Episode 85: Tiffany Bridge

Introducing Tiffany Bridge

Tiffany has been building websites for 20 years and building them with WordPress for 14. She now works at Automattic and helps empower people who do interesting things to get the most out of WordPress.

Show Notes

Blog | Tiff.is

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 85.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re joined by Tiffany Bridge. Tiffany has been building websites for 20 years and building them with WordPress for 14. She now works at Automattic and helps empower people who do interesting things to get the most out of WordPress. Welcome, Tiffany.

Tiffany: Hi, you all. How are you doing?

Liam: Very well, thank you. Very well. A pleasure to meet you out here in our little hallway, Tiffany. can you tell us more about yourself, please?

Tiffany: Sure. I am working currently at Automattic but over the course of my career, I have been an office assistant, a technical recruiter, a standup comedian. I’ve been in-house and I’ve been freelance. All of that kind of added up to where I am now. Now I live and work in Washington DC and I live up in Northeast DC with my husband and my son and my very large cat.

Tara: Can you tell funny stories about your very large cat?

Tiffany: He’s a pretty impressive beast. Actually, no. The one big story that I always tell about him is that he’s so large that when my son was in that ‘full-body tackle the cat four times a day’ phase, he was just completely unbothered by it because he and my son weighed about the same at the time. He would just sit there and take it and kind of look at me like, “Do you want to do something about this? Because I’m not giving up my seat on the couch so I’m going to need you to peel him off of me.” He’s just very, very chill and loves children.

Tara: That’s great. How did you get started with tech and websites? Did you go to school for it?

Tiffany: No. My degree is in political science with an auxiliary in Christian ministry. All I learned in college was to be super fun at parties. No, I got into tech because when I was a kid, I used to watch Star Trek reruns with my parents. That set the expectations for me of how computers should work. I was always very miffed that I couldn’t just ask my computer a question and then would have an answer. And, “What is this Encarta CD nonsense that I have to use with the computer?” When the internet started to become a thing, I was like, “Okay, look. This is it. This is the thing that is finally going to get me the computer that I have always wanted.” In college, I started teaching myself HTML on Geocities. Back when Geocities URLs were still based on physical addresses. If you were in college, you had an address on the quad. I was teaching myself from Webmonkey tutorials on Hotwire.com back before that was a hotel site. I taught myself HTML in college and then after I got out of school, I wasn’t really ready to be hired in tech right away so I tried to stay tech-adjacent as long as I could. I worked for a startup in the first .com boom. 1999, 2000, 2001 era. And then kind of bounced around a little bit until I ended up moving to DC. Then I was like an office assistant but I rebuilt the organization’s website because what are they going to do? They don’t have any money to hire anybody else so I did it myself. Then I worked at a software startup. Basically, just sort of stayed tech-adjacent until I could finally get a job where I was paid to build websites. Up until that point,