One of the main goals of Pontoon is lowering barriers to entry. Especially for end users (mainly localizers), but also for contributors to the codebase, since many of our localizers have a developer background.

I’m happy to acknowledge that in the last 30 days there has been more activity from volunteer contributors in Pontoon development than ever before! Let’s have a closer look at what have they been working on:

Michal Vašíček

Michal came up with the idea to highlight matches in original and translated strings when searching in the sidebar. He created a patch, but couldn’t finish it due to his school duties. It was taken over by Jarek, who earlier played a great role in reviewing the original patch by Michal.

Being only 14 years old, Michal is the youngest Pontoon contributor!

Jarek Śmiejczak (jotes)

Since he became an active Pontoon contributor over a year ago, Jarek has evolved from being not just a great developer but also a fantastic mentor; helping onboard new contributors and review their work. One way or another, he’s been involved with all bugs and features listed in this blog post.

Of course that doesn’t mean he stopped contributing code. On the contrary, he just completed a Firefox Accounts based authentication support which will soon replace Persona. And, he’s already busy working on bringing terminology support to Pontoon too.

Victor Bychek

A lot of our users have been complaining about their email addresses being exposed publicly in Pontoon UI and URLs, even if it complies with Commit Access Requirements. Thanks to Victor, these days are over: we no longer reveal email addresses in top contributor pages and filter by user selector, as long as you set a display name.

Victor is a pleasure to work with and is already busy with his next task, which will allow you to apply multiple filters at the same time.

Stoyan Dimitrov

As the new leader of the Bulgarian localization team, Stoyan takes his duties very professionally. He started by creating a vector version of Pontoon logo and changing the copy.

Later on he created a Firefox Add-On called Pontoon Enhanced, which can add new features to Pontoon before they are deployed or even implemented in the application. It’s basically a Test Pilot for Pontoon.

Michal Stanke

As an agile bug reporter, Michal has been one of the most valuable early adopters of Pontoon. Now he has decided to take a step further.

He set up his local Pontoon instance, fixed a few developer documentation bugs along the way and provided a patch that fixes one of the bugs he reported. It allows us to properly detect placeables of form %(thisIsVariable)s.

Get involved!

I consider myself lucky to be working with this great team. It is particularly valuable to see contributions coming from people who actually use the product. This is what the power of the open Web looks like!

You too can shape the future of Pontoon by filing a bug or starting to work on one of the mentored ones. The barriers to entry are low! 🙂