Mihaela has been involved with all things Inkscape for over 12 years. She contributed to all aspects of Inkscape community and is spreading awareness of Inkscape as the best vector and SVG editor out there!
The story starts ~2005 with Inkscape and GIMP. The availability of free manuals for them drew her to study them in detail. Inkscape and GIMP were the first and most important programs (what apps were called in the olden days) that made her switch to using Linux as her OS of choice.
When she learned all she could about using Inkscape she started helping out in forums where there were a lot of new users in need of quick Inkscape tips and general guidance with creating vector drawings. To make further use of her presence on inkscapeforum.com she became a moderator to also help with administrative and other tasks.
User requests often referenced features currently being worked on. New features and new releases excite all users. Advanced users especially dream of new things to come and how they might open new possibilities in their artwork and workflows. Mihaela's excitement overflowed into her becoming involved with Inkscape bug triaging and testing the version currently being worked on by developers (nightly builds). She would compile/install a fresh nightly build every two weeks, use it in her work, report bugs and test new features before they were available in an official release. She was also able to help with new reports, user feedback, and proposals for new features.
Insight and experience gathered during that time, along with some teaching background, enabled her to contribute to community further by co-authoring a book of Inkscape recipes “Inkscape 0.48 Illustrator's Cookbook”. The book is aimed at helping new Inkscape users learn how to accomplish specific goals designed to help them learn Inkscape as fast as possible. Advanced users have also reported drawing (!) from this well of guided processes and finding something new and useful. Writing the book was a daunting task, exhilarating when the perfect example was found for a recipe (not only educational but interesting and fun outside of the context of learning a new skill), and stressful when faced with difficult technical concepts (SVG filters anyone?) and strict deadlines. In the end, the book was well received which is all Mihaela could hope for, and part of the publisher's revenue was donated to Inkscape as part of their policy when publishing books on open source projects.
Currently, Mihaela is part of the Inkscape Vectors Team (find her on GitLab). She is helping with marketing, branding, and any technical tasks she has the skills to solve. Her business experience and interest in startups offer a new point of view of open source projects, how they differ from developing software under a company structure, and what business insights can be applied to open source projects to make them more successful.
Mihaela lives in Zagreb, Croatia, but is in constant contact with people all around the globe through the magnificent apparatus called the Internet.
https://gitlab.com/prkos
