Episode 119: Keanan Koppenhaver

Introducing Keanan Koppenhaver

Keanan is the CTO at Alpha Particle, a digital consultancy that helps their clients plan and execute their digital projects. He believes that technology isn’t always the answer, but when it is, it’s important to get it right.

Show Notes

Website | Alpha Particle

Website | Keanan.Dev

Twitter | @kkoppenhaver

Preferred Pronouns | He/Him

Episode Transcript

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions and our guests share their stories, ideas, and perspectives.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 119.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Keanan Koppenhaver. Keanan is the CTO at Alpha Particle, a digital consultancy that helps their clients plan and execute their digital projects. He believes that technology isn’t always the answer, but when it is, it’s important to get it right. Hi Keanan.

Keanan: Hey, Tara and Liam, thanks for having me.

Tara: Nice to see you, Keanan. Thanks for joining us. Can you start out by telling us a little bit more about yourself?

Keanan: Sure. Like Liam said, I’m Keenan, I run a company in Chicago here. We’re in the Merchandise Mart for those of you who know the area and currently enjoying a very mild winter, which is great. I hope I didn’t jinx anything by bringing that up now.

I’ve been in the WordPress space for six or seven years. I really enjoy it. I enjoy getting to know the community and the people in it, which is why, Tara when you and I were talking about Hallway Chats, it was really interesting community that you kind of gathered this community around your podcast. So I’m happy to be here and talk to you guys.

Tara: What is your journey to WordPress?

Keanan: I kind of on a lark in college decided I wanted to build a website which of course I thought was going to be the next billion-dollar thing. I didn’t really know anything about it, so I started just kind of googling like “how to build a website” and stuff like that, and very quickly realized that there were already lots of tools to help people do these sorts of things.

I experimented with a couple of those on my own but then ended up taking an internship with an agency here in Chicago that was primarily a WordPress shop. So most of what they did was WordPress. Throughout the course of my internship and when I eventually took a full-time position with them, day in day out was WordPress, working in client sites and things like that.

I found it really interesting as a platform and really powerful and able to help people work on the web on their own without necessarily needing a developer like me, which is super empowering for clients and people who run their own businesses and things. I never looked back at that point.

We still do a lot of WordPress, but also we’ve been expanding into other PHP frameworks and things too. But really what stuck with WordPress for me was how easy it was and how powerful it was for people, but then also the kinds of people that were involved in the community like we talked about a little bit, who spend a lot of their time giving back and helping other people come up behind them and get started doing the same thing.

Tara: Alpha Particle, are you one of the founders of that company?

Keanan: Yeah. It’s myself and my business partner, Jay. We started the company in May of 2017 so we’ve been around just about two and a half years. Initially when we started the company,