Introducing Tessa Kriesel

Tessa Kriesel is an agency and community engineer at Pantheon and she’s been a web developer for over 10 years. She’s the founder of Outspoken Women, she’s passionate about diversity initiatives and teaching people to code and mentoring new developers.

Show Notes

Website | tessak22.com

Website | Outspoken Women

Twitter | @tessak22

Website | Girl Develop It

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 33.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Tessa Kriesel. Tessa is an agency and community engineer at Pantheon and she’s been a web developer for over 10 years. She’s the founder of Outspoken Women, she’s passionate about diversity initiatives and teaching people to code and mentoring new developers. Hi Tessa, welcome.

Tessa: Hi, Liam.

Tara: Hey, Tessa. Great to see you, welcome. Why don’t you take a little bit of time and tell us a little bit more about yourself than what Liam just said?

Tessa: Yeah, there’s definitely a lot to know. I have a variety of passions and skills, but I would say things that are probably interesting to know, I am married, I have three kids, they’re pretty awesome. Really love web development and anything that it has to do with, as well as anything that has to do with bringing in new developers to our industry, as well as basically including more diversity in tech in general.

Tara: How did you get started with WordPress and coding?

Tessa: Oh, that’s a really good story. This could be a very long story but I’ll try to keep it to bare minimum since we only have half an hour. I actually got into coding a little bit in high school, I was just really interested in computers and programming. I was kind of that person that was sitting in the little– at our school, we kind of had this computer and networking club that would help with actual computer issues that teachers might have or other students, or whatever. So I joined that, I just really liked to do it. I had like a game programming class that I did and I really liked it. But I thought that my passion was actually restaurant management. I went to school for business management, then some restaurant management. I did a lot of staff management, creating menus, a lot of really cool stuff actually. But just realized that when you’re putting in a new point of sales system, that I really loved my job at that point. I kind of looked back then like, why did I really love my job during these few weeks and now I feel like I’m kind of in a slump again? And it was the computers, it was setting up all of the new point of sales, setting up the new system, getting them actually physically setup. And realized that my true calling was actually tech. My dad owned a small business so I built him a pretty basic HTML website. After that– kind of a tidbit about me is I used to be obsessively in love with Guitar Hero. I would play it like crazy, that was before I had kids of course, when I actually had time. [laughter]

Tara: You actually played the real guitar or just the Guitar Hero?

Tessa: No, I’m not a musician at all. Not even one bit. I have no idea what brought me to Guitar Hero but I really liked it. As I was playing Guitar Hero,