Yoast Care fund: An interview with Mathieu Viet

Meet the latest recipient of our Yoast Care fund: Mathieu Viet, who was nominated by Eleni Stergatou. Why? Because Mathieu contributes to the WordPress community in different ways! He contributes to WordPress core, speaks at WordCamps and organizes WordCamps and Meetups for the Parisian community. Besides these contributions, he’s also one of the WordPress translators for the French language. Let’s get to know this devoted contributor by asking him a few questions!

Hi Mathieu! Could you tell us what you do?
I work as an Internal Control Officer in a French company doing business in transport and communication. When my working day is over I can play with WordPress! I have fun building things mostly for the BuddyPress plugin, as I’m one of their core developers for almost 7 years now. I also try to contribute to WordPress Core as much as I can. In particular for the comments component as I volunteered to be one of this component’s maintainers.

Why and when did you start contributing?
I started contributing for a very selfish reason at the beginning: I wanted a bug to be fixed for the community site I was an administrator of. It was eight years ago on the BuddyPress Trac. I had no ideas about how to create a patch, so I simply pasted the code to edit into the ticket’s description. It was my very first meeting with JJJ, the BuddyPress Project Lead and I was very happy he fixed the issue so quickly.

Who is your WordPress mentor?
Boone B. Gorges. He really helped me improve my skills as a contributor to BuddyPress code and, as a result, to WordPress code. He showed me the way to learn by myself creating patches, writing PHPUnit tests, packaging BuddyPress releases and so much other coding stuff! I remember having this discussion with my brother when I attended the first WordCamp Europe in Leiden. He asked me “Have you met Matt?” and I replied “No, but I’m so happy I met Boone IRL!”. We had the chance to meet again during the WordCamp Europe in Paris and it was so great he could come as a speaker for the very first WordCamp Paris I was the lead organizer of. Being with him for the 10th anniversary of this event was a really great experience.

What contribution or moment are you most proud of?
My first BuddyPress commit! A very minor change, but I remember I triple checked everything before running the `svn ci` command from my terminal! It was great to share this moment on Twitter and with my best friends. The members of the BuddyPress Core Team: Mercime, Paul, JJJ, Boone, and Ray. It was also great to get congrats from them and from people very close and very important to BuddyPress like Tammie and Sarah.

Where can people find you?
The best way to find me online is to go to the #BuddyPress Slack channel. You can also ping me (@imath) from the #Core-Comments slack channel. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to find me IRL with the hard times (Covid-19) we’re all having to meet during WordCamps or Meetups. But as soon as the situation gets better: WordCamp Paris in France is the place to go to!

Thanks again and see you in #BuddyPress ;)

Thank you, Mathieu! We hope to see you soon, online or offline :) If you’re reading this interview and know someone who deserves some recognition for their hard work in the community, nominate them! Just go to the Yoast Care fund page, fill in a short form and send it in. It’s as easy as that!