Introducing Russell Aaron

Russell is a new father, blogger, racing enthusiast, and back-end developer meet support technician. Based out of Las Vegas, Nevada, Russell works at WebDevStudios.

Show Notes

Website | russellenvy.com

Website | WebDev Studios

Website | Maintainn

Website | WordPress Vegas Meetup

Twitter | @enqueue_russ

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 49.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re joined by Russell Aaron. Russell is a new father, blogger, racing enthusiast, and back-end developer meet support technician. Based out of Las Vegas, Nevada, Russell works at WebDevStudios. Currently, Russell is one of the co-organizers of the WordPress Vegas Meetup group. Hey, Russell.

Russell: Hi, Tara.

Liam: Hey, Russell, welcome. Thanks for joining us on the show today. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, more than Tara shared?

Russell: A little bit more than Tara shared. Alright, I started out doing affiliate marketing and we needed to build a website in order for people that track their sales so I got involved with PHP and I started learning basic how WordPress sites work and how– it was very brand new, this is 2004, 2005. But I started just learning the fundamentals and then I started building MySpace layouts for bands. I’m very big into music and I love everything about music. I have a guitar tatted on my arm, it’s my grandfather’s Gibson Les Paul. I love music. And I was helping my friends who had bands and I was building cool tricked out MySpace layouts, and I would use the blog feature of the WordPress blog and I would blog about my triumphs or my failures. I’d be like, “Oh, I can’t figure out this thing, or I don’t know how to build this template or whatever.” But I was doing it at the blog and I was using WordPress. One day, somebody told me that I could install WordPress on my own website. Once I did that, I just fell in love. I could do anything I wanted, I could be a blogger, or I could build a corporate website, or I could build my own little app. I was just hooked because the possibilities were endless. Then there is a WordCamp in Vegas, I think it’s 2013. Josh Strebel from Pagely, he did a presentation on the many faces of WordPress and he covered just the random websites that are built on WordPress, there’s an entire video game that you can play that’s all ran on custom post types and a WordPress site. I saw that and I just knew WordPress is where it’s going to be for a long time. That basically got me to the WordPress meetup group. I sought out more information, I wanted to meet more people in this community that I’ve heard so much about. Five months later, I was speaking and I haven’t stopped doing that and it’s really my passion. It’s a conversation that I can never stop having, anything really around WordPress.

Liam: That is great. What are you doing today in WordPress? In our intro, it said you’re a back-end developer but affiliate marketing to back-end developer I imagine had a few steps or at least a learning curve in between somehow. Talk to us a little bit about that, would you?