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Tiffany has been building websites for 20 years and building them with WordPress for 14. She now works at Automattic and helps empower people who do interesting things to get the most out of WordPress.
Blog | Tiff.is
Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.
Liam: We ask questions, and our guests share their stories, ideas and perspectives.
Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is episode 85.
Liam: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Liam Dempsey.
Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re joined by Tiffany Bridge. Tiffany has been building websites for 20 years and building them with WordPress for 14. She now works at Automattic and helps empower people who do interesting things to get the most out of WordPress. Welcome, Tiffany.
Tiffany: Hi, you all. How are you doing?
Liam: Very well, thank you. Very well. A pleasure to meet you out here in our little hallway, Tiffany. can you tell us more about yourself, please?
Tiffany: Sure. I am working currently at Automattic but over the course of my career, I have been an office assistant, a technical recruiter, a standup comedian. I’ve been in-house and I’ve been freelance. All of that kind of added up to where I am now. Now I live and work in Washington DC and I live up in Northeast DC with my husband and my son and my very large cat.
Tara: Can you tell funny stories about your very large cat?
Tiffany: He’s a pretty impressive beast. Actually, no. The one big story that I always tell about him is that he’s so large that when my son was in that ‘full-body tackle the cat four times a day’ phase, he was just completely unbothered by it because he and my son weighed about the same at the time. He would just sit there and take it and kind of look at me like, “Do you want to do something about this? Because I’m not giving up my seat on the couch so I’m going to need you to peel him off of me.” He’s just very, very chill and loves children.
Tara: That’s great. How did you get started with tech and websites? Did you go to school for it?
Tiffany: No. My degree is in political science with an auxiliary in Christian ministry. All I learned in college was to be super fun at parties. No, I got into tech because when I was a kid, I used to watch Star Trek reruns with my parents. That set the expectations for me of how computers should work. I was always very miffed that I couldn’t just ask my computer a question and then would have an answer. And, “What is this Encarta CD nonsense that I have to use with the computer?” When the internet started to become a thing, I was like, “Okay, look. This is it. This is the thing that is finally going to get me the computer that I have always wanted.” In college, I started teaching myself HTML on Geocities. Back when Geocities URLs were still based on physical addresses. If you were in college, you had an address on the quad. I was teaching myself from Webmonkey tutorials on Hotwire.com back before that was a hotel site. I taught myself HTML in college and then after I got out of school, I wasn’t really ready to be hired in tech right away so I tried to stay tech-adjacent as long as I could. I worked for a startup in the first .com boom. 1999, 2000, 2001 era. And then kind of bounced around a little bit until I ended up moving to DC. Then I was like an office assistant but I rebuilt the organization’s website because what are they going to do? They don’t have any money to hire anybody else so I did it myself. Then I worked at a software startup. Basically, just sort of stayed tech-adjacent until I could finally get a job where I was paid to build websites. Up until that point, I have been doing it sort of on the side or for personal– but it wasn’t until actually about 2007 that I actually got a job where my job was to do the website.
Tara: To do that job, when you’ve been working for yourself and you taught yourself, where did your portfolio, resume, confidence, background to take a job building websites that people pay you for in a job, can you talk about that a little bit? What that first job was like? Were you learning on the job?
Tiffany: Well, I was learning quite a bit but what I discovered was I had been building– since 2007, I’ve been doing that. I had been building just personal web blogs and stuff for several years up to that point. I had started with Blogger and then I moved to movable type, and then I moved to WordPress. So I had developed– back before you could just press a button and get WordPress on your host. You had to download it, and install it, and upload it, and change the permissions and everything all yourself. I had learned a lot of skills and could build a website from scratch. When it came time for me to do that– I had been working as a tech recruiter and my practice was closing down. The larger global company I was with was trying to get out of the business that I was in. And one of my former colleagues called me up and she’s like, “Look, I know the company’s kind of shutting you down but I’ve got this job that I’ve been trying to fill for four months and I just can’t find anybody. Do you have anybody left who needs something?” I was like, “Well, actually, I could do this job.” She was like, “Oh, we’re talking about you because I’m interested to hear that?” She was able to help me get the interview and I had a couple of– there was like a coding test and a couple of tech questions and things like that. And they were like, “Okay, well, I guess you can do this.” By then, the website was all like in content management system. And content management, it’s content management. You just have to learn the system, you learn the software and you know what you’re doing. I had enough HTML and CSS, more than enough, frankly, to work on that website. And then, while I was there, we ended up moving that website into Drupal. I was doing a lot of learning on the job, but I think that’s kind of how it is on the internet. Everything we do changes all the time. There’s never a point where you have like, “Learn what you needed to do.” There’s never a point where you know enough. There’s always learning the next thing. I think that’s been kind of the theme of my trajectory.
Tara: I guess you were working with a team then, too?
Tiffany: It was a team of two. It was me and my boss. It wasn’t much of a team. [laughter] I mean, when we migrated to–
Liam: That’s a tennis team, doubles.
Tiffany: Exactly. It was doubles, exactly. And my boss had started out as a graphic designer and had kind of moved into the web. There was a lot that he was still learning. When we finally moved the company website into Drupal, we actually had hired a firm to manage the actual development of the Drupal site because that was and, frankly, still is kind of beyond me. But I was kind of handling it internally from the content strategy side and things like that. For a while, I kind of was doing more content strategy than actual website builds. That was where I learned that that was a specialty one could have. That was cool. I did that for a while.
Liam: It’s interesting. The way that different web specialties evolve over time. Everything changes and like, oh, that’s a job. Okay, now it’s not a job because now technology is dead.
Tiffany: Well, it’s funny because I was a tech recruiter for about two years and I kind of watched information architecture become a specialty. Nobody was asking for it and then suddenly, everyone was asking for it. And there were only a few people doing it. So a lot of people had to kind of get on that quickly. That’s one of my favorite things is actually watching things that didn’t use to be jobs become jobs. It gives me hope for us all, I think. Like, oh, that thing that you like to do, it’s not a job? Well, it might be. Give it a couple of years.
Liam: But it certainly requires an embrace of don’t hang onto your skills too tightly because it may not be valuable in two years. And you’ve probably adjusted to that pretty well.
Tiffany: Because I’m self-taught, I kind of have this constant sense of imposter syndrome that leads me to feel like I’ve always got to be learning the next thing. Because on some level, I’m trying to like– maybe if I learn how to do this, I won’t feel like an imposter anymore. And that’s a fool’s game, intellectually, I know that. But on some basis, I’m like, “Oh, if I just learned how to do this. I would feel like I really know what I’m doing. And what I’ve learned from learning thing after thing after thing is that it never stops. It never stops. So you have to just sort of embrace the fact that there’s always going to be something new. Being really, really competent in HTML4 is nice but we’re a little bit past that now. Yeah, you have to just accept and embrace the change, I think. Especially in our field, but I think in all fields. I think the entire global internet of work, that’s especially true there. You don’t get to expect that you’re going to get to program in Fortran forever.
Liam: Yeah, exactly. And almost in the sense, the best of mindset is the mindset that embraces change. And we certainly hear a lot of, “I started in design and now I develop.” Or, “I started in content and now I design.” Or, “I started as a developer and I realized I wanted to do this other thing in technology.” And just having the ability to do that. Because if you’re willing to put in the time and energy, everything is so new that nobody’s written or gotten their doctorate on PHP. At least, I don’t think they have. Maybe they have, I don’t know.
Tiffany: I mean, I’m sure there’s somebody but– [laughs]
Liam: Right, somebody probably has. It’s the internet so somebody has. But the idea that things change all the time and if you’re willing to embrace that and work hard, you can make that happen.
Tiffany: And to also see the ways that your skills kind of connect to other skills. It requires some imagination, too.
Liam: I totally agree with that. And I love that idea of trying to map skill sets from job A to the requirements of job B because a lot of times, they are the same, right? If you can manage a project and get your work done and communicate. There’s not too many jobs if you’re willing to learn the technology, or the flow, or the system that you can do. Let me take a left turn here, or maybe it’s more of a gentle left turn than a hard left, and ask you about success. I want to ask you about what is your definition of success? Whether it’s personal, professional, or maybe a mix of both, Tiffany?
Tiffany: Success is so hard because– I mean, success is almost one of those things we’re always chasing and do we ever feel like– it’s kind of that same imposter syndrome thing. “If I just do this, I will be successful and I can stop feeling like I need to chase it.” But I feel like for me, I’ve really had to define success as happy to get to work in the morning and happy to go home at night. I want a job that I like and that is engaging and fulfilling, and then that I can leave at the end of the day because it supports my life that is also engaging and fulfilling. I feel like I have achieved it, and then lost it, and then achieved it again at various points in my career.
Tara: Yeah, the internet is not something you can really turn off at night and come back to in the morning and expect that nothing’s broken or changed. That’s an awesome goal on definition depending on what your role is in your job with website development. It may not be totally realistic unless you have somebody to back you up.
Tiffany: I think it’s less about being able to turn it off and more that both spheres of your life, like your work and your life are supporting and enhancing each other. Working from home right now– this is the first time I worked from home full time. I was freelancing for a while but this is the first time I’m working from home full time with Automattic and I’m really finding that I’m having to develop boundaries around my home life in a way that I didn’t have to do before, and I’m still learning to do that. But I feel like the work is engaging enough and the company is supportive enough that I will get there and I will figure it out, that’s just the learning process and I think it’s an adjustment because I haven’t been on Automattic all that long.
Liam: I wanted to ask you about your definition, the latter part where you said, “Happy to go home.” I interpreted that as the ‘not work’ side of life is pretty important to you and you can– be a success. And talk about that, prioritizing non-work. You mentioned earlier that you’ve got a husband, you’ve got a child. You have a house in DC so clearly, there are some bills, whether that’s rent or mortgage or what have you. How do you balance that all? How do you prioritize ‘not work’ in a way that makes you not so anxious to get back to work kind of thing?
Tiffany: I mean, I’m still learning to do that, it’s hard. I think part of it is that I think, first of all, having a little kid will sort of force you into it because he comes home from school and we have after-care with him. He comes home around the end of a work day so about five o’clock. And then you’ve got to get dinner on the table and you’ve got to hang out with your child, and he’s not super great at respecting workspace which, on one hand, I kind of want to teach him to do, and on the other hand, I feel like it kind of keeps me honest that he doesn’t. Because if I’m trying to steal another hour at my desk, he’s like, “Mom, come play Mario Kart with me. Mom, come play with me. Mom, I want to play PJ Masks, come play with me.” And I’m just not very good at playing, I’m not very much fun for a little kid but I think that really helps me remember like, “Okay, nobody at work is expecting you to be in Slack right now. You can actually walk away from your desk, it would be okay.” And my boss has said to me more than once, “You should really turn off all your alerts on your phone. Nothing we’re doing is that important here.” Nothing we’re doing is so important that I can’t wait until tomorrow, it’s okay.
Tara: That’s a good boss.
Tiffany: He is, actually. I’m really enjoying working with him. That’s nice. And I think that’s sort of a cultural position at Automattic as well is that you should do your work and you can do it any time of day, but that doesn’t mean you should be doing it at every time of day. Automattic is the kind of place where people work specifically because they want to live a full and enriching life when they aren’t working. Because you can work from anywhere. You can live anywhere. We have a lot of people who are interested in doing a lot of travel and things like that. They work at Automattic because Automattic supports that lifestyle. I feel like, “Okay, I’m not on the road, I’m not doing any of those things. I can at least go hang out with my kid and talk to him over dinner without thinking about work for a couple of hours.” And then he goes to bed and if there’s really something I have to do, I can do it. But I feel like just the circumstances of my life are conspiring to keep me honest on that, which is valuable.
Tara: I like that phrase, that’s good, “The circumstances of my life are conspiring to keep me honest.” That’s cool.
Liam: Children have a way of doing that. Sorry, Tara. Go on.
Tiffany: Yeah, they do.
Tara: For sure. And you can’t get that time back either so that’s a cliche now, I guess, but it’s true.
Tiffany: It is true. Parenting is this constant whiplash between, “Oh, my god. I hope you’re through this phase soon.” And, “Oh, my god. Stop, be my baby a little bit longer.” And I’ll feel each of those things ten times a day. That’s one of the things that I value about where I am in my career right now is that I don’t have a commute so I’m not having to– a lot of parents of his friends are frantically rushing home from work and they get there right at the last possible minute to pick their child up from after-care, and they never feel like they have enough time. And I’m like, “That’s like two hours of my day that I get back that I don’t have to spend on the metro or in a car, so I almost feel like an obligation to use those hours well and to not feel harried and not feel like my family life conflicts with my work life.” I think that’s a pressure, I think, that– I don’t think that only women feel it but I feel like women feel it very acutely because I feel like– I can’t take credit for phrasing it like this but it stuck with me, is that women are expected so often like they don’t have a family, and then manage their families like they don’t have a job. I feel like that’s something that is sort of socially put on women harder than it’s put on men.
Liam: I’d agree.
Tiffany: I feel like I have this position, incredible privilege to work for the company that I do and that is sort of laissez fair about interfering with your life as they can be. So I feel like I almost have a duty to not be stressed out about it.
Tara: Yeah, and yet you also can be available and sort of not stress out. Also, if you need to work at night, you’re at home, and you need to get work done after you put your kid to bed–
Tiffany: Yeah, it’s fine.
Tara: You have to go pick your son up from school because he was sick, then you make up that time later, you have that flexibility.
Tiffany: Yeah, I went to pick him up yesterday because he was sick. I came home, I put him on the couch and any pediatrician will tell you that the best way to keep a small child on the couch under a blanket resting is to turn on the television, so that’s what I did. And I set him up with a movie, and some fruit, and a bottle of water, and then I went back to my desk and I worked. I was then on a call with my team yesterday afternoon. We have a weekly chat on Wednesday afternoons. And he came over and was standing in front of my webcam and everybody’s like, “Oh, hey, look. We see him.” And waving– because we all work from home and there are a lot of parents on my team. This is all very common. It’s not a problem. I never feel like I have to hide my child from my coworkers. I never feel like it’s an imposition if he interrupts me during a meeting, because most of who are parents will all deal with it. It’s not a big deal.
Tara: I think it’s valued, too. That’s a corporate culture that a lot of companies these days are trying to embrace, is to value that. Because when you have employees who feel that relief from stress and that flexibility, they’re going to do a better job. They’ll be more motivated. I think that’s–
Tiffany: And they’re going to want to stay because I’ve been there like, three months, and I’m already, “How could I ever go back to an office environment after this?” Because this is so great. I’m able to– my ability to carve out time for myself is limited only by my willingness to do it.
Tara: What prompted you to seek out a job with Automattic? And what do you do for them, I guess, also?
Tiffany: Yeah, I’ll start there. I work at Automattic on the special projects team, which is kind of a cool and mysterious way of saying we’re kind of almost like a little internal web agency within Automattic. And what we do is we provide consulting and support to organizations and individuals who just need a little help getting the most out of WordPress. We do a lot of high-profile site builds and things like that, where we think it would be beneficial to the platform as well. If the project would reflect well on the platform, we’ll get it sent in to make sure that the project happens timely well, that sort of thing. That’s the kind of work we do. So I decided to apply for a job at Automattic because freelancing wasn’t really going all that well for me. What I discovered while I was freelancing was that I really hate biz dev and I can’t do all the things involved in running a business while also essentially being that business’ product. I just can’t do that. I have been stalking the Automattic careers page for a while, since before I had been freelancing. And for a long time, only jobs I saw that I was qualified for was happiness engineer, which is support for WordPress.com. And I don’t feel I’m really cut out for tech support, I find that level of interaction very stressful, I’m kind of an introvert. Eventually, a position called technical account engineer was posted and it was posted actually for WordPress VIP which is the hosting for the big enterprise WordPress. Like the New York Times’ WordPress or Facebook’s WordPress or whatever. So I applied for that because it was basically an account manager/project manager who’s good at talking to developers. I’m good at all of those things. And I didn’t hear from them for a little while. And then I did hear back from them and they were like, “Okay, that position is open but we also have this other one on special projects and we think that might even be better.” So I’ve talked to them about it and I was like, wow, this actually sounds exactly like what I got into freelancing to do, which was help people have really great experiences on the web. And help people who might not otherwise know how to get a great website to help their business or their project. Only I get to do it for Automattic at like a full-time salary and benefits. And I was like, “Okay, sold. What do I have to do?” I went through the whole process with them and had a trial project with them, and then that all worked out because I’ve been there ever since.
Tara: I’m curious about the special projects and the example that you mentioned. Talk about that process. Did they come to you and say, “Hey, we want to switch to WordPress and we need help.” Or is there some kind of a radar thing you have going on and you noticed somebody’s doing something and you approach them? Are they a client of yours? How does that work?
Tiffany: It’s kind of all of the above. Sometimes, it’s that we notice that there’s a problem and we introduce ourselves and ask. Sometimes, it’s referrals internally from our colleagues at Automattic. They come to us in a lot of different ways. Selling WordPress services is not really– selling that kind of WordPress agency services is not really our business model. There are plenty of other agencies who do that. It’s more like, do we provide a unique set of– is this project, first of all, beneficial to WordPress as a platform? Will it reflect well and encourage other people to join WordPress, to be on WordPress? Also, do we provide a level of expertise that isn’t generally available that could help?
Tara: Interesting. I was wondering about that because there are plenty of agencies, large well-known agencies that would do that type of thing as well.
Tiffany: Right. And we frequently refer to other agencies when it’s not a good fit and things like that. We’re not out there trying to compete with them. We really respect their place in the ecosystem, we really value their place in the ecosystem. It’s more like, when there’s something unique that we can do that would help, or when we think our participation will benefit the platform as a whole.
Liam: And coming from a WordPress advice conversation, I want to switch over to advice more generally and as it relates to life, I suppose. Tiffany, what’s the single most valuable piece of advice that you’ve ever received and implemented in your life? That can be from a friend, a book. Sounds like you already have something so I’ll stop.
Tiffany: Sure, I do. Something that’s really stuck with me for a lot of years, and this is from back in my days as a recruiter. “Tiffany, you are the CEO of your own career. Nobody is going to build a career for you. It’s not anyone’s job to care about the direction of your career. It’s not going to affect anyone as much as it affects you. You really have to see yourself as a CEO and take charge of it.” I feel like in the times when I have lost sight of that, my career has sort of stagnated. And in the times when I have kept that advice forefronts, my career has advanced. I think it’s probably the most valuable thing anyone’s ever said to me.
Liam: I love that. I say that all the time. Regardless who pays you, you always work for yourself. And if you’re working for yourself, then you’ll very much be the CEO of your career.
Tiffany: I like that way of putting it, too. That’s good. I’m going to put that in my back pocket.
Liam: I do a fair amount of volunteer work with people in transition and a mindset of always working for oneself makes preparing for transition and dealing with transition, even spotting it on the horizon that much easier, right? Because if we see the storm ahead and we’re the CEO of our own career, we can say, “This is a boat that while the ride is nice now, I’m going to pull this board out to port and get on a different boat so that I don’t get stuck in that storm.” I like that. “You’re the CEO of your own career.”
Tara: Yeah, that is excellent. Thank you for sharing that with us.
Liam: We have a bit of time here so I want to ask you about challenges. You’ve covered a lot of things in our conversation here, everything from child care to commuting, to new job and the like. Tell us a little bit about what’s been your biggest challenge to date and how have you overcome it? Or if it’s ongoing, how are you trying to overcome it?
Tiffany: I mean, aside from kind of the obvious in that being a parent presents a big challenge in pretty much every area of your life because, suddenly, you have that one thing that can’t ever be deprioritized. Aside from that, which is kind of obvious, I feel like I really encountered a big challenge a couple of years ago on my last full-time job. It was with a government contractor who has since been acquired by a much larger government contractor. It was my first time in the federal contracting space, and pretty much from my– I took the job ultimately because I was feeling stagnant at the job I was in and I took this other job with a federal contractor because I needed a change. And I didn’t really stop to think about whether it was actually going to be a good fit for my life. I just decided to sort of jump and try to make it work. Honestly, almost from the first day, it turned out to be a terrible move, a bad decision. I worked in an environment with– there was a lot of gaslighting and undermining, and I think I really– I was not my best there. I say that in kind of two sentences. One is, it’s hard to thrive when you’re being fed poison every day. It’s hard to exist, and thrive, and grow when you are literally walking around in the cloud of toxicity all the time. On the other hand, I don’t want to completely put it on my environment. I don’t want to completely disclaim responsibility for it because I feel like there were many points along the way where I could have done better than I did and handling it. And it’s funny, I was eventually let go from that job and I kind of walked out of the building that last day with this ridiculous grin on my face because I had been trying to find a way out and I was so unhappy there that it was affecting my ability to interview. I’d go into interviews and I’d think I was doing okay and realize retrospectively that I bombed them. I got out of there and it was like this huge weight, like I’m not being poisoned anymore. That was when I decided to freelance, because I was looking at jobs and nothing sounded good, nothing sounded like something I wanted to do, nothing sounded like people I wanted to be with. I knew that I couldn’t go back right away. I’m fortunate that my husband, who owns his own company, does well enough that I was able to kind of step back and say, “You know what? I want to try and freelance for a while and see how that goes.” And it went pretty well for a while. It just became clear that as a long-term strategy, that’s not for me. But then I had to kind of deal with the emotional challenge of, “Well, you tried this and it failed, too.” There was just a lot of feeling bad about my own abilities and my own skills and my own commitment to work. There was just a lot of crap I had to dig through. So I feel like– but I needed those couple of years not in a full-time job, just kind of recover and get some perspective on what had happened in the last few years of my career. It hadn’t gone well and some parts of that were on me, and some parts of it were absolutely not on me. And it was really important for me to get some clarity around that. I think women, in particular, we kind of get told a lot of the times, “Well, you should lean in, be aggressive. Oh, not like that. Now you’re being abrasive.” And that’s always been a big challenge for me and my career, because I’m kind of personality plus and, as people like to say, I don’t suffer fools gladly. It can be very challenging for me to thread the needle between, “Yes, I need to dial that back.” Or B, “This criticism is very gendered and not really fair to me.” And also, C, “Well, so what if it is gendered? You still have to work with these people and what are you going to do about it?” I feel like those couple of years were an intense intense privilege that not everyone has and I feel like there’s a lot of clouds that kind of cleared in the last several months for that. I feel like I’m pretty happy where I’ve ended up.
Liam: Yeah, thank you for walking through that. That sounds like that was not a fun place to be and it was helpful for you to have that.
Tiffany: It wasn’t, and I wasn’t fun to live with for a good chunk of it. I’m really glad it’s over.
Liam: I get that. We spend so much of our adult life at work, where if it’s not a productive, fruitful, enjoyable place, it’s hard to be rainbows and sunshine when we’re not there. So thank you for that, I appreciate you sharing. We are effectively out of time here, and one thing we haven’t done, and I really want it to, is get into your standup routine. [laughter] And to totally put you on the spot, do you have a work-friendly joke that you could share with us to wrap up the conversation?
Tiffany: Oh my gosh. No. [laughter] Because I would mention it in front of people at the office and they’ll be like, “Oh, say something funny.” And I finally just had to say, “Look, I write my routines for comedy clubs. They’re appropriate for comedy clubs. If you want to hear me be funny, come to a show. But understand that you are walking into a comedy club and I would say things there that I would never say in a professional setting.” [laughter] And honestly, I haven’t done it in a while because comedy is a low ROI hobby, because you have to spend a lot, like three hours a night sitting at open mics to get five minutes of time. And I am not in a place anymore where I can do that. I haven’t done comedy in a while but I still use those skills all the time, all the time. It was incredibly valuable. I’m now one of those weirdos who really likes public speaking because it just doesn’t– I took a class at the DC Improv, and if you can stand on the DC improv stage with spotlight directly in your eyes so you can’t see anything and make an audience laugh for 10 minutes, you can do anything. I recommend it as a skill to develop.
Tara: I have a friend who did that and I listen to The Moth Podcast a lot and often think about doing storytelling, and sometimes the storytellers are actually comedians on the side.
Tiffany: Yeah, there’s a lot of overlap there.
Tara: Yeah. I have a developer joke.
Tiffany: Go ahead.
Tara: Why did the developer quit his job?
Tiffany: Why?
Tara: Because he didn’t get a raise.
Tiffany: [laugh]
Tara: Get it? Array.
Liam: Ah. [laughter] Ba dum, tss.
Tiffany: I mean, that joke works on multiple levels. It’s also kind of a commentary on their value of digital labor. [laughter]
Liam: Tara Claeys will be appearing where on Tuesday night? [laughter] Tiffany, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
Tara: Thank you, Tiffany.
Tiffany: Thank you, it’s been a real pleasure talking to you.
Liam: Before we say goodbye to you, could you share with us where we can find you online, please?
Tiffany: Sure. My blog is at Tiff.is.
Liam: Tiff.is Perfect, thank you.
Tara: Thank you so much.
Tiffany: Thank you.
Tara: Bye-bye, Tiffany.
Tiffany: Bye-bye, now.
Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.
Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.
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Tiffany has been building websites for 20 years and building them with WordPress for 14. She now works at Automattic and helps empower people who do interesting things to get the most out of WordPress.
Blog | Tiff.is
Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.
Liam: We ask questions, and our guests share their stories, ideas and perspectives.
Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is episode 85.
Liam: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Liam Dempsey.
Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re joined by Tiffany Bridge. Tiffany has been building websites for 20 years and building them with WordPress for 14. She now works at Automattic and helps empower people who do interesting things to get the most out of WordPress. Welcome, Tiffany.
Tiffany: Hi, you all. How are you doing?
Liam: Very well, thank you. Very well. A pleasure to meet you out here in our little hallway, Tiffany. can you tell us more about yourself, please?
Tiffany: Sure. I am working currently at Automattic but over the course of my career, I have been an office assistant, a technical recruiter, a standup comedian. I’ve been in-house and I’ve been freelance. All of that kind of added up to where I am now. Now I live and work in Washington DC and I live up in Northeast DC with my husband and my son and my very large cat.
Tara: Can you tell funny stories about your very large cat?
Tiffany: He’s a pretty impressive beast. Actually, no. The one big story that I always tell about him is that he’s so large that when my son was in that ‘full-body tackle the cat four times a day’ phase, he was just completely unbothered by it because he and my son weighed about the same at the time. He would just sit there and take it and kind of look at me like, “Do you want to do something about this? Because I’m not giving up my seat on the couch so I’m going to need you to peel him off of me.” He’s just very, very chill and loves children.
Tara: That’s great. How did you get started with tech and websites? Did you go to school for it?
Tiffany: No. My degree is in political science with an auxiliary in Christian ministry. All I learned in college was to be super fun at parties. No, I got into tech because when I was a kid, I used to watch Star Trek reruns with my parents. That set the expectations for me of how computers should work. I was always very miffed that I couldn’t just ask my computer a question and then would have an answer. And, “What is this Encarta CD nonsense that I have to use with the computer?” When the internet started to become a thing, I was like, “Okay, look. This is it. This is the thing that is finally going to get me the computer that I have always wanted.” In college, I started teaching myself HTML on Geocities. Back when Geocities URLs were still based on physical addresses. If you were in college, you had an address on the quad. I was teaching myself from Webmonkey tutorials on Hotwire.com back before that was a hotel site. I taught myself HTML in college and then after I got out of school, I wasn’t really ready to be hired in tech right away so I tried to stay tech-adjacent as long as I could. I worked for a startup in the first .com boom. 1999, 2000, 2001 era. And then kind of bounced around a little bit until I ended up moving to DC. Then I was like an office assistant but I rebuilt the organization’s website because what are they going to do? They don’t have any money to hire anybody else so I did it myself. Then I worked at a software startup. Basically, just sort of stayed tech-adjacent until I could finally get a job where I was paid to build websites. Up until that point, I have been doing it sort of on the side or for personal– but it wasn’t until actually about 2007 that I actually got a job where my job was to do the website.
Tara: To do that job, when you’ve been working for yourself and you taught yourself, where did your portfolio, resume, confidence, background to take a job building websites that people pay you for in a job, can you talk about that a little bit? What that first job was like? Were you learning on the job?
Tiffany: Well, I was learning quite a bit but what I discovered was I had been building– since 2007, I’ve been doing that. I had been building just personal web blogs and stuff for several years up to that point. I had started with Blogger and then I moved to movable type, and then I moved to WordPress. So I had developed– back before you could just press a button and get WordPress on your host. You had to download it, and install it, and upload it, and change the permissions and everything all yourself. I had learned a lot of skills and could build a website from scratch. When it came time for me to do that– I had been working as a tech recruiter and my practice was closing down. The larger global company I was with was trying to get out of the business that I was in. And one of my former colleagues called me up and she’s like, “Look, I know the company’s kind of shutting you down but I’ve got this job that I’ve been trying to fill for four months and I just can’t find anybody. Do you have anybody left who needs something?” I was like, “Well, actually, I could do this job.” She was like, “Oh, we’re talking about you because I’m interested to hear that?” She was able to help me get the interview and I had a couple of– there was like a coding test and a couple of tech questions and things like that. And they were like, “Okay, well, I guess you can do this.” By then, the website was all like in content management system. And content management, it’s content management. You just have to learn the system, you learn the software and you know what you’re doing. I had enough HTML and CSS, more than enough, frankly, to work on that website. And then, while I was there, we ended up moving that website into Drupal. I was doing a lot of learning on the job, but I think that’s kind of how it is on the internet. Everything we do changes all the time. There’s never a point where you have like, “Learn what you needed to do.” There’s never a point where you know enough. There’s always learning the next thing. I think that’s been kind of the theme of my trajectory.
Tara: I guess you were working with a team then, too?
Tiffany: It was a team of two. It was me and my boss. It wasn’t much of a team. [laughter] I mean, when we migrated to–
Liam: That’s a tennis team, doubles.
Tiffany: Exactly. It was doubles, exactly. And my boss had started out as a graphic designer and had kind of moved into the web. There was a lot that he was still learning. When we finally moved the company website into Drupal, we actually had hired a firm to manage the actual development of the Drupal site because that was and, frankly, still is kind of beyond me. But I was kind of handling it internally from the content strategy side and things like that. For a while, I kind of was doing more content strategy than actual website builds. That was where I learned that that was a specialty one could have. That was cool. I did that for a while.
Liam: It’s interesting. The way that different web specialties evolve over time. Everything changes and like, oh, that’s a job. Okay, now it’s not a job because now technology is dead.
Tiffany: Well, it’s funny because I was a tech recruiter for about two years and I kind of watched information architecture become a specialty. Nobody was asking for it and then suddenly, everyone was asking for it. And there were only a few people doing it. So a lot of people had to kind of get on that quickly. That’s one of my favorite things is actually watching things that didn’t use to be jobs become jobs. It gives me hope for us all, I think. Like, oh, that thing that you like to do, it’s not a job? Well, it might be. Give it a couple of years.
Liam: But it certainly requires an embrace of don’t hang onto your skills too tightly because it may not be valuable in two years. And you’ve probably adjusted to that pretty well.
Tiffany: Because I’m self-taught, I kind of have this constant sense of imposter syndrome that leads me to feel like I’ve always got to be learning the next thing. Because on some level, I’m trying to like– maybe if I learn how to do this, I won’t feel like an imposter anymore. And that’s a fool’s game, intellectually, I know that. But on some basis, I’m like, “Oh, if I just learned how to do this. I would feel like I really know what I’m doing. And what I’ve learned from learning thing after thing after thing is that it never stops. It never stops. So you have to just sort of embrace the fact that there’s always going to be something new. Being really, really competent in HTML4 is nice but we’re a little bit past that now. Yeah, you have to just accept and embrace the change, I think. Especially in our field, but I think in all fields. I think the entire global internet of work, that’s especially true there. You don’t get to expect that you’re going to get to program in Fortran forever.
Liam: Yeah, exactly. And almost in the sense, the best of mindset is the mindset that embraces change. And we certainly hear a lot of, “I started in design and now I develop.” Or, “I started in content and now I design.” Or, “I started as a developer and I realized I wanted to do this other thing in technology.” And just having the ability to do that. Because if you’re willing to put in the time and energy, everything is so new that nobody’s written or gotten their doctorate on PHP. At least, I don’t think they have. Maybe they have, I don’t know.
Tiffany: I mean, I’m sure there’s somebody but– [laughs]
Liam: Right, somebody probably has. It’s the internet so somebody has. But the idea that things change all the time and if you’re willing to embrace that and work hard, you can make that happen.
Tiffany: And to also see the ways that your skills kind of connect to other skills. It requires some imagination, too.
Liam: I totally agree with that. And I love that idea of trying to map skill sets from job A to the requirements of job B because a lot of times, they are the same, right? If you can manage a project and get your work done and communicate. There’s not too many jobs if you’re willing to learn the technology, or the flow, or the system that you can do. Let me take a left turn here, or maybe it’s more of a gentle left turn than a hard left, and ask you about success. I want to ask you about what is your definition of success? Whether it’s personal, professional, or maybe a mix of both, Tiffany?
Tiffany: Success is so hard because– I mean, success is almost one of those things we’re always chasing and do we ever feel like– it’s kind of that same imposter syndrome thing. “If I just do this, I will be successful and I can stop feeling like I need to chase it.” But I feel like for me, I’ve really had to define success as happy to get to work in the morning and happy to go home at night. I want a job that I like and that is engaging and fulfilling, and then that I can leave at the end of the day because it supports my life that is also engaging and fulfilling. I feel like I have achieved it, and then lost it, and then achieved it again at various points in my career.
Tara: Yeah, the internet is not something you can really turn off at night and come back to in the morning and expect that nothing’s broken or changed. That’s an awesome goal on definition depending on what your role is in your job with website development. It may not be totally realistic unless you have somebody to back you up.
Tiffany: I think it’s less about being able to turn it off and more that both spheres of your life, like your work and your life are supporting and enhancing each other. Working from home right now– this is the first time I worked from home full time. I was freelancing for a while but this is the first time I’m working from home full time with Automattic and I’m really finding that I’m having to develop boundaries around my home life in a way that I didn’t have to do before, and I’m still learning to do that. But I feel like the work is engaging enough and the company is supportive enough that I will get there and I will figure it out, that’s just the learning process and I think it’s an adjustment because I haven’t been on Automattic all that long.
Liam: I wanted to ask you about your definition, the latter part where you said, “Happy to go home.” I interpreted that as the ‘not work’ side of life is pretty important to you and you can– be a success. And talk about that, prioritizing non-work. You mentioned earlier that you’ve got a husband, you’ve got a child. You have a house in DC so clearly, there are some bills, whether that’s rent or mortgage or what have you. How do you balance that all? How do you prioritize ‘not work’ in a way that makes you not so anxious to get back to work kind of thing?
Tiffany: I mean, I’m still learning to do that, it’s hard. I think part of it is that I think, first of all, having a little kid will sort of force you into it because he comes home from school and we have after-care with him. He comes home around the end of a work day so about five o’clock. And then you’ve got to get dinner on the table and you’ve got to hang out with your child, and he’s not super great at respecting workspace which, on one hand, I kind of want to teach him to do, and on the other hand, I feel like it kind of keeps me honest that he doesn’t. Because if I’m trying to steal another hour at my desk, he’s like, “Mom, come play Mario Kart with me. Mom, come play with me. Mom, I want to play PJ Masks, come play with me.” And I’m just not very good at playing, I’m not very much fun for a little kid but I think that really helps me remember like, “Okay, nobody at work is expecting you to be in Slack right now. You can actually walk away from your desk, it would be okay.” And my boss has said to me more than once, “You should really turn off all your alerts on your phone. Nothing we’re doing is that important here.” Nothing we’re doing is so important that I can’t wait until tomorrow, it’s okay.
Tara: That’s a good boss.
Tiffany: He is, actually. I’m really enjoying working with him. That’s nice. And I think that’s sort of a cultural position at Automattic as well is that you should do your work and you can do it any time of day, but that doesn’t mean you should be doing it at every time of day. Automattic is the kind of place where people work specifically because they want to live a full and enriching life when they aren’t working. Because you can work from anywhere. You can live anywhere. We have a lot of people who are interested in doing a lot of travel and things like that. They work at Automattic because Automattic supports that lifestyle. I feel like, “Okay, I’m not on the road, I’m not doing any of those things. I can at least go hang out with my kid and talk to him over dinner without thinking about work for a couple of hours.” And then he goes to bed and if there’s really something I have to do, I can do it. But I feel like just the circumstances of my life are conspiring to keep me honest on that, which is valuable.
Tara: I like that phrase, that’s good, “The circumstances of my life are conspiring to keep me honest.” That’s cool.
Liam: Children have a way of doing that. Sorry, Tara. Go on.
Tiffany: Yeah, they do.
Tara: For sure. And you can’t get that time back either so that’s a cliche now, I guess, but it’s true.
Tiffany: It is true. Parenting is this constant whiplash between, “Oh, my god. I hope you’re through this phase soon.” And, “Oh, my god. Stop, be my baby a little bit longer.” And I’ll feel each of those things ten times a day. That’s one of the things that I value about where I am in my career right now is that I don’t have a commute so I’m not having to– a lot of parents of his friends are frantically rushing home from work and they get there right at the last possible minute to pick their child up from after-care, and they never feel like they have enough time. And I’m like, “That’s like two hours of my day that I get back that I don’t have to spend on the metro or in a car, so I almost feel like an obligation to use those hours well and to not feel harried and not feel like my family life conflicts with my work life.” I think that’s a pressure, I think, that– I don’t think that only women feel it but I feel like women feel it very acutely because I feel like– I can’t take credit for phrasing it like this but it stuck with me, is that women are expected so often like they don’t have a family, and then manage their families like they don’t have a job. I feel like that’s something that is sort of socially put on women harder than it’s put on men.
Liam: I’d agree.
Tiffany: I feel like I have this position, incredible privilege to work for the company that I do and that is sort of laissez fair about interfering with your life as they can be. So I feel like I almost have a duty to not be stressed out about it.
Tara: Yeah, and yet you also can be available and sort of not stress out. Also, if you need to work at night, you’re at home, and you need to get work done after you put your kid to bed–
Tiffany: Yeah, it’s fine.
Tara: You have to go pick your son up from school because he was sick, then you make up that time later, you have that flexibility.
Tiffany: Yeah, I went to pick him up yesterday because he was sick. I came home, I put him on the couch and any pediatrician will tell you that the best way to keep a small child on the couch under a blanket resting is to turn on the television, so that’s what I did. And I set him up with a movie, and some fruit, and a bottle of water, and then I went back to my desk and I worked. I was then on a call with my team yesterday afternoon. We have a weekly chat on Wednesday afternoons. And he came over and was standing in front of my webcam and everybody’s like, “Oh, hey, look. We see him.” And waving– because we all work from home and there are a lot of parents on my team. This is all very common. It’s not a problem. I never feel like I have to hide my child from my coworkers. I never feel like it’s an imposition if he interrupts me during a meeting, because most of who are parents will all deal with it. It’s not a big deal.
Tara: I think it’s valued, too. That’s a corporate culture that a lot of companies these days are trying to embrace, is to value that. Because when you have employees who feel that relief from stress and that flexibility, they’re going to do a better job. They’ll be more motivated. I think that’s–
Tiffany: And they’re going to want to stay because I’ve been there like, three months, and I’m already, “How could I ever go back to an office environment after this?” Because this is so great. I’m able to– my ability to carve out time for myself is limited only by my willingness to do it.
Tara: What prompted you to seek out a job with Automattic? And what do you do for them, I guess, also?
Tiffany: Yeah, I’ll start there. I work at Automattic on the special projects team, which is kind of a cool and mysterious way of saying we’re kind of almost like a little internal web agency within Automattic. And what we do is we provide consulting and support to organizations and individuals who just need a little help getting the most out of WordPress. We do a lot of high-profile site builds and things like that, where we think it would be beneficial to the platform as well. If the project would reflect well on the platform, we’ll get it sent in to make sure that the project happens timely well, that sort of thing. That’s the kind of work we do. So I decided to apply for a job at Automattic because freelancing wasn’t really going all that well for me. What I discovered while I was freelancing was that I really hate biz dev and I can’t do all the things involved in running a business while also essentially being that business’ product. I just can’t do that. I have been stalking the Automattic careers page for a while, since before I had been freelancing. And for a long time, only jobs I saw that I was qualified for was happiness engineer, which is support for WordPress.com. And I don’t feel I’m really cut out for tech support, I find that level of interaction very stressful, I’m kind of an introvert. Eventually, a position called technical account engineer was posted and it was posted actually for WordPress VIP which is the hosting for the big enterprise WordPress. Like the New York Times’ WordPress or Facebook’s WordPress or whatever. So I applied for that because it was basically an account manager/project manager who’s good at talking to developers. I’m good at all of those things. And I didn’t hear from them for a little while. And then I did hear back from them and they were like, “Okay, that position is open but we also have this other one on special projects and we think that might even be better.” So I’ve talked to them about it and I was like, wow, this actually sounds exactly like what I got into freelancing to do, which was help people have really great experiences on the web. And help people who might not otherwise know how to get a great website to help their business or their project. Only I get to do it for Automattic at like a full-time salary and benefits. And I was like, “Okay, sold. What do I have to do?” I went through the whole process with them and had a trial project with them, and then that all worked out because I’ve been there ever since.
Tara: I’m curious about the special projects and the example that you mentioned. Talk about that process. Did they come to you and say, “Hey, we want to switch to WordPress and we need help.” Or is there some kind of a radar thing you have going on and you noticed somebody’s doing something and you approach them? Are they a client of yours? How does that work?
Tiffany: It’s kind of all of the above. Sometimes, it’s that we notice that there’s a problem and we introduce ourselves and ask. Sometimes, it’s referrals internally from our colleagues at Automattic. They come to us in a lot of different ways. Selling WordPress services is not really– selling that kind of WordPress agency services is not really our business model. There are plenty of other agencies who do that. It’s more like, do we provide a unique set of– is this project, first of all, beneficial to WordPress as a platform? Will it reflect well and encourage other people to join WordPress, to be on WordPress? Also, do we provide a level of expertise that isn’t generally available that could help?
Tara: Interesting. I was wondering about that because there are plenty of agencies, large well-known agencies that would do that type of thing as well.
Tiffany: Right. And we frequently refer to other agencies when it’s not a good fit and things like that. We’re not out there trying to compete with them. We really respect their place in the ecosystem, we really value their place in the ecosystem. It’s more like, when there’s something unique that we can do that would help, or when we think our participation will benefit the platform as a whole.
Liam: And coming from a WordPress advice conversation, I want to switch over to advice more generally and as it relates to life, I suppose. Tiffany, what’s the single most valuable piece of advice that you’ve ever received and implemented in your life? That can be from a friend, a book. Sounds like you already have something so I’ll stop.
Tiffany: Sure, I do. Something that’s really stuck with me for a lot of years, and this is from back in my days as a recruiter. “Tiffany, you are the CEO of your own career. Nobody is going to build a career for you. It’s not anyone’s job to care about the direction of your career. It’s not going to affect anyone as much as it affects you. You really have to see yourself as a CEO and take charge of it.” I feel like in the times when I have lost sight of that, my career has sort of stagnated. And in the times when I have kept that advice forefronts, my career has advanced. I think it’s probably the most valuable thing anyone’s ever said to me.
Liam: I love that. I say that all the time. Regardless who pays you, you always work for yourself. And if you’re working for yourself, then you’ll very much be the CEO of your career.
Tiffany: I like that way of putting it, too. That’s good. I’m going to put that in my back pocket.
Liam: I do a fair amount of volunteer work with people in transition and a mindset of always working for oneself makes preparing for transition and dealing with transition, even spotting it on the horizon that much easier, right? Because if we see the storm ahead and we’re the CEO of our own career, we can say, “This is a boat that while the ride is nice now, I’m going to pull this board out to port and get on a different boat so that I don’t get stuck in that storm.” I like that. “You’re the CEO of your own career.”
Tara: Yeah, that is excellent. Thank you for sharing that with us.
Liam: We have a bit of time here so I want to ask you about challenges. You’ve covered a lot of things in our conversation here, everything from child care to commuting, to new job and the like. Tell us a little bit about what’s been your biggest challenge to date and how have you overcome it? Or if it’s ongoing, how are you trying to overcome it?
Tiffany: I mean, aside from kind of the obvious in that being a parent presents a big challenge in pretty much every area of your life because, suddenly, you have that one thing that can’t ever be deprioritized. Aside from that, which is kind of obvious, I feel like I really encountered a big challenge a couple of years ago on my last full-time job. It was with a government contractor who has since been acquired by a much larger government contractor. It was my first time in the federal contracting space, and pretty much from my– I took the job ultimately because I was feeling stagnant at the job I was in and I took this other job with a federal contractor because I needed a change. And I didn’t really stop to think about whether it was actually going to be a good fit for my life. I just decided to sort of jump and try to make it work. Honestly, almost from the first day, it turned out to be a terrible move, a bad decision. I worked in an environment with– there was a lot of gaslighting and undermining, and I think I really– I was not my best there. I say that in kind of two sentences. One is, it’s hard to thrive when you’re being fed poison every day. It’s hard to exist, and thrive, and grow when you are literally walking around in the cloud of toxicity all the time. On the other hand, I don’t want to completely put it on my environment. I don’t want to completely disclaim responsibility for it because I feel like there were many points along the way where I could have done better than I did and handling it. And it’s funny, I was eventually let go from that job and I kind of walked out of the building that last day with this ridiculous grin on my face because I had been trying to find a way out and I was so unhappy there that it was affecting my ability to interview. I’d go into interviews and I’d think I was doing okay and realize retrospectively that I bombed them. I got out of there and it was like this huge weight, like I’m not being poisoned anymore. That was when I decided to freelance, because I was looking at jobs and nothing sounded good, nothing sounded like something I wanted to do, nothing sounded like people I wanted to be with. I knew that I couldn’t go back right away. I’m fortunate that my husband, who owns his own company, does well enough that I was able to kind of step back and say, “You know what? I want to try and freelance for a while and see how that goes.” And it went pretty well for a while. It just became clear that as a long-term strategy, that’s not for me. But then I had to kind of deal with the emotional challenge of, “Well, you tried this and it failed, too.” There was just a lot of feeling bad about my own abilities and my own skills and my own commitment to work. There was just a lot of crap I had to dig through. So I feel like– but I needed those couple of years not in a full-time job, just kind of recover and get some perspective on what had happened in the last few years of my career. It hadn’t gone well and some parts of that were on me, and some parts of it were absolutely not on me. And it was really important for me to get some clarity around that. I think women, in particular, we kind of get told a lot of the times, “Well, you should lean in, be aggressive. Oh, not like that. Now you’re being abrasive.” And that’s always been a big challenge for me and my career, because I’m kind of personality plus and, as people like to say, I don’t suffer fools gladly. It can be very challenging for me to thread the needle between, “Yes, I need to dial that back.” Or B, “This criticism is very gendered and not really fair to me.” And also, C, “Well, so what if it is gendered? You still have to work with these people and what are you going to do about it?” I feel like those couple of years were an intense intense privilege that not everyone has and I feel like there’s a lot of clouds that kind of cleared in the last several months for that. I feel like I’m pretty happy where I’ve ended up.
Liam: Yeah, thank you for walking through that. That sounds like that was not a fun place to be and it was helpful for you to have that.
Tiffany: It wasn’t, and I wasn’t fun to live with for a good chunk of it. I’m really glad it’s over.
Liam: I get that. We spend so much of our adult life at work, where if it’s not a productive, fruitful, enjoyable place, it’s hard to be rainbows and sunshine when we’re not there. So thank you for that, I appreciate you sharing. We are effectively out of time here, and one thing we haven’t done, and I really want it to, is get into your standup routine. [laughter] And to totally put you on the spot, do you have a work-friendly joke that you could share with us to wrap up the conversation?
Tiffany: Oh my gosh. No. [laughter] Because I would mention it in front of people at the office and they’ll be like, “Oh, say something funny.” And I finally just had to say, “Look, I write my routines for comedy clubs. They’re appropriate for comedy clubs. If you want to hear me be funny, come to a show. But understand that you are walking into a comedy club and I would say things there that I would never say in a professional setting.” [laughter] And honestly, I haven’t done it in a while because comedy is a low ROI hobby, because you have to spend a lot, like three hours a night sitting at open mics to get five minutes of time. And I am not in a place anymore where I can do that. I haven’t done comedy in a while but I still use those skills all the time, all the time. It was incredibly valuable. I’m now one of those weirdos who really likes public speaking because it just doesn’t– I took a class at the DC Improv, and if you can stand on the DC improv stage with spotlight directly in your eyes so you can’t see anything and make an audience laugh for 10 minutes, you can do anything. I recommend it as a skill to develop.
Tara: I have a friend who did that and I listen to The Moth Podcast a lot and often think about doing storytelling, and sometimes the storytellers are actually comedians on the side.
Tiffany: Yeah, there’s a lot of overlap there.
Tara: Yeah. I have a developer joke.
Tiffany: Go ahead.
Tara: Why did the developer quit his job?
Tiffany: Why?
Tara: Because he didn’t get a raise.
Tiffany: [laugh]
Tara: Get it? Array.
Liam: Ah. [laughter] Ba dum, tss.
Tiffany: I mean, that joke works on multiple levels. It’s also kind of a commentary on their value of digital labor. [laughter]
Liam: Tara Claeys will be appearing where on Tuesday night? [laughter] Tiffany, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
Tara: Thank you, Tiffany.
Tiffany: Thank you, it’s been a real pleasure talking to you.
Liam: Before we say goodbye to you, could you share with us where we can find you online, please?
Tiffany: Sure. My blog is at Tiff.is.
Liam: Tiff.is Perfect, thank you.
Tara: Thank you so much.
Tiffany: Thank you.
Tara: Bye-bye, Tiffany.
Tiffany: Bye-bye, now.
Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.
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