Episode 150 – Cate and Topher DeRosia

A Conversation with Cate and Topher DeRosia

The DeRosias are the founders and stewards of HeroPress. If you don’t already know about it, HeroPress tells the stories of people who have leveraged WordPress and its community to change their lives and achieve their goals. Through these stories, global connections are made and conversations are had that build a stronger community, more employment, and educational opportunities, and easier access to resources.

Show Notes

Website | HeroPress

Twitter | @mysweetcate

Twitter | @topher1kenobe

Episode Transcript

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions and our guests share their stories, ideas, and perspectives.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 150.

Tara: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Tara Claeys.

Liam: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Liam Dempsey.

Liam: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Liam Dempsey.

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Cate and Topher DeRosia. The DeRosias are the founders and stewards of HeroPress. If you don’t already know about it, HeroPress tells the stories of people who have leveraged WordPress and its community to change their lives and achieve their goals. Through these stories, global connections are made and conversations are had that build a stronger community, more employment, and educational opportunities, and easier access to resources. It’s a great resource, a great organization. We are such fans of HeroPress. Thanks for joining us. Hey, we’re glad you’re here.

Cate: Thanks for having us.

Topher: Thanks for having us. Tara…

Liam: You are very welcome. Go ahead.

Topher: Tara, you did an essay on HeroPress once.

Tara: I did.

Liam: Tara is awesome. Thank you for sharing that, Tara. And thank you for flagging that up, Topher. And welcome to you both, Topher and Cate. Thanks for joining us here today.

Topher: Yeah.

Liam: This is where we would normally say “tell us a little bit more about yourself.” I feel like because of your great work with HeroPress, most of the folks probably listening to our show or at least our regular listeners are going to know who both you Cate and Topher are. So we’re going to do things a little bit differently on this, our 149th episode of Hallway Chats.

What we’re going to do is in our little role change, we’re going to ask Cate and Topher really to interview Tara and I. And not so much from our individual perspective than individual lives, but really as the cohosts and organizers of Hallway Chats. So we’ll be really answering our two signature questions, not from our own personal perspectives, but rather from the perspectives of managers of this happy, little show. So if everybody’s all with us here, then I will turn the mic back over to DeRosias and invite them to get this interview underway.

Cate: So my first question would be, why did you start Hallway Chats?

Liam: And I’m going to turn that question over to Tara to start.

Topher: Well done.

Tara: We had a lot of free time. No, no. Well, in part, to be honest, inspired by what HeroPress was doing. And also at the time, for me personally, I listened to every WordPress podcast there was. And at the time, there were maybe four or five that I really listened to really regularly. And I noticed that a lot of times it was the same people on those podcasts each time. So I thought it would be kind of nice to hear stories of people that I meet at WordCamps and in Slack groups who aren’t on podcasts.