Introducing Russell Heimlich

Russell is the lead developer at Spirited Media and works remotely from home. He has two little girls and lives outside Washington, DC.

Show Notes

Website | russellheimlich.com

Twitter | @Kingkool68

Github | kingkool68

Skateboarding Website

Mr. HHS

Episode Sponsor

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.

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Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is episode 17. Welcome to Hallway Chats, I’m Tara Claeys.

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we’re joined by Russell Heimlich, the lead developer at Spirited Media. It’s a local news startup with sites in Philadelphia, Pittsburg, and Denver. Russel, hi, welcome.

Russell: Hi, glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Tara: Hey Russel, what can you tell us about yourself?

Russell: Oh, I’m just a WordPress developer that has kids, pretty much sums up my life at this stage at least.

Liam: [laughs] Can you share a little bit about how you got into WordPress?

Russell: Sure. Do you want the long story? No, let’s do the short story. One weekend, I had a website, I’ve started doing front-end development and then I heard about this WordPress thing and one weekend just sat down and just played with it and fiddled around with it. This was like 2008, I want to say, and I just took the default theme which was Kubrick at the time, and I made it match my site and eight hours later, I had figured out how to make a WordPress theme kind of look like my site. Then after that, I had a blog and I was like, “Oh, I guess I should start blogging.” So then I started blogging for a couple years and then that’s kind of how I got started with WordPress.

Tara: I love that. How did you get into front-end development, to begin with, before WordPress even came about?

Russell: I mean, it all kind of started in fifth grade I would say. I was outside my house and there was a new kind who was in school. He looked at my neighborhood and he was just kind of riding by on his bike. He was into skateboarding so me and him—he got me into skateboarding and we would be skateboarding for a long, long time. When you’re young and you skateboard all day, the next natural progression is to videotape yourself skateboarding. Then I convinced my parents to get me a video camera and they were kind of hesitant about it at fir...