded it and you can get started now.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   11:35
I'm almost disappointed.

Susi Moog  11:37
It's not scaring anyone anymore.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   11:40
Okay, so that club is over. Alright, I'll have to retire that joke. Now. It's you said you you were doing building this website in 2004? Ish. Do you remember what version of TYPO3? That was?

Susi Moog  11:53
Three, seven or three? Eight?

Jeffrey A. McGuire   11:56
Pretty early? Yeah. You made that Alumni website at university? Did you enjoy using TYPO3? Yes. What was it that you liked? I remember coding something, even before CMS is and then it was online, you know, and it's visible and change the green background to red or whatever. And that was just, it felt incredibly powerful to me.

Susi Moog  12:19
For me, the thing I liked most was TypeScript. Because I couldn't program at all. Isn't TypeScript programming in the end? No, no, not really. Have a script is just configuring for you. Yeah. I mean, if you want to call that programming, for me, that's configuration. And it's just yet some lines of configuration, and you can influence the whole rendering process. And without having to code. And for me, that was great, because I did want to learn to code at that point.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   12:47
It's also really interesting architectural choice on top of TYPO3 having always been decoupled. Right, there's also this potential interface language that you don't have to use if you don't want to, to influence what goes on to change what goes on between the two systems. It's, it's, it's pretty well then it allows people to put together TYPO3 sites in a lot of different styles, right. And I'm talking about working styles, right, using TypeScript or not, and and how they depend on each other. So okay, so you enjoyed TypeScript then what happened in your in your TYPO3 life?

Susi Moog  13:19
Everything? I mean, the last 15 years, it's like asking me what happened in your

Jeffrey A. McGuire   13:24
life? Yeah. Okay. What was your first job with TYPO3?

Susi Moog  13:27
Oh, the same one, I still have a second job next to the TYPO3 GmbH. So I work in a TYPO3 agency as developer and that start that in 2008.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   13:40
Okay, that's nice. Yeah. Nice. So Wow. So you, you started at a TYPO3 agency and you you still do that?

Susi Moog  13:50
Yep. That's cool. Okay. I mean, I like the company. And so I wanted to keep that connection alive. And that's why I'm just doing a little but I'm still doing that. I really enjoy getting in touch with with all those people again. Yeah. And I have a reason to go to Bremen twice a year where I lived for a long time. So we're back sometimes. And I

Jeffrey A. McGuire   14:13
think that if you think about the role of the GmbH it's great for someone in your position where you have responsibilities and hopes and wishes about helping the community and improving the system and everything if you keep your fingers in actual client projects, and the actual like today's API's and an integrating with with you know, real world problems, SAP Salesforce, you know, whatever. I can imagine that that helps you develop empathy and keep your skills up and like that must help the I think that must help your your TYPO3 job right.

Susi Moog  14:51
Yeah, yeah, does a lot. So in my opinion, it's a totally different job as working as an agency developer than as A framework developer or maintainer because the things you use and need and build are completely different. And working in the agency helps me to understand why things are needed, what kind of problems we're trying to solve. So I like solving problems, but documentation of code. And if we build a framework or write a piece of documentation, we are trying to solve a problem for someone and having an understanding of what that problem looks like. Right helps to solve it. Otherwise, we're just guessing.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   15:34
Exactly. And that comes to, you know, over in the over in startup land that's called product market fit somehow, right? Or a solution looking for a problem, right? And you don't want to work that way around. Cool. That's really, really neat. If you could start over, would you? Would you take a different path? Learning TYPO3. Would you do it a different way?

Susi Moog  15:54
Nah, I don't think so. I had a book and Typescript. And that everything I needed. I actually had that book right next to me, behind me the TYPO3 original book, I think it's from 2004. It's nice that you still have it. That's the only TYPO3 book I kept. I had a lot of them over the years. And this is the one I always kept for every move. That would have to come.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   16:19
Yep, yep. Yep. It's where everything started. I have a dictionary at home, like a paperback dictionary that's lost the front cover, and it's super worn. And that is the dictionary I learned German with. Right. So that's also my, that's my thing. And it was also before the internet and before Duolingo. And before any of that stuff, so I know exactly what you mean. Yeah,

Susi Moog  16:42
I also have kind of like the offline Wikipedia down there. I have books where you can look words up and see what they Whoa, you

Jeffrey A. McGuire   16:50
have dictionaries and encyclopedias? Yeah. Ah, okay, this is this is getting better and better. I bought a set of encyclopedias from a German High School in Kelowna, gimnasio. I bought an old set of encyclopedias, and they were a subscription set, where somebody the school bought the subscription. And every week or every month, they would send like, you know, 50 pages, or 100 pages or something in these sort of magazines. And then they were put into the old leather covers, right? Yeah. And then the leather things were were like 10 centimeters thick, and I probably have, you know, 25 or 30 of those. And there's really cool old photos. And they're, I think they're, they're from like the maybe the late 20s or early 30s as a very proud valcona. Right, I'm really love living in Kelowna, and I've been here for a very long time. I looked up Carnival in this in this thing, and it says, Oh, the Rhineland famous party, Baba Baba, and it goes, and it literally said, as everyone knows, Cologne, Cologne, Carnival is great. But in Dusseldorf Obama's just really not the same. And it's just not worth it was. It's so hilarious that that rivalries been going on forever.

Susi Moog  18:06
I don't understand carnival at all. Keep that in Cologne.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   18:14
Anyway, that you're talking about encyclopedias reminded me of that. And if somebody came to you today, wanting a career in web or needing a new technology or something, if you had a good excuse to say, hey, you should check out TYPO3, how would you? What would you tell them to you know, start them off? How should they learn

Susi Moog  18:30
today, I would probably recommend to go to the documentation and to read the TYPO3 guidebook depending on how they learn best, maybe I would first ask them how they learn best because you have different types of people and some really like videos, which I for example, can't understand at all. I want a book and I want to work through it myself. I don't want I just don't like people telling me what to do.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   18:56
Okay, now I understand. Fair enough. I kind of like a mixture with when we work on the media stuff here in doing this podcast and the and the others that we do, we use a free piece of software, which is really fantastic called DaVinci Resolve, which I know they use it the GmbH as well. Honestly, every single time I have a question or I get stuck on something i i Go online and there's always a video, there's always like a one minute or a five minute video and like, I think for that super quick help. Those are those are incredibly useful.

Susi Moog  19:32
I still prefer blog posts with screenshots. Yeah, it could also be the code samples. Yeah, code samples, or blog posts with screenshots for the visual things. Sound like my own grandmother, but I don't like that you have to listen to the video and then you can't search in it and then you have to switch and yeah,

Jeffrey A. McGuire   19:55
yeah, yeah. I mean, I think with with the AI technologies The whole sort of indexing spoken content is starting to happen. But it's the thing that I used to transcribe is incredibly random about saying TYPO3, and many, many other versions of TYPO3 every time we do it. And interestingly, the other incredibly disadvantaged format on the internet is music. There's no native way to code a sound or a particular note or have that your browser read sheet music. So that's a very good point, we put up a type a transcript of all of these podcasts for exactly that reason.

Susi Moog  20:40
Also good for your transcript. Really, instead of most of the time, I won't have the patience for watching or listening. And for 90% of the podcasts, I start listening to them, and then I get impatient. And stop listening and start reading the transcript.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   21:01
You know, you can put your podcast player on like to play faster, right?

Susi Moog  21:04
Yeah, I know, I do that already. But starting it two times faster than normal. The voices start to kind of, yeah,

Jeffrey A. McGuire   21:14
so we didn't, but I think it's interesting. I think we we try to get the names right and TYPO3, right. But, you know, we mostly leave the robots to it. So you said you like to read blogs and learn from blogs and and with screenshots and code and so on? Who's blogs in the TYPO3 community do you follow or find especially helpful, the two Daniels

Susi Moog  21:36
come to mind as first resource.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   21:41
And Daniel goods,

Susi Moog  21:42
those are the main ones. Then Andy, if he writes a new blog post, I like his blog post, but he's not logging all that much. Fun on this. Sometimes I read the lead some blog posts, right. But I also I don't really actively follow, except when somebody tweets about it, then I click on the links. But most of the time, it's just I'm looking for things, how to do things and TYPO3. Yes, I still don't know everything. So a lot. And then I find blog posts and I read them. So doesn't really matter from from home. They are. There's a lot of agencies blogging, for example. Yeah. Which you can find if you have a concrete problem problem. And I like that. Also, Mark Wilmont has a blog.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   22:32
I think much of your job is still coding stuff.

Susi Moog  22:36
None.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   22:40
Okay, so you do TYPO3 for fun. Now coding on the side?

Susi Moog  22:44
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I have. So first of all, I have a second job. So I'm doing four years in BH and eight hours, the other job, and the other job is actually coding. So I get my fingers.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   23:00
But that's, that sounds kind of perfect. Yeah,

Susi Moog  23:02
even community wise, I'm doing more documentation team work these days. Because I tends to code and I write helper tools all the time. But I'm not actively involved in the code development anyway. Well, because I think documentation is currently more important, or matching to my skills and the time I have.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   23:22
That's cool, though. Because just like you've been talking about, if somebody has a specific need, they can Google it and find the, you know, the documentation. And that type of documentation is really, really good. And it seems to be getting better and better and better than the last few years. So thank you for helping with that. What do you think about growing TYPO3, beyond Europe? And what can we do to spread the word or to convince more people to try it?

Susi Moog  23:44
Documentation is an important part of that. Right? Okay. Then I think we need some kind of education, educational material that is not strictly documentation, but more guided in a way, I'm not not fully sure how that looks like. That might be video courses, or real trainings, or kind of university courses.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   24:12
Also, just getting it in front of people in those moments when they need to build a website or need to solve a technical problem and just making it Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I've been talking with some people about potentially doing content aimed at editors and back end users. I don't know basic to medium advanced using the back end and doing your daily job, but not not so much like how to put a site together. The supposition is that a lot of content authors or marketing teams, if you shut Well, if you show a marketing team, a pretty backend that can do like something nice on the front, then they'll then they'll be excited, right? And then if you can show the content authors that approval workflows or a spell checker built in or what you know, show them that their life could be easier. It seems that those people are you know, able to influence the purchase decision of a given technology?

Susi Moog  25:03
I mean, I don't know, because he asked about what do we do outside of Europe? I don't know. And I don't know if there's one answer, because it probably depends on the market you're targeting. Yeah. Because for a long time, at least in Germany involves the technical elites that took the decision of which system to use. And it's switching over the last few years, but and being more the marketing department that's taking these decisions. Yeah. However, I don't know how that is for every other countries in the world. So I could imagine that there's still countries where there's the developers taking these decisions, I could imagine that there's countries where it's the marketing agency,

Jeffrey A. McGuire   25:47
that would be really, really interesting to find out. I bet Daniel, the other Daniel Homorodean. Has some ideas about that. But he's been getting around a lot lately. I'd love to, oh, that would be a cool thing to ask. Because I figure by being present at CMS, Africa, and by helping the government in Rwanda, and a couple other places now, I can imagine that that'll create some local employment and knowledge that that will create more value. But um, yeah, I have no idea who, who made those decisions. So that is a really interesting thing to investigate. Thank you. That's cool. What one word would you use to describe TYPO3?

Susi Moog  26:31
Powerful?

Jeffrey A. McGuire   26:32
What are your favorite features of TYPO3

Susi Moog  26:34
the list module molti, editing and the clipboard number two,

Jeffrey A. McGuire   26:39
wait, clipboard number two.

Susi Moog  26:41
Of course, for some reason, I'm always using clipboard number two for multi selection, and both the copying and stuff like that.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   26:48
The clipboard is pretty interesting. In TYPO3, can you just describe it, from your perspective, what you do with it, what what it's sort of capable of,

Susi Moog  26:56
I'm a lazy editor. So I'm creating a layout, once with all the content elements on it. And then I go to the list module and select every content element I need on the second and third and fourth page. So I did for the relaunch of taffy, calm, I did a lot of editorial work. And I basically copied everything all the time. Yeah, that's what I did with the clipboard. I copied stuff.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   27:20
Nice. So So for example, you make a page, putting in all the different content elements you want semantically organize blah, blah, blah. And then you take that, and you copy that as a template and reuse it to make new pages.

Susi Moog  27:33
Yeah, yes, super cool. But I don't copy all of that. Because 90% of it, that's the nice thing. Like what I need.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   27:43
Super cool. what feature would you like to see added to TYPO3,

Susi Moog  27:48
by changing of single elements? I'm laughing because I told me about that. I'm kind of complainy editor. Okay, so if I'm missing some something you will know.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   28:02
Oh, no, that's your you, you are a responsible Community Contributor and you file good bug reports.

Susi Moog  28:09
That's probably the American way of putting it.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   28:16
So, so what was the feature that you requested?

Susi Moog  28:18
If you have you copy and paste, not all your elements. And now you want to edit the single field of every element and give it the same value. So you can open I can already open that single field for all of the elements that's working already, because TYPO3 can do that. But what I want to do is like, set the checkbox once and it will add it for everything. Oh, basically, bug change.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   28:47
But okay. Okay, that's cool. Couldn't you make that that that one content element? Couldn't you put it somewhere else in the patriot and then and then sim link to it in ages?

Susi Moog  28:57
No, not not, not like that. So like, for example, you have a, let's make a stupid example. You have a checkbox in every content element that decides whether the content element will have a green or red background. Okay, very important first. On the first page, every every content element has a green background. Now on the second page, you want all of them have to have the red background. Now you need to open every element or the list of elements and click the check box. 30 times. Yep. Instead of doing that, I want to have one checkbox that says do this for all of these.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   29:34
So macros, bulk edits, that kind of thing. Yeah. Huh, cool. Now even better, what feature would you like to see removed from TYPO3,

Susi Moog  29:43
open document? Why? I don't really want it to be moved and just don't use it. Okay. Don't have anything against features.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   29:53
Tell us something that you wish people knew about TYPO3, but they usually don't.

Susi Moog  29:58
You don't need composer in Production, even though you can use two TYPO3 composer mode, so you can use TYPO3 in composer mode, even if you don't have composer on production.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   30:11
Okay, that is pretty wild. I definitely didn't know that. So do you have to put you have to put composer back in to do updates or changes then?

Susi Moog  30:19
Nope. So you can develop locally with composer and use composer to get the TYPO3 running and installed and everything. And then you deploy it. And on the target system, you don't necessarily need composer, all of the operations can just happen locally.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   30:36
So then you do your up, you do your update in your upgrade and your changes locally and push them again. Okay, that is that makes perfect sense. That is good to know. And then you save yourself a lot of hassle not having that on your target server. That's really helpful. What is the coolest thing you ever built with TYPO3.

Susi Moog  30:56
There are most cool way back when I just started working with TYPO3, we built a flash map plugin where the data was coming from TYPO3 and financials displaying a map and that was the first time I ever used real math in my developer job. Oh, like we need to calculate the distances because the map work wasn't the normal map. So like today, now I'm sending like grandma again. But today, you just use Google Maps or any of the other map API's to do all the calculations for you. And back then we had this Flash application with the pictures coming from the client. And he said, Okay, now you need to show a point with these geographical coordinates. Yep. And you needed to figure out how to calculate where on the map that point goes.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   31:57
I remember map rendering to and and like leaf rendering. And oh, yeah, I do remember when we used to have to solve that. It's so funny, being in open source for so long how the problem spaces have changed. And I don't notice it. And let's actually stop and think about it. You know, when TYPO3 started, there was no GitHub, and there was no none of these community tools, and none of these anything as a service, right? And the early communities TYPO3 Joomla, Drupal, and, and so on invented how to be and how to build and how to support a community, not just building a CMS with this incredible infrastructure that everybody has now but like, every single thing was new, and everything single thing was a decision. And I mean, I think it built great communities, right, incredible circles of friends and professionals and people who love interacting and doing this thing even now, but um, boy, it was it was really different, right?

Susi Moog  32:54
Yeah, I mean, we used to send patches via mail to a mailing list. So you had a patch file, but the review, and it's gotten so much better. But I don't want to say that there aren't any problems today. And it's just different kinds of problems. It's not better or worse. It's just different things

Jeffrey A. McGuire   33:14
are more complex now. And some base level of complexity is taken over. And we're trying to solve the next set of problems, right? And in 10 years, those will be solved and look and sound old fashioned too. Sure.

Susi Moog  33:25
Yeah. I mean, if you do artificial intelligence, for example, you will need math pretty fast again. So your math problem may be solved. But now you have a new problem.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   33:37
Yeah, I wanted to compare it to my so I've, I've been working remote since 2000. And that was before remote was a thing. And honestly, and I was working in the film industry, and Courier would show up at my house with VHS video cassettes, and paper movie scripts. And then I would do stuff on my computer, and then save the stuff that I done to a floppy disk, and put it back in a big envelope with the other materials, you know, all under NDA and everything and then call the courier and be like, Yep, I'm done with this one. And they would come and they would take it to the take it back. And yeah, but it worked. It worked. It worked. So we have a little thing that we like to call that we like to call the suggest a guest. Who is it that we should call up and talk to in season three of application, the TYPO3 community podcast,

Susi Moog  34:38
it's a really hard question to answer. Because there are so many people in this community and everybody has a great story to tell. So

Jeffrey A. McGuire   34:48
I see and that's why we're here, you know, and that's why we need to

Susi Moog  34:51
do more. So I'm going with Tom Warwick, who's part of the documentation team. Great working with me a lot on the documentation, then I'm good with Ollie harder, who's the leader of the security team? Perfect area and likes beer?

Jeffrey A. McGuire   35:07
Hey, I don't come on and I like beer.

Susi Moog  35:09
No, you don't have to

Jeffrey A. McGuire   35:13
stop the recording. So, Oliver harder and then.

Susi Moog  35:21
And then yeah, I don't know, you could probably ask the old Documentation team. So Lina wall for example or Alexandre Anita or there's also Lolly from the core team. Who is

Jeffrey A. McGuire   35:36
Abigail? Yeah. Great. So okay,

Susi Moog  35:39
there's a million people. Right.

Jeffrey A. McGuire   35:41
So Susi, fantastic talking with you. Thank you so much for taking the time. And yeah, it's great to see you. And it would be cool to see you in, you know, not in pixels, but actually over beers of your choice. I'm glad you're well. And I'm really, really grateful that you took the time to talk with

Susi Moog  35:57
us. Finally. Yeah,

Jeffrey A. McGuire   36:00