Sponsorship Spotlight: Antoine Griffard

Gábor: When did you first come across Orchard?

Antoine: In 2009-2010, I discovered the Orchard project in version 0.5 on Codeplex. It was originally managed by a team of people at Microsoft. I knew Bertrand Le Roy, one of the project managers, whom I had met in 2007 in Redmond when I went to my first MVP Summit. A few months later, another developer I knew, Sébastien Ros, joined the team. In 2010, version 1.0 was released with ASP.NET MVC Razor views, and the project switched to an open-source approach. I started contributing to issues, docs, translations, and modules like Fields. An election was organized to select the first Steering Committee members. Bertrand was the benevolent dictator at that time. There was an Orchard gallery (which ran the first version of the NuGet Gallery) where you could deploy your own modules and themes. In 2012, the first conference was held in Santa Monica, where I was lucky to meet in person some of the contributors I had been in touch with. Among them, two young Hungarian students.

Gábor: I think we all know who those two Hungarians could be!

Antoine: Yes, that was the first time I met Zoltán and Benedek in person. If I remember correctly, there was no Lombiq at that time.

Gábor: You are correct: Lombiq was founded a year later, in 2013. We have just had our 13th anniversary. But they started contributing to Orchard and were part of the community even before Lombiq was founded. Speaking of which, why do you like contributing to Orchard?

Antoine: After using the Framework and CMS, I felt like I had to give back a little. I switched from someone who uses a tool to someone who contributes to make it better and help people. For me, if you keep something for yourself, it is lost, but if you give some time and effort to contributing, everything you did will be yours forever. If you think about it, the contribution is the reward itself.

Gábor: You are totally right. It's a very good feeling to see that the code you write could be part of something others will use or improve later. But what do you like most about Orchard?

Antoine: Technically, I really like its modularity and extensibility. It offers many modules out of the box, and you can extend them with your own modules and themes. What I like most about Orchard Core is that it has made me a better developer in so many ways.

Gábor: Are you contributing to other open-source projects too?

Antoine: Probably not enough (laughs), but I try to contribute to other projects like Blazor component libraries (e.g., Fluent Blazor UI), Microsoft documentation, and products (e.g., Aspire). Sharing my knowledge is an important part of being a Microsoft MVP.

Gábor: I know we started our discussion about some members of the community, but what do you think about the community in general?

Antoine: The weekly meetings and discussion forums like Discord make you feel like you're part of a community. And being able to meet people and travel all around the world for conferences like Orchard Harvest is priceless.

Gábor: You attended the last two Harvests as well. In 2024, we organized it in Las Vegas, and last year the conference took place in Prague, Czechia. And we will organize it again this year: The next Orchard Core conference will take place in Vancouver, Canada, on September 10th and 11th! Will you be able to join, Antoine? If I remember correctly, you attended every single Harvest so far.

Antoine: Hopefully yes, I'm working on it!

Gábor: Thank you for the interview!

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