Featured User: Hakan Arabacioglu

This month we had a very pleasant interview with Hakan Arabacioglu, who really took his time to answer all our questions. The interview with Hakan shows the diversity of our users, not all of them are fulltime developers! Hakan has been working as a Life Coach for the past 12 years and runs his own company Zest Coaching and helps out friends by building components for them. Working with Component Creator did not only speed up development in Joomla for Hakan it's also brings in a lot of fun.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

My name is Hakan Arabacioglu. I have been working as a life coach for 12 years. Even though I studied Business Administration at the university, I always had a passion for coding. I loved the idea of imagining and then putting into life what I had imagined. I worked for Ford Motor Company in Turkey, managing the Internet projects in the marketing department. There, I had the chance of creating very big Internet projects from the client and marketing perspectives.

When I started coaching, which is another passion of mine, I wanted to have an interactive web site. I learned about Joomla and started developing my web site with it. At those times, I didn’t know any PHP at all. So the readymade modules and components helped me a lot to achieve what I wanted. At that time when I needed customization, I had some coding support from developers from different parts of the world.

When Joomla upgraded from 2.5 to 3, most of my customized modules and components stopped working. Some of the readymade components that I was using were also discontinued by the developers. At this point, as I also enjoyed working with the code since I was a child, I started modifying the codes by myself.

As a coach, I give one-to-one sessions to my clients but I am also selling “do it yourself” coaching packages from my website. Subscribers receive different homework every few days. New sections open as they move forward. There are some questionnaires in these packages and they produce custom homework for clients depending on their answers.

What does your company do?

Since I am working as a life coach, I am giving one-to-one sessions and group sessions. I had clients from more than 20 countries. Also, I am selling some coaching packages from my web site like “How to get your dream relationship” or “How to get your dream job”. I learned a lot from my clients within the years so I developed some question and homework sets which are applicable for general cases. Of course every client’s background is different but these packages are a good starting point for the clients if they want to have a look at themselves from a different perspective. These packages are also good alternatives if their budget is limited for coaching.

Where is your company located?

My company is located in Turkey but I can work from anywhere, even when I am abroad.

What is your role within the company?

I am the owner and the only coach of my company :-)

How long have you been using Component Creator?

My first contact with Component Creator was maybe 5 years ago when I was upgrading the site from Joomla 2.5 to 3. There was a discontinued questionnaire component that my web site depended on and when the site was upgraded, it stopped working at the backend. It would cost a lot of money to get it fixed by a developer besides most of the developers were not even familiar with Joomla. So when I was searching for a solution, I came up with your web site. When I started developing the questionnaire component by myself with the help of Component Creator, coding started to become more fun for me. It also trained me about how a component structure should be, how the code should be written etc. I learned a lot.

Roughly how many components have you built using Component Creator?

I created 3 components, 2 of them were quite complicated. I also created 2 modules.

How much time do you estimate Component Creator has saved you?

Maybe this question should be changed to “How much time and budget Component Creator has saved you?” Because even for some minor changes in the nonworking old components, the developing companies asked a few thousand dollars. It is not only about money and time though, but it is also about fun for me. “How much fun Component Creator brought you?” I cannot measure any of these. It saved me a lot of time, a lot of money and it gave me a lot of satisfaction.

In addition, it really thought me how an MVC component structure should be. I am not dependant on developers anymore. I had a lot of stress before: “What happens if one day my web site stops working because of the server upgrades, what happens if one of the components that I am using is discontinued?” Now I don’t care, I have Component Creator here. I can modify my code step by step. So the best question might be, “What kind of benefits did you have by using Component Creator?”

Can you give an example of a component that was built using Component Creator?

I was making a lot of changes on my web site but my clients were not able to follow every detail. One day, one of my clients asked me “Hakan, we don’t see anything different on your web site”. Then I decided to create another section as “What is new?” In this section; I am showing what is new on the web site, what is new about my coaching and what is new in my life. I supported this section with many emojis. I also added like buttons so that people can vote for what they liked most. You can see it here on my Turkish web site: www.zestcoaching.com/yenilikler In the background, it has only two tables; just the categories and the entries. But it was a good step for me to develop a component by myself for the first time.

I have finished a much more complicated component recently. I created a web site for one of my friends. She gives 2 workshops a month with very reputable teachers from all around the world. So in order to give more information about workshops, workshop categories, teachers and location, I created this component.  You can see it here: www.thehomeworkshops.com/en

Do you have any suggestions on how we can improve Component Creator?

I always send you my suggestions actually. They are already on Github.

As a user, what I am looking forward to seeing most is another tab for additional language strings. This is very easy to implement and very useful for the users. I don’t know why you don’t take it as a priority so far.

Exclusion of some tables from the content versioning would be also nice. This was suggested by another user before as well. And you can add this kind of feature requests on the roadmap. Seeing the roadmap encouraged me a lot to buy a subscription from you but not from your competitiors.

What do you like best about Component Creator?

It is simple to use and I understand that keeping it simple is one of your priorities. Sometimes I am amazed how easy it is to achieve some very complicated coding within seconds.

There are many times that I am surprised like “How could they have thought about this detail here, wow!”.

Is there anything else you would like to share with the Component Creator community?

I really love you all. I have a bonding with Component Creator stuff and the community.

• Interview