iDempiere enthusiasts share many examples of how iDempiere changed people’s lives for the better. Here we present to you our hero of the month for his contributions during March.

Sergey is the active contributor and maintainer of the web portal community plug-in. A plug-in that was created to communicate with Icreated Web.

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Tell us a little bit about your childhood and where you grew up.

I grew up in the USSR. Today they say Lithuania, Russia and Ukraine. I had a happy childhood where I was a very curious child trying to understand how things work. As a result, often I was playing with broken toys 🙂

How did you get into programming?

Most young people of my generation came to programming because of games with ZX Spectrum. I didn’t have this opportunity, so I started to learn Quick Basic at school with Iskra-1030
At Khar’kov National University of Radioelectronics, I’ve been studying at the faculty of Applied Mathematics and we used Pascal, Fortran, and C for numerical calculations.
I landed in the Java world in 2004 with Compiere ERP and I developed my first B2B web application with JSP/Servlet inspired by Compiere WebStore. During the next few years I’ve been working with different Java frameworks and technologies: Spring, JSF, ZK, GWT, JS, Angular, Python, Flask, etc

How long have you been part of iDempiere?

I have followed Compiere and Adempiere projects since 2004. I started to contribute to iDempiere in 2015 with experience in Adempiere customization.

How and why did you get involved with iDempiere?

It was a B2C project of Web Commerce with iDempiere as a backend. iDempiere was a very good choice because of VPS hosting and PostgreSQL support.

What is your experience in other OS projects?

Nowadays I’m working for the French company Cosmotech. We are developing a platform for digital simulation of industrial processes. Kotlin API (I’m contributing the most) and other features are available for developers at GitHub

Is there something that makes you passionate about open source in general and iDempiere in particular?

I’m happy to share my experience of Idempiere development and I hope it will be useful for others. I’m grateful to Chuck Boecking for his initiative that pushed me to contribute to the PortalAPI plugin.

What does your typical day look like?

In general, I’m working from home. Some cups of Brazilian coffee, some hours of coding, some hours of auto-education. No television, no social networks, no news. I’m trying to keep my mind clean and focused on my goals.

If you have your customers for whom you implement or customize iDempiere, what are they like and what do they typically want?

I don’t have any iDempiere customers for the moment

What are some of the things you would like to improve in iDempiere?

In the Portal API plugin, I suggested using MapStruct to convert iDempiere Model Objects to lightweight JSON objects for the Web Layer. Maybe this idea can help developers to improve performance in different plugins. In general, I’m trying to apply SOLID principles in my code. I think it’s a good way to improve iDempiere.

Additionally, this summer I will be working on my Angular WebStore plugin. My goal is to add: OpenApi first approach, MapStruct implementation, and Angular quality code. I imagine some developers don’t want to use Spring Framework in the OSGI environment. It will be a good alternative for them.

How does it feel to win the Hero of the Month title?

Honestly, I’m very surprised. I didn’t expect it. I’m very grateful to the community for this recognition. It gives me more motivation to continue my contribution to iDempiere.

What would you like to say to other community members? Any advice or suggestions?

Share your experience. It’s very important. It’s a good way to improve your skills and to help others. As a freelancer, my contributions help me to crack interviews and to find new job opportunities.