Hallway Chats

Corey is Chief Instigator at Coreyweb, LLC – a full-service design, development (& more) agency that works exclusively with WordPress as a CMS.

Website | www.coreybrown.me

Liam: This is Hallway Chats, where we talk with some of the unique people in and around WordPress.

Tara: Together, we meet and chat with folks you may not know about in our community.

Liam: With our guests, we’ll explore stories of living – and of making a living with WordPress.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is episode 21.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we’re joined by Corey Brown. Corey is the chief instigator at Coreyweb LLC, a full-service design, development, and more agency. He works exclusively with WordPress as a CMS. He’s been doing web work since 1995 and he says he loved every minute of it. Hi Corey, good morning.

Corey: Hey, good morning. Thanks for having me.

Tara: Hey Corey, good to see you. Welcome to Hallway Chats. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself after that great intro that Liam shared?

Corey: Sure. I guess what’s interesting is how for my professional career and over my life, it’s how things came together that I didn’t quite expect. As a musician growing up, that was my big passion. But I also had this passion for computers so when I was, I guess, about 11 or 12 years old, I mowed lawns and I did everything I could to make money. I bought one of those Commodore VIC-20s. don’t know if you’re old enough to remember those, but it was one of the first home computers on the market. And I learned BASIC, I took classes and I was writing programs. I kind of put that on the shelf during my high school years because I was all in on music and I ended up majoring music in college. It took a lot of crazy turns from that and ended up becoming a graphic designer which is kind of a family business in my family. I was a third generation graphic designer in my family. That all started out doing everything by hand, the old-fashioned way, the way my grandfather did and my father did. Then suddenly the Mac came on, so here I am again, computers. And I’ve always loved technology, so the graphic design world and getting on the Mac and learning all that brought me to the web at ’95. I was the art director of [a catalogue company. The CEO came down to my office and said, “We need a website.” I was like, “Okay.” I didn’t know anything about it and I love telling a story that, like, the web was so tiny, nobody cared, there was no book on HTML back then. There was no market for any of that because it was so tiny. Somebody said, “Oh yeah, there’s this thing called view source. Go to any website you want and view the source and see how they do things.” I started deconstructing sites I liked and learning HTML. At the time, I was really burned out on the whole graphic design world, pretty tired of it. I didn’t like how permanent everything was, I would never sleep at night before we set the catalog to the printer, having nightmares all night about mistakes. I love how on the web there are mistakes but they’re easy to fix.

Tara: Yes, I love that too.

Corey: In ’95 when I started, I said, “This is it. This is the future, this is what I want to do.” It took me about two years to kind of shed my art director duties, I was doing both. Yeah, as soon as I got on the web I loved it and that’s been it ever since.

Tara: I can identify with that. I also lost a lot of sleep over typos in the 5000 brochures that were printed.

Liam: I still freak out. I was doing a little business card for a little church project that was with online printed like a $20 job. I still sent it around for three reviews, “Did I get everybody’s details right?”

Corey: Right, right.

Liam: Once it’s gone, it’s gone. I know it’s lethal printing, it’s all color, it’s just RGB, it can be repeated, it’s not the same four-color or six-color jobs like they used to be and you had to go to print inspections which were fantastically fun if not a little stressful. But yeah, there’s no getting it back and it’s expensive. You can’t just log in to the printing press and change the 700 that have already come off the printer to redo it. I get that. And like you, the flexibility of the web was really neat, but I wonder, did it also kind of scare you and frustrate you a little bit? By that, I mean when you were working in Quark or PageMaker when you put the logo there, it stayed there. And when you put the image over there, it stayed there. And when you do that on the web, especially as the web began to evolve, it moved and you had to accept a certain– well, it’s supposed to kind of do that. It didn’t have that permanency and that caused me some stress. It took a while to get used to that. I wonder how you engaged with that phenomenon transitioning from print.

Tara: I’m going to add to that too, also, in terms of the lack of control that you have over user experience. Because when you’re used to having a PMS color that you know is going to look the same on all of your materials, when you go on the web, you really have no control, that color is whatever the hex code is but it looks completely different on somebody’s HP laptop as it does on your 27-inch Mac, right? That’s another aspect of the difference you can talk about.

Corey: Yeah, it was interesting in ’95 because I think we used Mosaic which was a precursor to Netscape. And there was no IE, thank goodness, there wasn’t– I think there was the Links browser which was text-based. I think what’s really interesting about it was that was HTML 1 maybe point something. We didn’t have even– the big innovation was when table-based layouts came out. You could actually arrange your pages into kind of a more magazine-style. We’ve come to expect now in a web that those first websites that I build, they looked like Word documents. They were Times Roman and Arial, and as far as graphics and– we don’t think about it now but graphics cards back then, the Mac I had– the first Mac I had came with 256 colors. Then I bought the expensive graphics card upgrade, installed it myself on the board. That was when website colors was a big thing. Don’t upload a– make sure your gif files only have what they need, 256 or less. I think I was on a 14-inch CRT monitor at the time, and everything looked terrible. And of course, download speeds were ridiculously slow. I remember when I got my first 14.4 modem and I was like, “Wow, this is blazing fast.” It went like 2800 or whatever it was back then. I think we tried to keep web pages under 20k, which is impossible now. Javascript file is over 20k. It was definitely very crude and like I said, when table-based layouts came out, that really fried my brain at the beginning. When CSS came out, we stopped doing table-based layouts so that really fried my brain because you had to kind of say, “Okay, everything we did before, we’re not doing that anymore.” But it was a big shift in thinking. Each stage was kind of like, that was hard because we were moving in a really rapid pace and there was not a lot of time to learn, to actually devote to just studying and learning, you really do it on the fly. Add to that, now we have all these browsers and everything looks like garbage on IE, or whatever. And then Netscape started being IE, Netscape 4 was like, every web developer hated it. And it was the gold standard forever. We look at it now, I mean, it’s ridiculous compared to what it used to be because we’ve got phones and tablets and Chrome books and cinema displays. We have to account for many, many more variables than we used to.

Tara: Don’t forget now the Notch, we have to also have the Notch. It’s more and more.

Corey: It was easier when it was mobile and computer, desktop or whatever. Now it’s a million different devices in between. When you think about it’s like, no big deal, but it was a big deal because this was all new and all new stepping stones. Even responsive kind of fried my brain at the beginning. You think back now and you’re like, “Well, it’s straightforward and we’ve learned it.” But those shifts were pretty monumental for a lot of people.

Liam: Yeah, I think every two years or so there would be a fundamental change of, “Oh yeah, I’ve been doing it for about a year and a half. I got this now, this is good. Wait, wait, what? There’s another memo, we’re changing what?” It keeps you mobile, keeps you agile, keeps you moving. Let me ask you about this, we’ve talked about the early days of transitioning out of print design and getting into web design and the challenges and fun around there. In our introduction, we heard about how you now work exclusively with WordPress as with CMS. Tell us about that? Where did you first stumble upon or specifically look for WordPress and what drew you to it? This is kind of an increasingly long question but then maybe even touch on, as you get through it a little bit, what are you doing with it now?

Corey: Sure. I downloaded WordPress pretty much at the beginning, I guess it was 2003 maybe, somewhere in there and probably a lot of people– it was for blogging and I thought, “Hey, I’m going to dip my toes in this water.” I’m a terrible blogger but I decided to start a blog so I downloaded it. I wasn’t great at PHP but I’ve always been fascinated with content management, and even though it had that sole focus of being a blog, I knew front-end so I could manipulate certain things about it but I think– it was one of those overwhelming moments for me. Like, oh, my skillset isn’t comprehensive enough to do what I want to do. I always tinkered with WordPress, back in those days I’ve done a lot with content management, I’m working with a lot of content managers and people with actual library science degrees and backgrounds in that. I started talking to the developers at the time about how content management was so, I guess, the way I always viewed it was content management systems made sense to programmers and they made no sense to content managers. I said to a lot of programmers, “I think we should build a content management system that is oriented towards content managers.” Thankfully, I didn’t do that. As WordPress matured, I think it was version 2.9 that came out in ’08 maybe, something in that range, where custom post sites was introduced. As soon as that happened, I said, “Okay, there’s no looking back now.” To me, that’s when WordPress became a full-fledged content management system. So I started to seriously look at that. The reason that we’re exclusively WordPress is, A, we love it, and we’ve yet to find a problem we can’t solve with WordPress in an elegant way, in a way the content manager will say to us, “Wow, that was really easy.” It’s really easy to add content. And I’m not talking about posts and pages. I’m talking about the specialty stuff, where custom post types come into play especially. That’s our primary goal, we want our clients to be very happy, we want the content managers who are not designers, who are not programmers to be able to say, “I can add this, I know how to add this and it’s going to look beautiful, and it’s going to function correctly. But I’m just filling the blanks and uploading media and choosing settings that I want. And I understand this from a concept perspective. I don’t have to understand what’s going on with the design or the functions.” The other reason– as far as my clients go and prospective clients, I’m definitely on WordPress advantage lists and can barely talk to them about that. The way I look at the web is, if there’s a leading platform, framework, whatever, I do really know my developers a lot to make decisions as to what we’re going to use. But when I see something– WordPress has 29% of the market now. I think Drupal has 1-1.5%, and it’s not a knock on Drupal, I don’t get into the– it’s like discussing politics or religion. “I’m not going to sway buddy, if you love Drupal, you love Drupal. And if that works for you, hey, I support that. Rock on. If that’s what’s working for you, I’ll never tell you that’s lousy and WordPress is so much better. That’s my view.” I mean, I don’t think Drupal’s lousy but I think WordPress is so great. When I look at– we use Bootstrap for front-end, it’s the number one Github project, I just learn one framework instead of a project. We use WordPress, we use SASS, we use a lot of things that the way I look at it is, I can go find the people who understand this and who work with this, I don’t have to train them on the framework. I just have to train them on our workflow and our philosophy, that’s much easier to train and say, “Oh, learn is proprietary front-end framework. We’ve built–” Versus, “You know Bootstrap?”, “Yeah.”, “Have at it.” I’ve always been drawn to what’s the dominance, that’s out there. It’s always worked out for me because, like I said, there’s talent everywhere, there’s resources out there, there’s a lot of people looking at these problems, WordPress is constantly improving. Bootstrap is moving forward. There’s a foundation out there which a lot of people love, but not as many use it as Bootstrap. So that’s my thinking, it’s an easy argument to say to a client, “Hey, if we vanish, it’s not like you have some proprietary thing that nobody’s going to be able to figure out. You can find a WordPress person that can take this over.” We’re not going anywhere but, you know, that gives people comfort. I might have something crazy weird proprietary thing that some developer is going to come and say, “This is garbage. I don’t understand.”

Tara: Yeah. It sounds like you have a team that works with you, you have some developers. Can you talk a little bit about your business, what type of clients you have, and how you’ve gone from being the art director of a catalog to having your own web agency all that you learned but how do you find clients and to talk a little bit about your business development and your structuring agency?

Corey: Sure. The good thing about working in an industry for 22 years is you meet a lot of people. So we don’t have sales staff and I’m probably the worst salesperson ever in terms of cold calling and knocking on doors. All of our work comes via word of mouth. We’ll have clients, we’ll work with people and then they’ll move on or they’ll hear from somebody they know at a different company, they’re looking for this and that, and so we get a lot of recommendations that way. I just want to do great WordPress development and design, and discovery and those sorts of things for clients. We’ve kind of fallen into this, we’re getting into the association marketplace here in the DC Metro area. We’re doing a fair amount of the fashion world now, and we’re doing some pretty cool stuff and in the world of music. It’s interesting how we didn’t have this identity of like, “Oh, we’re going to go after this verticle or that verticle.” Certainly, we picked we want to do WordPress development and that’s what we want to do for our clients. It’s not all we do but as far as development and content management system, that’s what we do. It’s really happened organically, I started the company with Seth Godin in 2005 and that became a really big website, it was called Squidoo. It was acquired in 2014. Those nine years that I did that, it was seven days a week. I didn’t have time for any consulting or anything else, so when it was acquired in August 2014, I was so burned out, I didn’t know what to do. I actually said to people, “I don’t know if I want to be in web anymore.” That’s how burned out I was. So I was just sitting around and trying to figure out what am I going to do for a living, what am I going to do at all. And I was getting pinged by some company that said, “We need your help.” The reason that my company’s named what it is is because it was me. I’m a web consultant and people call me and say, “Hey, we have some web problems we need to solve. Can you help us?” And I said, “Yeah.” And then it just grew organically because they’re saying, “Oh, we need this, we need that.” I’m like, “Oh, I know a guy, I know a person.” So I started bringing together this team but it’s basically just growing that way and keeping everybody busy. I’d love to say like, “Hey, I set out to do this, it happened, I didn’t really do it, it’s very organic.”

Liam: That’s really neat, the way that that’s wound up for you. Let me ask you one of our bigger questions then. We’ve talked about how you got started, we’ve talked about the success you have with Squidoo, you’ve talked about getting burned out and wondering if the internet was even right for you anymore. Then you’re into something new and you’ve got the passion for the web again and we can tell from your voice and from the look on your face when you’re talking about that, you really are enjoying it. I wonder if you can share with us your definition of success, be it personal, professional, a mix of both?

Corey: For me, it’s collaboration. I love working with people, and I think I was about 22 years old when I became an assistant art director, I got a promotion. My dad was an art director for 30 years and I freaked out, I was 22 and I was like, “What I do? I don’t want to screw this up.” And my dad said– and I took this through my entire career, my dad said, “If you’re in the position of hiring people, hire people better than you and let them do their thing.” Surround yourself with the very best people you can. And I had bosses to that point that thought the opposite, thought that if their direct reports knew more than them, that was going to harm them somehow. And we talked about it a lot and so I started doing that and I started to see how, as a manager, as a leader, I was actually looking great because look at how great my team is. And I enjoyed it and I was never threatened by somebody else’s knowledge. I was a great front-end developer for a long time. I am not now, it’s changed so much and unless you’re doing it every day– and we’re working with the greatest front-end developer, I’ve been working with him for a decade. He studies this stuff every day, he’s solving problems every day. And I’ll go to him and I’ll say, “Look, we need to do this.” But it’s a collaboration, it’s not like me saying, “Do it my way or do it this way.” If he knows there’s a snafu in there or if there’s a better way, I want to hear it and I’ll relate that back to the client and explain to them why we want to do this, we want to give them the choice but– I love that, I love working with WordPress developers who can do anything, and certainly, plenty of things that I can’t do.

Liam: I know that feeling.

Corey: It just makes us stronger and I learned so much from these people. When I’m in a potential client meeting, having all these conversations, even though I don’t know necessarily how to solve their problems exactly, I know kind of the area to either steer them towards or steer them away from because these collaborations I’ve had for years and hearing WordPress developer say, “Yeah, that’s kind of not the great path to be on.” Like I said, it just makes us so much stronger and so much better to have that. For everybody that works in whatever role they work and they own that, they’re in charge of that. I try to pretend like they’re my boss, they’re going to tell me the way it’s going to be done. All I know is what the end goal is and as long as we’re adhering to that end goal, it’s up to them how to do it.

Liam: How you get there. With that definition and with that real commitment to collaboration and support of the team, what’s the single most important thing you do to achieve that success every day?

Corey: I think probably my best role at the company is in writing the specs. I meet with the clients, I guide them on strategy, they know what their goals are, they know whether– I extract things from them like their adding segments, their goals. Most of the time, they’re not web people so I’m solving, “This is what you want to do, and this is how we can do it on the web.” And once we get consensus with the client, then I write a lot of specs for the team. It is an opportunity to collaborate on– but before the specs are written, I really work with them to make sure that anything they’re expecting is not one of those snafus. Yeah, I’d say that it’s the specs, it’s the blueprint. Because all I want them to do is do their job and not have to ask me a million questions about what did they mean here, what did you mean here. Starting off a project with real clarity, letting them break down the tasks and go from there.

Tara: I want to go back to something that you said about hiring people who are better than you and relating back to your challenge that you’re laying out specs and how you organize your company. One of the questions that we ask you’ve actually already answered even though we hadn’t asked it, which is about the piece of advice you may have been given. And when your dad told you to hire people better than you, can you talk about how you do that? Because I find in the WordPress community, there are so many amazing people that I would love to collaborate with. We have so many great opportunities to connect on Slack or social media, at WordCamps, at meetups and things like that. What’s your process in finding and hiring these great people? Can you share that with us? It sounds like you’re good at it.

Corey: Yeah, I don’t know if I can say I’m good at it. 22 years experience in the web business, I know people who know people so it’s a lot of word of mouth just how we pick up business. There’s a lot of word of mouth there. I worked with so many people over 22 years and I know this person is doing a lot of really amazing WordPress work. Typically, I’d just reach out to them and say, “Hey, I have a project that you’re going to be interested, here’s some specs.”

Tara: So they’re working with you, collaborating with you on a project basis, not as employees necessarily?

Corey: Yeah, I had a web company late ’90s, early 2000s and then I merged into another company, but we had payroll, 401k, computers. After that, I said I’ll never going to do it again, so we’re complete virtual agency which is really cool. Still, the people that I work with, they’re working full-time for me basically, but they’re free to do their own projects as well. And I tell my clients, “You’re not paying for overhead, you’re paying for actual work.” Because I don’t have to pay the front-end person if the front-end is done. And I would have to if he’s on salary.

Tara: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Then you can pay them more which inspires them to want to work with you more. That’s a smart strategy. I’ve know we’re coming up on the end here soon, but I would love to hear a little bit or have you tell people a little bit about your music. You said you were a music major in college. And actually, a lot of WordPress, a lot of developers seem to have some kind of musical background or a musical talent, I think there’s some brain connection there. Can you tell us just a little bit about what you do with music and how that’s a part of your life?

Corey: Yeah. I call myself a bass player, I played several instruments growing up and I majored in composition in college. I never finished college. The way I kind of tie it all together is the project I certainly learned the most about WordPress on launched or started in 2008, I think, maybe before that. It’s an online magazine for bass players called No Treble. And it’s pretty big now.

Liam: It’s pretty awesome.

Corey: 280,000 visits a month. It’s all for bass players, that’s it. It was the way to kind of merge all my passions into one project. WordPress, bass .. and so we have this great and growing team of contributors. It’s an online magazine, we publish a lot every day and have a great Facebook presence and all that. It’s also a lab for me. I talk to my clients a lot about the things that we learn on No Treble. Even though a lot of them don’t understand music for bass, they get the tactics and the outcome, and they think it’s kind of cool in a way, so yes.

Tara: That is cool. That’s great. Are you in a band?

Corey: No. I’m running two companies so it’s something I can’t– the bar band thing, I would love to do it but, you know, Thursday to Sunday night playing in bars and stuff like that. I’m an ‘early to bed early to rise’ guy. I’m up five in the morning.

Tara: Yeah, I know. It gets hard as we get older too especially.

Corey: I’d be getting home at four in the morning I was gigging.

Tara: Yeah, do you use to do that?

Corey: Yeah, I played a lot growing up. I love it. Like I said, if I can find a band that was full of people like me that don’t have this aspiration to gig and drive. The big joke is musicians drives a $500 car loaded with $20,000 musical equipment, 100 miles to make $50. [laughter] And the money doesn’t matter to me. I would do it because I love it but it’s a grind, and it’s too much of a grind for a guy that runs two businesses.

Tara: Yeah, I’m fascinated by the connection between web development and music because it just seems like there’s the dependence of people who both transitioned from music into development.

Corey: There’s actually a great story in the ’90s when the .com craze was happening, they couldn’t find developers. I remember reading this article where they have found that musicians were the best non-programmer candidates for becoming programmers, and it was because, if I remember correctly, reading music uses the same part of the brain as to write code, because it’s translating something that isn’t the right word.

Tara: It makes sense, it totally makes sense. My son’s studying music in school and they’re teaching him some computer stuff and I’m thrilled because I can see that he could possibly have that trajectory as well, which I make money at.

Corey: Nice fallback.

Liam: The intertwining of the mechanics of writing code, the mechanics of putting your fingers on the instrument on the right place and lifting them off at the right structure. That’s a routine and that’s a learnable thing, and it’s a skillset, it’s a knowledge base, it’s a knowledge-driven skill. But ultimately, when done correctly, it’s quite beautiful and it creates artform. I think the same can be said of code. I’m no parts developer, I’m a designer, I do almost no code these days. But the idea of a series of symbols, and commas, and semicolons ultimately deliver a beautiful web page or a web app or put astronauts in the space. That’s absolutely art.

Corey: Absolutely.

Tara: I think we need to wrap up, we just keep talking but it’s been great having around Corey, thank you so much for joining us.

Corey: It was my pleasure, Thanks so much.

Liam: Corey, before we say goodbye to you, sorry to interrupt you again Tara, can you share with us where people can find you online?

Corey: Coreyweb.com and Coreybrown.ni are two places, and of course, Notreble.com.

Liam: Excellent. And I can attest to the value of No Treble’s content. I’m a regular, if not silent visitor, and I get a lot of Youtube videos from that website.

Tara: Did Megan Trainor ruin that for you with that song? Doesn’t she have a song called No Treble?

Corey: She did. And we were five years old when that song came out and I said, “Look, I just want a penny per track.” [laughter] Thankfully, people don’t think of that song near as much but we were hearing about it every day.

Tara: Well, see, now it’s in my head and it’s probably going to be in everybody’s head who’s listening to this.

Liam: But don’t. Just go to the site. It’s beautiful, and the range of it is awesome too. I really like the content that you’re putting out on the site isn’t just this genre or that genre, it goes up and down. Thank you for all your work there, I appreciate it.

Corey: Thank you.

Tara: Bye Corey.

Corey: Thank you, bye.

Liam: Thank you.

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.

Maddy creates engaging content with SEO best practices for marketing thought leaders, and agencies that have their hands full with clients and projects. Maddy lives in Denver where she tells us she enjoys typical Denver stuff.

Website | www.the-blogsmith.com

Liam: This is Hallway Chats, where we talk with some of the unique people in and around WordPress.

Tara: Together, we meet and chat with folks you may not know about in our community.

Liam: With our guests, we’ll explore stories of living – and of making a living with WordPress.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is episode 20.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we have with us Maddy Osman. Maddy lives in Denver where she tells us she enjoys typical Denver stuff. Perhaps she’ll tell us more about that later. When not doing fun Denver stuff, Maddy creates engaging content with SEO best practices for marketing thought leaders and agencies that have their handful with clients and projects.

Liam: Hey, Maddy.

Maddy: Hey there, how’s it going?

Tara: Hi, Maddy. Good to have you on. Tell us more about yourself?

Maddy: Alright. Well, I’m definitely a work hard sort of person but I do like to play hard too and expanding on the Denver stuff that I like to do, it’s kind of funny because I was never outdoorsy before moving here. But I have since accepted the whole, you know, hiking every weekend, skiing in the winter. I just bought my first set of skies, so now I don’t have to rent anymore. And yeah, that’s kind of the gist of what I do outside of work. I also love to read, I’m an audiobook fiend. But besides that, just drawing away and on the job every day.

Tara: What brought you to Denver?

Maddy: My boyfriend’s job changed and I’ve always freelanced. So he was given the opportunity to pick from a bunch of different west coast cities, and ultimately Denver seemed to fit both of our personalities really well. For example, I love that there’s a really awesome startup scene here. In fact, this week we’re doing Denver Startup Week. I went to a couple of sessions yesterday which was really cool. His job changed and we kind of saw it as an opportunity to explore the west and yeah, for me, it wasn’t a big change just because all my work has been remote. So far, we’re not sure if we will move back. Don’t tell my mom. [laughter]

Liam: Well, maybe she doesn’t listen to this show.

Maddy: Yeah, we’ll see.

Liam: Maddy, tell us a little bit about what you do workwise. You have mentioned SEO content and the like, but get into the specifics of that. What does that mean Monday through Friday for you?

Maddy: Sure. A lot of the work that I do fits into this sort of article writing category for different companies, they could be small to medium, and even large-sized companies. I work on either a project or retainer base. For the most part, it’s creating blog content for them but it could also be website copy or even email copy. Things along those lines. And every article that I write serves an SEO purpose, as far as the blog content that I create. For different businesses that are trying to get found in search by their ideal customers, then these things are important to those types of people or these companies. And WordPress fits into most of what I do because most of the clients that I work with use WordPress. I use WordPress for my own websites and I do some web development in my work as well, it’s just not as high quantity when it relates to the other work I do, I would say.

Liam: As a writer working in WordPress, what’s your writing flow? Do you write offline and then bring it into WordPress? Do you start writing in the editor? Have you already switched over to Gutenberg? Tell us a little bit about what you do WordPress-wise when it comes specifically to writing. We’ll talk about development in a bit but let’s talk about writing first.

Maddy: My process, it probably helps to start there, is that I outline my article first, just bullet points, subheadings. And then I go in and I write my draft, then I edit the draft and present it to the client, usually in Google Docs. Some clients then ask me put it on WordPress mostly because they want me to fill out things like Yoast and add categories, upload the pictures and things like that. It really depends on the client as much overruling they want on– what I’m trying to say is how much access they give me, I guess. Some of them just like to do it themselves. For the most part, I’m starting on Google Docs or Microsoft Word, some people like it delivered that way too. But I don’t tend to use the editor, and one of my issues is when I’m transferring the file over to WordPress, and the formatting breaks, which is really annoying. And there’s some workarounds that I’ve found for that but there’s definitely improvements that could be made. But with regards to the topic of Gutenberg, I just wrote an article for Webdesigner Depo about it and it was after attending WordPress Denver this year, where they had a keynote about the topic that’s called ‘A Future of WordPress’ and Gutenberg is the huge focus on that. I think it’s really interesting that they’re essentially trying with the approval of the community to create sort of a page editor that’s built in with, what it seems like will be, more of a distraction-free flow than the current visual editor. I guess I am cautiously curious about how it will work out when it’s actually shipped as part of the core. But again, in this keynote that I was watching, Zach Cats, who’s the guy who gave it, mentioned that with this specific type of page builder functionality, it would be like backward compatible where your blocks of code would turn into HTML if you decide to switch editors or whatever. Obviously, we don’t know what it’s going to look like completely.

Liam: Stand by for more, right.

Maddy: Right. But I think it’s definitely an interesting topic and something that I’m excited to see how it develops.

Tara: Yeah, it is. And I wonder if that really would change your flow in terms of starting in a Google Doc. You probably would still do that, even if you were using Gutenberg, I would think.

Maddy: It really depends on the client, honestly.

Tara: Yeah. There’s a Google extension that allows you to sync your Google Docs to your WordPress site, you have to have Jetpack installed for that to work, but it does work on websites, and it actually works pretty well. It brings your formatting, it brings your images, it does actually work. Do you do most of your writing directly for the clients or do you go through freelancers or agencies?

Maddy: Most of it’s direct. But what I have found is that working with agencies is a nice little extra income in-flow. Of course, it depends on how the agencies value writers and freelances because a lot of the times they’re looking for people on UpWork or content mill sites where they know that these people can deliver but it might not be the highest quality article. It depends on the agency, and for me, that means a lot of betting. But there are some agencies that I work with right now that white-label what I’m doing for them and it’s a great source of income for me. And I don’t have to do any of the client management stuff, which is really nice.

Tara: Right. Where does the SEO process– you’ve mentioned in your description, you included SEO in that and when you talked about your process. I’ve seen that comes in the beginning and do you do that work or does the client give you the keywords that they want? How do you integrate that?

Maddy: It works both ways. Sometimes they’ll give me a very detailed brief that includes keywords that they’ve already identified that they want to use. And even sometimes they’ll go as far as to say how they want the keywords implemented. Like, in subheadings, this many times, this many internal links, what have you. But for the most part, especially with the smaller businesses that I work with, it’s me doing the keyword research and then implementing them on on-page factors. In some cases, some of the smaller businesses that I work with also then ask me to help optimize their website because, ultimately, if this feed sucks, if it’s not mobile friendly, if there’s any major technical issues, then it doesn’t really matter what I write because it’s on a sinking ship. So it comes full circle most of the time when I’m working with these smaller businesses.

Liam: Can you talk a little bit about how you go about business development? How do you find clients? How do you find agencies and research them as whether or not they’d be a good fit for the kind of work that you want to do?

Maddy: Totally. It’s a mix, definitely, of a lot of different factors. Referrals have always been a very good source of business for me, whether it’s from friends or happy clients. Besides that, I do go to job boards and I’ll pitch for different writing opportunities, ProBlogger, for example, is a great one. Brian Scott’s freelance writing jobs is another one that I look at every day. He sents an email newsletter. But honestly, one of the things that’s been working out really well for me recently as I’ve started to write for higher quality publications with larger subscriber bases is, if I get a bylined article and they let me write my bio and I have a link back to my site or even my Twitter, a lot of people are coming in through inbound means. It’s nice that the job that I have allows me to write about the stuff that I’m interested in and kind of the work I do every day, which helps to identify me as an authority, as an expert, somebody that people trust, because then they just reach out to me directly. That hasn’t been a huge part of my business development efforts until more recently, but I’m starting to see an uptick and it’s really nice because then I can just focus on doing what I really like to do, which is writing.

Liam: Yeah, that ducktails very nicely into what you write about professionally, what you do professionally lends itself to that kind of business development. You were kind enough to tell us about the day job and what you do, and we haven’t really gotten into development just yet. Can you just spend a couple of minutes, if you will, and tell us a little bit about what kind of development you do and how you go about doing that?

Maddy: Sure. It’s nothing super complicated. I would consider myself to be more of a front-end developer than a back-end developer. Most of the WordPress sites that I create are– I would describe them as simple, sort of like five-paged, about, service, blog, home, contact, sort of things for small businesses. I would say, more or less customizing themes for them, giving them whatever functionality that they’re looking for. One thing that I’m kind of starting to get into that’s really interesting to me is e-commerce, and I haven’t done it as client work yet but recently launched an e-commerce store that basically ties in with Printful, which is a t-shirt dropshipping app site sort of thing. And it’s built on WordPress and Woocommerce. It’s something I’m still very much experimenting with and figuring out the ins and outs of how that all works. But for me, it’s something that I hoped to one day be able to offer clients based on my own experience. I’ve been playing with things, breaking things, fixing things.

Liam: Well, we’ll have to wait for your blog posts about that process. Let me ask you about your definition of success. How would you define success in either personal or professional, maybe even both?

Maddy: Sure. I would say a lot of people define success by money. And I don’t think that that’s necessarily a bad metric to define your success by, but I think instead of setting out to be a millionaire, billionaire, have ridiculous wads of cash. I think it’s more about having enough to do the things that you enjoy, and just being comfortable, being able to go out here and there for a nice dinner, or go on vacations that you worked so hard to earn. I would say, taking that one step further, really both from a personal and professional standpoint, it’s just doing the work that you love, doing things that make you happy, that make you want to get up in the morning, that you’re excited to do, that you’re not putting off or dreading Mondays, having to leave your weekend. I think with regards to that aspect, for sure, what I’m doing right now, I feel fulfilled in what I’m doing and I feel excited about the possibilities. And I don’t know if I’m exactly where I want to be yet, but I think I’m at least on the right track. For me, that gives me a sense of fulfilment.

Tara: How would you say, how did you find this path? It sounds like a great fit for you and I’m really glad to hear you’re fulfilled and that you have that great definition of success. Can you tell us a little bit about how you chose this and it seems like you made a good choice?

Maddy: Thank you. I would say a lot of it comes down to the support of my family. And even before that, my dad was an entrepreneur so he had never ever since I was alive, he had never had a traditional job because he created his company. And when I was younger, I would go to his office after school, I’d kind of talk to different employees, and that’s when I really developed my love of web design. I was kind of a nerdy kid. I needed a good hobby to keep me busy. People at his work would help me whenever I would get stuck on different concepts, whether that be with coding or even things like Photoshop. From there, it developed into a job in college that kind of cut me in a department that was very interesting. Not like the typical college job, which was more associated with working at a desk or working in food service or something like that. Once I got this job, a boss that I had at the job mentioned that he had a client that he didn’t have time to work with who needed web development help and he recommended me. I took on that project and I think it was then that I really saw that it was possible to work for myself and make money doing it. And the fact that I had this client who was happy with what I did, who paid me. I was like, “I could do this again.” I eventually graduated school and I had two jobs that were in sales, I always saw them as my foot in the door for a marketing job that just never came. And I, call it being an annoying millennial or whatever, but I just couldn’t wait for that job to happen. Life’s too short. It’s just like, you only have so many years on this earth. I mean, I could die tomorrow, but if I did, I think I would be happy that I took this path and just gave it a try. I think that there’s a lot of people who feel that way. And I hope that they can learn from a story like mine and just, obviously, don’t just up and quit your job, make a plan, but know that you can do it. It’s totally possible. If you have skills, make use of them. If you want to learn something, tons of resources out there. This got really motivational but– [laughs]

Liam: Yeah, I love it. Your definition of successes includes a focus on finding a way to do work that you love and to build that in a way that enables you to get out and do all that fun Denver stuff with the resources that you need to do so, right? Walking up the mountain’s a little bit tough, right? It’s better to buy a Lyft ticket. Within that, what is the single most important thing you do every day to continue to achieve that success?

Maddy: Sure. I think for a lot of people in the WordPress community, you’re a freelancer, you’re working from home, and it can be very difficult to build those habits of self-policing yourself to actually do the work and do it on time, give yourself enough time to do it really well. I think that one of my habits that really helps – I can demonstrate it here – is that I write out my to-do list. I try to write the whole week in advance but I at least do a day in advance. And I kind of add to that throughout the week with different things that come up inevitably throughout the course of the week. But just kind of knowing what to expect the next day and are there any missing elements that I can take care of tonight, have somebody help me with, or anything like that.

Liam: So being organized and methodical in your approach?

Maddy: Right, being organized and having that mindset of knowing what’s next is very helpful.

Liam: Yeah, that’s helpful. It takes away some of the fear in the guesswork if we know. You mentioned the WordPress community, and let’s just circle back to that. We kind of skipped over it today. Tell us a little bit how you first heard about the WordPress community and how you got involved with it and how you stay involved?

Maddy: Sure. It comes back again to that college job, and my boss at the time was obsessed with this CMS called Silverstripe, which is like an Australian CMS, I don’t know. But eventually different clients had different needs and Silverstripe didn’t work for everybody, so we also experimented with Joomla and Drupal, and eventually, WordPress became a part of that mix. When I coded that first very simple WordPress site, that’s where it all kind of came together for me. I knew this was my CMS. It was so much easier to use than Silverstripe and the other ones too. But as far as staying in touch with the WordPress community, when I moved to Chicago as more of a full-time residence in the suburbs, I eventually got involved with some individuals who were part of the WordPress community in different little events. And then eventually, as a part of WordCamp Chicago, I spoke there, it was really cool, but then shortly after I moved to Denver where I kind of had to rebuild my network, my local business connections. Eventually, what ended up happening was I reached out to the people who were organizing WordCamp Denver. As it turned out, they needed some help with organizing. I got involved with them in terms of just helping them make sure that the website content was up to date, speakers, announcements, tickets, stuff like that. And then also, eventually, pitched a speaking session and did that this year.

Liam: Excellent, that’s awesome. That’s super awesome.

Maddy: Those were the main ways, I would say.

Tara: Congratulations. I follow you on Twitter and I’ve seen a lot of activity out there so that’s great.

Maddy: I’m a busy bee on Twitter.

Tara: Yeah. How do you find the speaking experience? Is that something that you have studied how to do that? Because I know that’s a whole another area of expertise, something else to learn how to do, especially if you’re a coder or a writer. Standing up in front of people and speaking is a whole different thing. How have you found that to be?

Maddy: Well, I’m kind of weird in terms of being a coder, being a writer, and being a very loud person in general. For me, of course, the first time is scary as hell, and you go too fast, you stumble on your words, you want to die, all those things. But I’ve found that by just trying to do it regularly, both seeking out opportunities and having opportunities brought in front of me, I just never say no, I just always if I can do it I will. That part of what I’m doing helps align credibility to myself, which is one of the main reasons why I do it, is most of the speaking gigs that I’ve taken have not been paid. Especially WordCamps, they’re not for profit sort of events. All organized and spoken by volunteers. But all that said, some of my more recent involvements have landed me paid gigs, and I’m hoping it’s the beginning of a trend because that would be an exciting new thing to add to my business.

Tara: Absolutely. I’d like to ask you a little bit about your writing. I’m curious. Not being a writer but working with writers and knowing the kind of things you do for blogs, I would imagine there’s a wide variety of topics that you cover and that you have to write about. Just curious if you want to share with us maybe some of the most interesting things that you’ve written about or how you enjoy and approach that process? I know I had a writer at work for me for a blog for a hair salon and they had to learn about a certain hair coloring technique, and then the next week they were writing about concrete. Talk about that a little bit?

Maddy: It’s definitely interesting as a writer when different types of businesses come forward asking for help. For example, I’m creating content right now for a custom padio company that does things like building firepits and outdoor kitchens and patios, obviously. It’s like, obviously, that’s not something I have experience in but I just try to become the student of the internet and look at competitors for kind of, how they’re presenting that information, what are the most important things to present, digging a little bit into the industry and just searching different concepts and trying to pick things out from there. Sometimes, it’s just interviewing with a client and saying, “I know this, this, and this, but can you fill in the gaps about this and what are the most important things about that? What would somebody want to know about this to make a decision? What are the major selling points?” Things like that. As far as topics that I write about, WordPress is one that’s becoming really big for me. I write for WPMU DEV, I’ve been writing for Pagely, and then one of my newer clients is GoDaddy in terms of the WordPress type of subject matter. Digital marketing is huge and I think, in some way, there’s overlap between the WordPress and digital marketing topics I talk about. What else? Freelancing is another one that’s really fun for me to write. There’s not always a whole lot of money in writing about it, which is kind of just typical of freelancing in general, but one that I really love to share my experience on. I’m always looking for new opportunities, especially in those top three categories.

Liam: That’s certainly a wide range of topics. That makes it fun though, doesn’t it?

Maddy: It does.

Liam: Having that diversity. Let me ask you this then. I’m going to change it up a little bit here. What is the single most valuable piece of advice, personal or professional, maybe both, that you’ve received and incorporated into your life?

Maddy: Uh, that’s a good one. One of my best friends once told me, “He who swears first loses.” Whenever you get into a fight with someone, try to curve your mouth, especially if you want to win that battle, even if it doesn’t seem like you want it. [laughter]

Liam: That’s hilarious.

Tara: Oh my goodness, I’m trying to think about whether I would lose all the time or not. [laughter] I’m not sure.

Maddy: I mean, if they swear first, then you’re allowed to swear after that but you don’t want to be the first one. And you also don’t want to get the last word in the fight because you want people to be thinking about what you would be saying. If you were to respond and just waiting indefinitely for that answer that never comes. Mind trick.

Tara: How would you say that applies to your professional life, that advice? Do you find yourself often in the situation where you want to have the last word?

Maddy: Do I want to swear at people? Going back to freelancing, every once in a while you have a client who doesn’t want to pay their invoices and I’ve been very blessed in that that hasn’t happened too often, I could probably count on one hand where there have been situations where people just have not paid their bills, and usually for one blog which I can probably spin and turn around for another client. But in situations like that, I very much would like to just lose my head at them and publicly shame them and just give them a piece of my mind. But I know that ultimately that’s not a good business practice. I think most of the time when people complain it reflects more badly on them than whoever they’re complaining about. Yeah, things like that I try to keep in mind whenever I’m about to lose it over a situation because it’s not worth my business, it’s not worth my reputation. Even if it feels good, I’d rather just let other person mouth off if they want to.

Liam: That mantra is really about maintaining control, isn’t it? Being mindful of what we say, and when we say it, and how we say it. It’s a funny way to say it, I like it a lot but being mindful is a great way to go about it. We have just a few minutes left and I want to circle back about writing because I actually am a writer and I do a lot for our clients. If you start in an offline mode like a Google Doc or a Word Doc, how do you deal with SEO type of things like Yoast, which just provides really nice checklist? And then, do you ever get into the, “Well, I wrote it this way, then it popped and then I had to make a number of edits for SEO.” How do you work that?

Maddy: I think it comes down to having sort of an internal checklist of what on-page elements I’m trying to optimize for. And, really, in the outline stage, I’m including the– both within the outline itself and at the bottom of the outline, I’m listing out what internal links I want to include and figuring out how I’m going to write that in the natural way, what external links I want to use for sources and credibility. I put the keyword at the top of the document for easy reference, and then just keep track of how many times I’m using it, is it in the subheader, have I weaved that into the title in a compelling way. Sometimes through some clients, it’s a matter of writing out the meta title and the meta description on that Google Doc so they can just plug and play NTOs.

Liam: That’s pretty comprehensive.

Maddy: Yeah. For the most part, by the time I’m putting it into WordPress, I’ve pretty much finished that process and Yoast is just my double checklist basically.

Liam: Exactly. Maddy, thank you so much for your time and insight today. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Before we let you got and say goodbye to you, tell us where people can find you and connect with you online?

Maddy: Sure. Most active on Twitter as far as social media goes, which is @maddyosman, website and portfolio is The-blogsmith.com, and if you want to check out my new tank top t-shirt dropshipping project it’s, Tanksthatgetaround.com.

Tara: That sounds great.

Maddy: Check it out.

Liam: Tanks that get around. Suitable for wearing in all sorts of fun outdoor Denver activities.

Maddy: Absolutely.

Tara: Very cool.

Liam: Thanks, Maddy, it was a real pleasure to meet you.

Tara: Thank you so much.

Maddy: Thank you, likewise.

Tara: Take care.

Liam: Thanks for the listening to the show. We sure hope you enjoyed it much as we did.

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.

Rich Tabor is a full-stack creative professional. Designer, developer, maker, and writer. He’s laid back but he’s also hard-hitting. Rich loves learning and bringing on growth through challenges.

Website | richtabor.com

Liam: This is Hallway Chats, where we talk with some of the unique people in and around WordPress.

Tara: Together, we meet and chat with folks you may not know about in our community.

Liam: With our guests, we’ll explore stories of living – and of making a living with WordPress.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is episode 19.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we have Rich Tabor on this show. Rich is a full-stack creative professional. Designer, developer, maker, and writer. He’s laid back but he’s also hard-hitting. Rich loves learning and bringing on growth through challenges.

Tara: Hi, Rich.

Rich: Hey, how’s it going?

Liam: Rich, it’s going great. Thanks for joining us today. Can you tell us a little more about yourself beyond the 25-30 words that we just heard?

Rich: Sure. My name is Rich Tabor and like I said, I’m a full-stack creative– I guess that means I pretty much wear a lot of hats. I love learning, teaching, writing, actually doing creative work and developing. I enjoy making things come to fruition and whether that’s personally or professionally, it’s all summed up into one for myself.

Tara: It sounds like you work alone or do you have an agency or employees or coworkers?

Rich: A little bit of both. I work on my own stuff. I’ve got my theme shop, ThemeBeans, where I make themes for creative professionals. I also work for Envato reviewing WordPress things on ThinkForest. I pick up clients here and there doing contract work for WordPress websites typically but that’s a little bit of, I guess, the trifecta of what I do.

Tara: Okay. Tell us a little bit about your background, where you come from and how you learned to do what you do?

Rich: Yes. I live in Northern Georgia, about an hour and a half north of Atlanta with my beautiful wife and two baby girls. I started getting into the WordPress space when I graduated college and I was studying marketing and learned design back in the old Photoshop days. Then I graduated, went into a marketing position at a local company and did only design work for them. The developers pretty soon were like, “Hey Rich, we can’t do all this. This is way out of scope, way too complicated. Way too much work.” I was like, “Okay, naturally I should learn the rules of the game.” I learned how you do a front-end design when I was there and that soon evolved into doing WordPress themes and then plugins and I just love learning so I just kept going.

Tara: What is your primary source of learning? Do you have a go-to book or a website that you use?

Rich: To be cliche, Google. I pretty much, when I’m developing or working on something new and I run into problems and google your way out of it.

Tara: And do you do some client work?

Rich: I do. I do all sorts of stuff locally, especially in a small business scene around here. I just picked up a thing to do the local school system’s websites around here, which is pretty neat because school systems have a lot of needs and their websites are not very functional or attractive, or no one really wants to pick up that type of burden. I really think serving my local community in that fashion would be pretty neat.

Liam: Yeah, the local community and being able to support it at that level, especially through the local schools is a great way to contribute to the quality of life around you. Tell me a little bit about that, the school system. Did you get a contract for the entire school district? Are you building teacher site? What specifically if you can share that with us?

Rich: Yeah, it’s for the whole school system in this region up here. It’s five or six schools to start off and then we’ll see where it goes from there. In that, there’s a lot of things like, they want to set up teacher blogs for each of the teachers. And just kind of building upon that sort of technological side of what they want to do in the school rooms, which I think is really exciting. There’s a lot of movement on that front.

Tara: You’re a full-stack and it sounds like you do everything sort of soup to nuts unicorn style. How do you find that? It sounds like a big project. Will you work on that all alone or do you have people that you contract to or partner with or something like that?

Rich: For bigger projects like this, I definitely reach out to a few people I know and kind of keep on my back burners just in case. With something this big, I do like having other eyes on it because it can easily get way overblown. Especially when you’re– I’m communicating with a bunch of people who have different ideas for what the website should be and how it should work. Part of the whole project is making them kind of come together in that. And they’re presenting an idea in a website and the functionalities that they really need in that core to what they want to do.

Liam: I agree with that point around the bigger projects and having additional people. It’s not that you don’t know how to do it or that you can’t come up with the conditionals or what’s the idea functionality, but it’s more on one person than I know how I would want to do it, but making this for an entire school system, “How do we go about doing that?” And also just the– what’s the wider experience? If I make it this way, “Oh right. If I then try to incorporate this, that creates technical challenges because of the way this system works.” Yeah, that can be tough though, to have that cadre of people around you when you are a freelancer. Would you speak how you go about building your professional network of suppliers, vendors, whether it’s developers, designers, copywriters that you know you can turn to when, “Oh, I got the big deal, I got a big project.” How did you go about building that, how do you maintain that?

Rich: Yeah, that’s a great question. A lot of the people that I’ve grown to network with and gotten to become more or less friends with, I’ve developed these relationships through online social media, Twitter usually. Even back in the day, answering questions online with people and people asking me questions. Then that sparks like a, “Hey, I’ve got this idea, do you want to work on this together?” Or I’ve got this client projects and then I’ll do something for them.” And then in the future, I might ask them to do something. Then at local conferences, even regional conferences, WordCamps. It’s great advice to just really put faces to names of people you may have never known or probably would never have met otherwise. Really, that’s how I do it.

Tara: Yeah, that’s a good thing about the WordPress community is it doesn’t have to necessarily be local but there certainly are a lot of resources locally, opportunities to meet people face to face. In terms of collaborating, it’s really easy to do that when you’re not face to face as well, so it sounds like you’ve got a good mixture there of the two. The variety of work that you do, what is your favorite thing? Your theme reviews, theme creating, client work?

Rich: It would definitely be creating themes. It’s kind of my bread and butter, that’s where I learned everything, basically. I like trial by fire so I put out a theme and five or six years ago it was terrible when I look back on it, but all those experiences and every time I released a new theme, you learn so much more. And today with WordPress standards evolving so fast and rapidly, and theme standards and plugin standards, it keeps you on your toes, it keeps you going and it’s so much fun. I love just taking an idea and doing the research and really making something great and putting it out there for others. That’s so much fun.

Tara: That takes a lot of confidence, I think. I’ve attended some talks about creating themes to be put into the repo and all that it takes to have them pass semester, and it seems pretty overwhelming. I’m sure once you’ve done a couple, you probably know where you get caught up or don’t get caught up, but have you had any experience with failing at that? Or when you say you learn from doing it, is that a painful process to learn? Is it learning the hard way when you’re putting it out there for everyone to see and compliment or criticize either way?

Rich: Yes, that’s the joy of open source. It’s good because you’re getting so many eyes to look at your stuff. But, I mean, if I was just sitting in my room teaching myself this stuff, I would never learn 80%-90% of what I learned because of the community because I’m getting eyes on it. And that’s helping me develop myself in a sense. And you said, failure is– putting the theme on the WordPress repository, it’s my first official theme. I’ve had a bunch of themes that are commercial only, and I submitted it earlier this summer. My goal for this year was to get one in there. I submitted it earlier this summer and it was torn to shreds. [laughter] It’s good though because I’ve taken that and I resubmitted it a couple months later with all the fixes. I was like, “These are all valid concerns and requests.” Then I just took all those concerns, requests, and bug fixes, and applied them to all of my things, which I would have otherwise not ever known. That’s helping me grow … it’s still in the queue waiting.

Tara: Yeah. Congratulations, that’s really interesting. I like that approach and it sounds to me like a great way to learn but it also does sound like to have a thick skin to do that. What would you say is your biggest challenge, Rich?

Rich: See, I think of work and life balance as– I don’t know, I kind of don’t really separate it. Work and life to me is the same thing because I’m passionate about work and I’m passionate about life, of course. For me, my biggest challenge is balancing the parent act with my life and with work because I’m a new parent, have a 19-month old, maybe 20-month old and a five or six-month old. Then numbers get blurry at this stage. [laughs] I’m learning this new style of living, really, of being wherever I’m being and it’s hard, it is. But like I said with the themes, it’s also challenging me to grow and the personal life, big important part of everything, which is so cool.

Tara: Yeah, and you sound like you’re passionate about what you do and working on themes and code, I know, can be absorbing and you kind of lose track of time. How do you balance that both in your time but also in your mind or, I guess, your mental health, your family health? How do you balance that do you beat yourself up when you’ve gone three hours past when you said you were going to be there working on code, if that happens to you? I know that might be familiar. How do you manage that kind of thing?

Rich: I’ve really learned to set expectations for myself, valid expectations. Things that I know I can accomplish in X amount of time. And there are the hours where something happens and you’re in a room for three more hours than you intended. But I don’t make that norm and I really, really try not to do that. Because I know even relationship-wise with my wife and I, setting those expectations are very important and even working from home, that magnifies that because I’m one room away but there’s a tornado going on downstairs because there are crying babies there. For me, it’s personally like, “Okay, what can I get done? How much time do I have to do this? I think I can do that. Okay, let’s do it.” And being hyperfocused on that because otherwise, it could lean one way or the other, I’ll get nothing done or I’ll just be away and I can’t have that either.

Tara: Yeah, focus and productivity. Those are two challenges, I think, that we all face when we’re dealing with having a family in the next room or being engrossed in passion about what we do. Related to this idea of balance, what would you say is your idea of success? We ask this a lot of people on this show, we like to hear different opinions about it. So in your personal or your business life, what would you say is your definition of success?

Rich: That is awesome, I love that question. Success to me is really, really loving what you do and just doing what you love. I guess it’s kind of the same thing but not at the same time. I just am passionate about my work, I’m passionate about my life, I’m passionate about being a dad. To me, that is success. I’m doing it and it’s fun, it’s great, it’s rewarding, it’s just success.

Liam: That’s a great definition. It’s so simple and profound in many ways. Then within that definition then of loving what you do and doing what you love kind of circle that back to then, how do you push the success of being a dad? So the time commitment, the– in a good way, right? You want to be with your children, you want to be with your wife. Versus success as a business owner, as a developer, as a designer, as a creator, and to some extent, the two can build on each other. The experiences of fatherhood and husbandry can lend themselves to success in creative shop and vice versa. But at some point, they also compete and I want to hear your thoughts about that?

Rich: Yeah, that’s great. From my two years of experience or just about two years of experience, for me, it’s spending the quality time with– in relation to success with being a dad is the quality time with the babies, it’s being there with mom and being with the whole family and just being, I guess. And in this stage we’re also starting to discipline a little bit, that’s part of life right now. For me to be a successful parent, I think that’s part of the deal. That’s it. That’s part of being successful for me is being able to learn with my wife on how to properly discipline and how to grow our children up, which is so exciting when you think about it.

Liam: It’s fantastic, it’s wonderful. It’s absolutely wonderful. Within that, then your definition in the challenges of balance, do you have systems that you’ve implemented or worked up that help you keep that balance? Whether it’s a to-do list, or timers, or a daily routine, so that when it all does hit the fan, whether the family, the girls are sick, or the client project that’s kicking off is really getting fast and furious in deadline, what kind of system do you have in place?

Rich: Yeah, I’m all about systems. When you have babies and multiple projects and different positions and you love it all, it has to be systemized. What I do is I have a Trello List that I use, I use Trello for everything, my ‘my day’ list and I just pull whatever I’m going to work on. And like I said earlier, the expectations and set reasonable objectives for what I’m getting done. I do a 15-minute ‘drive’ home from my office. I go to the bedroom and kind of just take a breather and get out of the work mode and into the home mode. I found that to be awesome because, on the days that I would go and hang out in coffee shops and such, I would come home and be energized and ready to go because I’ve had the drive home, instead of–

Liam: Right.

Tara: Or maybe because you drank coffee all day, that might help too.

Rich: That too. [laughter] But really, though, having just the few minutes to buffer the two, the work and the home life. That’s been awesome, it really has. And then also with expectations with my wife, whether you know a week ahead of time, like, “Hey baby, we’ve got this project coming up and it’s due on Friday afternoon and it’s probably going to go late or it could go late.” That way she knows to plan that and that’s how we take care of that.

Liam: Communication is key.

Rich: Oh yeah.

Liam: Let me ask you about your drive because I’ve never heard that practice before and I’m really interested by it. I would be fearful that I would go and I would just pull out my phone and surf Twitter and do that. What are you doing on your drive home?

Tara: You can’t drive and tweet. [laughter]

Rich: Right, you can’t drive and tweet. I usually just stay there.

Liam: What are you doing on your drive?

Rich: I just lay there always thinking about work, right after work, you’re not going to stop, you can’t just, “Oh, here we go.” But it is a point where I’m like, “What did I accomplish today? Did I hit all my expectations and my objectives for the day?” Okay, “Sweet, I did.” Or, “You know what? I didn’t get that one thing done. Okay, I’ll do that first thing in the morning.” That way when I’m downstairs playing with the kids, I’m not thinking of that, I’m not worrying about things, I’ve already thought about, go through a little bit and kind of gone from the developer mode or designer mode into the family mode. And no phones, like you said. If you’re just on Twitter, you’re just going to the numb state, you’re not really– you’re just absorbing, I guess.

Tara: That’s a great practice to share.

Liam: Yeah, I love it. I’m not going to let it go yet. I’ve got more questions about it. [laughter] You’re going through this mental review and I appreciate the value of that as an unwinding process. Are you bringing a notepad? You’ve just said, “Oh, I didn’t get to this today, I’ll do that tomorrow.” How are you indicating that? How are you letting your brain off the hook for remembering that? Are you quickly updating Trello on your phone? Are you writing something down? How are you respecting your drive but also a needle in your brain so that when you go downstairs and maybe you leave your phone in the bedroom and you’re committed to family time, you’re not freaking out like, “I’ve got to write that down. I’ve got to remember.” How you do that?

Rich: Right. If it’s something bigger, definitely on Trello I would just– I have a left-right system and then the ‘done’ list so I just drag stuff over and just kind of like, “Okay.” But it’s typically not anything that’s not on Trello. Like, if it’s not on Trello already then it’s something big. I’ve got to know what’s happening. Because, like I said, I’m a huge planner, I plan everything. Everything is pretty much buttoned up by the end of that period there, and then I can go downstairs and just chill. Well, when you have babies, it’s not really chilling, it’s a little whirlwind but it is nice.

Tara: It sounds like a good combination of meditation and also list making, or productivity. Liam’s question makes me think of one of my personal heroes, David Allen, who wrote a book called Getting Things Done and he talks about always having paper or a notebook with you so that when those thoughts come in your head, you can write them down so you don’t lose them. I know Liam is also a disciple of David Allen so I know where this question may have been coming from.

Liam: Absolutely, yes, you know me well, Tara. [laughs]

Tara: Yes, it’s easy to get the productivity bug when you work for yourself because it’s really important to have your systems in place or you can just kind of twitter away the day and get lost. There are lots of great tools and shiny objects and we’ve probably tried out, all of us, more than we need to but finding the one that works for you, whether it’s Trello or something else, it’s a gold mine once you find that. It really helps you be productive and ‘successful’, whatever that might mean. When you think to the future, Rich, when you think about where your business is right now and having two small children who I imagine you need to support financially to some degree, how do you manage that process in terms of thinking about your goals for your business, merging them with the goals for your family but primarily talking now about business when you look ahead, say, five years or further down the road? Do you set goals for yourself in that type of way?

Rich: Yeah, I do. It’s interesting, I guess. A lot of my goals are pending challenges, I guess, things that I really want to do. I’m like, “Okay, let’s figure out how to do that.” Like, I’m working on some course material, I’m going to do a course on mastering the WordPress Customizer because that’s kind of my bread and butter. I love making things easy for users and making things intuitive. That’s one of my goals for next year is to figure out if that’s a thing, if I’m going to do that, if it’s a viable product. And then for ThemeBeans, right now I’m just growing the customer base and it’s going awesome. The theme market, in general, is rough selling right now but I broke out from the crowd a little bit earlier which has helped me big time.

Tara: How did you break out from the crowd?

Rich: I differentiated myself through my design work and I also separated from selling on mass markets like ThemeForest and Creative Market as much, so my newer material is just solely on my website and I’ve been marketing a whole lot, studying. I studied marketing in school so I had a few tools in my bag before things went down market-wise. I have lots of emails, lots of people, lots of really loyal customers which have helped me through this rough sailing right now. I think in a year or two the market is going to be completely different again, which is cool because I think it’s moving towards a quality market. People are more educated about what it takes to have a quality theme versus a $19 theme on ThemeForest. There’s a huge difference likely.

Tara: Yeah. How does your work at ThemeBeans crossover with what you do with Envato?

Rich: I tried my best to keep it very separate but the crossovers that do happen are good, they’re educational things that I’ve learned, new ways of doing things, or better ways, or new standards, or upcoming standards. I’ve helped the folks at ThemeForest write some WordPress requirements for reviewing, so that’s been cool, that I’ve been able to be a part of that. It’s like we’re asking like why are we checking for this and is it necessary. Okay, how do we communicate that to the authors and how do we educate them on improving things. I think that’s really the only way– I really try to keep them separate mindset-wise. I don’t like to cross paths in that sense, except for the education.

Tara: This is like the elephant in the room of WordPress these days but I’ll ask you and you don’t have to talk about it for more than like a few seconds but as a theme builder– well, actually there’s two elephants in the room. I’ll ask you about how the growth of page builders is affecting your themes and also looking ahead to Gutenberg and how that will affect what you have to do going forward and also retroactively?

Rich: Those are great questions. Page builders, they have some room– they’re definitely affecting the theme market, in a good way though. I think they’re empowering users who would have had a horrible time trying to do the same stuff with shortcodes and on their own, or they would have paid someone lots of dollars to do the same stuff with probably lower quality. That’s totally okay, I’ve integrated Beaver Builder into a couple of my themes. It’s the one I tested a bunch and that’s the one I found to be the top of the line, but by integrating them it’s not in the same sense as their default modules. I set the parameters, I set rules so when they add specific modules to different locations, they already look great. It’s not like a full-on do everything you want to do, it’s more of do it within these constraints and it’s going to look awesome. And Gutenberg, I’m stoked about Gutenberg, I think it’s going to be great. It’s the revolution of shortcodes but in today’s time. I think it will be just as advantageous as shortcodes were before they weren’t there and now they were. I think that it leaves opportunity for authors and developers to add some really cool stuff to their things. That’s exciting to me. It’s like a whole another doorway that’s opening up.

Tara: I like your positive answers.

Liam: You’re a most positive guy.

Rich: It’s okay. Thanks. I think they’re just opportunities.

Tara: Sure.

Liam: Rich, let me change gears on you when I ask you a more or less signature question for us. What is the single most valuable piece of advice, either personal, professional or maybe a mix of both that you’ve ever received and incorporated into your life?

Rich: Yes, that one is good. This one for me, it’s all about being real, it’s being a human, a real person. If the internet is so easy to sit behind a screen and to never be there, to never be with your customers, never feel their pain points, to never be there to help them. It’s so easy to just be an avatar. For me, it’s about being human, being real and connecting with people, whether that’s social media, whether that’s a person at home, whether that’s at the store, or whether that’s in my support channels. It’s what kind of separates me from a lot of the competition out there in the support theme world, because I want my customers to know that when they buy a theme from me, they’re buying a little bit of me. I’m there, I’m in the theme, I’ve built it, I’m partial to helping them succeed with their website and I want them to know that. That’s the biggest piece of advice that I’ve ever seen.

Liam: How do you go about being human and real in support tickets or as part of the client project? What does that mean?

Rich: It means being empathetic, being honest and transparent. Just being who you would be if you were sitting across the table, helping them with their problems It’s taking that mentality and approaching support in a matter of, “I want to help you and I want you to learn how to help yourself too. Then we’re all going to grow, your website will be amazing. It’s already beautiful and now let’s fix these little issues we’re having and let’s kick this off.” And then making sure that they know that I’m there whenever they need me and making it easy to reach out to me.

Tara: That’s again a really positive answer. [laughter] I like that. And I’m hopeful that’s how it is most times. I would imagine that support sometimes is a rough road to travel but I think it’s kind of like anything else if you approach it with that positive pleasantness, then people have no choice but to respond to you that way. But maybe their initial reach out to you is maybe more panicked or freaking out. [laughter] Yeah. It’s important to have that positive attitude and mentality when you’re doing support, I think. Patience and all those things which sounds like you have in ample quantities, Rich.

Rich: Oh, thanks.

Liam: Your emphasis on being transparent and reliable, I would imagine that most of us would agree, if not all of us, that the world can use a lot more honesty and transparency at this point in time. Unless you’re taking that approach to your business and to your life, and to the way that you’re interacting with and loving and supporting and raising your family is promising indeed. Thank you for sharing that with us.

Tara: That’s impressive. Yeah. Our time is coming to an end, Rich, and we really have enjoyed talking to you and meeting you. Can you tell everyone else who will be listening where they can find you?

Rich: Yeah. I occasionally write on Richtabor.com. I sell my themes and you can see all my work at Themebeans.com. I’m on Twitter, @richard_tabor and I’m all over all three of those so you’ll catch me.

Tara: Great.

Liam: Rich, thanks for joining us this afternoon, it’s been an absolute pleasure chatting with you, getting to know you a little bit and hearing about you. Thanks for your time and your conversation.

Rich: Thanks guys, it’s been so awesome.

Tara: Thank you, thanks for joining us.

Liam: Bye.

Liam: Thanks for the listening to the show. We sure hope you enjoyed it much as we did.

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.

Robin is a work-from-home mother outside Chattanooga, Tennessee who ended up becoming a developer kind of by accident. She has been working with WordPress for about 10 years.

Website | https://robincornett.com/

Liam: This is Hallway Chats, where we talk with some of the unique people in and around WordPress.

Tara: Together, we meet and chat with folks you may not know about in our community.

Liam: With our guests, we’ll explore stories of living – and of making a living with WordPress.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is episode 18.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re joined by Robin Cornett. Robin is a work-from-home mother outside Chattanooga, Tennessee who ended up becoming a developer kind of by accident. She’s been working with WordPress for about 10 years and we’re really happy to have her here.

Robin: Hi guys, thanks for having me.

Liam: Hi Robin, welcome. Thanks for joining us. We heard just a little bit about you but go ahead and expand on that and tell us a little bit about yourself if you would please?

Robin: Basically I started working with WordPress about 10 years ago because my kids were old enough that I wanted to do something for a job and started my own little business and decided that I needed to have a blog as part of that. I started blogging with WordPress and just kind of gradually went down the trail of trying to figure out how to make it do more and more than what it did straight out of the box and ended up helping a friend rebuild their website in WordPress and then another, and then another. It just kind of kept going from there and here I am.

Tara: You started doing it as a hobby and as a favor, which I know happens with a lot of people who end up in the WordPress space, and then you decided you like it and can make a living from it. Can you tell us about how you make a living with WordPress?

Robin: Well, I am not the primary wage earner in our home. My income is supplemental but I kind of do a mix of client work and then in the last couple of years, I’ve started selling a couple plugins through my site so it is mostly those two.

Tara: Okay. What kind of client work do you do or have you done and how have you found those clients?

Robin: Mostly my clients and I connect through word of mouth or referrals and they kind of vary from small businesses to nonprofits and churches and a few individual bloggers here and there.

Tara: When you’re doing client work and now you’re doing your plugins, do you have a preference of which you prefer or what you’re doing more of if you had a choice? Also along the same lines or carrying that through, which is more sustainable for you?

Robin: I feel like they’re not really separate. A lot of my plugins have happened because of something that I wanted to do for a client and a solution that I ended up building for a client and then decided that I would like to be able to use it again. So I’ve extracted it out and made it into a plugin or something that I can drop into a theme – but primarily plugins, so that I could more easily reuse it on other projects. Some of them I’ve released on the WordPress Plugin Repository and people actually use them, which is a surprise to me every day – I mean, awesome, it’s neat to see that I’m able to help more than just myself.

Tara: Yeah, it’s impressive. I think that you figured out a way to carry one project, expand it into more than serving just one client, scratching that itch is how a lot of things are invented. but having the wherewithal and the interest ability and knowledge to release it out into something that other people can use, that’s an extra several steps from what I’ve seen. How did you learn how to do that? It’s one thing to say, “Oh, I’ve built this really cool thing for my client and my client loves it, it’s doing exactly what I want.” But you can’t just take that and put it into repo, there’s a lot that you have to learn how to do to expand that. Can you talk a little bit about your learning journey and how you’ve learned to code and learned to release a plugin like that?

Robin: Sure. You’re right, there is an awful lot that goes into making a plugin, especially one that you want to be able to release on the repository or through your own site and be able to update it easily for your users. And I feel like at first, I was working primarily in themes and child themes, I worked with the Genesis Framework primarily. I was doing a lot of the code just adding things to child themes and went from not knowing anything about PHP to learning that slowly but gradually. And I think the first time I figured out how to do a plugin, honestly, the hardest part was figuring out how to get it to show up in the WordPress Admin because there’s the block of header text that goes in the main readme file. And I see Liam nodding his head. [laughs] That was so hard for me to understand how to get that to happen so that the plugin would be available for WordPress to see. But once I got that, then I was able to start moving things into a plugin and started out fairly awful just because I was learning how to code from the ground up and I think one of the biggest learning experiences that I had was I contacted Gary Jones who’s a developer in the UK, and at that point he offered plugin audits as a service. And I had taken on a client project where I quickly realized that I was in over my head because they had some pretty specialized needs and I knew what I needed to make happen for them but it was all going to have to be built by me. That was a little intimidating so I got the code working and then contacted Gary and said, “I want to hire you for a plugin audit.” At that point he had two options, he said, “I can fix it for you or you can spend a little more money and a little more time and I will walk you through how to fix it.” I said, “I want to learn. Please, I will pay you more money, walk me through it.” It was incredibly helpful. It was amazing just how much I was able to get from a few hours on a Skype conversation, just walking through my own code basically line by line and getting an analysis.

Liam: That approach, Robin, of investing in your knowledge and spending an extra hour or two of a senior developer’s time to get that is an approach that I absolutely love and it’s one that we do in my consultancy where when we hire developers to do some more of the advanced code that we need, we never just have him write the code. We say, “We want you to write the code, and then we want you to budget some time to talk us through what your code does, how it does, why you chose that approach, what other approaches there could have been.” I just think that that extra hour of time, developers are 100 or 200 an hour but in terms of a learning curve, even $400 to know the process and to be able to repeat it because we understand that is great. Thank you for sharing that. One other point that I just wanted to flag up that I think is hugely important and I love that you did it is, you were in a client project, you realized you were in a bit over your head and you didn’t wait until after the deadline, you figured out a solution. Talk us a little bit about that because I think a lot of people struggle with that and they realize they’re out of their element and they’re not sure where to go. Sounds like you took a pretty proactive approach and I wonder how you came with that?

Robin: I think I was really fortunate in being able to know someone that I could contact and get that. I think a lot of times we do know that we’re in over our heads but there’s so much information available if you search, and you can search for days and then hit on the right search and realize that the first days of searching you were just looking for the absolute wrong thing, or maybe that’s just me.

Liam: No, I don’t think so.

Robin: But I think there’s just such a difference between being able to Google and answer and find something that works that you may or may not understand and having somebody walk you through and say, “Well, why did you decide to do it this way?” Or, “Do you understand what your code is doing here and do you realize that your conditional is never actually going to be true?”

Tara: Yeah. I totally agree with that and I think about that a lot whenever I’ve felt a need in my own development path to consider going back to college and getting a degree and sitting in a classroom and learning code. I always back off of that in favor of the more targeted one on one tutoring opportunities that you have in this community, either to learn for free on Google, or when it’s something that you need more attention or more enhancement with to do that, exactly what you did, which is solve the problem that you’re working on but use that as an opportunity to learn more and learn it one on one with someone. It’s less expensive than going back to school and way less of a time waste sitting there learning some things that you already know. I think that’s a brilliant approach.

Robin: I think one thing too is the revision process is really important. I’ve been thinking about that a lot the last couple of weeks because I realized that as a writer, I’m very prone to not revising. I’m a fair writer so I’ll put words on the page and then kind of give it a cursory once over and say, “Okay, I’m good.” But I realized that when I’m writing code, I get something that works and then I’ll stand hours going back through and making it more efficient and trying to figure out what could be better and what could be improved. I’m much better editing my code than my writing, but I think that’s really important because it gives you– once you get something that works, it’s tempting to stop and say, “Okay, great, it works.” But it’s better to dig through and say, “Okay, why does it work?” And, “Is this really the best way that I can be doing it? Did that guy on Google know the best way to do it?”

Liam: Can I ask you a question about that from a business standpoint? When your client asks you, “Can you add this bit of functionality to our site?” Are you, given your thoughts over the past couple of weeks, thinking that, “I know it only takes an hour to do that, I’ve done it before, I can do it for this site. It’s all a little bit of unique but it’ll be about an hour.” Are you thinking that maybe you want to budget an hour and a half of time so that you can spend that revision time, not just with the code itself, but as the code relates to that site or that project?

Robin: Well, I’m going to confess that I’m not great at budgeting time and most of my projects are not built by the hour so I don’t track time as diligently as probably I should or as a lot of people would recommend. And it depends, I feel like a lot of times the more intense revisions I’m working on are more the things that I’m doing for the plugins that I want to release for some reason or other. And when you’re offering them for free on the repository, there’s not a lot of return on your time investment, but it’s all learning so it’s all valuable, if not monetarily, at least for myself.

Liam: Yeah, great. The value of learning is difficult to put into financial terms but it’s hugely valuable in whatever ways we measure it. Let me ask you this, you have said that you don’t typically build by the hour or you don’t estimate on hourly and that you’re not good at timekeeping. I think all of us would put our hands up and say none of us are all that good at it, some are better than others but it’s a talent. But then how do you structure your billing? The client says, “Hey Robin, we would like this added to our site, it’s not currently there.” How do you figure out what to charge or what to ask for, or what the estimate might be?

Robin: If it’s a small thing that they’re coming back and saying, “We want to add in a small feature.” Then yes, generally I do build that hourly and I’ll look it over and I’ll say, “You know, I think it’s going to take two to five hours.” And usually we’ll do probably an hour on investment upfront and in those cases, I do track my time for them very religiously. And if it’s going to go over what I initially told them and they agreed to, then I absolutely let them know that I usually try to overestimate how long I think it’s going to take. But for major projects, it’s definitely like, “Here’s how much the project is going to cost.” And time is not their concern, it’s mine.

Tara: Yeah, so putting a value on your time that’s not necessarily tied to an hourly rate but on the value of your time on the project, I think that makes sense. There’s a lot spoken and written about that lately in this community.

Robin: Yes, but keep in mind I’m no business expert.

Tara: Speaking of business expertise and charging, and making money, and making a living, and having a budget for your time, paying attention to that. I know you were telling us earlier before we started recording that you live in Heaven near mountains. I’m sure you enjoy that time too. Something that we like to talk about with our guests is success and what it means to you. Whether that’s a personal thing or a business thing, or a combination of the two, how you maybe marry them together, how would you define success, Robin?

Robin: For me, I think success is being able to do what I want to do mostly when I want to do it, and still be able to be present for my family when they need me, when they want me.

Tara: Do you feel like you’re in that place? Is that what you strive for?

Robin: It’s what I strive for, I will say, during the summer it’s harder because the kids are home and they want to play board games or need to go more places than they do during the day. During the summer this year, it’s been more very early mornings so I can get a few hours of work done and then put things away and make breakfast for kids and then do things with them and maybe– it’s a handful of hours spread out in weird places over the day. But during the school year, they’re out the door and that’s my work time. And I try really hard when they come home that I’m done and not working in the afternoon or the evening unless they’re doing homework and don’t need me.

Tara: I’m very distracted by the fact that your teenagers want to play board games with you. [laughs] That’s amazing. You’ve got to grab that opportunity while you can, that’s amazing.

Robin: It’s true, it’s the younger ones who want to, the oldest does not.

Tara: Okay, thank you for clarifying that. I was starting to feel very self-conscious. I can’t think of the last time I played a board game with my kids. [laughs] That’s excellent.

Robin: I’m just telling you, don’t play Clue with my middle daughter because you will never win.

Tara: [laughs] I love Clue, that’s a great game. Robin, I’m going to switch gears and talk to you a little bit about the WordPress community. I have never met you in person, I don’t know what your involvement is with your local community so I’d like to hear more about that but I would also love to hear you talk about how much time you spend in Slack answering people’s questions? Because it seems to me that– I’m in Genesis Slack among other channels and whenever I have a question and I go there, you’re often the first one to answer it and you’re so gracious and helpful with your time with so many people. I just wonder how you budget that time and just in general your approach to the community in helping others?

Robin: You know the dogs in Up where they’re in the middle of something and then, “Squirrel.”

Tara: Yeah. [laughs]

Robin: Yeah, that’s what Slack does to me. I tend to work with Slack open and I like to see the conversations that go on there. And if I know the answer to something, I like to be able to jump in partly because I feel like I’ve received so much from the community and it had so many of my own questions answered that it seems only fair, I guess, that I should pay back forward in helping other people because there was a time where I knew absolutely nothing and could tell you what the time of day was and that was about it. And if I can answer somebody’s questions today, then I can. And ideally, I’d like to be able to answer questions with some groundwork so that people understand what it is that I’m explaining or why I’m explaining something a certain way so that they have something that they can take away as a learning tool, I guess.

Tara: What about your local community there, do you have one? Do you attend meetups or WordCamps or anything like that?

Robin: We do, we have a Chattanooga WordPress Group that is small but it’s a great group, and we are trying to grow. There are a lot of tech people in Chattanooga because we have the fastest internet in the country which is really awesome. I save a lot of time with downloads and uploads because of that.

Tara: I did not know that.

Robin: Yes. There’s a lot of tech people in the area, not necessarily WordPress related though. But we’re working to grow and we have a monthly Meetup and we’re working on it, it’s a great group, and yeah, it’s great.

Tara: In your daily life, switching gears again talking about something else that we like to ask people about, what would you say is the most important thing that you do every day? Whether it’s work related– sounds like you’re very family-oriented so I would think that’s part of your day as well. But if you were to say, to nail down one thing that you would say is the most important thing that you do every day, what would that be?

Robin: I think probably just to get on the computer and work on something, whether I’m trying to figure out a problem or make something better, or even if it’s not directly productive, if I’m writing code or trying to figure out how to make something happen, then I’m getting better and learning.

Tara: And what would you say is your biggest challenge?

Robin: Javascript. [laughter]

Tara: Are you working on learning that or is it something that you know and are trying to improve upon?

Robin: Remember, I started out knowing nothing so I’m learning Javascript, kind of kicking and screaming.

Tara: How are you learning it? Are you doing video classes or what’s your method?

Robin: Honestly, I really struggle with tutorials and classes that I can’t put my hands on, I guess so to speak. Like the tutorials that use words like foo and bar, as soon as I see that, I just have to close it and walk away because I know that I don’t understand. And I understand that that’s a programming tradition to use those bug again, this is not my background. When I’m working with my own code and breaking it– error codes are the greatest gifts because it tells me where something is broken and I can narrow my focus on what it is that’s broken. The hardest is when something is not working and there’s no indication of what it is that isn’t working. I forget what the question was but–

Liam: You answered it. I appreciate that, there’s something wrong, there’s no indication of what the problem is, where do I start, I don’t even know. That’s hugely frustrating. You just told us about your biggest challenge today being Javascript and learning that, and the struggles you’re having with that. But what is your single most valuable piece of advice, and it can be either personal, professional, or maybe a combination of both, that you’ve ever received and implemented in your life?

Robin: Goodness, I feel like I’ve gotten so much advice over the years. I think just to get in and work and keep working and keep improving, and I think back with watching my mom when I was growing up. She worked with data analysis, I guess, and she was kind of a troubleshooter for her company. And she would sink her teeth into a problem and I could just see the wheels turning in her head, even when she wasn’t at her computer. Sometimes she’d get up in the middle of the night because she had figured out what direction to go. So she would dial into– back in the day when you had to dial into the office maybe at three in the morning she’d get in and figure out how to solve that problem. And that’s something that’s really stuck with me, and maybe part of that is sometimes you just have to walk away from a problem because you can be sitting at the computer for hours, banging your head on something and not making progress, and sometimes the best thing I can do is close the computer and take the dog for a walk, which she needs anyway and I need it anyway, and a lot of times I’ll be a couple miles away from the house and went, “Oh, I know how to solve this problem.”

Tara: That’s excellent advice right there. Walk away, get your head clear and it might just come to you when you least expect it. I think that’s definitely true. I know we’re going to be wrapping it up soon but I want to ask a little bit more about something because I’ve been thinking over in my head all the things that we’ve talked about and I’m curious about and admire your interest in, as you said, revisioning and going back and improving the code. And just because it’s working, doesn’t mean that it’s done the best way. This is something that I think about a lot with website development is that there always seems to be a better way to do it. I would love to know the way, just tell me the way to do it that that’s the best practice and that’s the best way and then I know how to do it. But it seems like there are many different theories about that. How do you reconcile that with your great interest in improving upon your code? When do you stop? Because it seems like that could be an endless process.

Robin: Well, it is kind of an endless process. I think with client work, you do the best you can with what you know at the time and when the project is done, then you’re done, and you put it away. And I know that I have clients that had set up their site three, four years ago, and I would love to go back and redo it with what I know now because I know that it would be better. But they’re done and if that opportunity comes then I can redo it, but one nice thing about maintaining plugins is that I can continue to work on them and improve them. And even though I put something in the WordPress Repository three years ago, there are still things that I can do to improve it or make it more useful for people or make it better. And that has its own challenges because once you have more than just yourself using it, you have to worry about what other people have done and maintaining backwards compatibility. I see that it’s very difficult to do just in my own projects. And WordPress, in general, having such a strong commitment to maintaining backwards compatibility, you just realize how big of a challenge that really is. Continuing to work presents new problems too.

Tara: I think that’s a great answer. I think it is, I can’t imagine just the ongoing need when you have something like that, a plugin out there that you– it’s not like you’re saying like a client site, “Well, we’re done. You’ve approved this site.” We walk away and then if code changes or something happens then you rehire me to go back and fix it. When it’s your own thing, you really never are done, are you?

Robin: It’s true.

Liam: The proverbial excellent versus good enough.

Tara: that’s right. Okay, Robin, I think we’re about out of time. I want to thank you so much for joining us today. Can you tell us where people can find you and your plugins also? I know you’ve got some great plugins out there.

Robin: My website is just my name, Robincornett.com. It’s Cornett with two Ts and no E on the end. I have a handful of plugins in the WordPress Repository and one is display featured image for Genesis, and one is send images to RSS, one is scriptless social sharing which is a surprisingly hard name to say. [laughter] And there’s a handful of others. They’re all listed on my website.

Tara: Your superside me plugin, I’ve used that one, it’s a great one.

Robin: Thank you. That was one that started out as a client need and grew into a plugin.

Tara: Thank you so much again, it’s great talking with you. We appreciate you sharing your story with us on Hallway Chats, Robin.

Robin: Thank you.

Liam: Thanks for joining us, Robin. Pleasure to meet you.

Robin: Thanks, Liam.

Liam: Thanks for the listening to the show. We sure hope you enjoyed it much as we did.

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.

Russell is the lead developer at Spirited Media and works remotely from home. He has two little girls and lives outside Washington, DC.

Website | russellheimlich.com

Skateboarding Website

Liam: This is Hallway Chats, where we talk with some of the unique people in and around WordPress.

Tara: Together, we meet and chat with folks you may not know about in our community.

Liam: With our guests, we’ll explore stories of living and of making a living with WordPress.

Tara: Today’s show is brought to you in part by Liquid Web.

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Liam: Liquid Web is offering Hallway Chats listeners 33% off for the first three months. Go to Liquidweb.com and use the coupon code, HALLWAYCHATS, all one word, to sign up.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is episode 17. Welcome to Hallway Chats, I’m Tara Claeys.

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we’re joined by Russell Heimlich, the lead developer at Spirited Media. It’s a local news startup with sites in Philadelphia, Pittsburg, and Denver. Russel, hi, welcome.

Russell: Hi, glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Tara: Hey Russel, what can you tell us about yourself?

Russell: Oh, I’m just a WordPress developer that has kids, pretty much sums up my life at this stage at least.

Liam: [laughs] Can you share a little bit about how you got into WordPress?

Russell: Sure. Do you want the long story? No, let’s do the short story. One weekend, I had a website, I’ve started doing front-end development and then I heard about this WordPress thing and one weekend just sat down and just played with it and fiddled around with it. This was like 2008, I want to say, and I just took the default theme which was Kubrick at the time, and I made it match my site and eight hours later, I had figured out how to make a WordPress theme kind of look like my site. Then after that, I had a blog and I was like, “Oh, I guess I should start blogging.” So then I started blogging for a couple years and then that’s kind of how I got started with WordPress.

Tara: I love that. How did you get into front-end development, to begin with, before WordPress even came about?

Russell: I mean, it all kind of started in fifth grade I would say. I was outside my house and there was a new kind who was in school. He looked at my neighborhood and he was just kind of riding by on his bike. He was into skateboarding so me and him—he got me into skateboarding and we would be skateboarding for a long, long time. When you’re young and you skateboard all day, the next natural progression is to videotape yourself skateboarding. Then I convinced my parents to get me a video camera and they were kind of hesitant about it at first. So I got involved in just basically making skateboard videos, and then once you have skateboard videos, you need to have a way to distribute them. So I learned how to make websites via GeoCities. I had a GeoCity website. It was kind of neat because there was no YouTube back then. We actually distributed our video via peer-to-peer networks, Morpheus and Kazaa. We would just tell people, “Hey, go look for these keywords on this and download the video that way.” We had a skateboard video that got kind of popular, I guess, just by doing that. And progress, I started doing more websites. I went to college for video editing because that was really what I wanted to do. Then, by accident, I ended up doing web development and it turns out that web development pays better, it has more jobs, so I’ve been a web developer ever since I graduated college kind of by accident.

Tara: Well, since you have kids, I will say that I thought you were going to come back around and tell us that you’re now a skateboarder just like If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. Do you know that book? Your story sounded like it was going in that circular direction.

Russell: I hope so if my kids are old enough maybe I get back to skateboarding. My oldest daughter is two and a half, she’s too young to skateboard at the moment but maybe.

Tara: That’s a cool progression.

Russell: It’s kind of like my whole life, it’s kind of just being at the right place at the right time. There’s always like, something happened in the previous step which leads me to where I am today, kind of thing. It’s kind of like, if I trace it back, it’s all because of like, “Well, because of this thing, and this thing happened, and this thing happened.” There’s no way that you plan that out, it just happened that way.

Liam: The mystical stepping stones of life. Before I ask you about your current role at Spirited Media, I want to ask you, and this sounds really deep but it’s not going to be in the end, is the skateboarding video still online?

Russell: Oh yeah, the skateboarding website is still online.

Liam: Okay, that’s going to have to go into the show notes, absolutely. What’s the url for that?

Russell: Let me double check. I think it’s Mdskate.russellheimlich.com.

Tara: How old were you when you stopped skateboarding or are you still?

Russell: I mean, I could skateboard, I suppose, but I’m too old now really to be into it.

Tara: Russell – this videos is how old?

Russell: According to the web page, the last update was 11.11.2001.

Tara: Cool.

Liam: That’s going back.

Russell: That’s going back. I made this all in Dreamweaver. It’s got like a tiled blood background. This was like 1998, I would say, are some of these things. 1999, 2000, around that time. I even have—there’s an mpg version and there’s a gif version, and they’re only a hundred kilobytes different but that was a big deal back then. This was like 56k and it took a while. I think that you were probably saving—I’m really into archiving stuff. I even made a website in high school—there was this competition when I went to high school that had—it was like miss universe but it was for high school guys, I guess, and it’s called Mr. HHS. I made a website for our high school, for that. I had that one, it’s mrhhs.russellheimlich.com. It’s of the era, it’s very strange looking back at it now, but it’s a lot of fun. When I found this site, I scraped it, I archived it, and I’ve sent it around to a bunch of friends that were actually in the contest and like, “Oh, this was such a long time ago, this is awesome.” I just like storing stuff like that.

Tara: That’s great, I love that idea. I use YouTube for that. Do you use YouTube now or are you still putting things on self-hosted sites like that?

Russell: I have all the tapes back from when I was skateboarding actually in a closet right behind me here. And one of my goals one day is to digitize all of them. I probably have like 30 or 40 hours worth of video that I want to digitize and just throw on YouTube, just to have it I guess. For my daughters what I’m doing is my wife’s really into Instagram and so I built a WordPress site for each of my daughters and it scrapes hashtags for them and it creates a little archive for their sites. So it just pulls down a copy of the video or the photo and it’s like creating a scrapbook that way but it’s all digital, you can search it.

Tara: That sounds like a great business idea, you can do websites for your babies. That is a great idea, I like that.

Russell: It’s a lot of fun figuring it out. I guess these are kind of my hobbies now. When my wife was in labor, they just gave her an epidural. She passed out and took a nap and I was like, “I don’t know what I’m going to do now so I guess I’ll make my daughter a website.” Just figured it out there, got my version of it.

Tara: Very creative.

Liam: How does this creative approach, this, “I’m going to figure it out.” How does that come together when you’re on the clock at Spirited Media? What are you doing there and how does that all come together for you?

Russell: At Spirited Media, I’m the lead developer and basically, any kind of technical website issue is kind of my domain, is to figure out how to make it happen and how to align with what the editors want to do – how to make the technology part of that work for them. A lot of it is really just playing around. My whole life has really just been playing around with stuff and figuring out, taking things apart, putting them back together and just figuring out how things work. I have a degree in digital media production, which I got in college, but none of that really helped me in what my current day job, it was all kind of an accident and just kind of figuring it out on my own. If there is anything that needs figuring out, I just break it down step by step and go for it. I don’t believe in, “I need to get a class on this.” Or stuff like that. I’m always curious how things in the world work. When I drive on the road and I see big bridges and stuff, “How did people get together and decide they were going to build this massive infrastructure thing and make it actually happen?”

Tara: Russell, seeing as you are so creative and it sounds like you’re doing , as they say, scratching itches and solving problems and using your time resourcefully to develop your skills … Something that we talk about on this show is success and how our guests would define success. When you think about the trajectory that you’ve been on and what you’re looking forward to, where do you find yourself in terms of your definition of success and on that path where are you?

Russell: Sure. Yes, success. Success can mean a lot of different things in different contexts and stuff. But I think, in a general sense, if you can just get one thing done off of your list of things you need to do, then I think that considers a success because there’s way more stuff we need to do than we have time for and as long as you are making progress on something then I consider that to be a worthy success of your presence here on earth.

Tara: Is that something you approach on a day-to-day basis?

Russell: On a day-to-day basis I try to get at least one thing done. Sometimes it’s a real big struggle. And there are all these other things that come up that you track from your goal trying to get this one thing done and you just kind of roll with it. I’ve learned now as I got older that you can’t really fight a lot of things, you kind of just got to react and roll with it and make the best of it. There’s no use in trying to stop a lot of things, or get in the way of progress, I guess.

Tara: Where do you see yourself five years down the road, if you’re looking at accomplishing one thing each day? Do you have a long-term view as well?

Russell: It’s weird, I’m very long-term in terms of archiving, in terms of finances and stuff. I am into retirement savings, which sounds kind of weird to say but I enjoy that. I enjoy planning out saving, I guess. But in terms of what I’m going to be doing day to day, I hope it’s with websites and I hope it’s in media somehow. It seems to be where I ended up in my life is doing media creation so I hope that I continue doing that. In terms of long-term, no matter what I say here, I’m going to be absolutely wrong as to what actually happens. If you asked me 10 years ago, “What would you be doing?” And you said, “Build websites.” I’d be like, “That’s crazy. I don’t believe that. I’m going to be a video editor.” Look how everything turned out. I don’t know. In terms of long-term, I hope to be doing WordPress stuff and doing website stuff and just being happy doing that.

Tara: That’s good. Going back around to the day-to-day, getting something done each day, what would you say is the most important thing that you do every day?

Russell: Most important thing I do every day? Gosh, if I could name just one thing? If it’s for the website stuff, it’s just kind of being there for my team, I’d say, is the best. I have one direct report and just trying to answer questions he might have or helping him in whatever problems he might be facing. That’s something that’s very important, I think. Then, helping my wife if she has questions or needs help with something. That’s another thing I consider really important success is to help my wife with stuff that she needs and help my kids. So I guess it boils down to helping people every day, it’s what I do.

Tara: That’s a good approach. And you work from home?

Russell: I work from home, yes. I’m doing this for about two years of working remotely. Took some adjusting but I like it a lot, there’s pros and cons.

Tara: Yeah, have you ever worked for yourself or have you always worked for an agency or a company like you do now?

Russell: I never worked for myself as a primary career, I’ve done some freelancing on the side every now and then but not like, “I am working for my freelance. My job, myself, is my primary job.” I’ve never done something like that. I’ve always worked for a company or something like that. I generally enjoy when other people find the work and I do the work, as opposed to going out and finding the work and then doing the work. It’s not my favorite thing to do.

Tara: That makes sense. I think when we talk to freelancers, I’m doing that kind of work myself, you hear a lot how the actual work that you’re doing for your clients is one small part of what you have to do. You have a lot of business stuff to take care of that when you’re working for someone else, you can avoid that. There’s definitely an up sign to that. What kind of flexibility do you have working remotely in your job now?

Russell: I love the flexibility of being able to like—I can take my daughter to daycare and come home and my day doesn’t really get started until 10:00 AM and stuff. On the flip side of that, I sometimes go later or at night, on the weekends sometimes. I just enjoy being able to like, “I’m tired and I need to take a nap because I’m not productive and doing anything like that so I’ll take a nap. Because that would be a better use of my time than to try to pretend like I don’t need to take a nap and try to work through something and not getting anywhere.” The whole flexibility of being able to customize my setup and my office the way I wanted to. I painted my office myself and set everything up that way, the way I like it. I like that.

Tara: I like it too. No one else can see it but I can see it, you have very cool decor in your office.

Russell: Yeah, blue horizontal stripes, and what you can’t see is I have this octopus curtains that are out of view but my wife helped me set all that stuff.

Tara: That’s very nautical.

Russell: Custom desk here, too, yeah.

Liam: I see a Wapuu on a shelf.

Tara: Same one right behind you, as a matter of fact.

Russell: I also have a collection of Event Apart lunch boxes that I like to display because I really enjoy the conference of Event Apart. If you have the opportunity to go to that, you should check it out. It’s for people that work on the web. It has something for everyone.

Tara: Speaking of events, talk a little bit about your involvement with the WordPress community. I know that you have been involved with the DC WordPress Group. Can you talk a little bit about what that means for you and how you got involved in the WordPress community?

Russell: Sure. DC has a really thriving WordPress community. WordPress DC has been going on since at least 2010, if not earlier maybe. When I used to actually work in the city it was not a big deal for me to stay late at work and then go to the Meetup. I’d usually get there early and I’d help set up chairs and eventually I got wrangled into like, “Oh, you should be an organizer.” So I started setting up chairs and getting all the emails of all the invites from Meetup.com of all the people that were coming and stuff like that. I’ve just been involved helping any way that I can with the Meetup with my limited time and just trying to help keep it going. I know that WordPress DC Meetup was run by Leland, and Courtney, and Beth, and other people. They’re doing an amazing job and I just kind of sit on the sidelines and cheer them on from time to time. DC WordPress seems big, I think there’s over 1200 members in the WordPress DC Meetup.

Liam: That’s exciting.

Russell: It is very exciting. Yeah, a lot’s happening.

Tara: Do you interact with the community in other ways, online?

Russell: Every now and then when I have a free moment I like to go on to the WordPress stackexchange site and just look at the questions that haven’t been answered and just go through it, put my thoughts in there. I’m active in the Advanced WordPress Facebook Group so I help to monitor things that go through that and get my feedback where I can there. Just kind of helping answering questions, I think, it’s probably the best way for me to give back. There’s a lot of questions out there and a lot of people probably need help with things.

Tara: Yeah, it’s hard to find time to do that so anytime you can devote to it is appreciated by the community, I know.

Russell: Even if it’s just one question a day, that helps so much. If everyone just answered one question a day, there’d be no questions that are unanswered.

Tara: That’s a good point.

Liam: It’s always a bit of a trick to —someone shares a question or are in a setup, and because of the asynchronous way that communicates on Facebook, or on Slack, or on forums, get a question like, “Well, I can see answering it this way and this way.” And then we ask all, “How are you configured? What’s going on? What is your setup? Can you share a link so we can see the front end?” Then what I find as a struggle is by the time they get back to me sometimes, I’m buried on work and family and it takes two weeks to get back to them. Like, “Hey, we gave you the link. What’s next?”

Russell: Yeah. One thing I like about the Facebook, though, is you can see when someone’s typing so you can see what they’re answering back right away. A lot of the times it’s like, I’m just going to put my comments here and that will hopefully guide them in the right direction. Hopefully, I know a thing or two that they don’t know.

Liam: I like that. Let me ask you this. You talked about being involved in WordPress and you talked a little bit about how your career is progressing. Now that you’re with this media company, within that environment, what’s been your biggest challenge to date and how did you deal with it? Or if it’s ongoing, how are you dealing with it?

Russell: My biggest challenge? One of the things that struck me when I first joined was figuring out how—it was a technical problem, it’s website hosting. We have a dedicated web host there but I was kind of itching to do a big website deployment infrastructure rebuild project, I guess. I saw this as an opportunity to make that happen, so I came up with a written document and I figured out Amazon’s web services from scratch basically, and we made it happen. In about three or four months, we switched website hosting and now we’re cheaper and we’re more flexible for our website as we scale to more cities. That was kind of a big challenge and how we overcame it took to build something that wasn’t there before like that.

Liam: That’s pretty impressive. Would you describe yourself as more of a back-end developer, more of a sysadmin, somewhere in between? How would you describe yourself if you had to pitch your whole technical skills in some way?

Russell: I started out as a front-end developer and ever since then I’ve been getting deeper, and deeper, and deeper. I started as a front-end developer and I’ve been doing HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I learned Javascript by accident and then from there it was like, “Oh, now I’m going to do PHP development. I’m going to do PHP, MYSQL, stuff like that.” Then it turned into like, “I’m going to setup my own server now and configure server stuff. I’ve just been going deeper and deeper into that hole. I consider myself a full-stack developer because there’s a lot of knowledge where knowing how it works on the front-end can really benefit how it works in the back-end and vice versa. Seeing how everything fits together is kind of my specialty here.

Liam: Yeah, that goes back to what you said earlier about liking to figure things out. I can see that’s rolled out in your career. I think Tara had a question for you.

Tara: I was just going to make a comment that it amazes me that someone can learn Javascript by accident and I’m really curious as to how the heck that happens? [laughs]

Russell: It’s a funny story. In college, this was like 2005 or so. This is also the time when Javascript wasn’t what it is today, people would make fun of Javascript and say it’s not really a useful language. The classes at college were called Scripting 1 and Scripting 2, and Scripting 1 was CSS, so the next class was Scripting 2 and I thought, “Oh, we’re going to learn more advanced CSS stuff.” It turns out Scripting 2 was actually Javascript. And that’s how I accidentally learned Javascript because I didn’t know it was Javascript. Then, at the end of it, I had learned some Javascript. It was even weirder because I had taken Pascal programming class in high school and I kind of forgot about it. Then in the Scripting class, a lot of that stuff just came back to me. This was probably three or four years later from that and it was like, “Oh, we’re doing programming and I kind of remember this from Pascal. It’s kind of familiar.” Then from there, one thing that helped with learning Javascript or really anything was to have a—rather than sit down and say, “I’m going to learn Javascript.” It’s to say, “You know, I have this problem and I want to figure out how to make it work.” For me, I was taking photos, I belonged to a site called DeviantArt and they had this ability to sell prints and I wanted to be able to have prints in different types of sizes. I basically built this calculator that lets you build padding around the images so you can sell them at all the sizes. I did that via Javascript and it was kind of really rewarding when I actually got it working. I used Javascript to do the calculator stuff, basically. It started as a spreadsheet and looked like this web calculator thing. You could upload your image and it would figure out the dimensions and calculate all the stuff. That was kind of really neat and that was a fun way to learn Javascript as opposed to sitting down and going through exercises and just doing groundwork with it.

Liam: Would you say that you’re the type of an individual that learns by doing and by having an actual project? Rather than hearing a theory or reading the book, you prefer to dig into it and just explore and maybe google a thing or two when you really have to get your fingers onto the keyboard and a hand on the mouse to get more knowledge?

Russell: Absolutely, that’s the best way to learn is by doing, I think, and it actually informs you to then—I think by doing it a little bit, then you open yourself up to being more aware of the theory behind stuff, as opposed to just hearing the theory and then not making sense of it at all within context and then once you actually do it, it kind of makes more sense that way.

Tara: Do you find that you learn something fully or deeply when you are learning it to solve a problem, though, or do you—something that I ask myself a lot because I will have a problem and I’ll learn how to solve that one problem that I don’t end up learning the whole entire language or the whole entire package, and I just solve the problem.

Russell: Sure, yeah. I think at first, you always start to solve that one immediate problem and then you start encountering similar problems like that over and over again, and that’s kind of when you learn it deeply. Then after you’ve done it a dozen times maybe of solving the similar problem, then you think about like, “How can I go even deeper with this?” And that just leads you into this rabbit hole of going—I started front-end, and then I wanted the front-end to be a certain way so I went back-end to output the code on the front-end better. And then the back-end, I wanted to perform better so I learn server stuff. It just leads you down this path of going deeper, and deeper, and deeper until you get—it all started just with fun and trying to make markup pretty.

Tara: I think your approach in how you’ve taught yourself all of these things really shows that you like to dive deep into thing and you like to solve problems creatively, which is why you’ve been successful in solving something every day, it sounds like, Russell.

Russell: I’d say I learn something new every day. Every day is different.

Tara: That’s great. What would you say in your development from skateboarder to front-end, to back-end, full-stack, and working for different companies, people that you’ve encountered, what would you say is the single most valuable helpful piece of advice you have ever received?

Russell: Single most valuable piece of advice I ever received would probably be something that my dad said when I first started working and I had a job. He was like, “That makes total sense logically, but in the business world, it makes no sense at all.” He basically was telling me that there’s a lot of things that don’t make sense in a context of a company, or a corporation, or the business world, that probably makes sense to yourself as an individual. I guess he just prepared me that the corporate world is really weird and it doesn’t work the same way as the normal world you expect, I guess. Just preparing stuff for that, I guess. I guess it’s not really advice, it’s just kind of prepping me for what’s ahead. “Why do you do it this way?”, “Oh, we’ve always done it that was because of X, Y, and Z.” It’s like, “Oh, okay.”

Tara: Do you think that’s prepared you to approach things the way you have, which is trying to find a better solution?

Russell: It probably helps with that. Whenever someone says, “You can’t do something.” I always try to figure out a way to prove them wrong and do the thing they said I couldn’t do. Yeah, if I ever see a problem, I like to just tackle it head on and try to figure it out and not ask permission for it or wait around for someone to tell me that I should work on this problem kind of thing. It’s really just, if you see something wrong go and fix it and that will hopefully make things a lot better.

Liam: Let me ask you this if I can. Your father’s advice sounds like it was really helpful and prepared you mentally. What are you doing currently to make sure that you don’t become the employee or the corporate leader that your father warned you about? How do you avoid falling into those mental traps of ‘this is how we always do it’, ‘this is the way it should be done’, in that kind of overly strict kind of way? How do you avoid that?

Russell: I like to think that I listen to what other people are proposing or what they’re saying and try to—could speak the idea as opposed to trying to shut down the person or say I’m not interested. Being very open to feedback and being very open to what other people are thinking, I feel like I’m more aware, I have more empathy, I guess, to issues like that than other people. Trying to look at things from their point of view and seeing where they’re coming from and how we might be having a middle ground or something or where they’re coming from to see what’s influencing their statement, I guess.

Liam: I like that. It makes me ask a somewhat related but not immediately on-topic question is about the wider WordPress community. Given that it’s open source, and I’m mostly asking this to anybody listening, ourselves included, do you think as an open source project WordPress is more likely to draw in and attract people like yourself with that mindset of, “I want to hear what you have to say. I want to hear your thoughts and your views and where you’re coming to this.” Just by the very nature being open source where the code’s out there, the discussion is out there, the plans for the future are out there. The only way to move those forward together as a community is to be open to different ideas.

Russell: Yeah. I mean, yes and no. The code’s out there and you can go and take it. You can build plugins, you can extend it, you can make WordPress do whatever you want. It’s super flexible in that regard. But then in terms of, like, the whole bureaucracy of core, I guess, just like, you want to make a change so you file this ticket and then there’s a whole bunch of reasons of why it’s not going to get in and why we can’t do that. And this and that, it’s very—that part of it of WordPress kind of turns me off. It’s like participating in the wider community and trying to—I’d like to get back and do code stuff for WordPress core but there’s just a lot of politics and a lot of stuff that prevents—I just like to take WordPress and do my own thing with it, I think, and not have to worry about making this work through all kinds of different languages and all kinds of different situations, and all kinds of themes and plugins and different servers and all that kind of stuff. I like to take WordPress and do things that I want to do with it. In that regard, being open is awesome, it helps in that regard, but then maintaining that is something that—I can’t imagine how WordPress is still going. It seems very—It’s one of those mysteries, it’s like, “I don’t know how open source can work. It seems like it shouldn’t work on paper.”

Liam: Maybe it’s what your father was talking about.

Russell: Yeah.

Liam: I understand that dichotomy of the desire to create a tool that really is available and powerful for everyone to use, regardless of their cultural position. On the other hand, “I just want to use it. I want to make it my own, and frankly, my deadline is tomorrow so how do I do that?” That’s a tricky balance and I think it is one that’s likely to cost people to pull hair or stress out about. I don’t think we’re going away from that anytime soon but I welcome your thoughts on that.

Russell: Props to all the contributors that work on WordPress day in, day out.

Liam: Amen to that.

Russell: I don’t know how they do it or how they can­—it takes a special type of person, I guess I’m not that person to figure out how to make all these people agree and work together and stuff like that. I guess I’m not there yet, maybe that’s something I’ll acquire when I’m older with more wisdom.

Tara: Well, I think it takes some patience but when you have something that’s as large as this, I guess you have to have some bureaucracy built in or it wouldn’t work also.

Russell: It goes both ways, yeah.

Tara: Yeah. Russell, I’m sorry to say we’re out of time. It’s been great having you Hallway Chats. Where can people find you? And we are definitely going to include the skateboard videos in the show notes, but where else can they find you today?

Russell: My screen name is Kingkool68, that’s kool with a K. That’s pretty much I’m on the internet. No one ever told you at middle school that whatever screen name you pick, it’s going to stick with you for the rest of your life.

Tara: Is that your skateboard name, Kingkool?

Russell: That’s my skateboard name. In elementary school, I thought that was fun so that stuck with me for some reason. It’s K-I-N-G-K-O-O-L-6-8. That’s my handle on Twitter, that’s my handle on Instagram, Github. You can find me all over the internet that way. My website’s russellheimlich.com which I haven’t updated since 2006 when I graduated college. I haven’t had time to work on that. It still has a flash version so you can go check out what a flash version website looks like.

Tara: Wow, I love all the history we’re going to get when we look you up, Russell.

Liam: This is going to be awesome. I’m very much looking forward toward clicking on the links. Mr. HHS, here I come. Russell, thank you so much for joining us today, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Really enjoyed getting to know you. Thanks for sharing your time and your thoughts with us.

Russell: Thank you guys so much for having me, I hope to hear more great episodes.

Tara: Thanks a lot.

Liam: Bye.

Russell: Bye.

Liam: Thanks for the listening to the show. We sure hope you enjoyed it much as we did.

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.