Episode 169 – A Chat With Amy Kamala

Show Notes

Contact Info:

* Website

* WordPress

* Twitter

Episode Transcript

Topher: Hey everyone, welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Topher and my co-host today is Sophia.

Sophia: Hello.

Topher: She waved. Before we get started, I want to say thanks to our sponsor Nexcess. They’ve been good to us for a couple of years now. And I’ve been really, really happy with their hosting. Their servers are really fast. They give me all the special tools that I really like in a host, and they have some really great specialized things for WooCommerce like automated testing, which is pretty unique. I’m not sure of any place else that does that. And they have a Sales Performance Monitor and a Plugin Performance Monitor. So if any of that sounds good to you, check them out, Nexcess, and tell them we sent you.

All right, our guest today is Amy Kamala. Welcome.

Amy: Thank you. And thank you so much for having me. 

Topher: You’re welcome. I did say that right, right? Because you told me just a minute ago.

Amy: Yes, you did.

Topher: Okay, good. 

Amy: You said it right. 

Topher: Good. Where are you from? 

Amy: I’m from Los Angeles, California, United States. 

Topher: Excellent. Born and raised?

Amy: Born and raised. I’m from Venice Beach, specifically.

Topher: Oh, okay. 

Amy: It’s a big place. 

Topher: I’ve never been there. Been to a lot of California but never to LA. What do you do with WordPress?

Amy: I’ve been working professionally with WordPress since 2015. I’m a full stack developer and I have a master’s degree in Fine Arts. So I work with both development and design and the back end system, Linux and pipelines, development pipelines. 

Topher: Wow, that’s super-duper cool. You are way more advanced than me.

Amy: Well, I don’t want to give that impression because I don’t know everything by any means. Every senior developer and pretty much every senior in pretty much any industry that I’ve spoken to acknowledges that there’s always more to learn and research is really important.

Topher: Oh, yes. I have a soft spot in my heart for Linux. What do you do there? 

Amy: Well, I also have a soft spot in my heart for Linux. So I’ve worked for three different web hosts, and two of them are very infrastructure based. The third one is more cloud-based, a little bit less infrastructure. But I’ve spent quite a bit of time working my way around LAMP and LEMP systems, Linux, Apache, or NGINX, MySQL, and PHP, working command line. I would say that Linux command line is probably if we can call it a language, it’s my favorite to work with. Talking to a server or computer is so much fun. 

Topher: Do you run Linux on your desktop at all? 

Amy: One of them, yes, I do. 

Topher: What distro?

Amy: Red Hat. 

Topher: Okay.