Community Member Monday: Necdet Yücel

Today we’re talking to Necdet Yücel from the Turkish LibreOffice community, who has been mentoring students and helping them to get involved with LibreOffice…

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I have been working as a lecturer at a university for more than 20 years. I teach programming and computer networks courses in the computer engineering department. My main area of interest is free software. My personal contribution to the free software world is mostly by making Turkish translations of free software – and I try to explain the free software world to my students, and guide them through it.

What are you doing in the LibreOffice project right now?

I’m one of the old translators of LibreOffice. I have translated hundreds of thousands of words, but I have no motivation to work on translations for a while.

Since 2015, the year Gülşah Köse become a LibreOffice developer, more than 15 of my students made contributions to LibreOffice. One of them is Mert Tümer’s, who is an active LibreOffice developer. Gülşah’s work was a major influence for LibreOffice developments in Turkey. I am very proud of my students, who started with her and continued until Gökçe Küler.

Do you have any tips/thoughts to share from bringing people into the community?

I think we have no choice but to direct students to free software in universities. Because it’s the only chance to to study how the programs work. Reading well-written code, changing it, compiling and redistributing it are the main requirements for being good developers. If we can explain them to students, they will become free software developers.

Is there anything else you plan to do in the project

The only thing I think I know well is mentoring students to free software. My short term plan is to continue translating and consulting students for free software.

Many thanks to Necdet for all his contributions! And to everyone reading this who uses LibreOffice and is interested in getting more involved: find out what you can do here. We’d love to have you on board, in our community!

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