Episode 106: Courtney Robertson

Introducing Courtney Robertson

Courtney has a background in teaching WordPress, working as a contractor with Modern Tribe, The Events Calendar, and first started using WordPress with version 2.5.

Show Notes

Website | CourtneyEngle.com

Website | RobertsonHome.com

Twitter | @courtneyengle

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 106.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Courtney Robertson. Courtney has a background in teaching WordPress, working as a contractor with Modern Tribe, The Events Calendar, and first started using WordPress with version 2.5. She’s a mom of two toddlers and will share with us how she juggles work-life balance. I’m looking forward to hearing about that. Thanks for joining us. Hello, Courtney.

Courtney: Hi, there. It’s great to see some familiar faces today.

Liam: It totally is. How are you, Courtney? Welcome to the show. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

Courtney: Yeah. My background is that I was a high school business education teacher. So, think the computer programming teacher. I was in the public schools for probably six years or so, and then I decided to let go of that and start running my own web agency. I did that for I want to say about eight years, and then babies came along.

Now I’m an independent contractor. I could still freelance on the side, but I do a lot of work at The Events Calendar. I speak and attend a lot of the WordCamps in the Mid-Atlantic region. I’m located near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, so that’s a little west of Gettysburg.

Tara: How did you get started as a teacher?

Courtney: Wow, that one, I think I just really always wanted to be in the computer lab when I was in high school. And so I would get passes during all of my study halls and any bit of free time that I had to go play around on Dos and Windows 95 before we had the internet available in schools.

I started in college with a major in social studies, and then I switched over to business said because again, I just kept gravitating back to the computers. Funny college story, my one coding class in college was in a lab that was brightly lit at sunset with a dim projector before they had computers available for the students to learn simple C. We would take the notes on paper, trek over to the computer lab, put our disks in, mount them to the drive, write them in PICO and VI, and telnet in the whole business. I decided I didn’t like doing things that way, and I wanted to teach kids a better way how to do that.

Tara: Wow, that is old school. When you started teaching, was the technology advanced by then or were you making the transition from that old fashioned way as a teacher?

Courtney: Well, the first year I had a cart and I pushed it classroom to classroom, and I had chalkboards and overhead. And we would visit computer labs depending on the class subject that I taught. I kind of taught a little bit of everything within business education. The next year, I had a SMART Board. A few years later, I switched school districts and jumped about 10 years back in time because of the way that the state-owned public school worked.

It was a unique school. And it sadly is no more. But the way that that school worked, they wouldn’t only allow us to use what the government itself was using at the Capitol. So our network was very behind the times.