Episode 81: Susan Walker

Introducing Susan Walker

Susan Walker is a web developer at Rutgers University Camden where she manages the WordPress multi-sites. She’s a co-organizer of the Philadelphia WordPress meetup, has been a WordCamp Philly co-organizer, and has spoken at WordCamp US.

Show Notes

Website | susanwrotethis.com

Twitter | @susanwrotethis

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.

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

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is episode 81.

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re joined by Susan Walker. Susan is a web developer at Rutgers University Camden where she manages the WordPress multi-sites. She’s a co-organizer of the Philadelphia WordPress meetup, has been a WordCamp Philly co-organizer, and has spoken at WordCamp US. Hi, Susan. Nice to see you, today.

Susan: Hi. How is everybody?

Liam: We’re doing very well, Susan. Thank you so much. Great to see you again. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

Susan: Well, I live in Haddon Township, New Jersey. That’s about 15 minutes by rail from center city Philly. You mentioned that I work at Rutgers Camden. My official title there is web developer but that only is a little bit of what I do. Not much to tell about myself personally. Single, no kids, right now no pets but looking forward to getting a house fairly soon, and I will probably get myself a couple of little guinea pigs.

Tara: Oh, guinea pigs. Have you had guinea pigs before?

Susan: Oh, I have since I was a little kid.

Tara: Great. Do you teach at the university or do you run their web stuff?

Susan: No, I do no teaching whatsoever. The closest I ever come is pulling aside the content people, we call them ninjas and train them on specific things such as building web forms. But I do stay out of the classroom and that’s probably a good thing for both me and the students.

Tara: [laughs] So how did you find WordPress and get into web development to begin with?

Susan: Oh, gosh. That’s two different stories. Starting with WordPress, I was actually hired by Rutgers Camden as a Drupal developer and I don’t think that they had fully worked out the plan of what they were going to do with me once they got me onboard. They put me in an office and I basically sat around for four weeks and then the department head came in and said, “Well, we’ve decided you’re not going to do Drupal. You’re going to be doing our WordPress. And they had never actually asked me in the job interview if I knew anything about WordPress or done it before.

Liam: That is awesome.

Susan: Yes, I think about a week and a half into trying to figure out how to build a theme, I was just kind of sitting there crying because I knew that I was going to get fired once they figured out I had no idea what was going on. But it did work out and with a lot of time on Google and a lot of patience, I think about six months after being told that, I had built my first plugin and my first theme and we were starting to get things on the right track.

Liam: Can I ask, were you a Drupal developer at the time or were you a developer generally and you were going to dig into Drupal? What was the hiring process and where were you in terms of your development career with respect to getting hired in the first place?

Susan: I had started working with HTML about the year 1999 and that was because I was a public information officer at a two-year college. They told me that I would be working with the IT group on setti...