Episode 143 – Machielle Thomas

Introducing Machielle Thomas

Machielle is a mommy, a marketer, photographer, and a dreamer. She’s currently the senior brand manager for Bluehost, and most of her time is spent chasing her tiny terrorist, or finding the best tacos in her hometown of Austin, Texas.

Show Notes

Twitter | @machiellethomas

Preferred Pronouns | She/Her

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 143.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Machielle Thomas. Machielle is a mommy, a marketer, photographer, and a dreamer. She’s currently the senior brand manager for Bluehost, and most of her time is spent chasing her tiny terrorist, or finding the best tacos in her hometown of Austin, Texas. So glad to have you here. Thanks for joining us.

Machielle: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Liam: Machielle, it’s our pleasure. Thank you so much for spending time with us today. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself beyond what Tara shared?

Machielle: Yeah. I always laugh when someone else says tiny terrorist because all of my friends finds it funny. My son is four and we live here in Austin. He’s a very rambunctious 4-year-old. He’s like the epitome of a little bitty terrorist. I call him my little ankle biter because I try all the time chasing him around and him jumping on me. I was born and raised in Austin, Texas, where I currently live. I currently work for the Bluehost brand. It’s been for a few years now that I’ve been there, been to a ton of WordCamps, and spoken at about six or seven of them, I think. Really missing them this year. It’s been a really, really hard year after going from 10 to 15 camps to none. But yeah, I’m just a daydreamer and I love writing, reading all things, all things on the internet really.

Tara: Oh. How did you get started in WordPress or tech? WordPress, I guess, let’s start there.

Machielle: I actually was a user. I used WordPress for a financial services company that I worked for about eight years ago. And I use it just to manage the blog. Then I started working as a contractor for a couple of marketing agencies in Austin as well. And I used it again to manage their blog and posting. That way I didn’t really understand or really had never even heard about the community behind WordPress, and the people behind it until I started with Bluehost.

I started with Bluehost four months after my son was born. It was a really weird time for me, obviously. There’s a ton of hormones going on, and exhaustion from not sleeping. I kind of was like thrown into this world I didn’t really know anything about. I thought I was just going to be managing content and it turned out that I was also being invited to camps.

I went to my first camp in Phoenix in October 2017, and they were like, “You should speak next time.” And I was like, “Wait, what? Me? Are you sure? I don’t know anything about WordPress. I’m not a developer. I’m not a designer.” And were like, “No, anybody can speak about anything.” That was the one year they had a really quick turnaround on their camps. They did October and then February the next year. And I came back in February and I did content for the modern world. And it was all about content in this new age of media and understanding your target audience and stuff like that and how it can really impact you. So from there, I’ve just been all over the world at camps.