Episode 168 – A Chat With Maestro Stevens

Show Notes

Contact Info:

* Website

* LinkedIn

* Twitter

Episode Transcript

Topher: Hey everyone, welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Topher, your host today. My regular co-host Nyasha is sick today, so it’s just gonna be me and our guest.

Before we get started, I want to say thanks to our sponsor Nexcess. We’ve been hosted with Nexcess for a couple of years now and it’s been extremely good. To put it bluntly, their servers are fast, uptime is great, good communication when there needs to be downtime. A couple of times over the couple of years we’ve had midnight outages for 20 minutes while they redo something. But that’s great. I’m happy with their communication.

As a nerd, they give me what I want. I like SSH, I like database access, I like to get under the hood, and it’s all there. They also offer some stuff I don’t use but it looks really sharp. They have WooCommerce automated testing, which is great if you’re running Woo. They have a Sales Performance Monitor and a plug in performance monitor. So if those things sound like something you can use, I recommend giving it a shot.

You have to forgive me, I have a slight cold but we’ll press through. Our guest today is Maestro Stevens. Welcome, sir.

Maestro: Thank you for having me, Topher. Great to be here.

Topher: Welcome. I’ve been looking forward to this.

Maestro: Absolutely.

Topher: We met quite recently at Buffalo WordCamp for the first time. And then very soon after we got connected because of WordCamp Europe, and now we’re doing this. It feels like within the span of a month we’ve become best buddies.

Maestro: Yes, yes. It’s been a short journey but it feels like it’s been forever.

Topher: Yeah. You know, I’m impressed that we haven’t run into each other sooner because I mean, we live within 300 or 400 miles of each other. It seems like we would be going to the same kind of WordCamps or meetups in the same communities, you know?

Maestro: Yeah, I definitely can see that happening a lot more now that we have linked up at the WordCamp Buffalo-

Topher: Oh, yeah.

Maestro: That’s where we met in person, got acquainted.

Topher: So tell me a little about yourself. Where do you live and what do you do?

Maestro: Speaking of where I live, like you said, I’m pretty close to you. I’m in Cleveland, Ohio, currently is where I reside and I am a Brand Webmaster, also coined myself as the Fresh Prince of WordPress, just mainly because I’m striving to bring a fresh perspective to the WordPress community. I started my journey in WordPress back in 2018. But I started my company, which is a creative agency, helping people build websites and brands back in 2015.

Topher: Awesome. I’m going to tip my hand a little bit and tell the crowd that this is our second time through this podcast because somebody didn’t press the “record” button. So a couple of my questions I kind of know the answer to but I want to hear them again anyway. You own your business. Are you a solo? You said you had a team. Are they W2 or contractors?