Introducing Dave Kiss

Within the WordPress community, Dave Kiss has evolved from client work, to plugin development, to now teaching others code and development skills.

Show Notes

Website | https://davekiss.com/

Twitter | @davekiss

Episode Transcript

Liam: This is Hallway Chats, where we talk with some of the unique people in and around WordPress.

Tara: Together, we meet and chat with folks you may not know about in our community.

Liam: With our guests, we’ll explore stories of living – and of making a living with WordPress.

Tara: And now, the conversation begins. This is episode 14.

Liam: Hi! Welcome the Hallway Chats. I am Liam Dempsey.

Tara: I am Tara Claeys. Today we are joined by Dave Kiss who tells us that a Google search for information about how to program led him down a decade long worm hole into WordPress. Hello, Dave!

Dave: Hey guys! How’s it going? Thanks for having me.

Liam: Fantastic Dave. Thanks for joining us here today. We really appreciate it. We’re excited to get to know you. Spend a few minutes telling us about yourself. Where you are, what you do and what’s moving you ahead these days.

Dave: Yeah sure thing. As you guys know and I’d like everybody to know, my name is Dave. I am a full stack Programmer. I’ve been writing code for the past ten years or so now. I never really meant to do that. I kind of got into it by accident. I went to school for video production. I thought I was gong to be the next Star Wars guy or something like. But I found that carrying around those 70-pound cameras and working 16 or 17-hour days wasn’t really for me. I decided that maybe I should start looking elsewhere for what was fulfilling to me. So I kind of just got into…I always liked spending time on a computer and AOL was a big thing for me back in the days when it was 2.0 or 2.5. I loved chatting online. I thought maybe I would get started building some websites. So I wanted to show off some of the videos that I was making my own site, so I tried to figure out how to put all the videos I was making online. It turned out that I actually really liked the fact that nobody was bothering me when I was getting my work done. I liked the logical picking apart things and trying to figure how they worked. The more time I spent doing it, the more I realized that I really enjoyed it. So here we are ten years later. I don’t know. I kind of fell into this role, but I don’t know how I got here.

Tara: Yeah. So you taught yourself? Have you taught yourself everything you know?

Dave: Yeah. Everything is self-taught. Obviously, it’s not just because of me but because of everybody else with the ability to just Google something long enough to figure out how everything works and watching YouTube videos. Now you get to the point where if you do it long enough you eventually get good at it. So that’s where we are now.

Tara: So tell us a little bit about your work that you’re doing and your programming skills. Are you working for yourself? Are you freelancing? What kind of business are you running?

Dave: Ok. Sure thing. I guess when I first started off I was just doing client work for other sites and any kind of work that came my way. I would take on anything and just try to get things done for the client. But I realized (after doing that for a year or two) that I wasn’t really getting a whole lot of satisfaction out of it. I wanted to really figure out why that was. I think it really comes down to the fact that I never really got into this work just to do work for other people. I got into it because I was interested in building and I really liked the satisfaction of seeing my ideas come to life in creating. So instead of working for a client,