Introducing Beth Soderberg

Beth is a Washington, DC based web developer, digital strategist and activist. She builds websites and organizes around open source communities, feminist issues and the intersection of technology and empowerment.

Show Notes

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience 

Blacksburg Belle

Transcript:

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

Liam: I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we’re joined by Beth Soderberg. Beth is a Washington DC based web developer, digital strategist and activist. She builds websites and organizes around open source communities, feminist issues and the intersection of technology and empowerment. Beth? Hello!

Beth: Hello!

Tara: Hi Beth! Welcome!

Beth: It’s great to be here.

Tara: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself beyond what Liam just described?

Beth: Sure. I build websites for a living. I run my own small consultancy, and I work primarily with nonprofits, activist groups of various kinds and random small businesses as well as some larger subcontracting type clients. So day-by-day I’m building websites. I try to bring the work that I’m doing with building websites or supporting websites back to issues that I care about, especially with organizations that really need technical support. They can trust and rely on me (which is rare to find especially for a small nonprofit working an issue that is much bigger than their bandwidth).

Liam: That’s a great introduction. Thank you Beth. If you’re making websites and you’re on our show, are you using WordPress? Tell us a little bit about how you first got into WordPress. What impressed you about it? What drew you to it?

Beth: I was dragged to WordCamp Boston 2010 which was in January. It was a very cold experience. I knew nothing about WordPress. I just knew that my mentor at work had managed to convince our boss to pay for it to get me to go.

Liam: That always makes the trip seem nicer.

Beth: Yeah. I was working at a small nonprofit that was focused on women’s rights issues. We didn’t have money for this type of thing. So the fact that there was a moment in time where it was somehow approved for me to go to something like this…it didn’t matter what it was… I was going. So I went. I had been a writer. I was in charge of an online daily newswire about feminist news. The argument for me to go to the conference was to learn to be a better digital editor and strategist. I went to the conference. I went to some of the blogging sessions. I had already been working professionally online as a media producer for several years at this point. I got bored in those sessions. I started to just go to stuff I didn’t understand. That was the first time I was like huh! It’s interesting how this works beyond what I can put into it in terms of words. From there it was sort of a slow evolution into deciding that I liked writing code more than I like writing words. Now I’m back at a place that I realize I like writing both words and code. That’s been an interesting sort of full circle.

Liam: Talk to us about that circle of the evolution of writer to developer. I started as a writer myself and did not go code. I went with more design and writing (some code but no parts developer). Maybe you could talk us through your own journey?

Beth: I was an accidental writer. Writing is by far the thing I am best at. I always resisted it because I didn’t take English in college for example. I had placed out of it because I had 5s on the two English AP exams. I’m terrible at grammar. I’m awful at grammar. I can’t tell you what an adverb is still. But I’ve always been a very prolific reader. As a teenager…where I grew up there is a small-town library where I still know the librarians…this is how much I went as a child.