Interviews
Gunter Sammet
Community Profile: guntersammet
Date Added: 22nd April 2004
Tell us a little about yourself (Name, Age, Residency, ..)
Hello, I'm Günter Sammet, born in 1966 and living most of the time in Calgary/Alberta, Canada. Besides living in Calgary where I make my living as a freelance programmer, my family still owns a small farm in Germany. For about 3 months a year I am there. The farm produces wine grapes, apples and pears. My education as grape growing and wine making engineer and my experience as a manager of an agricultural coop has been a good foundation for my programming career which I started in 2000.
How and when did you get introduced to PHP and osCommerce?
After finishing a very intensive 6 month programming course in September 2000 which complemented my previous computer experience, I started programming in Java. Around fall 2001 I started my first eCommerce project building a web site with an online shop. With the requirements at hand I evaluated shopping carts for a couple of days. We needed a shipping module for German Parcel which I couldn't find in any OpenSource or proprietary software. I needed a solution which could be easily modified. osCommerce has been our choice since it met our specs. In addition to that the nice thing was that it is OpenSource and that it has a very helpful community :-)
Has osCommerce met your expectations? What would you like to see done in osCommerce?
After working with osCommerce for over 2.5 years now, I can say that it has met most of my expectations. I now know most of the core code by first name. The current code structure has a disadvantage for bigger modifications, so I would like to see a split between the business and presentation logic. As far as I know, this will be done after the final 2.2 release. I also would like to see the implementation of some of the core contributions into osCommerce ASAP.
Can you describe the contributions you have made to osCommerce, if any?
As mentioned before, a big advantage of osCommerce is the active community and the forum. It has been very helpful for me in the beginning because it helped me to master osCommerce. With the time I understood the code well enough to give something back. So I answered questions in the forums to get other people started. Right now I mainly answer support questions in the developer forum.
Beside the forum support I wrote and/or modified a whole bunch of modules. A few examples of modules I wrote are German Parcel, Registry, COD charge and shipping insurance. I recently modified and uploaded an enhanced version of "Visitor Web Stats" and "All Products Page". As soon as the time allows, I will extract and upload a few more modules out of existing code.
What keeps you motivated to work on osCommerce?
I want to strengthen the OpenSource market. This gives me motivation to spend extra hours to help out in the forums or to package code I wrote.
Can you describe your experiences as a store administrator so far had with osCommerce?
My experience as a store admin are mixed. To do a basic setup, you are usually up and running pretty quick. To understand all the settings you need to do a lot of reading in the forums and playing around. A good idea is, to have a copy of the store as a test store to play around with. There are some features which could improved (e.g. the attributes handling). As an overall rating I would say the admin tool is comparable with the other stores out in the market.
What advice would you provide to those being introduced to osCommerce?
Spend some time reading through the documentations and browsing in the forum to get a basic understanding. Install a copy of the store (that you can mess up) for testing and then go and play around with it. If you don't understand a specific feature, search in the forum. If you don't find anything there, try your favourite search engine. If this still doesn't help, ask a question in the forum. Most of them get answered pretty fast. If you gain from using the community, always remember to give something back. Either through some time efforts or if you don't have the time, consider a donation. This is what keeps the whole system rolling.
What do you think about the osCommerce community? Have you gained friends and contacts here?
I love the osCommerce community. With the time you get to know the regulars through the forum. I attended the meeting in Amsterdam and this has been a great opportunity to meet the team and some fellow users.
What slogan or logo would you wear on a t-shirt?
Only the genius masters chaos!
How do you spend your average day?
Getting up between 7.00 and 8.00 am. Turning on the computer and putting on some coffee. Either going through the emails first and then reading the paper while doing some stretching and having breakfast or vice versa. After that it's usually working on the computer doing some coding or research. Having lunch usually between noon and 3.00 pm depending on how busy I am. Once in a while I go for a run in the late afternoon and then hit the Sauna. After that it's usually back to the computer doing some more work. Half of the time I am out for the evening and/or spend some time with my girl friend. If I am not out, I am usually working on the computer while watching TV. If I am home I usually cook and have dinner sometime in-between the Sauna sessions and watching TV.
If I am busy and out for the evening I very often go back to the computer when I come home. Sometimes till early in the morning, sometimes only to catch up with emails.
How does your desktop look like?
I usually have between 25 and 50 windows open. If I get above 50, I usually close a few in order to still be able to remember what is in all of them.
