Interview with Jeff, GHOP student in the Silicon Valley

Posted by Sigurd on 22 January 2008

Completing my interviews with the top three GHOP students in terms of quantity of tasks, is Jeff from San Jose, considered the capital of the Silicon Valley. His work in the contest so far includes website themes, a website, widgets, and translating SilverStripe's interface into Taiwan's dialect of Chinese.

Jeff, tell us about yourself and where you've grown up...

Born in Taiwan, I consider myself a Taiwanese. I currently live in San Jose, California where I attend Evergreen Valley High School. Life as a high school student is quite busy for me. Not only do I have to worry about my rigorous academics, I also have to balance enough time to pursue my hobbies, like web development and robotics. One of the best things about living in the Silicon Valley is that you are motivated by the great innovations that happen around you.

Wow, that's cool to grow up with the innovation around you. What's your story with getting into computing?

I've always been passionate about the web and technology. In 7th grade, I became involved in an online gaming community where I was inspired by the site owners to learn programming. By 8th grade, I had taught myself the basics of PHP and SQL. My programming skills improved as I took up freelance projects. I would always look for open source tools and software like phpBB, CakePHP, and WordPress to help me build websites. I constantly motivate myself to learn from other people's code and strive to be a better programmer. Off the web, I've taught myself Java and C which I use for robotics over these two years.

Cool, and how'd you discover SilverStripe and GHOP?

I first heard of the name "SilverStripe" from Wikipedia where I was looking for a comparison of PHP frameworks. I did not look into it in depth, but the name struck back at me when I was going through the GHOP project list. I decided that I would stick with SilverStripe because I thought this would be a great opportunity to improve my knowledge of object-oriented programming. 

Nice, we were pleasantly surprised one day to find SilverStripe added by someone outside our community last year, and find that now its one of our major sources of traffic to SilverStripe.com. I'm sure Google would love to know how you discovered GHOP, too?

Being the geek I am, I learned about GHOP from digg. Without a second thought, I decided to participate simply because it was a great opportunity. I choose to go for SilverStripe because I felt like I belonged to a small community rather than a big community like Drupal. I also wanted to learn more about object-oriented programming.

Nice, all makes sense. Now that you've had some time with SilverStripe, what have your experiences been with the project and its team members?

Working with the SilverStripe framework has been fantastic experience. I've come to appreciate the genius idea of having a framework that is ideal for both developers and site owners. The complexity and thoughtful design behind the framework also boggles my mind sometimes. 

The SilverStripe’s close community is one of the reasons I choose SilverStripe as my GHOP project. I’ve always liked small communities because they promote collaboration and you can actually “be a part of it.” I think the community itself is heading towards the right direction, but we definitely do some work to promote our great piece of software.

Each and every one of the SilverStripe community have been extremely pleasant to work with. I would join the IRC channel where I get helpful answers and some laughs. It’s awesome! 

That's awesome to hear! If GHOP were to repeat, what you like improved?

The GHOP contest is no doubt a wonderful idea. It can definitely be improved in many ways though. There should be an automated system to accept claims and sort out duplicates. I think the contest dates should be in spring or fall so that people in both hemispheres get an equal chance. The reviewing process should also speed up to ensure the fairness of the contest. Last but not least, we need a proper official “score” tracking system.

I enjoyed the “create a widget” tasks because they require me to think about the programming design and the interface design. I think the SilverStripe community needs to suggest more tasks for the GHOP students to do. We could definitely move some of the trac tickets as GHOP tasks.. We’re don’t have many advanced coding tasks so “Create a simple module” type of tasks would also be awesome.

That's great feedback, thanks very much!  One of the challenges is to keep all the tasks roughly equal in terms of complexity, but all of your ideas make sense. So, back to you. What are your plans after GHOP?

I’m aiming for University of California Berkeley or M.I.T. where I’ll probably major in engineering and artificial intelligence. I’m quite fascinated with robotics and artificial intelligence so I hope to study more in the field. I also wish to move back to Taiwan after I finish graduate school. Taiwan is an awesome place. My dream is just to live a peaceful and healthy life. :)

Speaking of the future, how do you see the web and computing advancing?

Today, web and computing has already shifted focus onto the user interactions, like the SilverStripe CMS. In 5 years, I think we’ll start to see companies incorporating these user interactions into our daily lives, rather than being limited to the computer. And not even in twenty years, we’ll begin to see artificial intelligence like visual reorganization begin to dominate our lives. Yes, I think we’ll have to live with robots.

I think so too. If the robots are as cute as KeepOns, then that won't be so bad a thing! (Check out the video below) Thanks very much for your time, and thanks for being such an hard worker in the contest!