Solidus contributor Jonathan Rochkind

The Solidus core team personally recognizes that there are some individuals in the community that contribute regularly to core and would like to recognize those individuals on a more public level. These individuals take the time to contribute back to core, and we as a community are better off because of that.

The first outstanding individual we’d like to publicly thank is Jonathan Rochkind. Jonathan was introduced to Solidus back in December of 2015 when he was hired on at Friends of the Web, an iOS and Rails development consultancy. He’s been working with Solidus for less than seven months, but in those seven months has submitted numerous significant pull requests to the Solidus GitHub repository.

The 20 year veteran of web development but has been contributing to various open source projects around the web for the last 10 years and working with Rails for the last seven. His interest in web development led to his first undergrad job at his university’s website back in 1995. About ten years ago he headed back to school for a masters in library and information science degree, and went on to do web development at an academic library. It was at the library that he began developing and contributing back to open source projects like Blacklight, a search front end for Solr as well as traject, a data transformation command line app.

In our interview, Jonathan mentioned the amount of support he’s received in the Solidus Slack channel and the friendly camaraderie of the community as part of the reason he contributes so regularly back to core. He noted, “It’s nice using good tools and being a part of the community that makes those tools better to use.”

While he’s not focused on improving any one part of the Solidus platform, his PR’s do tend to lean towards improving backend functionality. “If I run into a Solidus bug that affects one of our apps, I’m going to try to submit the fix back. A local workaround to a Solidus bug is going to make future upgrades of our apps harder, so while submitting the fix back to core is good for the community, it’s also a little self-serving.”

In his off hours, Jonathan enjoys playing board games like Settlers of Catan, cooking for friends, and playing the accordion.

Contributing to the Solidus project makes it better for the community as a whole and each of the individuals in it. A big heartfelt thanks goes out to Jonathan for the time he’s put into Solidus core. You’re part of what makes this community great.

You can find Jonathan on Slack and GitHub as jrochkind.