Hallway Chats

Jonathan works in Portland, Maine for an employee-owned company called Qualpay. Jon went to his first WordPress event in 2016 and has been hooked on WordPress and its community ever since. When not working, Jon enjoys hiking, traveling, cooking, and hanging out with his cats and wife.

Twitter | @prefont

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 92.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Jonathan Gilbert. Jonathan works in Portland, Maine for an employee-owned company called Qualpay. Jon went to his first WordPress event in 2016 and has been hooked on WordPress and its community ever since. When not working, Jon enjoys hiking, traveling, cooking, and hanging out with his cats and wife. Welcome, Jonathan.

Jonathan: Hey, thank you, guys. Thank you for having me on the show. I’m very grateful to be here.

Tara: Hey, it’s great to have you here, Jonathan. Can you tell us more about yourself?

Jonathan: Yeah. I work for an employee-owned company called Qualpay. We’re based in San Matheo, California. I’m personally based in Portland, Maine as one of two remote employees out on the east coast. We’re a solution provider for WordPress and we create payments platform that helps developers earn additional revenue by providing a service that their customers need. We help merchants by providing the most updated tech in modern payment features to help their business grow. My job is to get developers and software providers to use our platform by offering it as a value-added service to their core offering. I’ve been having a lot of fun doing that in the WordPress community so far. It’s been a really tremendous experience meeting these people.

Tara: How much of what you’re doing is number-related? You have to know a lot about accounting and that type of thing? Or is it more coding and programming?

Jonathan: That’s really interesting. I have to know quite a bit about pricing and so forth but the people who work with me don’t. We have some pretty easy calculators that we use kind of to take the load off of our partner’s back and kind of do the thinking for them. For me, there’s a couple of quick calculations that I need to be able to do but I also have to understand– I can’t code myself but I have to understand and talk about code, and certainly, we’re API-based and so it’s important to be able to communicate why our services are valuable to a developer and a merchant. It’s a little bit of both, a little bit of being able to run some numbers but also having at least a remedial understanding of how programming works.

Tara: Yeah. What is your background then?

Jonathan: My background is actually in business. I went to business school to become originally a sports agent. I went to the University of Massachusetts to the school that the McCormicks founded, who is the father of support management. I graduated high school right around the time when Jerry Macguire came out and–

Tara: Ahh. “Show me the money.”

Jonathan: Yeah, exactly. I was like, “I really want to work in sports.” And then I first started working for Michael Phelps’ agent, Peter Carlyle and through that, I learned a lot about how non-profits work and– but I found the most thrilling part for me was kind of putting these presentations together where we would figure, what’s a good fit for Michael Phelps in terms of products that he should endorse? And what kind of values can he help communicate with these brands and create a perfect match? My favorite part was always when we were talking to those interesting companies and how we could help them kind of communicate the interesting things about their companies through sports, something that everyone can relate to.

Tara: That sounds like it must have been kind of fun.

Jonathan: It was a lot of fun, yeah. The part of the company that I worked for was Olympic and action sports. It was also during kind of the takeoff of a lot of these snowboarders and skiers like Hannah Teter and Shaun White. It was really cool to be around and get a free couple pairs of gloves here and there and some goggles. Yeah, it was a lot of fun.

Tara: Did you get some autographs too?

Jonathan: I did, yeah. Actually, when I was in college, I volunteered for the X Games and I worked in the Bagel Bites tent and I got to work with Tony Hawk. I basically was just cooking bagels back and forth but he was there signing autographs and a really cool guy to hang out with.

Tara: That’s really fun. What’s your trajectory from there to working on WordPress software?

Jonathan: Originally, I started working for the support management piece and then I went into a field called experimental marketing, which we were creating these experiences for brands and so forth like these Gillette shaving experiences with Michael Phelps or things along those lines. In 2006, I ended up leaving the company to go travel around Australia and kind of backpack around for a year. And when I did that, I came home and I started temping for a company called PowerPay which was just this payments platform. I just became really interested in how payments were connected to software companies and I just kind of understood that as a very important part of the software company’s business. You’d have these shopping sites, you created these e-commerce platforms, but you also needed to connect payments to it in order to get that license, in order to accept funds on their site. It just became fascinating about how that world unraveled. And recently, when joining Qualpay a few years ago, I was very drawn to it because I saw Stripe being this company that had this beautiful documentation and this great solution that a lot of developers liked. And I was like, “Wow. Wouldn’t it be great to work for a company that had these features but also had kind of an affiliate program so developers could earn revenue for doing this?” And I came across Qualpay and the first thing that we were kind of needing about this company and where we should kind of embark upon for e-commerce platforms, and either we wanted to do an open-source platform because we wanted people to play with our tools and to build stuff with them. So I checked out a WordPress event and I was really blown away by the community and really just how people treat each other. It’s a very interesting community where everybody is like a bit of a tinkerer. And solutions become popular not because you dump a bunch of money into advertising, it’s really this group of peers reviewing peers and helping each other out. I was really blown away by the fact that I was visiting these hosting company tables, Bluehost, GoDaddy sitting right next to each other, and they were getting along so well. They’d have a customer going from one booth to the other booth at this WordCamp. And they were competitors but everybody was helping each other. It’s very, almost, socialistic to the extent where it’s all for the greater good. If you’re not succeeding by helping everybody, you’re not really helping everyone. Just seeing other people lift each other up and seeing just the inter-connectedness of everybody, I just came away being– just had this overwhelming sense of happiness and I just felt so energized from the community.

Tara: Yeah. I would think that would be a big draw. I haven’t really thought about it too much but as a vendor, as a provider to the community, that would be, I guess, a really big draw to sell to this community because your competition is also your colleague’s. I know it’s like that from the agency perspective but I never really thought about it from the perspective of the hosting companies and that type of thing. That’s really interesting. And now, make a note of the time, Liam, Liam’s Zoom has frozen so he cannot unmute himself which could be a story for an episode when I’m hosting and Liam can’t make it. We can just pretend that that happened, but in fact, Liam is here, but we need to stop this Zoom call because he’s hosting it, and restart with a new Zoom link.

Liam: Jonathan. I want to ask you about your role at Qualpay. It says you’re not a coder but you have to be able to talk about it and you have to know what your company skill does, what it doesn’t do, what it plays nice with, and what it plays very perhaps poorly with if it plays poorly with anything. Talk to me about getting your head around that. Because if you’re coming from a non-technical position and you have to learn to talk tech, there’s a learning curve there and there’s a confidence issue. That first, “I’m going to show these people how to do it.” And they say, “Oh yeah, well, how about this?” And then you say, “Oh.” What was that like? What was that process like for you?

Jonathan: Very frightening. [laughs] I remember going to my first WordCamp and kind of demoing our free WooCommerce plugin and kind of showing people how it worked. But the thing I kind of understood was kind of logic of how everything happens. WooCommerce is already a small subset of what a website does, so the payment is an attachment to that. I don’t need to understand necessarily Javascript or understand how to make a theme do what it does. All I really need to understand is how can you take this last piece to the finish line and how can I enhance this end product by implementing or helping you implement our solutions to it? What I had to understand is your software does– like the terms of recurring payments. As a software provider, you can decide whether you want to store that information yourself, the credit card information. A lot of people in ’80s and ’90s, they had all this credit card data on a spreadsheet and whatnot. And now, nobody wants sensitive data, right? I can understand it’s like, “Hey, our solution, I don’t know how we do it but I can tell you that whenever– one of the things you need to worry about is where is this secure or insecure data hosted.” We have this solution, it’s called embedded fields, in which we host an iframe on a site. So when someone’s on a checkout page, you used to have to redirect to a payment page and then do the transaction there and come back. Our solution allows you to do that on the page because we’re hosting that little floating iframe.

Liam: So all the PCI compliances there.

Jonathan: Exactly.

Liam: Let me talk over you because I want to talk about Maine. [laughter] I’ve never been and it’s on my bucket list of places to go. Tell us a little bit about Portland, how big it is? You said you’re into hiking so can you walk out of your house and hike or do you have to drive to the edge of Portland? I don’t even know if that’s driving to the edge of a city of 800,000 or are there four people that live in Portland, you wave to them as you walk out. Tell us a little bit about hiking and living in Maine?

Jonathan: Maine’s got about a million people. Greater Portland has about 250,000. Most of the people are kind of where I’m living right now in this bottom part. I can tell you, one of my favorite parts about Maine is the local supermarket that we go to is called Hannaford. There’s three of them right next to my house. Two of them overlook the ocean and one of them overlooks a 10-mile nature reserve. Portland itself is very vibrant food, beer, and coffee town. Three favorite things.

Liam: That about covers it for me, too. I’m done.

Jonathan: Exactly. So there’s all kinds of running trails, walking trails, and biking trails within two miles of where I live in downtown. It’s very easy for me to be connected to nature and to leave and go see a little wooded forest. And that’s what I really appreciate, growing up by the water is being able to get out quickly and take a look at the ocean and smell the sea salts and hear the seagulls.

Liam: So you grew up there?

Jonathan: Yeah, I grew up about 15 miles south in a small town called Saco.

Liam: And you talked about going to see the ocean, to smell the salt, and to look at the seagulls. I’m guessing since you didn’t mention play in the water that it’s a bit cold and no one goes swimming up there or how does that work?

Jonathan: It is a bit cold. I actually surf in Maine. You’ve got to use a wet suit for most of the year but there are some pretty intense surfers out here who surf all the way into January, February because that’s when the biggest waves are. I am not that bold. I surf until November. 46 degrees, 45 degrees is cold as I’ll allow the water to be around me.

Liam: Yeah, that’s cold. I was watching a documentary recently about some guys who go surfing in the Arctic circle so that they can surf under the Aurora Borealis. And while the footage looked awesome, they had to like clear ice away from the edge of the shore to get in to go surfing. Colder than I’d like.

Jonathan: The funny part about surfing, it’s like, when you’re in the water, that’s alright. Yeah, you get splashed in the face, you get a little ice cream headache, every once in a while. But the hardest part is actually getting out from the ocean and out of your wetsuit into your car. Those five minutes are– and it can take longer because your body is a little numb and it’s so hard to wiggle out. The colder it is, the harder your wetsuit is to get out of.

Tara: What is the tech community like there, that remote place?

Jonathan: It’s actually a pretty big tech community. We actually do a lot in pet healthcare. There’s a company called Idexx that’s the largest veterinarian supply company in the world. They’re the ones who come up with heart medications and how to identify parasites and so forth. It’s a two-billion-dollar company, it’s downtown in Portland. We also have a pretty vibrant startup community as well with a lot of ocean-based products. We have some people who do kind of scientific marine stuff. You have people– one of the biggest companies out here was a lobster company that ships all around the world. These two kids that grew up from a high school around here. I don’t know if they hit 30 yet and they’re probably making few millions of dollars a year in profits. We do have a nice little tech community and a lot of it’s connected to marine sciences or pet sciences.

Tara: Okay. I want to ask you about success, especially talking sort of about quality of life where you live and appreciation for nature and that kind of thing. How do you define success professionally and personally, mixture of the two, or if you want to focus on one? What does success mean to you?

Jonathan: That’s something that continues to change for me. When I was a kid, I grew up on Welfare. So as a kid, most of my goals in life were about making enough money to buy a house and to have a cool car. Once I, at the end of my 20s, started making money and I got to buy a house, I realized that the next thing that you want is a campsite and this or that. Whenever you buy something, that satisfaction happens for a moment and then you want something more. When I think about personal success and when I reflect back on the things that made me happy and made me who I am, it’s been about these collections of these experiences that I’ve been a part of. It’s traveling, hiking the Appalachian Trail, backpacking through Australia, being part of sports teams. When I think about the things that have shaped me, it’s always been through experiences that have made me be uncomfortable or vulnerable in the people I’ve met through these journeys. Now when I think of success, I’m kind of, how can I showcase more gratitude? How can I be happy with what I have so I don’t want more? How can I keep evolving and put myself out there and keep meeting people who help enrich my life and help me understand common things that we’re all going through and things that can help us make us better?

Tara: I love the idea of not only being grateful but not wanting more. I just finished reading the book The Company of One, and it talks a lot about the idea in our society of success and never maxing out, just always trying to learn more and always improving on your revenue and that type of thing, and growing your business. You might not need that. He talks about a friend of his who basically works until he makes enough money to sustain him for the rest of the year and then stops working so he can go skiing or do whatever. The idea of understanding that you don’t always need more, it goes against the grain of, I think, our culture in a lot of ways but it’s a brilliant relief to realize that that’s okay, so I love that definition, thanks for sharing.

Liam: I wanted to ask a question about it. You said it’s about asking yourself, “How can I showcase more gratitude?” What did you mean by that?

Jonathan: It’s being able to internalize what makes you happy and also the things that you have and being mindful of the things that you have. For me, when I wake up in the morning, I try to say, “What’s one thing that you love about your wife? What’s one thing you love about your work? What’s also something that you love about yourself?” It’s reminding yourself of these little things that can help you be a little bit more happy with what you have as opposed to what you don’t have.

Liam: Do you ask yourself those three questions when you’re still in bed or is that when you’re brushing your teeth or when you’re having the coffee? When does that awareness of the emphasis on gratitude?

Jonathan: I try to do it the first thing I do when I wake up or it’s part of my meditation practice. Sometimes when someone cuts me off when I’m driving in my car, it’s not thinking about the person who cut me off, it’s thinking about how lucky I am that I have a car that I’m driving.

Liam: Yeah, especially in America.

Tara: For sure. Thanks for sharing that. How do you apply that idea in other ways? In your work and your interaction with your community? Do you have sort of gratitude?

Jonathan: I listen to this really great podcast by someone names Rich Roll and he had a guest named James Clear who talks about habits. A habit is a set of behaviors that you use to solve recurring problems. And if you think about your own persona, all we are is a story. When we think of ourselves, it’s a collection of all of our experiences. That’s really all we are. When you think about the person that you want to be, you can think about little behaviors that you can put together to kind of reinforce that persona. I want to be a healthy person in terms of my own health for my body, so I make sure I exercise five days a week. I want to practice being more grateful and mindful so I meditate. I also need to become smarter and to understand how people are also dealing with these problems maybe better than I am. It’s reading books from peers, it’s reading people’s Twitter feeds on WordPress and understanding how some of these people solve the same challenges that I’m going through it can make me a better person.

Tara: Yeah, that Atomic Habits is another book I’ve read recently and it had a big impact on me. Thanks for mentioning that one, too. So many things. How you define yourself instead of just saying you want to aspire to something, saying, “I am a healthy person.” And it helps you be that. For sure, yeah, absolutely.

Liam: Jonathan, what’s been your biggest challenge to date or what is your biggest challenge and how are you working it or how did you fix it, how did you overcome it if it’s–?

Jonathan: Yeah, it’s something I’m still working on. Being a new company, especially in a payment space where there’s a lot of other companies here, and especially in WordPress where Stripe and Paypal have been the overwhelming favorite for what people use. Because in a lot of senses, people have always thought about payment as kind of a means to an end. It’s like, “I’ve almost finished your site, connected your e-commerce software. Go sign up for the Stripe account because it’s easy to set up and I can just hand this off to you and kind of wash my hands of it.” And getting people to kind of understand that, your clients for one, are looking for you as a recommendation in the products and services that you offer. A lot of people think about when they design a site, “I’m going to resell them an SSL certificate, I’m going to resell them web hosting. I’m going to recommend this e-commerce platform and so forth.” And if you can help them make that very last step, which is choosing a payment processor for them, it’s a great way to earn recurring revenue for one and two, it’s a great way for them to save their pricing because the flat rate one size fits all pricing doesn’t work for everyone and there’s a lot of reasons why certain merchants should use it and certain merchants shouldn’t use it. And I’ve noticed that this community, because they have overwhelming use of Stripe and PayPal, people don’t have as much of an understanding about the impact of payments. So it’s been a really challenging thing for me but a really fun thing for me to educate people on why pricing matters, what kind of decisions do you think of when setting up someone’s payment processing, how do you sell payment processing, and so forth. I really enjoyed how open people are about talking, about their pinpoints and so forth. To me, it’s how can I further educate people on payments and help them empower their clients.

Liam: Do you see that more as a communication challenge that you’re facing or is that as an education challenge?

Jonathan: It’s a little bit of both. Pins can be so complicated. You can get so deep into the weeds. It’s really just first educating these people that this is something that you can’t use to earn revenue on. To me, it’s more of an educational thing.

Liam: Okay. Let me ask you another one of our signature questions and it’s about advice. You’ve talked a lot about the practices that you have to try to be a better person and I wonder if you can share with us some advice that you’ve received or gleaned or read and successfully implemented in your life? Some advice that’s made a big difference. What is that advice?

Jonathan: When I actually graduated college, someone gave me this old book from Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends And Influence People.

Liam: Yup.

Jonathan: There’s this really profound part where he was talking about the favorite sound that anybody can hear is the sound of their own name. When you meet people, keep repeating their name, but mostly, it’s a life lesson on how to be compassionate with your speech and how to kind of make people know that they’re important by asking questions about them. That really helps me when I’m at networking events, it’s always– I think everyone gets a little anxious when they don’t know people. And just being kind and asking questions is a great way to kind of open people up, to really get an understanding of what people are about.

Liam: Yeah, that’s certainly been my experience as well at conferences and meetups and tech events, is paying a little extra attention to what the people who we’re meeting, what their name is, and making a little extra effort to try to remember it. And then when we see them later in the day, to be able to say, “Oh, hey, Jonathan. How are you? How’s your day been?”, “Oh, you remember my name. Wow, thanks. Yeah.” The value of hearing your name, I never thought I heard it phrased that way but that’s really interesting.

Jonathan: Yeah. One of the things that I love about the WordPress community so much is how much people put an effort in because they know that there are people who are very introverted. Before, one of the WordCamps, I think it was WordCamp Miami last year, someone put this PSA about the Pacman approach. If you’re in a circle, you shold always leave a little bit of a circle open for somebody to come in because it’s hard to break into a circle. If a bunch of people are talking and there’s a lot of people who just want to be a part of that conversation. I think the etiquette that people use at WordPress events, it really warms my heart.

Tara: I love that. I’ve never heard that Pacman approach or description. That’s really cool. I love that. I’m going to remember that next time. And I also loved Pacman but I don’t play any video games anymore.

Liam: We’ll save that for another day.

Tara: Yes, for sure. Jonathan, it’s been great having you with us today. Thanks for telling us more about yourself and what you do, and your history, just really loved getting to know you a little bit and hope to meet you at a WordCamp. Can you tell us where you can be found online?

Jonathan: Yeah. My personal Twitter is @prefont and you can find information about Qualpay at Qualpay.com.

Liam: Jonathan, thank you so much for joining us out here on our virtual hallway today, it’s been a real pleasure getting to know you and I look forward to trying to get up to Maine and get that ticked off my bucket list before too many years more.

Jonathan: Yeah, pleased do it.

Liam: Definitely, I will, I will.

Tara: Thanks for joining us.

Jonathan: Thanks for having me.

Liam: Bye.

Tara: Bye.

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.

Sara is a software engineer working remotely for the US Federal Government. She’s passionate about education and diversity in tech and loves helping others level up their skills.

Twitter | @sarassassin

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 91.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re joined by Sara Cope. Sara is a software engineer working remotely for the US Federal Government. She’s passionate about education and diversity in tech and loves helping others level up their skills. Outside of work, she enjoys collecting toys and adventuring with her family. Welcome, Sara.

Sara: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Liam: You’re most welcome. Thanks for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Sara: Yeah, I am a woman in tech for the past 17 years surprisingly. My background with that is in software development and project management. And then outside of my full-time job, I also do some mentoring and teaching at an education boot camp. And then my home life, I have two sons and a pug named Bowie.

Tara: And your two sons, how old are they?

Sara: Ben is 12 and Nick is 18.

Tara: And are they involved in tech?

Sara: Well, Ben for sure is. He is more of a systems nerd. He built his own computer, I think he was 10 or 11 when he built his first computer. He loves networking and all sorts of things. Nick is not into tech as much. He actually wants to be an epidemiologist.

Tara: That’s interesting that your older son took apart a computer. We recently spoke to somebody who works in education. We were discussing the fact that it seems like the current generation of students is less inclined to actually dig in and take things apart because everything is so app-driven and not as much hardware. Is he involved in something in school that does that or have you led him down that path? Where does that curiosity come from?

Sara: Well, it’s actually my younger son. My 12-year-old.

Tara: Oh, sorry. Okay.

Sara: And he is on a RobotX team in a local community. It’s not affiliated with his school but it’s a community team, which he’s been doing for four years and it’s called First LEGO League. That probably I’m sure has had some influence and we also, I always have old computers and old electronics that I keep on hand so he’s always kind of having sitting around to tinker with. I think that’s helped him get interested, too.

Tara: Interesting. How did you get involved in tech? Tell us a little bit about your background?

Sara: Well, when I was young, my dad had a lot of computers that were sitting around that I wanted to tinker with. He would get computers and computer parts and go and sell them at local conventions or the Hamventions is what we have here in Dayton, Ohio for Ham radio operators. So we always had these computer things laying around, and I just wanted to play games on them. With my siblings, we would try and see which computer worked and would run the games that we wanted to play. And then eventually after Windows came out, I got more interested in computers and actually creating things on computers. And I would make little movies and animations and thought that was really cool. And then in junior high, I had the opportunity to take a programming class. And I just knew right away that I want to do something with computers.

Liam: That’s really interesting, the progression there. And you mention that you professionally are into software development. Talk to us a little bit about what kind of software you develop and both maybe now for the government and anything else that you’ve done in the past?

Sara: For the government– I’m a front-end engineer and right now, I work on Code.gov which is our federal open-source inventory for all of federal government. We’re really trying to get more open-source code available throughout the government. That is primarily what I work on. And I also have other projects. My other main project is the US Web Design System, which is our design system for federal government.

Tara: How does that work in terms of transitioning between administrations? How long have you worked there or have you been there? Longer than this administration? Have you seen things change?

Sara: Yeah, when I was at my previous agency, I was actually a project manager for web applications development. And I decided I wanted to go back into writing code full time. It was more kind of my side thing back then. So I went to this platform called Open Opportunities. It’s where federal employees can go look for little volunteer gigs basically. Through that, I found one of these gigs that was developing a site for the White House. And that was in 2014 or 2015, I think in the Obama Administration. And that actually was a WordPress site so that kind of is what started the ball rolling for me, as far as transitioning into front-end full time and starting to work on projects for the White House.

Liam: Yeah, that must be really challenging with the White House responding to everything in the world in real time and, “We’re changing this. We’re changing that.” Was that first website then? Was that your introduction to WordPress in a formal way or have you been working with it beforehand?

Sara: That was the first time, I think I had worked with WordPress through my full-time job. My initial introduction to WordPress was way long time ago, probably in I think around 2008 when I was like, “Oh, what’s this cool blogging thing? Let’s check it out. So I put up a WordPress.com site and I was like, “This is great. I want to be able to tinker.” Then I went to .org self-host it and I was like, “This is great.” I really don’t like blogging but I like tinkering with WordPress. So I started freelancing and did that for a few years which was a lot of fun. And then after that, I moved on to work on my friend’s WordPress website CSS-Tricks, which on there was more like, I wasn’t doing a lot of WordPress stuff. IT was more blog, admin, and operations type things. So I did that for six years. I’ve kind of been exposed to WordPress and working on WordPress for quite a while.

Liam: CSS-Tricks is not a website that gets almost no traffic. That’s a pretty busy site and I’m interested to know kind of your mental approach of, “Hey, I’m going to work on this site that gets a whole bunch of traffic and I’m going to have to push my code up there.” What was that like in the sense of, were you super-confident and like, “Oh, yeah. I’m really good at this. I’ll push it up, it will be awesome.” Or like, “What if I push it up there and it all breaks?” I don’t even know how many thousands of people visit that site every day. I wonder what was that like for you the first time?

Sara: Luckily, I wasn’t responsible for that stuff. I was not doing the design or coding on CSS-Tricks at all. A lot of my work was fixing Chris’ typos, and mailing t-shirts, and special little projects. Like, we did a Kickstarter and I did a lot of the work on the Kickstarter. I did a lot of, “Let’s make thumbnails for these 150 videos.” A lot of those little things that as someone who is blogging on that site and maintaining the site, that he didn’t want to do.

Liam: But they add a lot of value, don’t they? Go ahead.

Sara: Yeah. I feel like it added a lot of value because it freed up his time to really create more content and not worry about those little things. But we added the Almanac to the site at that time. He added a lot of courses he was able to do, just a lot of things. For me, I don’t really have to think like, “Oh, millions of people are going to look at this.” Because when I hit ‘save’, that’s when I worried about if I made an edit, “Okay, let me go back, make sure I didn’t screw up everything on this post.” But it was pretty low pressure as far as the work went.

Liam: That’s cool. And I just want to go back to the value of not just freeing up Chris Coyier’s time to write more content, but I think from a presentation standpoint, from a brand-management, not having typos, having thumbnails that match the video. That really ties the design together and the content together, and the presentation in a way that probably people don’t realize until they start landing on posts with typos or they land on a page that doesn’t have any images and it’s, “Oh yeah, that’s nowhere near as nice or really engaging.

Sara: Yeah, I also stood up all the social media for CSS-Tricks. That was one of the special projects that I worked on and that was fun. It definitely rounds out the value.

Tara: It also broadens what you’re doing so you’re not just writing code and developing. You’re doing things like social media, that kind of broadens what you’re doing in terms of your tasks as well. What’s your favorite thing? Do you prefer to be in code all day or do you like having it broken up?

Sara: I prefer being in code all day for my full-time job. And then for after hours, I like doing other things and doing things that are more hands-on or creating something out of a craft or cooking where I’m not just staring at a screen all day.

Liam: Let me ask you quickly on cooking. Are you a recipe follower? Are you, “I’m just going to wing it because I’ve been doing it for a while.” What’s your approach?

Sara: I do both. I have a set of recipes that I’ve been doing for a while and I’ll just cook. But I also love getting cookbooks and trying new recipes and then tweaking them and kind of adding those to our rotation. My younger son, Ben, is actually into cooking, too. That’s been really fun for us lately.

Liam: I’m so bad at following directions. I’m so bad at recipes because I don’t read them close enough and I make something like, “Oh, yeah. Baking soda, that’s going to make a difference.”

Sara: I totally do that all the time, too. But you just keep trying and do it again, yeah.

Tara: Sara, we like to talk about success on this show. Can you talk to us about your definition of success? How you define it, what it means to you in your personal life, your professional life, one, the other, or combination? What does success mean to you?

Sara: Yeah, I think success, for me, is just being able to work on something fun and enjoy life but also in a place where I’m adding value to other people. That’s important to me, and working in public service is important to me and I really enjoy that a lot. In order to feel successful and doing something fun, I also plan way out for my future so I don’t have to sweat the little things on a daily basis.

Tara: I imagine working on a level that you are in the government and doing these really broad things must feed into that idea, as you mentioned, of public service. I guess working for the government is ultimately a public service. Where does your experience fit into–

Tara: When it comes to public service, talk to us a little bit about, how what you’re doing with the government is interpreted as a public service? In the most basic level, how is it helping the world or the country?

Sara: With the agency I work at, we do a lot of work in order to help other agencies. That’s our mission. That trickles down to the citizens because– Sorry, let me start over. The work that I do in our agency is aimed at helping other agencies accomplish. Here we go again. Sorry.

Liam: Don’t be.

Sara: The work I do for my agency is aimed at helping other agencies accomplish their missions. We do tech and commodity buys and all those things so the other agencies don’t have to so that they can better focus on their specific missions. At Veterans Affairs, they’re not worried about putting together web design standards and design systems and worrying about the specifics of publishing websites because we’re doing that for them. And then they can spend their time and effort and dollars on taking care of the veterans.

Tara: Thank you for clarifying that.

Liam: I want to talk about– part of your definition was about adding value to the lives of others and that also comes back to what Tara shared about you right at the start of the show, that you like to help others leveling up their skills. Talk to us a little bit about that. What does that mean in a practical sense? How are you doing that and when did you get into that or how?

Sara: I think I’ve always been interested and really enjoyed education from the first position I took in the federal government and all of my roles afterward, I’ve always incorporated education into that. My first job, I taught application coordinators, people who were more in a specific domain but needed tech knowledge, technology training. And then from that, I actually went into a position where I was doing the day-to-day management of some IT interns for Veterans Affairs. Coordinating their education, teaching a few classes and things like that. I’ve always kind of been involved in education in my work, but then also out of work, outside of work, I’ve been involved in that as well. Five years ago, I think, I started the local Dayton chapter of Girl Develop It and really wanted to get together with other women in tech, put on classes like, “Let’s level up our skills together. Let’s talk about what we’re doing and how we can kind of grow together as a community, and as a community of kind of this underserved population.” I started that five years ago, which was a lot of fun. And then two years ago, I actually started formally teaching and mentoring as a side job for education boot camp called Thinkful. So I do coaching, and mentoring, and help people do tech evaluations and interviews. All that related to development. That’s been really fun and really fulfilling as well.

Tara: Can you describe your experience as a woman in tech and sort of seeing that evolve for a number of years?

Sara: Yeah. I was very lucky in starting out with government, because in the government hiring process, while it is a little slow and it kind of takes a while to actually get hired. Part of that process is a lot of checks that are in place so that you do get a diverse workforce. In my career in tech, I’ve always worked with other women, I have worked for other women in almost every position that I’ve had, and that has been awesome. When I really felt exposed to the lack of women in tech was when I started working remotely. I decided, “Okay, I need to get out to my local community. Let’s go talk to some people in tech, go to some tech meetups.” So I wasn’t feeling so isolated. I went to our local web meetup and I was the only woman there. That’s when I really started realizing like, “Oh, where are all the other women at?” And that was really kind of what drove me and motivated me to start a local chapter for just women in tech, to kind of find– “I know you’re out there, let’s get together and talk about it.”

Liam: So you get out there and you realize that you were the only one attending the tech meetups, the only woman attending the tech meetups so you took it into your hands to change that proactively? That’s not a small amount of work and I appreciate that you went to Girl Develop It so you didn’t have to start everything from scratch, but that’s a– you have to research and, “Is this a good agency and what other agencies or organizations, are there other organizations out there? What does this mean, what does that mean?” And, “Okay, now we’re official chapter. We have to let women know that we’re here so that they know where to show up.” All of that takes a lot of time and energy. How do you balance all of that with work, with being a mom, with having to walk the dog?

Sara: It definitely was a lot of work and really challenging but I think my experience throughout the years kind of gave the tools and resources I needed to be able to accomplish that. Between 2007 and 2009, I took graduate classes and six nights a week, I was studying and doing work for two to three hours at night after the kids went to bed. After I finished my graduate classes, I was like, “Now I have all this time on my hands, let’s do something else.” And that’s really when I started getting into WordPress. I just continued in those little spare moments that I had working on something. And back in 2015, when we decided, “Let’s do this thing.” I already had created pockets of time, and learned very well how many hours I have in a day and what I need to do in each of those hours to get those things done. It’s just time management or kind of using those margin hours where people are just normally maybe watching TV or lounging around. I was working.

Liam: It’s just time management, she says casually as he struggles to figure out how to get his day organized. That’s another question I had for you is you talked about planning your life way out in advance and that might be the way I heard it, not necessarily the way you said it. What does that mean? Because way in advance for some people is, “Yeah, I know what I’m doing in two hours.” And for other people, it’s, “I know what I’m doing in two years or in 15 years.” What does it mean for Sara?

Sara: For me, it means I know where I want to be when I’m 85 years old and I have a 15-year plan, 10 years, five years, three years. I have a next week plan. And I started doing that really early in my life. I had my first son when I was in college, a sophomore in college and I had to figure out, not finishing college is not an option. How do I get to the finish line? I started at the end and worked my way back. And I’ve always kind of done that since then. You’ve got to start where you want to be and figure out all the tiny little things you need to do to get there. I’m a goal setter and a planner and so every year, I have this whole life planned that I edit and revise, and it takes a long time but it’s worth it. And then I break that down into, “Okay, here’s what I’m doing this quarter, this month, this week, and today.” And I literally set my goals on my desk and read them every day.

Liam: So you said that started when you were in college, when your son was born. And if you’re talking about computers and getting into college and studying in college, you’re organized at some level. But it sounds like the wonderful arrival of your son was a bit of a game changer. Aside from all the things that children– but in terms of your mental approach to planning and was that the case? And then from there, quite often, we say, “I’m going to do this new planning system and then we run with it for a while and then we change gears or we stop doing or whatever it is. And it sounds like you’re still doing it 18 years later. Is that right?

Sara: Well– yes, my son being born while I was in college was absolutely a game changer for me. If he had not been born when I was in college, I don’t think I would have actually graduated in four years. I probably would have mosied on through and finished four, five, six years. Who knows? I definitely wasn’t hardcore motivated until he was born. He was a game changer for me, which I think now is awesome. And I don’t mean to say that I’ve got all this figured out and it’s amazing all the time and I never change my plan. That’s totally not the case. I am a huge productivity organizational nerd so I’m always like, “What’s this new system on the blog? What are you doing? Will that work for me?” While I’m changing the systems, all the time probably, the overall things that I’m doing, which are long-term planning and breaking them into small-term action items. That’s what stays consistent for me.

Liam: Yeah, I like that.

Tara: Oh, we are going to have a long talk after this recording because that is totally my thing as well.

Liam: Productivity geek alert, productivity geek alert.

Tara: Yeah. Goal setting and all of that, I think it gives you a sense of control. I’m realizing more and more, every little thing that you plan, you take control of in your life and then you just feel more in control of everything. Whether it’s what you’re eating, whether it’s how you plan your day, how you set your goals for your business, how you approach your relationship with your family. All those things. If they’re on your mind, you’re controlling them and it just gives you a sense of piece, I find. So yes.

Sara: I definitely agree with that.

Tara: Yeah. It takes a while to figure it out and then sometimes I think it waxes in veins so some days you’re really on your game and you’re in control, and other days you just lose control and I think there’s also sort of the whole mindfulness, if you ever do meditation and they talk about meditation letting thoughts pass you by like clouds in the sky and you just say, “Oh, look. There’s a thought.” And let it pass you by. It’s the same thing with the day that’s not productive. “Oh, look. There’s a day that I did not get done what I was supposed to.” So you have to be forgiving of yourself as well. It’s really easy to fall into a sense of disappointment in yourself when you’re trying to be that controlling as well. How do you manage that balance? What do you think about that?

Sara: I definitely have learned to kind of give myself grace when I am not accomplishing all those things on my task list for the day. And actually, what I started doing. Unless I have something very urgent for that day, I don’t even put it on my daily list. I’ll have a weekly list and I’ll be like, “These are the things that I need to get done this week and I’ll just steadily work on them through the week.” So I don’t feel as much daily pressure for specific items, but I definitely have had to work on letting things go sometimes and not beating myself up about it and kind of making sure I tell myself, “It’s okay, let’s move on.” And sometimes, that means not getting to a goal for whatever reason or changing a goal and also not giving myself a hard time about that and just telling myself, “Okay, we’re going to rebase one. That didn’t work out, we’re going to go in another direction.” So just being forgiving for myself really helps a lot.

Liam: Absolutely, a test, giving ourselves the space both timewise but mentally, emotionally, psychologically to get back on track is a good idea and healthy. Sara, I want to ask you about advice. And you certainly shared a bunch with us about some of the meaningful ways in which you’re able to structure your life. But how about advice that someone has given you or that you’ve read in a book or found online in a blog post or something? What’s the best advice that you’ve ever encountered and implemented in your life?

Sara: I think going way back to high school, my dad gave me a piece of advice that I still think about all the time when I’m setting these goals and trying to figure out my path. He said that — and I think we were talking about — maybe we were talking about going to college. I don’t really remember. He said that you really only need three things to accomplish something. You need brains, time, or you need money. And he said, “Of those three things, you really only need two.” He said, “If you don’t feel like you have the brains. If you’ve got the time and money, you can get it done. If you don’t have the money and you’ve got the time and brains to persevere and get through it, you can get it done.” And I think that really gave me confidence and it still gives me confidence throughout my entire life where I feel like, okay, I can get this done, I can figure out how to get it done. And here are the three big things I’m working with. How do we leverage and adjust those three things to accomplish whatever it is we’re looking at?

Liam: The simplicity of that formula is brilliant, no matter what you’re trying to do. Whether it’s, get the ingredients for the cookie recipe for this afternoon, or, plan your life so that you know exactly where you’re going to be at age 85. Those three things, that’s really great. What a wonderfully simple practical flexible formula. I see why that has stuck with you.

Tara: I think it also can relate to the idea of planning because when you’re setting your goals, you can relate them to the idea of those three things, that you need to hit two of the three in your goal setting. You need to have the money or the time or you need to learn and level up your knowledge. I can see where that fits into how you approach your life and your goals. Thank you for sharing that with us.

Sara: Sure.

Liam: Sara, we have a little bit of time left and you talked about cooking. Are you a savory cooker or a sweet cooker? Are you making cookies or are you making the steak and the bacon and– you’re nodding your head. I’ll let you share your answer.

Sara: Yeah. I’m definitely a savory cooker. I don’t have much of a sweet tooth and I don’t normally even make at all unless my son wants to bake, then I will bake and we’ll have cookies or cupcakes. But I’m usually into cooking the dinner. I really like pulling a dinner together and having all the different little pieces and then you’re just making something out of nothing. In the end, you’ve got this hopefully, but not always, amazing dish that you’re offering to other people and I think that’s super fun and awesome.

Tara: Tell me how you fit your love of planning with your cooking? Do you plan out a week of meals at a time? If you’re pulling things together, are you waiting until the last minute? How do you do that?

Sara: I plan out a month of meals at a time. That’s my goal. Sometimes it is just weekly. When I’m having a time that’s super busy, I’m like, “Here’s my list of meals. Go!” But I have a spreadsheet for everything. There’s a spreadsheet of here are the common meals that we cook, they’re categorized by like, here’s our slow cooker meals, there are our quick meals, these are our breakfast meals. And I’ll use that to make the grocery list. Sometimes, that means going to the grocery, more often than not lately, it means ordering them online, which I think is super fun. I definitely do all the planning for meals.

Tara: Yeah. I used to put them on the Google Calendar with a link to the recipe online. That’s like my thing. I planned that out also weeks in advance when my kids were little. Liam is cracking up over there. [laughter]

Liam: You ladies are amazing. You’re absolutely amazing. I love you both. [laughter]

Tara: Liam should experience my love of spreadsheets but yet.

Sara: Yeah. I have a spreadsheet for absolutely everything.

Tara: Yeah, I do, too. Well, Sara. It’s been a pleasure having you on the show. I’m sorry that we’re out of time but I’ll probably keep chatting with you after we stop recording about this because I love it. Thanks for joining us and sharing your story and for all you do in the open source community. Where can people find you online?

Sara: You can find me on Twitter at @sarassassin and I have a website at sara.io but it’s really just a link to my social media. I don’t have a lot of content right there.

Liam: Sara, thanks so much for joining us, it’s been a huge pleasure and a real loving experience, thank you.

Tara: Thank you, Sara. Bye-bye.

Sara: Thanks for having me. Bye.

Liam: Bye-bye.

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.

David is a professional web developer focused on helping small businesses by providing ongoing WordPress maintenance and support through his service FixUpFox. He helps organize both WordPress Orlando and WordCamp Orlando.

Twitter | @davidwolfpaw

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 90.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re joined by David Wolfpaw. David is a professional web developer focused on helping small businesses by providing ongoing WordPress maintenance and support through his service FixUpFox. He helps organize both WordPress Orlando and WordCamp Orlando. Welcome, David. Glad to have you here.

David: Thanks for having me.

Liam: Hey David. Thanks for joining us today. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

David: Yes. Professionally, I’ve been doing a lot of web development. Not professionally, I started web development in high school which at this point now is almost 20 years ago. And then I started doing web development professionally when I was in college when the things that I was doing for fun, for myself, just building little websites for myself or for my friends, other people started asking me to do them as a business. At the time, I was charging an embarrassingly low amount even for that time. Over the years I have slowly increased both my skill level and the billing. And then in 2008 I believe is the first time I discovered WordPress.It had just hit version 3.0 so I only got– Actually, sorry, it doesn’t matter but I came in a little bit before that so I know when custom post types came out, that was very exciting in 3 .0. So just about 11 years now I’ve been working with WordPress and I’ve been managing WordCamp Orlando and WordPress Orlando, the meetups since 2012.

Liam: That’s a lot of WordPress. When did you start working for yourself? We heard earlier in our conversation that you have a company called FixUpFox. Did that spin right out of college? Did you graduate and then just go right into self-employment?

David: Well, yes and no. Actually, just before I graduated, I realized that– I was doing this basically off the books for a few years and just before I graduated in 2009, I realized I should get a little bit more formal, more official. I just had my 10-year anniversary. The parent company is actually called Orange Blossom Media. I can get into a little bit about the name thing but just at the 10-year anniversary, about a week or two ago.

Liam: Congratulations.

David: Thank you very much. And through that time, I worked for two other agencies doing some work for them, but I always kept the company going in the background. The second company that I worked for, it was basically a go to work, go home, take a nap, eat dinner, and then spend another five or six hours on the computer working on client work, until I got to the point where I was making about as much at home as I was at the other job. So, of course, when I quit that, I did have an income drop. But the extra time let me build a business up a bit more. I started out doing custom website builds. That would include building custom themes, custom plugins for clients, or just setting things up. But then I noticed that a lot of clients were coming back to me. They would say– I’m talking about a year or two later for some of them. “Hey, we love the site but somebody hacked us.” Or, “This is great but we lost some files. Do you have a backup still?” Something like that. In 2014, I should probably have a date. Sometime September, 2014 range, I started a side service that would manage people’s up sites ongoing. That was the company that eventually got called FixUpFox. It was intended to be just a little side thing but over the past two years, that’s been the main source of revenue. Clients will come to me, they will pay on a monthly or annual basis and I will handle most things for the WordPress sites. The thing that I found most important was preventative care. When I bring someone on, I tell them, honestly, 75% of the requests that I used to get I won’t get anymore because they were things relating to backups, to security, to updates failing, things like that. All the kind of things that I consider table stakes for any maintenance company, make sure you have at least daily backups, some sort of security, daily updates, etcetera.

Tara: Yeah, I had a local meetup last night here and most of the people that attend this meetup are beginners and not experienced users. And I always ask what topics they’d like to cover in future meetups. The main topic this time people wanted to hear about was backups, how to backup, where to backup, when to backup, all those things. That is something that befuddles a lot of users of how to do it and not sure they’re putting it in the right place and all of that. So having a service that offers that gives people a lot of security and confidence that their website is going to be available if anything bad happens. So I can understand that’s probably an easy selling point. What are the biggest challenges with that business? I’m glad to hear it’s growing and it’s become a good source of revenue for you. What is your challenge? I know there are a lot of other companies that do that.

David: Just like I think if you ask most people who have their own WordPress-based companies, assuming they’re selling services. A lot of people say, “I don’t consider these other people my competitors, I consider them partners or friends because there’s so much work to go around.” And I think the same thing happens in the maintenance space as well. Of course, there’s the opportunity for somebody to choose my company over, as you said, one of the many, many other companies that offer WordPress maintenance or choose one of them over me. But I could not handle all the work that is available there. I think more people should be moving into recurring revenue. I think it’s very– I know it’s easier said than done, just like myself, so many people want to pivot into trying products out one day. It’s certainly easier said than done but if you take the time to work at it, it’s great to have something where you know, okay, at least barring anything crazy, like everyone suddenly canceling. I have this much coming in each month and I don’t have to worry about those dry periods when people don’t need new work. When we’re recording this, it’s early February, and in January, I had the onslaught of emails from people who suddenly have new budgets available or who have a new resolution to do some updates to the website or something. The past few weeks, I’ve seen a huge influx of new work. Who knows what’s going to happen later in the year? But the clients that I have on a regular retainer, I at least know that they’ll be there.

Tara: Yeah. How do you divide your time up and manage that because doing maintenance on websites is not predictable in terms of your schedule? You can’t plan when a website is going to down and when somebody’s going to email you with an emergency. Do you have a team that helps you in other time zones or do you keep your phone by your bed and you’re ready for somebody to contact you at one in the morning that their website’s down? How do you manage that scheduling?

David: Well, both of the things that you said, having a 24-hour team or keeping my phone by my bed. They presuppose that, one, there’s some things that happen that would be major emergencies, and two, it’s assumed that I would be available on call 24/7 for them. And I do understand that there are a lot of companies that want that and there are companies that market that. I listened to the episode that you had with Joe Howard of WP Buffs and he mentioned that was one of their growing pains was moving to the 24/7. It’s certainly a selling point, I’ve certainly lost potential leads that wanted some 24/7 support. But honestly, it’s myself and a few contractors as needed. But the majority of the work I do myself. That’s been the case for a past few years. Honestly, it’s easier to manage when you know your own schedule. Of course, if anything happens, I need to make sure there’s something in place and that’s what I find most helpful is having something in place, having some sort of process, some sort of systems for work. One thing that my clients know when I’m on-boarding them, actually, even when we’re in the sales pitch, before they give me any money, is that you’re working with me directly. If we’re working with anyone else, you’ll know in advance who it is, what they’ll be doing, and here are all the ways that you can reach me. I try to make it more personal. The newsletters that I send to clients are more personalized. I also share with them some things that are going in my life. I try to keep up with what’s going on in their lives a bit. I try to make it a bit more of a one-to-one relationship. You’re not just hiring a company but you’re hiring a person individually. The reason that I think I do that is because they know there’s somebody at the other end of the computer. It’s not– if you ever just talk to customer support at some big company and you know it’s just somebody who doesn’t care who you are, doesn’t even know who you are, you’re a number there, something like that. So you know, they’ll know when I go, “Well, it’s after 05:00 PM Eastern time or it’s the weekend, so we’ll be getting to this on Monday.”

Liam: Yeah, that’s got to build a lot of trust where they can say to you, “Hey, David. You remember a couple of months ago when we did this thing?” And you know what that is, it’s not a support ticket where they have to type it in and, “Well, we did this and did that, and we did that two months ago because you were the one that did it and you remember.” I suppose also then with that trust, if it is 05:05 on a Thursday afternoon and the clients emails in, “Hey, David. This really is an emergency.” You know that client and you can say, “You know what? That person never cries emergency when it’s not. I’m going to jump back on and take that because that is an emergency. Let me fix that.” Because it’s the trust and relationship, right?

David: Absolutely. Again, I’m not a stickler like, “Nope, it’s absolutely after this time frame, not going to help you.” But I have the opportunity, I have the option to do so if I want to. And I say that just to say, I don’t feel as stressed as I could be. Because there’s certainly a lot of things that can get stressful about work. But I’ve been making a conscious effort over the past few years to remove as many of the stresses as I can, one of them feeling like I always have to be by my computer 24/7. Any time that I have a support ticket come in, I do get a notification about it. That’s one of the very, very few notifications that I allow to take place on my devices. Again, I have no other cruff coming in that I have to filter through so I know when it’s important. I will be available when they need me but reason so we both feel comfortable on both sides or at least that’s how it always seems to me. Because I’ll get some clients who will say, “Oh, thank you for responding so quickly.” And I responded that afternoon when they sent me a message earlier in the day but I had closed email because I was in the middle of a deeper project. And I always felt, even years ago, that was one of the things that clients would say when they would work with me. They’d go, “I like working with you because you’re responsive.” So many places you’ll go to and say, “Hey, I need a full website built. Here’s all my details.” And then the person wouldn’t get back to them until they had something fully complete and go, “Here you go, here’s your website. Enjoy.” And then, of course, if they didn’t have any conversations in between to say, “Is this what you want? What might have changed over time? How does this change?” Or some people just not getting back to them at all. A lot of companies just won’t respond and I feel that way too. I will talk to some other companies or some other contractors that I might want to work with and just get no response for whatever reason.

Liam: Yeah, that’s a good point.

David: To the point where you said that I know what’s going on on the website. Of course, I try to keep copious notes. I also let clients know. I’m going to tell you what I’m doing, unless you don’t want me to. If they ask me to make some change. I can go, “Here, I will give you a detailed multiple-paragraph here’s what I did and why or here’s what was wrong and why, unless you don’t care and you go, I just want it fixed.” More clients are in the latter camp, they’re just like, “I want it fixed.” Not like in a, “I don’t care what you’re doing.” But more of a, “It’s great that it’s up. This is why I’m hiring you.”

Liam: Right. It’s like when we go to the lawyer or the accountant and say, “Fix our books or write us a new contract.” We don’t really care how they do the research, as long as they do it well and they give us a contract that protects us.

David: Right. But I also make sure I’m available for any education that they may want, because sometimes, I’ll see something where I go, “Oh, this thing stopped working because of this other thing that you’re using because of whatever. Here are a few options we can do to fix the problem, or here’s something to keep in mind for the future.” You mentioned that if I keep notes, I’ll be able to remember and go back and make changes again. I think that’s also important for timing. That’s one of the– when people ask me– to back up, part of my service besides all the preventative care is I also offer unlimited small-task fix. Basically, in my mind, I say anything that I consider to be under a half hour or so of work would be included. I have a detailed page on my site that I can refer people to that says, “Here are the kind of things that are normally included. Here are the kind of things that aren’t included in service.” Just so they know in advance that if they have something small we need to get done, they can send an email and it will get done probably the same day, and not have to worry about hiring somebody for every little task they have on the website, going through that process over and over again. And if anyone asks, “How can you support that?” Usually, the main thing is the time savings. If I have a relationship with the client, then I can do things more proactively. I can make changes before they even see they need to be made. And I’ll know where their site is at. If you had me go on and make a change to the menu on your site, that can take me a half hour to do so where I have to get your credentials, log in, make sure I’m not messing anything else up, blah, blah, blah, find out that it’s actually in a widget instead of a menu, whatever. The second time you ask me to make a change there, It’ll take maybe five minutes to log in, find the changes, and do it. Over time, I think it serves both parties well.

Liam: Yeah, I totally agree with that. We have an agreement with some of our clients where if anything is less than two hours, they don’t ask for an estimate and we don’t provide it. We just do the work. And that saves us having to spend 10, 15 minutes, how long is this going to take and prepare an estimate. Even if it’s just in the body of an email, send it over to them, they have to think about it and respond. Because we know and they know and there’s a trust. If it takes us 15 minutes, we’ll bill 15, if it takes us an hour and a half, we’re going to bill an hour and a half. And the efficiency of time and not having to make decisions makes it much easier for everybody involved. But it’s all based on trust, what you’re talking about. David, let me ask you a little bit about the WordPress community. We heard earlier in our conversation that you help organize WordPress Orlando, the meetups there, and the WordCamp there. How did you get involved with the community? You told us earlier that you discovered WordPress around 3.0. Did you discover the software and then the community, did somebody drag you to a meetup and then you said, “Well, the software is cool.” Tell us a little bit about that?

David: I discovered WordPress, the software several years before I discovered the community. It was early 2008, I remember. I was working on a project for a client that was going to include some blogging capabilities, that’s where I went looking for blogging tools and found WordPress. At the time, I was already doing some PHP development so I wasn’t fully afraid of it. But at the same time, I know I did a lot of really dumb things and I’m probably doing really dumb things now too.

Liam: I’m laughing and raising my hand too. Yeah, I’m with you there.

David: And even though things like the forums existed. I didn’t really piece two and two together. It wasn’t until I was working at an agency in 2011. I saw that somebody there was on a meetup and they were like, “Hey, there’s a WordPress meetup starting.” I’ll get really detailed just because I remember exactly. WordPress meetup started in November 2011. I went to the very first meeting with the coworker and met a few other people in the community who I still continue to see and talk to this day. And then by the third meetup, I was helping to organize it, which would have been like January 2012. That’s because there was one person doing it who knew that he wanted to have meetups around WordPress but honestly, he wanted people who knew more WordPress to come. Which I get the same benefit, too, people who know more than me come and teach me things all the time at the meetups. And then 2012, we rebooted the WordCamp Orlando because it had been dormant for a year. So yeah, I knew about WordPress well before I knew about the WordPress community. And I found that’s been a thing for a lot of our other organizers as well. They say, “I can’t believe I didn’t realize there were other people here who cared as much about a piece of software as I do.”

Liam: Yeah, that’s an experience we hear a lot about on this show. Let me change gears on you one more time, if I can, and ask you about success. This is a question we ask all of our guests and I want you to share your definition of success, whether it’s a definition of personal success, professional success, or maybe a mixture of both?

David: Absolutely. Myself, when I think about any goals that I have for the future, any plans that I’m making. I consider success around those, obviously, to complete as many of those as I can. But I consider it more in personal terms. This business is here to serve my life, not the other way around. I enjoy the work that I do. of course, there are a lot of things that can get frustrating in the day to day, in the moment. But at the end of the day, I enjoy what I’m doing for work and it is helping me to live a comfortable life. I’m very thankful that I’ve had the opportunities that I’ve had, that people have given me the help that I’ve had in the past. That’s my roundabout way of saying that success to me is that– I’m not thinking about it in financial terms, in terms of like, “Oh, I want to have the biggest company, do the biggest thing.” But, “Oh, I have money in the bank so I know if there is an emergency, if there is an accident or anything, I’ll be covered.”, “Oh, I have great relationships that I’ve built both in and out of this community that aren’t negatively getting affected by my work. And I say that because, again, I try to remember that some, way too high number of Americans wouldn’t be able to pay their mortgage if they missed a single paycheck. Of course, we had hundreds of thousands that missed a lot of paychecks over the past few weeks. I’m very thankful that I’m not in that position. And I remember getting to that position and feeling this sense of relief going, “Okay, great.” I went to one of those financial courses a few years ago and one thing that a lot of them tell you is make sure that you have some amount of money in the bank for emergencies, things like that. That’s one thing that I consider success. Right now, I am fairly healthy, I have great relationship. I don’t have any major life issues, both ones that either I caused or the ones that a lot of people have that they don’t have control over. And I’m able to give a lot of help to other people.

Tara: How do you manage a balance of things? You have a couple of different businesses and a personal life, I assume. Talk a little bit about your, I’ll use that cliche term, work/life balance, but how do you mentally, emotionally, physically manage the balance between running your own business and having a life outside that?

David: In part, I admit, probably more than it should be, a lot of my personal life can revolve around business-related things. We do at least two meetups a month as an example and I can’t remember the last one that I missed. And then, of course, we do all the things outside of the meetups that relate to community. That’s one way that helps to build some of those relationships that can become more personal. A lot of the other organizers I consider personal friends, not just professional friends. And then I find time for my hobbies and my interests outside of work. Again, besides having cut off times where I can go, “Sure, I will do some work in the evening if I choose to do so, but I have that option not to that lets me not feel guilty that I’m leaving some task hanging.” Of course, all the things that most people say, try to maintain time to be healthy a bit, take a walk every day, walk my dogs, spend time with friends. I admit, I do always feel that there’s more that I could be doing. Every time that there’s– which, I guess could be a positive in one way, going, “Yes, there is that task hanging. But honestly, once I finish that one, there’s another task, and another one.” I don’t have to think that this one task is the one thing that’s keeping me frustrated.

Liam: The task of the Damocles – not the sword, the To Do List of Damocles.

David: I have a lot of to-do lists. I try to stay very organized. The thing that I feel most important for work/life balance for me is having systems and processes. Just knowing what I’m going to do. How I’m going to handle this situation when it comes up. Of course, you can’t handle everything. Automating a few things if I can, making tasks easier. I’m a big fan of having canned emails that I can bring up with a text snippet so that I can– because, of course I’m not just going to send a form email to somebody, but that gets me 80, 90% of the way there for requests that are the same all the time. Anything that I see myself doing more than once or twice, I want to at least document in some way. And then, hopefully, find some way to improve it. And I do have a few other business ideas that are related to that, that I’m working on now. Because I finally decided to set aside some official time for them. I guess that’s another thing. I try to make certain things that I can schedule, scheduled, to say, “The focus of this week is going to be X.”

Tara: Yeah. Do you have a system or a method that do you use for that or do you write it down on a piece of paper? How do you do that sort of goal setting?

David: I am a humongous fan of Trello. If people don’t know, Trello is like a Kanban/Agile whatever. I know there’s actual methodologies for this but it’s that kind of board. That Dave Allen getting things done mentality of moving things, sorting things out, and getting rid of the things that are not important, which I think is just as important as getting things done is figuring out what things don’t need to get done at all. And then just handling all the small things. And I’m going to say this maybe in a joking manner because some of the people in my life, some of the people close to me in my life aren’t very organized. At times, I can see a problem coming a mile away and I’m like, “Hey, you should do this.” They don’t do it, it happens. And I don’t want to do a gloating, “I told you so.” But more of a, “Oh, I think of these things that look really minor in advance, that way when they come up, hopefully, the things go smooth.” You know, “Oh, I see that–” I don’t have any great examples off the top of my head but just things that can seem like insignificant, little, honestly, just thinking about something and doing it in advance in the moment while you’re there can save so much headache later.

Tara: Yeah, planning is a good thing. And it sounds like we’re going to transition really easily into my next question because you are giving us some good advice, giving our listeners some advice about managing their schedules and being organized. But can you share with us some advice that you’ve received, a piece of advice that’s really stuck with you and that you’ve implemented into your life?

David: Most of those things that I went over, other people taught me. I didn’t just discover on my own. Especially, the most important of those things would be, again, finding out what things don’t need to be done. I’m sure we’ve heard it from many people many times. My favorite is the way Derek Sivers says it which is, “Either it’s a hell yes or it’s a no.” In case you like to change it to heck yes instead of a no. And I don’t always do that. And again, you can hear people say things like that all the time and still find it hard to implement. But if I can be one more person in that chorus, if something isn’t the right fit for you and you can choose not to do it, you can choose not to take that specific client, you have the ability to not work on a specific project, listen to your gut, make time for the ones that are the right fit for you.

Liam: Yeah, I like that a lot. For me, that’s a difficult practice to get over. I tend to forget it. “That sounds really interesting, let me explore that.” And then I’m three months and maybe 15 or 20 hours of mental exercises and paper exercise– paper, not papal exercises. I don’t do those. Paper exercises into it and realize, “You know, I don’t like this. I don’t want to do this but I’ve already committed so much time. Maybe if I just do a little more, I can get around the corner or get around the bend and it will be fun. That’s really hard for me but I think you’re absolutely right. The sense of belief and– it’s just that, the sense of release of, “That’s not for me. I’m not going to do that anymore. It’s not hanging over me, it’s not keeping me down, it’s not occupying my thoughts.” That’s a great bit of advice. Thank you for sharing that.

David: Like I said, that and really a lot of things I’ve learned from the WordPress community. There are a lot of great people in the Orlando area, and of course, I’ve gone to many, many WordCamps. There are great people there who have taken their time out to sit and chat with me about any questions that I might have, share a lot of advice. Some of the people who come to top of mind are Mason James of LA, Syed Balkhi of WPBeginner and Awesome Motive and his many companies, Cory Miller of iThemes. There’s a lot of people who have said specific things that when they said them– again, other people could have said them in the past, I might have heard it before. But for some reason, just whatever way they said it was the way that it finally clicked for me. A lot of my personal and professional success is thanks to people in this community saying, “Cool, you’re doing whatever it is that you’re doing. Here’s the way you can do it better. Or, here’s the way that I do it. Have you considered this?”

Tara: Yeah. I think it’s unique to this community. I’ve talked to people in other fields and they don’t seem to have the same kind of interactive, supportive, inspirational community that we have. I think many of us can say that we are better not just in our professions and in our coding and in our development, our business, but also, I think, as people. I think we inspire each other. There’s a lot of great people in this community who set a good example for how to be a better person every day. Sounds like that’s effective.

Liam: Here, here.

David: And if I can share just one more thing relating to that. Not only do people give me a lot of help, but I consciously try to make that effort to give help to others. Besides at least setting several hours aside every month to do in-person help desks with people at a meetup, I mean more like helping raise others up. Everyone else who’s– It’s not like a bragging thing or anything but everyone else who is an organizer of one of our meetups is somebody who came in and I was like, “Hey, you should get involved and start doing this.” We had a new member who came to one of our meetups about two years ago. And his very first meetup, he asked a lot of very good questions and I saw he was actually taking notes, and he was very thankful, and he kept coming. A few months later, I asked him if he could share what he was working on and he was like, “Well, I don’t know much. I only started doing this a few months ago.” So he gave a talk about getting started, getting involved with WordPress, and getting started with development. It was amazing. He said he had never done public speaking before. I am pretty sure he is lying because he was amazing, people loved it. WordCamp Orlando is coming up in a few months and all the organizers, we were like, “What about this guy?” I guess you can look it up. Sam Smith. He’s one of our organizers here. He works for GiveWP, he does now, that is. And he said, “That was a great talk. People at the meetup loved it. Why don’t we have him be the keynote for WordCamp Orlando this year because it’s starting the first day, very inspirational? I didn’t know anything about the web, here I am working for a company, doing all this like a year later. And again, it was amazing.”

Tara: That’s great. You’re making me want to come, that’s great. Thank you so much for sharing everything that you shared with us today. We are out of time but I think we’re ending on a really positive note, which is always great to do. Where can people find you online, David?

David: Main place if they want to find anything professional would be Fixupfox.com. Honestly, I just use DVAs for things now for the main business. And then my full name @davidwolfpaw on Twitter. Those are probably two main places. I’m not super active on social media on purpose.

Tara: Yeah, we’ll put those in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing your story today, David. Bye-bye.

David: Thanks for having me. Bye.

Liam: Thanks David, bye-bye.

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.

Charlie serves as the director of technology for Penn Manor School District in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. His first book, The Open School House, chronicles more than 15 years of open-source learning programs at Penn Manor.

Book | The Open Schoolhouse

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 89.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Charlie Reisinger. Charlie serves as the director of technology for Penn Manor School District in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. His first book, The Open School House chronicles more than 15 years of open-source learning programs at Penn Manor. Welcome, Charlie.

Charlie: Hi, there.

Tara: Hi, Charlie. It’s nice to meet you and have you on Hallway Chats and I’m really excited to hear about what you’re doing, it sounds cool. Can you tell us more about yourself?

Charlie: Absolutely. Thank you again for spending some time with me this afternoon, my day job is the director of technology for Penn Manor School District. We’re located in beautiful Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. My role here as part of the senior leadership team is to oversee our technology operations and our instructional technology programs. My work takes me from the server room to the classroom and just about everywhere in between. I’m fortunate to be in a position where I can oversee programs and policies but also have the time and in many ways, the autonomy to work with students. Actually, I should say our super students are terrific teachers.

Tara: What’s your background? How did you get started in technology?

Charlie: Sure, sure. I came to this position in, I guess, a peculiar way. I am not a technologist or a programmer by training. My undergraduate degree is in psychology and I also had a philosophy minor. My master’s degree is instructional design and design, that’s really the study of the intersection between pedagogy and technology. But I certainly did not. think when I was in college that I would be having a technology program. But I guess by a series of strange swerves, I ended up here and that’s awesome.

Liam: Charlie, you shared that you have an undergrad in psych and philosophy, and a graduate degree in instructional design and technology. I wonder if you came to your job. Did you get into working with the school district as a technologist and then discovered your love of teaching and kind of the intersectionality of that or how did that come about?

Charlie: It was both. When I started Penn Manor School District, it was in 1998 and I was hired as a building technician. The sole focus of my job was to provide desktop and network support for our students and teachers. However, before I arrived here, I was the IT director for a small two-year school that is now part of the Art Institutes. The name of that school is Bradley Academy for The Visual Arts in York, Pennsylvania. And there I had a role that was deeply embedded into both technology and management, but also working side by side with students and teachers. But I think even stepping way back, I’ve always been interested in education. I think that’s a big part of the reason why I got into psychology, because those two disciplines are so deeply intertwined. I’ve always been interested in technology from its communication standpoint. Obviously, I love all things network, and code, and programs, and process. But I think what really got me interested in a true technology route was probably just like many people. It was in the early ’90s when this new internet thing came about. I saw that as a communications medium for people to connect and share ideas and, at its foundation, to learn. I guess where I’m going with this is that for me, technology, education, learning, it’s always been intertwined. And I think some of that was also driven by the fact that I believe I’m the product of the series of outstanding teachers that just instill the love of learning in me. Later in life, as I found new technologies and new capabilities, it just seemed like a natural big ball of connectiveness.

Tara: Where does WordPress fit into this?

Charlie: Ah, where does WordPress? I guess I should start with our WordPress story. We began using WordPress here at Penn Manor in approximately 2007, 2008. I began looking for simplistic tools for our teachers to create websites. And again, I suspected that is not very atypical. That’s probably how many people first arrived at tools such as WordPress. We began using it internally in select sites for select building web pages. I brought up our Penn Manor technology site on WordPress initially. We discovered it to be ridiculously easy to use. It took all of the heavy lifting away from our teachers and it caught on like wildfire. In a couple of years, we started expanding and many of or classroom teachers began using WordPress. We expanded to our school websites all using WordPress. By about 2010, we have brought up all of our school buildings and the vast majority of our teacher web pages on WordPress sites. I’m trying to think back at that time, I think that was still when WordPress Multisite was split out as a separate project and kind of a little bit fuzzy on the dates as to when that happened, but we actually started on WordPress Multisite, WordPress MU before it became Multisite and then later when the projects merged, we went in that direction.

Liam: That’s really neat. That’s going old school. Charlie, I want to touch on one other thing that you and I have talked about before. We’ve known each other a few years now through the open source communities in and around our corner of Pennsylvania. And one of the things that’s always struck me about Penn Manor under your leadership, and I know you just lead the IT section but is the way that the school district engages with the students via technology. That’s very, very different than the way my local school district does it here where my children go to school. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that and why your school district made the decision to go where it has, what it’s actually doing, and what are some of the benefits you’re finding by going the way you are if you would?

Charlie: Sure, sure. We are not your typical district in terms of our technology programs. We should probably provide some context. I guess the place to start is that we, from a technology and a software standpoint, believe in open source principles. We believe that there’s open source principles should extend to our students’ technology devices. We are one of the few districts, I believe in the country, that are using Linux laptops with our students. We have a one-to-one technology program in grades four through 12 where each one of our students receives a laptop running Linux and open source software exclusively. And we push that even further. Students have those laptops but another thing that we do differently is we allow our students to have root-level access to those laptops, and that differs from most districts across the country that will take devices and lock them down and restrict what students can do with that device. But our philosophy here, not only in my department but across the leadership at Penn Manor and our principles is that we want to give students the opportunity to be able to tinker and explore, to lift the hood of those devices and discover computing. We found the best way to do that is to lift many of the restrictions that you would typically find on a school laptop and allow students to directly interact, tinker, and experiment with their school-owned devices.

Liam: Charlie, I’m just going to interject and talk a little bit about root access and clarify that. That really just means that the students can do whatever they want. So if they want to add programs, they can add programs. If they want to delete programs, they can delete programs. If they want to install an extension in Firefox or Chrome, they can do. Although I don’t know that those were on Linux necessarily. But they have complete control so it’s not, for example, a standard school district where you say, “You can use these programs in these ways and can only communicate via these systems.” They can really do whatever they want with it.

Charlie: That’s exactly correct. Obviously, we have policies around responsible use of technology. That’s not to say that we don’t provide and enforce web filtering for sites that students obviously should not be visiting. All these rules and policies apply. Security, password management, not stealing someone else’s ID. But as you said, the core of our program is that students have incredible levels of autonomy on their devices. With root access, there are local admins, so if they want to program, they can install it, they have full access to the command line. If they want to run a local lamp stack and run WordPress, they could do that on their machines. Our philosophy has been to give our students as much control and agency over devices. And again, as you know, that’s very dissimilar from most districts that highly restrict what students can do on their device. And that just doesn’t fit our model of education and open learning.

Tara: That’s fascinating. Do you find a lot of kids take advantage of that? Do you have a disproportionately high number of kids coming out coding and things like that because they have that access?

Charlie: See, now that’s an interesting question because you would hope, we would hope that more and more students would take advantage of it. In some ways, it’s a little depressing. What we’re finding is that very few students understand the power that they have in their hands. And that’s in spite of us trying to help educate them about what they can do when the capabilities that they’ve been given. I sort of have a running theory on that. I think, as our technology is becoming more simplified, it’s moving students further and further away from the raw materials of a computer and computing. And they just don’t understand that they have, again, the autonomy, the agency, the ability to go in and play with the dials. Some of that, I think, is in our tablets and our cell phones, we’re removed. The interface is so abstracted from the undergirds, the computer, the raw programs, the raw operating system, console games, PC games. Our technology tools are becoming very app-specific and I think we’re losing something in that, and that is the ability to, again, lift the hood, to go deep or really understand computers, and operating systems, and code, and essentially, all of those powerful forces that are making decisions on our behalf and on our students’ behalf.

Tara: Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me. We’ve spoken to a number of people on this show who are of a little bit older generation, maybe in their 30s and 40s who tell stories of being in middle and high school and taking apart computers and putting them back together, and doing lots of stuff that I know, for myself having children who are recently finishing school, that that was never anything that was popular to do, or I didn’t know any kids who do that and I think what you’re describing in terms of the way that technology is used now is taking people away from that. How many students are in your school district?

Charlie: We have about 5400 students. That’s K through 12. Our composition is we have seven elementary schools, two middle schools, and one high school facility.

Tara: Yeah, that’s pretty small district relative, I guess.

Charlie: Yeah, it’s interesting. For Pennsylvania, we’re large because there’s a number of school districts that are under 2000 students, but relatively speaking, as you look out across Pennsylvania, we realize, we obviously don’t compare to a School District of Philadelphia or a Harrisburg School District, or the others.

Tara: Are you involved in the local WordPress community or do you have your students get involved? Do you know if any of them are– I know Lancaster does have a vibrant community.

Charlie: Absolutely. I’ve been involved in the Lancaster WordPress community for a number of years. I’ve helped and I’ve been involved with WordCamp Lancaster, I’ve spoken at WordCamp Lancaster. It’s just a terrific local community that we have. I try to get out to the Philadelphia region as much as possible. Yeah, obviously, I try to speak, I try to support it as best I can given my schedule. But I think the second question is more interesting. How can we get more students involved? And that’s just proven to be difficult. Our students have been involved for the past decade or so as content creators, but moving them beyond using WordPress at Penn Manor to maintain our high school newspaper or maintain a classroom site or maintain a site for our one-to-one helpdesk or student helpdesk, that’s just alluded us. Some of that or the restrictions of time and where we can get that to fit into the curriculum. Some of it is just the development or the time effort that takes to bring students up to speed really to be able to understand more complicated application like WordPress. We keep working at it, though.

Liam: Yeah, it’s a challenge. There’s a lot of aspects to get in there. Charlie, I want to ask you one of our questions that we like to ask all of our guests and it’s around success. I wonder if you can share with us your definition of success, whether that’s a personal definition, a professional definition, or maybe a mix of two?

Charlie: On a personal level, success for me is pretty simple. I have a terrific wife and daughter. That is success. I’m very fortunate in my personal life. On a professional level, I feel successful when I know that I’ve helped our students reach their potential. I think a big part of that is helping students discover both what they’re capable of and also what they may fall in love with. I think a large part of our job as educators is not just simply around curriculum and content, but it’s around introducing students to ideas, pointing them in new directions. I think I’ve been successful, as I said before, is because along the way, I’ve had amazing teachers that saw I may have an interest and they just fed that interest, gave me the space to explore, the space to learn. So now as an adult and working with students and teachers as well, I try to create those environments for our kids and introduce them just to new things and new ideas. That, to me, is success. If I can act as a learning and knowledge mentor, I’m a happy guy.

Liam: Yeah, I can imagine that. To see the eyes of a child light up when they get it or they start to imagine, “Well, if A is true and B is true and I just learned C, oh my gosh, what about D, E, and F?” That must be really rewarding. And I love the simplicity of your personal definition. I have a wonderful wife and daughter, success. I love it.

Charlie: Success. What more can we ask for, right? We have partners and great kids, yeah.

Liam: that’s fantastic. I want to ask you if you can share with us. You might need a minute to think so I’ll try to stretch this question out. You’ve talked about success as helping a child, a student reach their potential or see their potential or understand it. And I wonder if you have an example or two of a child who just absolutely blew your mind when maybe you opened the door half an inch, so to speak, or whatever that analogy is, and that child went somewhere that you just, wow, wow, wow. Something like that?

Charlie: Absolutely. I’m going to probably rattle off a couple examples.

Liam: Go ahead.

Charlie: We recently had a student who was working as part of our one-to-one helpdesk that was at a conference a little bit over a year ago, it was the Central Pennsylvania Open Source Conference. He heard a talk on software-defined radio, so essentially, capturing radio waves over the air and processing them. He was so inspired by one of the speakers that as he was working with the helpdesk, that’s the project he wanted to work on as part of our one-to-one helpdesk course. It’s really like a work-study at our high school. I gave him the space to run. Gina Costalitch, who is the day-to-day student mentor at the helpdesk gave him the space to run on, we gave him materials. And he was so interested in this and so dead set on capturing satellites as they were passing over the Earth, that he created this little satellite capture ring that he threw into a backpack and he was in the evenings when he was on his work breaks, he was running outside trying to capture satellite passes. He was looking for the NOAA Weather Satellites. So he was so consumed and this is just what he wanted to do. He got close, he didn’t get a really clean satellite pass but that was just terrific to see him run and just to see him fall in love with this whole concept of pulling radio waves down over the air and being able to capture them. It’s projects like that. We had a couple of students recently that were working with ROS, that’s the Robot Operating System, and they were working on– we challenged them to create a self-driving car with a little robot called the Turtle Bot, and that was a terrifically complicated project. But watching those students just stick with that and work with that and persevere and just completely struggle with an incredibly complicated open source instead of software to make that work, that was another great example. How much time do we have? [laughter] Recently, we’ve had another student. I love this one, this was a student that joined our course who had never touched Blender before. Blender is an open source 3D modeling program. Again, terrifically complicated. She never thought that she would be able to make anything work animation-wise inside this program. And at the end of the course, she had a working model that she was just beaming with excitement. There’s just so many examples. One other one.

Liam: Go for it.

Charlie: If I may.

Liam: Please do.

Charlie: A student who– her passion is role-playing games and she created essentially her own Roll20. If you’re not familiar with that, Roll20 is an online tool for managing role-playing games. She was just so fascinated by creating her own system that she built her own code and released it open source on GitHub for others to start using. I knew that she was deeply involved in the project and that she was completely consumed because she was responding to questions via GitHub over the summer. [laughter] How many students do you know that are working on their school projects in the middle of July?

Tara: That’s amazing.

Charlie: So we should have a whole separate podcast on student examples but I’ll leave it with just those four.

Tara: That is really cool. Not to be like a downer but what’s the biggest challenge that you face?

Charlie: Yeah. I think our challenges are the same as most every school. It’s finding a balance our resources, our time, and what the state says what our curriculum demands that we do. And it is challenging because we want to make sure that we provide a well-rounded education for our students. But how do you balance getting all of the requirements in, but at the same time, giving our students that space to play, and run, and explore. We all in education find that very challenging. We tend to be a mile wide with our curriculum but unfortunately, only an inch deep and we keep jamming more and more information into our curriculum, and it gets tough when you just know that students want to run with these projects and spend a day or two or three doing nothing but coding or exploring a robot. So how do you balance that? That’s truly the challenge.

Liam: Yeah, I can imagine that for teachers where this child wants to go deep on this subject, whether it’s math or history and yeah, that’s great. But by doing this, they were on to the next chapter because we’ve got to cover the next battle, or the next war, or the next economic focus.

Tara: Yeah, teaching for the test.

Charlie: And what do you do? Because everything is important. It’s not like math isn’t important, science is obviously important. So as we jam more and more to the curriculum, it gets harder and harder to make decisions about what is the most important. Oh, and by the way, we want to provide students space and time to work on personally meaningful projects. Yeah, it’s tough.

Tara: Yeah, are the kids stressed out more than they used to be as a result?

Charlie: Oh, I think absolutely, absolutely. Just, I’m not going to guestimate on the ages of the folks in this call at the moment, but I’ll go first and sort of date myself. I’m in my mid-40s. For those of us in this general age range, I think many of us would discover that education is a very, very different place from what it was when we were younger. And I think there are many, many more stressors on kids. In fact, without a doubt, there are many more stressors on kids. Not only a complicated wide curriculum, but just society’s more complicated. And it stresses our kids, there’s no question about that.

Tara: I think we often think that they have it easier because there is all this technology right at their fingertips, but that may be in some ways– it may make some things easier but the mental stress of having social media all the time and all those things, I think we may underestimate that. There’s a lot written about it but it is, I know.

Charlie: Well, that’s huge and that’s another problem we didn’t have to contend with when we were kids. Now, our lives are publicly broadcast all the time. Speaking for myself only, I can’t imagine if some of the silly things that I did as a kid were potentially on public display. And I don’t think I did anything that bad but I mean, everything out of context, that’s a whole level of pressure that those of us that aren’t growing up today just don’t understand.

Tara: Yeah, I would not want to be growing up today for that reason, it’s hard.

Liam: Yeah, absolutely. And I think when we were growing up, not everybody went to college, and now, I have no idea the percentage-wise, but such a greater percentage of high school graduates go to college and I can only imagine that, that ups the competition for those spaces. But let me change gears a little bit back towards WordPress if I can and Charlie, I’m going to ask you a big question and just pick your brain a little bit. What can WordPress community do to engage a student in a way that you are struggling? You’ve mentioned that you struggled to get them to do content or to get involved with that because it’s a more involved system, at least on a wider level, and you said that not a lot of the students are engaged with their local WordPress community. And okay, some of that’s just going to be the naturing of schedules and high school versus working adults, but what are your thoughts on that?

Charlie: Yeah, that’s a challenge. I should probably back up and talk a little bit about how school districts operate and just websites in general. Early on, I mentioned we do things differently here. WordPress doesn’t specifically feature in public schools. The reason for that I think is two-fold. Public schools at the executive decision level– let me back up. I’ll start here. Public schools often have no idea that WordPress even exists, and I think that’s really the root of the problem. Schools tend to make decisions based on what everyone else is doing. Most of the policy makers and decision makers don’t understand open source software in general, and open development communities, let alone individual applications and platforms like WordPress. Just if you want to get it at root cause of that, education and awareness is the place to start. Teachers just don’t know WordPress. Even some of our teachers today, even though we explained how to run a WordPress site and all that, they just know they go to make a web page. So I think getting– and we try and do that in our work, to talk a lot about open source software in general, obviously, WordPress and other tools just to educate other school district administrators and super intendants at wards. I think that’s really the place to stat because once the district is educated, then teachers can make more informed decisions about the tools that they’re using. I think that’s probably the answer but it’s also the largest challenge.

Liam: Yeah, increased exposure can be a challenge to get the attention and hold it and come back to it often enough.

Charlie: Yeah. And it’s, too, if you put yourself in the position of–I’m fortunate here. We have a very open collaborative leadership team. Our superintendents, assistant superintendents, I believe we’re very open to new ideas. But not every district is like that. Most boards and most superintendents, most IT directors, the leadership team is going to be looking at what other schools are buying. And often, they are buying pre-packaged off-the-shelf web toolkits because it checks the box. “Okay, well, we know we need to have a website.” Let’s outsource that to a company that ‘specializes’ in school websites. Likely, that is their own whatever custom software package. And again, they just check the box. That’s off the list.

Liam: Yeah, I see that a lot and that’s a whole another podcast right there, isn’t it?

Tara: Yeah. I have a friend who’s a teacher and I hear all the time complaints about the different things. I think some of their stuff is WordPress and all the different kinds of blackboard canvas, all these different things that the schools try out. They have to learn something new very frequently so I think it’s a challenge you can’t please everybody in, people learn different ways.

Charlie: For us, just to kind of pull it back to us very specifically. I’ll give you an example, for schools to purchase a web platform for their students, for their school buildings, for their district, you could be looking at school of our size easily $20,000 a year. I mean, there’s no question. And that would obviously be whatever hosted package is out there. We’ve been on WordPress now for well over 10 years. I look at that as every year, we’re saving approximately $20,000 and those cost savings for us have stacked immensely. Every time that I choose an open source software package and it fits our needs, whether it be WordPress or Moodle or many of the other tools that we run here. I tend to look at those cost savings as a way just to find our teachers. $20,000 is a huge chunk of a teacher’s salary. I look at it, obviously, WordPress is a terrific platform. That’s without question. But at the same time, for schools, WordPress is a tremendous gift both in its flexibility and its capability but also as a massive cost savings for public education.

Liam: Yeah, absolutely. Charlie, we’ve got a couple of minutes left here. I want to ask you about advice. The focus of the question really is advice that you’ve received. What’s the best advice that you’ve received or read or found and successfully implemented in your life?

Charlie: I actually want to tell a story because the advice that I received that is most– it was not someone taking me aside and saying, “Hey, Charlie, try this. Or did you think about this? Don’t do that, you should do this.” I think my best advice came in the form of an opportunity that an elementary teacher provided me when I was very young. The first subject that I ever fell in love with was astronomy. And I’m still a big astronomy buff. But when I was in elementary school, I was absolutely convinced I was going to go to Cornell University, I was going to study astrophysics. That was what I was going to do. And I had a teacher in elementary school, her name was Peg McCain, who saw my love and saw me talking about this, and saw that I was reading up on astronomy and I just couldn’t get enough of it. And talked about it during science, she saw that I had this interest and she gave me the opportunity to present a miniature lecture on the solar system to fellow sixth-grade students. That was life-altering for me. And I didn’t really– maybe I got it then as an elementary student, but later in life, I realized how profound that was because she gave me the space and the time. I don’t know, she just believed that, “Hey, we have a kid who’s really interested. Let’s remove the barriers from him talking about this.” I think it wasn’t advice so much as, “Hey, I trust you. What you have to say is important. You have a voice, you have an interest. And just go for it.” There I was, standing up in front of, I don’t know, 100 kids talking about the solar system.

Tara: What a great story. I love hearing stories about teachers like that and the ones that we remember years later. When I think about my friends that are teachers, I always think what a great gift they will have one day when they’re old and retired and they think about how many children’s lives they had an impact on. That’s a great rewarding thing.

Charlie: It really is. I don’t know that we so much remember what people say to us as we do how they make us feel. And that’s what I really remember. It wasn’t what she said so much as just the feeling of empowerment that I had. And for a young kid, that’s world-altering. That what you have to say is important and you can do this and just go for it, and it wasn’t any specific line or phrase, it was just, “We’re going to allow you to get in front of your peers and give a lecture on astronomy.” Who does that?” Well, this teacher had the courage to do it and I just absolutely never forget that.

Tara: I love that line that you don’t remember so much the words people say but how they make you feel. What a great way to wrap up the show today because we are out of time, but I really loved that and I’m glad we’re taking that away as our final thought. Thank you so much for joining us today, Charlie, and sharing your story, and all that you’re doing in your school district. Where can people find you online?

Charlie: Sure. On Twitter, I am @charlie3. You can also find Penn Manor technology website at Technology.pennmanor.net and if you are interested in all things open in schools, you can check out my website The Open School House. I did write a book about that. Again, if you’re interested in schools and technology, I hope that would prove to be a useful resource.

Tara: Excellent, thank you so much.

Liam: Thanks so much, Charlie. What a great time to spend with you. Thanks for your time, this afternoon.

Tara: Bye-bye.

Charlie: I appreciate it. Thank you again, bye-bye.

Liam: Bye.

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.

Lisa Stambaugh has been known as “Web Diva®” for over 20 years. She is a knitting enthusiast, curly girl and cookie artiste. That’s not all! She tells is also she is an obsessive wordsmither and musical theatre devotee.

Book | Web Diva Wisdom

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 88.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re joined by Lisa Stambaugh. Lisa has been known as web diva for over 20 years. She’s a knitting enthusiast, curly girl, and cookie artist. That’s not all. She tells us she’s an obsessive wordsmither and musical theatre devotee. Lisa is a writer for the GoDaddy Blog and the author of Web Diva Wisdom: How to find, hire, and partner with the right web designer for you. Welcome, Lisa. Glad to have you here today.

Lisa: Glad to be here.

Liam: Hey, Lisa. Thanks for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

Lisa: Well, I live in Fremont, California, which is right in Silicon Valley. I grew up here. I’ve pretty much always been kind of where the action is in the high-tech world, and my mom still lives in the house I grew up in and we always say, if you draw a triangle between Google, Facebook, and Apple, that house is right in the middle. 60 years ago, they landed in this sweet spot. That’s been great. I’m married, I have two kids that are both adults. one is an engineer and the other is a veterinarian. I have a grandson so being called Bubby is probably the best thing I’ve been called in my life. You mention Web Diva and I will say that when I got into this business over 20 years ago, it was all guys, they were all Web Masters. I thought that sounded a little bit too much like Dungeons & Dragons and I started calling myself the Web Diva. it was kind of a joke, and it stuck. And I have a registered trademark on that and it’s kind of my brand, it’s in the title of my book. So I kind of enjoy having that web diva reputation, so to speak. I came into the web world after 18 or so years in high tech, in more traditional, I guess what you call, engineering, quality, IT, kind of what you’d expect jobs if somebody said you were an engineer. And I was ready for a change and a lifestyle that worked better with small children and didn’t involve so much travel and crazy hours. And I had some web experience because I was managing an IT department and the website was part of our domain, and I had started doing a little fun and games website stuff on the side. It took a flier on it being a short-term, let’s see how this goes, career, and it turned into something. Right place, right time. So over 20 years in the web world based on that.

Tara: And then WordPress specifically?

Lisa: WordPress specifically– okay, when I started doing websites, the latest and greatest tool was FrontPage 95. Thank god that’s not the answer anymore. So I did some work with that, moved into Dreamweaver, got into WordPress about 2010-ish, and pretty much once I went there, I never went back. I moved all of my sites to WordPress, and then pretty much, if people come to me and want a website, and they don’t want WordPress, then they don’t want me. That’s everything that I do.

Tara: How do people come to you, Lisa? Do they come from word of mouth?

Lisa: I’m very lucky in a variety of ways I get a lot of referral work. I was the first person having a freelance web business in our town at the time, it was pretty easy because I was the only game in town. Of course, there are many people doing that now and there are many sort of ‘do it yourself’ options and more paths for people to get to a website. But everything is by referral. I’m also a member of the Chamber of Commerce, I’ve been on non-profit boards. There are many venues, avenues to getting referrals. Quite a few when my kids were still in school, through other parents who said, “Oh–” And I managed the high school’s website for 11 years. Every high school parent knew who I was based on that, that didn’t hurt me either.

Tara: Yes, we have similar background in that regard. As well as an affinity for cookies and musical theater. Do you participate in musical theater or do you just like to go watch?

Lisa: I’m not the person you want on stage but I go to the theater as often as I can and I’ve been volunteering for many years with a local musical theater group. I do their website, of course, but even more fun, I work on costume design.

Tara: Oh, fun. Do you have a favorite musical?

Lisa: Oh, don’t make me choose. [laughter] I can tell you that I’ve seen pretty much all the major ones. I go to San Francisco probably once a month to see whatever’s touring. I will say that my favorite ones for making costumes for, once I designed a coat for Joseph and The Technicolor Dreamcoat, and that was a many, many-hour project. Once, they did Cats and that’s 50-some people. They were wearing airbrushed unitards and I knitted arms and leg-warmers and arm-warmers for the entire cast.

Tara: Wow.

Lisa: That was quite a fun project.

Tara: Fun. I just saw the revamp of Cats a couple of years ago in New York. I’ve seen it when I was young, too. The costumes are amazing in that show, really. That’s cool. We won’t bore everybody with musical theater stories but I love to go see them as well. Tell us a little bit about your involvement in the local WordPress community. You mentioned that it’s grown, you were the first person there to make websites. Is there a WordPress community there now?

Lisa: I wouldn’t say I was the first freelance web designer in town and over the years, in the beginning, people would come to me and know nothing. “I know I need a website.” They don’t know what tools they need, they don’t understand the platforms, and they would just take my advice whatever we would do. Now, of course, people either are more educated or think they know more. So there’s a lot more discussion about pros and cons of platforms and why do you use this one, and what makes you an expert on that. Being part of a community like WordPress, whether it’s WordCamp or remote discussion groups or various things, it’s an easy sell to potential customers to say, “Look, I’m part of this community, I interact with other people.” There’s a huge amount of complementary work being done where you have to explain to people what a plugin is or a theme. But you can say, “Look. If there’s anything you want to do on your website, I know either how to find that or find someone who knows that, or I have the tools, or the smarts are there somewhere in the WordPress universe to solve whatever your problems are.” And that becomes a great selling point to clients, to say, “You’re part of this community of people doing the same kind of thing.” And then a side benefit of WordPress that I consult pretty easily is the ones who want to do their own blog, I can say, “Look, we’ve got a facility for you to participate in this. You can leave the heavy lifting to me, I’ll do all the back-end and all that stuff, but you can be involved and let me show you examples. Or I can hook you up with resources or people.” And being part of that group, and not only is it obviously, to me, a more holistic or more complete way to build and support sites, it’s knowing that there’s other people who have the same problems. When I have a– I don’t want to say problem. When I have a challenge or when I have an issue or a question, somebody knows how to do this. You’re never the first person to solve anything. And I like that there’s this big community of WordPress people that you can talk to anywhere, and you have a bond and everybody’s helpful. People share what they do. It was a really good find for me in terms of shaping the path I was going down in my business, I think because of that. And they don’t have a WordCamp, to my knowledge, anywhere in Silicon Valley probably because there’s so much else here. I end up going to Sacramento, which is a couple of hours north. Which is very reasonable as opposed to traveling for– but it’s fun to go to these things. And you always learn crazy, unusual, interesting things from people standing in the lunch line, standing in the– Excuse me?

Liam: I said, “Absolutely.” Let me ask you a question about– I won’t call it sales pitch, I know that’s not exactly what you said, but you’re talking to prospective clients about the value of the WordPress community and how– to kind of paraphrase, they’re not stuck with something that no one knows how to fix. It’s not a unique system. There’s a lot of people out there who know how to use that and they follow standards and codes. Are you seeing anything around prospective clients looking for systems like Wix and Squarespace because they hear so much advertising around that? Have you encountered that in any kind of way when talking to clients about the benefits of WordPress and the community around it?

Lisa: I have actually helped people implement Squarespace sites when it’s, let’s say, a volunteer project, they have very minimal needs, they don’t need somebody on call to deal with a lot of problems, they want to manage it themselves. For whatever reason, I don’t market myself as somebody who builds Squarespace but I understand that there is a time and a place for sites like that. My experience with using Squarespace, it’s kind of a one-size fits all, great for the ‘do it yourself’ person. Very limited in customization. So for some people, that’s the right answer. For the people who want to hire me, they want a lot more than what those systems can offer. And I used to joke some years ago, I’d say, “Some day, these systems will be good enough, they’ll put me out of business and I can retire.” We’re not there yet because even when you have the best technical front end that’s bulletproof from novices, that doesn’t help you at all with organizing the information, presenting the information, understanding your audience and how to build the site to interact with them in a way that does whatever it is you need them to do. So the tool by itself is not enough to make a great website, even WordPress by itself is not enough to make a great website. You need architecture, you need understanding of your audience, you need exceptional writing, you need messaging. There’s all these other things that go into it. WordPress is the platform, it’s the framing of the house or whatever you want to say, but by itself, it doesn’t build a great website. But it enables me to build what I like to think are great websites.

Liam: Lisa, let me ask you a question about success and it’s a question that we ask all of our guests here on the show. And it’s really asking you to think about and share your own definition of success, whether that’s a professional definition, a personal definition, or maybe a mix of both. How do you define success?

Lisa: Success to me, I think there’s sort of a standard thing which is, I’ve delivered something that somebody wants. But I like to think that success relies a lot on learning and improving, and process improvement is kind of a big deal to me. I like to think that I’m always learning and improving, but also that I’m helping my clients or whoever learn and improve as well. It’s a great day when I can teach a client something. Whether it’s about websites, or business, or writing, or anything, it’s like, “Okay, good. That was a successful day.” And I really enjoy writing. Here, I’ve written a book, I write articles. I like to think I learn and improve when I’m writing those pieces because I have to do research. For people who write articles, sometimes you choose the articles and sometimes the editor chooses the article. And I might get to sign something I’m not an expert in but I learn about it–

Liam: Have to learn about it, yeah.

Lisa: Know well enough to write. And I do enjoy teaching. I taught a community college class for about 10 years, which was interestingly one of those things where you go to them and say, “Here’s an idea for a class.” And they say, “Great. We love your curriculum. Now we have to go find someone to teach it.” I say, “Well, me. What about me?” But the college has a rule, they have to interview whoever wants to do it. Fortunately, I got the job. And the class was ‘Women in Science and Technology’. It was ten sessions, let’s say, one hour, once a week of survey class. And the whole goal was to get women of the community college who were considering tech careers and high school seniors, again women, to come in and learn more about what the opportunities are in technology. It was more broad than just web development, which is careers in tech. And it was the opportunity to expose them to aspects of working world or working careers that they didn’t know, to meet role models, we went on field trips, all sorts of things. I’m still in contact with some of those students all these years later. I get baby announcements and announcements about their promotions and information like that, which is pretty cool. So sharing information and helping other people use that to be effective to me is a big piece of success. I would say that– and this may be sideways a little bit. When I was in high school, I was pretty good at writing and art and I thought that’s what I want to be. I want to be a writer, I want to be an artist. And the comment was, “Well, you don’t get a lot of money doing those things but you’re pretty good at math for a girl. You could go into technology.” This was in the ’70s, mind you, but it was Silicon Valley. So perhaps a little more forward thinking on that. And for some number of years, not that I was disappointed but I felt like I wasn’t getting to do some of the things I wanted to do. Now, all these years later, guess what? I have a career that does a lot of writing and art in addition to technology. And to me, I feel very successful that I merged a number of desperate things into a job that I love.

Tara: Yeah, that’s great. I love that definition of success. I want to talk to you a little bit about your– it’s fascinating that you taught a class about women in tech and that you have this diva name that you’ve trademarked for yourself. Can you tell us a little bit about your path as a woman in this field, as you’ve seen it evolve since you started and where you see the role of women in tech having changed or not changed, what are your views on that?

Lisa: first of all, my bachelor’s degree is in electrical engineering. I was the only woman in all of my classes. My master’s degree was in computer science. I was the only woman in a group of 50. And at that time, which was early ’80s, there was no undergraduate computer science. It was a graduate program in the math department and they took 50 people a year. This was at Stanford. And I was the only woman, there was this ongoing joke, which is, “Clearly, you’re the affirmative action at entry–” And not because I was the only woman, it’s because I was the only electrical engineering undergrad. Everybody else was a math major. And I really liked the fact that I was the affirmative action for not the reason of being a woman, which was kind of fun. I won’t go into some details of some crazy stories. I had jobs where I was the only woman in the lab of 200 male engineers, I had a summer internship where it didn’t take long that the engineering building did not have a women’s restroom. But next door, they did, in the marketing building. In the web world, when I got into it, again, I had been managing IT, didn’t find too many women that were managing IT departments. This was in the mid-’90s. And again, it seemed like it was mostly men. I think, now, it seems much more balanced to me in terms of the people I meet. I may be unusual in that I’m a little bit on the older side because, you know, now there are plenty of excellent college programs where people are getting a degree say in web design or something related. And there are many more younger women in that, but you don’t find any women my age, I’m in my 60s. That part’s a little bit unusual. I don’t feel at all discriminated against, I haven’t had people tell me they wouldn’t hire me because I was a woman. I haven’t seen anything like that. When I left Corporate America to do this, my kids were much younger. They were in grade school junior high. They’re adults now, they’re in their 30s. I submitted a proposal for project a couple of years ago in town. They got it down to two people, me and one other person. And the selection committee said, “We like you, you’re experienced, you’re well-known around town, a lot of people involved here know who you are, but this other guy is young, he’s really bright, we think we can give him an opportunity.” I said, “Great. Give it to him.” Anyway, they wind up hiring me and then they asked if we would like to see each other’s proposal so we can learn from it, and I’m thinking, “What am I going to learn at this point? I’ve been writing proposals for a long time.” We share the proposals. I know the other guy because he’s a classmate of my son. So, I’ve known who he was since he was in second grade. [laughter] Then you have the interesting ‘which is worse’, to lose out on a project to your friend’s mother or to lose out on a project to your child’s friend. Real generational difference. Anyway, we all laughed about it. I met with him, I did a little mentoring and coaching and he’s got his own business. As far as I know, he’s doing fine. But it’s just an interesting spread of the experiences now of who you might encounter that you would hire for web design. I am always very happy to meet younger women in technology, whether it’s engineering or web or anything related, and just to say, “You have such a great opportunity. You don’t have t fight some of the battles I did about proving that you’re as good as the guys, that people take it at face value and say, of course, you can do this work.” But the class that I taught was from 1990 to 2000 so already, that’s more than 20 years ago.

Tara: Yeah, it’s very different now than it was then.

Lisa: Things have changed. And at that time, there were many women– again, some of them were high school seniors, they came to the class, they did not know any women engineers or women in technology. If their own parents were not in it, they may not have been exposed to some of it. For them to come and hear guest speakers in various fields and get some exposure to those backgrounds was really cool. I don’t feel like I have to do that so much now in the web world.

Tara: That’s good to hear. It sounds like you have enough confidence that being an older woman, being a woman in tech, you’re using it as your advantage, I guess is what I want to say, and it is an advantage in many ways. You probably stood out even more than you do now as a woman in the field of tech. What do you find to be your biggest or has been or currently is your biggest challenge in that path to success?

Lisa: I will tell you that a real challenge I had when I first left the corporate world to go into being self-employed freelance. In the corporate world, you have a fairly well-defined job. You’re managing this project, or if you’re in IT, or you’re doing the website, or you’re doing whatever. And when I went on my own, what I envisioned was a business where I had this umbrella over, here’s all these great things I can do. I can build you a website, I can do print collateral, I can do consulting along the lines of some corporate work that I had done. I could do information architecture. I was trying to do a lot of different things and it didn’t take long to figure out you can’t do a lot of things and be good at all of them. You have to specialize or at least focus. I did some corporate consulting for several years, which was fun and interesting. I taught a class inside eBay for a year, which was fun. But then I said, “You know what? I’m just going to do websites.” And then, over the course of the business, I tried to specialize even more. I only do one platform now, I only do certain types of clients. Not 100% but maybe some percent of my clients are in the Bay Area because I like to work with local people where I could meet them or go into their store, even if I don’t do it very often, I could. Over the years, I’ve really kept refining, refining, and trying to narrow down my focus so that I can do something and be really good at it and provide excellent value at whatever it is that I’m doing. Sometimes, people come to me and they might want WordPress, but they might want something I’m not going to do. And I will refer them to somebody else, or I will help them find another WordPress expert that can better provide what they need. And I think that’s a hard lesson for many people when they first become self-employed is, where do you draw the boundaries about what I’m going to do and what I’m going to continue. Again, I said success is about learning. You can’t keep learning about everything, right?

Liam: I think it also takes a while to learn what you like to do and what you want to do. And the type of project you like, and the type that you don’t. And also what sets you apart. “What are your differentiators?”, “I don’t know, I’ve only been doing this for six months.” It takes a while for clients to come back and say, “Hey, Lisa. We really like that you did this.” And then the third time you hear that, you might say, “Ah, right.” That’s something–

Lisa: “Do that again.”

Liam: Yeah. You shared with us about transitioning out of corporate into freelance and trying to figure out how you wanted to focus your business. How did you manage the business side of things? Because in corporate, you don’t do the billing, you don’t do administration, you don’t do the business development necessarily. How did you find that with freelancing, how did you tackle that?

Lisa: I have a little bit of good fortune in that my father had sort of done a similar thing. He’d work in big companies and eventually had his own business in consulting. I’ve seen how some of that worked, and of course, he was a good resource and mentor. I remember when I first started doing this, I’ve read quite a few books about how to run your own business, how to be self-employed, what are things you need to do, setting up tools and processes, and checklists, and templates, all the nuts and bolts pieces that go into it. I sort of did a self-study crash course on some of those things, the thing that I did which was super helpful for me was I met with– one of my daughter’s classmate’s mother was a CPA and I met with her from the very beginning, and she helped me set up an ESCORP, so I have a corporation, she helped me with setting up a chart of accounts and QuickBooks, explained the different financial models. Whether you keep track – accrual versus actual. It was a good choice to engage an expert on thing– I’m never going to be a financial expert. It was a good choice. And she still does my business taxes now after 20 years.

Liam: That’s a good long relationship.

Lisa: I think that was helpful. I think it helps that I’m a very organized– maybe some people don’t think that’s– my husband probably gets a little crazy with it but I’m pretty organized. I keep track of everything, I write stuff down, I have lists, I have checklists. From the get-go, trying to keep track of everything, to me was a natural thing. I think that’s a challenge for some people. The joke was always, I like being in charge of all the web stuff, but I’m also the IT department, the finance department, I’m the custodian, I’m the lunchroom lady. You have to do everything and outsourcing some things can be– no, one thing I did from the very beginning, which I’m so proud of myself, was I hired a payroll company. It’s only me, I have a company, I pay myself a salary. And for a very small fee every month, those people take money out of one bank account, put it in another bank account, file the taxes, do the W– all that stuff gets done because I don’t want to be a payroll expert and I don’t want to know the tax laws and how they change.

Liam: I like that.

Lisa: Sometimes, outsourcing, stroke of genius.

Liam: Let me ask you a question about advice and this is a question that we ask all of our guests and it’s advice that you’ve heard or have been given to you or maybe read in one of those books about running your own business. What’s the best advice that you’ve ever been given or received and implemented in your life?

Lisa: I have written articles about this advice because I like it so much. This is the advice I was given by my very first boss at my first engineering job out of college. Speak precisely and listen forgivingly. That’s it. Forward. ‘Speak precisely’ translates into taking the time to explain and not leave anything to chance when I’m talking with clients. I may err on the side of over-explaining but I try to be very clear and articulate, not make assumptions when I’m explaining things or when I’m doing things. And then the ‘listen forgivingly’ part is in work, when somebody asks for something, it’s, okay, I’m going to not take it literally sometimes because I don’t think that’s what they really meant, it’s what do I think they meant, ask for clarification, sometimes I’ll write back and say, “I think what you’re asking for is this. I want to make sure I understand that correctly and do it.” And it turns out that in communication, in general, those are really good principles to try to be precise and articulate as a judgment call. But try and not be nebulous in how you speak or wishy-washy. And then on the reverse side, try and give people room to be nebulous and try and figure out what they’re really saying. I had to write an article recently about communication skills and I pretty much talked about that because I think those things are pretty important.

Tara: They’re very important. Thank you for sharing that.

Liam: Fantastic.

Tara: And thank you for sharing your story with us today, I really admire what you’ve accomplished. I don’t mean that because you’re an older wiser woman than a lot of young people here, I’m about your age as well. But I think it’s awesome what you’ve done. I love hearing a story about the place where you worked and there was no women’s room in the building, that’s just amazing to think about. Thank you for joining us and sharing with us today, Lisa, it’s really been a pleasure chatting with you. Where can people find you online?

Lisa: Collectivediscovery.com. That’s my business, it’s a long name but I’m the only one that has it so that works.

Tara: Okay. And actually, before you go, what’s your favorite cookie? Is there such a thing?

Lisa: Ah.

Tara: I know. I’ve never met a cookie I didn’t like! [laughter]

Lisa: Here’s the one I make that always gets rave reviews and I just took a batch to the Superbowl party. It’s sort of like a chocolate chip cookie except it has chocolate chips and peanut butter chips, and coffee dissolved in Kahlua and cocoa. It’s chocolate with coffee, Kahlua, and peanut butter. [laughter]

Tara: Oh my gosh. If you have that recipe, we’ll put it in the show notes, how about that?

Liam: If you’re willing to share that, yeah.

Tara: Awesome. I am absolutely a cookie monster. Completely love cookies, definitely.

Liam: I don’t know if you send out cookie gifts to holiday friends, but if so, I’ll go ahead and forward you my address. [laughter].

Tara: Well, thanks again for joining us, Lisa. Take care.

Lisa: Well, thanks for having me. This was fun.

Liam: Thanks Lisa, nice meeting you. Bye-bye.

Tara: Bye.

Lisa: Bye.

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.

Val loves social media. He is very passionate about technology and online marketing. Some of his interests include CMS hardening and tech writing. He loves to take photos, go swimming and spend time with his family.

Twitter | @adspedia

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 87.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we are joined by Valentine Vesa. Val loves social media. He is very passionate about technology and online marketing. Some of his interests include CMS hardening and tech writing. He loves to take photos, go swimming and spend time with his family. Welcome to Hallway Chats Val!

Val: Hi! Thanks for having me.

Liam: Salut Val! Thanks for joining us. Can you tell us a more about yourself?

Val: Salut? First of all let me say that Salut in Romania means Hello from Romania. As you said my name is Val. My legal name is Valentine Vesa. I live in the city of Cluj Napoca, right in the center of Transylvania. The country name being Romania. I’m 39. I’m married. My wife and I have three….two (oops) who knows?

Liam: We can edit that out.

Val: My wife and I have two children. We have an 11 year old daughter. Her name is Hana. Our son’s name is Luca and he is 14.

Liam: That is great. You talked about in the intro, or Tara read that some of your interests include CMS hardening. I am going to read that as Content Management System hardening. So basically website database driven websites; hardening making those safer and secure. I’m guessing that’s probably a professional focus for you. If so, can you tell us about that?

Val: Yes. I do social media for a company called Sucuri Security. That’s a brand now of GoDaddy where I manage all of our social media presence, monitoring, doing some customer support when necessary. Also, I write on a blog. I like to write about what happened to me. I used to be a customer. I had a site that was hacked. I found Sucuri. They cleaned the site and eventually everything led to me actually being hired by the company. So to say a former customer now becomes an employee.

Liam: Should I ask if you hacked the site yourself as part of your growth strategy?

Val: You could ask, but I didn’t. I wish I had because my wife and I had started this charity project 11 years ago. It just happened before Christmas 2014 (like 5 years ago). The site got hacked. I tried everything I knew how to fix it, I just couldn’t. Sucuri saved the day. I just like them so much. I like the culture, the company, and the services they were providing. I had a similar interest in the area of tech. I was already working on WordPress sites, building sites, custom builds and so on. I just created a connection. The opportunity arose and then I got it.

Tara: That’s great! I know Sucuri is very heavily involved in the WordPress community and I see them around a lot. So tell us a little bit about your WordPress history?

Val: I installed my first WordPress site back in 2009. Actually I started the website that I was telling you about for the project we do is called Shoebox Romania. It’s basically wrapping gifts before Christmas every year in shoe boxes and just offering them to underprivileged children, orphans or families having issues or having a hard time. I was talking with my wife and she was like ok. We cannot go on doing this out of our Yahoo messenger chat box. For those people out there that are too young they might not even know what that is. For us, we remember a time when all chat online was done either via ICQ (if you guys remember that) MIRC, IRC chat or Yahoo messenger. I used to have a status description in the Yahoo messenger chat saying we collect boxes for children with needs. We just couldn’t get the words and the letters to match in a meaningful sentence because there were like 65 characters. Then Yahoo sometime later offered the opportunity to also add a website URL to a member field. You could say something in there like for more details click here. Then you had a link. Then my wife…guys out there… listen to your wives… they have amazing ideas. Sometimes we just brush them off too easily. She said why don’t we just do a website? I was like how in the world am I going to do a website? I’ve never done a website. I was kind of a hosting site as a project, but I never actually created a website by myself. I started looking online. The famous be on line in five minutes catch phrase caught me immediately. I was like ok. So there is a system that allows me to have a website online in five minutes. Ok. I’m going to get on it. There was of course WordPress.org. I downloaded it. I uploaded it to my server and went through the install. It was literally more than five minutes of course because I wasn’t familiar with what I was doing, but we were online. Then I remember getting a free theme; whatever the default theme back then was. Then there was the guy called Vlad. His website is Vladstudio.com. I want to mention this because he was the first person to ever help me with like anything related to…yeah you can just disable this shape. You know there’s this plugin that comes automatically. Then make sure you have this. Permalinks. That’s how you do them. That’s how you create pages. These are posts versus pages. It was a mess in my mind but I was so eager to learn. I was sure that having a website there live, I could write so much more stories about what we do in the project that I could never write in a 65 character limit that chat was offering on Yahoo. So we went online in 2009. Then we just took it from there. As I was involved in marketing and social media, I was starting to talk to customers that I was having and I was like ok. You can also have a website. So of course all the websites I ever did (ever) were always based on WordPress. Just because WordPress was the first love. So I always go back to that.

Tara: Yeah. It is great to hear a use case where you learn because you have a need. So you learn how to use it and then you take that learning and you apply it to another opportunity. So with WordPress, a lot of us start out that way. When you have a specific project to work on it’s easier to learn it then if you just take a class I think. Then tell us about the WordPress community where you live.

Val: So in my area we just started recently (maybe almost a year or year and a half) gathering let’s say every other week or every three weeks in Meetups. We don’t have a WordCamp now in Cluj. We are hoping to have one maybe next year. But the community is already I would say pretty strong. I remember the first Meetup we had almost a year and a half ago. There were like 4 people. Now we close to 80, 90 and sometimes a 100 that come.

Liam: That’s great!

Val: In Bucharest, the capital of Romania (maybe a 5 or 6 hour drive away from where I live) we do have WordCamps. So we had a WordCamp Bucharest, the core Wordcamp of Romania if I can say so. We had it for two years already. I have attended both of them. It’s a small community in the sense that the ones that come to Meetups, chatting in Slack and so on, are very connected. Like we know each other by name even if we never met. Maybe we just met at events, like we don’t live close by. We don’t see each other every day. But is really interesting how you can just connect through what is called the WordPress community vibe. I’ve seen that. I’ve never been to any WordCamp before being hired by Sucuri. As a brand evangelist, I get to go to all of the events that we sponsor, speak at or just attend. I am going to Joomla events, I’m going to Drupal events, I am going to WordPress events. I am going to no CMS events. I am going to all these marketing, whatever tech related events. I don’t want to offend anybody, by really the WordPress community has something that is special. It’s not necessarily the sheer amount of people because, yes maybe there are the most number of people (if I can that in English). It’s just a sense of…I remember my first WordCamp I think was in Munich. I’m sure it was Germany but necessarily Munich. I speak German. So I went there to just had to say hi and everybody was like where are you from? What are you doing? When was the first time you used WordPress? What projects are you working on? Do you need any help with anything? What plugins do you like? There were so many questions! I was just suspecting to be like that new guy in the corner just watching the speakers and just to be left alone. It wasn’t happening like that and I didn’t want to be left alone. So that was great. I wanted somebody to ask me hey! What are you doing here? What are you looking for? It was awesome to see the interaction the community has with sponsors as well. The gratitude that is explained every time. I see the tweets that are being put out. I see the content of the sites of these WordCamps. Everybody says thank you so much sponsors because they allow people to come. They have such low, maybe no tickets at all or very cheap tickets just so they can join the community. That is really special. The more I learned about talking to companies that have maybe people who actually volunteer an hour a day, one day a week, weeks in a year or something to the WordPress community; working on the core maybe or just working on plugins or other projects. I feel it’s just very special. It’s much more than just a CMS people build sites with. It is is a community supporting basically every kind of idea you have that needs online presence. You can do that with WordPress. If you don’t know, just drop a message in a Slack or just go in the community on the forums and you’ll get an answer (sometimes in minutes). That’s just amazing! That doesn’t happen in the other communities. I am a member of other communities as well. So I speak knowing both, or all three or all four sides of the aisle.

Tara: That’s good to know. I didn’t realize that other communities weren’t as helpful.

Val: Well, maybe they are. Maybe you need to take more time to adjust. I felt that I was much more welcome and much quicker adopted (if I can say so) by the WordPress community compared to the others.

Tara: Val? I would like to ask you a question we ask everyone which is how you define success? What does success mean to you in your professional and/or your personal life?

Val: Success is a word that everybody struggles with. I see it trending. I would like to use something that my grandmother and my mother used to teach us when we were small children. We are three brothers (just boys…so just imagine a mom having three boys). My mom always used to say make sure that when you go to bed in the evening, you are not only proud of what you did in that day but know you for sure you didn’t possibly hurt anybody or whatever you say is success, Like I made it today to achieve something. You had three tasks and you did them. Was anybody hurt by what you did? If yes, that’s not success. That’s a failure. When I heard that, being a student, a young boy, I am like come on mom! You’re always going to have somebody offended by something you do. You get an opportunity at work and some other colleague wanted that. There are so many situations. Now that I am almost 40 years old looking back, I would say that’s maybe one of the most important values I learned as a child from my parents. If your success or if your measure of success goes against anybody else being harmed by what you did, then it is not success. It just your ego out there and trying to…I think there is a word in English that says step on bodies. So, I don’t want to do that. For me success is if I can be happy in the evening knowing that I haven’t hurt anybody during the day with my actions, my words, my achievements. If I go on a stage and say thank you for this award (whatever that award means) or not necessarily a physical stage, I want to be sure in my heart that I didn’t hurt anybody to get there. If that makes sense.

Tara: No it does makes sense. I’m thinking of the inverse of that which would be it sounds like you already knew that. You got started in WordPress by helping other people. So on the flip side I guess, carrying that thought along of not causing harm, the opposite of that is doing good and helping others.

Val: Causing good.

Tara: Right. Yeah! So does that fit into that definition as well by default?

Val: Yes. I think you cannot be in the middle. There’s no gray area between doing good and doing bad in my mind. You either do good or you do bad. I don’t believe in the saying that says you know you can do some bad things so you can accomplish good things. No. You’re just going to paint. Does that make sense? You’re going to paint the good you’re doing if you employ bad things to get there. So at least that is how I live my life and that’s how we teach our children as parents. They have to pursue doing good. And doing good many times does not come as natural. You feel sometimes that you can cut some corners, you can take a shortcut, do this, do that, cheat at school to get a good grade. You know what I mean. But it’s going to be paid back to you. No thing like that would just remain unpunished. I just tried to stay away. Nobody is perfect. That’s i true and I have my ups and downs. I just try to do good. Push to do good.

Tara: Yeah. How do you handle the times when you may unintentionally hurt someone? As you said, you may do that without intending to. How do you respond to that? How does that fit into this idea of not doing harm?

Val: That is very hard. The moment you were asking that… you know when somebody is asking you something…you can like visualize specific moments when you did that. The hardest thing for me to do is not say I’m sorry but is actually facing the person. I hate to text, email or send documents with I’m sorry. I like to be as much as possible at least in a zoom or video if it’s not physically possible but I want to be in front of the person I hurt intentionally or not intentionally. Express my sorrow in that way or just say my remorse. I am really sorry that I hurt you. I sometimes send texts to my wife saying I love you. I think that’s important. I think it’s also important to say I love you face-to-face but it’s even much more important to say I’m sorry to that person’s face. You kind of would give in to whatever is in your mind saying but that was for higher purpose. That was for a higher good. It’s ok that you hurt them. No it’s not. It’s not ok that you hurt people to get any good accomplished. I think not necessarily automatically that good accomplished by bad means is bad, but I would say it’s not really something that you should be proud of or attach to your CV. Accidentally, if you do a good thing by actually doing a bad thing. I would say don’t brag about it. Don’t add it to your resume.

Liam: I’m really liking this conversation.

Val: I just want to say if you set your mind to do something that you know is bad and then eventually some side effects of that are good you are going to most likely try to brag with those good side effects. I would say don’t even mention them. People will ask how did you come up to do this? And what are you going to say? You’re going to lie. You can’t say you wanted to do a bad thing. It’s just going to add more bad to the things you already did bad. Why? There is a saying in Romania (I’m not sure you guys have it in English) but by the time it takes for the truth to put on his its boots, a lie would circle the earth 10 times.

Liam: Laughing. I like that phrase.

Val: People talk bad about things about you. They gossip you know? You you have all this things going on out there. They say how wrong you were or how bad you spoke about somebody. But when you know the truth you don’t rush. You don’t hurry. You go for sure. You know where you’re doing. You’ve got the proof that the truth is truth. So you’re just gonna put on your boots really slowly, get up in the morning, brush your teeth and just go out there and tell them. Even if the lies goes he’s coming. He’s going to lie to you. No. Just take your time. You go for sure because your truth. So that’s how we Romanians refer to the everlasting battle between the truth and lie.

Liam: I really like that.

Val: It’s like the rabbit and the turtle. You know? Like the speed when they race? It’s a similar comparison.

Liam: So I want to ask you one more question about success. You said it’s going to bed at the end of the night knowing that you didn’t hurt anybody. You have been pretty transparent and that’s not easy to do. If we can set aside the extreme cases of losing your cool at work and shouting at somebody or whatever that kind of thing might be, I kind of wonder the little things that might go unnoticed. Right? Where we just tired so we choose to be lazy. Maybe no one else notices. Maybe we’re lazy at work or maybe we’re lazy at home or maybe we’re lazy on the train as we’re going away and going somewhere at the end of the day. How does, I guess the context of where I am going on this is if complete success is getting through the day and not hurting anybody, where does like…if you only hurt one person because you were lazy where does that fit in? How you try to psychologically land yourself with that? Obviously, there’s room for improvement but how do we balance trying to be a better person without beating ourselves up over our flawed humanity?

Val: That is a great question because recently I’ve lived through a moment like that. I am going to share this here. I’ve shared it already on my Facebook some three or four days ago when it happened but that’s going to be in Romanian so nobody is going to be able to read it anyway. So I’ll share it here. I was about to catch a flight to go to a conference. I called my Uber. It arrived. It tells me go meet your driver. I get downstairs from my building. I get in front. Then in my mind I visually expect the Uber driver as most of them do…they get out, they open the trunk so you can put your suitcase in. They smile and say hop in, whatever. The guy doesn’t even move. I see no trunk popping up, I don’t see him move, he doesn’t even wave. Nothing. In my mind I was like ok. You could at least get out of the car and help me put my suitcase in.That’s in my mind. Again, there’s no words happening, There’s no signal. There is no waving. Nothing. I go in the back of the car. I tried to open the trunk but nothing happens. So I bang two times like hey! I’m still here and I see that it opens. So I put my suitcase in. I close it. I go in the car. I say good morning and I’m like ok. Let’s go to the airport. As we are driving he starts talking. Talking just like the regular driver/passenger conversation. Then he tells me that that day he’s coming like he just arrived at my building from the mayor’s office (I don’t know if you have that in the US) it’s in the mayor’s office where it happens here. He got divorced. He got divorced because his wife said she can no longer live with somebody who has cancer. He had a …what’s the word…I don’t know the word for the condition he had but he could no longer normally go to the toilet (if you know what I mean). So he needed a special pouch. So in my mind, the moment he started saying this is like of course he couldn’t get out of the car. Of course he couldn’t help me. Now I understand. He is having such a shitty day because he just divorced today. I am complaining in my mind because he did not get out to open the door for me. So what looked like somebody disrespecting me actually was nothing compared to the sorrow and the bad condition that he was in his life. So I immediately, as we were still driving start writing on my Facebook. I am like guys. This was such a blow to my ego. Look this is what just happened. I don’t know if you can treat everything you do bad or anything you think that’s happening is kind of a not ok. Just go out to your Facebook friends. Of course I only share those things my friends only (privacy on). I think it takes a lot of guts to confess to somebody that not necessarily is your very close friend or family. Because when you do that (you know some people go to the priest) but again if the priest is not really a good friend of mine (I am not really religious) you know maybe it is not going to help. Just confessing (I don’t have another word it) kind of a bad things you did to somebody you don’t know and I do something else. That’s going to sound crazy but it’s not. It helps me at least personally. I share things like that in the airports while waiting for the next plane to somebody that happens to sit next me. Where I just say hey! Where are you going? Like just carry on a casual conversation where I say I don’t know how perfect you are but I’m not. an for two days ago this happens to sit next to me. Like hey what are you doing. It’s just like carrying on a conversation. Yesterday I shouted at my kids. Or two days ago this happened. Initially, they look at you like why are you telling this? Then it’s minutes before he starts or she starts saying the same things back. It’s a moment in time where you have that chat where you kind of just take off something off from your soul. They do the same. Then you say goodbye, have a safe flight and most likely never see them again. But hours after that conversation you’ll still remember the ahh. I got this off my chest feeling. That’s just a cleansing experience for me. If it helps anybody, try it. It does help me every time.

Tara: It’s sounds like that’s inspiring for you and it sort of spreads that inspiration around. Think about it as drops of water in a puddle that becomes a big ocean. You can always put these good drops of goodness and good thoughts into the ocean of the world. We can have a bigger impact on positivity. That’s my deep thought for the day everybody. Val? You sort of alluded to this earlier when we asked you about success because you discussed how your mom shared this advice with you on not doing harm but maybe you have another piece of advice that you can share with us? We like to have our guests share advice that they’ve received, that they have implemented in their life that has been meaningful to them. Maybe there’s something in addition to that that you can share with us?

Val: Absolutely! I am going to go back a generation and share something that my grandmother used to say to us when we were kids at home. Specifically because I was the oldest from the three boys, she would say well, if you ever get in a position or situation somewhere on God’s huge globe, if somebody asks you a question that you don’t know the answer to you should say (mark my words) I don’t know. Because after I don’t know there are no more questions. If you say sure I heard about it. I kind of know what you’re talking about. They are going to ask more questions. You are going to look much worse if you say yeah. Of course I know. That’s one piece of advice I use thousands of times with no error. When you are talking to somebody and they ask you about something or the conversation goes along on a topic that you have no idea what that means just say I don’t know. I don’t know this topic. But I added something on top of what my grandmother said. I always say you know what? I am going to look into it. I am going to get back to you. Just give me a day, some hours, whatever (depending on how unknown to me the content of the conversation is). When you say go back. I am going to go back on this and tell you what my version is. Make sure you always go back and tell them. Then they are going to know that this guy is guy of his word. When this person says something they are going to do it. Even if it’s just something that they didn’t know anything about initially, they researched it and came back. Even that shows that you are a man of your word.

Tara: Yeah. I was going to ask you if you explained the addon that you do. I was going to ask you how that works. Do you just say I don’t know, Because if you said that when your wife said how about building a website you wouldn’t be here with us today probably. Don’t end it there.

Val: True.

Tara: You’re being honest but also expanding your knowledge and showing a willingness to learn something. As an entrepreneur, you need to have the ability to do that. You just can’t limit yourself to what your currently know. Thanks for that addon.

Val: Sure.

Liam: Val? Tell us a little about challenges. What’s been one of your biggest challenges that you have dealt with? If you are still working on it, how are you getting over it? How are you dealing with it?

Val: The first challenge I ever felt was after communism fell in Romania (back in 1989, December). We were living in a closed world. Of course for your American audience most likely this will mean nothing. But if anybody is hearing this and they have lived in communism, they will know what I refer to when I say you have no idea that there is a world beyond your borders. They will tell you in the press, in the media, everything outside of your country is bad. They use drugs in America. Everybody is shooting in the streets. Everything was bad, bad, bad. Just so you don’t see the bad in your country. The moment the borders were open and Westerners started pouring in, they would come with books, food, blankets and medicine. I remember some lady in a pharmacy. They were open like open source for pharmacies…like all the hospitals from Germany, England and France would send pills, medicine and all these treatments in to Romania. We would just put them in a pile I would say. You would just get for free whatever you needed. I remember my mom saying you know? Kids were dying in this country because this pill (she was holding a pill) never existed. It was a challenge for me to accept the fact that people that we thought (as we were being educated) were bad and killing us. They are going to ruin us. They are actually coming to help us. Then when I started traveling outside Romania, a challenge was to get transcultural with the people I was visiting, like understanding the local behavior. It happens to me even now. Like when I speak in English many times (English is not my maternal language) I have to realize that some words I am saying could be offending in English just because of the way you arrange the words in a sentence. Maybe you have sayings that don’t make any sense in English for an American or British person. I am trying to go over that. The biggest challenge that I have right now is that I want to learn Chinese. That is my current situation. That is my personal goal. I think in 10, 15 or 20 years not knowing how to speak Chinese would be an impediment to anybody’s career or business. Just look at what happens. They are growing. They are getting all over the world. If you want to have a business relationship with anybody that is meaningful in 20 or 30 years, I think most likely you will have to speak some Chinese. You might cut that out, I don’t know. That’s what I think.

Liam: We’re running long so I will try to be succinct here. I love the challenge in trying to overcome your own cultural understanding and stuff outside your own experience to see the world from other people’s views. That’s more relevant now, at least in the west than ever. That’s a huge problem for us. The importance of doing so, with your example that could have saved lives. Little children might still be here. That’s powerful. I see that in you. You told us that you speak German. Clearly you speak English. You speak Romanian. You said earlier before that you speak French and Russian. You are the second guest we’ve had on this show that wants to learn or is learning Chinese. You are pushing yourself.

Val: Now I want to know who the other person is. Maybe they can teach me.

Liam: Yeah. So that’s great. I am really moved by that story and by the work you are doing to overcome that and to use that in the WordPress community to bring more people together. That’s fantastic.

Tara: Yeah. Thank you for sharing your story and giving us a more personal view of what your life is like in your country. I guess it’s been about 30 years.

Val: Yep, almost.

Tara: Yeah. So you were quite young at the time?

Val: Fifth grade.

Tara: Thank you so much for sharing your story and all of your advice and thoughts. It’s been really great chatting with you and getting to know you a little bit. Where can people find you online?

Val: I am on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. On Twitter and Instagram my handle is @adspedia. On Facebook I am just Valentine Vesa, my legal name. Same as LinkedIn.

Tara: Thank you. We will put that in the show notes.

Liam: Thanks Val!

Val: Thank you so much for having me. Bye guys!

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.

Evan has been creating websites since the last century. Daniella has a 14-year background in higher education. Together, they’re now trying to grow Evan’s business into something that can sustainably support their family of four.

Website | Minimal Chaos

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 86.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Evan Scheingross and Daniella Knelman. Evan has been creating websites since the last century. Daniella has a 14-year background in higher education. Together, they’re now trying to grow Evan’s business into something that can sustainably support their family of four. Hi, Evan. Hi, Daniella.

Daniella: Hi.

Evan: Hi.

Tara: Hello. Welcome. So glad that you’re here today. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourselves?

Evan: Sure. I guess I will go first. I am Evan and I’ve been making websites since the Dinosaur days of the late ’90s. And working professionally, running my own business, doing so for over 10 years now.

Daniella: Hi, I’m Daniella. I’m Evan’s wife. I guess you can put that out there.

Evan: Sure, that’s helpful.

Daniella: [laughter] Yeah, Evan’s wife. The WordPress community and the web development community is pretty new for me. I’ve always watched Evan. I’ve been in the background watching Evan run his business and build websites for over 10 years, but I actually had a separate career in higher education, working in student affairs at a local university for almost 14 years, I guess. Wow, that makes me feel kind of old. But recently, I left my position and we decided to give it a go and really see what we can do together working towards one goal and growing Evan’s business. So here we are, trying to make it all happen.

Tara: Wow. Can you tell us a little bit more about that decision and how long it took you to come to it and what was involved and sort of more about your plans, what role you’re going to be playing in this new venture, Daniella?

Daniella: Absolutely. In some ways, I would say we’ve always thought about doing this probably since Evan actually went 100% out on his own. He had worked for some companies in the early days, but then I think starting in 2009, he was doing his own business completely. We’ve always thrown around like, “Oh, wouldn’t it be great if we worked together? I think we’d be a good team. We’re doing it in other ways in life pretty well so maybe we can bring that to a business.” But it really financially didn’t make sense. I had a career that I really enjoyed but I would say 2015 was the first time we really thought hard about doing this and actually sat down and looked at the numbers and started talking about strategy. That was probably when our first son was about six months old. We were starting to feel those effects of being first-time parents and juggling me being back to work and kind of the chaos that goes along with having a small child. But after looking at the numbers and really thinking it through, we said, “No, this isn’t a good time for us.” So we kind of kept talking about it every now and then but I stayed at my position. Then our second son was born in November of 2017 and I would say that for us was a big shift. We were managing with one and then we brought a second one in and it was like, “What did we do to our lives?” And the funny thing is he’s the easy one.

Evan: We know what we did. He’s wonderful, but it’s a lot.

Liam: [laughter] He may listen to this in future years, good cover, good cover.

Daniella: Yeah. He really is the easier one, too, but it just became a lot to balance two. Once I went back to work when he was about four months old, we just felt like we could not keep our heads above water. It was just a runaround of, “Okay, this kid goes to daycare. This kid goes to preschool.” Anything we try to do outside of our normal schedule was just a push and a pull. Evan felt like he wasn’t getting any work done because I had to be out of the house every day at my job, and between working eight hours and a commute, and picking up and dropping off a kid to preschool, that was 10 hours a day pretty much, almost 10 hours a day. Then any time I needed to work late or do something or had to go in early, Evan had to flex his schedule because he was the flexible schedule. After doing this for about six months, we said, “This is insanity. No one’s happy.” I felt like I was being a not great parent, just really frustrated all the time. Didn’t have good quality time with my kids, wasn’t seeing them a lot. We said there has to be a better way and we really started to put the wheels in motion to make this happen.

Tara: That’s really interesting that you took really a couple of years to come to this but you finally just pulled the plug. Tell us more about this business that you’re starting?

Evan: Well, the business has a new business name. It’s called Minimal Chaos and it’s really a reflective of our personal lives and funny enough, it didn’t occur to me to use this as our actual business name until Daniella said, “Hey, let’s think of the obvious. We make websites less chaotic, too.” As far as the business itself, we make websites for other small businesses, entrepreneurs, non-profit organizations with a real focus on communication and messaging. Because for too many years, when I was doing this on my own. I was neglecting that portion of my projects. And the websites were being launched without very good content. I knew when I put them out there that I was doing my clients a disservice because I could have our should have helped them more, but maybe I didn’t feel able or I wasn’t experienced enough. Over the last probably one to two years, I really made that a much stronger focus in my work. With Daniella who brings in a wealth of written communication, management, talking skills. [laughter] The works. I knew that we can really play up that angle. We work with people who value effective communication on the web.

Tara: Where are you located?

Evan: We are in San Diego, California. More specifically, in La Mesa which, oddly enough, is where I grew up. Our house is less than a mile away from my high school and I’m strangely cool with it because the truth is– and I’m not bragging but maybe I am a little bit here but when you live in San Diego, nobody really leaves. All my friends are still here and for good reason. Nobody could afford to live by the beach. We did that back in our younger days, we rented an apartment. But all my friends, they’ve found houses and places to live somewhere within the county. And I don’t get to see them as often as I want because everybody has kids now, but it’s good to have like a group of kind of natives here that I see and associate with, it’s kind of like my crew.

Tara: I think the weather there is amazing. I’ve been there once but I know probably nobody ever leaves because isn’t it ideal weather?

Daniella: It’s absolutely ideal weather and I think, the truth is once you’ve lived here, it’s really hard to live somewhere else. I think, for Evan, it’s like, he’s thought about leaving several times, and then it’s like, but why? Why would I go? There has to be a really compelling reason, so far there hasn’t been.

Liam: Where are you from, Daniella?

Daniella: I am from, I like to say Southern California. I was born in Los Angeles, kind of grew up in Orange County, and then came down to San Diego for college and that was 18 years ago. I haven’t left so I kind of got sucked into the San Diego vibe down here. And then, of course, Evan wasn’t going to go anywhere, so if I wanted to hang out with Evan, I had to stick around, too.

Evan: Yeah, and I think it should be noted for all the listeners. Important piece of this puzzle or story I don’t think we covered was that we met that first year at college. We’ve actually– and we were friends all throughout college and we didn’t get together as a couple until after that. We basically have 18 years of friendship/partners together. And that kind of strong relationship is really what propelled us into this decision as well.

Daniella: But if we’re going to go personal here, there’s one other piece missing, which is that actually, in between, “Okay, we’re friends but we’re not dating.” We were actually roommates for three years.

Evan: Well, housemates. We didn’t share a room.

Daniella: housemates.

Liam: Thank you for clarifying for the parents that are listening.

Daniella: But he was the best housemate that I’ve ever had. And I think we worked really well as a team even back then. I feel like we were always the ones who took control over cleaning the house and making sure that things are running effectively.

Evan: We would definitely be responsible people in the house. Yeah. And we kind of ran that ship together. In some ways, that was like our first job together maybe. I don’t know.

Tara: We’ve had a couple of other couples on before and it does– I don’t want to say, impress me. That’s not the right word, but I am sort of fascinated by the idea of couples working together. Speaking personally, my husband and I do almost nothing together. [laughs] I mean, I can’t imagine. We divide and conquer, we don’t work together. It sounds like you guys have a history of that. I wonder if translating that into business thinking and all of the stuff that you have to do for business when, up until now, all of your partnerships have been sort of related to household management. How that transitions going for you and your schedule, are you working out of your home, I assume?

Daniella: We are.

Tara: So all of those adjustments, tell us a little bit about how that’s going. You’ve got big smiles on your faces and I can tell you–

Daniella: I’m actually laughing because you just used a term that we talk about a lot, that we both think we need to do more, which is to divide and conquer. I think because we do work well as a team and to joke, that we actually enjoy each other’s company, we tend to not divide and conquer so much and that was fine when our livelihood didn’t really depend on it. I think in our past lives, we didn’t get that much time together during the week. So if we had an opportunity to do something together, it was nice and we would take that opportunity, or on the weekends, it was like, “Well, you can go to the store and I can go do this but we could just do it together because that’s nice, we get to spend time together.” But now that we are spending a lot more time together, we actually need to learn how to divide and conquer better, and realize that we can do things separately because this isn’t like a one-time shot. This is every day now.

Evan: and to add to that, I would say, you ask how is it going? Not as well as it could be because I am learning how to be– I’ve never had to delegate before, my business was just me. I’m sort of trying to be a boss with no formal training.

Daniella: Yeah, no.

Evan: Do you notice, she was like, “Yeah, no.” [laughter]

Tara: Do you have like a formal employee review and all that kind of stuff?

Daniella: I think during my first week, I was like, “So how are you going to onboard me?” He was like, “I don’t know how I’m going onboard you.” We’re definitely figuring it out and I think one of the challenges, too, is that I’ve been closely tied to the business for so long. I’m Evan’s website reviewer. I’m the person who gives him feedback on a new proposal, or a new contract. If he had a not great phone call with a prospective client, I debrief that with him. I know a lot but what I’m realizing is that I don’t really know enough– I don’t know as much as I thought I knew, I guess, I don’t know enough to just sit down and get going. There’s still so much for me to learn. We’re trying to balance this onboarding me. We’re trying to balance that piece. And then the other challenge, too, is that I’m only part-time. Currently, at least for now, I’m three days a week with Evan and then I actually have our kids full-time with me two days a week. We’re finding, too, that I just don’t have a lot of time during the week either, that’s been a challenge I think.

Evan: Yeah. To start like, we had to be realistic with the business plan to start. And with Daniella going in full time to start and having the kids in school and daycare full time, financially, it just wasn’t going to work. So we were going to have to change something. The kids are in school less, Daniella is working. We’re shooting for 20-ish hours a week and we’re going to see how it goes. We’re in this early phase where we’re really taking it month by month. We made this decision probably in October, November. Daniella officially left her job in early mid-December. And now here we are at the end of January. It hasn’t been that long. In our minds, it wasn’t really even official work time until the start of this year. Daniella quit her job and we had a week or two enrolled right into the holidays. And that’s when kids are home from school and you see family and it’s kind of crazy anyway. We’re kind of in early struggles of getting all the wheels spinning and kind of working out the kinks. It’s exciting because I see so much opportunity and it’s super scary and frustrating because I realize how much work is still in front of us, too.

Liam: It’s interesting. As you two start your business life together here, I want to ask you about your definition or your definitions of success? And maybe you can share those and whether you have a single definition or you have individual definitions. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you define success?

Evan: Daniella’s looking at me. For me, this year, what we’re doing. This is really kind of the ultimate test of success. To me, if we can make what we’re working towards work and make it sustainable, and bring in enough revenue our family doing what we do, running our business, working together, and live comfortably doing so, to me, that would feel very successful. We’re not expecting to have that happen right away in month one, two, or three. But hopefully, within year one, we’re going to be at a place where we say, “Hey, we’re doing it.” And that’s going to feel awesome if we could get there. Or maybe more positively when we get there.

Liam: Nice, nice. And how about you, Daniella?

Daniella: I would agree with all of that. I think just if we can come out at the end of this year and if we can say like, “Hey, this is working and we can go a second year and we haven’t completely drained our savings account and I don’t have to start looking for a new job, then I think that is success.” But the thing I would add to what Evan said is our quality of life, I think, in the home. Our family quality of life, that was a big motivator behind making this change. I don’t really think we would have made it had we felt like every day we were coming home and feeling pretty happy and balanced, and if we felt like we were getting good family time. I think that was really lacking for us and we saw the effects it was taking on us and taking on our kids. In some ways, I feel like even if the business piece of this doesn’t work out for us, at least we’ve tried it and at least we’ve had a year to really focus on the things that are most important to us. That, to me, is– if we can kind of get our family life back to a place where we’re all just a little bit happier, and healthier, and more balanced, and feeling better, that is a success right there.

Liam: I like that, that priority of not work and not overly attaching success to professional endeavors, whether it’s joining your husband in trying to grow that business, or even building a career. It strikes me as a very healthy perspective to make individual and family happiness the priority. And to some extent, how that happens, “Well, let’s try this for a while, let’s try that for a while, let’s try something else for a while but make the goal, make the success the personal family joy.” I like that a lot.

Daniella: Thanks.

Tara: You’ve talked about some of the steps that you’re taking and why you’ve made this decision and maybe some of the challenges that led to that decision. What would you say are the biggest challenges, not the obvious ones, a start of business, but the biggest challenge of this change that you’re making, that you’re facing?

Evan: The biggest challenge in this change I think is, for me, learning how to operate my business differently and learning how to account for another individual involved. When it was just me, I had everything in my brain and I didn’t have to write it down or delegate or make it known, I could jump from task to task because I knew what I was doing, but that doesn’t really fly anymore. That’s kind of, I knew it was coming but that’s a rude awakening, that’s a big challenge and a change for somebody who’s like a creature of habit and has been sort of doing the same thing for 10+ years because it was working well enough, so why change it? Any other big challenges, Daniella?

Daniella: I think for me, the biggest thing right now is kind of my professional identity and who am I right now. Because I’m coming from a place where I was– I don’t want to say that I was an expert in my field, that’s probably too strong, but successful and accomplished in the work I was doing, knew what I was doing, really understood my job, and gained a lot of satisfaction and feeling of accomplishments from that. And now coming into this new role, I kind of don’t know what I’m doing half of the time. That’s humbling and it’s a new experience. I’m questioning kind of everything that I say to Evan and everything that I do, and kind of feeling like, “Am I doing this right? Am I doing the right thing?” And on top of it, knowing that I’m not full time and so much of my weekday experience is also being a full-time mom for my two boys, that’s very new too. I’m balancing two new identities for myself that really weren’t in the forefront before this year.

Evan: I just want to add to that. I don’t know what I’m doing half the time either, for the record. Together, I guess that’s 100% of the time.

Daniella: Recipe for success.

Evan: You know, hire us to make your website. [laughter]

Liam: I love that candor, right? Life is one big busk and we all just kind of busk it and try to convince people we know what we’re doing. Daniella, I’m interested to know what your role and responsibility is within the company. What assets in work are you leaning on given your professional background and skill set?

Daniella: Yeah, I know. It’s a great question and I thought about answering that with, “Well, yeah. I’d like to know, too.” [laughter]

Evan: We have talked about this.

Daniella: We have. We didn’t go into this completely blind. The things that we talked about for me, I think for starters, is really just helping Evan get a handle on all the things he hates about his work, which is the administrative stuff. Stuff that really takes a lot of his time, but he’s not necessarily getting paid to do it, and he doesn’t enjoy doing it. He also probably, as we’ve learned, doesn’t have the best methods for doing some of it. My role is to really kind of come in and take some of that off his plate, but also hopefully streamline some of the processes that he’s created, make them better, make them more efficient so that we’re starting to really develop something that’s sustainable in terms of business processes, so that he’s not rewriting the same email 12 times and he can just go to his template folder and pull it out, which you were doing before, so that was a bad example.

Evan: Okay, thank you.

Daniella: You do a few things right. [laughter] And then I think beyond that, as we’re moving towards this place of really wanting to work on content and messaging, and supporting clients in that way. I’m hopeful to be doing a lot of content writing and a lot of editing and working on messaging with clients. It is new for me but I’ve done so much, so much of my old job was communication, and it was writing. And it wasn’t necessarily writing for the web but I think it’s going to be a pretty smooth transition for me. And again, just having that background of knowing Evan’s work and knowing his clients pretty well, I think I’ll be able to transition into that. And then, ultimately project management, really keeping things moving. I think one of the things that I’ve seen as an outsider is that a lot of Evan’s projects get hung up kind of in that, ‘we’re almost ready to launch but’ phase. So how can we keep moving things forward and how can I support that by just having that time to send an extra email, give a call to a client, help lay out the groundwork for, “Here’s what we hope to accomplish with this project and here’s the timeline we hope to accomplish it in.”

Tara: Sounds like your job description is ever-expanding. That’s a lot of stuff to take on. You’re ambitious, that’s good. I’d like to ask you guys about advice and if you think about advice that you’ve received, each of you, that has made a difference for you and that you take to heart and implement in your life, whether it’s personal life, professional life, both. If you could talk about that a little bit with your advice?

Evan: Sure, yeah. One really good piece of advice, it actually came from Daniella. She told this to me many years ago now but I still keep it in the back of my mind. I’m paraphrasing but essentially, she said, your client’s failure to plan is not your emergency. And you know this happens all the time in our world, somebody comes to you, urgent request, something’s on fire. My inclination, because I’m a nice, very giving person, my inclination is to want to help them and drop what I’m doing and say, “Hey, I can do this.” But the truth is, if you’re running a business, their failure to plan is not my emergency and I often have to remind myself of that and talk to them diplomatically and matter-of-factly and say, “Hey, this is how it’s going to go.” That was really good advice that I’m sure has saved my sanity multiple times. Yeah, what about you?

Daniella: Before I left my job, but I guess before we had made the decision even for me to leave my job, my former supervisor had said to me during a really good conversation, she had said, “You know, your tendency towards perfectionism, it can stand in the way of you being successful.” And I really took that to heart because it’s absolutely true. I have the tendency to want it all to be perfect and organized, and beautiful, and to not show anybody until it looks that way. And I think especially in this current world that we’re living in and our current lives, that’s just not possible. Nothing can be perfect right now. It just has to be good enough a lot of times and that’s a really hard thing for me because I want to always do my best and put my best work out there. But sometimes, especially when you’re trying to get something off the ground, you just kind of have to go for it and adjust on the fly and adjust as you go along. I think we’re both learning that and starting to do that more.

Liam: And that’s a learning process, it’s learning to trust what is good enough that doesn’t turn around and bite you, or slap you, or anything like that. That’s definitely a learning curve there.

Tara: Yeah, I say often to clients especially, don’t let perfect be the ending of the good because you have clients who sometimes won’t pull the trigger because they are trying to fine-tune every single word on their website and you just say, if you’re waiting for perfect, you’re never going to have a website or much of anything else. I think that is good advice to rein in the perfectionism now and then.

Liam: Daniella, earlier in the conversation, you mentioned how all things and WordPress and WordPress community are new to you. Would you and Evan talk about your involvement and engagement with your local WordPress community?

Daniella: Yeah.

Evan: She’s looking at me so I’ll start.

Daniella: You should start. Can I note that I’m drinking my coffee out of a WordCamp Orange County mug right now?

Evan: You are.

Liam: Duly noted.

Evan: Yes, I have some product placement as well. My Givewp.com mug from the local guys here, Give, they make an awesome plugin. They’re cool guys, they get a shoutout. I like all of them.

Tara: I like them, too.

Liam: They’re good people.

Evan: But yeah, my involvement in the WordPress community here is– let me be the first to say it’s not as active as I’d like it to be because I don’t– especially, since having kids, I don’t really have the time and I haven’t made the time to get out in that community as much as I’d like. But I will say my track record of attendance at WordCamp San Diego is perfect, it means that I’ve been to every single one. And I’ve spoken, I think at three of them. And we do have a local AWP Meetup here that I tried to go to but realistically, I show up maybe twice a year, just because of life, and it’s at night, and it’s tough with kids. But I really value the spirit of the community and the people involved in it and how it’s so open and accepting and progressive, it values freely sharing knowledge. Those are the things that turn me on, to begin with. You’re smiling. Daniella’s looking at me with this weird smile.

Daniella: No, I’m listening.

Evan: Oh, you’re listening, okay.

Daniella: And for myself, like I said, the WordPress community is very new but back in 2016 when we were contemplating me joining Evan’s business, the first round or maybe the second round, I’m not sure. I did attend WordCamp San Diego, like a dinner with Evan. I’ve dabbled a little bit but I’m sure that’s going to change a lot this year as we move forward.

Tara: Yeah, WordCamps are pretty impactful for people as you start working in this space. I’m sure that will be the same for you. And you guys will be a couple. There are some notable couples in the WordPress space. You can be one of those WordPress couple, there aren’t that many.

Evan: One day! I think we’re not so notable now, but goals.

Daniella: Something to aspire to, exactly.

Tara: Awesome. Well, I look forward to following you guys. We are out of time for today but it’s been so lovely getting to know you and hearing about what you’re doing and seeing how well you work together and share the podcast microphone together. Thanks for joining us today, where can people find you online?

Evan: We are online at Minimalchaosweb.com and we are actually blogging about this big transition in our lives from Daniella’s work to working together at Minimalchaos.blog.

Tara: Awesome.

Liam: Excellent. Thank you both so much for joining us here. It’s been an absolute pleasure chatting with you and getting to know you a little bit.

Tara: Thanks. Bye-bye.

Evan: Likewise, thank you.

Daniella: Thank you. Bye.

Tara: Bye.

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.

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.

Rene Morozowich is a WordPress developer from Pittsburgh, PA. She works with agencies and small businesses and loves planning, organizing in all of the details. Rene is an introvert who loves rollerskating, naps, non-fiction, and talking about money.

Website | Rene Morozowich

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 84.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Rene Morozowich. Rene is a WordPress developer from Pittsburgh, PA. She works with agencies and small businesses and loves planning, organizing in all of the details. Rene is an introvert who loves rollerskating, naps, non-fiction, and talking about money. Hi, Rene.

Rene: Hey, guys. How are you?

Tara: We’re great and so glad you could join us today. Thanks for coming on the show, Rene. Can you tell us more about yourself?

Rene: Sure, yeah. Thanks so much for having me. I’m Rene and I live in Pittsburgh. I live here with my 10-year-old son half the time. I will be 40 this year. I don’t know if I should say that or not.

Liam: You just did.

Rene: Yeah, I did. I don’t know if I should tell or–

Tara: No shame in that. 40 is awesome.

Rene: It’s the new 30s or something, right?

Liam: You are wearing black, I see.

Rene: I am. I’m just preparing for the year ahead. I’m excited. I’m hoping that I avoid the midlife crisis. I’m also wondering, is this midlife? Have I reached it or am I going to live to 100 and then I have another 10 years until midlife? I don’t know how it goes.

Tara: Having just turned 50 last year and about to turn 51. I would say I feel like I’m frighteningly beyond midlife now. I’m on the other side of that.

Rene: Really? Yo just feel like you feel though. I don’t feel really like I aged. I kind of just feel like me.

Tara: I think you definitely do, but when you’re looking at your life ahead of you, it’s sort of like, “Wow. Look at all that’s behind me.” There’s still a lot ahead of me but it’s not as much as what’s behind me. That’s the thing, I think. At 40, you are kind of in the middle, so happy birthday. [laughs]

Rene: Thanks. That’s a little bit about me. I work with WordPress. That’s why I’m here.

Tara: Where in Pittsburgh do you live?

Rene: I live in the suburbs. I live in East Side. Then when you live on– I don’t know if this works that way with other cities but when you live on the East Side, you don’t like the other side.

Tara: Oh, yes.

Rene: To go to the South, no, no, South Side is no good. North, no, it’s so far and there’s so much traffic. Pittsburgh doesn’t have a grid system so it’s all haphazard, there’s hills and one-way streets, everything’s always closed so you can’t really get around. I like the East Side and I stick to it mostly.

Tara: Did you grew up there?

Rene: I grew close to where I live now, yeah, in the suburbs. My parents live about 10 minutes away. Yeah, it’s fine, it’s nice. They can live closer to the city once my son is older.

Liam: Classical question about Pittsburgh. I understand that it has the second most amount of bridges of any city in the world, bar Venice. If that’s true and even if it’s just anecdotally true, I know there are tons of bridges. Has anybody or do you keep track of how many bridges you’ve crossed to try to cross every bridge in Pittsburgh?

Rene: I don’t keep track. Sometimes you end up going across the bridge that you don’t intend to go across. You’re like, “I’m on this road, I didn’t realize. Oh, no. Here I am. I’m going somewhere else.” But funny you say that. I work for an agency who just did a website for a client called 446 Bridges. The theory is that there are 446 bridges in Pittsburgh. I don’t know if that’s true and I can imagine that’s a not a fixed number I would think.

Liam: I don’t know that it would flex all that much, right? It’s not simple to throw up a bridge across over a quarter of mile wide piece of water.

Rene: Exactly, right. Yeah, if maybe one goes down, they put it back up. But specifically, 446. They tore one bridge down, it takes years of lifting it back up. And then maybe they tear one down and it never goes back up. Like, “Oh can’t go that way any more.” It’s just the exact number. So yeah, about 446 but–

Tara: That’s a lot of bridges. I’m going to bridge into WordPress and ask you how you got started with WordPress?

Rene: I started with WordPress a few years ago. I was working at, I had like a regular job. I went in at 8:00 and then I went home at 5:00, that kind of thing, every day. I kind of had been down at work, I started looking around. And then I had so much downtime that I started taking some classes. I got really interested in it. I liked the community that I found and I liked how I can leverage some of my past experience to either do something new, and it was new and exciting, and it came with all of those other things beyond WordPress like working for yourself and taking on different kind of clients and projects where I get a regular job. You work with the same people doing the same project every day. I really liked that and I kept going. And last year– not last year. Year before in August, I quit my job, with some clients I jumped in. I had seen this cartoon where there is a guy hanging off a cliff in the first panel, and then the second panel, he let’s go. And then the third panel is the ground is three inches below him. He thinks he’s going to fall really far and he really doesn’t fall that far and it’s totally fine, which is what happened. So far, it’s been really good. Everybody’s been really nice and I’ve had really great clients. Some difficult times but overall, it’s a much better fit for me.

Tara: What’s your background? Has it been in computer, coding?

Rene: Yeah. I went to the school for computer science and then when I graduated, I got a job at PPG, some people know PPG. They make glass and paint and stuff like that. I worked there for a little while and I knew right away that it was not going to work. They gave me a lot of money and a bunch of benefits and all these things, they put me in an office, and I was 22 years old, and thought, “Oh, no.” And I would cry, and I’d go home and I’d cry. I couldn’t get up in the morning, I would cry. It was so bad. A few years later, I quit and my parents were like, “Ugh.” Like I had done something really, really terrible. And then I had some other jobs. I kept going back to that same sort of job. I was programming, I did a little bit of teaching adults computer related things, but I kept going back. Every two years or so, I would get a new job, just in a different company doing the same kind of thing. What’s insanity, doing the same thing and thinking something else is going to happen. The same things kept happening. Then eventually, I was like, “Wait, wait. No. Something has to change.” So here I am.

Tara: Sounds like working for yourself feels more right.

Rene: Definitely, yeah. And I like the whole gamut of things. Some people are like, “I hate billing. I hate talking on the phone.” And all this stuff. I like all that stuff in moderation. I can’t talk on the phone all day, I can’t do billing all day, obviously. I like the whole spiel, so it is good.

Tara: That’s great. And you have flexibility, you have a son. How old is your son?

Rene: He’s 10.

Tara: Okay.

Rene: So I don’t cry in the mornings now.

Tara: Yeah. [laughs] He needs some attention and you can be flexible which is a great thing.

Rene: Yeah, definitely. I can pick him up early, or I can take him in late. It’s not a big deal. If he’s sick– and he really hasn’t been sick now that he’s passed that really young and child age, he’s better. Now I can just, for the most part, stop whatever I’m doing and attend him if he needs.

Liam: Yeah, that’s a great flexibility there and it’s hard to put a dollar amount on that, right? A few years down the road, what would they have to pay you to get rid of that? Like, “Oh, geez. I don’t know.” It’s such an interesting thing and I’m in a similar position. My children are about the same age and I work from home and work for myself. Having that flexibility to be there when they need me, or even just when they want me. Like, “Yeah, alright. Let’s go play some Fortnite. Let’s go do that.”

Rene: Yeah, definitely.

Liam: Yeah, let’s go out for ice cream, why not? That’s lucky. Tell me a little bit about your clients? Who do you work with? You said you work with agencies and small businesses. Are you working directly with the website owners? Are you working on behalf of other agencies that are delivering for their clients? How does that all work for you?

Rene: I do work with some agencies and in some cases, I have access to the end client. I can talk directly to the end client. I just move the agency people in and that’s no problem. Other agencies, I don’t, I just work with agencies themselves. They give me all the requirements. In those cases, though, they’re generally website build. So, “Here’s the design, build out the homepage and some of the other pages.” And then they take it from there. I like both, both are nice. But then I do work with my own clients, individuals and small businesses who need something. Maybe they need changes to an existing site and maybe they need a whole new thing entirely. I can do those sort of things. I just started working with a plugin developer making some plugin changes. That’s my goal in 2019 is to get a little bit more into that and get up to speed in the WordPress world as really to the languages that are used here. I have programming experience but in other languages.

Liam: I see. That last plugin work is a plugin owner is saying, “Hey, Rene. Can you help me add these three bits of functionality? We want to bulk this out in some way, shape, or form. Can you just lead on that?”

Rene: Yeah, that’s exactly what happened so far. That will be my goal is to look for more opportunities like that. How, I’m not sure yet. And maybe do some contributions to free plugins where it looks like it might fit my skillset.

Liam: And the plugin that you’re working on, is that a paid plugin or is it one of these freemium where it comes free and then the add-ons come in? I’m just wondering about the business behind it and not asking you to reveal for whom you’re working but more just what’s the economy behind what you’re doing?

Rene: Yeah, the freemium sort of model where the base plugin has a nice number of features, and then if you want to add this on or add that on or add something else on, then those features, too.

Tara: You’re doing a lot of different things and you like the variety of the things that you’re doing. What is the biggest challenge of when you are doing so many different kinds of things? How do you manage all of the things that you have in different directions?

Rene: I think part of it, yeah, is hard to manage the time, especially with the technical work, I really need to block off time where if I’m working for an agency and making some changes or doing a quick build and waiting for a client, I can have my email running. I can have Slack open, I can kind of ping around and do these things. But the other type of work, I have to turn all of that off. I try not to promise anything really quickly. That will give me buffer time so that somebody says, “Hey, can you do this by tomorrow?”, “Well, I can do that by Friday. Give me a couple of days.” That way I can fit it in so that it works out.

Tara: Yeah, it sounds like you have a good handle on your time management and what you need to do to get things done which helps you.

Rene: As it gets busier, it can get more difficult. I have that worry right now. I have a couple of new leads and okay, what if people sign up all at the same time? I try not to think too far ahead, just, “Okay, what do I have to do right now? What’s upcoming? Map it all our as best I can and basically just sit down and get to work.”

Tara: I was going to say that you know how to plan your time so that your time so that you can be successful, which is the question I’m going to ask you next, which is, how do you define success, Rene? In your personal, professional, combination of the two, how do you define success?

Rene: I think we talked a little bit about it already but the professional is that flexibility, doing interesting work, helping people. People email me and say, “I need help with this.” It’s so exciting to be able to write back or talk with them on the phone, meet with them in person and help them in their business. Even making enough money to support myself and not crying in the morning, all of those. I feel like I’m wildly successful right now. I don’t want to jinx it. I feel very fortunate, too, for the professional success. And then personal success is traveling, spending time with people that I care about, spending time by myself relaxing, hobbies, that kind of thing. That area probably needs a little bit of work but those are things that I define personal success.

Liam: Yeah, those are good things. What are hobbies? Travel, that’s a pretty obvious one, the newness and the adventure, different cultures, all that comes with that. But when you’re not working, when you’re not traveling, what are you doing?

Rene: As soon as I said hobbies, I thought, “Oh no, I shouldn’t have said hobbies.”

Liam: “Now I have to have a hobby.”

Rene: [laughter] I know.

Liam: It doesn’t have to be a hobby.

Tara: I do hear rollerskating.

Liam: We all refer to hobbies, but yeah, talk to us about rollerskating.

Rene: I love rollerskating.

Liam: Are you an inline skater or a four-wheeler?

Rene: No, no. Four-wheeler. I have my own skates. For a couple of years, I wanted to teach my son to skate. I feel like it’s my duty as a parent to teach my son, whether I teach him or somebody else teaches him, to arrange for his teaching of these things that are harder to learn as an adult. I felt like rollerskating fits into that. And he has a girlfriend that’s 16 or whatever and she likes to roller skate, and he’s like, “Well, I can skate.” I feel like I will have done him a disservice. We have some friends who go. He really likes the inline skates so he has those, but I have my own roller skates that are black and pink. It’s a communal activity but it’s really an individual activity. We’re all there together. We all take a break and get some snacks. We eat a couple of things and then we sit down on the side and we talk to each other. But when you’re out there skating, it’s just you and it’s kind of freeing. You listen to songs and go around the ring.

Tara: I did that when I was younger. I didn’t even know there still were rollerskating rinks.

Rene: There’s actually one. My sister lives in Minnesota and they have one close to her house where they have an over 30 night and it’s just people over 30. I would love to do that. When I was out there, we didn’t get to go but that’s my dream, to go, when there’s no kids.

Tara: Elbow pads, knee pads, big huge pads on everybody. I have a friend who tried rollerskating, she broke both of her arms.

Rene: Oh, no.

Tara: Yeah.

Liam: Not good.

Tara: It gets dangerous when you get older.

Rene: It is. And that’s why I feel like maybe skiing or something. And I go slow. I’m not that person zipping around the rink. You’ve got to be careful.

Tara: That’s cool for your son. Imagine him growing up with that skill and doing it with his friends and that kind of thing.

Liam: Can you skate backwards?

Rene: Funny you say that too, my brother-in-law was here over Christmas and he was asking my son about skating backwards, and neither of us can do it. So we went a couple of weeks ago after Christmas, and there was a backwards skate so I thought, “Okay, I’m going to go out there and do it.” I get out there and I’m thinking really hard, I said, “Take a video of me.” So I have a video, I was going so slow and we were with a couple of friends, and the little girl was five. In the video, she just glides backwards right past me and here I’m thinking and trying, trying to wrap my mind of it. Obviously, way overthinking the whole thing. So no, or not yet. [laughter]

Liam: Not yet. That’s the success. I like that.

Rene: I’d like to do that crossover thing, too. Where you see the people and they cross.

Tara: Do you ice skate also?

Rene: No, no, no. I’ve been ice skating before but you have to try to skate really tightly around your ankle and that’s uncomfortable for me. But the same friends that we go with, they like to ice skate. Maybe we try it. We haven’t yet but maybe we will.

Liam: I look forward to seeing that video, please.

Rene: Oh, no. [laughs] I’ll put it on Twitter later.

Liam: Alright, sounds good. I want to talk to you a little bit about WordPress community. You shared, Rene, how from your day job, you started looking at WordPress as something new, a bit of a challenge, freshen things up, what have you. And then you drifted, I’ll say drifted but if you like to plan that well and you’re that organized, you did not drift, you went methodically from one point to the next, but I’m going to use drift. You drifted into where you’re at now professionally. But how did the WordPress community find you or how did you find it and how did you get into it really?

Rene: When I was taking some classes, somebody mentioned that there were things like meetups and there were things like WordCamps. I didn’t know any of this, I didn’t know it existed. I went to a meetup in Pittsburg. I had two Meetups, one on the North and one in the city because, again, if you go to one, you’re not going to the other, in general. And I met Melinda Helt and she was the organizer of that city group at the time. And just the minute I walked in, she was so eager to talk about WordPress and everything that was available and how everything worked and all of that. She works for automatic so she has a lot of information and has been in the community a long time. I started coming to the meetups regularly, I went to WordCamp Kent, which was my first WordCamp in, not this past year but the year before. It was a two-day event and the first feature was Carrie Dils and she talked about her time at Starbucks and wearing a green apron and what that meant. And I started crying, I’m like, “What is this? What have I stumbled into?” I thought we’re talking about WordPress and we’re talking about Imposter Syndrome. We’re all encouraged to say hi to each other. I’ve been to tech conferences before, like, no, not doing that. You know, you’re encouraged to find somebody sitting alone and go to lunch with them and all that kind of stuff, which I did. So it’s overwhelming but in a good way. Then I went to another WordCamp – WordCamp Pittsburgh – and then I started organizing that city Meetup. I’m kind of the organizer from the perspective of like, I like to find people to talk, I like to reserve a space and I like to make it all happen. I’ll be the introduction that–

Liam: All the details?

Rene: Exactly, the details, I take care of all that. Make sure everybody is here and all that kind of stuff. And try to welcome and encourage people when they come. Then a bunch of meetups last year, we have a meetup next week, and then I have two more scheduled. Our meetup next week is just like a coffee. We’re going to meet at a coffee shop and just talk. Then in February, we have a back-to-back Google Analytics 101 and 102. We had the 101 last year and it was really popular but some people couldn’t make it. We’re going to do a Zoom call Monday night and then the 102 the next day. We have two really great spaces here in Pittsburgh that we have the meetups pair-networked. On the South Side is the local hosting company, they host anybody and they’re really great. They’re personable, you can call them and just talk to somebody in Pittsburgh right away. And also Code & Supply. Code & Supply is a coworking space and they do a lot of really great community things. We can use their space for free and it’s really nice. I started doing that last year. WordCamp Pittsburgh, I helped with the social media and the tweeting. Overwhelming. I tried to post some on the website and kind of just make people aware of the event and try to get people in. We had a really nice event, it was good. Just kind of keep going from there. Also, I’m part of a Slack group that Tara’s in. And we’re just trying to meet people with any opportunity that there’s like a call or something that we can kind of get together. I like to try to take advantage of– because although I like to work alone, I do like to talk to people, too. I hope that answers the question.

Liam: Yeah, that was great. WordCamp Pittsburgh is definitely on my list. I’m over in Philly and it’s one state separated by just a lot of miles.

Rene: It’s far, it’s really far from one to the other.

Liam: But I do have plans to go, so you’ll have to keep us posted.

Rene: We’re looking for an organizer, though. Terry was the organizer of the past two years and it’s a little bit of weight right now and it’s kind of uncertain.

Liam: Do you know anybody that likes to get all the organizational work done and bring in the speakers, and arrange a venue, do you know anybody that’s good at that?

Rene: I don’t know if I’m ready yet. There is some pressure but I–

Liam: I’ll walk you back to that. I think you got it if you want it. Let me ask you another question, if I can, and it’s about advice. It’s not advice necessarily that you would share or that you pass on, but what is something that someone has shared with you? What’s the best advice that you’ve ever received and successfully implemented in your life?

Rene: When I got out of college, I stumbled upon this CD by Jim Rohn. It’s called the Art of Exceptional Living. I realize this is not an actual person that I know or somebody who’s said specific words to me personally but–

Liam: That’s fine, that’s fine. Anything.

Rene: It’s a great CD and as I was preparing for our talk last night, I was searching for it. There’s actually a SoundCloud recording of the whole thing, which I can share. He’s such a great teacher and he’s so eloquent. So not only the things that he says, it’s how he says it. But basically, the gist is you have the power to create the life that you want and also then for you to think about what you actually want. But through practicing daily positive habits and continuing to learn, life isn’t something that’s happening to you, it’s something that you can fashion and you can create the life that you want. Although it took me a while to really understand and implement those lessons, I feel like I’m on a better road now. So that was good advice.

Tara: That is good advice and I love hearing about new resources like that. New podcasts or books and things like that. Thank you for sharing that, that’s great. What books are you reading right now that you’re enjoying? You said you liked to read non-fiction?

Rene: Yeah. I’m almost finished with Start With Why, it’s one that I’m almost finished with. And I’m actually reading one about. I forget what it’s called, it’s something about stopping binge eating and it’s a really loaded title but binge eating meaning anything outside of how you want to eat. Not like, “I ate four quarters of ice cream.” But, “I ate two pieces of cake and I really didn’t want to eat two pieces of cake.” It’s a really interesting book, I’m almost finished with that. I’m reading one more, I’m reading The Daily Stoic. Adam Silver and I both bought The Daily Stoic. It’s 366 meditations, so it’s a meditation a day. I’m just reading one of those every day, two to or three pages.

Tara: Do you also meditate or is reading a form of meditation, I suppose?

Rene: I’ve meditated in the past. I have an inside timer and there’s a few meditations that I will listen to, especially if I wake up really early. If I wake up at four o’clock in the morning, my brain will turn on like, it’s go time. That’s unacceptable. I’m not getting up at four and I’m not going to start working. So I tried to listen to a meditation that will lull me back to sleep and that worked pretty much. But yeah, that’s the extend rate right now. I did Headspace for a year and that was really great.

Liam: What’s Headspace?

Rene: There’s a book but there’s also an app. The app kind of guides you on a daily meditation practice. There’s different packages, like 30 Days for Sleep, and things like that. But it became an obligation. It became self-care that was something I had to check off the list, which I think was defeating the purpose.

Tara: Yeah, I feel that way about meditation. I used Headspace as well and I’m sort of back into it now. I’m trying to get a streak of a few days in a row but I don’t feel like it makes that huge of a difference for me but I know it’s supposed to so I keep trying it. It is that ‘check the box’ type of thing.

Rene: And over time, it’s supposed to help at some point later where you don’t need to necessarily see the results really quickly.

Tara: Hoping to maybe pause and let things kind of roll past you so they don’t, so I guess you can handle them better maybe as part of it, as part of the philosophy. You referenced a couple of times getting over a phase for you where you’re crying in the morning. You want to tell us a little bit about that or how you’ve moved beyond that?

Rene: At the time, I think it was just the structure of the work and it was like, “Oh, my god. I can’t go, I can’t sit there all day.” And sometimes you’re not busy and all it takes in workplace. The guy that never washes his dishes. It’s too much. Some people are great with that sort of corporate thing. My sister works for 3M, her and her husband both. They’re high up in the food chain and they’re like the people and they’re doing the thing. I’m just not that kind of person. My dad is a mechanic, he owned his own business 50 years this year and he’s doing whatever, man. He goes and he wants to haul something today, he’s going to fix some cars. He works. He’s a good worker but he’s working on his terms. He’s not taking that person that comes in and they seem like they’re pain, he’s going to tell them to go to the next garage over. But it’s just more how I feel. I don’t know how I got to be that way but that’s kind of how I feel about it. The crying has subsided just because I can do what I want to do now.

Tara: Good to hear.

Liam: Following the Jim Rohn CDs or DVDs? Life your life the way you want it to, think about how you want it to and then make that happen over time?

Rene: Yeah. And that you really have the power to do those things. He talks about things that are easy to do or also not easy to do. It goes both ways, so like eating an apple every day, easy to do, easy not to do. But it adds up over time. So you have that power. We just read Atomic Habit in the Slack group, we’re going to talk about it I think later today. And also, I read The Slight Edge. Those are books that talk about the same thing where, like, if I’m eating a cookie every day and you’re eating an apple every day. For a really long time, it looks like we’re going along and making a thing. You’re not going to see this in podcast but eventually, my health is going to go up if I’ve been eating the apple, and the other person’s health is going to go down if they’ve been eating a cookie. It looks like it will have happened all of a sudden, but it’s that exponential curve. The same thing with money. The curve looks like not much is happening and then, whoo, it goes up or it goes down.

Tara: Interesting. Very introspective. Those are some good resources, you have a lot of good tips and information, your reading pays off.

Rene: I like to read.

Liam: We didn’t even get into talking about money and that’s probably going to have to be a conversation for another day because we are out of time today, Rene. It has flown by. Thank you very much for joining us.

Tara: This has been great.

Rene: Thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me. I had a lot of fun.

Tara: Thanks for joining us. Where can people find you online?

Rene: They can go to my website, Renemzw.com and that will redirect to my name which is much longer than that and harder to spell, so Renemzw.com. And also on Twitter, but you can find that from the website.

Tara: Great. Thanks again for joining us and we’ll talk to you soon. Thanks Rene, bye.

Rene: Thank you.

Liam: Bye, Rene.

Rene: Bye.

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.

William Jackson has advanced degrees in education with a focus on educational technology, social media, and STEM. William has worked for NASA as an internet and technology instructor, and as a technology consultant with the Florida Department of Education. He is a past professor at Edward Waters College.

Website | My Quest To Teach

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 83.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re joined by William Jackson. With advanced degrees in education with a focus on educational technology, social media, and STEM, William has worked for NASA as an internet and technology instructor, and as a technology consultant with the Florida Department of Education. He is a past professor at Edward Waters College. Hello, William. Welcome.

William: Thank you. Glad to be here and happy new year.

Liam: Thanks, William. Welcome very much to our little conversation out here in the virtual hallway. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

William: Definitely. I am a teacher of 31 years in public education. The majority of my teaching experience is in elementary age where I’m a physical education teacher and technology teacher as well. I focus on STEAM which is science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics, and a little bit of music. I just love engaging with the students and being an inspiration and a role model, and just being involved and getting them to be global thinkers and learning more about the world around them. Not just the local education, but a global education.

Tara: That’s wonderful. How did you get started with that?

William: Well, I’m a fourth generation teacher so it was kind of ingrained in me to be a teacher. When I was growing up in high school, I had an opportunity to be a part of a program called the Naval Sea Cadets in Philadelphia. I’m born and raised in Philadelphia. So I had an option of either going into the military or going to college and I chose the college route because I wanted to work with young people. So it was a good fit, and rest is history. Going to college, majoring in education. I wanted to have an environment where I was outside. Physical education was a great fit. I do love the sciences and technology but I have more opportunity to engage with kids with physical education.

Liam: You said you grew up in and around Philadelphia and you work for NASA and you’re a technology consultant, or you work as a technology consultant with the Florida Department of Education. I believe that Edward Waters College is down in Florida as well. When and how and why did you make the shift south? How did that go about?

William: That’s an interesting story. When I graduated college, I wanted to go someplace that was different and the furthest south I could get was Florida so I’ve decided to come down to Florida and got involved in the school system down here. I initially started in Putnam County, taught there for about 10 years. Moved up to Jacksonville and there were more opportunities with Jacksonville being a larger city. I had the opportunity to work at Edward Waters College. They were actually looking for someone to teach technology at time, and this was like the middle ’90s, and they needed someone to teach teachers how to actually implement technology in your classroom. And NASA was a partnership with them. At the time, there weren’t too many involved that knew how to integrate technology in the class. It was a good fit for me because I had that zest and that zeal and that excitement for the two worlds and created a curriculum where we used Microsoft Office at that time. It was an earlier version of Office, if you can imagine in the ’90s. Microsoft still developing your applications. And we had a lab setting where the teachers could get on the computer and I taught them Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and different applications where they could use it in the classroom. We went from a low-tech environment to a high-tech environment.

Liam: Yeah, you sure did.

William: Yes.

Liam: This is really interesting to me because, William, you are the second teacher who we’ve had on the show here who teaches teachers technology. We had a teacher from the Georgia area, Nadia Williams, join us a while back. We met her in Atlanta and she does the same kind of thing for her local school district where she teaches teachers technology. It’s interesting to me that teachers in technology drift to WordPress. Can you tell us about how you found WordPress and what bought you in and your story there?

William: WordPress is, and I use the word ‘a great fit’ a lot. Because it offers a lot of flexibility. When I started blogging about 10 years ago, I was using other programs and it just really weren’t a good fit for me for the kind of content I wanted to post and the multimedia. When I attended my first WordCamp was WordCamp Orlando back in 2014. At that time, I didn’t realize the significance actually of WordPress until the more I got involved in it, the networking that was great. From there, each year I attended the WordCamps and just fell in love with not just the people but the community, the open-source community, and all the knowledge that I was learning so I could take it back and share it with not just the teachers at my school but the students as well. This provided a platform that was easy to use. Learning curve wasn’t too steep but I was able to learn more using that platform to promote my blogging and integrating social media internet. So just allow me to expand, I guess I can say, in my voice mor of a platform and expand my voice.

Liam: Yeah, that’s great. We hear that a lot. Tara?

Tara: Do you find WordPress to be something that’s easy to teach? You’ve taught a lot of different software and technology. How do you find WordPress to be in terms of teaching? What do students stumble on, that type of thing?

William: Definitely. When I was a professor at Edward Waters College, one of the programs that I developed was Educational Technology, Social Media, and STEM. And students during the course of the class had to maintain a blog. They had to consistently blog once a week for the 12-week course. And it provided a platform where even if they didn’t have a lot of knowledge about how to actually blog. Setting up the platform, setting up the application so that they can just log in and use it in one day, it was really simplistic and really easy for them to do it. Because at the time, a lot of students, they are not aware of the opportunities to share content, to create content, and they didn’t understand the value of it, so WordPress was a perfect platform. It also taught them to write better, to be more aware of the content that they create. Once you put it out, you’re just out there permanently. It allowed them to expand their horizons to go into business but to use technology instead. Also, the teachers that were taking the course as well, because it’s a funny thing to have the students when you go to a school know more about technology than the teachers do. You’ve got to really prepare them for it. It’s a wonderful platform, the kids love the blog on it. Actually, for several years as we were doing it, there’s still some young people that took my class that are still bloggers as well.

Tara: That’s cool. Are they using WordPress.com or WordPress.org?

William: Both, both platforms. Beauty of it too is Aida and I, we are organizers for WordCamp Orlando so during the course of us creating the curriculum for the kids camp, one of the things was integrating STEAM into it but also teaching them and your parents how to create website through WordPress.com. And we had a great time doing it, we had a wonderful time. All of them were successful. The cool thing about it was not only, as we were teaching, the kids were creating their sites but the parents saw how easy it was and they started creating sites also [on your phones and your tablets.

Tara: That’s great. What would you say is the one thing that people get hung up on the most? I know it’s easy but is there one thing that you find that’s a sticking point to a lot of people universally or is there–?

William: I think one thing is choosing a theme. You have a large selection of themes that are available, and once you see them, it’s like, you get this excitement built up inside like, “I can see that one, that one. I can integrate pictures.” But then when you start developing that and building, that’s when you learn, “Okay, well, I need to learn a little bit more about how to modify my theme or how to import a graphic or how to import a video.” I think that’s one of the challenges.

Tara: Yeah, I remember that when I first started using WordPress, that that was overwhelming. And you try one and it’s not the right one, then you try another one, it’s not the right one. Yeah, I can see. I remember that from being a new user. Liam, you mentioned Aida. Do you want to tell us who Aida is?

William: Sure. Aida, come here. [laughs] Aida has a wonderful story. We’ve known each other for years and we worked together with a program calledReader’s Theater and through the course of that, we found a love for technology and integrating technology. She’s very artistic. I have no artistic bone in my body. Arts, it’s really not my forte but it is for Aida because she’s an artist and actress. We love going to WordCamps together. We’ve been speakers, organizers, so I’ll just let her explain what she does.

Aida: Hi. I’m Aida and I own a company called Love Built Life. Basically, I help people live life more creatively. That’s what I do. I teach art and sewing, but I’ve also started integrating graphic design and technology. That’s how we’ve gotten involved with teaching kids. When we do the kids camp, we put art and technology together.

Liam: That is awesome. Organizing a kids camp, or organizing a WordCamp is not easy. Adding a kids camp to that is even more work. Talk us through that process a little bit. What was that all like? The idea of a kids camp, yay, and then you start to get into the nuts and bolts and you realize– you’re in education, William, so you’re well ahead of where I would start. But both of you– how that all came together and what that was like once you were in the thick of it?

William: The process is similar. The planning aspect of it– you plan it more, not just the instructional part but you plan it, you want the kids to have fun and be involved and engaged. I took it as more or less a class of lecture environment, which is the wrong way to take it. And Aida was more hands-on process so building that type of program was fun and exciting because it got the kids to be engaged. It was more focused on their ability to have hands-on projects. For example, in Orlando, our projects were recreated, three projects.

Aida: The first project we did for the kids in Orlando. The theme was space, so each individual kid created their own spaceship. Draw it out or they can use their computer. We actually had a few kids draw it. A few of them actually created it on the computer. One even made it an animated spaceship. Then there was a group project. Now each individual child had a spaceship and now they had to create a space station. Each group had to decide what was their station about, what was its mission, where was it located. Many of them, when they created their space station, they actually drew their little ships attached to the station where their ships would be docked.

Liam: That’s wonderful.

William: And they were designated as captains and their parents were their first officers. We showed pictures of Star Trek and Star Wars, playing music in the background. It really made it inviting in that atmosphere.

Aida: Just to let you know that kids camp was not individual to us, someone else was already doing kids camp. We just happen to know them and they in Orlando were kind of stuck. They were already an organizer, they didn’t have time, they were going to cancel it. And they asked us if we would step in. Now, since we’ve stepped in and we’ve added the component, it’s blown up. Now we have people who want to sponsor the kids camp and really make it grow so that every WordCamp has the opportunity to have a kids camp where you have hands-on and blogging aspect.

Tara: I think that’s so wonderful. I attended WordCamp Miami a couple of times and that’s the first time that I saw the kids camp. I thought it was amazing what the kids were learning and doing and just the way that the community was embracing them and supporting them, it was really cool. I’d like to ask you one of our signature questions, which is how you define success, whether that’s personal, professional, or a mixture of both? How do you define success?

William: I guess for me, it’s a combination of personal and professional. Being an educator, you want to see the students that you’re working with grow in some way, to build your self-confidence, to build their ability to excel past where they are. Also, for them to be inspired and motivated to work toward their goals and their accomplishments. So any time a young person is smiling, they’re happy, they’re excited about the learning process, that motivates and inspires me and my teaching ability to do as much as I can and inspire them to move further in than where they are. Education is one of those careers where you really don’t see the fruits of your labors until the kids come back years later and say, “Hey, thank you for teaching me this or teaching me that, or doing this, or being patient with me.” The wonder is and a great feeling when kids and parents come back and tell you thank you.

Tara: Yeah, that’s got to be one of the most rewarding things, being able to see that down the road and all of the many, many lives that you’ve touched. It’s really great.

William: Oh, yeah. I love elementary school. it’s like, from kindergarten to fifth grade, they’re just so full of energy. And it’s interesting, in this day and age, last couple of years, when your third, fourth, and fifth-graders come to you and tell you that they’re following you on Twitter and they’re following you on Instagram, and you’re following them, that plays a different dynamic like, “Okay, let me make sure my content is family-oriented, and fun, and exciting. They will comment on it.”

Tara: Yeah, in this day and age, you have to be very careful of that, for sure. You have children of your own?

William: Yes, my son Shawn, he’s a student at Florida State University. He’s majoring in engineering. My daughter graduated from University of Central Florida. She was majoring in Mass Communications. They’re off doing their own little thing.

Tara: Do they use WordPress for anything?

William: My daughter does. It’s funny, when she started a blog and she kept telling me not to read her blogs. She loves to blog. She also has Instagram. She’s like, “Daddy, I don’t want you to read my stuff.” I said, “I’m not going to be critical of it. I’m going to just let you be you. Let you do your thing.”

Liam: Were you the one person she blocked on Instagram? [laughs]

William: Yes. I can’t make any comments. She’ll unblock me occasionally but I just keep watch. [laughter]

Liam: I love it. Your definition of success around students I thought was really heartwarming in the sense of that’s exactly what we would want a teacher to say. That’s got to be hard day in and day out. You love your job, you love the children, you love teaching. Some days it’s a job, right, and that’s the last place you want to be, just because of the eb and flow of the life. How do you inspire, how do you not just give up, so to speak? You’ve got a room full of faces that are looking up to you. How do you get through that, what’s that like?

William: When you see the faces of the kids and you think that, okay, they are– and it’s a whole and old adage – they are blank slate. They’re just there to absorb all the information that you can share with them. It’s not about teaching a curriculum, it’s not about just teaching them the ability to read, which is important. Or teaching them the ability to do mathematical projects, which is important, but it’s explaining to them why they need to learn this, to be able to apply it in the future. I like to always tell them, “Everything that you’re learning, you should have a global perspective of it with the world because you never know as you get older and you start thinking about careers, where you’re going to end up in the world, or who you’re going to meet.” The joy is when they really get an understanding of, “Well, I just don’t have to stay in Jacksonville. I just don’t have to stay in Orlando. I just don’t have to stay in Tallahassee. I can go work and have a career anywhere in the world.” That shows that the world is so diverse and so open to new ideas and creativity and innovation, it helps to bring that out in young people. And it inspires them as well because being a teacher, you are a role model for them, and it doesn’t matter what grade or what subject because you instill the value of learning in them to want to continue to be universal learners or global learners.

Tara: It sounds like you are a great role model.

William: I say I’m a big kid, too, because I love physical education, being outside and playing games. My knees don’t hold up as much as they used to. We have a good time.

Tara: You mentioned that you also come from a long line of teachers. Were you raised with these same kind of ideas and values, I would imagine?

William: Yes. My mother was a high school business teacher. Actually, when she started teaching, she started teaching on shorthand in high school. That was years ago.

Liam: That’s going back a few years.

William: Yeah, it’s going way back. And the first typewriters that she had were the IBM Electric Typewriters that they had in their classrooms. She progressively integrated technology and she would ask me occasionally to come into her room and help her set up things and plug things in. She was actually my role model because not knowing it at the time, she was guiding me towards understanding the importance and value of technology. It was a good opportunity to see how typewriters progressed and when she got IBM computers, how that progressed, installing software. Actually learning a little bit of coding when the C prop came up, and installing software. And my dad was a reading teacher. He emphasized the value– not just the reading, but comprehension. It’s like, why you should be able to read and understand what you’re reading so you can apply it.

Tara: I like that. William, what would you say is or has been your biggest challenge in getting to where you are as an educator?

William: I think the biggest challenge is meeting the needs of the established curriculum that we have to teach by. And within that curriculum still make learning fun and exciting for students, even though there are certain things that even in physical education, or art education, or music education, or the arts, we have a curriculum, we have to follow. It’s still inspiring and getting that excitement in the students to say, “Hey, even though we’re covering a particular area you may not be comfortable in, get down to your comfort zone and let’s make this fun, let’s make this exciting. But this is how you can apply it to other areas.” One of my things in school is you can’t say the C word, which is the ‘can’t’ word. You can’t say can’t. You can’t tell me it’s too hard because I believe that you can do that and you’re capable of achieving great things. And the curriculum is designed to prepare you to be a continuous learner, and the ultimate goal is to graduate high school, to get that high school diploma. The challenge, there may be changes to the curriculum from the legislature. They may once do this to learn a particular area, like the changes in mathematics. But we have to implement those changes in a learning environment that’s still nurturing, that’s still fun, that’s still engaging and that still provides opportunity for growth.

Liam: I think the fun of learning is so important and not that everything has to be a game, not so much for me at grade school level, but at the university level, at the college level. I was in a program that I got into for about a year and a half and I just did not like it and my grades reflected the fact that I was not studying. Then I changed majors and my grades shot up because I absolutely loved what I was learning and it was, “Oh, this is neat. I totally want to learn this. This is so good, I want more.” And with teachers at the grade school level, they’ve got to teach everything. It’s reading, it’s writing, it’s math, it’s social studies, it’s the foundation of everything. That’s hard to make everything exciting for all students given how different we all are.

William: It is. And you try and find resources online that you can integrate into your lessons. I love using YouTube videos. We recently had a bicycle activity where PE teachers reserved bicycles. I had 25 bicycles reserved, but before I actually got the bicycles, I went on YouTube and pulled up videos that showed how to ride bicycles safely, and showed them to the students a week or two weeks before we actually got the bikes. They had the visual element, we had discussions about how to be safe, and all of that together with finally getting on the bikes and they remembered, “Oh, yeah. I should wear a helmet. Oh, I can wear knee pads or gloves or elbow pads. This is why I do need to have a helmet. Look both ways before you cross the street.” You ingrain those elements in your brain ahead of time so that when they actually do the lessons, they put all the pieces together.

Tara: I want to ask you a little bit about when you were talking about inspiring kids to do their best and graduate. I know there’s a lot of talk in the WordPress community that diversity in our community or lack there of in a lot of ways. Because WordPress is open-source and free and you can really learn WordPress very economically, are you working with different socio-economic groups to teach them? When you’re targeting teaching kids, are they coming from all over or are you seeing the diversities increasing with younger crowd?

William: There is an increase in diversity. When Aida and I do a workshop, we invite all students. It doesn’t matter gender, socio-economic backgrounds, because we try to instill that this is something that you can use now to help you think about what type of career you want in the future. Or the value of learning programming, the value of learning web development. And you can take these skills and learn probably how to network and attend WordCamps. We’re always promoting on our social media platforms why it’s important for young people and college students to attend WordCamp conferences. For the empowerment, for the networking, and the opportunity to meet so many dynamic equals such as yourself. It was great sitting at WordCamp US and having that conversation and learning from each other and just sharing the fun and excitement of the open source community. I think the challenge is to broadcast that information on a broader platform to communities that really need that information, that aren’t getting it through traditional means. Because I would love to have a relationship with schools and colleges and talk to young people about coming out to WordCamps and attending kids camps. Aida and I have talked about that a lot, about what ways could we get that information out, whether it’s actually going to schools or using social media platforms to let the students know the value of attending and participating in one, and fun as well.

Tara: Yeah, I think that’s an interesting concept. I’m just brainstorming in my head some kind of group that would do outreach to schools. Especially schools in inner cities and that type of thing, or rural areas as well, to try to get more kids involved who maybe aren’t going to pursue college or higher education, they can still get a job doing web work, working with WordPress. I think that’s a very interesting thing. I’m going to mull on that a bit. I don’t know if anything like that exists already that does outreach.

William: I usually do the traditional method. I email the principals and provide them the information, but it still goes back to the administrator, do they think it’s valuable enough to share with the students and with the teachers. It’s the same with teachers, the teachers that I know, and educators that Aida knows, artists, we communicate with them about when WordCamp is coming. We’re the organizers of the kids camp for WordCamp Jacksonville. Now, we’re in the process and the communities around us letting schools know this is what’s coming up June 30th the kids camp, WordCamp Jacksonville is 29th and 30th. Even if you just want to attend and learn and network, it’s a valuable opportunity to do so.

Tara: Right. And I know their organization like Kids Who Code and that type of thing that outreach in schools, just don’t know if there’s any WordPress specific thing. Before we run out of time, which we’re about to do, we always ask our guests also about advice. And if you share with us what you would consider to be the best most valuable advice that you’ve received and implemented in your life?

William: I’ll give you what I usually start our presentations with at WordCamp or when we’re talking with kids. I’ll hold up my phone and what I usually say is, and Aida reminds me to say it in the way that everyone understands, so I do it this way. I’ll have everybody repeat me and I’ll say, “This can be your best friend or your worst enemy depending on the content that you post online.” That’s very transformative because it gets people to think about, “Okay, well, I can pick up this phone and get on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, whatever platform, and share my voice, but I still have to be accountable and responsible for my content.”

Tara: That’s great advice and very specific. Yes, even for non-kids, that’s important advice.

Liam: Absolutely.

Tara: Love/hate relationship with that thing.

William: Exactly. [laughter]

Tara: William, it’s been such a pleasure to have you on the show and to meet Aida as well. Thanks for being here today with us. Where can people find you online?

William: They can find us on, let’s see, our Instagram is @lovebuiltlife and @williamdjackson, and Twitter is at @wmjackson and I believe it’s @lovebuiltlife as well. her’s is easy.

Aida: Mine is @lovebuiltlife anywhere.

Tara: Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us. I hope to see you soon, bye-bye.

William: Bye-bye, I had a great time.

Liam: Bye-bye, take care.

William: Bye-bye.

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.