Episode 155 – A Chat With Jen Swisher About WordCamp US

Jen Swisher is a Happiness Engineer on the Jetpack plugin at Automattic and is organizing WordCamp US 2021 online.

Show Notes

Event Date: October 1

Event Website: https://us.wordcamp.org/2021/

Twitter | @JenSwish

Episode Transcript

Topher: Hey everyone! My name is Topher.

Cate: And my name is Cate.

Topher: And this is Hallway Chats. We’d like to take a moment to thank our sponsor Nexcess, a Liquid Web brand. Be sure to check out their new product WP Quickstart. WP Quickstart is a fast and affordable way to build membership sites on WordPress with packages beginning at just $49. Visit Nexcess.net to get started.

Our guest today is Jen Swisher. Welcome.

Cate: Hi, Jen.

Jen: It’s great to be here.

Cate: So Jen, we’re really glad to have you here. We’re excited to hear a little bit more about you. We want to talk about what keeps you volunteering in the WordPress space and to tell us a little bit more about being a part of the lead organizing team for WordCamp US and the upcoming WordCamp US 2021 which is right around the corner, October 1.

Jen: Yeah, it’s sneaking up closer and closer every day.

Cate: I know it’s crazy. I’m like, “I am not ready for October yet.” But October is coming whether I like it or not.

Jen: Yeah, barreling towards us.

Cate: Right.

Topher: Tell us about where you’re from and how you got into WordPress.

Jen: I’m from a teeny tiny little town in Michigan—it’s actually not too far from y’all—called Sunfield. So I lived there, went to school there… was basically born there. I left there when I was 19. I moved to St. Louis, Missouri, which is where I live now. I came here for college. They gave me a very, very generous scholarship. And it’s the only reason I have a degree honestly.

So I graduated in 2012 with a degree in Interactive Media and Web Design. But my WordPress story actually starts about halfway through my time there where I started working for a website company. They asked me, “Do you think you could use this WordPress thing to build websites for us?” I literally never heard of it before in my entire life. I was like, “Sure, why not? Let’s do this thing.”

I started, you know, just kind of trying to dig into everything I could possibly find about the software. And the Codecs, as it was called at the time, it’s big. It was very, very big and very hard to understand if you’re just starting to get your feet wet.

So I started looking for other online resources and found out about these meetups that they were doing in our area. So I started going to the meetup started meeting other WordPress people and asking questions and learning things like… I think one of the first things I learned was how to build child themes. And that’s basically what I did the rest of the time I worked there was I used… I think it was either 2010 or 2011 at the time to build child themes for local businesses and nonprofits that the company I was working for had contracts with. So that was where I got started with WordPress really.

Cate: That’s really cool.

Jen: Yeah. And then it would have been 2014 for WordCamp San Francisco. So during WordCamp San Francisco that year, that was the last one before it actually flipped to WordCamp US. That one, there was a fire drill in the middle of one of the sessions in the morning.

Topher: I was there. I remember it.

Jen: My community-

Topher: I could not do it.

Jen: Right. No. Apparently, it was some sort of scheduled thing and they just didn’t tell anyone.