Episode 54: Carrie Dils on Genesis Theme Development

Welcome to today’s episode and we’d like to thank WPNinjas for supporting us all year and everything they’ve done to help us produce this podcast. We do have an open sponsorship available, check out the website for information on the opportunity.

Carrie Dills is our guest today.  Carrie is currently doing web development with Crowd Favorite by day and dabbling in a variety of things tech by nite. She has been working around computers her whole life, and began freelancing straight out of college. About five years ago was introduced to WordPress and that was the beginning of her present story. She is currently a team lead and software developer at Crowd Favorite.

In today’s episode we’ll will talk about:

The challenges of going from an independent contractor to working as part of an enterprise

Work/life balance

Carrie’s Utility Pro Theme

Office Hours FM Podcast

Courses offered by Carrie

On Genesis…

When Carrie’s being just Carrie she’ll head outdoors to bike or just take a walk. If she happens to land at a craft brewery in town, that would be okay too. A mystery-thriller is a great way to end her day.

You can visit her at carriedils.com or you can find her hanging out at Twitter @cdils.

Resources mentioned in this podcast:

Utility Pro

Office Hours FM

lynda.com

If you’re enjoying the show we sure would appreciate a Review in iTunes.  Thanks!

Transcript

INTRO: Welcome to Apply Filters, the podcast all about WordPress development. Now here’s your hosts, Pippin Williamson and Brad Touesnard.

PIPPIN: Hello, and welcome to Episode 54 of Apply Filters. This episode is sponsored by the WP Ninjas, the creators of Ninja Forms, Ninja Demo, and a few other plugins. They’ve been exceptionally gracious over the last year and sponsored countless episodes, so we want to thank them for all of the kindness that they’ve given us and help that they’ve provided to help us produce this podcast.

Today is the last episode, for a while, that they’ll be sponsoring, so we do have an open sponsorship. If you’re interested, go ahead and get in touch with us from the sponsorship page. But, again, a most sincere thanks to the WP Ninjas for everything they’ve done to help us produce this podcast.

All right, we’re going to go ahead and dive right in. Today, we have Carrie Dils with us. She is pretty well known throughout the WordPress community, so if you aren’t familiar with Carrie, you can find more information about her on her website and obviously today in this episode. Carrie, do you want to say hello?

CARRIE: Hey, Pippin. How’re you doing?

PIPPIN: I’m doing great. It’s awesome to have you on.

CARRIE: Thanks for having me.

PIPPIN: Well, Carrie, why don’t we go ahead and start by having you just give yourself a quick introduction, tell us briefly what you do, maybe where you work, and anything else you feel like throwing out.

CARRIE: Oh, sure thing. Let’s see. I’m based out of Texas. I am presently doing Web development for a company called Crowd Favorite. We do a lot of enterprise level WordPress projects as well as some other tech, so that’s my day job.

By night, I do lots of other things. I dabble in creating some of my own products and so forth. Anyways, CarrieDils.com is my website, but I’m usually always hanging out on Twitter @CDils if you want to say hello.

PIPPIN: Fantastic. Crowd Favorite is just a small, little, tiny company.

CARRIE: Just a little one.

PIPPIN: Just little. I want to cover a few things. I want to hear more about your work at Crowd Favorite. I want to hear about some of your side projects and some of the other things that you do. Let’s start by diving into a little bit of your back story, maybe how you got into Web development, WordPress, or anything that kind of led up to it. What’s your history?

CARRIE: I grew up around computers. My dad worked for a computer company, so always,