Mathias Bolt Lesniak
“After completing my computer science studies in 2006, I got a boring Java job,” says Lina. “But then I met someone who showed me TYPO3 and talked me into becoming a freelancer. That was around 2007, so 3.8 was the first version I used.”
TYPO3 Blogging and Care
As she got to know TYPO3 better, she started a blog that was popular in the community. The blog was both a way to learn more about TYPO3 and a source of work. “My current employer hired me because the lead programmer knew the blog,” she explains.
At the Developer Days that year, Lina enjoyed a presentation about documentation by Sybille Peters, and was inspired to join the Documentation Team. However, by that time she had also taken on another important role: “My mother had cancer, and I was nursing her and working in a 60% position on the side.”
More People Involved in Documentation
During the Covid-19 pandemic, her mother passed away. Finding herself with a lot of time on her own, Lina increased the time she spent on her Documentation work. “My employer asked if I could work more than 60%, but I chose to do part-time freelancing instead,” she says. “I could also put a lot of work into documentation because of the budgets I received from the TYPO3 Association.”
When Daniel Siepman announced that he wanted to step down from co-leading the Documentation Team with Martin Bless, Lina knew she could do it and said she would be willing to take over the role.
“My goals for the next few years is to get more people involved in Documentation,” says Lina, who also thinks it is important to make it easy to contribute. “Everyone who finds more information should know how to write a ticket or fix it themselves.”
Contribution Made Easy
Lina says it is especially important to be nice to first-time contributors and help them get their changes merged. To her and the rest of the Documentation Team, even small changes — down to a single word — are valuable contributions. “The first contribution is an important step,” she says.
Reviewing pull requests for changes is a great place to start. “You don’t even have to know a lot about technology to contribute there,” she says, adding that “you can move a lot of things far forward in just five minutes.”
Version 12 is the Next Big Thing
“We worked hard to get the documentation ready for the release of TYPO3 version 11 LTS,” says Lina. “Every Changelog entry automatically creates a GitHub issue in our Documentation Repository. The issues can then be tagged, assigned or closed.”
The new goal is to surpass the success of version 11 by making it even easier to involve others in documentation work for TYPO3 version 12. It will be released in 2023, and onboarding new volunteer contributors in good time beforehand is important.
You can start contributing to the TYPO3 Documentation today. Just visit docs.typo3.org, and if you see something to change, just click the Edit on Github button to suggest changes.
Meet Lina and the rest of the Documentation Team on Slack: #typo3-documentation
