Introducing Jessica Reilley
* amixofpixels.com
* instagram.com/jessreilley
Show Notes
* Jess’s business coach: De Yarrison – essentialshiftnow.com
* Original music for Hallway Chats by Brian Claeys
Episode Sponsor
Episode Transcript
Liam: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Liam Dempsey.
Tara: I’m Tara Claeys. Today we have Jessica Reilley with us. Jess is a single mom of two awesome kids. She’s a front-end developer and works exclusively with WordPress. In her free time, Jess can be found traveling with her kids in tow, hiking, taking photos, reading or connecting with others. Hi, Jess!
Jess: Hi! Thanks for having me.
Liam: Hey Jess! How are you? Thanks for joining us.
Jess: Thanks. I’m good Liam. How are you?
Liam: Very good. Very good. I’m going to acknowledge the dog in the background barking. Otherwise, it would be silly if we didn’t. The dog is around somewhere (as they are always) and that’s wonderful. Jess? Why don’t you take a few minutes and tell us about yourself?
Jess: Ok. Thank you. I can’t believe she is barking. She rarely barks. It’s great that we started up the podcast with Cocoa barking. Anyway…so I am a front-end WordPress developer. I work exclusively with WordPress. I started working with WordPress almost 10 years ago. That was in 2006 and that was for my own personal blog. I just came across the software and I thought, “This is pretty cool.” I installed it and started playing around with it. I just liked the blogging aspect of it. That’s when I first got involved.
Then a couple years later I had a friend who needed a website (a glass artist). I actually still do her website. I said why don’t we build it on WordPress? She liked it and I liked it. Back then it was really more of a blogging platform. Now it’s evolved to really be a fully all-encompassing website platform. Yes, so that’s where I started. In 2008, I had my first child and I stopped working completely at that time. Then I had my second child and I was still doing that original website. I guess what happened was I started to help out more people with WordPress. I really loved the platform. Eventually I started helping and doing web development for people that weren’t friends. I started to think well maybe this is something I can actually do for a living. I actually started jumping in full-time. I actually made my business official and I love it. It’s been my favorite thing. I get to do this every day for my job. It’s creative, it challenges me and I get to be around my kids. That’s the really awesome part. I get to see them off to the bus, and to work during the day. Then I get them off the bus every day. I love that.
Tara: That’s great. I love your story and I can relate to it a little bit too. I did a website early on for a glass artist as well.
Liam: I’m going to chime in and say I did one as well. We’re three peas in a pod there.
Tara: No! What are the odds? I appreciate also that you started out doing WordPress as a favor for people just to learn and have progressed to doing it to make a living. Tell us a little bit about how have you developed your skills? How did you learn to do what you do and evolved over the past 10 years from doing it as a hobby to having the skill level to do it professionally?
Jess: So, first off I should say my degree is in computer engineering. I have pretty solid coding background. Although, after I graduated from Penn State I worked in industry for five years. At that time,
