Quick questions David Deutsch

Hi David, tell us about yourself

Hey, I'm David, but you can call me Ted if you want. I'm not the kind of person to deny another person making pleasant mistakes like that. Although you might want to have a doctor look at that.

I live in Germany with my lovely wife and when I'm not working or spending time with my better half, I get lost in other things that pique my interest (like music) and pretend they're not related to sitting indoors staring at a screen (they totally are). We recently moved apartments and are now the proud tenants of a place with a balcony. I often step out in the mornings (in PJs - it has a high, opaque railing) and pretend like that is establishing a healthy balance to being indoors so much. (It's not.)

For more than 6 years, I happen to write Free and Open Source Software for Joomla, mainly the AEC Membership Manager. And by write, I mean having fun doing one of the most enjoyable occupations that I could possibly imagine. It's right up there with donkey herder and ice cream confectioner.

Congrats to the release of AEC 1.0! What are the biggest changes in this version?

Thanks a lot! Luckily, the changes this time are quite dramatic and obvious, so it's not the usual, boring "oh, we added dozens of new integrations" (we did that too, of course) or "it has been improved in hundreds of ways that you probably won't notice" (we did that as well).

The biggest changes are the completely revamped frontend and administration of the component. In the frontend, everything is a lot more streamlined and pleasing to the eye (both the backend and frontend use bootstrap) and we now support templating and joomla template overrides.  In the administration, we also gave everything a big overhaul and streamline and several other, important sounding buzzwords. Bottom line is: It's less confusing and helps you get your work done more quickly while looking like 2012 instead of 2005.

If I was to choose one feature to advertise in the new version, though, it would be the Statistics. I completely fell in love with the d3 javascript library and was thinking about doing sales statistics in AEC anyhow. So four months later, I woke up from a drunken stupor of feature creep confusion and now we have beautiful and deeply informative statistics. They have become my favorite feature, one that I use every single day. Multiple times. I may just be overly anxious.

Why did you choose to develop for Joomla and not any other CMS?

That's a tough question, actually. I think I found the community and software the most inviting. I remember that when I installed my first Joomla, it claimed to be better than fresh baked cake. While it wasn't as nutritious (although it's debatable whether cake does you any good), it certainly was incredibly pleasant to use.

So I started out being "just a user" and actually wasn't even a programmer back then. But I desperately needed a good membership software, something that just wasn't around. Long story short: I solved my own problems by improving an existing (but abandoned) project for that kind of software and here we are.

What's your plans for the rest of the year, regarding Joomla and AEC?

Apart from multiple sinister and conning plans that are none of your business, my main plan is to use the time that I bought with the big 1.0 release and split up the software in its parts.

AEC grew organically for years now and that means it's quite a monolithic package. Which is nice and all, but there is functionality that could be reused (like the invoices or the payment processing) and a lot of users simply don't need the huge package, so it makes sense to put the better parts in libraries and give users just the things they need.

Well that and obviously working tirelessly on improving the current codebase. There was a time when I thought you could "finish" an application or even a branch of it. Oh, youth.