Hallway Chats

This was a live, in-person Hallway Chat between Topher and Vassy at WordCamp Europe 2022 in Porto, Portugal.

Vassy’s Site: https://valchanova.me/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vasvalch/

Twitter | @vasvalch

Topher: All right, what is your name? 

Vassilena: It’s Vassilena, but I use the short version Vassy. 

Topher: Oh, right. 

Vassilena: First off, it’s easier for internationals to pronounce, and also because when someone uses my full name in our language it’s almost as if they’re mad with you.

Topher: Oh, yes.

Vassilena: So like I always get the flashback of my mother saying, like, I never fix the bed or something. 

Topher: Yes, I understand. Where are you from?

Vassilena: From Bulgaria. I’m originally from Sofia, I lived there most of my life with a couple of skips here and there throughout Europe. 

Topher: All right, cool. Well, where else? Where have you lived? 

Vassilena: I lived in Leeds for half a year and I also lived in a small town called Leeuwarden in the Netherlands. It’s right north near Groningen. 

Topher: Just for fun or school or something?

Vassilena: School. Both were related to university studies and so on. But it was nice to see something different. 

Topher: Oh, yeah. And what do you do with WordPress?

Vassilena: I’m a digital marketer, and a lot of the work that I do is to help companies, either ones who are just starting out or companies that have been around for some time but they’ve mostly acquired new customers through word of mouth to make their marketing better, to have a structured plan or how to do marketing. A big percentage of that is related to content marketing. So any form of creating the blog posts or webinars or whatever form makes sense for their audience. And WordPress being in score also a content platform that’s usually where our routes connect.

I also have some clients who wanted to move to a different platform and I personally suggested using WordPress, because I know my way around it. So it will even be easier for me to help them out down the line.

Topher: Sure. 

Vassilena: But also because it’s very usable. So it’s user-friendly, people can quickly get into it.

Topher: You’re speaking, right, this weekend?

Vassilena: Yeah. 

Topher: What’s your topic? 

Vassilena: I just spoke this morning actually about building content marketing personas. So this is sort of similar to like most people have heard about buyer personas or user personas. And when I shoot that to, say, content marketing persona, that means any type of audience that consumes your content.

So this can be new people who just hear about you through your content and they might be interested in your services, or it might be existing users who get educational content from you to get better at using your product or service, or it might even be like thought leaders who are not your core target market but will learn about you and hopefully recommend you to others.

Topher: Okay. Which came first? Digital marketing or WordPress?

Vassilena: They were pretty much tied for the first part because I actually… the way I got into WordPress was through blogging. So back in my first year of university, and this is gonna, you know, diverge sort of my age, but that’s fine completely by me. Back in first year in university, we have a class on digital media and journalism. I studied in journalism school. 

So back in first year they told us about this newfangled thing called a blog. This was very interesting to me. So I just decided to create a blog and to see what all the fuss is about, with no plan or agenda. I’ve been blogging for 15 or 16 years now. 

Topher: Wow. 

Vassilena: First two were on BlogSpot but then I quickly switched over because, I mean, WordPress is better.

Topher: Do you still have those blogs? Like do you have a 15-year-old blog?

Vassilena: The original version was in Bulgarian, and still the archive of that still exists locally. Then in 2016, I switched to a new domain and a version in English. So now that’s the only place where I create content.

Topher: Gotcha. Cool. Do you use WordPress outside of work? Like do you have a personal blog or kept pictures and whatnot?

Vassilena: I think the most interesting personal use that I get was when I was… Let me see. It must have been when I was in the UK. Yeah, exactly when I lived for half a year in the UK, I created a blog for a stuffed elephant that I had with me there to share with… It was a gift from my close friends at my going away party at home. So I put it in my luggage and I started blogging from the perspective of the elephant, obviously, to just keep them up to date with what’s happening with me-

Topher: That’s really fun.

Vassilena: …outside of Facebook or whatever. 

Topher: That’s really fun. WordPress is very different now than it was five years ago. Have you liked the changes? Do you like Gutenberg?

Vassilena: I do. I find it much easier for me because I’m obviously a marketer, not a developer. So I need something that’s easy to create and easy to, you know, move stuff around, like the homepage or something like that. And I found a few really nice themes, even the one that I use for my personal website. It’s been super helpful to have like readymade blocks that you can move around, that you can repurpose on different pages, and so on. So I’m pretty happy with that.

Topher: Cool. How much practical webpage building do you do? Like do you tell your customers, “You should do this,” and they go do it? Or do they pay you to build out a website or make a webinar or something?

Vassilena: I’m not a developer as I already said. But still, I would often find some of the stuff easier to do online or with their marketing team rather than outsource to developers. So what we usually have is if it’s a new website, let’s say, there will be a developer partner who’s going to create everything, build the structure, you know, create a theme from scratch or repurpose one depending on the project.

And then when we go to actually creating different landing pages and so on, this would mostly be done either by me or I’ll be helping the marketing team, the in-house marketing team for the partner gets their hang of WordPress and continue to do that on their own.

Topher: All right. Do you have employees? Do you work alone?

Vassilena: I’m a one woman show. 

Topher: And do you like that? 

Vassilena: Yeah, I do. That’s actually one of the reasons why I went to freelancing already three years back. I was part of a company back then. And I’ve been an in-house marketer for close to 10, 12 years, something like that, by that point. And at one point I just felt that I want to take a break from managing teams because I was often liking the senior role there. So I wanted to take a step back and continue to focus on actually doing the work rather than managing people.

One of the previous bosses that I work with, he had the saying that a skillful surgeon would not always be a great hospital director. I’m more comfortable currently in the skilled surgeon section.

Topher: Are most of your clients local to you? Or do you work nationally or internationally?

Vassilena: Most of the clients are in, well, of course, a variety of regions, but mostly Northern America and Western Europe. I have very few clients that I still work with from Bulgaria. I mean, it’s also a question of, you know, the more experienced you get, the higher the rates are going to be and the more challenging the projects you want to do. In Bulgaria, the market is much less mature than I would like it to be to pause a challenge. So this is why I would most often work with international clients.

Topher: All right. Have you ever thought about living somewhere else? You can live anywhere.

Vassilena: Yeah, that’s true. Up until a few years ago, that wasn’t really an option because my husband he’s the marketing director of a big local eCommerce store. But I think that with COVID, one of the cool things is that their team also learned to work remotely and they’re getting quite good at that. So now that’s becoming more of a thing to think about.

I wouldn’t necessarily like, you know, at this point at least, consider living full-time somewhere else, but you know, spending a month in Lisbon or Porto by the way that will be great. We have this habit of going around and looking at real estate agency listings in the towns we visit. Here it’s been very interesting to see. 

Topher: Recently my kids have grown up enough that we left them. They kept our house, we moved out. My wife and I both work remotely and we’re like, “We could go anywhere.” So thank you very much for your time. It was very interesting.

Vassilena: That’s good to hear. 

Topher: I picked mostly random four people that I didn’t know, only one was a developer. Everybody else does something else, which makes me happy because there’s a stereotype that you have to be a developer or designer to do WordPress.

Vassilena: Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s true. 

Topher: I like showing that there’s a lot more to it.

Vassilena: Cool. Awesome.

Topher: This has been an episode of Hallway Chats, a part of the HeroPress Network. This episode was recorded in person at WordCamp Europe in Porto, Portugal. Your host was Topher DeRosia. We’d like to thank Sofia DeRosia for the music, and Nexcess for hosting our network. If you liked the episode, please subscribe and mention us on social media.

This episode of Hallway Chats kicks off a new era with a new co-host Nyasha Green! And this week we talk with Matt Mullenweg.

Matt Mullenweg is co-founder of the open-source publishing platform WordPress, which now powers over 40% of all sites on the web. He is the founder and CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Tumblr, WPVIP, Day One, and Pocket Casts. Additionally, Matt runs Audrey Capital, an investment and research company. He has been recognized for his leadership by Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, Inc. Magazine, TechCrunch, Fortune, Fast Company, Wired, University Philosophical Society, and Vanity Fair.

Matt is originally from Houston, Texas, where he attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and studied jazz saxophone. In his spare time, Matt is an avid photographer. He currently splits his time between Houston and San Francisco.

Matt’s Site: https://ma.tt

Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/photomatt

Twitter | @photomatt

Mike Flanagan’s post about No Sleep.

Topher: Hey, everyone. My name is Topher. 

Nyasha: Hey, my name is Nyasha. 

Topher: And this is Hallway Chats. For those of you paying attention, you’ll notice that my co-host is not Cate this week. Cate is stepping aside as co-host, and Ny will be joining me as our regular co-host in the future. Ny is the Editorial Director of MasterWP, and a WordPress developer. 

Before we get started, I want to say something about our sponsor Nexcess. They have a ton of cool features that I really appreciate. And they’re all over the marketing material. But there are some things they do especially well that I want to call out. Things like really good caching, a super great admin panel that lets me do things myself without needing to wait for support, and being able to SSH between staging servers. It’s those finely polished edges that I love so much. And right now, they’ll buy out your contract with another host, up to $200. So if you’re looking for a great host, check them out.

Our guest this week is Matt Mullenweg. Welcome, sir. 

Matt: Good to see y’all. 

Topher: Good to see you too. When I set this up, I got the time zone wrong because I didn’t realize you’d be on the West Coast. Are you just hanging out or you got a place over there now?

Matt: I’m actually right now in the mountains. I’m in Montana. 

Topher: Oh, that’s awesome. 

Matt: Yeah. I really love mountains. Because there’s something about the idea of something being so rock solid, building, foundations, the air, you know. I really like mountains.

Topher: Something you really can’t affect yourself very much. It’s just there. All right. So on the off chance that no one knows who you are, who are you?

Matt: My name is Matt Mullenweg. I was born and raised in Houston, Texas, and co-founder of WordPress with a guy named Mike Little. And later I started a company called Automattic, which has now grown to be, gosh, I think about 2,000 people that are around. 

Topher: That is amazing to me.

Nyasha: It’s awesome. 

Matt: And we make wordpress.com, Jetpack, Tumblr, WooCommerce, Pocket Cast for people looking into podcasts. We’re trying to make basically great open web stuff, stuff so good that you choose it because you like it, but then when you choose it, you make the web more free and open. 

Topher: Yeah, that’s cool.

Nyasha: That is awesome. Can I also say I am a big fan of Tumblr, by the way. I’ve been trying to get everyone to go back to Tumblr. I love Tumblr.

Matt: I’m looking at it at the moment right now. 

Nyasha: I love what you people have done. 

Matt: So I wear different hats in different years. You know, my role changes a lot. Like when Gutenberg started I was really deep into that. But right now one of the things I’m doing is I’m directly running Tumblr as a CEO. And that’s been really exciting to see this beautiful community and so much creativity thrive. It’s been fun to sort of like, as Twitter has its turbulence, to see just droves of users, hundreds of thousands per day come over to Tumblr.

Topher: Wow. 

Matt: And what we’re doing is trying to create a place for them where they can share and find stuff that enriches their life.

Topher: Do you have issues of scaling? Like, did you suddenly, “Oh, look, we have an extra half million users today. Let’s fire up another server.”

Matt: We definitely have had some of those. But fortunately, Automattic has been doing a lot of infrastructure for a long time. So we are, I would say, a deep technology infrastructure company. So we’re able to absorb quite a bit of additional… you know, because we host everything from like small blogs, all the way up to like whitehouse.gov hands-on-

Topher: Right. 

Matt: …so we can handle the very small to the very large. And that sort of security mindedness, network infrastructure, data center, points of presence, everything is definitely coming into play right now when we have this huge surge of interest. 

Topher: One of the questions I have here for you is, what does your day to day work look like? What does the CEO of something like Tumblr do? Do you get up in the morning, you sit down at your desk and you code Tumblr?

Matt: Well, so right now I’m running… This changes. So right now I am running wordpress.com and Tumblr directly. In the future, I’ll hand those off to other leaders. Right now I’m kind of hands-on with them. So that means I’m looking at products. We collaborate a lot through P2S, much like make. WordPress, where we, you know, write and read as a primary form of communication.

And I gotta tell you my favorite thing I do, I’ve done a couple of these already today, is customer calls or talking to people.

Topher: Oh, nice.

Nyasha: Awesome. 

Matt: There’s nothing better… I would say this for anyone listening. Like if your business is stalled, whatever, just, you know, spend some time with your customer to know them and see them in their space. 

Someone was screen-sharing with me today like how they manage… They were managing like 1,600 sites and they were showing me how they manage all that and use like Jetpack and other things to it. And that was really cool. And it gave me a ton of ideas for how we can make that easier and better. 

Auto updates and staged updates and backups and security and brute force protection and logins. There’s so many things we can do to make that easier. But there’s nothing like really going deep into the weeds with a customer.

Topher: You said call. Does Tumblr do phone support or you-

Matt: No. We do do… So I hack I have now that Automattic is now over 2,000 people is with all the leads of the business units to join like one customer call pretty periodically. So like Maiorana who’s the CEO of WooCommerce and myself will get together with a customer of WooCommerce and you know, those screenshare show us the admin, show us their orders, talk about what is working well, talk about what isn’t working well. 

You kind of have to go high and low. You have to move between like that really, really big picture because you have to sort of zoom out and make sure you’re heading in the right direction, that we’re making the internet more free and open place that we’re like meeting user’s needs that were aligning with our organization. 

But you gotta get down to details too. And the details being like, “Wow, that button doesn’t make any sense,” or “I was so stuck there.” Or you know, the wording of things really, really matters. And so it’s a fun dichotomy. But I really enjoy it that sort of pendulum swing between the very, very small details and the really, really wide philosophical aperture. 

Topher: Cool. 

Nyasha: Nice. So Matt, say I get back into Tumblr 2012 when I was on Tumblr, and I’m writing fanfiction, again, Game of Thrones, Doctor Who fanfiction, you’re telling me like one day I can potentially like hop on the phone with you and talk to you about that?

Matt: You might. Actually, something we do at Automattic is that every person who starts Automattic does two weeks of customer support, then every team rotates to do one week per year of customer support. Again, that’s a different version of the same idea which is, like, if something’s not working, again, go back to the people-

Nyasha: That’s awesome. 

Matt: …and try to understand their struggles and their stories. There’s nothing more rewarding, especially as a builder, someone who codes or designs or writes things, to see how someone interacts with your work and then iterate based on that. It’s really satisfying.

Nyasha: I love it.

Topher: Ny, you had a question about AI art. Just throw that out there.

Nyasha: I did. I did. I really wanted to get your opinion on this, Matt. So AI art is popping up everywhere. I think the latest viral craze is Lensa pitchers. How do you feel about the AI art hype that’s going on right now?

Matt: I think it’s pretty incredible. We’re almost living in like a sci-fi novel right now. Like we’re seeing the early versions of super intelligence is booting up, and we’re able to chat with them, with like ChatGPT or play with them with the Dall-E or MidJourney. So think of this as like interacting with the new life form.

Nyasha: Oh, wow. 

Matt: It’ll send you stuff back, you can interact, you can play, they’re learning. I think it’s really beautiful because we’re able to, you know… I’m just really excited for what it enables people to do. Because what I think of AI art is that it’s not the end state but it’s a great starter, right? 

So often you need that kindling, that thing to start the fire, if you’re a writer, or musician or something like that. And that generative process of brainstorming and coming up with ideas or trying different things, how cool is that a computer can try 30 things all at once and show them all to you? And then you can kind of browse through and be like, “Oh, that…” They could say that hits different. And you can then iterate based on that. 

What’s beautiful about this is that, I mean, basically, the entire history of humanity is us using tools to augment our natural abilities. Whether that’s like… Topher you’re glasses right now, right? That’s a tool that was created to augment our vision. There’s so much we’ve done over time. And I think of these tools as things that will augment our creativity, our ability and our production. 

Topher: That’s cool.

Nyasha: I like the vision. 

Topher: Every time I get to talk to you, one of the last things I want to talk about is technology because that’s kind of our world. I see what you write, what you say on Twitter, and anywhere, in the news, whatever. But what I see about your travels is one picture every few months on “not on WordPress”. And I’m like, “What? Is he there right now? Is this an old picture? So I have tons of questions about travel and pictures and stuff. 

Matt: Sure. 

Topher: Just the other day you posted one from Iceland. Were you there then or was that an old picture? 

Matt: Yeah. I post a lot more to my Tumblr. I try to put some of the best stuff on the matt.blog. I’ve been posting a lot more to my Tumblr, just also to try out things. I was in Iceland recently and saw the Northern Lights. I don’t usually post exactly when I’m there. Like I’ll kind of time shifts a little bit.

Topher: Oh, sure. 

Nyasha: But generally I really enjoy. The Northern Lights for me was a bucket list item. Like literally-

Topher: Aren’t they amazing? 

Nyasha: All my life I’ve been wanting to have a great experience. And just last week I really, really lucked out. I planned this trip to Iceland and the lights were out in full force. 

Topher: That’s awesome.

Matt: People from Iceland were like, “This is the strongest we’ve seen in six or seven years.”

Topher: Oh, wow.

Nyasha: Wow.

Matt: Like the moment we arrived, they were really out there. So the Northern Lights is basically the solar winds interacting with electromagnetic fields with Earth’s. It’s hard to describe. The pictures don’t look real. They look like Photoshop or CGI or something. But once you see it in person, you’re like, “Wow, it really much like a solar eclipse.” Like solar eclipses, Northern Lights, the Southern Lights as well in the southern hemisphere, and things like that, gosh. 

Whenever I find that I’m like getting a little burnt out or toasty or anything like that, it’s usually because I haven’t been in nature. And my mom always reminds me of this. She tells me three things. Like, “Are you hydrating, are you sleeping, and are you getting out in nature?” That’s her three-list thing whenever she sees me being a little off-kilter. And I like it because it’s just three things.

And usually, if I go down that list, I can find one that I’m not doing if I’m feeling off. And nature’s one of these magical things. Like WordPress, we say it’s both free and priceless at the same time. And there’s beauty at every scale. So it’s fractal. Like there’s incredible beauty in like a grain of sand or an acorn, if you like really studied and look at it. 

Sunsets, clouds, all of these things we take for granted actually have incredible amounts of beauty because they’re sort of made by natural systems, right? So like evolution create things that are naturally pleasing to our eye. And they’re very accessible.

Like obviously there’s people listening to this all over the world, and like I traveled to Iceland to see the Northern Lights. Whatever it is for you, figure out what is your thing to reconnect you to nature. Look at it right now, touch grass. It’s kind of cold outside where I am now so I won’t touch grass. But something like that is a really good reset to your system. And I find, especially if I’m like responding to people or feel like I’m kind of shocked or something.

Topher: I’m gonna time shift a sneak peek. Tomorrow’s HeroPress Essay, which people hearing this now, that will be a couple of weeks ago is by Anders Norén. And when he was burning out, he started hiking. So this next summer, he’s going to hike the entire length of the Swedish mountain range in nine weeks. 

Matt: Wow. 

Topher: And he just can’t get enough.

Nyasha: That’s incredible.

Topher: So you travel a lot. Do you travel mostly because work demands it or because you can and your work allows it? Are you traveling for fun? Like, why are you in Montana? Just because it’s pretty? If I may pry? 

Matt: I find my environment affects me quite a bit. I’m very sensitive to what’s around me. And so I travel to put myself in different modes to gravely charge myself in different ways. It’s like the energy I get from being in New York City, for example, with the art, jazz, the culture, is like, now, can I handle that every day? I don’t know. I mean, a lot of people do. 

But as a traveler, you remain the same. But as the background changes, you kind of see yourself in different lights and interact with different cultures, learn different things, hear different languages, try different food. All of this is, I think, enriching your knowledge, helping you understand that just incredible diversity of experiences around the world, giving you appreciation. And then you can start to synthesize which means like take the best parts of other things and combine them. 

And I find that innovation always happens at the intersection of disparate things. So when you’re able to take… If you think about it, actually all the way back to WordPress, WordPress was a blogging system. And I was going to start a different software, I was going to call it Content Press or something, to manage pages. So they’d be like the blogs and then they’d be like the page software.

And for a variety of reasons, myself and a lot of the developers were like, “Let’s just put this all in one thing.” Which hadn’t happened as much before. Like we’ll type out some pages. But like WordPress is really leaned into, like, let’s have the chronological stuff and the kind of permanent stuff all in one system. And what will that look like? And that worked out really well. 

It’s like peanut, butter and chocolate. Whoever thought to put that together the first time, that was a good idea. Sometimes it doesn’t work. I tried to do like avocado, peanut, butter or something, there’s something… And failure is definitely part of the creative process. 

That’s also why like, you know, I’m not big on like pylons. Like guess what? Automattic is gonna launch things that totally flop. I’m gonna say things that are totally dumb. We’re gonna make huge mistakes. But that’s part of the creative process is that you have to put things out there, try and you can iterate. But if you’re not failing, you definitely aren’t trying enough.

Topher: Right. 

Nyasha: Good advice. 

Topher: I know you have a reputation as a photographer. You are a photomatt, but I have only ever known you as a software person, company owner, or something like that. How much of your life is photography these days? Like are you the guy who always has one on your hip whenever you go to any country so you can snap anything that pops up or do you like go on specific trips just to photograph or do you just not do it much anymore?

Nyasha: I used to carry a digital SLR camera with me everywhere. It was essentially on my hands. I think there’s over 30,000 photos in my ma.tt media library. [inaudible 00:20:16] and post some things. That was really fun. And that whole process of capturing… By the way, there’s a lot of early WordCamps and WordPress. I was just doing… I just shoot wherever I was. 

And I like that because it helped me appreciate scenes, like look at things differently. And it also help me remember because my memory is not very good. Like I forget things very easily. So a photo, of course, can immediately evoke like an emotion or like the people that were there or something like that. 

Now, in the past 10 years, though, everything’s changed. Like my workflow changed. I started to be like less autobiographical, like sharing things in real time as I was doing them. Phones have gotten so good, like the iPhone.

Topher: Oh, yeah. 

Nyasha: I’ve taken photos on there. Actually, the Northern Lights photo I posted on matt.blog, that’s an iPhone photo.

Nyasha: Oh, nice.

Matt: I was not even like an SLR or anything. And that trip to Iceland was interesting because I brought the camera and the drone and all the stuff. I do enjoy playing with that. And there’s like a gadget part of me that just loves the tech side, too. But while I was there, I ended up not pulling it out. So the photo I posted was an iPhone photo.

I think there were two things. I had some friends that are really great photographers who were there. So I felt like a little bit of the role of photographer was held by someone else. So I was able to release that. But also I just kind of wanted to experience it. Because I think for a long time, you know, a photomatt, part of what I use the camera for was like I was like a security blanket because I love people intensely, like it’s my favorite thing, and I’m also like car-shy and awkward, uncomfortable with groups and things. And so the camera was like kind of a thing that would allow me to be part of a group, but also like have a little bit of distance.

I have friends who do this with dogs. Like I have a friend that carries a tiny dog everywhere. The dog is like, you know, draw some of the attention, is like something that helps them connect with others. With the cameras, that too. And then I would send the pictures afterwards. Like there’s a whole kind of playing around with it.

So I’m also just trying out to be more present. So that’s maybe not being behind the lens or in front of the lens as much, but really just appreciating the phenomenal moments as they pass. 

Nyasha: Awesome.

Topher: I’ve never had a serious camera. So I’ve come to love camera phones. And I feel like they let you have a bit of a middle ground between being in the moment and not. Because I can pull my phone out and snap a picture and put it back in my pocket in four seconds and kind of still be there, you know? 

Matt: It’s Apple’s greatest gift to humanity, the camera on these devices. And at the same time, some of the stuff too. But like Apple, they really push it. It’s so incredible. Stuff that I used to have to spend thousands of dollars or like have a tripod or process things for long amounts of times, they just now do. Like when you snap a photo, it’s actually taken multiple photos and bracketed them. 

Topher: Right.

Matt: So Automattic writes about computational photography. This is really, really, really, really powerful. And I think that it’s getting better and better. I love that as well. Because then you can just kind of, like you said, snap up moment and not be taken away from it. Because a lot of, you know, streaming… think of like a professional photographer of like a studio and lights and everything. Like how much chasing that great from the moment and the photo.

But you’ll be able to… I think we’re already there and it’s gonna get better. You can get that quality of photos from your iPhone now. Like a portrait mode, studio lights, you know, they can take out the background. You could do such incredible stuff. And then we can just enjoy life more. And we have this like infinite cloud storage and sharing. It’s pretty great.

Nyasha: Awesome. Matt, I have a question for you. Again, like a brain picker. So I am from a very small town in South Carolina. And while I’m not there, I’m still close. I am trying to bring WordPress to South Carolina to make it… Well, it’s there, of course, it’s everywhere. But I want to make it bigger. 

Our capital is not the biggest tech-friendly place. But just listening to what you said, I really relate to you saying like you’re always trying, so am I. I love your ambition and I am not afraid to fail. My first steps are, you know, we’re going to have a Columbia, South Carolina WordPress meetup group.

Matt: Oooh!

Nyasha: Yeah, I’m very excited. But outside of that, what advice would you give to me, someone who’s trying to just take a bigger thing in a smaller place?

Matt: Is that I like leading by example. I still do this to this day, you know. Like I come across a small business or something and their website is a little janky, I’ll reach out to them and be like, “Hey, here’s my email. Let me help you fix this. Let me connect you with someone who could fix this.” Just that leading by example, that little spark, it works. 

And really, it’s the whole history of WordPress. Our competitors, like Wix and Squarespace, have spent billions of dollars telling people about themselves. WordPress is really all… I mean, it’s not marketing, but it’s really like all word of mouth. Like, even you saying, like, “Hey, you want to do this thing, I got this tool, and here’s how you can use it and here’s how it can make you awesome. And the more you learn it, the more superpowers you have.”

That’s kind of the magic of education and learning and something like WordPress, which is free and open, and accessible. Literally, you can download the code, you can run it anywhere, you can run it on any host, you can run it yourself, you can run it in a web browser now. I’m going to talk about that. Like, there’s so much you could do that puts a lot of power in your hands. And I love that. 

Nyasha: Great. Well, I will be that spark there. I hope we do great things.

Matt: When you do it, also tell that person, “Hey, help someone else.” It makes it viral.

Nyasha: Oh, yeah. 

Matt: So that’s like the GPL. The GPL is called a viral license. The beauty of it is that when you teach them how to do it, also say like, “Hey, if you enjoyed this, if you see someone else that needs some help, don’t think that… wherever you are, you can always help someone else.” That’s how we got started with open-source contributions. 

The predecessor to WordPress was called v2 open-source software. And I just went to the forums to ask for help because I couldn’t figure something out. And someone answered my question. And I went back and you knows… just kind of go back and say, I went back to ask for help but I saw someone else had asked a question that I already knew the answer to. 

And again, I’m like a neophyte. I’m like brand new. And so then I just answered their question, not because I was an expert, but because someone answered my question like three weeks before. And so I was able to help. And that was really like the first step on the path that is now WordPress, was that someone that helped me and passed it along. And then that gets you more and more involved in contributing and being involved in helping out.

Nyasha: Awesome. Awesome. Thank you. 

Topher: We’re getting near the end of our time, but I have one more question. Do you have a few minutes? 

Matt: Yeah.

Topher: All right. So I put this question in as a potential for State of the Word, but it might not get picked, and I don’t want to lose the opportunity to ask it. So a strong mantra of WordPress and its general community is “own your content”. I’m curious where Tumblr fits in that philosophy because it appears to be a hosted solution. You can’t download a Tumblr client like you can download WordPress and set it up yourself. 

I know it’s important to you, to Automattic and so I can’t imagine you haven’t thought about it. So I’m curious to know where you’re going with it. How does Tumblr fit in and own your content world. 

Matt: It’s a good example of like ideals of pragmatism. Switch Tumblr to be WordPress powered. So every Tumblr is a WordPress. Tumblr is so darn big. That is most high year engineering project. You know, Rome wasn’t built in a day. So that transition is gonna take probably a few more years even from today. We’ve been working on for a few years already.

Topher: But that is a plan to make it so you could have a Tumblr on your own server?

Matt: I mean, one thing you can do is look at the… I always say vote with your wallet, you know? What are your principles? Whatever kind of world you want to see out there, support the commercial enterprises that share the same values. That’s the best thing to do. In the capitalist society, if there’s, you know, two different web hosts and one of them contributes a lot back to WordPress and one doesn’t, spend your dollars on one that contributes.

Topher: Yeah, exactly. 

Matt: That will then go back into the system, and that that’ll be the world you want to live in. So one thing we’ve tried to do with Automattic is have now 17-year history of like open web ideals and everything like that. 

Tumblr is a SaaS service right now. It’s not open source yet. But we’ve said it’s going to be and we’ve tried to make the data super open. So the API’s, you can put your Tumblr into WordPress very easily, you can export all your Tumblr content. So we’ve got some pretty good solutions for problematic and practical data portability that it belongs to. I think you need to think about like the values of… 

Because we all work with some host or we all work with some organization. So like, do they share your content moderation values? Again, at Automattic and at Tumblr, we try to foster healthy communities, have freedom of speech. So we host a lot of stuff we don’t agree with but we also try to be mindful of fostering healthy dialogue, not hateful speech or harmful things. So that’s all fine balance, right?

Topher: Yeah. 

Matt: That it’s way more complicated than it seems at first because there’s a lot of pieces. I make sure I demonstrate that. And then longer term, we want to support these new protocols like activity pub on top of… We’re gonna support RSS so things are easy to get in and out. 

We’re gonna try and unify the API’s. Because when you look at like the APIs for Tumblr, the APIs for wordpress.com, which is basically the same thing as WordPress API, they’re doing the same stuff but they’re just slightly different XML-RPC calls and things like that. So we’re going to merge those and just make it so… 

My hope is that basically Tumblr and wordpress.com, which are the two things I’m running right now, they’ll be essentially like two different restaurants that share the same kitchen. You have different vibe, different dishes, different experience, different kind of front end experience, but on the back end, you know, same great ingredients, same attention to detail, same infrastructure, same sort of stuff on the back end that makes you to be excellent. Food is actually a good analogy.

Topher: Yeah, it is.

Matt: What’s better? Italian food or Japanese food? You can’t answer that, right? They’re different. You sometimes want one, you sometimes want the other. And there are some fundamentals that are same between both. Like you want the food to be clean and healthy and raise well, all that sort of stuff. But the actual preparation, that spices and the presentation, everything, all that’d be different. So think of like WordPress and Tumblr are different front ends, the same core, good thing on the back end.

Nyasha: Gotcha. 

Topher: Well, I’m glad. That’s exactly what I was hoping to hear. I understand it’s a ton of work. You inherited a beast. 

Nyasha: Oh, yeah. 

Topher: So you can’t just… Well, you can’t treat it like Twitter. All right. We are-

Matt: I don’t sort of speak about this on tough times but gosh, we need it. I want Twitter to exist, I love Twitter. 

Topher: I know. I love it too.

Nyasha: I love it too. 

Matt: But in the meantime, maybe let’s have some fun on Tumblr. Get some more WordPress stuff going on there. I’ve been sharing some WordPress GBG stuff, which has been kind of fun. It’s fun to have just a slightly different space because software has affordances and encourages certain things more than others. Tumblr is pretty fun.

So I guess since this is a WordPress-heavy audience, I’d encourage you, sign up at on Tumblr. Think of this space you could be more creative and free without barely the constraints of having to think of your theme or your content, or you know, code, plugins, whatever. Just post. It doesn’t have to be a big post. You could just like reblog something or like share something or remix or add account. 

Topher: I don’t think I’ve seen any repost on… What was that? 

Nyasha: Reblog my fanfiction. 

Topher: That’s right. I don’t think I’ve seen any blog posts on Tumblr ever. It always seems to be a-

Matt: Topher, I’ll sent you a post. There was this movie director that wrote this amazing, amazing story about a movie he shot, like a famous movie, which is also part of his journey to becoming sober. 

Topher: Wow. Nice. 

Nyasha: Oh, wow. 

Nyasha: I was like, “Wow, this is such an incredible…” I mean, he’s a movie director so he like… Maybe we can put in the show notes.

Topher: Oh, yeah, absolutely. 

Nyasha: That’d be great. 

Matt: A good example of like a super long Tumblr. And also, if you haven’t heard of it, check out… Another example of what’s fun on Tumblr is like… Have you heard of Goncharov?

Topher: No. 

Matt: The Martin Scorsese film? 

Topher: Oh, yes, I have. 

Nyasha: Oh, yeah.

Topher: My daughters are all over it.

Matt: Here is… Actually, I got it out. Here’s the link to that great post by Mike Flanagan. 

Topher: All right. Let me get that out of chat before I lose it. 

Matt: Doctor Sleep. I guess it was like Stanley Kubrick had worked on, he was refilming or something. 

Topher: Yeah. Excellent. 

Nyasha: This is awesome. 

Matt: Topher, it was great talking to you. Thank you so much. 

Topher: Yeah, we’ve come to the end. I want to respect your time. I could talk to you forever. I have a good time every time we talk. 

Nyasha: Same thing. You’re helping my creative process. I appreciate that. Seriously we do.

Matt: Talk to you later.

Topher: Yeah. Well, bye. 

Matt: Bye. Take care. 

This episode of Hallway Chats is a little different from previous episodes. Recently Cate and Topher had the opportunity to go to WordCamp Europe in Porto, Portugal, where we had some literal hallway chats. This 4one is with Grzegorz Ziółkowski.

Piccia’s Site: https://gziolo.pl/

Twitter | @gziolo

Topher: All right. So tell me your name. 

Greg: My name is Greg Ziolkowski. But I go by Greg because it’s just easier for everyone. 

Topher: Yes. Yeah. All right. And now what do you do? 

Greg: So I work at Automattic and I also do work full time on WordPress Core, and in particular Gutenberg Project. And it’s been five years since I started contributing to Gutenberg.

Topher: Oh, very beginning. 

Greg: I mean, not start. Like a few months after that. Exactly, you know, five years ago at WordCamp Europe was that first probably demonstration of that. So like three months after that I joined the team. I was working internally at Automattic with the whole community on-

Topher: So were hired to work on Gutenberg or you moved to Gutenberg?

Greg: No. I asked to be moved to Gutenberg.

Topher: Oh, you moved. You asked.

Greg: Yeah. I mean, I just like, asked, “How can I be part of the project?” 

Topher: That’s one of the things I’ve always liked about Automattic.

Greg: I also did some contribution to other products. And it worked, and here I am. 

Topher: Great. And you’re still happy with it?

Greg: Yes, I am. It took a lot of time to realize the vision. We are slowly getting to the point where it’s something that was like planned. It’s so great to see all the talks showing, all the power of the paradigm of logs, how it works, you know, seeing the excitement about new development over block patterns, block themes. 

Topher: That’s really cool. Is there a particular part that you worked on? 

Greg: Oh, so you know, it’s been five years, so it’s been different things that are- 

Topher: What are you working on now?

Greg: Right now, also the last two months I spent as a co-lead for editor test for WordPress 6.0 release. It’s always like more about making sure that everything gets properly moved from the Gutenberg plugin to WordPress Core. But, you know, it changes. I work a lot with the ways how people can build blocks. And that applies to API’s that are exposed to both the core but also to all extenders they’re plugging out, you know, team out also. And also have to develop tools that make it easier. You know, like the transition from PHP to Java it’s quite a journey.

Topher: It is.

Greg: So we are trying to make it more straightforward so that people can-

Greg: That’s great.

Topher: …start, like plays that and end slowly, learn how to tackle double. Any sort of like what you had in the past with PHP, like when people started, they didn’t know PHP.

Topher: Right.

Greg: But also you could play, tweak things in PHP back then. I’m also PHP developer. My first job was in PHP. So I know the experience. It was so easy to work with PHP.

Topher: I’m a PHP developer and I’m not a JavaScript developer, so I haven’t made that journey yet. 

Greg: I mean, JavaScript, if you use Node.js these days, it’s like PHP as well, like on the server. But as soon as you go to the browser and all the interactivity, it’s hard even for me to catch up with everything, with CSS and getting so advanced and JavaScript trying to take parts of CSS, like animations, and even combine them together to make some nice user experiences that try to replicate what you can do on mobile phones, which drive all that, right?

Topher: Right. Yeah. 

Greg: So I know. Even for me to catch up is a-

Topher: Once upon a time, CSS was my favorite thing. But then I looked away for six months, and when I came back, it was  Sass and SCSS and Grunt and Gulp, and other PHP. 

Greg: And all the things to make sure that it looks the same in all browsers, you know, like this prefix is for Firefox, for Chrome and so on. It’s getting even more advanced these days with new specs and new features and… yeah. 

Topher: It’s hard. So where do you live? 

Greg: I live in Poland. I work from there remotely, so it’s pretty convenient. 

Topher: The thing I know most about Poland is the salt mines with the carvings. 

Greg: Oh, yeah. Wieliczka?

Topher: Yeah. Do you live near there? 

Greg: Oh, it’s like three hours away driving distance. I’ve never been there. But it’s very popular. Like most of the family members know the place. It’s just I didn’t have a chance yet. 

Topher: I used to live near a great lake in Michigan. I live in Michigan. I used to live near the beach and I never went. It was crowded with the tourists. So we talked about where you live and what you do. How long did you travel to get here? 

Greg: Oh, that’s, you know-

Topher: Did you fly or train? 

Greg: I fly. 

Topher: Okay. 

Greg: That’s a story because we went to the Baltic Sea on vacation with my family. So it wasn’t like the regular/usual route to the place. So I had to go to the smaller airport. So I had to connect two flights. So it took like eight hours maybe-

Topher: Oh, wow.

Greg: …to do the connections. But usually, when I fly from home, it is like five hours tops with one connection. I always connect in Germany because from Germany you have many connections to all the cities in Europe. 

Topher: I’ve been through Frankfurt. 

Greg: Yeah, the same.

Topher: I assume this is not your first WordCamp Europe. 

Greg: No.

Topher: No. How many have you been to? 

Greg: So I was to WordCamp Vienna.

Topher: Awesome. 

Greg: Then WordCamp Belgrade in Serbia and Borkum, Berlin. 

Topher: I was there.

Greg: And then we head to-

Topher: And now we’re here. 

Greg: …to WordCamp part of… the European part of the remote. And here we are finally.

Topher: Do you go to small local ones?

Greg: So I was twice to WordCamp Poland. I spoke once and once as an attendee. I mean, there’s one next week, but I’m inclined by doing vacation thing, so I will miss that one, unfortunately.

Topher: Cool. Are you gonna be able to come to WordCamp US?

Greg: I think I will skip this year. Although it’s a smaller one than usual.

Topher: It is much smaller. 

Greg: What’s the reason for that?

Topher: Venue.

Greg: Venues, okay.

Topher: Venues are hard to find right now that things are coming back and everything’s booked.

Greg: Everyone wants to book. I’m not surprised to hear. Here it was so nice to see all the familiar faces.

Topher: Yeah. But it’s on the beach.

Greg: I know. Also flying from Europe to California is a super long flight.

Topher: Super long. I did East Coast to Sydney one time. That is super long flight. 

Greg: Super long. 

Topher: All right. I appreciate your time. It’s nice getting to know you. 

Greg: Happy to chat.

This episode of Hallway Chats is a little different from previous episodes. Recently Cate and Topher had the opportunity to go to WordCamp Europe in Porto, Portugal, where we had some literal hallway chats. This one is with Piccia Neri.

Piccia’s Site: https://designforconversions.com/

Twitter | @Piccia

Topher: So I have heard your name pronounced seven different ways today. So first order of business, state your name.

Piccia: Pea-cha. 

Topher: Pea-cha. 

Piccia: Like peach with an A at the end. And it’s quite interesting. Like for you and me, English Italian, is quite innocuous but you know… I was printing out again the pass today because I couldn’t print it yesterday for some reason, and there was one of the guys behind the desk that was just really, really chuckling. And I was like, “You’re from Slovakia?” He’s like, “Yeah.”

And then in Spain, it means the opposite of what it does in Slovakia. And now I now live in Spain. But the way you pronounce this, the way it’s spelled because I’m Italian, it’s not a name in Italy either. I mean, you know, we could go on. But in Spain, they read it Pik-cia. So I tell them Picsy and then… yeah. Anyway, so Pi-cha. Like peach with an A at the end. 

Topher: Piccia.

Piccia: Yeah.

Topher: Cool. I like it. What does it mean? 

Piccia: It doesn’t really mean anything. But if it does mean anything, it’s small, tiny.

Topher: Make sense. Cool. So I was asked to pick some people to interview, and I deliberately picked people I did not know except for you because I only know you a little bit. And I found that interesting. And I would like to know more about you. So what do you do with WordPress?

Piccia: I am a designer. I don’t actually build that many sites anymore, but my mission is to get everyone in WordPress to be design-led and an accessible design-led as well. 

Topher: Sure.

Piccia: That’s become my mission. Because what I find very interesting is that, what do we do with WordPress? We build products, we build experiences, we build websites. There’s very little talk about design and there’s very few designers even in a WordPress environment, if you think about it. So it should be entirely design-led but isn’t it.

And that’s really interesting to me. I think that’s a limitation, I think it should definitely be a design-led because I think ever since I started doing this or I started… because I started using WordPress in… I think my first blog was 2009. It was called One Sketch a Day. I would post a drawing a day.

Topher: I remember those.

Piccia: Because it was pre-Instagram. And then when Instagram happened I just didn’t do it. I don’t know why, but anyway… So that’s when I first started playing with it but I wasn’t very involved in community. 

And then when I really saw the gap, I was like, “No one’s talking about design, this needs to be done.” Because sometimes you would see talks about CSS, and it’s like, Yeah, but that’s not a design, that’s a tool. It doesn’t matter. I mean, something completely different when I talk about design. It’s a mindset. It’s a work process. It’s many things but it’s hardly ever talk about styling. And that’s what people think when they think about design during the speaking.

So I saw this real gap. I saw this hole in the community. I mean, there’s a few people… Tammy Lester talks about design, but just very few other people. So I started with that. And then it’s now sort of slowly, not so slowly anymore, moving into accessibility. Because there’s very little of that as well.

Topher: Accessibility is design in itself.

Piccia: Yes, exactly. And everybody should start from that. But again, it goes back to my concept of design as, first of all, structure. And then when you think about accessibility, you start from structure. It’s a mindset. And to me design is a mindset. So it just works really well with my whole philosophy. It was a big digression from your original question. which was what do you do with WordPress?

Topher: No, I don’t think it was a digression at all. I think that’s perfect. Are you in freelance? Do you work for a company?

Piccia: I am currently freelance. I am looking for collaborations, in fact. Part-time collaborations are perfect for me. I was with Cloudways for a while, for two and a half years, something like that, maybe three, which was great because we did a lot of content creation that meant interviewing people that had something to say that I thought mattered.

And my point always was to promote good design—design that is inclusive. I mean design and marketing as well because they work together. So good user experience, good marketing, good ethics. And actually, yeah, I think ethics is a big issue as well and getting to marketing, and so on. So yes, so I am-

Topher: Freelance but looking. 

Piccia: But, yeah, looking. Very, very, very curious to see what happens next.

Topher: I have been a developer for a long time, five years ago, our process was to have a designer create design and hand that to a front end developer who turned it into HTML and CSS. And then that would go to me as a back end developer and I would turn it into WordPress. And it was very flexible. The designer was free to do anything, and we would just turn it into web.

Now with Gutenberg, I’m finding that most themes and block groups and all that have their own opinions about design. And as long as you stay within those opinions, they’re easy to use. You drag and you have a fade and you slide in you have a curve, and you drag and drop widgets. 

But if you try to go outside of that, if a designer says, “Well, I don’t want this, my block doesn’t do it,” I don’t know how to do it anymore. Are you finding any issues now with really custom design in Gutenberg? Or is it not being a problem for you? 

Piccia: I’m not. And I tell you why. Because my way of conceiving a project is completely different from what you described to me. That would never happen. Because to me, I mean, I’m not saying that everybody should be in the room, that the clients that should necessarily be in the room. But the designer and the developer plan together, they’re in the same room. So that will not happen. 

Like, for instance, right now I’m leading… we’re nearing the end of the rebuild of the websites for an Italian museum, which they are very, very proud of that digital content because they digitalized all their catalog. So they’re not doing printed catalogs anymore. They’re like, “That’s the catalog.” And it’s incredible the wealth of material that they have. But you can imagine how organizing all that content, how hard. 

And also they’re a very interactive museum in terms of what they do, their events, their initiatives, and so on. So there was a lot going on. But the developer, who they said it’s an agency that love Gutenberg. So the team was me doing the UX, lots of art historians, curators doing the content, a UX writer, and a design team, a design agency who don’t really know the web. I mean, they do design for the web, but I’ve noticed that they’re creative more than.

And we were in the same room for a long time, I mean, virtual room. So that never happened. Because first of all, the new UX writer structured the content excessively. So we have all the headings and everything styled the way… not styled but you know, structured the way it should be. Anything that needs to be styled rather than, you know, is given the appropriate tag. Why? Because I had a discussion with a developer and I told the designers, “you have to consider all of this when you design the pages.” 

The developer is doing everything by block so that the museum team is going to be trained so this staff can create their own content within limits because we don’t want for that mess to happen. So that’s exactly what I mean. 

What you just described, I’m sure that it worked fine for you but that’s not been designed-led. Being design-led is… because done like that designers should not be left on their own either. Because these, you know, I had to stop these people. There were things that the designers would do that showed me, proved to me that the interaction design is not their first thing. So I’d have to steer them in the right direction and did the developer.

So I would always ask the developer, “Can we do this? What do you think?” For instance, that we wanted to do accordions? And I said, “I know that there’s a way to make accordions accessible, but otherwise, screen readers have a hard time with accordions. And the developer said, “Yes, don’t worry, I can do that.” 

But there was always this conversation going on. And we worked at the sitemap together, because the sitemap also has accessibility consequences, and so on. So it was never going to happen that the designer would say, “I don’t know how that block works.” 

But it’s interesting that you bring that up, though, because I think that Gutenberg, in certain ways, has made WordPress less easy. It’s loved by developers but not by that many other people. 

Topher: As a developer, I’m not in love with Gutenberg at all because I do feel limited. I don’t know JavaScript. So I don’t know how to make my own blocks, and at the mercy of whatever my theme comes with, or whatever block pattern I borrowed or bought, or whatever, I have, in a number of occasions, used Gutenberg to get close and then open my CSS editor and beat it to death. 

Piccia: Yeah, exactly. And that’s not what it’s… that’s not-

Topher: It’s not the way it’s supposed to work. 

Piccia: No, it’s not tidy. 

Topher: So I have found that to be difficult. 

Piccia: Correct me if I’m wrong, my feeling is that Gutenberg has… because with all the page builders, I think we got to a stage where I mean developers were right. I mean, a lot of sites built with page builders are a mess. You know, mostly they are. 

And I think that we all know it. And we’re like, “Yeah, sorry, I’m in a hurry, I need to do this. I don’t have the budget. I don’t have the knowledge, so I’ll just do it this way. My client doesn’t have the budget, I do it in Beaver Builder.” At least Beaver Builder is one of the sort of the better ones. 

And now we’ve gone back the other way again, and now we really depend on developers. I think that in a way, that’s good but not everybody has the budget. But we still have the Page Builders anyway. So it was still fine. But I have to say that, because with this project, I had the luxury of having an incredibly good developer on the team who also knows about design and who is super knowledgeable about accessibility, who completely understood what I wanted. I could see why Gutenberg is so good. 

And I didn’t go into the project thinking I wanted to use Gutenberg. It wasn’t even a discussion. He told me how he would use it, and I was like, “That’s it.” But then now we’re going back to developers having more power, maybe so we should be. But just as long as we can work together… And I actually think that developers should learn about the UX process and understand it a bit better because it’s a mindset in my view.

Topher: We need more WordCamp training.

Piccia: Yeah. I mean, totally. I’ve got courses, I’ve got… In fact, one of the things that I do and that I love doing and that works super well is coaching for agencies. Because the reality of many… I mean, maybe not the VIP agencies, the big the bigger ones, but I would say the majority of WordPress agencies maybe have designers, but they work in the way they were described or they are completely the last wheel, you know, the cork. And therefore they get handed a brief and they go, “But I can do this. This is not right. This is not going to work. This is not good UX, and whatever.” And they get really frustrated.

So what I do is… You know, maybe there’s a design team, but it’s a small team made of very young designers who don’t know how to make their voices heard. So what I do is I give coaching. The coaching package that I have is six seats on my course. I have a big UX course that includes UI as well and coaching. 

So I’ll meet with the agency team and we either talk about topics or they can tell me that, for instance, they more and more to say, “Can we have a session about accessibility?” And it’s incredible how little… how we go over their site and I go, “Aaah.” I mean, I am getting I guess better and better on accessibility. I’m actually launching an accessible typography course that starts from structuring content, which I think is essential part of the Gutenberg. 

Topher: That’s cool. That’s really cool. 

Piccia: Another digression, but they’re-

Topher: They’re not digressions. This is exactly what I wanted. 

Piccia: Good.

This episode of Hallway Chats is a little different from previous episodes. Recently Cate and Topher had the opportunity to go to WordCamp Europe in Porto, Portugal, where we had some literal hallway chats. This one is with Sofie Couwenbergh.

Sofie’s Site: https://letmewritethatdownforyou.com/

Twitter | @SCouwenbergh

Topher: So what is your name?

Sofie: I’m Sofie Couwenbergh.

Topher: Where do you live?

Sofie: I live in Lisbon. I’m from Belgium originally, but I moved to Lisbon two years ago.

Topher: So you didn’t have to come very far?

Sofie: I did not have to come very far. I had to take a three-hour train ride.

Topher: Okay, I was gonna ask you about the train.

Topher: Are the trains nice?

Sofie: There’s different kinds that you can take. One from Lisbon to Porto. You can take one of like the first ones, and that’s quite comfortable.

Topher: Nice.

Sofie: Although it advertises Wi-Fi, but it doesn’t really work. So it’s always a little bit when you think there’s gonna be Wi-Fi and it’s there for two minutes, and then it falls out. That’s worse than when there isn’t anyway, right?

Topher: Yes.

Sofie: You just keep trying.

Topher: You keep trying. That’s terrible. So I have a few questions. What do you do? But also what brings you here?

Sofie: So I do two things. I mainly at the moment do content strategy and writing for businesses in digital marketing. So I work with companies such as Meet Edgar, which is a social media scheduling tool, Paperbell, who has accounting software for coaches, but also with agencies like email marketing agencies, SEO agencies. So for them, I do blog strategy and the actual writing as well as optimization.

Topher: You do this freelance?

Sofie: I do this freelance, yeah. I have my own company and I have a few freelance assistants working for me.

Topher: Oh, nice.

Sofie: So self-employed I would say. That’s my main gig. But I also run a travel authority site on WordPress. I’ve been doing that for 10 years.

Topher: What is travel authority?

Sofie: Well, like a big travel blog, let’s say. Not just an affiliate site, but a proper travel blog. So I used to do a lot of marketing campaigns for tourism boards, for travel brands, etc. And I guess that’s where my journey with WordPress started. Because the first version way back in 2012, I had to figure everything out myself, and I did like to design myself the most basic coding, you know, like changing the color of boxes and things. But now I have a developer who helps with those kinds of things, and I have a custom site.

Topher: Excellent. Do you still travel a lot for that?

Sofie: Well, the pandemic kind of put a stop to that. So the story is that I kind of… “grew sick” is a bit big word, but grew out of travel blogging, I’d say, or I wanted to do something different or mid-2019. But it was also the most successful time for the travel blog, I would say. So it just seemed crazy for me to drop that or to start something else while it was doing so well.

And then COVID came. And whilst it was horrible in so many ways, for me, it was a great opportunity to go and do something else because travel just crashed. I lost 90% of my income with that business. So I very quickly decided, “Okay, this is my opportunity to launch something new,” which I’ve been doing since. And the travel blog is now… Like I use it for passive income. So now it just runs on affiliate marketing advertising.

Topher: Sure.

Sofie: And I have some people help me keep it up to date.

Topher: You are not the first person I met that started with a travel blog and doesn’t really do that anymore.

Sofie: Well, yeah. I still do it. I mean, I’m trying-

Topher: Another friend doesn’t do it at all.

Sofie: I briefly contemplated selling it, so I kept it up to date. And then I thought when travel picks up again, then I might sell it because it was taking up so much brain space.

Topher: Sure.

Sofie: But it is starting to take off again. And I’m like, “actually, this is a good asset to hold on to. Let me see how I can keep it going.”

Topher: And if you start going to WordCamps again.

Sofie: Could be interesting. So to come back to your question if I still travel a lot, at the moment, I’m mostly enjoying exploring Portugal. Because I moved here two years ago, but because of the pandemic, even travel within Portugal was a bit harder. So I’m really enjoying exploring different regions here. And I think travel will start picking up again now.

This was nice to be able to do my first in-person conference again within Portugal. And what brings me here is that… Well, actually, I’ve known about WordCamp for several years already because I’m a WordPress user. But I always thought like, “I’m not techie enough to go speak there. I don’t know… You know, like that’s not my scene.”

But then one of my clients actually kind of motivated me and pushed me and was like, “You know, just apply for a workshop and see what happens.” And I got in. And then the fact that it was in Porto was an additional benefit because I kind of want to expand my network. I’m used to going to digital marketing conferences, SEO conferences, not as much these types of conferences. And it’s so nice to meet people who do things that I don’t know anything about. But perhaps in the future, we could work together on something.

Topher: Absolutely. So this is your first one?

Sofie: It’s my very first one.

Topher: They’re all like this.

Sofie: That’s good. That’s good. Then I’ll be back.

Topher: They’re all not like this. The small ones are also very much fun, but obviously not the grand scale.

Sofie: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Topher: But I’m really glad you’re here. There’s a stereotype that WordPress is all developers and designers. And one thing I’m happy about this interview is that it’s representation. I’m gonna put out a website that here’s a person who’s not a developer or designer still making a great career with WordPress.

Sofie: And I’m thinking now that all of my clients use WordPress. So even when I’m doing client work, I’m working kind of with WordPress every day.

Topher: Sure.

Sofie: And I see the different types of plugins that they’re using, what their setup is like, if they have a custom design, or if they use something like Elementor. So that’s interesting.

Topher: That is cool. My wife has spoken at WordCamp and her topic was how to be in WordPress and not be a developer or a designer?

Sofie: That’s funny.

Topher: Because she is neither, and they appreciates.

Sofie: I was surprised yesterday as well. At the start of my workshop, I asked how many people were actually in content. Because I was a bit worried beforehand I had no idea who would be in the audience.

Topher: Sure.

Sofie: And more than 50% of the people in the audience were in content in some kind of way. So I was like, “Okay, that’s interesting.” I had not expected that.

Topher: It’s a very easy way for people who aren’t developers or designers to make a career with WordPress. I mean, if you’re a writer, there you are. You are in.

Sofie: True. True. I think there’s so many people who just use it, right? And “just” it’s not the right word. But like you don’t have to actually be creating it to work with WordPress every day. As a user, it’s such an important tool in your kit to have.

Topher: I’m a developer and I often lose track of the fact that the purpose of WordPress is not development. That’s all I use it for is to build things. And it’s fun. My wife had the same attitude for a long time, because that’s all I did with it. She’s a writer. And she was like, “Well, I wish I could read stuff on the internet.” And I’m like, “I have a tool. Maybe you could do it.”

It could change your whole mindset to think that, oh, WordPress is a writing tool. It’s not a toy that developers build on for fun. So we as developers we often have to stop and remember we’re building a tool for content creators.

Sofie: For end users.

Topher: For end users, yeah. That’s important. So how much do you actually use it every day? Like how much part of your life is it?

Sofie: Good question. I work on my own website even if it’s just like maybe one or two hours a week. So that’s on WordPress. And then for clients, I would say it depends. Most of the writing I do just happens in Google Docs or tools like Ahrefs for SEO research. But when I do an audit, when I start working with clients and checking their setup and checking, especially their blog setup is always part of the process. So it’s really hard to say like, oh, every week, I spent so many hours within WordPress because it’s different from week to week.

Topher: Is there a particular part of WordPress that makes it better than other tools? Or is it just as a whole this is the best? Like, is there one thing you need get in there like, “Oh, I get to use this thing today?”

Sofie: To be honest, because it was when I started blogging, again, 10 years ago, but this was the standard, I think I briefly looked at… I don’t know if it was Wix at some point, but there was kind of like no question about what to use. And within those 10 years, I’ve never felt like I needed something else. So I’ve never used anything else aside from WordPress because I don’t feel the need and maybe that’s a good answer to your question that whatever I need is there. And if it’s not there, and you know, there’s someone who’s gonna create something that I can add on and it’ll be fine.

Topher: WordPress is very different now than it was in 2012. It’s with Gutenberg, yes.

Sofie: Which I do not like.

Topher: You do not like. I was gonna ask you if it’s made it better or worse.

Sofie: I am a very strong fan of the classic editor in blogging. So this is maybe going to sound weird but I write my articles in HTML. Very limited. But I will not write a title and then select h2 heading. I will write the h2 tag and write the title and close the h2 tag. So for me, it was super easy to just write my article in a Google doc, do copy-paste in text editor and I was done, my article was done.

And now I have to click on all of these blogs, and I need to add all of these things, and I need to check that it’s… And I open the code and there’s just so much extra that I don’t need there to be. And I’m sure if I work with it, I’ll get used to it, because I’m actually using it now for the blog that I’ve launched for my business or my content business. I’m using it because my developer was like, “You know, at some point you will need to switch. You will need to switch.”

But I can really see the benefit of it for a lot of people. For me, it’s just… I don’t know, it adds a bit more clutter, I think, to my process. So that’s why I’ve held off the boat. But I realized I will have to switch at some point.

Topher: I felt very much like you for a very long time and kind of still do. But I’ve been forcing myself to use it because at some point I’m going to have to switch. And I’m more comfortable with it now than I used to be. And it is getting better as time goes on. It’s better now than it was a year ago.

Sofie: Yeah. I just wish we had a choice.

Topher: Yeah. You can install the classic editor plugin.

Sofie: Sorry.

Topher: You can install the Classic Editor plugin.

Sofie: I have it. Yeah, mostly. Yeah. I have over 600 blog posts in two languages on my travel site. So I’m not very keen on switching those over.

Topher: What do you use for multilingual?

Sofie: WPML.

Topher: Okay. Are you happy with it?

Sofie: Yeah. In general, I’m happy with it.

Topher: How does translation happen?

Sofie: I do my own translation.

Topher: You do your own?

Sofie: Yeah. So the travel side is in English and Dutch. I’m native Dutch-speaking, so I do both.

Topher: Okay.

Sofie: For like content strategy, I work solely in English. But being a travel blogger who was based in Belgium previously, it just made sense that on that language, it really broadened my market, and it also made it much easier for me to get client work.

And during the pandemic, for example, because my English audience is mainly American, the audience kind of fell away because they were not traveling to Europe anymore. But I still got to maintain that Dutch and Belgian audience.

Topher: Did you see the WPML folk who are upstairs?

Sofie: I did not.

Topher: They have a booth.

Sofie: No way!

Topher: Yeah.

Sofie: I walked the expo area yesterday so I must have missed them.

Topher: They are right next to Polyglots, which is another plugin.

Sofie: Oh, I did see Polyglots. I must have missed that WPML. I was quite busy. Okay, I’m going to go there. I’ve been using them since, I want to say, 2013, 2014.

Topher: Oh, wow.

Sofie: Yeah, a long time. And I know that they have a lot of options for working with translators. What I really like is that they now implemented the option to work with DeepL. I don’t know if you know DeepL.

Topher: Mm-hmm.

Sofie: So I much prefer DeepL over Google Translate.

Topher: Oh, yeah.

Sofie: And that is something that I have considered maybe doing in the future, translating everything also into French or into German just to widen the audience without recreating content.

Topher: That’s really great. I think we’re gonna wrap it up so that the next group can come in.

Sofie: Okay, cool.

Topher: Thank you very much for your time.

Sofie: Thank you for the questions. I enjoyed it.

Topher: Very nice getting to know you.

Sofie: Awesome, thank you.

Aurooba Ahmed is a freelance WordPress developer and contributor.

Aurooba’s Blog: https://aurooba.com/

Twitter | @aurooba

Topher: Hey everyone, my name is Topher.

Cate: And I’m Cate.

Topher: And this is Hallway Chats. Before we get going, I want to thank our sponsors at Nexcess, a Liquid Web brand. They have some new tools for eCommerce that really make them stand out from other options. WooCommerce automated testing, Sales Performance Monitor, and Plugin Performance Monitor give you data you need to stay powerful and profitable. And they’re free with every Nexcess plan.

Okay, our guest today is Aurooba Ahmed. Welcome.

Cate: Hey, Aurooba.

Aurooba: Hi. Thanks for having me. Hey, Cate.

Topher: Did I get the… not accent… the emphasis, right, on your last name? Is it Ahmed?

Aurooba: Yeah, that works. I would say that it’s more about the emphasis on the first name where it’s Aurooba, not Aruba. It’s A-U.

Topher: Ah right. It is an A-U.

Aurooba: It is.

Topher: I’m looking at the spelling. For those of you that are just listening, it’s A-U-R-O-O-B-A.

Aurooba: It’s pretty common.

Topher: So no relation to the island.

Aurooba: No relation at all. And yet I have heard that song many, many, many times.

Topher: I don’t know the song.

Aurooba: Aruba, Jamaica, oh I wa-

Topher: Oh, the Beach Boys. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Aurooba: My gym teacher, the first time he read my name off of the attendance list was like… He didn’t read my name. He just sang the song.

Cate: That’s got to be exciting.

Aurooba: It gets old after a while but I love it.

Cate: I mean, it is a positive association. I mean, I would happily be associated with a Caribbean island where people go on vacation and have a good time. So I mean, there are worse facilities, yeah.

Aurooba: 100%. Very true.

Cate: And do you live in Aruba? Like are you in Caribbean island?

Aurooba: Oh, I would love to go there one day, but I’m in Calgary by the Rockies in Canada.

Topher: That’s cool.

Cate: And is it warm and tropical there?

Aurooba: Only in my mind.

Cate: Right.

Topher: We realize the Rockies are close to Calgary.

Aurooba: Oh, it’s like less than an hour away from my house. I can see the mountains from my bedroom window.

Cate: Nice. Awesome.

Aurooba: Mm-hmm. But it is not tropical here. It is very cold right now.

Topher: One of the first things we’re going to ask is who you are and where you live and stuff like that. So now we know you’re in Calgary.

Cate: And we know she is Aurooba.

Topher: Yes.

Aurooba: That’s true.

Topher: Have you always lived in Calgary? Are you a Calgarian?

Aurooba: Oh, no, I am not a Calgarian, although I met a Calgarian yesterday. They are a rare breed. I was born in Pakistan, but I never lived there. I spent my childhood in Saudi Arabia in a small port town called Yanbu by the Red Sea. And then we moved to Toronto, Canada, when I was 10.

Topher: You even say it like Torono.

Aurooba: Oh, I did live there. We moved there when I was 10. And then my dad got a job with an oil company in Alberta in a small town called Fort McMurray, where the oil sands are. And we moved there when I was 15. And then I went to university in Edmonton. Then my parents moved to Calgary partway through my university career. And eventually I also ended up here because I want to be close to them.

Cate: Yeah, that sometimes happens. It must have been fun moving from Toronto to Alberta when you were 15. I’m guessing it was-

Aurooba: It was a culture shock. Fort McMurray at the time was not a place that you would equate with diversity.

Topher: I’m sorry, did you say Canada?

Aurooba: Yeah. I mean, it was small but rich because of the oil sands. Then my family was, I guess, part of this influx of people who were coming there because of all the jobs, and so then suddenly became very, very diverse and very, very quickly.

Topher: Oh, that’s cool.

Aurooba: So it was a very big adjustment for the city, it was a big adjustment for us, for everyone. It was very interesting.

Cate: Again, another fun thing to be dealing with at 15.

Aurooba: So fun. The stories I could tell.

Cate: I will buy you a drink and you can tell me all about it.

Topher: I’ll ask about the diversity of Canada, but I have to say Toronto was the most diverse city I’ve ever been in.

Aurooba: It is very, very, very, very diverse. Before the pandemic, we went to Toronto at least once a year. We have a lot of family there. I go once a year and yet it is so drastically different every single time. I mean, in terms of the people-

Topher: From the previous time you mean?

Aurooba: Yeah, yeah. Every time it’s like something has changed in a way that is so obvious that it’s like, “Oh, but it has only been a year. How has this happened? I do not know. This does not compute.” So it’s a pretty cool place.

Topher: That’s cool.

Aurooba: Yeah.

Topher: I have wanted you to do here, as I say, for a long time. And I totally respect why not. But the story is interesting. And so-

Cate: No shame. There’s no shame here.

Topher: No shame. Not at all.

Cate: There’s a lot of things he wish I would have done over the last 25 years that I haven’t done, and I feel no shame about it whatsoever.

Topher: So how did you get into WordPress.

Aurooba: I already knew how to code in HTML and CSS. But then when I was in grade 11, my dad started up a nonprofit in Fort McMurray, and they need a little website. And he needed to be able to edit it himself, at least a little bit. And so I was like, “There must be a way this can happen.” So I went googling and I landed on WordPress, and it was pretty easy to install. And I made a child three from whatever the default theme was back in 2008, and off we were. That’s how it all started really.

Cate: It’s so funny how many WordPress owners end up with a very similar story. You know, it was you kind of figured it out one day, and all of a sudden you have a career. It’s just great.

Aurooba: I played with it all through high school.

Topher: When did it move from messing around in high school to a career? Like I only met you two years ago?

Aurooba: 2019. Yeah.

Topher: Yeah. And you’ve been in the community for a while, or at least working with WordPress.

Aurooba: Yes. Those are two different things.

Cate: They are, actually.

Aurooba: Yes. Ah, well, when I was in university, I also helped build one of the residents’ association’s website with WordPress. And that was when I really like sort of started to understand some of the power of WordPress and what it could do. Because of it, I ended up freelancing with a few companies while I was in school, just building sort of internal websites for them.

And then when I finished being done in university, I decided that I just wanted to freelance and I just did WordPress. So that would be 2014.

Topher: That’s cool.

Cate: Have you always worked for yourself then?

Aurooba: Correct. I have had three summer jobs. And that’s about as far as it goes for working for someone else?

Cate: That’s really phenomenal. It’s great that you’ve been able to build your own business the way that you wanted to build no matter where you’re living. That’s the thing I love about WordPress. I could care less about the software, I could care less about coding anything, but just how many people can build a life that they want regardless of where they’re living, it’s just amazing.

Aurooba: It was one of the primary reasons I did it. Because for many, many reasons, I decided that I wanted to always be remote. At a time when remote was not a thing, I wouldn’t have said remote then. I just was like, “I want to work from wherever my computer is.” And the only thing I could think of was building websites or doing some sort of software development and not working for anyone because I didn’t know any companies at the time that did distributed work. I mean, there were some, but I didn’t know them.

Cate: No. Even for us, we started out in 2010, we left a paid job to freelance because we didn’t know any companies that hired WordPress people. And it was about 2014 only we found XWP and they were kind of the first one that we knew of that hired remote people to work on some…

Aurooba: Cool.

Cate: Yeah, it’s been a huge change. But it’s a far more recent change than I think people realize.

Aurooba: And yet there have been people who were remote before then too. It just it wasn’t mainstream enough to be easily discoverable.

Cate: Yeah, exactly.

Topher: So when did you start engaging with the community?

Aurooba: It was an accident. I moved to Calgary and I was trying to make some friends. And I found this organization here in Calgary called Chic Geek. They basically support women in tech. And I did a presentation there on Git because they really, really encouraged me to do so and I was trying to get better at public speaking and put myself out there a little.

And there was someone there who happened to know about WordCamp Calgary. So they’re like, “Hey, you should do this talk at WordCamp Calgary. It’s Coming up.” So I applied, but I had no idea what WordCamp was. I didn’t know this was like a thing that is everywhere.

Aurooba: And I spoke there. And then I met this really awesome person called Christina Workman, who was in the community and introduced me to the community in Make WordPress. That was like late 2018, early 2019. It was totally by chance.

Cate: And you stayed. So I’m guessing that you found some things you like about it. I mean, we all know there are things to not like about it. The community sadly is full of people and people are terrible. I know this. I’m a people. I’m terrible. But occasionally-

Aurooba: I think that’s every community, right? Like once you get to a certain size, you’re very, very… But no, I always stayed. I think that when I first started contributing, I didn’t know what it meant to really contribute, aside from like being part of WordCamp. And I would say yes to things because I didn’t want to be mean or rude.

And four months later, I burnt out so hard that I basically just disappeared. And then I tried to come back in late 2020, and then work put me out. And I was always sort of there but couldn’t be there as reliably or consistently as I want it to be.

And now I have, you know, grown a little, I’m a little bit more experienced in trying to balance work and contributing, and also like my life. So seems to be working out a little better this time.

Cate: Yeah, well, and I think it’s kind of funny to say. I’ve been there myself. So 2019 after WordCamp US, in fact, I almost didn’t go to WordCamp US, I almost just kind of left the community right there. It just was feeling really overwhelmed and had a really negative year. And it just was one of those spots where it was like, “Really can’t I do something other than this?” But stayed, and you know, then hit some other walls as well.

But I think hitting those walls, burning out every once in a while, it’s kind of part of the learning process. You don’t know what your boundaries are until you test them a little bit.

Aurooba: I agree.

Cate: And if you don’t push a little, then you’re going to miss some opportunities you’re going to be sad about because you didn’t try. So it’s really, really hard, though, to find that balance of what’s enough and what’s too much. And then as we grow, like you said, as people, and our lives change, the opportunities we have available are different.

Aurooba: Yeah. And I think what I’m learning is if I have 100% capacity, I should be looking to fill at most 80% of my capacity because I still need the 20% to recharge, process, rest, and have the wiggle room in case things happen that I don’t have plan because life just throw a few right hooks sometimes.

Cate: Yeah, that’s exactly it. I was recently asked about like how do you manage a community or how do you plan an event? And one of the things I said is, you know, plan for the known unknowns, like the things that generally go wrong, because the unknown unknowns are going to bite you. Like there’s going to be this whole list of things that will go wrong that you never thought of. And so you’re so right about leaving some space for that to happen.

Aurooba: Hard one lesson. I’ll tell you that.

Cate: But common.

Aurooba: I think it’s one of those things-

Topher: And now it’s time to speak about it at WordCamps. So that would be funny too.

Aurooba: It’s so funny. I think we all know this intellectually. We’ve heard other people talk about it. But until you experience it yourself, it doesn’t quite sink in. I commend the people who listen to other people and it sinks in right away. I am not one of those. I have to experience it.

Cate: Me neither.

Topher: It can happen to me.

Aurooba: Or, “You know, it can’t be as bad as this person to say. They’re just exaggerating for a fact. Mm-mm.”

Topher: I’m stronger than that. I would deal with it fine.

Aurooba: My life is not that messed up. Crazy things don’t happen to me. What? No.

Cate: I just can’t not laugh through this because it’s such a… Fortunately, I have reached the point where I’ve just accepted that my life is messed up and it will happen to me and I’m just going to try to enjoy the ride.

Aurooba: The thing is you’re not alone. Your life is this interconnected web with all these other people, and you can’t predict what they’re going to do. And sometimes you can’t even predict what you’re going to do. So that’s like a whole thing itself. But put that all together and that’s-

Cate: And then you have power outages or sickness or, you know, like all of the things that are just completely out there.

Topher: All right, worldwide pandemic.

Cate: Right.

Aurooba: Oh, yeah, yeah. Ruining all my plans left and right.

Topher: All right. I’d like to ask you some questions about not WordPress. What do you do outside WordPress? Do you ride in the stampede or anything? Have you ever been?

Aurooba: Yes. Fun fact, I have never been to Calgary Stampede despite living here for nearly five years now. I’ve just never been. It’s a time when the town goes a little crazy and I prefer to not be where the crazy is.

Cate: Topher and I both grew up in small towns that had big events. Not nearly as big as that but they had that one weekend that something happened and none of the locals attend. Unless you have a job there, you just stay home or you go on vacation that weekend. Because of the insanity of everybody coming to town, it’s just insanity.

Aurooba: It is. It is. I think that in the locals that do go—and lots of locals do—in my group, we tend to think of it as like that’s where the single people go. And I am not single and also have never particularly had interest in large turkey legs. These are not things that are part of my interests.

My interests are more the mountains and going there and enjoying the time, enjoying outdoorsy stuff that isn’t necessarily like in downtown, with us in a city. Not that I don’t like being in a city but I’ve lived in such a big mix of types of towns that the thing that I feel is a constant in my life is nature. And I enjoy that.

Topher: Do you ski?

Aurooba: I do ski sometimes. I wouldn’t say that I’ve skied very recently. I’m more of a hiker. I like to hike. Not in the winter. I don’t really do winter sports in the winters, I read books.

Cate: Well, you get some pretty substantial winter up there. I mean, it’s not like Michigan winter where it’s kind of a balmy 30 most of the time. I mean, you guys get some pretty cold weather.

Aurooba: We do. I’m sorry I don’t know though Fahrenheit version. It’s all Celsius on my end. But the thing about Calgary is we have schnucks. Because of the mountains, it never stays super cold for very long. It’ll be really, really cold, and then it’s going to be warm and I’ll be wearing a hoodie for like a week. And then it’ll be super cold and I’m wearing a winter jacket and boots because now we have this much snow and it’s then it melts again.

So it’s very up and down, which means I get a lot of migraines in January and February. But aside from that, I do enjoy that there are small moments where I can go outside and not have to wear a jacket. That’s nice.

Cate: That’s similar in Michigan here because we get to kind of the jet stream comes down from you to us. And so about two days later, whatever you were dealing with we’re dealing with. But generally, again, not quite so bad because it’s not quite so cold.

Aurooba: Yeah. The mountains just really wreck things a little bit. They’re great. I love them. They’re majestic. They are very stable, the world around them. They create instability of weather.

Topher: Oh, cool. Cate, I interrupted you a few minutes ago. You were going to say something. Do you remember what it is?

Cate: That’s okay. I was just going to ask what kind of things that she likes to do out in the mountains. Again, Michigan, not a lot of mountains. We have a few. They’re far away and I don’t go there. And just how much you have enjoyed being so close to the Rockies. It’s a very unique place to be.

Aurooba: I feel very privileged. It is the kind of beauty that doesn’t seem to ever get old. You know, there’s really beautiful lakes and I have definitely not seen all of Banff or all of Jasper, or any of the Rockies. You know, they’re just too big.

But mostly we hike, we take picnics out there, go swimming in the lakes. That kind of thing. Very, very simple. Nothing like super crazy or fancy. I’m not rock climbing or jumping off of cliffs. But I like to just take in the beauty and appreciate it and walk around. I love walking so hiking is like the next thing.

Topher: That’s cool.

Cate: That sounds lovely. I can’t wait. We need to come visit.

Aurooba: You have been planning to visit for a while now.

Cate: Yes. Well, there was a pandemic.

Aurooba: When is this trip going to happen?

Topher: We’ve only known you outside pandemic for like a month, two months.

Aurooba: Yeah. That’s true, that’s true. Most of our interaction has been really just during the pandemic. But things are hopefully going to ease up a little and it’s going to… Maybe the variance will stop being so uncool.

Cate: Invariable.

Aurooba: Yeah, yeah. And then you can do your trip.

Cate: Yes, exactly.

Topher: Do you know anything at all about a WordCamp Calgary in the future?

Aurooba: I think that for us our community is fairly small. So it doesn’t make sense for us to do a virtual WordCamp because we really value the in-person aspect of it because it’s a small community. So the next time will be when we can meet in person. And I don’t think that’s going to be this year. Because although technically we’re allowed, I think we as a team don’t feel comfortable with.

Cate: And I’d say we feel similar in Grand Rapids. We have a really strong group but we’re just starting to have a conversation about going back to in-person meetups and whether we’re ready for that, you know, move that to or expand that out to a WordCamp. And that’s even so much more so. I don’t know that I want to manage that.

But that said, you are helping to plan WordCamp US, which hopefully will be in-person in San Diego, where it is not going to snow. And we really appreciate you coming on board for that.

Aurooba: I’m really excited about it.

Cate: You’ll be leading our web design team. Just really thrilled.

Aurooba: Yeah, it should be really cool. I’m really excited about the team that’s being put together and really looking forward to what we can make out of this first in-person event after the pandemic. Wow. Like very intense in a way.

Topher: Are you a designer?

Aurooba: No, I’m not a designer.

Topher: Oh, okay.

Aurooba: I am a developer. It’s the design and web team. So we’ll be creating the website.

Cate: There’s a slash in there but I didn’t speak. Unfortunately, we have given her a couple of good designers to help her not have to be a designer.

Aurooba: Yes. And I work with designers all day so I have lots of thoughts and I have a good eye for design but I prefer not to be doing the design. Implementation is where I shine.

Cate: Which is exactly what we need as a lead in that category.

Topher: I know how to use Photoshop, but I can’t make it do pretty things.

Cate: And occasionally we take away Photoshop. Like he’s just not allowed to design anything.

Aurooba: Oh, that’s funny. Hey, Topher, we can be implementation buddies.

Topher: That’s right.

Cate: Exactly. Exactly. I remember the last website I think he designed himself was for an engineering company. And they wanted something really basic. And it was basically like a wireframe of a website. And it fit him so well. It was really perfect for what they needed but it was like the stick figure of designs.

Topher: They were engineers.

Aurooba: I mean, that’s close to what my personal website is right now. It’s as simple as I could make it. I made it when I went solo in 2019. There was a partner before then. And I was like, “I need something.” So I just threw this thing together. And it’s been there. But I am hoping to refresh it with a professionally designed something later this year or early next year.

Cate: I think a good point is that you don’t have to start with something super fancy. In fact, you’re probably better off not starting with something super fancy. And if you do a good job of displaying your skills and competence, you can always grow into something more down the road.

I know a lot of people get stopped because they don’t have a huge budget for development or design or they don’t personally have the skills to do it. And that’s sad. That’s a mistake. That’s a loss to the whole community.

Aurooba: I agree. I mean, that’s the great thing about WordPress, right? You could be no code or you could be all the code. And you can build things with the free resources that are out there and get yourself something that is not bad, some even pretty good, with a little bit of effort. That’s all you really need.

Ultimately, this is what I’m always harping on to my clients. It’s not about the design. It’s not about the flashiness. It’s about your content. Get the content right. Get the content right. And the design should support it should highlight it, but it is second to your content.

Cate: And I am so delighted to hear you saying that because I am a content person. It’s so true. People forget about formatting their content. I mean, the content is the biggest picture people see on your page and how they can comfortably interact with it, whether it’s divided up well or there’s places for your eyes to rest. It really makes a huge difference.

Aurooba: Exactly.

Cate: So I just love you for that a little bit more.

Aurooba: The web is a medium for importing information, not importing design. I mean, design is really great and it has a very powerful impact on making information more easily accessible, and understandable and spreading it. But that is its job to do it for the information. If there’s no information, the design can’t do anything.

Cate: So I’m curious to know, as an individual and someone who’s been around for a while, as an experienced individual, how do you feel about Gutenberg and the move to full site editing. It’s completely reasonable, though. Whatever your opinion is. This isn’t you have to have one or the other. I’m just curious if it’s been an asset to you, if there are more drawbacks in its worth or how you’ve used it or not.

Aurooba: I think that the Block Editor and the Gutenberg movement, as we could say, is generally a really good thing. I think it’s the right move for WordPress. I think it’s going in the right direction. Do I have some reservations around the melding of the visual with the content when you’re creating it? Yes, I definitely have those reservations. I think a lot of people have those reservations. And I think that they are worth bringing up and bringing up again, until they get the attention they deserve.

But you know, I think it is valuable to be able to see more of what you’re working with in the editor rather than having to go and preview your site constantly. Because I don’t know, a lot of people do write and create their content straight in the WordPress editor and I think more of them do so now. But that a lot of people who are doing really heavy content things are not usually going to draft their content in there.

And that might change when the collaborative stage of Gutenberg comes into play. But right now, I think that it’s a good thing that we have some melding of the visual with the content, as long as we don’t forget that visual is not everything. Right now it feels like visual is more important than the content itself. And that is something that is not true. We’re content first. It’s the web, like I just said. So that’s really important.

But overall, I think that design and content is modular. It’s modular no matter how you approach it. And that’s something that the Block Editor and Gutenberg really shines in, because it is meant for modular things, whether that’s content or design. And that power, putting it in the hands of end-users but also more experienced people, I think that it can lead to some very cool and very powerful things. So I like it for those

nuances.

Cate: I would agree completely. I’m someone who’s just moving into creating content in Gutenberg versus creating it all in Google Docs and moving it over. I couldn’t trust Gutenberg before to really flow nicely when I was writing. It’s still not as comfortable for editing, like there’s an editing element that’s missing to it. Like you can do revision… Anyway, Google Docs is better.

Aurooba: Yeah, totally.

Cate: But I have found myself enjoying working in Gutenberg more as it’s growing. Like you said, the modularity does have a huge impact. It is nice just be able to move things around a little bit. And the whole concept feels very open source. The idea that we can continue to adapt it and adjust it and have the conversations about it so that we work as a group to move it into something that is better for the group, best for the group. I mean, nothing is perfect but-

Aurooba: No. That’s the power of open source. I mean, think about Google Docs. Google Docs is proprietary software that is controlled and thought of by a small group of people as compared to how people use it. Now, do they take feedback from their end users? Of course. But those end users are not necessarily directly involved in figuring out, planning, and implementing those features.

So when you have something like the Block Editor that does have that aspect, what you’re going to get out of it ultimately is stronger, more user-tested, and just better for everyone. And everyone’s use cases.

Right. So long term I think this is great. I think that obviously it is still a piece of software that is in development, so there are bound to be hiccups. But I use it in all my projects. I don’t do any non-Block Editor projects at WordPress anymore. So that says something.

Cate: Yeah, it really does. And I do think we have to remember that projects like this, particularly if we want to embrace them as open source, have to have a growth period. Kinda like a child where, again, going back to being 15, you know, not everybody’s at the same place when they’re 15. Some of us are awkward and just barely making it through. So projects will be similar. The head will grow faster than the feet, the feet will catch up.

Aurooba: Yeah. It’s a weird teenage phase for the Block Editor.

Cate: Right.

Aurooba: Right? Everything’s awkward. Your voice might be changing and there’s weird things happening to you and you don’t really know how-

Topher: There’s no documentation.

Aurooba: Exactly, exactly. And even though other people might have experienced the same thing, they can’t adequately explain it to you.

Cate: Yeah, exactly.

Aurooba: Exactly. There is no manual, unfortunately. Or at least not a very good one.

Cate: No.

Topher: All right. We have been at this for about a half an hour now, so it’s time to wrap up.

Cate: Oh, I’m disappointed. I thought you were going to say that was a quiz or that we’re going to spin the wheel.

Aurooba: Wheel of Fortune.

Topher: Wheel of morality, turn turn turn.

All right, I’m going to read the outro here. This has been an episode of Hallway Chats, a part of the HeroPress Network. Your hosts were Cate and Topher DeRosia. We’d like to thank Sophia DeRosia for the music and Nexcess for hosting our network. If you liked the episode, please subscribe and mention us on social media.

Cate: Thanks so much for joining us, Aurooba.

Aurooba: Yeah, thanks for having me, both of you.

Cate: I feel like it’s more of a put up with. Thanks for putting up with us for a half an hour.

Aurooba: I am not okay with you being rude to my friends like that. So no, you cannot say this.

Cate: Oh, yeah. Thanks for coming, Aurooba. We really appreciate you talking with us and sharing your experiences, of sharing the mountains. And again, truly can’t wait to get up and see you in person.

Aurooba: Yes. Well, I think we’ll see each other before then.

Cate: That is most likely true.

Topher: It might wait till San Diego. When is that? September?

Cate: September, the first weekend.

Aurooba: Mm-hmm.

Topher: Which isn’t that far away.

Cate: We don’t use words like that. Nobody is talking about that right now.

Aurooba: I was talking about that yesterday with my partner. I was like, “This is very close.”

Cate: It’ll be fine. It’ll all be fine.

Aurooba: It will be fine.

Cate: All right.

Aurooba: That doesn’t change the fact that it’s very close.

Cate: Oh, goodbye, Aurooba.

Aurooba: Goodbye. Have a good rest of your day.

Topher: Bye-bye.

Tammie Lister is a web designer at XWP and a WordPress core contributor.

Tammie’s Blog: https://tammielister.com/

Twitter | @karmatosed

Topher: Hey everyone! My name is Topher.

Cate: And I’m Cate.

Topher: And this is Hallway Chats. Before we get going, we want to thank our sponsors at Nexcess, a Liquid Web brand. They have some new tools for eCommerce that really make them stand out from other options. WooCommerce automated testing, Sales Performance Monitor, and Plugin Performance Monitor give you data you need to stay powerful and profitable. And they’re free with every Nexcess plan, which is really cool.

All right, our guest today is Tammie Lister. Welcome.

Cate: Hi Tammie.

Tammie: Hi.

Topher: Thanks for being here.

Tammie: Thank you for inviting me.

Topher: We know who you are because you’re a cool friend. But we can’t assume that everybody else does. Tell us a little about yourself. Where do you live?

Tammie: So if you are trying to come in the middle of England, you’ll probably find me. I currently live in a village that has no road names. That’s where I live. So I live super rural, but I really enjoy doing that. So that is where I live.

Cate: That’s really wonderful.

Topher: I know you moved recently. Were you super rural before as well? Have you been there very long?

Tammie: I was. I’ve been pretty rural for a number of years now. Before that, I was living down south, but I have lived kind of in Midlands, pretty rural, for a number of years now.

Topher: Do you have things like chickens, etc.?

Tammie: I do not. But I have a new puppy. So I have a-

Cate: Not so many eggs but lots of snuggles.

Tammie: Lots of snuggles, lots of nips because it’s a working colleague, the puppy. So he is just 19, 20 weeks now.

Cate: Wow. Nice.

Topher: Is he going to be big?

Tammie: I don’t know. He’s got big paws. Everyone keeps telling me yes, but I’m hoping no. So that’s always a bad sign if you don’t want him to grow.

Cate: Right.

Topher: Yeah. Well, you can’t stop it.

Tammie: You can’t. You just gotta go with it. He’s very strong and very bouncy.

Cate: Well, that’s good for exercise.

Tammie: Yeah, he likes to bounce.

Cate: So I hear he’s part Tigger. This is what you’re saying?

Tammie: He is basically part Tigger. He really is. He does the backflips and bounces. He keeps me on my toes. But you have to live in the countryside with a dog like that.

Cate: Oh, yeah. Topher and I grew up in the middle of nowhere too. So we have a good understanding of what that’s like.

Topher: My sister used to say it’s not the end of the world, but you can see it from there.

Tammie: I think the end of the world might be a couple of fields from where I live now.

Topher: So what do you do with WordPress?

Tammie: So I’m a designer with WordPress. I’ve had a bit of a journey, but I’m currently working at XWP as a senior product designer.

Cate: Oh, that’s really cool. So tell us a little bit about your journey, or as much as you want to.

Tammie: Thank you. I do think it’s been quite long. I started out basically torturing my own CMS back in the day. Back in the day it was like this thing of like everybody has to know their own CMS. It was like a badge of honor. And it was back in the day when you thought you had to know programming. And there was thing I’ve been able to do on the web design. I was just hurting the CMS, like I said. But if someone said, “Have you seen this new thing called WordPress?” Which probably dates me a little bit.

Even back then, it was a bit clumsy, but how easy I could be in it struck me. And I was like, “Oh, okay.” Back then it was like the CSS reboot challenges and those like changing your theme all the time. One of those kinds of things. Like change your theme like new t-shirt. That was kind of like… it was such a… you know, theme switches and all those kinds of things. There was a big change in blogging networks.

So I moved because it’s just easier to put the effort into that, and then my writing than it was into torturing code because it was so insecure. At some point, someone was going to have a laugh. It was just going to be… because, I was… yeah, it wasn’t going to be good.

I didn’t really look back from then. I started contributing pretty early on because I already had a bit of a background in open source. And then it just kind of went from there. I kind of found my way around lots of different teams, which I think is everybody’s story in open source or in kind of WordPress specifically.

I went finally went to themes for quite a while, and then BuddyPress. And then my journey took me kind of through the past few years into Automattic. And I was quite a long time in the community before I kind of went into Automattic. And then my journey in Automattic took me through the theme team, kind of through Gutenberg. That was an amazing experience.

And I’ve come out through that back into now creating with Gutenberg and the editing experience, which is just a full cycle. So yeah, my journey feels like it’s been on this road that is never planned, but always seems to follow on. I feel very lucky. I think it’s part of being an open source. Sometimes your path just close because you work on one project that leads into another project that leads into another project that leads into another one. I don’t think I’m uncommon doing that. So yeah, I’m really, really great like that. I’m very lucky.

Cate: I used to think that the path to success was a straight line.

Tammie: No.

Cate: It’s more like the Flight of the Bumblebee. You know, eventually you’ll get there and it might be right next to where you started. But it’s going to be this big circular loop de loop kind of thing that takes you all over where you’d never thought you’d go.

Tammie: And sometimes it’s empowered… no, no, I’m saying the translating Sometimes you drop out of the path and you need to get up again. So I’ve done things like design up some different things and it felt like, “Okay, now I’m pausing that.” But then I come back to it, right? Or, oh, no, I’m pausing this bit of coding, but then I come back to it with like theme.json or…

You know, it always feels that anything that I know and I know quite intensely is never a waste. I’ll come back to it. The same as people. Lots of interactions I’ve had, I can probably tie down to like a moment I had that conversation, a moment I had that moment or that thing. So yeah.

Cate: I couldn’t agree with that more. Like the knowledge is never wasted, even if you’re not using it right now. And the people you meet, I like to think of them like books in the library. You don’t read them all the time, but you’re always glad you have them there. You can take them off the shelf and spend time with them if you need to. But it’s just so important to build those even micro relationships.

Everybody knows so many cool things that I would never touch on. You know, I just wouldn’t think about it. And so to get to learn those from each other is just so huge.

Tammie: And with openness, I think that’s the thing. Like let someone tell the story, his story. And I think the mistake is if you’re like, “Okay, what can I learn? I’m going to like try and…” It’s not going to work that way. You’ve just got to go into it open-hearted, see what may. And then out of that potential so many good things could grow.

There’s so much potential if you let the potential happen. If you search a potential… It kind of kills potential if you look too closely. It’s kind of like that thing: don’t look too close. Within the WordPress community, different people are very good at accelerating if you give them space to do that, both in their own personality, so giving someone the right space to do that, and also allowing someone to do that to you.

When I’ve opened myself enough to be accelerated, that’s a good way. But like to allow that to happen to me, you have to be very particular to allow that to happen to you, it’s gone really well.

Cate: Yeah, that’s really cool.

Topher: I have a question about designing. You mentioned you’re a designer in WordPress. Is there something unique about that to design? Somebody else who’s any other kind of designer, are they going to go, “Oh, I’ve never heard of that thing you’re doing because it’s only WordPress.”

Tammie: Historically, it was different. Because just honestly, the way things were done were pretty out of sync at one point the way things were done in the outside world. The outside world of design was getting pretty structured, design systems are getting structured.. Now less so. Because we’re starting to have a design system… starting… we have. And we’re having a lot more of that.

I would say design within WordPress it depends where you are. I’m quite a technical designer. I’m designing more on the UX and technical. So that is a particular. And because of my knowledge of the system, that kind of is a companion to it. Just like sort of maybe say I’m a copy, right? I love some copy and design.

There’s always this kind of thing. A full stack developer. I think designers are kind of like that. There’s a spectrum of design as well, which I think sometimes designers just say design and they kind of say… I also used to be this thing of like not being proud of being a designer that designed on CMS. It’s like, “Gosh, do that design.”

And honestly, I think open source design is something to be very embracing. To be able to create across in that space and in that platform I think is really powerful for designers to be able to function there. I’m seeing more and more designers embrace that and more designers work in that space as well. It’s novelty anyway.

Cate: I would think that it would have its own unique challenges. I never really thought through it before but it’s a platform that’s always changing. So, as a designer, part of what you can do, and I live with two artists, is you get good at something and you continue to build your skills in that area.

So if your platform was always shaky, like having your tables shake under while you’re trying to draw, it’s hard to get good at something if it’s always shifting. But at the same time, new tools, and new options are always being created for you to continually explore-

Tammie: That’s the difference between art and design. So I pointed on that as well. So art does change because it depends or whatever. But whatever sounds super. But yeah, it changes. It’s ever-present and never changing.

But design is very changeable. And both on the platform and both on the… You know, a painter probably the paints you use. If you are traditional painter, probably you’re using some traditional paints that have been used for a number of years, give or take or whatever.

But with design, your platform is ever-changing, because the digital systems you use and particularly product designer, which is like kind of specifically focus on the products you work, the business mode. That includes business models, that includes user experience which we learn new things about the way the human brain works, we learn new things about the way that we interact online, we have new technology. Like React has opened up so much that we could do and only dream of that we could do on web.

We couldn’t do these things. Like we couldn’t do what we do with the new editor before we could do it with the new editor because the technology didn’t exist. It wasn’t that we didn’t have to do it as a project because we didn’t do it as a project. We didn’t do it because technology wasn’t there for us to do it as a project. Which is the really interesting thing. Like the technology has finally caught up with where we really wanted to be and experience it like that. We can do it.

Topher: I’m really happy to hear you say there are more artists getting into open source because I’ve been an open source software user for about 30 years now and the majority of the interfaces I’ve ever used were designed by engineers, and it was set.

Tammie: I think it’s about meeting on the middle. And I think this is the thing about recognizing that not everyone is just one or the other. That’s something I’m incredibly… I think there was this weird kind of sorting thing that we had back in the day. It’s like, “You can do. You can do.”

It’s particularly prevalent in women. It was like, “You got to do.” But across all genders it was, right? And all people. And it definitely was like if you are technological, you cannot do art. If you’re artistic, you cannot do…”

Topher: No.

Tammie: And turns out that a lot of what we need for engineering now, you need to be very aware of experience and very aware the way that implements accessibility through to an experience. A lot of design, depending on the space you’re in, you potentially if you want to, and some designers don’t have to, and it’s up to you what you want to be specialist in. And I think that that’s the amazing thing, you get to determine what you’re specialist in there. You could specialize in that.

And I think that’s where everyone kind of meets and becomes the right team for the right creating of the product, which I think is different from, you know, we need four engineers and two designers and a senior in the mid-level. Before it felt like somebody had a clipboard every time you did a project.

Cate: Yeah, that’s a great point. Because we’ve been around for so long, I remember when like a developer had to do everything. And now it’s really easy… or not easy. Easy is a bad word. But it’s much more possible to get a job in something that you really enjoy that you can do really good.

Tammie: You can specialize now.!

Cate: Right. Exactly.

Tammie: Which is really hard for the people who are older. Even for me, “hang on, I could be a specialist?”. I made a career about being a generalist! It’s also relieving to think that you don’t have to do everything. The thing the next generation we can say you can go slow with your career and be very refined and precise about what you want to do. I find that amazing.

But I just said to someone, “No, you don’t have to learn how to code as a designer. You can do this.” Or no, as a developer, you can learn experience, and you can be this incredibly experienced developer.” That fills me with… You know, if someone started a career as a junior, you can say, “Okay, what are you interested in? No, this is your path that you are on as an engineer or this is your path as a designer, and thou shalt not to tread from this path. This is your role.” That’s not going to get us to have people… that got us to have burn out people that left careers and had to go farm, which is fine.

I like living in the countryside. But you know, we want longevity, and we want people to really embrace what people have and not have, people just getting burned out by the industry or doing different things. I think it’s really, really important.

Cate: The entire project flourishes when you have the right people in the right positions. Like when you’ve got the right skills, making the right decisions, or just be… because then we’re all that much more effective and creative and enjoy what we’re doing.

Tammie: Yeah. And create better products.

Cate: Yeah.

Tammie: Which I think is an interesting thing. And we in WordPress kind of like gives packages and things. Its products. We see like acquisitions and these conversations in business, and we’re making products and we use words rather than using the word “product” sometimes or rather than using word “experience” because we focus on other words, because they’re maybe easier or more comfortable. But that’s what we’re creating. And it’s really, really important for us to start thinking about this kind of like collaborative creation of something and embracing that. It’s a healthy thing. It really is for the ecosystem to shift to that product mindset.

Cate: Yeah. I couldn’t agree more.

Topher: So I have another question about your contribution to WordPress. You have been a contributor to the project for a long, long time, and have been both as an employee of Automattic and as not an employee of Automattic. Have you seen a substantial difference?

Tammie: Well, my journey kind of started out, not in Automattic, went to Automattic and there was no Automattic. So for me not really, because it’s kind of the same journey. I think my journey has more reflected the changing nature of WordPress rather than my own personal journey, if that makes sense.

I think WordPress has changed whilst I’ve been in it rather than I’ve changed in it. Like my role doesn’t particularly change. What I love about it particularly is I’ve been able to be involved in projects and see other people lead in projects. Which I think is one of the amazing things I’ve got to do. I’ve got to do things that are like creative and then I get to see other people do creative. And that’s the incredible thing about open source, that different people get to do different things like that.

For me, I think contribution, again, to focus on that was great. But now being able to create with that thing that I worked o is teaching me an awful lot as well and giving me so many ideas to be able to implement and build on. I consider that full cycle that I’ve got to do. Like I learned all the problems, then I got to kind of create things to fix problems I guess. And now I’m building this thing to find more problems to maybe fix later. I don’t know, I haven’t got the time machine.

But that is often the way that I work. Like try and learn the problems… Or at least my design learning process is find the problems, fix the problems, if I can. Hopefully fix the problems even better. So that feels very attuned with the way that I worked before WordPress and the way that I worked within WordPress anyway.

And it’s just so much bigger now. When I first started, it was tiny. I’m late 40s now. I’m a different person to when I started out in WordPress. We all have grown up with WordPress and have grown into a different career. I see people now with families who didn’t have families, I see people now who’ve got partners who didn’t. You know, the whole lifecycle has happened within WordPress. I think that is really powerful. I’ve got to see past the world I wouldn’t have seen.

Topher: People who weren’t born when WordPress came out are now contributing.

Tammie: Yeah. And that’s the future. Me and next in my field I’m not the future of WordPress. And that I am so okay with. I have planted some seeds that I’m slowly nurturing a little bit, but I want to pass this on. I wonder like what the next generation of WordPress are going to do with it because they are going to do so much better than I did with them in a way that they understand what their next generations and the generations after need. Because I’m okay, but I’m getting a bit older.

My connection is more to support that. And it’s absolutely what you should do. I’ve got some time in it yet. But you know, that should happen in those projects. I’ve seen sometimes that doesn’t happen so much that we should be very aware of how can we keep that going and be aware of that in design?

Design we need a culture and engineering, we need a culture of how do we get this constant flow of people or roles we needed so that we can support this and learn from those who aren’t going out there and get that kind of knowledge flowing? It’s an evergreen problem but it’s a really interesting problem as a project become so old… old as WordPress… It is, right?

Cate: It really is. For open source to have grown the way that it has. I mean, I remember when Topher was looking at whether he was going to go with Drupal, Joomla, or WordPress. And to look at it now, to look at the numbers of usage and that sort of thing, it would be a no-brainer. But at that time, they were all kind of equal. I mean, this was 2010-ish.

WordPress has grown in a way that the other open source projects just couldn’t. And I think the community is a huge part of that. Like Automattic itself reinvested in the community in ways that people don’t necessarily think about. And without that, like you said, it’s nurturing that next generation of people to come in to continue what was started because we won’t be around forever. I don’t want to be around forever. I shouldn’t be around forever. It’s not how it’s supposed to work.

Topher: The goat farm calls.

Cate: Right.

Tammie: Goat farm hackers!

Cate: Let’s have both, you know.

Tammie: I think that that’s completely right. It’s also this community is so different than the community I started. It wasn’t as welcoming. The community that I joined initially, I was like, “Oh.” I was a lot shy as well. And I’ve learned myself. I think when you’re like, early 30s you’re very different from late 40s. Like, as a human being you are, and you learn a lot about yourself in those years.

And honestly, the people that I’ve seen has helped me to do that. And it provides a community space that allows everybody to kind of be stronger in themselves and stronger in who they can be. And I don’t want that to stop. I’m very excited where could that go. Because I do still see that that’s difficult in some areas. I think it’s changing, the world is changing, thank goodness, from back when… I remember back in the day being not able to use…

It’s a strong point, but not being able to use a female name online. That’s like most women’s experience at a certain age online. But that is changing slowly. And I still say slowly, because that’s the narrow end of how we should change this. There’s so much will change. And if that is still slow. So yeah, we are getting there.

In our community having space and growing I think it’s a generational thing is where it starts. And I just think having this option where you can change roles. A good thing is being able to change different teams, being able to come and learn a role, and come and develop your business.

Seeing that, that is such an interesting aspect of WordPress for me at the moment, you know, to come and have an idea, get the support, slowly learn the skills you need. Even in contributing, go to marketing team, learns that, go to design team, go to plugin team, learn how a theme was used, maybe put your theme in.

All these skills, maybe you can set up your own business and then maybe start going part-time. And maybe then you work a little bit somewhere, or maybe you meet someone at the WordCamp virtually or in the after times, maybe you get to know… You know, all these kind of things.

That has so much potential for the where can that go mixed in with where technology’s going. And the fact that so many of us now have worked longer remote than we’ve worked not remote. That’s my case That’s not uncommon in this community now. That’s something to pass down to people as well. Yeah, it’s really healthy and powerful kind of growth.

Cate: Yeah, it really lets you have the decisions about your life. You know, you aren’t stuck with the jobs that just happened to be near enough for you to travel to. You can actually use your own creative self in a way that works best for you. And then generally is better for everybody.

Tammie: You can find yourself, whatever that is, or you can be given the space to explore to find yourself. And I think everyone has to go on that new journey. You do, right? And it can take a long time. I’m still online. But I think that that is an important thing. You know, it would be very different for me if I’d had to still go to an office and do that. It wasn’t going to be something that would have worked for me.

And I’m very lucky that this career kind of happened for me, that has allowed me to do the work that I could do in companion with what I wanted to do. So yeah. But that’s not an uncommon story in our community, which I think I’d love. So I’m taking care of like anyone in your family to take care of yourself, the whole kind your family.

Cate: Yeah. And I think it’s still valuable to highlight though because we get isolated. Like I forget that people don’t work from home, the people don’t just live this life.

Tammie: Some people don’t understand it. “Do you work?”

Topher: “When are you getting a job?”

Tammie: We don’t have to grow up. It’s great.

Cate: We certainly don’t have to wear pants.

Tammie: I’m wearing dungarees though. The pants is a completely different meaning for me being English.

Cate: Oh, that’s fantastic.

Topher: All right. I had one more thing on here. No, I didn’t.

Tammie: Now I need you to do one more thing. I want one more thing now.

Cate: I do kind of have a thing. So Topher and I are both kind of at the beginning of embracing Gutenberg. And it’s actually been kind of funny. We both kind of found the cadence theme at the same time, and love that we could use it differently. Like he can strip it down to nothing and rebuild it from whatever he wants it to be. And I love that I can go in as a writer who’s a non-designer and make things pretty without having to code or even be a particularly good designer. But that really all falls into Gutenberg and what Gutenberg can do.

And before Gutenberg, you were there doing the Gutenberg projects, you know, you are a designer. And I’m just curious to see if you’ve… and I don’t want to put you on the spot. Because there’s a lot of things around Gutenberg. And if this is a question you don’t want to answer, that’s perfectly fine. But I’m curious to see how you feel about Gutenberg and how it’s evolved.

Tammie: I am more than happy to answer this. So I’m really happy about the way it’s evolved because I actually use the word Gutenberg for the plugin because I thinkGutenberg now is the plugin and the editor itself is WordPress. That’s kind of where my brain goes. But that’s probably someone that’s very close to the project. And that’s where I go.

Because I also think when we call it something else it becomes over. And I think that that’s the othering of it in that sense doesn’t maybe help it. I’m really happy but it’s not reached its potential yet. And I think sometimes it’s very easy to judge. Like it’s like, to use a pretty weird image, would go, “Hold in tight, we’re going on a journey.”

If you’re baking a cake and it’s going to rise, and if you would open too soon, it could flop, it could go horribly wrong because you’re judging it too soon. It’s not going to go really well. But if you are trying to do too much full site editing now and you want to do it, it’s not even in decent here to maybe do that. Kind of where I’m going.

It has so much potential. It can do so much. But if you were going to use it on a production site and you’re going to do that, judge it for what it is. If it’s like five minutes into its baking, it’s not. It’s more than five minutes. But it is not fully baked yet, it is not ready to put the icing on.

If you were in a baking competition, you would be missing the deadline. You wouldn’t be able to put the icing on if you were going to try and take it. I’m going to stop that there. But you couldn’t complete that.

Cate: That’s a great analogy. And I would say that I’ve kind of seen the same thing as a complete outsider where when it first came out they needed people to be using it to kind of figure out I’m guessing what they needed to do differently.

Tammie: It’s because it’s so big. The editor itself, first of all, was a bit like an iceberg. I can never give a straight answer apparently. Because it was a lot of entrepreneurial work, it was a lot of infrastructure, it was changing the structure, changing the language, all of that had to be changed. And you didn’t see that.

So all of these things that took so long, why did they take so long? Why? What is going on? The best is being formed and like getting weird inside out. You know it seem to be made, you know, all of that, like, as it was going to to pieces and all that kind of stuff, right? All of that is happening. So of course it was going to take a really long time to get to you. And now that’s there. That’s here, and that’s here.

But now full site editing there’s so much you can do. There’s so many possibilities that someone’s going to use for it. And to understand every single one of those and create a product that works for every single one and then works for all the plugins, and then works for all the parameters, because you have made it consistent, and then doesn’t upset any of those parameters, it needs a lot of testing, and it needs input, and it needs all of those.

So that’s why it takes so long to bake. And that’s why it needs open conversations and open feedback. And honestly, that could be more, should be more, will be more. So it’s actually really good it’s having all of that. But it’s really hard when someone does call for testing to not like, Well, it must be ready.” If I’m doing a call for testing that means it’s ready for me. Call for testing doesn’t mean-

I think it’s changing in the community. For a long time in WordPress, the concept, it kind of came in during the first phase of Gutenberg, this idea of testing things when it’s not ready. But it was still such a new concept. It was really hard to kind of get around this testing thing when it’s not ready. So to try and move that mental model, try and keep that a little bit I think it’s happening. I see it a lot. But it can be used so much.

I am so excited at the potential. But I’m also excited at not having to use all of that potential. Which I think is really, really important for this. The thing you use will decide that potential for you. You will be able to determine that. But you’ll be able to change that thing without, I can use imagery, you can’t change a thing like clothing currently. And you should be able to.

At the moment, it’s like you’ve got to take your arms off, take your head off to be able to. You can’t. It’s not a better way. It’s like trying to find like one size does fit all in most clothing stores. The ideal will happen in this world where you’ll be able to just change, you’ll be able to go in and it will fit. It will fit everything and it could just change.

And that is what we are getting to and your customizations will pour over magically. But to do all that magic and to do all of this work requires a change in the system and the change in thinking. I am so excited for that. But I’m excited for that because I’ve got to see the vision and because I’ve got to be part of that.

So my perspective I openly know is very different. I am very excited to the phases that I haven’t got to see that live. Like when we move on to the publishing flow and the multi-lingual, I have my own ideas like everybody else that I’m not there, the Genesis those. And I’m so excited to be surprised. I’m so excited to be surprised where full site editing goes from now because it super exciting to me where it’s going.

I’m excited to not agree with something, because that is when plugins are created and that’s where debates happen in open source. And what is released in 5.9 is beta and what’s released in 6.1, I don’t know. It will take time. Tickets can be opened. And that’s the whole point.

It’s not like “it shall never be judged.” There’s things released in 5.0 that are completely different. I mean lots of things that were released in 5.0 that are completely different now. And that’s the way it should be. Open source changes.

WordPress didn’t for a very long time change. And unfortunately, that’s slightly the mindset that’s some things don’t change. And we’ve just got to change a lot. A lot in Gutenberg has changed dramatically from release to release because it should. If it’s not right, change it. As long as it doesn’t cause a fracture to the experience of someone, change it gracefully so it’s reliable still, so you can trust in the experience, and it’s not like, “Surprise!”

Cate: So it is.

Tammie: In short, I’m really excited. But I think it’s easy for me to be excited. But I always want to quantify why I’m excited because I think sometimes, of course, you’re excited. But it’s easy to be scared as well. It’s easy to look at it and go like, “I’ve had a bad experience.” It’s like, “Okay, what did you have a bad experience with? Would you be willing to try it now?” Invariably because people are awesome, yes. And invariably they find something that’s usable for now. Because what they are invariably scared of was something that’s changed now.

Cate: And I think it’s really important to acknowledge that there have been painful moments and that some things have gone wrong. I mean, that’s the nature of creation. And we kind of forget that. And when the livelihood is on the line, it gets even scarier. But you’re right, it’s ever-evolving. Really to judge myself on what I was 20 years ago, please don’t do that. Like who I am now is so different.

Tammie: A I cannot dismiss it. And I think that’s the thing: you cannot dismiss it. If someone has had a bad experience, maybe they lost a client, maybe the client said no. They could have been completely for Gutenberg. They could have lost a pitch because they were for Gutenberg. I don’t know their story. I don’t know what happened to them. But I cannot judge what happened to someone doing that. I’m thankfully not all seeing because my head would explode.

Cate: Oh my gosh, no.

Tammie: I think this is not the superpower you want, like the hero. That is not to me to judge what someone feels. If that is a genuine feeling someone have shared with me, great. You’re sharing a story. Thank you for sharing your story.

I’m not going to dismiss if you tell your story. I’m going to give you grace of listening. And then I’m going to ask, “Can we discuss? Can we talk? Show me. Could you maybe show me on the latest version?” And if we see it still, I’m going to write you a bug report. I’m going to say this is hard for you still. This is why this is hard for you still. This is maybe how we can make it easy for you.” I’m going to say, “Is there a plugin that can do this?”

There’s a discussion, right? Is it a plugin? Is it a bug report? Is it an enhancement? And that’s how, like, is it just for your unique…? No, I always think that the toolbar that ended up like 50 people like it down here, 50 people like it here. It back and forth in the Gutenberg issue. Like Nobody could decide where that damn toolbar was.

Because it was not. Like you’d move it and then people would be like, “I want it here.” Because it’s personal preference. Certain things depends on personal preference. And that’s why we have plugins. It’s going to come down to I think over time recognizing a lot more about that. Maybe we have a lot more of that. Not like I’m not suggesting open the floodgates with too many options.

Some recognizing it for accessibility reasons. We’re just human. For getting older, I have reading glasses, or whatever. Some people just have a preference. You know, some people like this, some people like that. And that’s okay.

Cate: Yeah. And I think that’s such a great point, maybe even to end on is that it’s okay to have different preferences. And that’s why it’s open source is because you then get to create the thing that works better for you, which is going to work better for somebody else too, because there’s other people out there that have the same needs.

Tammie: Yeah, if you have that preference sell enough in that preference. And that is like the thing. Just gracefully have that preference. I think that’s recognizing that everybody is doing it in the fullest of their heart and the fullest of their intention.

I think it’s very hard to do that when you’re passionate. And passion in open source sometimes overrides or it makes it look kicks in a little bit when sometimes when we’re passionate and when it’s like, “Ahhh!” But that’s okay as well. Sometimes we all put boots on and stop. And that’s fine. You might be just having the feels. And if you’re having the feels, have the feels.

Cate: That’s really wonderful.

Topher: All right, I think it’s time to wrap up. That was a fantastic question, Cate.

Cate: I mean, I don’t ever want it to be time to wrap up. We should be able to just keep talking indefinitely. But I think we all have to go do something else at some point.

Topher: I really liked how that last question went. That was really great.

All right, so I’m going to read the outro here. Here we go. This has been an episode of Hallway Chats, a part of the HeroPress Network. Your hosts were Cate and Topher DeRosia. We’d like to thank Sophia DeRosia for the music and Nexcess for hosting our network. If you liked the episode, please subscribe and mention us on social media.

Cate: Thank you so much, Tammie, for joining us today.

Tammie: Thank you for having me.

Jen Swisher is a Happiness Engineer on the Jetpack plugin at Automattic and is organizing WordCamp US 2021 online.

Event Date: October 1

Event Website: https://us.wordcamp.org/2021/

Twitter | @JenSwish

Topher: Hey everyone! My name is Topher.

Cate: And my name is Cate.

Topher: And this is Hallway Chats. We’d like to take a moment to thank our sponsor Nexcess, a Liquid Web brand. Be sure to check out their new product WP Quickstart. WP Quickstart is a fast and affordable way to build membership sites on WordPress with packages beginning at just $49. Visit Nexcess.net to get started.

Our guest today is Jen Swisher. Welcome.

Cate: Hi, Jen.

Jen: It’s great to be here.

Cate: So Jen, we’re really glad to have you here. We’re excited to hear a little bit more about you. We want to talk about what keeps you volunteering in the WordPress space and to tell us a little bit more about being a part of the lead organizing team for WordCamp US and the upcoming WordCamp US 2021 which is right around the corner, October 1.

Jen: Yeah, it’s sneaking up closer and closer every day.

Cate: I know it’s crazy. I’m like, “I am not ready for October yet.” But October is coming whether I like it or not.

Jen: Yeah, barreling towards us.

Cate: Right.

Topher: Tell us about where you’re from and how you got into WordPress.

Jen: I’m from a teeny tiny little town in Michigan—it’s actually not too far from y’all—called Sunfield. So I lived there, went to school there… was basically born there. I left there when I was 19. I moved to St. Louis, Missouri, which is where I live now. I came here for college. They gave me a very, very generous scholarship. And it’s the only reason I have a degree honestly.

So I graduated in 2012 with a degree in Interactive Media and Web Design. But my WordPress story actually starts about halfway through my time there where I started working for a website company. They asked me, “Do you think you could use this WordPress thing to build websites for us?” I literally never heard of it before in my entire life. I was like, “Sure, why not? Let’s do this thing.”

I started, you know, just kind of trying to dig into everything I could possibly find about the software. And the Codecs, as it was called at the time, it’s big. It was very, very big and very hard to understand if you’re just starting to get your feet wet.

So I started looking for other online resources and found out about these meetups that they were doing in our area. So I started going to the meetup started meeting other WordPress people and asking questions and learning things like… I think one of the first things I learned was how to build child themes. And that’s basically what I did the rest of the time I worked there was I used… I think it was either 2010 or 2011 at the time to build child themes for local businesses and nonprofits that the company I was working for had contracts with. So that was where I got started with WordPress really.

Cate: That’s really cool.

Jen: Yeah. And then it would have been 2014 for WordCamp San Francisco. So during WordCamp San Francisco that year, that was the last one before it actually flipped to WordCamp US. That one, there was a fire drill in the middle of one of the sessions in the morning.

Topher: I was there. I remember it.

Jen: My community-

Topher: I could not do it.

Jen: Right. No. Apparently, it was some sort of scheduled thing and they just didn’t tell anyone. But our local meetup was having a watch party during WordCamp San Francisco when we were watching and hanging out and eating chili and all kinds of stuff like that, and the fire drill happened.

And so we’re all just kind of standing around like, “What do we do now?” We don’t know if this means the event’s over or if they’re coming back. So we just kind of were hanging around and I got to talking to some of the meetup organizers at the time, and they’re like, “Oh, well, we’re recruiting folks to join the organizing team for WordCamp St. Louis for 2015.” That’s when I was like, “Well, I have all of this event planning experience from college. I helped plan homecoming and stuff there and big concerts that we have, like the plain white T’s and stuff like that.

Cate: Oh, wow.

Jen: I know a thing or two about a thing or two. So I was like, “I can help.” So 2015 was the first year that I was on an organizing team for WordCamp. And so I did 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018 was St. Louis. And then 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 with WordCamp US.

Cate: Wow, that’s exhausting. We were actually at your first WordCamp, WordCamp St. Louis 2015.

Jen: Topher was a speaker.

Topher: Can you remember?

Jen: I think so. It sticks to my mind.

Cate: If there’s a microphone, then Topher is usually a speaker.

Jen: It’s on mind for some reason. I look at those sites all the time for various reasons.

Cate: Yeah, it was a really great WordCamp. I really enjoyed being there.

Topher: Yeah, I liked it.

Jen: We did City Museum for the after-party. I planned the after-party that year. That was a great after-party. I love the City Museum. I was so glad we were able to bring WordCamp US in 2019 to there.

Topher: You know, I’ve been to a number of WordCamps where the after-party was at a museum, and it has always been amazing.

Cate: There’s a funny story where I was in the City Museum for the 2019 after-party, and never left like a 10-meter section of the lobby. Because I ended up in so many conversations in that space. The girls are telling me all these stories about all the cool things. You know, the slide that they had gotten down in the dinosaur they crawled through and whatever, you know, all of the stuff. And I was like, “Wow, that sounds really nice. We’ll have to come back sometime.”

Jen: You definitely should. I mean, it’s built into this old shoe factory. So it’s like just a big flat warehouse space on every floor. This artist bought it, he’s actually now passed away, but this artist bought it and basically used all of these reclaimed and recycled materials to build that… the best way I know to describe it as a grownup playground.

Cate: That is an excellent way from what I’ve heard.

Topher: Yeah, it really is.

Jen: You can climb on everything. There’s a 10 story slide, paves like… it’s wild. There’s so much to look at. I mean, I’ve been multiple times and you can go back a million times, and you’ll find something different every time.

Topher: I really enjoyed the antique arcade, the pinball games, and stuff like that.

Jen: They’re so fun too.

Topher: When you say arcade, you think Pac-Man, but this was like 1930s.

Jen: Oh, yeah.

Topher: Yeah. It’s really good stuff.

Cate: Well, I thought the lobby was lovely. Nice access to the bathroom, good ventilation. It was charming.

Jen: Yeah. Close to the fire exits.

Cate: Exactly.

Jen: Yeah. Yeah.

Cate: So you were from a local WordCamp to… which as someone who has organized a local WordCamp, that’s a big feat unto itself into doing a national WordCamp, which really is an international WordCamp. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about WordCamp US and maybe what makes it different from a normal WordCamp that somebody may have gone to like their local WordCamp?

Jen: Sure. I think the biggest and most noticeable difference is the budget really. Your average local WordCamp budget is going to be right around $10,000. The WordCamp US budget is usually somewhere around a million dollars, a little over a million dollars. And that’s, I mean, the sheer size of it, the venue that we have to go with. And then there’s all of these little fix… I say little and I mean not so little, fixed costs, like catering. The venues we go with generally have their own exclusive caterer. Catering is actually like a third of that budget.

Cate: Oh, yeah.

Jen: So there’s going to be almost 2,000 people on site. We’re going to make sure you’re fed. So that’s-

Cate: You don’t want 2,000 hungry people on site.

Jen: No.

Cate: Nothing good comes with that.

Jen: That’s like lunches, that’s all of the coffee. Oh, gosh, I think we were in the hundreds of gallons of coffee for 2019. That’s one of the biggest stick line items on our budget is coffee and drinks. Lunch is pretty close. But we as a community consume quite a little bit of coffee.

Cate: Generally, for the best. Again, we don’t want an uncaffeinated crowd that just leads to riots.

Jen: No. No. Crying babies. Nobody wants that. Yeah, nobody wants an uncaffeinated WordCamp.

Cate: Like you said, until you’re someone who’s organizing the events, you don’t understand the restrictions that come with having a venue. Like you look at the venue, “Yeah, oh, it’s really great, let’s get a big space.” And the space often doesn’t cost as much. But everything that you have to put into the space is exponentially more expensive.

Jen: The actual space rent for our WordCamp in St. Louis was a little over $30,000.

Cate: And it’s a massive space. It really is.

Jen: Yeah. We had tens of thousands, maybe even over 100,000 square feet of space at our disposal. It is a very small, small component of it is the actual space. It’s all of the restrictions we have around which vendors we can use. Because every event center or conference center like that is going to have, at least here in the United States, exclusive vendors that you can use for certain things.

Jen: And then there’s also rules around like… there’s unions that operate out of the convention centers and there are rules that we have to follow to stay in line with the union contracts. We can only use two-wheel dollies is a great example of that. Anything that needs to be brought in with three or more wheels has to be wheeled in by a union member-

Cate: Oh, wow.

Topher: Wow.

Jen: …of the staff to wherever it needs to go. There are things that you learn to work with. But we also have exclusive vendors for things like providing internet service to everyone, which is extremely important, and electricity and… I already mentioned catering, audiovisual production-

[crosstalk 00:12:50]

Jen: Yeah, food, food. But audiovisual production, we have to do that all in a certain way to make sure that the live stream can happen still while also running an in-person event. We also have a production company, and we use real human captioners to caption our events. So we have to pay for all of the service there on the ground, but we also have to pay to bring those people in. So there’s travel costs associated with that as well. So what seems, you know, oh, yeah, it’s like a little WordCamp except bigger, so it really shouldn’t cost that much more. No.

Cate: No.

Jen: No. Once you add a convention center, the prices go up exponentially.

Cate: And so that had to play some into the decision to cancel WordCamp US 2020.

Jen: It definitely did. You have to kind of understand how will that played into that, you have to understand how the WordCamp US planning cycle works. It works pretty similarly for Europe and Asia, but I don’t know enough about how their process works to speak to it. This is my fifth WordCamp US and I mean, first online-only, but I did three in person before this.

So WordCamp US usually happens in the last quarter of the year. It was originally in December, we moved it to October in 2019. So we have basically from January to October. And the reason we only have from January to October is because November and December those are kind of wrap-up months for closing down our budget. Since we have such a big budget, there’s a little bit more involved process of getting everything consolidated and accounted for.

Cate: For sure.

Jen: Plus the holidays are in November and December. So there’s no way we can get any planning done during those months anyway. So we don’t start till January.

Cate: I’m sorry, Jen. Are you saying that you’d like to have an actual life outside of WordCamp?

Jen: Maybe. Maybe. We started up again in January. Well, January 2020 as we know is when the Coronavirus have officially made its way to the United States. There’s enough evidence now, we know, to suggest that it was here before that. Just not as widespread as it became or started to become in January. So we already kind of had that uncertainty playing against us.

Cate: Oh, yeah.

Jen: And then in February, WordCamp Asia, as we know, move through online because things got very serious very quickly. And then we started to see it get very, very serious very, very quickly here as well. Here in Missouri, where the 2020 event was supposed to happen, we also had a really unfortunate situation where our state government wouldn’t require masks statewide or any kind of quarantine period, or any other basic public health protection type orders.

Here in St. Louis County, and St. Louis city where the convention center is we did have a mask mandate and we did have specific quarantine periods that you had to follow and lockdowns at several points throughout 2020. But the people that we’re bringing Coronavirus into the city and county don’t live here because they live in St. Charles County and other surrounding counties, and then come into St. Louis to work and bring it with them. So things got very bad here very quickly.

And so by the time April came around, we made the decision at that point this is not going to get better soon. Unfortunately, that’s the reality of it. At that point, we were having 2,000 to 3,000 new cases a day. And it only escalated from there. So we made the decision at that point to go online.

Before that, though, we had been planning essentially two events at once. We’ve been planning both to be in person and to be online at the same time. So we were trying to be excited for being in person and also grieving not being in person at the same time, which those two things don’t really mesh well. You know, there’s this kind of cognitive dissonance that comes with that, that you will feel excited and sad at the same time. And it’s hard to continue forward on to that.

Cate: It’s a lot to ask of your volunteers too.

Jen: Absolutely.

Cate: I mean, I was on the team and really happy to give my time to do it. But planning either an online event or an in-person event is a big task for a small group of organizers.

Topher: Absolutely.

Cate: Asking them to try to do both and be excited about it while also dealing with family and their own health and their own circumstances, that’s a lot to start asking of yourself as an organizer and the people that you’re trying to work with as well.

Jen: Like we’re all experiencing this collective trauma of the pandemic while at the same time trying to keep the lights on at home by going to work and keeping our houses in some sort of semblance of order and taking care of our family members, dealing with the possibility of family member coming down with the Coronavirus and the possibility of them not making it was very real then.

Cate: Very, yeah.

Jen: My own dad came down with it. Thankfully, his case was very mild and he was fine. He hasn’t had any lasting effects. But I consider myself really lucky. He is immune-compromised, it could have been a lot worse.

So there was that kind of stuff going on. But add on top of this that uncertainty isn’t something that we’re okay with asking our valued sponsor partners to take on. Like WordCamp Europe and WordCamp Asia, they had started their planning processes before the pandemic had happened or had really taken hold. And so they already had commitments from their sponsors and speakers, and all of this stuff had already been planned.

It didn’t hit the United States until January. So we were literally starting at square one as it’s starting to barrel towards us. So, trying to balance all of these life things, the work, the living through this really difficult time in our lives and all of the other responsibilities outside of WordCamp US, and then asking folks to continue working on this when they’re already feeling so, so much overwhelm and burnout because of everything else, it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair to them.

At the end of the day, I don’t feel like if we’d kept moving forward with an in-person event that it would have been an event that the community would have enjoyed either.

Cate: Yeah, I agree completely.

Jen: If we’re trying to drag a coffin across the finish line with a piece of fish line it’s just not going to work.

Cate: Right, exactly. There are too many other factors that went into it. It would be too costly for people to have to come in and quarantine for two weeks if you’re coming from out of state. And then kind of by that time, I don’t know that anybody had the emotional energy for another online event.

Jen: No.

Cate: As great as it is to move online, you’re already spending all day and now you’re having more Zoom meetings than you ever before. I know personally the last thing I’d want to do is sit at my computer and watch one more online event at that point.

Jen: There was an immense opportunity that was presented by moving online. Absolutely. But we also had to look at this from the “is this helpful to our organizers or is this harming them?” And at the end of the day, it was doing more harm than help.

Since I became a member of the leadership team for WordCamp US is that we focus our organizers’ efforts towards things that both benefit the community, but also don’t harm them. That’s something that’s really near and dear to my heart is making sure that people are prioritizing themselves over a volunteer opportunity.

Yes, WordPress is a 100% volunteer-driven project and we can’t keep the lights on without them, but it’s also really important to make sure that we aren’t burning out our volunteers because if they get burnout, and they don’t come back, who’s going to take their place? Keeping the torch burning and keeping it sustainable are equally important goals.

Cate: And it’s a difficult world to just step into-

Jen: Oh, yeah.

Cate: …even if you’re… Like me just on the comms team, you know, just helping with a tiny little piece of it, you need to have some background and some understanding to be able to… You can’t just pull somebody off the street and ask them to help out. It’s complicated.

Jen: You have to understand where this event started. This event wasn’t WordCamp US forever ago. It started out is WordCamp San Francisco when Matt had this idea, “Let’s have this conference to talk about WordPress for a day or two or three.” And now we’re here.

I feel like a lot of the other folks on the organizing team felt that in a year like 2020, where everything feels like it’s broken, that we needed to prioritize the people actually doing the work of putting this together. That meant unfortunately canceling the event.

Cate: I felt totally supported by the team, really valued. I felt like in the process you all were transparent about it. You really welcomed feedback and input. Somebody’s always got to make the decision, but I felt like you all, you as a group were really upfront about it.

Jen: My least favorite decision that I’ve ever had to be involved with.

Cate: Absolutely.

Jen: I got on this organizing team for WordCamp US out of a purely selfish mission to learn how the big events we’re doing is so that I could bring it back to St. Louis. And then I met the people on organizing team and I got just absolutely hooked and fell in love with the event. And for all of the growing pains, and for all of the missing shipments and things getting sent to the wrong booths and just the crazy last minute “where did the coffee go?” situations. I would do it over again a million times.

Cate: Speaking of you are doing it over again.

Jen: I am.

Cate: Here you are. WordCamp US 2021 is just next Friday.

Jen: Just next Friday.

Cate: We were planning this on a Friday.

Jen: No big deal.

Cate: Just next Friday. You have loads of time.

Jen: Yes.

Cate: But you guys went with kind of a similar event this time around. I think it was a great idea. Kind of like a firework a bit. Like short and sweet. So you want to tell us a little bit about the upcoming WordCamp US?

Jen: Sure. Like Cate said, it is next Friday, October 1. We went with a single day event this year. It’s a single day event but we also only have two tracks. WordCamp US when we’re in person has traditionally been four-plus track event with multiple days of content and a contributor day. I mean, this online event format thing is very foreign to me.

Personally, this is my first time actually planning an online event. But also the LT, the lead trio, we call ourselves the LT, we’re the three lead organizer folk, I guess you could say, we share that role equally. We all have teams that are kind of like the teams that we work with more closely. But we share that role equally so that if, you know, Kathy got struck by lightning tomorrow, for instance, there would be two other people that could step in and jump in and keep the lights on and keep the ship going in the right direction.

Cate: Yeah, absolutely.

Jen: So we started meeting in March, which is quite a bit actually before we brought in everyone else to talk about kind of a vision forward for this event, because the three of us knew that we really didn’t want to have a giant behemoth of an event. But we also didn’t want to try and replicate the in-person experience that we all know and love from WordCamp US.

For the three of us, it was very much a decision made out of still being really kind of heartbroken about the previous year’s event and not being able to have in-person events. You can’t replicate that. You could try a million different iterations but you can’t replicate what it’s like to walk up to somebody you haven’t seen in a year and give them a hug. And that is sad.

I’m so excited to bring this event back to the community. But I am also so sad that we’re still… sorry, that we’re doing this online. I’m happy we’re doing this and also really sad that this means two years apart.

Cate: Right.

Jen: It’s hard.

Cate: Topher was mentioning… I’m used to doing some interviews around HeroPress and he realized that two of his interviews today were with people that he hasn’t seen or talked to in nearly two years.

Topher: Yeah. We talk on Slack but this was the first time we did a Zoom and I saw their faces. It’s just weird.

Jen: I saw my sister for the first time in two years last week.

Topher: Oh, wow.

Jen: She flew in last Wednesday and stayed over the weekend. We were those stereotypical people you see in the airport hugging and sobbing all over each other. That was us. Just because we’re both immune-compromised and she still was like KN95 mask with one of the disposable regular masks over the top of it all the way through the airport and onto the plane.

Cate: Oh yeah.

Jen: I feel that so deeply just about the community too. There’s equal parts. I’m really, really glad to be having this event because I’ve gotten to have those weekly meetings with all of the team leads, regular chats with all of my friends online who I do WordCamp organizing with. So my heart feels full just being able to have those times together, but I am really sad that it doesn’t end at some random location with all of the organizers in a big room together eating dinner and celebrating the months and months of work that has gone into the event.

Cate: I think you guys made a really wise choice to not try to replicate an in-person event, you know, to try to just let it be what was best to be this time around. It still kind of moves things into a more normal realm. It kind of moves us closer to normal which I think we all need more of right now. And I love that it’s happening on October 1. So that kind of kicks off the holiday season here in the US. It’s kind of like coming together with your friends to go for a hayride and then-

Jen: Absolutely.

Cate: It’s been really impressive how you guys have pulled it together so quickly too. I mean, you talked about how long an in-person event takes. And if you just started in March that gives you about six months. And I know I came on the team in August so it’s been a whirlwind.

Jen: We didn’t officially kick off with the full organizing team until just over two months ago.

Topher: Wow.

Cate: But it’s been great. It’s gone really well. At least you’re making it look like it’s going great and really well.

Jen: Yeah. This year we have 22 organizers to share. Our last organizing team had 47 people. And to say that I’m impressed with the amount of work that has happened in the last two months would be a gross understatement. I am shocked and awed and impressed and so incredibly grateful that this thing that Kimberly and Kathy and I were just throwing around ideas around start back in March is like it’s happening in a week.

That I think despite being away from each other, despite everything that’s happened this and last year, we’re still living that. I think despite all of that, the fact that this is happening and that we kind of picked up and it felt to me like nobody had ever really left.

Cate: I agree completely.

Jen: It very much felt like coming back to the organizing team this year, very much felt like coming home in really just be super cheesy. It was really great to start having those weekly conversations again and…

Cate: It makes a big difference to be interacting with people in a more normal sort of way, to be doing fun projects that aren’t just work and aren’t just the everyday tasks. Is there anything else about WordCamp US that you want to share with the group, to share with the community?

Jen: To come.

Cate: All our work will be wasted, all the coffee we’ll just get cold if you don’t show up.

Jen: The virtual coffee.

Cate: Wait, you’re not having coffee delivered to every attendee’s house?

Jen: I wish we could. That’d be fun.

Topher: That’s a budget.

Jen: That would be so cool. Oh, gosh. Like I said we have two tracks. I think we have a really great lineup. The schedule is already online so you can go check that out on our website by going to us.wordCamp.org and going to schedule page.

Cate: I have nothing to do with it, but the website is so cute. I love the design of the website.

Jen: I love our website so much. Mel Choyce did the design on the site. I think they did an amazing job.

Topher: So good.

Jen: In our most recent post about the Wapuu, we actually have a quote from Mel about the inspiration behind the design. Let me go see if I can find it. It was… oh, gosh. She… excuse me, they-

Cate: I saw the Wapuu just the other day. It’s adorable. It’s so perfect.

Jen: Thank you. I’m super excited about it. It goes really well with the kind of site theme. So the theme is kind of based around this concept of travel and exploration. That’s why the actual WordCamp US logo is a map. But one of the first things that Mel did after getting fully vaccinated was go on a short road trip to some of the National Parks here in the US.

Cate: Nice.

Jen: So the theme of the site and all of our marketing materials and stuff is kind of based around that travel, nature kind of vibe. I really love it. It’s so different than anything we’ve ever done. And I just love how it turned out.

Cate: Yeah, it fits so perfectly.

Jen: Yeah.

Cate: As much as I would love to talk with you for the rest of the afternoon, you have a little bit of life to get back to. You got one weekend left to WordCamp. I’m sure you have nothing to do-

Jen: No big deal

Cate: …this weekend. So that’s-

Jen: Nothing at all.

Cate: Nothing at all. So thank you so much for giving us all of the inside scoop on what’s going on, what has gone on, you know, talking a little bit about the hard choices that come with being an organizer. And thank you for your willingness to do it anyway. Without people like you being willing to help organize events like this, and I know Kathy and Kimberly are a big part of it as well, there’s a huge team of 22 people-

Topher: Twenty-two.

Cate: But without people being willing to step up and help organize events like this, it wouldn’t happen. This isn’t paid. There isn’t a line of people waiting to jump in to do it. So just really appreciate your willingness to take the time and put so much energy so much of yourself and to the events that you’ve been a part of. It really shows in a good way.

Jen: I really, really love WordCamp and community organizing in general. But yeah, WordCamp US is hands down one of my favorite things I’ve ever worked on.

Topher: That’s great.

Cate: I’m so glad. I’m so glad to have you be a part of it.

Topher: All right, I have a thing to read here and then we’ll be done.

Cate: All right.

Topher: This has an episode of Hallway Chats, a part of the HeroPress Network. Your hosts were Cate and Topher DeRosia. We’d like to thank Sophia DeRosia for the music and Nexcess for hosting our network. If you liked the episode, please subscribe and mention us on social media.

Joe Howard  is the founder and Chief Innovation Officer of WPBuffs, and is organizing the second WPMRR Virtual Summit.

Event Date: September 21-23

Event Website: https://wpmrr.com/

Twitter | @wpmrrsummit

Topher: Hey everyone! My name is Topher.

Cate: And I’m Cate.

Topher: And this is Hallway Chats. We’d like to take a moment to thank our sponsor Nexcess, a Liquid Web brand. Be sure to check out their new product, WP Quickstart. Web Quickstart is a fast and affordable way to build membership sites on WordPress with packages beginning at just $49. Visit Nexcess.net to get started.

Now let’s get started with Hallway Chats. Our guest today is Joe Howard. Welcome!

Joe: Thank you, Topher. Thanks, Cate. Happy to be here.

Cate: Hey! We’re really glad to have you. We know the WPMRRVS, virtual summit, is just around the corner, and we’re really glad you took a few minutes to help us tell people more about it. Well, it’s a great, exciting three days. There’s so many things about it that continue on afterwards that we’d love to be able to get this episode out so that it continues to be on people’s minds.

Joe: Yeah.

Topher: I have a quick question to start with. Joe, you started WP Buffs. Is WPMRR an extension of Buffs or is this a Joe Howard special?

Joe: That’s a good question because I don’t know exactly what it is. The story behind it is that at WP Buffs we do website management, and we started doing white label website management, which means we work with agencies and freelancers. And they wanted to offer 24/7 support. And so we would offer them as white label solution where they could sell our care plans and we provide all the fulfillment.

But then we also ran into some people who didn’t want to do white label support. They just wanted to do the support themselves. They’re just was like, “How do you do it? Can you tell us?” So I was like, “Oh, why don’t we do a course on teaching people how to do website management?”

Topher: Nice.

Joe: So that’s how WPMRR started. It was actually an online course. You know, folks could log in… you can’t register for the course anymore. But folks who originally had access still have access to be able to log in to a little like secret login area.

So created this course for folks. It pretty much open sourced everything we did it WP Buffs. And then it was great until I realized, oh, you can’t just build a course and launch it, and then it’s evergreen. You have to keep it updated. Like we’re changing things every week at WP Buffs. So it’s like, “Do I have to update this course every week?”

Joe: So it got to the point, you know, months later, maybe about a year later where I was like, “Hmm, I don’t feel as comfortable having it up anymore because I don’t want to give people old stuff we were doing. It needs to be new. And if I’m not updating it, then let’s change it up a little bit.”

So instead of doing a course, we can keep it as the WPMRR Podcasts and we could also fold in the WPMRR community on Circle, and then the virtual summit. Which is like, okay, we can do this, once a year, big to three-day event, and that itself is the content. And a lot of that can be evergreen and people can look at the date and stuff. So that made, I think, more sense for my perspective of where I wanted to go.

So to answer your question, WPMRR kind of grew out of WP Buffs. This is kind of a separate conversation but I’ve recently transitioned out of the CEO position at WP Buffs. I’m now the CIO. Again, that’s a whole nother conversation. Nick is now the CEO of WP Buffs.

But that kind of transitions WPMRR a little bit like less under WP Buffs and a little bit more into its own thing. That’s what I’m focusing on. I want to make it a great community. I want to have great podcast content. I want to have the best possible virtual summit, which is very top of mind since it’s next week. So, yeah. I think that’s what more obviously WPMRR is.

Cate: That’s really cool. I mean, because they complement each other so nicely. But part of what I like about WPMRR and the virtual summit is that, well, it grew out of the website maintenance area. It doesn’t apply just to people looking to do website maintenance. I don’t have to want to be recreating the buffs to get so much out of the virtual summit and the community around it. You’ve really done a great job of making it fairly universal.

Joe: Cool, yeah. Thank you. I appreciate it. There’s a space for that. And obviously, like I have somewhat of a niche expertise in terms of building a productized service, growing a productized services company, running a productized services company, doing website management, all the nuances that are entailed in that. So there’s a space in the community for that.

There’s a website management space so that people can talk specifically about that. It’s pretty active. But I like the idea of I want to help people build monthly recurring revenue with WordPress. I wanted it to be a little broader for folks. Because whether you’re trying to build subscription revenue doing website management, or you’re building a plugin that’s doing annual recurring revenue, or maybe you’re doing SEO as a service, and that’s just like a flat, systemized package service every month, there’s a lot of different ways to build subscription revenue.

And I think that just because I do website management, and someone else does SEO, or someone else does design work, or someone else has a SaaS, real Software as a Service, I can learn from all those people too. And it’s really helpful actually to learn from outside of your specific niche because it gives you all sorts of ideas and chemistry and things bubble up you wouldn’t have thought of before.

So I like kind of having everybody doing subscription revenue in one place because it just adds to that—what I think is a pretty dynamic space to be able to improve your subscription revenue in MRR.

Cate: Yeah.

Topher: Yeah.

Cate: I was thinking the same thing, that when I start working with people who have similar goals as me, but are doing it in different ways, I learned so much from them. Seeing things from other people’s perspectives and what they’ve learned from their own individual struggles, because not every business hits the same bumps, that every business is going to hit bumps. So think of you learning and growing and in unique ways that maybe other people in your industry aren’t necessarily because they’re not making those same connections.

Topher: I think it’s interesting that WPMRR grew out of that course about how to maintain websites. I’ve known about WPMRR, your podcast, and what you’re doing for a long time. But because of what I do in WordPress, I’ve always thought of it through the lens of a freelance web developer. How can I do that? And that’s quite different from offering a SaaS or something like that.

But then again, to a certain extent, it’s not. I mean, I build websites and they tend to be one-offs. But if I really want MRR, then I’m offering them a service, I’m continuing to maintain their website and do SEO and all that kind of stuff. It surprised me just now, I don’t know why, when you said that it was related to the Buffs business, because I don’t do that. And yet, it seems very relevant to me at the same time.

Joe: I talked with a lot of people who have started businesses, people who work at small businesses, businesses are going to differ. They’re going to have different challenges when you get into the nitty-gritty day-to-day stuff. They’re just in different industries, they have different target audiences, they do different work. A lot is different across all different businesses. So the specific challenges are going to be different.

But if you zoom out and you look at probably the three to five biggest challenges most small businesses have, you find a ton of overlap. Just like a Venn diagram where it’s like the intersection is what’s similar, and then you’re going to have the outsides which are different. But that intersection, there’s a ton in there.

I talk to a ton of people from different businesses, like hiring, and onboarding, and personnel, that’s a big challenge for a lot of people. So that’s just one area where if you were to take a hundred small businesses, at least small businesses that have done some hiring before, you’re not going to have five of them that will say hiring was kind of challenging. You probably going to have like 30, 40, 50, 60. Like it’s kind of everyone. So I’m with you, Topher.

Topher: My local mechanic is a guy with just like two employees in a small shop, and I am very often surprised by how very, very similar our issues are with our businesses: dealing with clients, dealing with people who don’t want to pay, people who are unhappy with the product they got, you know, all that stuff. I’m like, “Oh, man, we have the same job. It’s just you have a wrench and I have a keyboard.”

Joe: Totally. Yeah, yeah, it’s the same thing. It’s like, you know, we deliver a service, 9 out of 10 people really liked it, one out of 10 didn’t. Okay, how are we going to deal with that? How are we going to use it to learn? That doesn’t change across any business. No business is 100% perfect in their delivery of their product or service or whatever they’re doing.

You have to find ways to improve what you’re doing over time. And that becomes harder when you have more people on the team, when you have more complex business. So, yeah, that’s a great example, Topher of like everyone… that’s a challenge, whether big or small, for everybody. Lower churn.

Cate: So all of that has to be really complex to try to channel into a three-day conference.

Joe: You said it.

Cate: Your conference is coming up on the 21st, 22nd, and 23rd of September. Just next… I’m sorry to say this. Next Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.

Joe: Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

Cate: So how do you go about fitting all of that into three days?

Joe: Maybe I have multiple things to say about it. I had two thoughts in my head this year about how we wanted to split up the days of the conference. The way that WPMRR community is right now, it’s focused on people at different stages of their business. It’s people who are trying to hit this 10k MRR mark, which is kind of this usual, like, I can probably go full time on it if it’s $10,000 MRR. Like I can quit my full-time job and go do that thing if I wanted to. That’s a big marker for a lot of people.

And then there’s the next marker of 83,000 MRR, which is a million dollar a year business, which obviously you have to scale pretty well to be able to get to that point. But that’s where we find a lot of our folks in the community they want to get to.

What I was thinking about, in the summit this year, was do I want to have two days that are separate? Like split up like that? One starter and one advanced or something? But we decided to keep it the same as last year, in which the first day is more sales, marketing content, more how do I get the customers, attract the customers?

Cate: Sure. sure.

Joe: And then second day, once you have the customers, okay, how do I do operations? How do I systemize things well? Things like that. And we went with that because in our mind… Brian is doing something with me.

Topher: Brian Richards?

Joe: Right. It’s Brian Richards. I forget not everyone… I’m like, “Everyone knows Brian Richards. Brian Richards, for folks who don’t know, but he does WooSesh, WordSesh. We kind of fell on this. Like it’s just going to be easier for people to decide what they want to attend, and if they want to attend the whole day. It’s like, what are their challenge areas is where we want to go.

We did a feedback survey and most people just said, like, “Well, I have sales and marketing and lead generation. That’s a big challenge.” So we’re like, “Oh, well, that should just be a day so people won’t have to say like, “I want to these two sessions that day and those two sessions that day on the same topics.” Like let’s put all the topics together. So that’s how we’re doing that in terms of the day today.

We have day three this year, which is website management. Bringing in the… okay, WP Buffs does website management. We want to help this industry evolve. We want to help everybody level up.

Cate: Sure, yeah.

Joe: People who are like me five years ago, you know, they’re just starting out, give them a leg up. And we have people from all sorts of management companies. I just recorded with folks from sitecare.com, Valet, Maintainn with two Ns and WebDevStudios. So a lot of folks who are coming together to give these great talks and roundtables in that area. That’s day three. Okay, I know I’ve talked a little bit.

But the last thing I wanted to add was that we’re streaming the summit in the Circle community that we’ve built. That’s different than last year. The idea there is I wanted to mention this, because you said, “How are you supposed to fit all this stuff in three days?”

Cate: Right.

Joe: Well, from where I’m coming from, it’s actually like you’re never going to attend a three-day summit and then the fourth day, the day after, you’re like, “I did it?”

Topher: No, I know.

Joe: “I did all the stuff I was going to do.” Right? So the point of streaming into the community is that I’m hopeful that people will be in the community. They have to sign up to be a part of the community, to attend the summit. And then hopefully they can actually continue to grow their MRR over the year, not just over three days. So the summit is going to be great. It’s going to give a ton of actionable items, all the stuff you can do, all these great talks.

Okay, now, the next month, which talk are you going to implement those three end action items from? What’s your challenge area? And how can we do this together? Like that’s the whole point of that community is how can we collectively, responsibly grow a monthly recurring revenue? That’s the only impetus behind what we’re doing in the community.

And so I’m hopeful that the three days of the summit translates into weeks and months of getting at it, and doing it together and feeling like you’re not the only person struggling or having this challenge. Someone post a challenge, 10 other people are following, following. Like, I have this challenge too. Like, hey. So I’m hopeful that’ll be a value to folks who want to really hit the ground running in terms of growing subscription revenue.

Cate: I think you’ve really addressed an issue that a lot of conferences don’t cover. I go to something like this and I’m so excited about it, and I’m ready to act on it. And then I get home and the rest of real life happens, you know, and you get a little behind, or you get a little stuck, and you don’t necessarily know who to turn to, to ask for help, or you don’t have somebody kind of alongside you, helping, motivate you, or you spill coffee all over your notes, whatever it is.

I love the idea of having a community around it, where you can stay motivated at your own pace, and where the new people you know, trying to reach that initial 10,000 mark can be helped by the people who’ve already made it to the 80,000, and you’ve got the support of the people in between.

I also really think the structure of the summit plays nicely, in that regardless of what your current monthly recurring revenue is, you’re always dealing with sales and content and how to run the business itself. There’s things that will always be challenging no matter how good you get at them. Because as your business grows, it just continues to get harder. Again, it’s like having a cat. You still have to feed the cat even if you fed it yesterday.

Joe: The cats need to be fed every day.

Cate: I know, right? It’s crazy.

Joe: Honestly, this is an experiment from where I’m standing. Like I don’t know how well this is going to work. I’m the only admin right now in the community. I’m trying to make changes on a weekly basis to try and put the community in a better position to help more people responsively hit their MRR goals. And it’s hard. I don’t know exactly how to set the community up to do that. I’m going to be honest here on this podcast, I’m figuring it out, too. I’m creating this on the way as well.

But I think that I have a pretty good idea of where I want things to go. And a lot of it’s just going to be about getting more folks in there, having people be active, allowing people to easily give us feedback on things, learning from how other people are doing things, and then just continuing to mold the community and really create a community structure that’s going to be helpful for people.

Is that 10k and 83k MRR mark spaces, are those the most effective ways to help people? I think so right now. But I don’t know that 100%. It’s like I could change it next month and maybe it’s going to be more effective or less effective. But that’s also just how I do things. I’m a tinker, I’m always going to just kind of like… I’m going to wonder how something’s going to work out and then I’ll just try it. Because for the MRR community, it’s okay to try new things.

Cate: Yeah.

Joe: If people see things changed, and they… they see things changing, they maybe hear this podcast, they know I’m doing it because I’m trying to always take a step forward. I think that’s what’s most important for me so.

Cate: And if you don’t try things you’re never going to know. Communities are so incredibly dynamic. You want to be trying new things, and you want to be unafraid of failure. Because it just means that it wasn’t the right thing at the right time. It could work great, you know, next October, but it may not work this time. That doesn’t mean it was wrong. It just wasn’t right.

Joe: Totally. I did want to mention the choice to build on the Circle platform as well. And Cate, I want to give you a shout-out too because you helped put all that together before it launch. So shout out to Cate for sure.

Cate: Yeah, I was glad I could help.

Joe: Yeah, yeah. There’s a lot of different ways to have an online community. And there’s a lot of Facebook groups and Slack channels, that folks can have different experiences in. We didn’t want to go with Facebook because I’m just kind of anti-Facebook person. I’m sure a lot of people are. I never log into Facebook. But I have Facebook News Feed Eradicator Chrome extension. I’m just over Facebook stuff. If I am not going to be on it, then I’m not going to be able to do a good job with the community.

Cate: That is invested as you are in it too. You don’t want to hand it over to somebody else. Like you don’t want to give Facebook ownership of your group by-

Joe: Yeah, that’s a whole nother… Like, it’s closed.

Cate: Right, exactly.

Joe: And so if they decide to shut my stuff down, they don’t like what people are saying, “All these crazy WordPress people talking open source,” they could shut it down if they want to. There’s Slack as well. But I always felt like when I was in slack channels like it’s… what I like about Slack channel is I can DM anybody. I can reach out to someone or… But in terms of the conversations, I miss everything. If I’m not there, I have to hit a button to go up. It’s just like to me it’s not good like…

It’s a tool that wasn’t built for communities, per se. It was built for work communities. So that’s a little bit different thing. Circle is like Facebook, it has all the same posting and liking and commenting features, but it’s its own standalone thing.

Circle is technically a private company as well. They could shut my group down probably if they wanted to as well. I’m a big proponent of open source, but when the opportunity costs of standing up a community easily outweigh the ability to 100% own things. Like I made that decision. To me, that was an okay decision to make. So I’m still a proponent of open source stuff, I just chose not to do it in this case, because I want to put my focus on the community, not on the other pieces of managing my own open source software. So that was Circle.

What you said Cate was also… I want to bring it back to what you said a few minutes ago about you can consume information at your own pace. I really like that. I think the last 18 months or so have been really stressful for a lot of people. And I think there’s a lot of value to having an event or community where you have to show up for live events or show up for in-person things. Clearly, there’s value there. And I’m sure we’ll continue to do some of that in the community.

But I like Circle because it’s built to be asynchronous. So you can come in and you can see posts by different people. You can turn on notifications so that you get a notification inside the browser, but you don’t get emailed and you don’t get the browser, you know, push notification. You can use the search functionality, it’s excellent. If you have a challenge around hiring, just search “hiring.” Like 10 things pop down, about 10 conversations around hiring or whatever challenge people are having.

So I like that people can consume the information at their own pace and come on whenever they want to. And it’s easy to lurk. And you don’t have to. You don’t have to come. Not everybody wants to be the super active member.

The goal of the community is to help people responsibly grow their MRR whether they’re super active, or whether they’re quieter in the background, whether they like one post. If I can help someone in one way, or ten or a hundred, that’s the point. And I don’t need that to be… show up to my thing live. We’re going to put all the videos on YouTube. I’m not making that a secret. For free. People can go watch whenever they want to.

If you want free merch, free WPMRR merch, hey, then you need to show up for the summit. I don’t want people to show up if they don’t feel like they have to. It’s all good.

Cate: Well, it’s really nice to provide that variety though, because we all learn at different times and in different ways. And like you said, it really has been a challenging 18 months. It’s not looking like it’s going to give a whole lot easier that much sooner.

Joe: It’s like almost we had like a peek in there. Oh, maybe, but hmm, not quite.

Cate: Yeah. And so having the options to learn when you’re ready and to interact as you’re comfortable with the amount of energy you have left to give it’s just such a great value to the community. Circle does do a great job of making it really easy for people to get in and get involved, which I love. So the summit is free, correct?

Joe: Yes.

Cate: So three days, free advice from people, and amazing community that you can be involved in. You said that the sessions will eventually be up on YouTube so that people can consume them there as well, which is fantastic. Anything else you want to tell us about it? That free merch, you know, if you’re there?

Joe: Yeah. I want to do some merch giveaways. Speaker lineup is great this year. It was great last year.

Topher: Yes. I was going to ask you some questions about speakers.

Joe: Go ahead, Topher.

Topher: If I can lightly pivot there. What are you looking for in a speaker? How do you choose? What makes a good WPMRR speaker? I mean, aside from being able to speak. Which people are good at having that wisdom?

Joe: I think there are multiple things that do. We’re looking for speakers this year… I had certain topics I wanted touched on. There were certain topics that we touched on last year that need a new kind of paralleled or very similar topic because they were just so popular. There were some things that we didn’t get to touch on last year that people gave in the feedback survey this year and we said, “Oh, we need to give a talk on that for sure.”

So that’s what led to really the speaker selection because we just want to provide the… We want to give the best content we can. I mean, if we’re not doing that, what’s the point? Like Erin Flynn, for example, we had Erin Flynn. She’s giving a talk on… I believe her talk is growing and scaling a freelance business.

Cate: Nice.

Joe: That was a big driver because a lot of our attendees are freelancers. Right?

Topher: Yeah.

Joe: So it’s like an easy choice to want to do that in terms of building your monthly recurring revenue as a freelancer. I brought Kristina Romero in and she’s talking on day three. I’ll give a shout-out to Kristina also because I talked about my course before, and some people might be like, “Hey, I want that course.” Kristina Romero has a great course on care plan stuff. So go take her course. I think it’s wpcaremarket.com. So people should go check that out. If you want official course, you can sign up for it.

But she’s giving a talk on how to make your care plans and website management profitable-

Cate: Nice.

Joe: …which is a big challenge area for a lot of people. You’ll look at a lot of management companies and they’re, in my opinion, really underpriced. Like why do you just have $30 a month…? That doesn’t… How would you…? How? How are you going to grow then? If you try to grow, that’s going to crush you.

But it’s a challenge for a lot of people. And it’s not just like a pricing challenge. It’s also like maybe a psychological challenge. Like, “I can’t raise my prices. Is what I do really worth $100 or 100 pounds or whatever a month?” That’s a challenge. And Kristina is talking about that. Because I’ve talked with a ton of website management folks over the years and that’s a big challenge is how do I price a productized service, specifically, website management?

So Kristina is talking about how to make your care plan work profitable, which is probably essential for all businesses. You probably want to run a profitable business. So, hopefully that kind of answered your question.

Topher: Yeah.

Joe: For instance, I want a good content, we got a lot of feedback from the last year, and just based on my experience of talking to people. That’s why we hence selected folks to speak on certain topics. That’s probably how we got about 80% of our speakers. And then the other 20% kind of got plugged in through either maybe folks who have been on the podcast, which is another value to running a podcast. I get to talk to all sorts of great people.

Cate: Oh, yeah.

Joe: I’ve talked to awesome people for like 45 minutes. You two know. “So, hey, I had a great conversation with that person, but it felt like we could talk for like three hours on that topic. We miss that topic. Oh, I really want to talk about… Hey.” That’s super easy plug-and-play. I know their personality, I have their email address. I know, they’re a great person. I know, maybe they want an opportunity to speak.

I don’t even have to like put an email together that’s like, “I formally ask you to…” It’s like a slack message and it’s like, “Yo, you want to give a talk to the summit?” And like, “Yeah, that sounds cool. Just let me know what I need.” And that’s easy. So that was probably how the last 15% to 20% of people got plugged in. There you go. That’s speaker section.

I will say, again, just Brian Richards and I doing the summit. And I really like the idea of doing an open call for speakers. That does require a little bit more work, and bandwidth, and energy, and probably some other folks working on the summit. So that’s why we didn’t do that this year. So we’ve done two years of kind of our outreach for speakers.

Another reason I really like doing blind acceptance is it does help a lot with diversity of speaker candidates. Of course, I always want to be pulling from a diverse pool of folks, not just like, “Who’s my network of WordPress space?” Because it’s just like most people who we know probably their network of WordPress folks is going to skew in a certain direction.

So I use websites like Underrepresented in Tech, trying to do some outreach to folks as well, in terms of just getting that as broad a diverse range of people in terms of outreach as possible. But I think the outreach is still not the ideal way to do that. So that is something I admit that next year I would love to do that.

We’ll see what happens with the 2022 summit. Maybe we’ll have more official sponsors to help us continue to step up in those areas as well. So I’m following a big Orange Heart in that capacity as I’m sure a lot of summit folks are. I talk to them a lot. And you know, folks like you Cate doing great work over there. There’s a lot of stuff y’all do over there that folks like me are like, “Hmm, yes, I would like to do exactly that, please.” So it’s always a work in progress as I’m sure it is at the Big Orange Heart too.

Cate: Yeah, yeah. I think you’ve done a great job with a small conference. It is important to keep it manageable. And while it’s great to be able to do an open call for speakers, when you’ve got a very topical oriented conference, starting with what you know and growing it, like you did for number two, and then opening up the community where you then start to create your pool of potential new speakers, and just again, continue to be seen better in the community, you’ll find more of those speakers. But it is a challenge.

Speaker selection of everything I’ve done is always a challenge. You would love to let everybody speak, you would love to have it be just completely open mic, but you also don’t want to waste people’s time by not giving them the best information you can. And so really it’s hard. And I think you’ve done a really great job of it.

Joe: Cool. I appreciate it. As you two probably know, and people who are listening to this podcast can probably hear it, I’m pretty off the cuff and informal with most things I do. So that open mics thing sounds awesome.

Cate: I know.

Joe: Maybe I’d be like, “Let’s do that.” But on the other side of things, you want things to be curated enough so that you’re guaranteed a floor of value delivery. It’s this quality… Even though it’s a free event, you don’t want to throw a bad event. You want to throw a good event. You have sponsor sponsoring the event, so it’s got to be a good event. So probably somewhere in the middle there is a good, happy medium.

But yeah, I mean, it’s funny because my podcast is super informal. I just kind of have folks on and we talk about whatever we want to talk about. Usually WordPress-related, but like, whatever. We go on a tangent for 10 minutes, like I don’t care. Hey, talk about family, hey, talk about that thing you did last week, hey, that vacation, whatever. It’s like hearing that information adds value in itself.

But the summit is a little different. It’s slightly more formal to I think bring maybe those beginners or people coming into the WordPress space just in that foundation. So that I can maybe then talk to them on the podcast in three months, and that thing I said on the podcast that like seemed off the cuff was actually super important, they’ll get that because they have that foundation knowledge, where someone who just started that little seed may not grow. And probably shouldn’t because they’re just not at that stage yet. So it’s all a work in progress. But yeah, I appreciate that.

Cate: And then again another reason to have the community alongside the event, because you can have more of those informal conversations, you can, again, get more voices involved in the conversation without ever necessarily everybody talking at the conference.

Topher: I have one more question and then we should wrap it up. Your first summit was after the pandemic started? Is that correct?

Joe: Correct.

Cate: Yes.

Joe: September of 2000? I’m like, “What year is it?” Yes, same time last year was 2020 summit. So correct.

Topher: What I’m getting at is, is that why it’s virtual? Will we see an in-person WPMRR summit at some point?

Joe: I’ve talked with people about this. I would love to do something in person in the future. I’ve been to PressNomics before, which is the Pagely conference. I mean, it’s thrown by Pagely, but they have sponsors, they raise a lot of money. It’s like the PressNomics is the economics of WordPress. And I loved that event.

That was probably one of the best WordPress events, WordCamp or not, that I’ve ever been to because it was totally my bag. It was like, “WordPress economic.” “Boom, where do I sign up?” So I loved that event. But that’s also a lot of event management. Like if I think virtual event is to manage…

Topher: It’s an entirely different kind of event.

Joe: Oh, my. Yeah, Topher. Whoa. I don’t think I really have the chutzpah to want to do something that formal. Although I think it adds tremendous value, and I think it would be somewhat fun to do. I like the idea of doing maybe more of… Chris Lema had this event called BeachPress. It’s not CaboPress. CaboPress is a little bit more…

Topher: Yeah, I’ve been.

Joe: There you go. Were we there the same year, Topher?

Topher: No.

Joe: It was 2019.

Topher: No.

Joe: Okay. CaboPress is like a little bit more of, I don’t know, business networking sort of event.

Topher: Yeah.

Joe: But BeachPress was literally Chris being like, “I got this like 20 room Airbnb, you know, an hour outside of San Diego. Sign up, grab a flight, come and co work and hang out.” That event was equally awesome in some ways because it was so informal and we got together for like an hour a day just to kind of like talk about stuff.

Some people gave some short talks about stuff, but mostly it was just chillin’ and co-working and letting it organically happen. “Hey, you want to go work on that thing?” “Sure.” Hey, you have this challenge?” “Oh, doesn’t that person do something similar? Oh, I should go talk to that person.” Or like, “Hey…”

I like that event because, one, I think it adds tremendous value just to be surround… you know, you’ve heard that conversation. You become like the people you surround yourself with.

Topher: Yeah.

Joe: Well, it was just kind of like that. You can do it informally, it doesn’t have to be formal. And two, I just have to find an Airbnb and kind of just put the word out there in my community. We’ve got – what? 300, 350 people in the community right now. Maybe in a year from now we’ll have 1,000 or 3000 or 5,000, then 20 people may show up from that.

I don’t think too much to expect in terms of conversion, but that to me would be a success. Like if I could do an event like that, that sounds like more of maybe my style. I think it helps and adds value and would be fun, and would also be easy to plan. Pretty easy and not a ton of work. Shout out to Pagely folks who do PressNomics. It was fantastic event. Just like, man, like, whoa, a lot of hours to put in, a lot of work for me.

Cate: And you know, it’s important to have those different events that have different feel to them. PressNomics was great. I love PressNomics. It’s like not everybody goes to Disney World on vacation. People like different feeling, different atmospheres. And so it just adds to the richness, the diversity of the whole community by having a variety of different events.

Joe: Agreed. And I think everyone can throw whatever event they want to, and you’ll probably find a subset of WordPress folks who are into that. It’s like-

Topher: And another subset who aren’t.

Joe: That’s the essence of creating something that’s so targeted is that you’re going to have folks who really love it and enjoy it, and you’re going to have folks who are like, “No, that’s not for me.” And it’s an advantage to be that little bit… not attracting some people because it means you’re targeting people well.

Cate: Yeah, absolutely.

Joe: It’s like Burning Man, 70,000, 80,000 people go to the middle of the desert for 10 days. And it’s the highlight of their year. For a lot of folks it’s highlight of their life. They plan their life around it. And for some people, they’re like, “What? No, not my thing.”

Topher: I know people who would rather die than go.

Joe: Totally, totally. But that’s part of why it’s so successful. There’s like 1% of people who were like, “Oh, yeah, that is everything.” And there are probably like 5% or 10% of people who were like, “I’d go try that. I would go for a year. And then who knows? Maybe I’ll go the next year, or maybe it was just a one-time thing.” And then there’s probably like 80% of people who will never go. And that’s cool.

So I think about it like I think about email unsubscribes. Like, I think people think like, “I don’t want anybody to unsubscribe from email.” But it’s like every time you send an email out, probably like… it’s actually good for people unsubscribe because it means the people who don’t want to get the email aren’t getting it. And that’s okay. You didn’t fail, you didn’t do anything wrong. You just use that information to see maybe who it was, why did they unsubscribe? Why did they subscribe in the first place? Why? If they don’t want it, then that’ll help you learn and get better and target the people you want better. So a tangent there for a little bit.

Cate: Oh, but it was a good tangent. I really liked it. But thank you so much for coming on and telling us about virtual summit and all the things that went into creating it, and for taking time that you don’t have out of your busy schedule.

Joe: No, problem. It’s all good. It’s all good. I’ll give a shout-out to y’all doing Hallway Chats and HeroPress. But hallway chat specifically, I was looking back at what episodes… I’ve been on the podcast before.

Cate: I think it was five.

Joe: I was on Episode 6.

Cate: Six. Okay.

Joe: I was on Episode 6 of the podcast way back in the day with Tara and Liam. And I remember when they announced like, “We’re stepping down from Hallway Chats. We’re handing it over to Cate and Topher,” I was like, “Boom.” Because a lot of you know, whatever. I know this wasn’t like a traditional acquisition or anything, but it was like a lot of those you’re like, “Oh, man. (at least I am) I’m like, “They could have kept going.” But this was one of the ones I was very excited about. So I was like, “Oh, Cate and Topher, awesome. This is the perfect people. I couldn’t choose two better people to take this over.” I’m a big listener and it’s always cool to be on podcast I listen to anyway.

Cate: Thanks.

Topher: Thank you very much.

Joe: Thanks for having me on. And congrats again on doing this whole thing. It’s awesome.

Topher: Thank you very much.

Cate: Yeah, it’s been a busy building summer but we’re excited to get back to regular episodes again. Hopefully, this is the kickoff for that. So wpmrr.com is where they can register for both the community and the virtual summit, and their package deal for free?

Joe: For free.

Cate: And it’s next Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, September 21st, 22nd, and 23rd.

Joe: Yes.

Cate: Wow, that’s crazy. I’m not ready for it to be that deep.

Joe: I know. It’s like I’m still trying to deal with 2020, it’s already 2022? I will say it is an asynchronous event and we’re posting the videos afterwards. So if you want to attend live… it’s going to be a good time. Don’t get me wrong. But if you just want to get the notification of like when the videos go live or when things are going to be posted or updates, you should also register because you’ll just get all the updates. And then you can attend if you want to attend live when you get those notifications or you can just receive the email when the videos go live and you can watch them the week after, the month after, next year, whenever you want.

Topher: 2023.

Joe: 2026 with WPMRR 2021 Virtual Summit.

Cate: That’s right. That’s fantastic. Well, thanks again, Joe, for giving us some of your afternoon. We wish you all the best with the summit. Can’t wait to see it. Can’t wait to join the community and be a part of it. Because who doesn’t want monthly recurring revenue? I mean, I like money. It helps me. They exchange chickens at the grocery store.

Joe: Take my chicken, please.

Cate: Yeah, exactly.

Topher: All right. And after that moment of silence, we’re going to cut it. So that was the end.

Joe: Excellent.

Cate: Wait, didn’t you want to do the outro?

Topher: Oh, I always do it afterwards.

Cate: Oh, well, I knew that. So I guess we’re good.

Topher: Joe doesn’t need to be part of it.

Cate: Well, he might have wanted to hear it. It’s really exciting. It’s not as exciting.

Topher: Okay, I’ll do it.

Cate: No, no, no, no, no, no.

Joe: Oh, let’s do it.

Topher: No, I’ll do it because then the audio will match. Okay, here we go. This has been an episode of Hallway Chats, a part of the HeroPress Network. Your hosts were Cate and Topher DeRosia. We’d like to thank Sophia DeRosia for the music and Nexcess for hosting our network. If you liked the episode, please subscribe and mention us on social media.

Topher: And that was my radio voice.

Cate: You’re so professional sounding.

Joe: Ooh, You nailed it, man. You crushed it.

Seth is a WordPress designer and digital marketer who has been active in the WordPress community in the Philadelphia for more than a decade.

Website: GoldsteinMedia.com

Podcast 1: DigitalMarketingDive.com

Podcast 2: EntrepreneursEnigma.com

Twitter | @GoldsteinMedia

Twitter | @SethGoldstein

Topher: Hey everyone! My name is Topher.

Cate: And my name is Cate.

Topher: And this is Hallway Chats. We’d like to take a moment to thank our sponsor Nexcess, a Liquid Web brand. Be sure to check out their new product, WP Quickstart. Web Quickstart is a fast and affordable way to build membership sites on WordPress with packages beginning at just $49. Visit Nexcess.net to get started.

Our guest today is Seth Goldstein. Welcome.

Seth: Hey.

Cate: Hey Seth.

Seth: Thanks for real.

Cate: We’re really excited to have you on. Why don’t you go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself?

Seth: Well, I’ve been using WordPress—this is a WordPress podcast so we’ll start with that—since 2010. Before that, I was trying to do things old school with HTML, and I was like this, “There’s got to be a better way.” And then I discovered WordPress, self-taught myself how to do that. And it’s been WordPress ever since. I mean, I discovered the community, I think, around 2011, first WordCamp soon after that.

But before all this, I was a journalist. I went to University of Delaware and went to J School there. Did that for six years, major burnout from that job just because the nature of the job it’s a lot of long hours, lots of meetings, lots of accident scenes. Leave that one alone. But this a lot of stuff. Then left that, then opened up Goldstein Media because I’ve been doing web design on the side since – what is it? 1998, I think what decade it was. It’s 1998 before the millennium. So last century. We guys are old.

Anyhow, I’ve been doing it 20 years since then. But then from 2013 onward, I’ve been really diving into WordPress, following people on WordPress. I met Topher. I think I met you at WordCamp US, the first one in Philly, which is local for me because I’m just north of Philly. We met there. And Cate you were there too, weren’t you? That was fun.

Topher: You are muted, Cate.

Cate: I am muted. So, yes, I was there. We had both girls with us.

Seth: Oh, yeah.

Cate: It was a family affair for us.

Seth: That was an exhausting event and I was only a volunteer. I did photography for the first two WordCamp US in Philly.

Topher: That’s cool.

Seth: My feet hurts so bad after that.

Cate: There is a lot of walking for sure.

Seth: A lot of walking and conference centers are not known for their plush carpets. I think there was stuff around on it. So yeah.

Cate: Over the years, I’ve definitely developed conference shoes and not conference shoes.

Seth: Oh, that’s a good idea.

Cate: It’s funny how when you travel a lot to conferences, you start to really curate what’s worth taking and what’s not worth taking, and what serves-

Seth: The shoes are a must.

Cate: Shoes are a must.

Topher: Is the weight in your bag worth it?

Cate: Yeah. So that’s really cool. I love that you went from journalism into WordPress. I think that’s a really natural move for a lot of people. I’m a huge journalists fan. And if I thought I could get a job in it, that would have been my degree in college. I went the general English route. And the questions from my dad about what does one do with that-

Seth: I was also a history major as well.

Cate: Exactly.

Seth: What do I do with that except teach?

Cate: Yeah. But I think that being a journalist coming into WordPress, it gives you a special insight into it. I mean, in theory, blogging is a form of journalism. But I think as a trained journalist, if you look at things differently that is really beneficial particularly in marketing when it comes… I was actually just thinking about this this morning. Just funny. But when it comes to marketing for your clients or even just working in marketing, being a journalist, being a good communicator at the forefront can carry you very far.

Seth: Ironically, what I wanted to do with the journalism degree is a kind of history that went to journalism as well. I wanted to do journalism so it could show that I could write. I wanted to get into marketing originally. Ironically, that’s what I’m doing now. And I was like, I didn’t want to do business school because I didn’t want to do accounting and the math and all that stuff. So I was like, “Journalism shows I can write.” Turned out I fell in love with it, the whole Woodward and Bernstein aspect of it, putting a politician’s feet to the fire. It was a very much of a romance of journalism that I love. I did newspaper journalism, so it was like the old school journalism. Now I’m doing podcasting. So I never quite leave the journalism angle.

Cate: And it’s funny because I think that WordPress has reached a spot where there’s even more opportunities for journalism. One of the first couples that I ever met in one of my first WordPress WordCamp sessions attending in 2015… So my first WordCamp was in 2014. But really kind of we started 2015 with a long list of camps to attend. And I met a couple who were in their 60s who were reviving their small town newspaper using WordPress.

Seth: Oh, wow.

Cate: And I thought, “How brilliant!” Because as you know, the newspaper is such the heart of the community. And as they start to die off, the community really tends to scatter. There’s just no way to spread the news. And the idea that you can use WordPress to revitalize that aspect of a community really made me think about the other ways that you can use WordPress to revitalize these small communities. For me, that’s always been kind of a driving factor in why I’m in WordPress, why I’m active there. So I love that you kind of came into it similarly. Like journalism was also your entry into WordPress.

Seth: And I love it. I do like writing. Ironically, I’m a better reporter than I am a writer. I mean, I love Grammarly for a reason.

Cate: We all have our things that we’re better at. And it’s more about recognizing it and working with it than trying to force yourself to be good at something that you’re just not enjoying or just not qualified.

Seth: Exactly.

Cate: Not qualified, but you know, it’s just doesn’t fit you.

Seth: Absolutely, yeah.

Cate: So you’re using WordPress for marketing now? Like, that’s your primary thing?

Seth: What I do now is I do a lot of websites for mid-size, the bigger companies, some small businesses. I have a team and we just build out their websites, we help them with their SEO, their digital marketing strategy, we’ll teach them how to use social media appropriately, we won’t do it for them because that’s a whole nother beast. We’ll do email marketing for them as well. And I do love newsletter glue that just kind of slide right on in and slides later in the WordPress and works.

Cate: Yeah, they’ve come up with some really nice tools to make that whole side of things a lot more user-friendly. That’s great, too, because then we can get a lot more quality content out into the community without having to put quite so much effort into it, which is really… because we all are putting effort into a lot of different places. If some aspect of our job can be a little bit easier, or the user experience for the client can be a little bit easier, that’s only going to make WordPress that much stronger.

Seth: Absolutely. I totally agree. It’s all about not making easier, but simplifying things so they can get done quicker. Yeah, yeah.

Cate: Yeah. Yeah, the fewer steps we have to go through, the legitimately better it is for everybody.

Seth: Absolutely.

Cate: So you have a team. What size is your team?

Seth: Well, it’s myself and my designer, and my wife is the books when she has time because I’m a right-brain guy. But myself and a designer. And then I have a lot more freelancers. If I need following up on stuff I know who to call. I can go and say, “Hey, I have more stuff. Can you pick up this site? Can you help me build this site out? Can you help me build that site out?” WordPress is easy for that.

Cate: Right. It’s such a great aspect of the community. There’s a lot of people who want to be working on their own, but enjoy that relationship with an agency where they don’t necessarily have to deal with the client-side of it but they can just do, again, the thing that they’re good at, and leave you or your wife to deal with the things that they don’t want to mess with.

Seth: Especially the financial stuff. It’s like you do what you’re good at and you hire for the rest.

Cate: Yeah, exactly. I love that the community has grown to a spot where you don’t have to be… because you’ve got to know coming from ’98 with web development. Topher started in ’95. So he’s older than you are, which is great. But when you started you had to be good at everything.

Seth: Everything. It was a wild west.

Cate: Right. So much so really. And now you don’t have to. Now you can just focus on what you enjoy, what your strengths are, and let other people be strong in their areas.

Seth: Absolutely.

Topher: One of the things I struggled most with when I was freelancing is having to do everything. And I don’t mean just tech stuff, but like invoicing—becoming a business owner.

Seth: People don’t realize that. They think, “I’ll just build these websites and the money will come in.” But you do stuff to get the money in.

Topher: Yeah.

Cate: Or even if the money comes in, you still have to do something with it after that. I know so many freelancers who don’t save for taxes or don’t even think to save for taxes. I mean, everybody’s been hit by that at some point. There’s a lot more. It’s like getting a kitten. Kittens are adorable, but they come with so much responsibility and stuff.

Topher: What was funny is I knew that was coming. I did a ton of reading before I went freelance. I read all the books, and everybody’s like, “You’re going to have to become a business owner now.” It’s like, “Okay, cool. Let’s do that.” I just didn’t like it. So it’s not like it really bit me. But it’s not for everyone.

Seth: It definitely isn’t. And that’s the thing. I found that the business development side of things, my designer, she is really fantastic at what she does. So she’s on the design side of things, helps to make the sites look great and stellar. I mean, when I first started Goldstein Media 13 years ago, I wanted to do everything. Like this had to be my idea, my this, my that. Now I’m like, “You know what? Let’s just make the client happy. Let’s show some good work, let’s show some good work. Let’s deliver to the client.” And then like look away and develop the website. So what’s close to me is the way I’m saying Goldstein Media developed it because Goldstein Media developed it.

Cate: I do think there’s some value in having done the different aspects of the jobs-

Topher: Oh, sure.

Cate: …particularly before you’re handing them off to somebody else. If nothing else, you get to experience the pain points that they’re going to be facing. It’s a lot easier to be compassionate and understanding when I hit a struggle. Because I remember I did this with my first WordCamp when I was organizing. I had the time and I didn’t want to delegate something I didn’t understand. So as much as I could, I did as much as I could and realized that “Yeah, that’s why you have a team.” But I still think there’s a lot of important learning lessons to be learned there.

Seth: I think you need to at least try it first. At least go through the motions with the designer first so you can understand how they work and figure out how they want to work and how best they work.

Cate: And you don’t know if you’re going to like something until you try it. I mean, you did journalism as an initial step into marketing, but then found that there were aspects of it you really loved. And I think that we can all surprise ourselves that way, sometimes.

Seth: It’s actually kind of funny that what got me hooked in journalism, I went to University of Delaware where our current President went. So I worked for The Review, which is a student-run paper, and I had to call his office or something. He was then Senator Biden. And he got on the phone and talk to me. He heard that I was a University of Delaware student, from his alma mater, and asking questions. He was walking by his press secretary, so he’s on the phone, and she said something like, “The Review,” and he’s like, “Let me talk to him.” And I got hooked. I was like, “Oh, my God, I’m talking to…” Then he was a senator.” Now I have talked to the president of the United States.

Cate: The president, right.

Seth: It’s like, yeah, regardless of what you think, he’s a nice dude.

Topher: That’s cool.

Cate: Go ahead, please.

Seth: No, that’s how I got hooked. And I was marketing in the hallway and I was like, “Maybe this is a little more fun.”

Cate: Well, I think it’s important for all of us to remember, as we gain more experience in the community to be as accessible as we can be to new people coming in. I remember one of my first WordCamps, I sat down with, you know, three really experienced people over lunch, and they just made me feel so included.

Particularly as someone who is not overly technical, really just doesn’t enjoy the technical side of WordPress, it can be a real struggle to find where I fit. And they just made me feel included. And that’s something that I’ve kept in my mind. Because you never know. Everybody brings so much richness to the community. You don’t want to exclude them, you want to give them an opportunity to find their fit and to find their encouraging moments like that.

Seth: Yeah. I try and tell people. I mean, I know so many designers that have no idea how rich this community is. Like my designer, I’ve been telling her, like, “We have to go to a WordCamp Philly when it comes out. I’m going to drag you to that because I mean, SEO community is very welcoming and inclusive for the most part too.” But [unintelligible 00:14:30] is not as inclusive. It’s expensive, again, to do these conferences and stuff. Whereas WordCamps, 10 bucks; WordFest, free, which is nice. I think they should charge a little bit. But I’ve now seen how much work goes into one of these things. But it’s an inclusive community. People can join and just to be part of the community and they’ll have to not be code [monkey?].

Cate: And it’s getting only easier which I think is fantastic. I like to think of it as, you know, you used the word “rich” earlier. It’s like rich like brownies. We all add this depth and chewiness to the community with our individual response.

Seth: Now I want a brownie.

Cate: I know, right?

Seth: Thanks, Cate. Now I want a brownie.

Topher: And then you have to ask yourself, are you the raisins or the nuts?

Seth: I don’t like nuts brownies.

Cate: Put raisins in brownies.

Seth: Yeah, no nuts, no brownies. No nuts, no raisins.

Cate: Raisins in brownies.

Seth: They are pretty good actually.

Cate: I guess. Anyway, moving on. You mentioned WordFest, Seth, and we were glad to have you join as a volunteer. I love the fact that some of our other volunteer spots didn’t really fit. So you just came to us and asked what else you could do. And it’s been great having you included in the conversations and the work that we’re doing? What drove that? What made you want to be involved with WordFest?

Seth: Well, the thing was that WordFest was crazy. The first one was only in January of this year. I think you guys are slightly nuts are doing two of them in the year. I mean, WordCamps are once a year and they’re what? 12 hours max?

Cate: Yeah.

Seth: And this is 24-hour multiple con… Okay, sure. So I figured, let me see how I can help these nutter butters out here. And then also, I was like, I wanted to volunteer. Last time in this time I’ve been micro sponsor. So I was happy to do that. I’m like, “I’m going to pay for this ticket because they should be charging at least 10 bucks for this ticket just to make sure people show up. People do show up in excess.

I mean, like the numbers I heard last time were incredible. I was just like, “I want to do something.” I said, “Look at the volunteer spots. I was like, “Oh, well, I could moderate this. I could moderate that.” With my little eight-year-old, he wanted a clump of four hours spots. I’m like, “I can’t do that.” So I said, “Hey…” I was talking to Michelle. It’s Michelle, right? It’s Michelle, yeah.

I was talking to Michelle and she’s like, “We’re thinking about doing a digital swag bag.” Do you want to take that on?” I’m like, “Okay. I don’t know how I have to do this. I have never tried this before.” I Googled that a little bit, went down some rabbit holes. And we now have a swag bag. It was not totally impressive. It’s a title page and a page of codes and eBook links and stuff like that. But I think it’s pretty neat for the first edition of the swag bag.

Cate: Yeah, you’ve worked really hard on that. Like you said, particularly for our first one, it’s a great start. And it’s something we can only build on. And your experience joining us pretty much where all of us have had, we’re like, “Sure, we’ll help. We’ve never done this before but we’ll figure it out as we go.”

Seth: Yeah. I mean, especially swag bag, I’m like, “How hard could this be?”

Topher: We never ask that question.

Seth: The first thing was figuring out what is a digital swag bag. Second thing was getting sponsors to give me stuff for this swag bag. Third thing was let’s make something better than just an 8 by 10 piece of paper. Like make it a little pretty. Thank you, Canva.

Cate: Right, exactly. When you add in the digital element to something like that, it certainly adds a new layer of challenge, you know, when normally you could actually pack it into a bag and have physical things you can touch. When you turn it digital, you have to… you know. And I think that’s kind of another sentiment for the whole conference. A physical conference, you can really kind of get excited about how do you get people excited about a digital experience?

Seth: Yeah, you guys do a good job of that because I mean, it’s definitely exciting.

Cate: I’m glad. We try. It’s hard to tell sometimes because we’re a small group. And again, when you’re on the internet, you can’t tell if you just screaming into a void or not. But I do love we get a ton of community feedback, which has been huge. Really doing this twice in a year, particularly the end of a pandemic and all the other things going on, it has been-

Seth: It’s viscious.

Cate: Yeah. But at the same time, wonderful because the community really has rallied around it. A lot of enthusiasm for the first one. And then when we announced the second one, we had people clamoring on board to help out. And it really-

Seth: I think you guys all are nuts because I mean-

Cate: They know most of us know that we are in fact nuts.

Seth: Oh, my gosh. I saw this and I literally thought the other one happened last year. And then I was in one of the calls and Dan, our fearless leader said, “This is the second one in this year. The first one was in January.” I’m like, “Was it January? Oh, my God, you guys are nuts.” And it turned out great. It’s going to be fantastic.

Cate: Yeah, it’s looking like it’s going to be really great. We’re excited.

Seth: You’ll sleep the whole weekend. Absolutely.

Cate: It’s true. It’s going to be like all of the push in the planning for the last four months and then Saturday it’s just over. And it’s kind of like, oh.

Seth: Then you start to snore.

Cate: Exactly.

Topher: But try not to snore on microphone.

Cate: Fortunately, all of my jobs are in the backside of the event and so I can fall asleep if I need to and snore.

Topher: That’d be a cool Zoom feature. So touch snores and auto mute.

Seth: Automate the snorer. Face tracking snore tracking?

Topher: Yes.

Seth: All right. That’s good. Hey, there’s an idea for someone who’s entrepreneur. Exactly.

Cate: Exactly. Or habits like come on when somebody starts snoring so you tell who fell asleep in the middle of the meeting?

Seth: “Joe, wake up.”

Cate: So Seth, you live in the Philadelphia area?

Seth: Yes, just north in Doylestown.

Cate: That’s really cool. Are you from that area?

Seth: Born and raised in Bucks County, which is the next county out from Philadelphia county. Born and raised, love Philadelphia, love the community. It was kind of that ultimate fight against Philadelphia, New York. Like we think Philadelphia is better than New York. New York think Philadelphia is just, eh, whatever. Swat them away. But I love Philadelphia, I love the community. I love the WordPress community around here. It’s a big one around here. It’s a big one in Bucks County even as live as web developers that do WordPress so I can just walk in the street get some help if I need it.

Cate: That’s really fantastic.

Topher: So I have a quick question for you then in regards to that. Did you have anything to do with starting the meetup?

Seth: No, I didn’t. There’s two of them actually. One is actually helped run through Automattic that helps fund it. One is fully WP. And then there’s ‘Burbs WP, which Liam runs. I think that self-funded by them. They do it all themselves.

Topher: Okay. I recently had a young man just out of college wants to know about starting a meetup in his city, there isn’t one. He’s really struggling to find other WordPress. I said, “You just make one. You should show up someplace, hang up a sign and say, “WordPress meetup,” and see who comes. But he’s like, “I don’t know anyone in my city who’s a WordPress or so. I don’t know how to contact them.

Seth: They should reach up Automattic. Automattic would help them off. I mean, that’s the thing. Automattic sponsors a lot of these meetups and get things set up. If there’s no none in that city, I’m sure they really want to get someone there running one.

Topher: We’re headed down that road. We’ll see where it goes. But I’ve never… I shouldn’t say that. I was involved in starting the one in our city but there were three of us. And the other two guys knew some other people already. So like out of the box.

Seth: They came with people?

Topher: Yeah, we had some.

Seth: I tried to set one in Bucks County, but there’s one up in Lehigh Valley, which is just north and there’s one in Philadelphia, and there’s one to the west. So I was ready to set up Bucks County one. But it when you have three within an hour of each other, you don’t need another one.

Topher: Yeah.

Cate: We’re similar. Ours is still fairly small but we have people who come from an hour or so away to get home. It’s a tricky thing. You know, meetups are great, and being part of the community is really great. But as you know, I mean, when we started ours here in town, our kids were 8 and 10. You have an eight-year-old. As much as you want to be a part of the community, it’s hard to balance that family time as well.

Seth: Absolutely.

Cate: And we’ve been able to do a lot of what we do because the girls wanted to be involved. And so they got involved as volunteers at WordCamps, and they’re on t-shirts. We’ve let them choose their own path, but it is a struggle. It’s a real struggle to balance having to work with wanting to be a part of this community with also your other family and friends commitments. Go ahead.

Seth: No, I was going to say my eight-year-old he has a website, he’s had his domain name before he was born. He doesn’t know how to use WordPress. I tried teaching him. It was a little frustrating because he was like, “I know everything.” And I’m like, “You know nothing about WordPress yet. You need to learn young padawan.” That kind of thing.

Cate: My first WordCamp as an attendee was the girl’s first WordCamp as attendees. They wanted to go into Chicago with us, which is about three hours from our house. And they were 12 and 14 at the time. We homeschooled, so I had control over what they were learning. So we handed them Lisa Sabin-Wilson’s WordPress book. They had to have some reason to go so they had to have some understanding of WordPress, if they wanted to go. And in two weeks, they’d use her book to set up their own blogs.

Seth: That’s awesome.

Cate: They’ve both done different things with them over the last six, seven years that they’ve had them more than others. We’ve always put some things in place that they have to do, like kind of have to introduce themselves to it if they’re going to be part of the community. But what they do with it from there is entirely up to them. And sometimes they’re really excited and sometimes they just leave it alone. And letting them find their own path really has been the best option for them.

Seth: He’ll get there if he wants. But right now he’s very much into video editing, and he wants to do podcasting because he knows I do it. So he’s like, “I want to do a podcast with you, daddy.” I’m like, they’re a little young but if there’s a podcasting camp and you want to do that, that’s fine. I think video editing is a little bit more interactive for you, the way your brain works.” But he does like to talk. So bad.

Topher: You can make some pretty good money video editing too. I regularly people on Twitter saying, “Hey, I hate video editing. Who wants to do my work?”

Seth: Exactly, exactly.

Cate: Well, and podcasting is only getting easier. You don’t need the big equipment like you used to, you don’t necessarily even have to have a soundproof room. All of the traditional kind of ideas of… we come out of a radio background. And so you don’t really need to have a radio studio in order to be a podcaster.

Seth: No. Honestly, this is not NPR. As much as this is like the NPR podcast, you don’t need to be Terry Gross. It is not Terry Gross. It’s not all things considered. Now you can tell I’m a NPR nerd, but this is more Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!.

Topher: It really is.

Seth: It’s a [unintelligible 00:27:27] pants, have fun. People enjoy the realness of the podcast versus it too scripted. I mean, some of the scripted ones… Like I listened to Thinking is Cool with Kinsey Grant. I love it. It’s totally scripted. I can’t listen to all of them, because it just gets tiring on the ears. It’s like, “No, this is so much NPR.” There’s so much scripted podcasting. I love that show. It’s just I need conversation in my ears.

Cate: Right. Remembering that everybody learns differently and enjoys differently, which I know is what you’re saying here, there’s definitely a place for scripted versus non-scripted. If NPR was all just Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! about we get old too.

Seth: Yeah, that’d be exhausting.

Cate: Right. Exactly. And so we’re also NPR nerds so that helps a lot.

Topher: And Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! nerds.

Cate: And Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! nerds.

Seth: It’s so much fun. And they’re based out Chicago, I think actually.

Cate: Yeah, they are.

Topher: They are.

Cate: You know, it’s great that podcasting is becoming more accessible because I think it’s easier for people… I’m a writer so writing is easy for me. But there are so many people that have great ideas that find writing to be a challenge for a number of reasons. And with podcasting, you can get the same kind of content out there but without some of the barriers. I personally am really grateful for that. I never thought I’d be in the podcasting side of things. But now that we have one, we only have more ideas for others.

Seth: Oh, good. I have two.

Cate: Right?

Seth: Yeah.

Cate: And we’re contemplating… so we’re about to… our family all lives together, even though the girls are 19 and 21. She is 21.

Seth: Wow.

Cate: I know. In the next six months, at least we’ll be splitting up and we’ve been debating doing a family podcast-

Seth: Oh, that’d be fun.

Cate: …as a way where we can just kind of sit and connect with one another.

Seth: People would listen to that. People would listen to that.

Cate: My mom is very excited. She lives in Texas. So she’s about 18 hours away from us.

Seth: Oh, jeez, yeah.

Cate: She requested that it be video so that she can also see us. But those kinds of things are important to have real people out there talking about things. It’s important to have scripted things too. It’s important to have good quality information that’s researched and being presented well. But it’s also good to just have conversations.

Seth: Absolutely.

Topher: All right. Well, I think we’re going to wrap it up.

Cate: Is it brownie time now?

Topher: Is it brownie time?

Seth: Is it brownie time? It’s always brownie time somewhere? Absolutely. This has been so much fun, guys. I really enjoyed it.

Topher: Yeah, it’s been really fun. Thank you so much for coming.

Cate: It’s been great because I’ve met you in a couple of different ways over the last six months. I mean, previously, but really in the last six years. I was really excited to see that you had signed up to be on the podcast. You put up with us. We were going through the transition time-

Seth: Oh, yeah.

Cate: But I was really looking forward to getting to sit down and just chat for a while.

Seth: It’s fun.

Cate: It is.

Topher: All right, then, I’m going to wrap it up here. This has an episode of Hallway Chats, a part of the HeroPress Network. Your hosts were Cate and Topher DeRosia. We’d like to thank Sofia DeRosia for the music and Nexcess for hosting our network.