Episode 145 – Kyle Maurer

Introducing Kyle Maurer

Kyle is the Director of Operations at Sandhills Development which is a WordPress plugin company. He loves bringing people together and has a passion for making music and craft beer.

Show Notes

Website | KyleBlog.net

Website | Sandhills Development

Podcast | WP RoundTable with Tara Claeys

Podcast | The Get Options Podcast

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 145.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Kyle Maurer. Kyle is the director of operations at Sandhills Development, which is a WordPress plugin company. He loves bringing people together and has a passion for making music and craft beer. He’s also officially the biggest Hallway Chats fan, yay for us, and he could not be more excited to be on the show today. Welcome, Kyle. We’re so happy that you’re here. Thanks for joining us.

Kyle: Thank you, Tara and Liam. I’m so thrilled to be with you all today. This is amazing.

Liam: Kyle, we’re absolutely thrilled to have you here, and my ego in particular is grateful for your presence. So flattery can continue as long as you would like to do. It is very welcome. Welcome.

Kyle: I am happy to. I have an abundance of comments and just thoughts on this wonderful show. I would love…

Liam: To interrupt you, maybe you can start by telling us a little bit more about yourself beyond what Tara has already shared.

Kyle: Well, that’s totally fine. That’s what the show is about, right? I have a story that’s no more interesting than the next person’s and we can run through that I suppose. I’ve been doing the WordPress thing for a while just like you have and all the other amazing guests that you’ve had on this fantastic show. I was fortunate in many ways when I was younger, but if there is one thing I look back that I lacked, it was probably role models and mentors. I spend a lot of time in my early career wandering about not knowing what to do or where I was supposed to end up. I milked cows, I ran registers, I shelved books, I powerwashed houses.

I did all this random stuff not knowing where to end up until I finally got…not finally. I was pretty young at the time. But I got married and bought my first house and started to get really serious about needing to accelerate my career development. I did a lot of research and eventually found that if I learned just a little bit of web programming in my spare time, it could open doors much faster than the dead-end jobs I was working at the time. I don’t remember why. I started with PHP, took some tutorials, dropped some acronyms on my resume, and immediately had takers.

I turned an internship at an agency into a position and a full-time position, and then a director of technology role, and then eventually had to leave that company because I caught on to how shady the owners really were. But then I started my own company with an abundance of unearned competence and ran a marketing agency with a business partner for five years. And that was the time period when I got the most invested into the WordPress world. At the time, when we started our business WordPress was emerging as the leader of the options at the time but was by no means ubiquitous dominator in the scene that it is today.