Hallway Chats: Recent Episodes
Topher and Cate DeRosia
Introducing Russell AaronI didn’t learn WordPress at a fancy college or career academy. I graduated from the University of YouTube. My internship was the Las Vegas WordPress Meetup and WordCamp Vegas. The rest I learned building mortgage company platforms, working for casinos, inside managed WordPress hosts, and at some of the best WordPress development and support shops on the planet.
Show NotesFor more on Russell, check out his website: https://russellenvy.com
Transcript:Topher DeRosia: All right. Here we go. Hey folks.
Russell Aaron: And three, two, one.
Topher DeRosia: Hey folks. Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Topher, and I’m here with Russell Aaron. I assume I pronounced that right, because it’s not that hard, but you never know.
Russell Aaron: You know, so many people call me Aaron. They’ll tag me and they go, “Thanks, Aaron.” And I’m like, “You know, it’s Russell, but it’s cool.”
Topher DeRosia: Yeah, nice. All right. Well, I saw a post on LinkedIn the other day from you talking about podcasts having the same people on episodes all the time. I thought, “Oh, I gotta have that guy on my podcast.” Because then you can’t go on any other ever again, because then you’ll be that guy.
Russell Aaron: Maybe.
Topher DeRosia: So, I snooped a little. You live much closer to me than I expected. Have we met? Did we meet at a WordCamp?
Russell Aaron: I think we met at WordCamp Ann Arbor one year.
Topher DeRosia: Oh, okay. I went to a whole bunch of those.
Russell Aaron: Yeah. I think I spoke 2018, something like that.
Topher DeRosia: Yeah. I was probably there.
Russell Aaron: Yeah.
Topher DeRosia: All right. So tell me where you live, what you do, all that kind of stuff.
Russell Aaron: I currently reside in Indianapolis, Indiana, and I am just freelancing as of right now. You know, I live in a pretty small town where it’s kind of old school WordPress, if you will. Anyone who is worth their salt keys will remember a day when websites were not responsive or a business has a cousin of a friend of a brother who builds websites and, “Hey, he’s working on it,” and three years later, there’s still no new website.
I kind of live in a town where I’m kind of getting back to my grassroots, where I stay up late at night with my insomnia, and I will roll up to a business and I will say, “Your new website can look like this today. If you pay me this much money, I will install it today, and this is your new website.” And it’s got your updated menu, and it’s responsive, and it works on mobile, and we can connect it to AppPresser and make it an app and stuff like that. So I’m kind of reliving the glory days of what I remember WordPress to be.
Topher DeRosia: I’m also freelancing right now, sort of by choice, sort of not by choice. Somebody I’m married to would rather I had regular pay and insurance.
Russell Aaron: Heard that.
Topher DeRosia: Are you in the same boat, or did you do this on purpose?
Russell Aaron: I did this on purpose. I was not working for the man, but I was working with some people. I’m over the tiny little granular things that somebody can fire you over. Like they’re watching if your mouse moves or they’re watching if you haven’t logged in. There’s just no more trust, I feel like, in so many cases. And so I know that I can do things better on my own, and I’m going to.
Topher DeRosia: I have to admit, I love the freelance life. It is pretty special.
Russell Aaron: Right. It’s almost like… what’s that movie? The 40-Year-Old Virgin, where they are making a website and they’re like, “Hey, Spider-Man 3’s on in five minutes. Let’s go watch it.” Like they totally ignore their job and they just go watch this movie now. It’s kind of like that.
Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Yeah. For me, it’s doing stuff with my wife. She has a day job, but it has kind of chaotic hours and not specific days of the week. And so I work when she does, which sometimes is Saturday and Sunday, and then I just don’t on Tuesday and Thursday. That’s pretty great.
Russell Aaron: I’m kind of in the same boat. My wife has a wonderful job, and she is with a great group, and she does global advocacy. I mean, she just deals with people that are happy with the product, and she keeps them happy. She does lots of stuff like that.
I’m kind of the same thing, where their company is now starting to get into AI, and they have so many questions, and I’m over here building things with AI and doing things like that. So I’m not exactly consulting, but my ideas are going into their company through my wife.
Topher DeRosia: My wife works at a grocery store, and they have a cash machine they use in the back office that runs Linux.
Russell Aaron: Oh, wow
Topher DeRosia: And the IT guys had to come in and do some work on it, and she saw the screen and she’s like, “Oh, is that Linux?” And I’m like, “Who are you, and what do you know?” Super nerd. So what’s your company name? Do you have one, or is it just WP Pro Support?
Russell Aaron: WP Pro Support.
Topher DeRosia: WP Pro Support. Okay. Do you concentrate more on support, or do you build more?
Russell Aaron: I have been doing support since 2011. I formed my very first support company, and I launched it the same day that Shane Sanderson launched Maintainn. My buddy, who you might know, John Hawkins, I was at the Vegas WordPress Meetup Group, and I had the idea in Vegas WordPress Meetup Group where there’s 70 people sitting right here behind me and they all want help. And I was like, “How do I do this?”
So I built my first thing where I gave everybody free-for-life support, and they were my test group, if you will. And they helped me work out my bugs and tickets, and they helped me work out how I actually operate and do stuff like that.
Then when I launched it, literally that day, John goes, “Wait, have you seen this?” And we had no idea about each other, but we literally launched them the same day. Fast forward three years down the road, I ended up working for Maintainn when it was owned by WebDevStudios.
But everything I’ve done in WordPress has been support, whether I’ve worked for a mortgage company, a casino in Vegas, hosting with Liquid Web, doing stuff with NerdPress or AppPresser. Everything I’ve done is support. That’s really where my passion is because I remember what it’s like being a first timer.
I think that there is a huge market potential here of people are always going to be new. I don’t care who you are. There’s always somebody new walking in the door, and there has to be a person who will sit down and say, “Come here, I’ll hold your hand.” And I am that person. I always try to look at WordPress from that lens is if a new person is looking at this today, are they going to be happy? Are they going to be confused? And I go from there.
So currently today I’m transitioning away from support as we know it, where you write a ticket and then somebody on the other end is like, “Hey, I fixed your site,” or whatever. And I’m transitioning to a new product that I’m working on. So I’m going to be getting away from traditional support, but I’m still going to be doing things in the support space, if that makes sense.
Topher DeRosia: Yeah, that makes sense. When I first got into WordPress, it was 2010, and custom post types were brand new.
Russell Aaron: Right?
Topher DeRosia: And I was out of my element with WordPress. I did not know what I was doing, but I did know PHP, and no one else knew post types yet. So when it comes to that, I was on an equal footing, and that was my way in. That was my leverage. I made a lot of money in the early days just building custom post types.
Russell Aaron: Custom post types and single-posttype.php or whatever. Yeah.
Topher DeRosia: So I was a competent PHP guy who didn’t know WordPress. And I feel like we’re in kind of the same transition space right now with AI, where we have tons of competent WordPressers who don’t really know AI yet. I think there’s a great space for that, teaching our friends, teaching everybody we’ve known for 10 years in WordPress. You know what I mean?
Russell Aaron: I do. That’s one of the things that I really love about WordPress is that… let’s take the new 7.0 that just came out, I think it re-leveled the playing field. Before this came out, there were people that were ahead of others when it comes to patterns or blocks or the command palette and stuff like that. But now I think with this, we’re back to an even playing field because every… I mean, not exactly. There’s still some people who know AI a lot better than others, but you’re always five minutes ahead of somebody and five minutes behind somebody else.
Topher DeRosia: Oh, yeah.
Russell Aaron: But I do think that with 7.0, a new level playing field has come out. And now is the time to start learning, or you got to wait until 7.1 comes out where that new level playing field comes out. But that’s what I love about WordPress is that it continues to happen.
Like you said, CPTs. I still love CPTs. I think they’re one of my favorite things. I look at all of these features, you know, page builders, another time when the playing field was leveled again. Now you learn page builders and then shortcodes and then this and then that. I think that’s the one gift that WordPress keeps giving is that you might be out of date six months from now, but then 7.1 comes out and you’re caught right back up.
Topher DeRosia: Right. Yeah. And while you’re five minutes ahead, you quick do a WordCamp talk.
Russell Aaron: Yes. Yeah.
Topher DeRosia: For that long, you know more than other people, right?
Russell Aaron: At least it’s on video, right?
Topher DeRosia: Right. I was an expert for a minute and a half.
Russell Aaron: That was my 15 minutes of fame.
Topher DeRosia: What is your WordCamp life like these days? When was the last one you went to?
Russell Aaron: The last one I went to was in Vegas, 2018. It was at the Plaza Hotel, which I worked at. When John was putting that together, in Vegas we had a wonderful space, and it was called The Innevation Center, and it was at a data facility called Switch. And they donated so much to us, and we are so grateful to them.
And then they kind of had a change in their policy where they weren’t doing things, and then they overpriced how much it would cost to hold events and stuff like that. I was working at a hotel, and so we had this giant convention space, if you will. And so because I was able to pull some strings, we got a great, great discount, all food paid for. I mean, all of it.
So that was my last WordCamp. The after party was on top of a pool deck, and there was pickleball courts, and there was a pool, and there was an open bar. I mean, it was rad. That was my last one.
I have kids now. My kids are seven and eight and so my WordPress travels have slowed. No, I’m sorry. I take it back. WordCamp US last year was my last one, where we went scorched earth. That’s what I call it. I call it WordCamp scorched earth.
Topher DeRosia: I was there for that one. I used to go to a lot every year. Go to-
Russell Aaron: Five, six?
Topher DeRosia: Five and 10. But since COVID, I think maybe just US every year. It’s weird to just go to one.
Russell Aaron: It is. And just US, it’s almost like we used to have what I used to call regional events, where I lived in Vegas, I would hit up WordCamp Orange County, then I’d hit up San Diego, then we’d hit up LA, and then we’d make our way up to Portland, and then maybe if San Francisco did one, and then Phoenix. I did all my regional stuff. And then every once in a while I would venture… I mean, I love WordCamp Minneapolis. Love the people up there. Love so much about that event. Used to do that a lot. What’s the one in Ohio that I used to go to?
Topher DeRosia: In the teens, there were five in Ohio. And being in Michigan, I used to just cruise down there.
Russell Aaron: It’s a three-hour, three-and-a-half-hour drive, huh?
Topher DeRosia: Yeah.
Russell Aaron: About that. Yeah.
Topher DeRosia: At the time, I was working for a company that was paying me to go to WordCamps. I had to make the case for each one, but it was a really simple case for all the Ohio ones because I didn’t need a plane ticket. I just drive over there. It’s like five in Ohio. There was Ann Arbor, there was Detroit, there was Grand Rapids, there was Chicago. I mean, there was almost 10 WordCamps within a three-hour drive of me.
Russell Aaron: That’s beautiful.
Topher DeRosia: It’s just not there anymore.
Russell Aaron: I was very fortunate to work for companies like WebDevStudios, where I could tell them, “Hey, I got into WordCamp Minneapolis. I’m going to speak there.” And because I’m speaking there, they would reimburse me X amount of dollars for something, and then they would sponsor the WordCamp, and then they would make a thing out of it. I mean, I was very fortunate in being able to do that.
Then I worked with a really great company called NerdPress, and they are a fantastic group of people that do the same thing. And then I ventured out into different straits, and it was very much different. I’ll say that much.
Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Those are good times.
Russell Aaron: It’s almost like… the way that I put it is it’s like we all graduated. We all did our four years of college, we all graduated, and now we went to our temp jobs or we went to our internships. Like the band broke up.
Topher DeRosia: Yep. Yeah, it is a lot like that. I have seen generations of WordPressers. There was all the crew before 2010 that were downloading zip files and hacking themes to even get them to run. Then there was after 2010, and custom post types were new and stuff. And then there’s the whole Gutenberg generation that never experienced all that crazy theme stuff.
Russell Aaron: I mean, you tell people that child themes were so new that people didn’t even grasp the concept of a child theme, and today it’s so baked in. It’s not even something that people think about. It’s just you install this and the child theme, and it’s a thing. But I remember writing those by hand.
Topher DeRosia: Yeah. No kidding. Then to a certain extent, not even having child themes anymore because nothing is stored on the file system.
Russell Aaron: I love it. I love it. In my very first WordCamp talk in Vegas 2012, I made a prediction that everything was powered by the theme. Everything used to… I mean, that’s as far as I go back is every template was the same. It was left column, right sidebar, header, and every page, whether you liked it or not, looked like a blog post. And it wasn’t full-width, responsive. I remember a lot of that.
And then corporate themes came out, and then cupcake themes came out, then lawn company themes came out, and then the rise of Envato and stuff like that. That’s a good name for a band, The Rise of Envato.
Topher DeRosia: I’d go see them.
Russell Aaron: But all that stuff comes out. And then you look at it now and it’s like, that seems so far away. I still remember the day that I learned about child themes, and I’ve never forgotten that. And I think, coming back full circle, that’s why I stay in this beginner support space because I’m kind of keeping that nostalgia around, I guess.
Topher DeRosia: Yeah. There’s a lot of joy in watching people’s eyes light up when they get it.
Russell Aaron: That’s the best part is just telling people what’s possible. When they’re frustrated with something and you go, “Oh, hey, Gravity Forms can do that.” And they’re like, “Wait, what?” And I’m like, “Yeah.” And they can also do… And I just start naming stuff. And I show all 50 extensions that they have and they’re just like, “Wait, what?” And I’m like, “Yeah.” I’m like, “This starts getting radical when you’re into it.”
Topher DeRosia: There’s something I miss from old WordPress that I don’t see in modern WordPress. It might not be a thing. And that is dramatic new styling with a theme the instant you install it. My wife is not a computer person and does not care about computers. She loves design stuff. There was a time we used Winamp.
Russell Aaron: Wow.
Topher DeRosia: And she loved getting skins for Winamp. And she would download 30 in a day and try them all out. And then when I set her up for the blog the first time and showed her the theme repo on .org, this is in 2011, she would literally spend a day just downloading theme after theme after theme.
Russell Aaron: Same way.
Topher DeRosia: And you just install it and poof, your site looks amazingly different. These days, I mean, you install something like Kadence or GeneratePress or Ollie or any of them, really, and it’s kind of a blank canvas.
Russell Aaron: It’s very minimalist. It’s very minimalist.
Topher DeRosia: I miss the ability to say, “I feel like making a change today,” and two minutes later, your site looks completely different because you’re using…
Russell Aaron: Couldn’t agree more. Couldn’t agree more. I mean, I look back at old pictures from when I would host the meetup group in Vegas, and there’s pictures of me talking, and then on the screen behind me is my old site, and it was this old layout. I bought the theme from Envato because I was just fascinated with it. It was everything that I wanted it to look like.
But same thing is now when you change your theme from this one to that one, that dark grunge kind of thing is gone, and now you’ve got this bootstrap-looking thing or whatever. I agree with you. I think that comes from my days of being in MySpace. That’s how I got started with all this. So you could change your MySpace template like that, and I think that’s where it comes from, at least for me.
Topher DeRosia: I haven’t even looked into it. Can you make a Gutenberg-based blog theme that has a very striking look and just release it? And then, I don’t know, just release a whole bunch of them like in the old days? Theme shops had 35 themes for sale, and they all looked different because they were all totally different themes.
Russell Aaron: I remember there was a day on Envato where it was the same theme, it was just rebranded. So it was like theme name 1.0, and it was called Atlas. And then it’s the same theme but in orange, and now it’s 1.2, and it’s called Dungeon or something. And then we have 1.3 again. Same theme, same framework, but each version was named something different. It made that developer look like they had five different products instead of just one over and over. Now you look at something like a page builder, and it’s like, “We’ve got 500 different templates in one thing.” I can’t do that. I think that’s too much for me.
Topher DeRosia: It’s like the days of the CSS Zen Garden.
Russell Aaron: Right.
Topher DeRosia: HTML is the same, CSS changes. Before I used WordPress, I built my own blog system.
Russell Aaron: Oh, wow.
Topher DeRosia: It never got super advanced, but I used it for 10 years. One of the things you can do in your HTML is register alternate stylesheets. It’s the same tag, it’s just an alternate word in there. And then in Firefox, at least, you can go under “view Page Style”, and they would all be listed there, and you can just choose different themes.
I figured out the JavaScript, even though I didn’t know JavaScript. I figured out the JavaScript to make a little dropdown box in my sidebar so my visitors could say, “Oh, I want to change my theme here.” I never figured out how to do that in WordPress because everything was so tied to style.css. I didn’t know how to make a different one be the main one. But that’s something else I miss in WordPress is the ability to just so dramatically and dynamically change your design because your content is structured so well.
Russell Aaron: You know, not only that, but I really liked the websites where there was a demo, and then it gave you a basic username. The username was demo, the password was demo. But then the one thing I never figured out was how every 24 hours the site would just reset. So somebody can go in there and they could do whatever they wanted to do. They could create their own pages. They could create their own blog posts. And for 24 hours, there was a page called Russell’s Awesome. But then after 24 hours, it would just reset. I always thought that was so cool, but I could never figure out how to do that.
Topher DeRosia: Oh, yeah. And everybody was editing all at the same time, within that 24-hour period.
Russell Aaron: I have since restructured my website. I use the block theme from WebDevStudios. I kind of feel like that’s where I got my education from. I was somebody who kind of dabbled around in WordPress, and then when I went to go work with them for three years, they had a set of standards that I couldn’t even fathom to begin with. But then as we built things and I saw how their machine works, how their business revolves, I was like, “You know, for me, this is the way that I like to do things, is the way that they like to do things.”
And so my new website… I mean, not new website, but it’s my new theme, I actually had AI build it for me. I had Claude. I was using… It’s by ThemeIsle. Neve. I was using Neve, one of my favorite themes. Love them. So I was using that, and then my site was kind of all over the place. It was an “I’ll teach you how to do this”. That’s kind of the main focus of my site is I will jump on a call with you, and whatever questions you have, I’ll sit here for five hours with you if you want. I will teach you and until you get it.
But then I also had this section about band names that were just… earlier when we were talking about the rise of Envato, you know, like I would have a section on my blog where you could create a new band name and then I had all these random blog posts. And so my website was kind of like this potluck, if you will, just like this random stuff. And I was like, you know, I want to be doing something else. I think my website needs to change. And I have those old blog posts still, but they’re hidden.
So now with my new theme, I had AI look at my old site and say, this is what I think we should do. I picked out some colors and over like five days, I had it build me five different HTML pages, like completely different, you know? And then I started giving AI and I said like, “Okay, I want to look like this.” And then I was like, well, okay, I like this and I like this, but I also like this from this other site.” So I started feeding it information and like when the HTML came out, I had 12 different templates. I had my blog posts, I had my archive, but I had everything built in HTML.
And the cool thing about the WDS block theme is that it serves everything as an HTML page. So I literally just took AI and said, “Take these HTML pages, bake them into how this theme does it,” and bam, my site came up. I had it done in maybe two days.
Topher DeRosia: Wow.
Russell Aaron: And then after that, I had it take all of those HTML pages and create me patterns. So now I can go in, and when I go into my full site editor, I can go to patterns, I have all my homepage patterns, my blog patterns, I sliced everything up, and they’re all WordPress native blocks.
So I can literally go in and change the coloring on any page I want instead of having to edit the HTML or anything. And now that I have that, I feel this sense of freedom where I’m not worrying about an update coming tomorrow, if my update is gonna break or I don’t have to read a changelog that is not specific anymore. I can’t stress how much I love not having to read changelogs or the lack of changelogs. I mean, I’m fully happy with how things have come out. And over time, I’m gonna keep fine-tuning it, but I’m pretty much where I’m at right now.
With all of this new technology that’s come out, I’ve really kind of found my love again for WordPress. I was kind of in a slump where I just wasn’t really doing anything. Now I take my son and we’ll drive down to Louisville, Kentucky. He rides BMX. So while he’s racing, I will literally have Claude Code open on my computer and I will log into the Claude app on my phone and I can keep sitting there having the same conversation. So this new thing that I’m building, I can still do it while I’m sitting there watching him race or while I’m doing something else. I was just like, this is fantastic.
And then my wife will drive home and I’ll just sit there and I talk into my phone, I literally put the microphone on and I’ll be like, “You know, I don’t like that. And here’s my thoughts about this.” And you know, my phone dictates all of that and then I send it to my computer through the app and it just keeps spinning things up. Then by the time I get home, I have a new version that I can demo or I have a new version that I can test. I mean, I am just so fascinated by it.
Topher DeRosia: That’s cool. Were we at WebDev at the same time?
Russel Aaron: I don’t think so.
Topher DeRosia: I was there just over three years ago.
Russel Aaron: I was there 2015 through 2018.
Topher DeRosia: Oh, yeah. I came much later. I was only there for like two months.
Russell Aaron: Oh, wow. Sometimes that’s the way it goes.
Topher DeRosia: Yeah. They were gonna get a big contract that hired a bunch of people and two months later didn’t get the contract and let us all go.
Russell Aaron: As much as I hate that, that also taught me that the people that do great work or the people that show up every day and are putting in more than they’re getting out, those are usually the people that stay in companies like that. That really changed my work ethic. I used to be somebody who wanted to be not lazy, but I didn’t wanna be pressed for time or having to go, go, go and having to be on all the time.
Now, I’m the opposite. Now, I’m like, now that I’ve done that, I kind of earn for that stretch for a little bit. I mean, you were just saying that how you’ve transitioned to where you are. I was watching a Barstool Sports interview with a guy who runs a pizza shop in… it’s either New Jersey or New York. The guy’s only open Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. And he’s only open nine to six or something like that. And he built that business… well, it’s been in his family for like 60 years or something. He has one of the last original pizza ovens ever.
But anyways, the point is, is that he lives at the pizza place, that’s where his entire life is, but he built the business around his life. I’m doing the same thing where if I wanna literally go jump on my bike right now and go for a two-mile ride, I’m gonna go do that. And I don’t have to feel like, hey, you’re not logged in and we’re not tracking your mouse. Like what’s happening? How come you’re not on Slack? You know what I mean? I’m not tied down to that. And I can’t stress that enough of like, that is where I wanna be.
Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Yeah, it is a good life. We are at about the time to wrap it up. Okay. So I’m gonna do that. Where do you hang out online?
Russel Aaron: Where do I hang out online?
Topher DeRosia: Are you in any common WordPress Slacks?
Russel Aaron: I’m on the main WordPress Slack sometimes. I tend to watch more than I do involve anymore. A long time ago, I used to be very vocal and I used to be not afraid to walk in to a room guns blazing. With the big cultural shift that happened in WordPress, I tend to just sit back now and be more self-reserved. So I post on my website, russellenvy.com. I’m on LinkedIn.
I’ve been utilizing Reddit a lot too. I think for me, Reddit is a place where I kind of disagree with the fact that you can hide behind a pseudonym, but I do like the brutal honesty that people will have because they are hiding behind something and they will say, dude, this flat out sucks. Or they’ll be like, Hey, this is great, but it would be cool if, or somebody can be like, “Hey, that already exists. You’re not doing anything new.” I do like that. Because it kind of not puts me in my place, but it shows me either how connected or disconnected I am to what I think I’m doing. And so Reddit is a very great place. I mean, everything is russellenvy.com except for Twitter or X, whatever you want to call it.
Topher DeRosia: All right, cool.
Russel Aaron: Where do you hang out at?
Topher DeRosia: I am in probably 40 slacks, but the vast majority of them, I don’t look at. I’m there so that someone can ping me. I’m in a couple of slacks in India.
Okay. I’m in the WordPress Italian community Slack.
Russel Aaron: That’s interesting.
Topher DeRosia: Post status make, of course there’s a hero press Slack. I have my own company Slack, my local meetup has a Slack. There’s just a lot of them. I wouldn’t say I’m super active on any of them. I just occasionally interact with somebody. I use my own company Slack to invite my clients in when we talk there.
Russel Aaron: Right. Do you find yourself reading things more than, you know… from the outsider looking in, I post a lot and it looks like I post a lot… I mean, especially on LinkedIn, but I’m always consuming more than I’m posting.
Do you find yourself doing that? Like where you’re… maybe not keeping up with the trades anymore, but like, you know… I used to read maybe 1,500 blog posts a week and then… what was that service where you could like save…? I used to have a service where you could save articles and then that way, late at night, I would just read, you know, maybe 10 or 15 of them a night.
But now I look at things like Reddit where I see… I just look at somebody who’s going on there and asking for help. Again, it’s a standard WordPress person that, hey, I’m new to this, I don’t know how, and I’m looking at it and I’m just like, how can we make that better? That’s kind of where I’m at these days.
Topher DeRosia: I don’t read a whole lot in Slack. It really is for my convenience. I’m pretty active with my RSS reader. I follow a lot of stuff.
Russell Aaron: Oh, wow.
Topher DeRosia: Because I don’t wanna go chase it all down all over the internet. So, you know, there’s that. I’m on LinkedIn a fair amount, Facebook a little bit. I’m on Mastodon and Blue Sky mostly just to post stuff.
It’s funny, I have more followers… No, let me say it this way. Mastodon, I have the fewest followers, but the most engagement from those followers.
Russell Aaron: Isn’t that interesting?
Topher DeRosia: Yeah, I’ll post something and I’ll get some favorites or reposts or whatever. Blue Sky, I get almost nothing at all, despite the fact that I have like a thousand followers there.
Russell Aaron: But Blue Sky is a community that is fast-moving. I almost compare it to anything Meta has, which is you can post today right now and in three minutes you’re 785 posts down. That’s what I really love about Reddit is that I posted something about this AI team that I’m building that I give away for free on GitHub, and so for like five days, I was the number two post on that subreddit. And the volume that I saw from that.
I mean, Reddit really loves human writing. If you go in there, you post something that somewhat seemingly might suggest that you had AI do anything with it, they will just downvote it. But if you write original and you write from the heart and stuff, like your stuff skyrockets there. I’ve learned a lot from Reddit because of that.
Topher DeRosia: That’s really cool.
Russell Aaron: It’s interesting.
Topher DeRosia: Yeah. All right, well, thanks for chatting with me.
Russell Aaron: Thank you for the time.
Topher DeRosia: And now you can’t be on anybody else’s podcast.
Russell Aaron: I’m actually starting my own, sir.
Topher DeRosia: Are you? All right.
Russell Aaron: I have, like you said, the reason why we started this is because you saw something from me that says, “I’m tired of the indie circuit,” if you will. I put out a LinkedIn post, I don’t know, maybe a month ago at this point and I asked people if they wanted to be on a show. So I have WP Roundtable. I got that from Kyle Mahler, a person who I love in WordPress more than I can express. One of the best people on the planet, I feel like.
I was thinking about starting that up again, because we don’t have WP Watercooler anymore. We don’t have anything like that. That’s kind of where I got my start from. But again, I also identify that that’s kind of the problem is that every Monday or Friday I was on a show and I was one of the people that you would see constantly.
And so I was sitting there thinking and I was like, what doesn’t the space have? What kind of show do I wanna watch? Because I don’t watch shows when they come out, do you?
Topher DeRosia: No.
Russell Aaron: I always watch them maybe four weeks down the road at like 2:30 in the morning when I have nothing going on. And by that point, the information is almost stale. I mean, the way that anything works these days. And there’s a few that I might watch maybe within 48 hours of coming out, but at this point, there is something… a new idea that myself and… the guy’s actually an automatician. And so it’s actually kind of interesting because we don’t wanna say anything that would put him in a position to where he’s saying something bad about the company he works for, but I’m also the person where I get to say something to the person who works at Automattic to maybe incite some change.
So we are working on something like that, but it’s not going to be an interview show. It is not going to be something where you tune it out or you put it on a 2.5 playback speed just to get through it. You know what I mean? And that’s really what the emphasis of my post was about is that so many of the interviews go that way.
Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Are you familiar with wppodcasts.com?
Russell Aaron: Yes.
Topher DeRosia: Okay, good. So when you get it started up, submit it there.
Russell Aaron: That’s a place. I’m very fascinated by Gary Vaynerchuk. Are you familiar with Gary V?
Topher DeRosia: No.
Russell Aaron: I watch something Gary V every day. That guy makes me feel like I’m lazy every single day, but he is also one of the people that says like, “Hey, you’re 40, you’re still just a baby.” A lot of people feel like I should be two kids, a house, marriage, this, that, and because I’m not, I’m behind the ball. And he’s one person that’s like, “Listen, you’re still a kid.” And he’s like, “You’re 40, I’m 40, and you have 10 years until you’re 50.” And even then you’re still so young to where you can generate something again and from 50 to 60, you can now do. That kind of mentality really moved me around.
Why I bring that up is, I’m trying not to post on the same places that everybody else is. I wanna find that new venture. Substack is a great one. And they also have a way to release podcast episodes through them. So they can actually be your entire engine. So like you don’t have to host them on different places and stuff like that. So I’m looking for different plays like that.
Topher DeRosia: All right, cool. Well, I look forward to hearing about it when it comes out. I’m sure you’ll post on LinkedIn.
Russell Aaron: Yes, yeah.
Topher DeRosia: All right. All right then, well, I will maybe find you on Slack or Reddit or someplace.
Russell Aaron: Slack, Reddit, LinkedIn. Either way, please keep in touch. First of all, it’s great to see somebody familiar in the space. It’s great. I mean, just talking about the old days, I could sit here and do it forever.
Topher DeRosia: All right, I’ll see ya.
Russell Aaron: Have a good one.
Topher DeRosia: All right, so that was the end of the podcast. If you could send me a headshot. And yep, that’s the one. Cool. And any links you want in the liner notes.
Russell Aaron: Cool.
Topher DeRosia: And two or three sentences about you and what you do and whatnot.
Russell Aaron: Cool. I noticed that you… are you trying to revive Hallway Chats? Or is it something that when you just find something interesting, you’re like, hey, I’ll go do that.
Topher DeRosia: That’s it right there.
Russell Aaron: Okay. Sure, sure.
Topher DeRosia: There was a time when it was a weekly podcast and now it’s a whenever I feel like it podcast.
Russell Aaron: I love it. I think that’s the biggest reason why I’m trying to do something different is I really dislike watching a podcast. The first thing they do is they come on and they go, “Hey, welcome to WP whatever. Hey, sorry we didn’t post this week. I was bit…”
If you are gonna say you’re gonna post every Wednesday at one, that’s on you. But I do not like when things start off with an apology. Like just get to it. Because I’m not watching it Wednesday at one. I mean, unless you’re Joe Rogan, or unless you are somebody who has a huge following that people will watch you live because it’s important. Otherwise, it’s just consumable stuff, you know?
Topher DeRosia: Yeah. For years, I posted it Heropress weekly on Wednesday without fail. I would ignore my family to go get it done. Then I was talking to Morton Rand Hendrickson. You know him?
Russell Aaron: Uh-huh.
Topher DeRosia: Yeah, he’s a huge fan of Heropress. And I said to him, “Do you read every week?” He’s like, “Oh no, not at all.” He’s like, “Oh, I thought you really liked it.” And he said, “Oh, I love it. But I don’t have time to read every week.” Every few months I’ll get depressed about the WordPress community and I’ll go read 10 essays.
And then one time I was at WordCamp Ann Arbor, probably the same one you were at and Josepha came to me and said that… she was kind of a sounding board for employees that come to her and said, “Listen, I’ve been working support all day and people suck and I’m depressed and I hate life.” And she would just listen for a while and then at the end they would say, “Okay, I’m gonna go read a bunch of Heropress and I’ll feel better.”
And it really changed my perspective of what I was making. I wasn’t making a weekly publication. I was making an archive, a collection to be used as a tool, a library.
Russell Aaron: I’m gonna say this poorly, but it’s almost like you are creating a support help hotline where it’s like, if you’re on the verge of blowing up your website, please call this number. We’ll talk you down from it. It’s almost like you’re building that.
Topher DeRosia: That’s funny.
Russell Aaron: That’s interesting. And then now you’re just selective about it or you’re so far-
Topher DeRosia: I’m less aggressive about finding essayists and less insistent that they get it to me by a certain time. Like I would find somebody and say, listen, I need it by Sunday on this date. And they were like, “Okay.” And that worked for a while.
Russell Aaron: Oh, before, before. Okay.
Topher DeRosia: Yeah. But now I’ll find somebody… No, I don’t go looking as often.
Russell Aaron: You’ll maybe find something that somebody wrote and you’ll be like, “Hey, are you interested in doing this?”
Topher DeRosia: Yes. And I don’t find people as often. I used to find my people on Twitter and I’m not on there anymore.
Russell Aaron: Like by personal choice?
Topher DeRosia: Yeah.
Russell Aaron: Okay.
Topher DeRosia: I just left Twitter.
Russell Aaron: Oh, wow. You feel like your life improved?
Topher DeRosia: Yes and no.
Russell Aaron: Okay.
Topher DeRosia: I feel the loss of what Twitter was. And it’s not there anymore. It’s just gone.
Russell Aaron: Especially around WordCamp and stuff like that. That used to have to be the place that you’d be on, you know?
Topher DeRosia: The Twitter I loved doesn’t exist anymore. And so, yeah, I feel that loss.
Russell Aaron: I need a t-shirt that says that.
Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Wow. I’m in the process of making a printable store. Printable? Printful. Printful store.
Russell Aaron: Cool.
Topher DeRosia: With Woo, to make a video with. I need to make a bunch of products. Maybe I’ll make one of those.
Russell Aaron: It’s interesting. Wow. You just flat-out left X. Do you feel like with Heropress, it was… and again, this is why I made that post, is that people almost see it like they can make the rounds. And it’s like, well, I haven’t gone there yet. And so they’re gonna submit something to you because they’re gonna get some press out of it. And it’s not so much what’s best for your brand or it’s not best for your website. They just see it as, well, I’m gonna get some exposure there. Do you feel like it used to be that?
Topher DeRosia: No. I’ve gotten maybe two or three submissions ever like that. And a couple of them, I was able to say, “No, that’s not what we’re about. It’s this other thing, what Heropress is actually about.” And they’re like, “Oh, well, okay, that’d be great.” And they do that. And maybe one or two people have said, “I built this great company and everyone should come use my company.” Like, no, not so much.
Russell Aaron: Interesting.
Topher DeRosia: And that’s the end of it.
Russell Aaron: I remember back in, I wanna say like 2013, people used to call each other out and be like, why are you giving the same speech at WordCamp Miami, WordCamp Minneapolis, WordCamp San Diego. And that’s kind of where I was at with that same LinkedIn post. It’s like, I really, really enjoy watching Matt Cromwell’s show, but the guy that he just had on also was on Jonathan Denwood and was also on this one. It was also on, I was like, I’ve already seen this.
Maybe I get three more percent information that wasn’t in that last, or because Matt knows a little bit more about personal stuff in WordPress or building a business, he might have some more insight there, but it’s like, I’ve already heard this and I’m kind of already over it. And that’s kind of where I was at is you don’t have to just say, I’m gonna do this one and that’s it. But it’s almost like, you’re making yourself not… what’s the word. Not credible because you’re going around and saying the same thing and it’s just, you’re not doing anything different than a blog post could have done.
Topher DeRosia: You know what I mean? I don’t feel too bad about repeating WordCamp talks because, especially at small camps, because a lot of people are just gonna go to their local camp and never go to another one. And unless they cruise.tv, they’re not gonna see it.
I struggle a little bit with podcasts because I’ve been asked a lot over the last 10 years to come on a podcast and talk about the story of WordPress. And it’s the same story every time, you know? And so, I’ll try to mix it up a little bit, give different information that I’ve never given before, that sort of thing. But it is something I think about and struggle with a little bit.
Russell Aaron: What do you struggle with about it?
Topher DeRosia: I don’t wanna just say the same thing over and over again. You know, I don’t want people to go, oh, Topher’s on another podcast episode. Oh, I’ve heard this story. I don’t need to be on this episode. Fortunately, it’s been around long enough that I can give a brief synopsis of the beginning and talk about stuff that’s happened in the last couple of years.
Russell Aaron: Right.
Topher DeRosia: Which is gonna be really different from the podcast episode I was on in 2020.
Russell Aaron: You know? Right.
Topher DeRosia: It’s an interesting dilemma when you have one story to tell and everybody wants you to tell it. How do you deal with that?
Russell Aaron: Well, I’ve noticed that too. It is like, you know, I’ll watch [Insert Famous Name Here], and they have a podcast, and they’re interviewing, again, [Insert Famous Name Here], and that person was also just on That Famous Name and That Famous Name. I actually saw somebody, it’s like almost a year ago, and they were just like, “Do you want me just to say this so your show has this speech in it or are you genuinely asking me?”
Because, you know, like you want this story so you can post it on your social media. But I’ve already given that story 15 different times because they wanted it for their own, you know? And it’s almost going that way where I kind of respect it in a way because you don’t want to post other people’s content. But I also feel like I’m tired of saying the same shit over and over again. It’s interesting, man.
Topher DeRosia: Yeah, that’s a dilemma.
Russell Aaron: So you’re just like kicking back and… are you building something for you that you think is gonna scale or are you trying to get away from WordPress? That’s kind of where I’m at right now.
Topher DeRosia: Yes and no. I have always wanted to… I’ve always been better with people than code. I’m a life coach.
Russell Aaron: Yeah. I did not know that about you.
Topher DeRosia: I love talking to the client more than coding. I love helping people learn things. And so those skills could be anywhere in WordPress, but also could be anywhere outside of WordPress. So I’m looking for those jobs and they are not out there.
Russell Aaron: Right.
Topher DeRosia: So here we are.
Russell Aaron: I’m to the point now where my son, he’s eight, but he races BMX, like actual bikes and stuff. And so there’s a college here in Indianapolis and it’s one of the best cycling schools in the country. And there’s like five Olympians that practice every Tuesday and Thursday and they’re right in our back door. These are people that have a great social following, but they don’t post very well. They have a brand name, but they don’t have a website.
So I’m noticing that every new space that I go into, it’s kind of like I get to jump back into WordPress again, where it’s like, hey, I just built a website for this BMX track in Louisville, Kentucky. It’s one of the best tracks in the country by everybody that has ever raced in a sport, they all vote that it’s one of the best, but they don’t have a website period.
I just went through this where they have a guy, he’s their treasurer and he’s like, “Well, I’m an AI software guy.” And I’m like, “Well, how come you don’t have a website?” And he’s like, “Well…” And I’m like, “Listen, I submitted a new version of a we… literally, I uploaded it to my Russell website or to my Russell Envy site and I just put it in a sub-folder and I was like, “Your website could look like this today.” I was like, “For free. I don’t want anything from you. No free anything.” I was like, “I want to donate this to you because I want to grow the sport.”
And the guy’s like, “I wanted to build it and React.” And I’m like, “Well, why didn’t you?” And the guy’s like, “Uh.” And I’m like, “I have free hosting for life from WPEngine.” And I was like, “I won’t charge you guys ever. I will host a site. I have free with AppPresser. I’ll build you guys an app where you guys can send push notifications.” And the guy’s like, “Well, I want to have a lot of control and say over it.” And I was just like, “All right, you know what?” And then I built my own. Now I own a domain all about their BMX track and now they’re calling me going, “We should have went with you.”
I’m to the point now where I’m nice. And then it’s just like, “Dude, I’m 10,000 miles over you and I’m going to go this way.” Liquid Web did that to me. Liquid Web brought me in and they were like, “We’re going to…” I was supposed to be the OG stellar WP. They brought me in, I was hiring all my friends and I was bringing in people and we were building something. And then they called me and they were like, “Well, you can either be a level two support person or you could just not work here.” And I was like, “Well, I don’t work here anymore.” And they were like, “Well, wait, hang on.” And I literally hit “click” and I have never logged on since.
Topher DeRosia: That’s funny.
Russell Aaron: I’m in that same boat where, you know, I don’t have to work for you. You know what I mean? Like, fuck, I’m 40. I should be doing something on my own anyway. I kind of wish I had… what was WP 101? Sean did that for all those years. I wish I would have done that. Or every week, I should have had some YouTube about talking about something and maybe I could have monetized that, but I’m not behind the ball. I let the ball slip is what I feel like.
Topher DeRosia: It’s not too late to start. I picked that up when Sean, quit and I’ve got a YouTube channel with a bunch of stuff on it. I published one today.
Russell Aaron: Oh wow. It’s just interesting things that you think about, or is it like educational, like tutorials?
Topher DeRosia: It’s educational tutorials, but stuff that I find interesting. Like today I made a desktop wallpaper for WordCamp Europe.
Russell Aaron: Nice.
Topher DeRosia: And I did it by going to their webpage in my browser and using the console to hack the HTML and CSS until it looked like a screen, a wallpaper.
Russell Aaron: That’s fucking cool.
Topher DeRosia: So I published it right before I’d started talking to you, like minutes before that. And it has three views.
Russell Aaron: Woohoo.
Topher DeRosia: But a couple of weeks ago I did one called fun and games in the terminal. And it’s how to play Tetris in the terminal and how to make a choo-choo train go across your screen when you type LS wrong. And it has 784 views right now.
Russell Aaron: That’s awesome.
Topher DeRosia: I did one on how to brighten a photo. I did a series. I’m working on a series called Topher learns how, or I talk to people who know how to do things that I really should know how to do, but don’t. I talked to Scott Kingsley Clark about pods, which has been around forever, but I’ve never used. I talked to Donata about Termageddon, because I know it’s important, but I have stayed away because I don’t understand and it’s scary.
Russell Aaron: Termageddon. I’ve never heard that.
Topher DeRosia: Oh. You know the little cookie consent things, privacy policies and whatnot?
Russell Aaron: Yeah.
Topher DeRosia: So when you sign up with term again, you pay a surprisingly low monthly fee and they have a human get on the phone with you and talk through your requirements of where you live, your legal stuff. Like, are you in Europe? Are you in California? Where are you? Where are your customers, your viewers? Then you drop in a short code for your privacy code and for the cookies and they keep them up to date based on how the laws change. So you don’t have to pay attention to, Oh, did California make some crazy new law about cookies? What do I need to do to update my site? It’s really, really great. So I did an interview with her.
Russell Aaron: $12 a month or $119 a year.
Topher DeRosia: Yeah.
Russell Aaron: What is the point of having a privacy policy if you don’t pay extra for limiting your liability? Wow. That’s amazing.
Topher DeRosia: It is.
Russell Aaron: That’s someone just thinking outside the box.
Topher DeRosia: Yeah. I have a couple of videos where I was given an account at a hosting company that I’ve never used and videoed logging in for the first time and getting to a website.
Russell Aaron: Oh, wow. Just from first login to setting everything up to now you have something production. Wow.
Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Specifically not reading the docs.
Russell Aaron: Oh, just trying to brute force your way through it.
Topher DeRosia: Yeah.
Russell Aaron: That’s smart, dude.
Topher DeRosia: It’s partly about… well, they may have wonderful docs. It may be super easy to do if you read all the docs. I don’t want to read the docs.
Russell Aaron: Me neither.
Topher DeRosia: Clickety clickety click, I have a website. So I did GreenGeeks. I did honesthosting.io. I did X cloud. So that’s the kind of stuff I’m doing.
Russell Aaron: That’s interesting. That is something that, that Gary V talks about a lot is that it used to have to be where you are this WordPress brand and you do just this and all your videos could only be about that. Anytime you stepped outside the box, people were like, “Why am I watching this?” And today now we’re to finally to where my website would probably actually thrive is it’s so random. It’s just something out of my head and one thing can skyrocket and it’s like hitting the jackpot, you know? That’s interesting.
Topher DeRosia: Another thing I did is I made a site called topher.how and because I realized I had never really made stuff in my own channel. I’ve been blogging for decades, making videos, WinningWP. I have over a hundred videos on WinningWP.
Russell Aaron: WinningWP?
Topher DeRosia: Yeah.
Russell Aaron: Did you start that when Charlie Sheen started doing Winning?
Topher DeRosia: No, no, no, no. But I was thinking, boy, I’d love to have all this stuff on my own website, but I don’t want to go find it all and copy paste posts. And then I realized nearly every place I’ve ever made content has RSS for their authors.
Russell Aaron: Yeah.
Topher DeRosia: And so I found the sites, found my author RSS feed and started piping them into WP all import. And now topher.how has all my content from the last 15 years on a dozen different sites, doesn’t more than a dozen different sites, all my videos, all my posts, everything on wordpress.tv, all that stuff. So it’s kind of a portfolio. Yeah, so you can go to topher.how and see all my stuff.
Russell Aaron: That was actually one thing that I was really proud of was that my entire WordPress journey is documented on somebody else’s project. So, like you go to WPwatercooler and my resume, what is great about it is that it is not me who can edit those videos, it is not me who can master them. Those words are there. Those words are me. You want to know my qualifications in WordPress, there’s all my shit. For me, I was like, “That’s actually pretty sick. You know what I mean?”
Topher DeRosia: Yeah.
Russell Aaron: Wow. Topher.how. Oh, dude, do you know who Jeffrey Zinn is?
Topher DeRosia: No.
Russell Aaron: Oh God. Him and Brandon Dove they have Pixel Jar. Have you ever heard of Pixel Jar?
Topher DeRosia: Maybe.
Russell Aaron: They’re big West coasters. I’ll tell you that much. He just wrote me, “He literally just said, dude, how do you find the time to write so much on LinkedIn? I enjoy all your stuff, but mostly I’m blown away by the volume.”
Topher DeRosia: Nice.
Russell Aaron: I’m going to write him back and just tell him the truth. But you know, it’s all thought man. Interesting. Topher, I’ve had a lot of fun. Am I taking up your time?
Topher DeRosia: I should get back to work.
Russell Aaron: All right, sir. Have a good one.
Topher DeRosia: All right. I’ll see ya.
Russell Aaron: Bye.
Topher DeRosia: Bye.
Introducing Rob RuizMeet Rob Ruiz, a seasoned Senior Full Stack Developer with nearly two decades of expertise in WordPress innovation and open-source magic. As the Lead Maintainer of WP Rig since 2020, Rob has been the driving force behind this groundbreaking open-source framework that empowers developers to craft high-performance, accessible, and progressively enhanced WordPress themes with ease. WP Rig isn’t just a starter theme—it’s a turbocharged toolkit that bundles modern build processes, linting, optimization, and testing to deliver lightning-fast, standards-compliant sites that shine on any device.
Show NotesFor more on Rob and WP Rig, check out these links:
- LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robcruiz
- WP Rig Official Site: https://wprig.io
- GitHub Repository: https://github.com/wprig/wprig
- Latest Releases: https://github.com/wprig/wprig/releases
- WP Rig 3.1 Announcement: https://wprig.io/wp-rig-3-1/
Transcript:Topher DeRosia: Hey everybody. Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m your host Topher DeRosia, and with me today I have-
Rob Ruiz: Rob Ruiz.
Topher: Rob. You and I have talked a couple of times, once recently, and I learned about a project you’re working on, but not a whole lot about you. Where do you live? What do you do for a living?
Rob: Yeah, for sure. Good question. Although I’m originally from Orlando, Florida, I’ve been living in Omaha, Nebraska for a couple of decades now. So I’m pretty much a native. I know a lot of people around here and I’ve been fairly involved in various local communities over the years.
I’m a web developer. Started off as a graphic designer kind of out of college, and then got interested in web stuff. And so as a graphic designer turned future web developer, I guess, I was very interested in content management systems because it made the creating and managing of websites very, very easy.
My first couple of sites were Flash websites, sites with macro media Flash. Then once I found content management systems, I was like, “Wow, this is way easier than coding the whole thing from scratch with Flash.” And then all the other obvious benefits that come from that.
So I originally started with Joomla, interestingly enough, and used Joomla for about two or three years, then found WordPress and never looked back. And so I’ve been using WordPress ever since. As the years have gone on, WordPress has enabled me to slowly transition from a more kind of web designer, I guess, to a very full-blown web developer and software engineer, and even software architect to some degree. So here we are many years later.
Topher: There’s a big step from designer to developer. How did that go for you? I’m assuming you went to PHP. Although if you were doing Flash sites, you probably learned ActionScript.
Rob: Yeah. Yeah. That was very convenient when I started learning JavaScript. It made it very easy to learn JavaScript faster because I already had a familiarity with ActionScript. So there’s a lot of similarities there. But yeah. Even before I started doing PHP, I started learning more HTML and CSS. I did do a couple of static websites between there that were just like no content management system at all. So I was able to kind of sharpen my sword there with the CSS and HTML, which wasn’t particularly hard. But yeah, definitely, the PHP… that was a big step was PHP because it’s a proper logical programming language. There was a lot there I needed to unpack, and so it took me a while. I had to stick to it and really rinse and repeat before I finally got my feet under me.
Topher: I can imagine. All right. So then you work for yourself or you freelance or do you have a real job, as it were?
Rob: Currently, I do have a real job. Currently, I’m working at a company called Bold Orange out of Minneapolis. They’re a web agency. But I kind of bounce around from a lot of different jobs. And then, yes, I do freelance on the side, and I also develop my own products as well for myself and my company.
Topher: Cool. Bold Orange sounds familiar. Who owns that?
Rob: To be honest, I don’t know who the owners are. It’s just a pretty big web agency out of Minneapolis. They are a big company. You could just look them up at boldorange.com. They work for some pretty big companies.
Topher: Cool. All right. You and I talked last about WP Rig. Give me a little background on where that came from and how you got it.
Rob: Yeah, for sure. Well, there was a period of time where I was working at a company called Proxy Bid that is in the auction industry, and they had a product or a service — I don’t know how you want to look at that —called Auction Services. That product is basically just building WordPress sites for auction companies.
They tasked us with a way to kind of standardize those websites essentially. And what we realized is that picking a different theme for every single site made things difficult to manage and increase tech debt by a lot. So what we were tasked with was, okay, if we’re going to build our own theme that we’re just going to make highly dynamic so we can make it look different from site to site. So we want to build it, but we want to build it smart and we want to make it reusable and maintainable. So let’s find a good framework to build this on so that we can maintain coding standards and end up with as little tech debt as possible, essentially.
That’s when I first discovered WP Rig. In my research, I came across it and others. We came across Roots Sage and some of the other big names, I guess. It was actually a team exercise. We all went out and looked for different ones and studied different ones and mine that I found was WP Rig. And I was extremely interested in that one over the other ones. Interestingly enough-
Topher: Can you tell me why over the other ones?
Rob: That’s a great question. Yeah. I really liked the design patterns. I really liked the focus on WordPress coding standards. So having a system built in that checked all the code against WordPress coding standards was cool. I loved the compiling transpiling, whatever, for CSS and JavaScript kind of built in. That sounded really, really interesting.
The fact that there was PHP unit testing built into it. So there’s like a starter testing framework built in that’s easy to extend so that you can add additional unit tests as your theme grows. We really wanted to make sure… because we were very into CICD pipelines. So we wanted to make sure that as developers were adding or contributing to any themes that we built with this, that we could have automated tests run and automated builds run, and just automate as much as possible. So WP rig just seemed like something that gave us those capabilities right out of the box. So that was a big thing. And I loved the way that they did it.
Roots Sage does something similar, but they use their blade templating engine built in there. We really wanted to stick to something that was a bit more standard WordPress so that there wasn’t like a large knowledge overhead so that we didn’t have to say like, okay, if we’re bringing on other developers, like junior developers work on it, oh, it would be nice if you use Laravel too because we use this templating engine in all of our themes. We didn’t want to have to worry about that essentially. It was all object-oriented and all that stuff too. That’s what looked interesting to me.
We ended up building a theme with WP Rig. I don’t know what they ended up doing with it after that, because I ended up getting let go shortly thereafter because the company had recently been acquired. Also, this was right after COVID too. So there was just a lot of moving parts and changing things at the time.
So I ended up getting let go. But literally a week after I got let go, I came across a post on WP Tavern about how this framework was looking for new maintainers. Basically, this was a call put out by Morton, the original author of WP Rig. He reached out to WP Tavern and said, “Look, we’re not interested in maintaining this thing anymore, but it’s pretty cool. We like what we’ve built. And so we’re looking for other people to come in and adopt it essentially.”
So I joined a Zoom meeting with a handful of other individuals that were also interested in this whole endeavor, and Morton reached out to me after the call and basically just said, “I looked you up. I liked some of the input that you had during the meeting. Let’s talk a little bit more.” And then that eventually led to conversations about me essentially taking the whole project over entirely. So, the branding, the hosting of the website, being lead maintainer on the project. Basically, gave me the keys to the kingdom in terms of GitHub and everything.
So that’s how it ended up going in terms of the handoff between Morton and I. And I’m very grateful to him. They really created something super cool and I was honored to take it over and kind of, I don’t know, keep it going, I guess.
Topher: I would be really curious. I don’t think either of us have the answer. I’d be curious to know how similar that path is to other project handoffs. It’s different from like an acquisition. You didn’t buy a plugin from somebody. It was kind of like vibes, I guess.
Rob: It was like vibes. It was very vibey. I guess that’s probably the case in an open source situation. It’s very much an open source project. It’s a community-driven thing. It’s for everybody by everybody. I don’t know if all open source community projects roll like that, but that’s how this one worked out.
There was some amount of ownership on Morton’s behalf. He did hire somebody to do the branding for WP Rig and the logo. And then obviously he was paying for stuff like the WPrig.io domain and the hosting through SiteGround and so on and so forth. So, we did have to transfer some of that and I’ve taken over those, I guess, financial burdens, if you want to think of it like that. But I’m totally okay with it.
Topher: All right. You sort of mentioned some of the things Rig does, compiling and all that kind of stuff. Can you tell me… we didn’t discuss this before. I’m sitting at my desk and I think I want a website. How long does it take to go from that to looking at WordPress and logging into the admin with Rig?
Rob: Okay. Rig is not an environment management system like local-
Topher: I’m realizing my mistake. Somebody sends me a design in Figma. How long does it take me to go from that to, I’m not going to say complete because I mean, that’s CSS, but you know, how long does it take me to get to the point where I’m looking at a theme that is mine for the client that I’m going to start converting?
Rob: Well, if you’re just looking for a starting point, if you’re just like, okay, how long does it take to get to like, okay, here’s my blank slate and I’m ready to start adopting all of these rules that are set up in Figma or whatever, I mean, you’re looking at maybe 5 minutes, 10 minutes, something like that. It’s pretty automated. You just need some simple knowledge of Git.
And then there are some prerequisites to using WP Rig. You do have to have composer installed because we do leverage some Composer packages to some of it, although to be honest, you could probably get away with not using Composer. You just have to be okay with sacrificing some of the tools the WP Rig assumes you’re going to have. And then obviously Node. You have to have Node installed.
A lot of our documentation assumes that you have NPM, that you’re using NPM for all your Nodes or your package management. But we did recently introduce support for Bun. And so you can use Bun instead of NPM, which is actually a lot faster and better in many ways.
Topher: Okay. A lot of my audience are not developers, users, or light developers, like they’ll download a theme, hack a template, whatever. Is this for them? Am I boring those people right now?
Rob: That’s a great question. I mean, and I think this is an interesting dichotomy and paradigm in the WordPress ecosystem, because you’ve got kind of this great divide. At least this is something I’ve noticed in my years in the WordPress community is you have many people that are not coders or developers that are very interested in expanding their knowledge of WordPress, but it’s strictly from a more of a marketing perspective where it’s like, I just want to know how to build websites with WordPress and how to use it to achieve my goals online from a marketing standpoint.
You have that group of people, and then you have this other group of people that are very developer centric that want to know how to extend WordPress and how to empower those other people that we just discussed. Right?
Topher: Right.
Rob: So, yeah, that’s a very good question. I would say that WP Rig is very much designed for the developers, not for the marketers. The assumption there is that you’re going to be doing some amount of coding. Now, can you get away with doing a very light amount of coding? Yes. Yes, you can. I mean, if you compare what you’re going to get out of that assumed workflow to something that you would get off like Theme Forest or whatever, it’s going to be a night and day difference because those theme, Forest Themes, have hours, hundreds, sometimes hundreds of hours of development put into them. So, you’re not going to just out of the box immediately get something that is comparable to that.
Topher: You need to put in those hundreds of hours of development to make a theme.
Rob: As of today, yes. That may change soon though.
Topher: Watch this space.
Rob: That’s all I’ll say.
Topher: Okay. So now we know who it’s for. I’m assuming there’s a website for it. What is it?
Rob: Yeah. If you go to WPrig.io, we have a homepage that shows you all the features that are there in WP Rig. And then there’s a whole documentation area that helps people get up and running with WP Rig because there is a small learning curve there that’s pretty palatable for anybody who’s familiar with modern development workflows. So that is a thing.
So the type of person that this is designed for anybody that wants to make a theme for anything. Let’s say you’re a big agency and you pull in a big client and that client wants something extremely custom and they come to you with Figma designs. Sure, you could go out there and find some premium theme and try to like child theme and overhaul that if you want. But in many situations, I would say in most situations, if you’re working from a Figma design that’s not based off of another theme already that’s just kind of somebody else’s brainchild, then you’re probably going to want to start from scratch.
And so the idea here is that this is something to replace an approach, like underscores an approach. Actually, WP Pig was based off of underscores. The whole concept of it, as Morton explained it to me, was that he wanted to build an underscores that was more modern and full-featured from a development standpoint.
Topher: Does it have any opinions about Gutenberg?
Rob: It does now, but it did not when I took it over because Gutenberg did not exist yet when I took over WP Rig.
Topher: Okay. What are its opinions?
Rob: Yeah, sure. The opinion right out of the gate is that you can use Gutenberg as an editor and it has support like CSS rules in it for the standard blocks. So you should be able to use regular Gutenberg blocks in your theme and they should look just fine. There’s no resets in there. It doesn’t start from scratch. There’s not a bunch of styling you have to do for the blocks necessarily.
Now, if you go to the full site editing or block-based mentality here, there are some things you need to do in WP Rig to convert the out-of-the-box WP Rig into another paradigm essentially. Right when you pull WP Rig, the assumption is you’re building what most people would refer to as a hybrid theme. The theme supports API or whatever, and the assumption is that you’re not going to be using the site editor. You’re just going to kind of do traditional WordPress, but you might be using Gutenberg for your content. So you’re just using Gutenberg kind of to author your pages and your posts and stuff like that, but not necessarily the whole site.
WP Rig has the ability to kind of transform itself into other paradigms. So the first paradigm we built out was the universal theme approach. And the idea there is that you get a combination of the full site editing capabilities. But then you also have the traditional menu manager and the settings customizer framework or whatever is still there, right? These are things that don’t exist in a standard block-based theme. So I guess an easy example would be like the 2025 WordPress theme that comes right out of the box. It comes installed in WordPress. That is a true block-based theme, not a universal theme.
So it doesn’t have those features because the assumption there is that it doesn’t need those features. You can kind of transform WP Rig into a universal theme that’s kind of a hybrid between a block-based and a classic theme. And then it can also transform into a strictly block-based theme as well. So following the same architecture as like the WordPress 2025 theme or Ollie or something like that is also a true block-based theme as well.
So you can easily convert or transform the starting point of WP Rig into either of those paradigms if that’s the type of theme you’re setting out to build.
Topher: Okay. That sounds super flexible. How much work is it to do that?
Rob: It’s like one command line. Previously we had some tutorials on the website that showed you step-by-step, like what you needed to change about the theme to do that. You would have to add some files, delete some files, edit some code, add some theme supports into the base support class and some other stuff. I have recently, as of like a year and a half ago or a year ago, created a command line or a command that you can type into the command line that basically does that entire conversion process for you in like the blink of an eye. It takes probably a second to a second and a half to perform those changes to the code and then you’re good to go.
It is best to do that conversion before you start building out your whole theme. It’s not impossible to do it after. But you’re more likely to run into problems or conflicts if you’ve already set out building your whole theme under one paradigm, and then you decide how the project you want to switch over to block-based or whatever. You’re likely to run into the need to refactor a bunch of stuff in that situation. So it is ideal to make that choice extremely early on in the process of developing your theme. But either way it’ll still work. That’s just one of the many tools that exist in WP Rig to transform it or convert it in several ways. That’s just one example. There are other examples of ways that Rig kind of converts itself to other paradigms as well.
Topher: Yeah. All right. In my development life, I’ve had two parts to it. And one is the weekend hobbyist, or I download cadence and I whip something up in 20 minutes because I just want to experiment and the other is agency life where everything’s in Git, things are compiled, there are versions, blah, blah, blah. This sounds very friendly to that more professional pathway.
Rob: Absolutely. Yes. Or, I mean, there’s another situation here too. If you’re a company who develops themes and publishes them to a platform like ThemeForest or any other platform, perhaps you’re selling themes on your own website, whatever, if you’re making things for sale, there’s no reason you couldn’t use WP Rig to build your themes.
We have a bundle process that bundles your theme for publication or publishing. Whether you’re an agency or whether you’re putting your theme out for sale, it doesn’t matter, during that bundle process, it does actually white label the entire code base to where there’s no mention of WP Rig in the code whatsoever.
Let’s say you were to build a theme that you wanted to put up for sale because you have some cool ideas. Say, page transitions now are completely supported in all modern or in most modern browsers. And when I say print page transitions, for those that are in the know, I am talking about not single page app page transitions, but through website page transitions. You can now do that.
Let’s say you were like, “Hey, I’m feeling ambitious and I want to put out some new theme that comes with these page transitions built in,” and that’s going to be fancy on ThemeForest when people look at my demo, people might want to buy that. You could totally use WP Rig to build that out into a theme and the bundle process will white label all of the code. And then when people buy your theme and download that code, if they’re starting to go through and look through your code, they’re not going to have any way of knowing that it was built with WP Rig unless they’re familiar with the base WP Rig architecture, like how it does its object-oriented programming. It might be familiar with the patterns that it’s using and be able to kind of discern like, okay, well, this is the same pattern WP Rig uses, so high likelihood it was built with WP Rig. But they’re not going to be able to know by reading through the code. It’s not going to say WP Rig everywhere. It’s going to have the theme all over the place in the code.
Topher: Okay. So then is that still WP Rig code? It just changed its labels?
Rob: Yeah.
Topher: So, it’s not like you’re exporting HTML, CSS and JavaScript? The underlying Rig framework is still there.
Rob: Yeah. During the bundle process, it is bundling CSS and HTML. Well, HTML in the case of a block-based theme. But, yeah, it is bundling your PHP, your CSS, your JavaScript into the theme that you’re going to let people download when they buy it, or that you’re going to ship to your whatever client’s website. But all that code is going to be transpiled. In the case of CSS and JavaScript, there’s only going to be minified versions of that code in that theme. The source code is not actually going to be in there.
Topher: This sounds pretty cool. You mentioned some stuff might be coming. You don’t have to tell me what it is, but do you have a timeline? When should we be watching for the next cool thing from Rig?
Rob: Okay, cool. Well, I’m going to keep iterating on Rig forever. Regardless of any future products that might be built on WP Rig, WP Rig will always and forever remain an open source product for anybody to use for free and we, I, and possibly others in the future will continue to update it and support it over time.
We just recently put out 3.1. You could expect the 3.2 anytime in the next six months to a year, probably closer to six months. One feature I’m looking at particularly closely right now is the new stuff coming out in version 6.9 of WordPress around the various APIs that are there. I think one of them is called the form… There’s a field API and a form API or view API or something like that. So WP Rig comes with a React-based settings framework in it.
So if you want your theme to have a bunch of settings in it to make it flexible for whoever buys your theme, you can use this settings framework to easily create a bunch of fields, and then that framework will automatically manage all your fields and store all the data from those fields and make it easy to retrieve the values of the input on those fields, without knowing any React at all.
Now, if you know React, you can go in there and, you know, embellish what’s already there, but it takes a JSON approach. So if you just understand JSON, you can go in and change the JSON for the framework, and that will automatically add fields into the settings framework. So you don’t even have to know React to extend the settings page if you want. That will likely get an overhaul using these new APIs being introduced into Rig.
Topher: All right. How often have you run into something where, “Oh, look, WordPress has a new feature, I need to rebuild my system”?
Rob: Over the last four or five years, it’s happened a lot because, yeah, I mean, like I said, when I first took this thing over, Gutenberg had not even been introduced yet. So, you had the introduction of Gutenberg and blocks. That was one thing. Then this whole full site editing became a thing, which later became the site editor. So that became a whole thing. Then all these various APIs. I mean, it happens quite frequently.
So I’ve been working to keep it modern and up to date over the past four years and it’s been an incredible learning experience. It not only keeps my WordPress knowledge extremely sharp, but I’ve also learned how various other toolkits are built. That’s been the interesting thing.
From a development standpoint, there’s two challenges here. One of the challenges is staying modern on the WordPress side of things. For instance, WordPress coding standards came out with a version 3 and then a version 3.1 about two years ago. I had to update WP Rig to leverage those modern coding standards.
So that’s one example is as WordPress changes, the code in WP Rig also needs to change. Or for instance, if new CSS standards change, right, new CSS properties come out, it is ideal for the base CSS in WP Rig, meaning the CSS that you get right out of the box with it, comes with some of these, for instance, CSS grid, Flexbox, stuff like that. If I was adopting a theme framework to build a theme on, I would expect some of that stuff to be in there. And those things were extremely new when I first took over WP Rig and were not all baked in there essentially. So I’ve had to add a lot of that over time.
Now there’s another side to this, which is not just keeping up with WordPress and CSS and PHP, 8. whatever, yada yada yada. You’ve also got the toolkit. There are various node packages and composer packages of power WP Rig and the process in which it does the transpiling, the bundling, the automated manipulation of your code during various aspects of the usage of WP Rig is a whole nother set of challenges because now you have to learn concepts like, well, how do I write custom node scripts? Right?
Like there were no WP CLI commands built into WP Rig when I first took it over. Now there’s a whole list. There’s a whole library of WP CLI commands that come in Rig right out of the gate. And so I’ve had to learn about that. So just various things that come with knowing how do you automate the process of converting code, that’s something that was completely foreign to me when I first took over WP Rig. That’s been another incredible learning experience is understanding like what’s the difference between Webpack and Gulp. I didn’t know, right? I would tell people I’m using Gulp and WP Rig and they would be like, “Well, why don’t you just use Webpack?” and I would say, “I don’t know. I don’t know what the difference is.”
So over time I could figure out what are the differences? Why aren’t we using Webpack? And I’m glad I spent some time on that because it turns out Webpack is not the hottest thing anymore, so I just skipped right over all that. When I overhauled for version 3, we’re now not using Gulp anymore as of 3.1. We’re now using more of a Vite-like process, far more modern than Webpack and far better and faster and sleeker and lighter.
I had to learn a bunch about what powers Vite. What is Vite doing under the hood that we might be able to also do in WP Rig, but do it in a WordPress way. Because Vite is a SaaS tool. If you’re building a SaaS, like React with a… we’re not a SaaS. I guess a spa is a better term to use here. If you’re building a single page application with React or view or belt or whatever, right, then knowing what Vite is and just using Vite right out of the box is perfect. But it doesn’t translate perfectly to WordPress land because WordPress has its own opinions.
And so I did have to do some dissecting there and figure out what to keep and what to not keep to what to kind of set aside so that WordPress can keep doing what WordPress does the way WordPress likes to do it, but also improve on how we’re doing some of the compiling and transpiling and the manipulation of the code during these various.
Topher: All right. I want to pivot a little bit to some personal-ish questions.
Rob: Okay.
Topher: This is a big project. I’m sure it takes up plenty of your time. How scalable is that in your life? Do you want to do this for the rest of your life?
Rob: That’s a fantastic question. I don’t know about the rest of my life. I mean, I definitely want to do web development for the rest of my life because the web has, let’s be honest, it’s transformed everyone’s way of life, whether you’re a web developer or not. You know, the fact that we have the internet in our pocket now, you know, it has changed everything. Apps, everything. It’s all built on the web. So I certainly want to be involved in the web the rest of my life. Do I want to keep doing WordPress the rest of my life? I don’t know. Do I want to keep doing WP Rig the rest of my life? I don’t know.
But I will say that you bring up a very interesting point, which is it does take up a lot of time and also trust in open source over the past four or five years I would argue has diminished a little bit as a result of various events that have occurred over the past two or three years. I mean, we could cite the whole WP Engine Matt Mullerwig thing. We can also cite what’s going on with Oracle and JavaScript. Well, I mean, there’s many examples of this.
I mean, we can cite the whole thing that happened… I mean, there’s various packages out there that are used and developed and open source to anybody, and some of them are going on maintained and it’s causing security vulnerabilities and degradation and all this stuff. So it’s a very important point.
One thing I started thinking about after considering that in relation to WP Rig was I noticed that there’s usually a for-profit arm of any of these frameworks that seems to extend the lifespan of it. Let’s just talk about React, for example, React is an open source JavaScript framework, but it’s used by Facebook and Facebook is extremely for-profit.
So companies that are making infrastructural or architectural decisions, they will base their choice on whether or not to use a framework largely on how long they think this framework is going to remain relevant or valid or maintained, right? A large part of that is, well, is there a company making money off of this thing? Because if there is, the chances-
Topher: They’re going to keep doing that.
Rob: They’re going to keep doing it. It’s going to stay around. That’s good. I think that’s healthy. A lot of people that like open source and want everything to be free, they might look at something like that and say like, well, I don’t want you to make a paid version of it or there shouldn’t be a pro version. I think that’s a very short-sighted way of looking at that software and these innovations.
I think a more experienced way of looking at it is if you want something to remain relevant and maintained for a long period of time, having a for-profit way in which it’s leveraged is a very good thing. I mean, let’s be real. Would WordPress still be what it is today if there wasn’t a wordpress.com or if WooCommerce wasn’t owned by Automattic or whatever, right? They’ll be on top. I mean, it’s obviously impossible to say, but my argument would be, probably not.
I mean, look at what’s happened to the other content management systems out there. You know, Joomla Drupal. They don’t really have a flourishing, you know, paid pro service that goes with their thing that’s very popular, at least definitely not as popular as WordPress.com or WordPress VIP or some of these other things that exist out there.
And so having something that’s making and generating money that can then contribute back into it the way Automattic has been doing with WordPress over these years has, in my opinion, been instrumental. I mean, people can talk smack about Gutenberg all they want, but let’s be real, it’s 2025, would you still feel that WordPress is an elegant solution if we were still working from the WYSIWYG and using the classic editor? And I know a lot of people are still using the classic editor and there’s classic for us, the fork and all that stuff. But I mean, that only makes sense in a very specific implementation of WordPress, a very specific paradigm.
If you want to explore any of these other paradigms out there, that way of thinking about WordPress kind of falls apart pretty quickly. I, for one, am happy that Gutenberg exists. I’m very happy that Automattic continues. And I’m grateful, actually, that Automattic continues to contribute back into WordPress. And not just them, obviously there’s other companies, XWP, 10Up, all these other companies are also contributing as well. But I’m very grateful that this ecosystem exists and that there’s contribution going back in and it’s happening from companies that are making money with this. And I think that’s vital.
All that to say that WP Rig may and likely will have paid products in the future that leverage WP Rig. So that’s not to say that WP Rig will eventually cost money. That’s just to say that eventually people can expect other products to come out in the future that will be built on WP Rig and incentivize the continued contributions back into WP Rig. The open source version of WP Rig.
Topher: That’s cool. I think that’s wise. If you want anything to stay alive, you have to feed it.
Rob: That’s right.
Topher: I had some more questions but I had forgotten them because I got caught up in your answer.
Rob: Oh, thank you. I’ll take that as a compliment. I mean, my answer was eloquent. But I’m happy to expand on anything, know you, WordPress related, me related, you know, whether it comes to the ecosystem in WordPress, the whole WordCamp meetup thing is very interesting.
I led the WP Omaha meetup for many years here in Omaha, Nebraska and I also led the WordCamp, the organizing of WordCamp here in Omaha for several years as well. That whole community, the whole ecosystem, at least in America seems to have largely fallen apart. I don’t know if you want to talk about that at all. But yeah, I’m ready to dive into any topics.
Topher: I’m going to have one more question and then we’re going to wrap up. And it was that you were talking about all the things you had to learn. I’m sure there were nights where you were looking at your computer thinking, “Oh man, I had it working, now I gotta go learn a new thing.” I would love for you to go back in time and blog all of that if you would. But given that you can’t, I would be interested in a blog moving forward, documenting what you’re learning, how you’re learning it and starting maybe with a post that’s summarizes all of that. Obviously, that’s up to you and how you want to spend your time, but I think it’d be really valuable to other people starting a project, picking up somebody else’s project to see what the roadmap might look like. You know what I mean?
Rob: For sure. Well, I can briefly summarize what I’ve learned over the years and where I’m at today with how I do this kind of stuff. I will say that a lot of the improvements to WP Rig that have happened over the last year or two would not be possible without the advent of AI.
Topher: Interesting.
Rob: That’s a fancy way of saying that I have been by coding a lot of WP Rig lately. If you know how to use AI, it is extremely powerful and it can help you do many things very quickly that previously would have taken much longer or more manpower. So, yeah, perhaps if there was like five, six, seven people actively, excuse me, actively contributing to WP Rig, then this type of stuff would have been possible previously, but that’s not the case. There is one person, well, one main contributor to WP Rig today and you’re talking to them.
There are a handful of other people that have been likely contributing to WP Rig over the versions and you can find their contributions in the change log file in WP Rig. But those contributions have been extremely light compared to what I’ve been doing. I wouldn’t be able to do any of it without AI. I have learned my ability to learn things extremely rapidly has ramped up tenfold since I started learning how to properly leverage LLMs and AI.
So that’s not to say that like, you know, WP Rig, all the code is just being completely written by AI and I’m just like. make it better, enter, and then like WP Rig is better. I wish it was that easy. It’s certainly not that. But when I needed to start asking some of these vital questions that I really didn’t have anyone to turn to to help answer them, I was able to turn to AI.
For instance, let’s go back to the Webpack versus Gulp situation. Although Gulp is no longer used in WP Rig, you know, it was used in WP Rig until very recently. So I had to understand like, what is this system, how does it work, how do I extend it and how do I update it and all these things, right? And why aren’t we using WebPack and you know, is there validity to this criticism behind you should use webpack instead of Gulp or whatever, right?
I was able to use AI to ask these questions and be able to get extremely good answers out of it and give me the direction I needed to make some of these kind of higher level decisions on like architecturally where should WP Rig go? It was through these virtual conversations with LLMs that I was able to refine the direction of WP Rig in a direction that is both modern and forward-thinking and architecturally sound. I learned a tremendous amount from AI about the architecture, about the code, about all of it.
My advice to anybody that wants to extend their skill set a little bit in the development side of things is to leverage this new thing that we have in a way that is as productive as possible for you. So that’s going to vary from person to person. But for me, if I’m on a flight or if I’m stuck somewhere for a while, like, let’s say I got to take my kid to practice or something and I’m stuck there for an hour and I got to find some way to kill my time 9 times out of 10, I’m on my laptop or on my phone having conversations with Grok or ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever. I am literally refining… I’m just sitting there asking it questions that are on my mind that I wish I could ask somebody who’s like 10 times more capable than me. It has been instrumental. WP Rig wouldn’t be where it is today if it wasn’t for that.
I would just say to anybody, especially now that it’s all on apps and you don’t have to be on a browser anymore, adopt that way of thinking. You know, if you’re on your lunch break or whatever and you have an hour lunch break and you only take 15 minutes to eat, what could you be doing with those other 45 minutes? You could just jump on this magical thing that we have now and start probing it for questions. Like, Hey, here’s what I know. Here’s what I don’t know. Fill these knowledge gaps for me.” And it is extremely good at doing that.
Topher: So my question was, can you blog this and your answer told me that there’s more there that I want to hear. That’s the stuff that should be in your book when you write your book.
Rob: I’m flattered that you would be interested in reading anything that I write. So thank you. I’ve written stuff in the past and it hasn’t gotten a lot of attention. But I also don’t have any platforms to market it either. But yeah, no, I made some… I’m sorry.
Topher: I think your experience is valuable far beyond Rig or WordPress. If you abstract it out of a particular project to say, you know, I did this with a project, I learned this this way, I think that would be super valuable.
Rob: Well, I will say that recently at my current job, I was challenged to create an end to end testing framework with Playwright that would speed up how long it takes to test things and also prevent, you know, to make things fail earlier, essentially, to prevent broken things from ending up in the wild, right, and having to catch them the hard way.
I didn’t know a lot about Playwright, but I do know how toolkits work now because of WP Rig. And I was able to successfully in a matter of, I don’t know, three days, put together a starter kit for a test framework that we’re already using at work to test any website that we create for any client. It can be extended and it can be hooked into any CI CD pipeline and it generates reports for you and it does a whole bunch of stuff. I was able to do this relatively quickly.
This knowledge, yes, does come in handy in other situations. Will I end up developing other toolkits like WP Rig in the future for other things? I guess if I can give any advice to anybody listening out there, another piece of advice I would give people is, you know, especially if you’re a junior developer and you’re still learning or whatever, or you’re just a marketing person and just want to have more control over the functionality side of what you’re creating or more insight into that so you could better, you know, manage projects or whatever.
My advice would be to take on a small little project that is scoped relatively small that’s not too much for you to chew and go build something and do it with… Just doing that will be good. But if you can do it with the intent to then present it in some fashion, whether it be a blog article or creating a YouTube video or going to a meetup and giving a talk on it or even a lunch and learn at work or whatever, right, that will, in my experience, it will dramatically amplify how much you learn from that little pet project that’s kind of like a mini learning experience. And I highly encourage anybody out there to do that on the regular. Actually, no matter what your experience level is in development, I think you should do these things on a regular basis.
Topher: All right. I’m going to wrap this up. I got to get back to work. You probably have to get back to work.
Rob: Yeah.
Topher: Thanks for talking.
Rob: Thanks for having me, Topher. Really appreciate it.
Topher: Where could people find you? WPrig.io?
Rob: Yeah, WPrig.io. WP rig has accounts on all of the major platforms and, even on Bluesky and Mastodon. You can look me up, Rob Ruiz. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can find me on all of those same platforms as well. You can add me on Facebook if you want, whatever. And I’m also in the WordPress Slack as well as Rob Ruiz. You can find me in the WordPress Slack. And then I’m on the WordPress Reddit and all that stuff. So yeah, reach out. If anybody wants to have any questions about Rig or anything else, I’m happy to engage.
Topher: Sounds good. All right, I’ll see you.
Rob: All right, thanks, Topher. Have a good day.
Topher: This has been an episode of the Hallway Chats podcast. I’m your host Topher DeRosia. Many thanks to our sponsor Nexcess. If you’d like to hear more Hallway Chats, please let us know on hallwaychats.com.
Introducing June LiuJune Liu is the Creative Strategist at backpocket ACE, where she helps projects run smoothly and accessibly. She’s also the co-editor of WP Wonder Women and co-founder of Speed Network Online.
Show NotesBackpocket Ace
WP Accessibility Day Bio
Transcript:Topher DeRosia: Hey everybody. Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m your host Topher, and my guest today is June, and I’m going to make you say your last name.
June Liu: Okay. Hi everybody. I’m June Liu. Yep, Liu. It’s the easier way to pronounce it. You don’t want to do the Mandarin way.
Topher: I do. What is it?
June: “Leo”.
Topher: Liu. Okay. Fair enough.
June: Yeah. Good enough? It’s not an easy sound to make. I enjoy hearing it as Liu over the Mandarin way, so don’t worry about it.
Topher: All right.
June: So, it’s good to be here.
Topher: Yeah, thank you for coming.
June: Sure.
Topher: I had never heard of you before recently when you and Michelle did the speed, not dating, networking thing. And I thought, “Hey, somebody new. We should get to know her.” So I literally know essentially nothing about you. So who are you? Where are you from? What do you do? Etc.
June: Okay. My name is June Liu. Let’s start there. I’m outside of Washington D.C. in a little tiny place called Vienna, Virginia, if you’re familiar with it. It’s a small township outside of a very big metropolis area. But it still has a small-town feel, so I’m happy with this area.
The reason probably why you never heard of me because I’ve only really returned to work in the last three years. So that’s…
Topher: Okay.
June: Yeah. I met Michelle working through WordPress Accessibility Day. Last year, I was selected as one of the organizers. And that’s where Michelle and I met. I had the bandwidth to do more for WPAD last year. So I just kind of put my hand up anywhere they said, “We could use somebody.” And I was like, “I got time. I’ll do it. I’ll try it. I don’t know how to do it, but I’ll try it.”
Topher: Stand back.
June: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Last year too I was also working with Bet Hannon on the sponsorship process of the WPAD event and helping her just getting all that information together for sponsors and contacting sponsors and just kind of working through that process. And it allowed me also, because I knew who the sponsors were, it helped me be a liaison into the marketing team. So that’s how I started working with Michelle there. She was the lead for marketing team last year.
This year, Michelle and I co-lead the marketing team, and I still am on the sponsorship team working with Bet. So that’s kind of my happy place recently.
But as for what I do, I am a marketing consultant. It won’t be too far of a stretch here to imagine that my focus is on accessibility in marketing. What that all means is putting together a marketing campaign. When you put it all together, you want to make sure that you have the accessibility features in mind.
Much like how you do a website and you make sure that you have alt tags in your pictures, you have the right heading, structures, etc. For marketing campaigns, we want to make sure that the message that you’re sending is inclusive, first of all, and then if you have any subsequent links that goes with it, that it is understandable what you’re trying to promote and it’s just not a blank link that says, “click here.” So that’s kind of where my world merge between where my happy place is and what I’m trying to build.
My agency is called Backpocket ACE. It’s a nickname given to me by a former supervisor. So I thought it was a pretty cool little name for a company, and the domain name was ready. So it was mine. How can I resist that?
Topher: Nice.
June: That’s a little bit about me.
Topher: Okay. So what I’m hearing is you do marketing stuff. How does that relate to WordPress? Did you just happen to choose WordPress as an area?
June: Well, I kind of stumbled upon WordPress about, oh, I guess it was like 15 years ago now. I was working for an association management company. And it was a former client there that said, “Hey, we need to figure out how to get your system to work with our system.” And I was like, “Well, what’s your system?” And they said, ‘WordPress.” That was probably around 2014 or so. Oh, yeah, that’s 10 years or so. Back then, I was like, “Oh, what is that?”
So that was my first introduction into WordPress. And then a few years after that, I didn’t really get a chance to work with WordPress too much more. After that, I left the company and I became a caregiver for my mom. So that was the reason for my long hiatus. But when I came back, I was kind of like, “Well, I don’t want to go back into a corporation. I want to try to do something on my own.” And so I was like, “Well, what little organization, what little group is out there?”
And in the back of my mind I kept thinking, “WordPress. WordPress.” That was kind of the unfinished business and unfinished research that I didn’t get to finish. So I was like, “Well, let’s look into this.” So I found that’s how I kind of… when I said I stumbled onto WordPress, yes.
So I landed on WordPress.com first, like a lot of people, and then realized, no, that’s not what I want. And then I found my way through a couple of friends who introduced me to different networking groups. And then I was like, “Okay, I’m on the right path of creating my own website and, you know, finding WordPress network groups that allowed me to learn more about WordPress, learn about other people and what they do in WordPress and how. And still I’m trying to figure out how I fit into the WordPress world, essentially.
Knowing Michelle has given me a leg up this year. I’m just going to praise her right now for a moment. But she really has given me a platform to find myself and to find my voice. In addition to Speed Network Online, she and I also work on WPWonderWoman, the newsletter. So I get to find out a lot about women in WordPress. And I’m happy to hear that there are so many women that is in the periphery and in the core of WordPress.
I’m very happy to hear that since when I started learning how to code and stuff, I was really just the only woman in a company of pretty much all men. And for me to learn how to do what I did eons ago, it was at W3 Schools. That’s how I learned HTML and CSS.
But it was nice to see that there’s so many women involved in WordPress. It’s just nice to kind of, you know, you turn around and you find another woman there. So yeah, so that.
Back to Michelle, though, she’s kind of pushed me a little bit and say, “Okay, come on, get out of your comfort zone. You know, you can do this.” And being able to be code lead with her in WPAD, the Accessibility Day event, she gives me latitude to try different things, but she’s right there to support when I need it, and being that sounding board.
So it’s finding my skill set again and being more confident with my own skill set and having opportunities to meet people like you, and then eventually into a podcast. Hey, look at that.
Topher: Yeah.
June: That’s how I found WordPress.
Topher: That’s really, really cool.
June: Yeah, thanks.
Topher: Have you been to a WordCamp yet?
June: In 2023, I went to the first… That was my first WordCamp. That’s the one in Washington, D.C. It was kind of like nearby.
Topher: Yeah, WordCamp US.
June: It was nearby. So I was kind of like, “Yeah, I think I’m supposed to go.” I think my stars aligned and I’m supposed to go. So that’s what I did.
I met a lot of people, but it was a star align that I should go. And I’m glad I went. But on the flip side of that is I met too many people that I didn’t know how to follow up yet.
Topher: Oh, yeah.
June: When I came back from WordCamp, I was kind of like paralyzed. I wasn’t sure how to advance. Then from there, it was a lot of baby steps, you know, and a lot of trial and error and trying to formulate my voice and then eventually still reaching out with people that I met there and say, “Oh, yeah, I remember meeting you there. I’m not sure if you remember me, but this is what I do now.”
I should back up when I went to that WordCamp, I probably had just come back with the idea of the business, and it had been like three months. So, yeah, so I really jumped in and said, “I had no idea what I’m doing.” But, hey, you know, in that WordCamp, I met lots of people that I’m still in touch with now, and I’m pretty happy with that. And I even got my Michelle and me selfie.
Topher: Oh, nice. Excellent. Are you going to Portland in a couple of weeks, days?
June: No. No. Unfortunately, no. It’s a little cost-prohibitive. The event itself isn’t that high of a cost for the entry fee. It’s the flight. It’s the hotels. It’s the transportation.
Topher: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
June: And then, of course, my own, shall we say selfish desire to stay in Portland another week. And I have family out there on the West Coast, so I’m like, “Well, I can’t go to the West Coast and not see them, you know?”
Topher: Not say hi. Yeah.
June: So that would have extended all my time. And then I’m like, Mm. Hmm. I do plan to do it again one day. It also is, you know, once I have a bit more budget to spend on networking possibilities and events. But it’s in my mind to do so.
Topher: The big WordCamps can be very overwhelming. They get easier as you go to more because you see people that you saw last time. And that’s fun. But I would really recommend you try a small one. WordCamp Montclair isn’t that far from you. I think they’ve already done it this year, but-
June: They have.
Topher: There was like 150 people. You can easily meet everyone and have a great conversation, you know?
June: Yeah. For this year, Montclair, it was on my to-do list. It’s driving distance for me. So I was thinking about doing it, but it fell on a bad weekend for me so I wasn’t able to. But yes, it’s always on my mind to figure out, well, which events can I go to?
And even like Buffalo, when they had color code, I thought about going there. And again, it was another bad weekend, you know, scheduling-wise for me. But I think with more advanced planning and with event being more top priority for me as an agency, I will definitely be going more often.
Topher: Nice. That’s pretty cool.
June: So are you going to WordCamp?
Topher: I am going. It normally would also be prohibitive for me, but I got a sponsor. So that helped a lot.
June: I’ll plug another Michelle project. She and Marcus Burnette did SponsorMeWP. That is a way for people to get sponsorship as they contribute to WordPress Core or make WordPress. So yeah. That’s another plug. Maybe we should call this the Michelle Love Fest.
Topher: Yeah. She has her own podcast. We could just go be on that.
June: That’s true too. She’s interviewed me for Women in WordPress. And then when we launched Speed Network Online, she also did that for in post status. Happiness-
Topher: Gotcha.
June: That was fun. Yeah.
Topher: That is cool. Wow.
June: So if people who are listening to this is interested in Speed Network Online, our next event is next Thursday, August 21st at 10 a.m. Eastern time. I don’t know when you’re putting this out, but Speed Network Online is going to be monthly. So check us out online. Speednetworknetworkonline.com. You can find our schedule there too.
Topher: If people are going to listen in the future, is it the same like third Thursday or something so that people could just go or is it a dated thing?
June: It’s not. We’re trying to randomize it because, you know, there’s time zone differences, which we’re trying to give opportunities to people on the APAC side of the world and Europe and even in like the West Coast. You know, sometimes when we do it at 10 a.m., it’s really early for them. And people are probably not the most comfortable to network at 6 a.m. or such. So we try to randomize it.
We’ve done one at… I think it was 2 p.m. And then we’ve done one… Oh, I don’t remember anymore. But this is our third so far. So we’re really hoping that people find value in this and then we can continue. There is a small fee.
Topher: I did one and I-
June: Yes, I know.
Topher: I did one and it was a great value.
June: I mean, I understand that if you’re… it does move kind of fast. So if you’re somebody who wants to take it a little slower, it may feel a little overwhelming. But, you know, Michelle is in the main room and everyone else is in breakout rooms during the one-on-one conversations. And if it’s too overwhelming, you can just kind of stay in the main room with Michelle and that way you won’t feel like… you can catch your breath, basically.
Topher: Right. Yeah. That’s cool. Something else I was about to say, and I don’t remember what it was. Oh, well, I know. I’m going to put the link to the Speed Networking in the description of the podcast so we’ll be able to find it.
June: Thank you. I appreciate that.
Topher: Yeah. So we’ve talked about what you do for a living, what you do in WordPress, talked about Michelle. I remember what else I was going to say. I’ve seen posts occasionally, like on LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever, where somebody says every day or every week, I try to pick one person and say wonderful things about them. I think it’d be interesting to have a podcast where you get several people together and pick a person and just talk about how great that person is for a while.
June: Like we’re doing for Michelle right now.
Topher: Exactly. And they don’t have to be there. They can come along later and say, “Oh, look, people said nice things about me. That’s great.”
June: Well, I think I do think that would be fine. I also think that, you know, some people aren’t as… they don’t promote themselves as much, even though they do a lot of good things, you know? That’s definitely an opportunity to kind of shower some love on somebody who’s quietly doing the behind-the-scenes things.
Topher: Sure. Yeah. I know a lot of people who do really amazing things. And within the right circle, they’re very well-known because they do great things. But outside of that, not so much. And it would be interesting to highlight those people.
June: Oh, absolutely.
Topher: So there you go. There’s two podcast ideas. So I expect to see those from you.
June: So you’re teaming up with me to do that, right?
Topher: Oh, sure. Well, if I started another podcast, I think my wife would be grumpy. This is only the second episode we’ve done since 2023.
June: Oh, really?
Topher: Yeah. We just kind of, just kind of put it down for a while and didn’t do it again. And then somebody said to me, “Hey, can I be on your podcast?” And I thought, “Sure, let’s do it right now.”
June: Yeah.
Topher: Like with you, like I contacted you this morning and said, “Hey, want to do it?”
June: Yeah, exactly. You also do HeroPress, right?
Topher: I do. I’m delighted to hear you’re familiar with it.
June: Yes, I am. I am. Tell me more about Hero Press.
Topher: Okay. So Hero Press is a blog, I guess you could say. It’s a collection of essays from people who’ve leveraged WordPress to make their lives better. So I have people from all over the world, all ages, genders, languages, cultures. I work really hard to access diversity in as many intersections as possible. So yeah, like everything I mentioned, age, gender, height, culture, ability, all that stuff, I really reach for that.
You know, it’s people in repressed economies making great money remote working. It’s older people on their fourth career. It’s single moms who don’t have to put their kids in daycare because they can work from home with them.
And each essay is written to their peers. But they get to decide who that is. I mean, everybody has a really diverse peer set. Some people have done exactly what I expect and some people have really surprised me.
June: How so?
Topher: I had a blind person once do an essay and I assumed that they would write to other blind people and it never occurred to them.
June: Yeah.
Topher: I work really hard not to suggest too much, not to make assumptions. Sometimes people ask, you know, what should I do? And I say, well, you’re this and you’re that, and you’re here and you speak this language and you know, you’ve moved different countries, you know, whatever. But for the most part, I try to let people think themselves.
And the whole idea is for them to suggest to their peers, I did this, maybe you could too. It’s whoever they identify with, whoever they want to speak to.
June: I mean, you’re definitely giving a platform to people to share their voice. Everybody has a voice. Sometimes it needs to be encouraged to let them share and that it’s okay for them to share.
Topher: Yes. Yeah. Many people say, “Oh, my story is not interesting. No one wants to hear it. I don’t have a story.” Like, “Hogwash. I’ve been talking to you for three minutes and I’m fascinated already.”
June: I don’t know if you follow Humans of New York.
Topher: No.
June: You don’t know that one?
Topher: No.
June: Humans of New York started as a social media platform. I think it was on Instagram and this person went onto the streets of New York and just interviewed people that this person found interesting. I can’t remember who the creator was. I don’t even remember if they were male, female, or what they identify as. And they had such a following on social media that they created both… I haven’t heard a lot of them recently, so it’s a little fuzzy. Details are a little fuzzy. But I think they had enough for a book definitely and possibly like a DVD.
But Humans of New York, it’s all these interesting stories of people. And New York has the feel of interesting people, but the level of how interesting they are is just like, wow.
Topher: Yeah, you know-
June: That goes to everybody has a voice and everybody has a story that people would love to hear about.
Topher: Yeah. When I started HeroPress, I used to research people before asking them to write. Partly I wanted to know, is this an interesting person, and we’ll talk about that in a sec, probably to make sure they weren’t a horrible person, you know?
June: Understood.
Topher: But I’ve backed away from that a little bit because what I’m finding is that everyone is interesting. Everyone has an interesting story, even people who think they don’t. Sometimes I’ve noticed that me telling their story back to them helps them realize how interesting it is. Like, wow, I never thought of that. I didn’t think about that. I guess not many people have done this, you know? That’s interesting too. So a lot of the joy I get from it is while meeting people I hear a lot of backstory that doesn’t make it into essays. I’ve met a lot of people that never did essays.
But seeing, now through Slack, seeing the light in their eyes when they realize that it is a good story and they are significant and they do bring meaning to the community. You know, they’re not just a random user out there with no connection to the rest of us.
June: Right.
Topher: So it’s very, very rewarding.
June: Well, I’m glad to hear that. I’m glad to know a little bit more about HeroPress too.
Topher: Have you ever read it?
June: I have. I have. I often visit because I want to feature the women that you post on there.
Topher: Oh, yeah.
June: Yes. I can’t remember what the name of the last one is, but when you did the photo, Lydia’s photo-
Topher: Lydia’s photo?
June: Yes. You posted about a photo.
Topher: Oh, like on wpphotos.info?
June: Mm-hmm.
Topher: Yeah.
June: So when that was posted, I grabbed that information and posted it into the WPWonderWoman.
Topher: Oh, that’s super cool. I didn’t know that.
June: Yeah. So if you didn’t know how you got that one little tick in your statistics, that’s me. That’s my tick.
Topher: I don’t very often look at the stats. They tend to be disappointing.
June: But isn’t it fun though? Isn’t it fun though? Yes, statistics is… we shouldn’t put weight on a lot of statistics. It should be just kind of like informational. But a lot of people do lean into, oh, I got how many visitors. Oh, I got how many clicks. And I don’t know. I kind of follow that up with, okay, did it turn into a purchase? Did it turn into… you know? And they’re like, “Oh, no.” I was like, “Okay, well, let’s look at the end result first.
Topher: Google kind of broke this, but it used to be really fun to go to the real-time and watch the bubbles pop up. So I would do a release and then go watch. Oh, look, there’s somebody in Azerbaijan. There’s somebody in Faso. There’s somebody in Mexico, you know? That interface is not as cool anymore, but that used to be really fun.
June: I agree with you. It’s not as fun anymore.
Topher: It’s funny because HeroPress sometimes feels extremely popular. Everybody loves it. But my stats are really low. On a release day, I get 150 visits a day. On a random Sunday when I haven’t done a release, I’ll get two or three visits total. And for a while that was pretty depressing. I felt like nobody cared, nobody wanted to read.
And then one day I asked a friend who’s very strong supporter of HeroPress. He loves it. Talks about it all the time. I said, “Do you read every week?” He said, “Oh, no.” I said, “Why not?” He said, “I’m busy. I don’t get around to it.” But every now and again, I get really depressed about the WordPress community, people fighting, WP drama, whatever, and I go read five or six essays at once.” And it renews my faith.
And somebody else, who used to work at Automattic and doesn’t anymore, said that she would have people, she was a manager, she would have people come to her doing support and say, “I hate this job. People are terrible. You know, I’m doing support, I’m trying to help them, and they’re calling me names and they’re telling me my product is junk. I just hate it.”
And she doesn’t even have to say anything. She just listens. And at the end they go, “Okay, thanks for letting me rant. I’m going to go read HeroPress now and then everything will be all better.” She found me to tell me this, that people say that. And I thought, “Wow, that’s worth it.”
June: But that’s the goal of your, you know… I think when people start leaning into statistics, they forget what the goal of the original project is. And your HeroPress is to uplift. It’s not artificially uplift people. It’s when they need it, they have it.
Topher: Yeah.
June: So, you know, I’m going to say it this way and see if you can find relatable nugget there. When there is less depression in the world, then HeroPress will have lower visitors.
Topher: Oh, yeah. I see that.
June: So you’re that lifeline, that life vest that helps people out. So HeroPress is a very good apt name for this site. You know? I don’t know how you got to that conclusion with HeroPress, but, yeah, it’s definitely a mean and you match the goal with that. So Kudos. Kudos to you.
Topher: Thank you. It originally started out to be a video project.
June: A video project? So the essays were gonna be videos?
Topher: Yeah. And they were gonna be big elaborate productions with a film crew and traveling the world and costing tons of money. And we did a Kickstarter, and it failed. People weren’t interested.
June: So does that mean your background is in video production?
Topher: Not at all.
June: We never end up where we think we are. Right?
Topher: Yeah. These days I make a lot of screencasts for WordPress, but nothing like cameras and lights and, you know, sound systems and whatnot.
June: Right. Right. Do you think that because more people are working from home and just the advancement of technology in the last ten years? Do you feel like it’s easier to produce videos and podcasts because everyones’ equipments are better or do you think it has been more difficult?
Topher: I don’t know. I’m gonna say it’s probably easier. I’ve noticed the kind of content has been changing. More people are making vertical style shorts on their phones and using Descript or whatever to put text on them. It’s very accessible. Super easy for just somebody with their phone to just go. With that said, I’m not seeing a lessening of people like me using this $2,000 microphone — It’s not a $2,000. It’s an $800 microphone — and high def widescreen, blah blah blah. That’s still out there. I just think there’s still a place for it. But I do think better tools are making it more accessible to more people.
Definitely the smartphone has made a change in how people do streaming and live streaming too. You go on to social media nowadays and definitely use… you’re two clicks away from a live feed somewhere. Yeah.
Topher: Yeah. This could be live if I click the right button.
June: Surprise a lot of people, including me. Yeah.
Topher: So All right. Well, we’ve been doing this for more than half an hour now, which is past how long we usually do it. So I’m gonna wrap it up. It’s been a delight talking to you.
June: Well, I enjoyed it myself, Topher.
Topher: Someday, I will see you at an event somewhere.
June: Yes. And we’ll shake hands.
Topher: Yes.
June: And be face-to-face without a screen in between.
Topher: Yeah.
June: Well, thank you very much for having me.
Topher: Thank you.
June: All right.
Topher: This has been an episode of the Hallway Chats Podcast. I’m your host Topher DeRosia. Many, many thanks to our sponsor Nexcess. If you’d like to hear more hallway chats, please let us know on Hallwaychats.com.
Introducing Amber HindsAmber Hinds is the CEO of Equalize Digital, Inc., a company specializing in WordPress accessibility and maker of the Accessibility Checker plugin. She is the lead organizer of the WordPress Accessibility Meetup, board president/co-lead organizer of the WordPress Accessibility Day conference, and participates in the WordPress core accessibility team.
Through her work at Equalize Digital, Amber is striving to create a world where all people have equal access to information and tools on the internet, regardless of ability. Since 2010, she has led teams building websites and web applications for nonprofits, K-12 and higher education institutions, government agencies, and businesses of all sizes, and has become a passionate accessibility advocate.
Show NotesWordPress.TV Talks
Amber’s LinkedIn
Equalize Digital
WP Accessibility Day 2025
Transcript:Topher DeRosia: Hey folks. Welcome to Hallway Chats. My name is Topher. I’m your host. I’m here today with Amber, and I’m going to make her say her last name because I do that with everybody.
Amber, who are you?
Amber Hinds: I am Amber Hinds. It sounds like the ketchup, but it’s spelled differently.
Topher: Yes. Spelled like a deer.
Amber: Yes. Or behind. We made the mistake, though, of giving one of our children a middle name of Beatrix, and so her initials would be her first name, B. Hines.
Topher: Yes.
Amber: If she were to write it with the initial, and I was like, “Maybe she’ll just never include her middle initial in her signature.”
Topher: My sister’s first name is Elizabeth, but she goes by Beth, and so her initials then become BAD.
Amber: Oh.
Topher: She likes that. She likes writing BAD for her initials.
Amber: That’s fun.
Topher: All right, so where do you live?
Amber: I live in a town called Georgetown, which is just north of Austin, Texas.
Topher: Oh, all right, cool. My in-laws live 50 miles north of you.
Amber: Oh, in like Waco?
Topher: No, De Leon. It’s a very, very small town.
Amber: A town I’ve never heard of. Is it small?
Topher: Yeah, it’s very small. You asked me about being on this podcast years ago. Do you remember?
Amber: Oh, probably. I think when I first started my current company, Equalize Digital, I was like, “I should try and do some podcast interviews.” And I think I did a whole round of that maybe in like 2020 or 2021. Was that when I messaged you about it?
Topher: It was some time before a WordCamp in Alabama, Birmingham?
Amber: Oh, WordCamp Birmingham, yeah, that might have… that was more recently because it was more post-COVID, I think, right? That was one of the first WordCamps that came back.
Topher: Yeah, at Birmingham, it had been long enough that I apologized that I never got back to you.
Amber: Well, I didn’t remember that, and I’m not mad, so we’re all good.
Topher: Good, good, good. All right, what do you do?
Amber: I am the CEO of Equalize Digital, as I mentioned, which is a company that focuses on accessibility on the internet. We have a heavy focus on WordPress because that’s where we all started. It’s our love. We have a plugin called Accessibility Checker for WordPress websites, but we do a lot of accessibility consulting and auditing outside of WordPress land as well.
Topher: All right, cool. For those unfamiliar, what does accessibility mean?
Amber: Accessibility is all about making sure that websites work for people of all abilities. This means it could be anything from someone who is blind or deaf or someone who has mobility issues, people who have dyslexia, certain fonts can make it difficult for them to read on websites. So it’s really about making sure that everyone can access your content and buy things from you if your website is about selling things, even if they are not typically able, or maybe they’re not using a computer with a typical device. They might be using a screen reader or an alternative keyboard. They might not be able to use a mouse.
Topher: All right, that’s cool. You mentioned consulting and plugins. First question, do you fix websites that have accessibility issues? And two, do you just build websites and they happen to be accessible? Like if somebody came to you and said, “I need a website,” will you make one? Do you do that?
Amber: So the first question, do we fix websites? Yes, if they are built with WordPress. We have come up with what has worked really well for our customers is recurring remediation plans, which you can find information about this on our website. But basically, instead of trying…
Topher: Oh, wait, where’s your website?
Amber: Oh, our website is equalizedigital.com.
Topher: All right, keep going.
Amber: And what we do with that is not just copy their whole website to a staging site, work on it for however many weeks or months, and then launch it with all the fixes. What we try and do is break up accessibility fixes into small bite-sized things that can be released quickly so that remediation goes out over time, and then it allows people to spread out costs. So we do do that. We do not these days anymore build new websites with small exceptions. So we…
Topher: I have a million dollars. Will you build me a website?
Amber: Probably. I mean, it depends on what it is, right?
Topher: Yeah, yeah.
Amber: But our background came from being a WordPress agency, and we built a lot of enterprise websites. When we were last building websites regularly, to give you a picture, our starting price was $50,000.
Topher: Okay.
Amber: And we built a lot of… Interestingly, we got into a niche of building WordPress-powered web applications or portals. There’s actually a talk you can find on wordcamp.tv about one web application we built. The talk is called Uber for Nurses, which is the best way I could think of describing this. But a lot of times… I didn’t know this until we started working with this company. But a lot of hospitals don’t have enough on-staff nurses to do every procedure, like putting an IV in.
Topher: Interesting.
Amber: And so they will use freelancers, and freelance nurses might go around between different hospitals in a city, just getting an order, like, hey, this patient in this room needs an IV or needs this thing, and they’ll drive there, and they’ll do it, and they’ll get paid to do that one thing, and then they’ll go to a different hospital, or they’ll go to a nursing home, or whatever that is. It’s weird. It’s kind of like Uber for Nurses.
It slightly scares you about going to a hospital. I kind of want to ask every nurse now, “Are you actually on staff here, or are you a freelancer? What’s going on with the situation?”
But there is a talk from WordCamp US. My partner Steve and I talked about that application, which has a lot of great screenshots if you want to see more of what I’m talking about when I say we built a lot of WordPress-powered apps. But we do do some websites occasionally, either for existing clients that want a refresh, or we have partners sometimes that will come to us and say, “Hey, we really want to partner on an RFP,” and if it makes sense, then we will do that.
A lot of times we aren’t doing the dev, though. We’re more the accessibility team and consultant on those projects.
Topher: Right. All right. That’s cool. You mentioned a partner. How big is your company?
Amber: So I have two business partners, one of whom is my husband. And then we have another partner. So Chris is my husband, Steve is our CTO. And he started as our developer, and then we realized that we just worked super well together, and it made sense, and so he came on as a partner.
Then we have a full-time developer, an accessibility specialist, a content specialist, a designer. And then we have a handful of contractors that we work with, particularly different people with different disabilities that do testing for us. We actually do user testing sessions where they get on and we record, we walk them through scenarios, and then we provide feedback to customers.
Topher: How does that work? Do you have a studio where people come in? Or like I’m assuming somebody with mobility disability doesn’t want to come to your place. They want to do it at home in their living room or whatever. How does that work?
Amber: So before COVID, we did run user testing sessions in person at our office in Georgetown, which meant we were typically only working with people who were somewhat local, either to Georgetown or we partnered with Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired. And they would sometimes drive students up to our office.
The wonderful thing about COVID was it forced us to figure out how to be able to run these over Zoom. So we now do user testing sessions over Zoom, which is nice because that means that our clients can attend them as well, instead of just getting the recordings. We used to take a camera on a boom mic and put it up over their head looking down at their computer before we were doing this on Zoom, right?
Topher: Right.
Amber: And sometimes we’d have two cameras, like one over their shoulder, one straight down so you could see what they were doing with their hands on their keyboard, and they would just get the recording. But now they can come on Zoom, which they don’t always choose to, but a lot of them like to because then they have the opportunity to also ask questions of the user.
Topher: Right. When I was imagining this, I was imagining having multiple cameras. So you can watch their hands. You can watch what’s on the screen, what they see. How do you mimic that with the Zoom? Or do you not need it?
Amber: I don’t feel like we need it anymore, being able to see what their hands are doing. If someone has an advanced Mac, it is possible to have a keyboard view camera, interestingly. But a lot of our user testers are actually on Windows machines, and they don’t have it.
I think the biggest thing is adapting the questions that I have to ask them. And sometimes I’ll pause and I’ll literally say, “What key are you pressing?” And I’ll just ask them to make sure that I have clarification on what they’re doing, if I’m not sure.
Topher: Yeah. I just realized that you could have your phone join as a second Zoom person.
Amber: You could. It would be a lot more difficult, particularly if our user is a blind user because we would have to walk them through positioning their camera, which isn’t impossible. It’s not impossible, but it definitely would require a lot more work for, I think, probably little benefit.
Topher: Yeah.
Amber: Okay.
Topher: That’s really interesting. I know less about accessibility than I would like, but I feel like my history on the web has helped a lot with just general understanding. When I learned HTML, there was no CSS, there were no images. And so we wrote very plain HTML. And I’ve heard a lot of people say that plain HTML is very accessible. It’s when you start getting crazy with JavaScript and whatnot that it becomes less.
I feel like I’m generally aware of it and I make accessibility sites. I know about colors, you know, I know about-
Amber: Color contrast.
Topher: Yeah. Tab order stuff like that. Because when I started tabbing is how you moved from link to link on every browser.
So please tell me something that you are surprised that more people don’t know. Like what do I don’t know? I mean, you can’t really know, but when you look at somebody who’s an experienced web developer, they probably don’t know X and they should.
Amber: One of the most common mistakes that I see in WordPress themes created by professional developers who sell the themes are that they don’t use headings in the proper order. They still, a lot of times pick a heading or we’ll make something a heading because they wanted to have a certain size or color or font, not paying any attention to the fact that those numbers behind the scenes are actually used to convey meaning to a screen reader user in particular about the page and how the content is nested and you know, what is on the page. So that is one thing that always shocks me when I look at WordPress themes is that is done wrong so much.
I think another really obvious thing that a lot of people forget on the content side is providing link text that makes sense on its own without having to read any surrounding content. So we still see all the time people who just link the word “here”. Like they write a sentence, “To contact us, go here, and then click here,” instead of just writing, “contact us here and linking the whole phrase.” Learn more, download. Download what?
All of these things can really make it difficult for a screen reader user to know what’s on the page, where to find the information that they need to find, how to go where they need to go, how to add the right product to the cart. Like if it only says add to cart on a page with like 10 different products, but it doesn’t include the product title. So those are things that are super basic that can make a huge difference, but are overlooked a lot.
The other thing that I would say at this point that I think frustrates me to a degree is when we encounter things like empty links or empty buttons, things that can be very, very easily detected with an automated testing tool, like our accessibility checker plugin. Because what that shows me is that those developers aren’t even using the bare basics. Like I understand if you’ve never turned on a screen reader, thinking, I’m going to go screen reader test my WordPress plugin, is really daunting.
But at the same time, there are so many amazing automated tools, our plugin or browser extensions that you could just in seconds get some of these major critical blockers for people identified and then you could fix them. And so for me, I think that is probably one of the more frustrating things when it’s like you clearly didn’t even try.
Topher: Yeah. Something I struggle with as a website builder is that the people managing the content do terrible things. Like my theme is all set. All the buttons are right, all the links are right, all my theme images have alt text, all that stuff. But like you said, they’ll write a sentence and link the word here.
I had a senior content manager one time tell me to not link to the phrase, but rather just the word here because she didn’t like the way a longer link looked. And that really bothered me, but she was the boss.
Amber: Unfortunately.
Topher: When I started HTML, all headers looked the same. Their entire purpose was to indicate structure. It was a text browser, so you can’t make them bigger. You can’t make them bolder.
Amber: Yeah, it was before CSS.
Topher: Yeah. And so they all looked the same. Crazy. So I’ve already asked you now what you think people are doing wrong. Anything you want to get off your chest, anything you want to say to the world, hey, stop doing that or start doing this. Or did we already cover that?
Amber: No, I think we mostly covered it. I would say the biggest thing about accessibility is you have to just start testing. It’s not an overnight thing. You know, like I mentioned, we have these plans where we try and make small fixes over time. But the reality is that is a good accessibility practice.
In many ways, it’s like SEO. A lot of your listeners probably understand that you don’t just like SEO to optimize something and then say, I’m done now. You’re doing it the whole time over a period of time. You’re constantly using different tools to check it and going back and revising, if needed, old content or adding new content, those sorts of things.
Accessibility is very similar. You want to be regularly running tools that will alert you. And if an accessibility problem has occurred on the website, you want to regularly be doing some manual checking as well on your own.
You want to start making little fixes prioritized by how critical a problem might be. And then just like putting into your regular practice of doing that, whether you are a website owner doing this on your website, or whether you are a WordPress plugin or theme developer doing this in your own products.
And I will say like particularly I’ve put a lot of effort in the last couple of years of trying to promote WordPress plugin owners putting more effort into accessibility. Because when you think about the impact of that, it’s not just like fixing one website. Fixing one website is amazing, and it makes that one website really great. But a plugin that’s used on 10,000, 100,000, a million websites, they fix a problem like an empty button or, you know, whatever.
And now think about the great impact that has to all of those sites that are using their plugin. So I really think if we want to see meaningful difference and change happen on the web as a whole, because if we think about WordPress powering 40-some percent of the internet, it has to begin with the plugins.
Topher: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I had another question for you. Now I’ve forgotten it because I was listening so intently to what you said. Oh yes. Okay. So, not being in the accessibility world, I don’t pay a lot of attention to products and processes and all that stuff. But I saw a tremendous uproar in social media, not too long ago about a plugin called accessiBe. And it was all about how terrible it is. I didn’t even pay enough attention to know what it was they were doing to know why it was bad. What kind of plugin is that? Or is it a plugin? Is it a service? What are they doing? Why is it bad?
Amber: So accessiBe is a company that is grouped in what is generically called accessibility overlays. Other examples of this are AudioEye, UserWay, Factually, which is a French-based one. And basically many of them have WordPress plugins, but they are SaaS services that allow you to install their plugin or just put a line of JavaScript in the header of your website.
And then it does two things. One is it puts a toolbar on the front of the website, which you may have seen that when you click it, it expands and it allows people to change, you know, stop all animations or increase the font size or change the contrast to a high contrast mode or switch it to dark mode or many other things.
And then the second thing that they do is they use that JavaScript to attempt to modify or fix the website as the page loads. So it would look for all of the link, like all of the images that don’t have alt text and it would use AI to attempt to write alt text for all of the images. Which can have particularly bad results on like an e-commerce store. It won’t always pick the right information that somebody would need to know to know if they’re going to buy this particular article of clothing or whatever.
And they are also known for… actually, they will try and detect if someone is using a screen reader or if somebody is using a keyboard navigation, like hitting the tab key to move through the website or their arrow keys instead of a mouse. And then they’ll make further modifications.
There is a website called the Overlay Fact Sheet, I think it’s just overlayfactsheet.com, which has a ton more information about these products and why they are bad. And it has comments and feedback from actual people with disabilities about their experiences with that, many of whom have spoken out and said that these are not good.
An interesting thing about accessiBe is that earlier this year, and this is probably what you heard, in the US, the FTC fined them a million dollars for lying about their ability to make websites accessible. So the FTC said “accessiBe cannot make websites accessible. It cannot make them comply with laws in the United States like the Americans with Disabilities Act. And accessiBe was using false claims in their marketing, which is against the law and also deceptive practices.”
So they also got in trouble because they were doing things like hiring what looked like independent people to say their product was really good, but they were actually paying them. They also made a bunch of different websites that pointed back to them, but pretended to not be affiliated with them. So they had a lot of really bad marketing practices that they got called out on, but their product as a whole also cannot live up to what they were promising it could do.
Topher: Gotcha.
Amber: And I’ll say, even the toolbars, there are a lot of WordPress plugins out there that just provide a toolbar and don’t try and hijack the experience of someone’s a screen reader user or things like that. But even those toolbars, for the most part, they aren’t anything more than I think performative. Meaning I put one of these on my website to try and show to the world that I care about people with disabilities, but they don’t necessarily actually help people with disabilities.
Topher: Right. I want to look like I care without actually caring.
Amber: Yes. And I can explain about that a little bit more. So, for example, if somebody needs a website zoomed in, then they typically would need all websites zoomed in, like most of them. And so they would either be running their operating system at a higher zoom level, they’d have their browser default set to a higher zoom level, or they might be using a separate screen magnification software. So they don’t really need a tool on your website that they can turn on. Like they need it everywhere.
Same thing for someone who doesn’t want animations. If animations make them nauseous or cause problems for like maybe they have photosensitive epilepsy, then there’s a setting in their operating system where they can turn on reduced motion.
So the best way to handle that as a web developer is not put a button on the front of my website that allows people to stop that. Instead, the best way to handle that as a web developer is that every time I’m putting motion on something, I can code a CSS media query that recognizes that someone has this setting turned on and I can just not have the animations play.
And there’s a lot of other things. Like some of these toolbars include a screen reader. Someone who needs a screen reader needs a screen reader to use their entire computer. Before they even open a web browser, they have to have the screen reader on. So they don’t need you to add a screen reader in a toolbar on your website.
We could go through all of the different features that are in them, but really most people with disabilities don’t use those toolbars. It’s very unlikely that it would be beneficial. And so it’s more a way for website owners to try and show that they’re doing something about accessibility when maybe they’re not actually doing anything about accessibility. Or maybe they are and they’re also adding that and they don’t realize that the toolbars aren’t really super beneficial to most people. People have asked us to add that to our accessibility checker plugin and we’ve said no.
Topher: That would even be weird to have a checker do that.
Amber: Well, our plugin, it is interesting because it’s evolved over time. So its name is Checker. It does include automated fixes. So it has some things that correct issues that you can turn on if your website needs it. For example, if your website theme is missing skip links, then you could go in accessibility checker and turn on skip links and say what the ID that it needs to target is, or if it’s multiple IDs on different types of pages. So we have a few things like that.
We have a setting where if our checker realizes that perhaps you have the ability to zoom and scale in your meta tag in the header of your website disabled, which is a problem. Why is this a problem? Because on mobile, I don’t know how many times… I do this all the time. If I get on a website that’s too small, I like have to zoom in in order to read. Well, if you disable user zooming, that’s an accessibility problem.
So our checker will alert you to that. But we also have the option if you want, you could… the best thing would be go fix that at the source in your theme. But if someone’s not a developer, then they could check a box and say, Hey, actually turn this on. And then we will make it so that that’s no longer disabled. So it does include some fixes. They’re a lot different from the way the overlays work because you have to turn them on. Sometimes you have to configure them in certain ways.
The other thing that is beneficial about ours is that they don’t trick our scanner. So for example, we have one that’s like label form fields and it will attempt to create a label for unlabeled form fields by looking at placeholder text or maybe the name or the ID of the field, if it can. But if it doesn’t create a good label, our checker that was flagging this field as unlabeled is still going to say it’s unlabeled. So it’s basically like they talk back to each other and say, no, this didn’t work.
So then you know, okay, the automated fix in this specific scenario isn’t going to work. I’m going to have to come up with a different fix.
Topher: All right. Feel free to tell me you don’t want to talk about this, but I’d like to name some names in a good way.
Amber: Okay.
Topher: What are a couple of really good starters to use that people like? I use Cadence. Is it pretty good?
Amber: Yes. Cadence would be what I would recommend if you’re going for… it’s not fully premium because there’s a free version. I have a huge report, which maybe you can link in your show notes, where I compare a bunch of different builders for accessibility. It’s called the page builder, but I’m using that term loosely to just not have this long phrase.
It’s a combination of looking at what we think of traditional page builders, like Divi, Elementor, things like that, and also block library theme collections or pairs, I guess, if you will. So Cadence was included in that.
I will say everyone at Stellar is super supportive of accessibility, and we’ve been working with them for the past year, auditing all of their plugins, and they’ve been fixing a lot of things for their plugins and also in the Cadence theme. I know that’s something where if someone else finds a problem and flags it for them, they work really hard to get a fix out. So if you’re looking for that theme, I would say that is a good place to start.
The other thing is in the WordPress.org theme directory, there is a filter where you can only see themes that have received a tag of accessibility ready. These themes have had a human review, not necessarily always of their most recent release, but initially when they went into the directory and are approved to use that tag because someone has looked at them and said they meet a certain set of criteria, which you can read about on the WordPress.org theme handbook, I guess. That’s another place to find some free accessibility ready themes.
Now, it doesn’t mean that you can’t or that it’s going to be 100% perfect. You still have to put effort in because, for example, like you were talking about colors, all the accessibility ready themes start with good color contrast. That’s a requirement. If you didn’t change the colors, you’d be good to go. But we all know that one of the first things we do when we put a theme on a website is we go change all the colors.
So it doesn’t absolve you from having to pay attention to accessibility if you use one of these themes, but it does provide a better starting point maybe than another one that doesn’t have that tag.
Topher: All right. Do you want to name a couple of plugins that are just really good at this?
Amber: Really good at accessibility?
Topher: Yeah.
Amber: So WooCommerce has been putting huge efforts in over the last year. WooCommerce itself, WooCommerce Core is fully WCAG 2.2 AA conformant as of version 10. It also passes several of the AAA success criteria, which is awesome. So I would say if you want to do e-commerce, it makes sense to do WooCommerce.
Topher: Right.
Amber: They are in the process also of working through all of their official add-ons too.
Topher: Very nice.
Amber: So WooCommerce. LearnDash is another one I mentioned of the Steller family that has put a huge effort in. If you go to the accessibility pages for both WooCommerce and LearnDash, you can find they have what’s called an accessibility conformance report, which we help them draft, which shows how they compare or meet or don’t meet, all of the different web content accessibility guidelines. Then also for them, we did a European version, so it includes European specific accessibility requirements. So those are a couple that I want to shout out. I mean, there’s a few tiny ones.
Gravity Forms is the form plugin that we like that does a lot. I feel like they were one of the first form plugins to put effort into accessibility. I also really like that they have guidance in the editor. So if somebody is making a poor choice, like maybe leaving a label on a form field blank, it will tell them this is a problem. So that’s really nice.
I’m trying to think of tiny blocks. So there’s one plugin called Simple Table of Contents block, or Simple TOC might be the name of it. It’s a free plugin. It doesn’t have any paid add-on. That is one that we use on the WordPress Accessibility Day website that we gave the developer some feedback before we started using it, and he fixed it, I don’t know, like same day maybe, I feel like.
Topher: Wow.
Amber: Which is amazing when it’s a little free plugin with no premium support. So I feel like that is definitely worth shouting out. It works really well. Just like creates tables of contents from your headings in a post or on a page, which is really nice. And it’s super easy to use. I’ll find for you and send it to you. There’s a blog post that we wrote on the WordPress Accessibility Day website, maybe a year or two ago, that says plugins that we use because people would always ask us this.
That might be a useful resource to put in your show notes if people are curious. Obviously, it doesn’t cover all awesome plugins because there’s some things that we don’t need on that website, but it might give some people some ideas.
Topher: Yeah, that is cool. We’re nearing the end of our normal time, but I have two big questions. Do you have a little more time?
Amber: Sure.
Topher: Okay. I mentioned earlier I can build the most accessible theme in the world and give it to my content person and they’re going to make header soup out of it. What’s something I can do to help them? Like you mentioned, Gravity Forms will give you hints, say you left off a label. There’s something I can put in an editor, because I’m not going to sit there next to them, and they’re going to forget everything I tell them. There’s something I can put in to the WordPress editor to say, hey, don’t do that.
Amber: Well, you should install the Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker plugin.
Topher: Will it do that?
Amber: Yes.
Topher: That’s amazing.
Amber: Our plugin puts reports both in the post editor and also on the front end. If they’re building a website with some front-end page builder like Elementor, our plugin runs scans in the editor of Elementor as well.
Topher: That’s awesome.
Amber: That is really why we built this plugin to begin with, because we had a lot of higher ed clients that we would build them an accessible website and then hand it off, and then Joe or Jane faculty member or person from the admissions department that is a student intern would have to go write blog posts or go edit content on a marketing page.
A lot of the SaaS solutions that were out there would only do every Wednesday it goes and crawls the website and gives you a report, but then you have to go look at it in a separate dashboard and it’s not real-time feedback. We realized you really need the real-time feedback as you’re editing. That’s what motivated us to build it, and that is what Accessibility Checker is best at.
Topher: That’s amazing.
Amber: It’s interesting. It’s not just a tool intended for remediating or making sure you’ve built a website accessible in the first place. It really should live on the website over time, because it can provide that real-time feedback much like an SEO plugin might. And it can do the fixes.
Then the other thing that you have to keep in mind too with WordPress, of course, is that you’re getting updates for your plugins and maybe your theme too, and those could introduce accessibility problems at any time. You do want to have something on that’s continuously checking and providing feedback.
Topher: That’s awesome. I’m really excited about that.
Amber: There’s a free version.
Topher: Yeah.
Amber: In the free version, we don’t limit posts like a number of posts or pages. There’s a couple, maybe two or three other plugins that do what we do, but it’s like you can only do your homepage or you can do 10 pages or something. In our free version, you can do as many pages and posts as you want. You just can’t do custom post types. That’s one of our lines on Pro. But if you had a basic website with a blog and I don’t know, 500 pages, you could use our free plugin if you wanted.
Topher: Yeah. That’s great. My next question is when, again, I haven’t paid a ton of attention to this, but when Gutenberg came out, people went up in flames about how inaccessible it was. They said, “Oh, we’ll make it accessible.” They said, “Oh, it should have been accessible when you started, blah, blah, blah.” How far has it come? Is it anywhere near good enough? Is it great now? Where do we stand?
Amber: WPCampus, which I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, but it’s a separate non-profit that runs WordPress events and has a Slack group for higher ed, in 2018, they commissioned a huge accessibility audit of Gutenberg and I think some other parts of WordPress Core. All of the issues that were identified from that audit have been remediated. So it is significantly better than it was in 2018.
I am multitasking as I pull up here because I think that it is really interesting to just answer that question and know how many issues are there open right now. In Gutenberg right now, if you look at the Gutenberg GitHub repo, there are 576 open accessibility issues that have the tag focus accessibility.
Topher: Okay. Compared to how many last year or five years ago?
Amber: I don’t know. I don’t actually know. Do you know if there’s an easy way to see history on a tag?
Topher: I don’t.
Amber: I can see that there’s 2,655 that have been closed.
Topher: Okay.
Amber: But I can’t see what cadence that’s at or what the timeline look like for that. So what I can say anecdotally is that how accessible Gutenberg is, in particular to someone who is blind and relies on a screen reader, might depend a lot on who the user is and what they’re trying to do.
I have a really good friend, Alex Stein-
Topher: Yeah, I know him.
Amber: …who is a WordPress core contributor. He’s worked on Gutenberg as a contributor who would tell you that it’s not accessible. I also saw a presentation by, I believe she is Italian, a blind woman who really likes the block editor and thinks it makes it easier for her to blog and use with her screen reader than Tiny MC.
Topher: I know her as well.
Amber: I don’t know that either one of them is wrong.
Topher: Yeah.
Amber: Right? So there are some things about the block editor that are phenomenal and just cannot compare that frustrate me if I have to go back to a post that’s using classic.
Topher: Yeah.
Amber: Being able to write and mark down really helps from an accessibility standpoint because you don’t actually have to go through the rigmarole of trying to get a block and then go to the toolbar and change it to an H4. You can just type four pound symbols and guess what? Now you have an H4.
That I think really does help and make things easier from an accessibility standpoint. But there is still a lot with regards to the toolbar and the side controls that need to be continually worked on. I would say anyone who’s listening to this podcast that is interesting to contribute, please go look at these open issues. If you are able to either test them or provide feedback or even better, code patches, that would be phenomenal.
Topher: Where would they go? To this GitHub thing you sent me or is there another place?
Amber: Yeah. So you can go to github.com/WordPress/Gutenberg. And then if you go to the issues tab, you can just search either using the label filter or there’s a box. But if you just search for anything that has, it’s got a square bracket focus accessibility and then in parentheses A11Y. That is the best way to see all of the current open issues for accessibility in Gutenberg.
Topher: And make new ones.
Amber: And make new ones.
Amber: I think the hardest thing about accessibility in Gutenberg, I don’t think it’s that anyone who works on the project doesn’t necessarily want to make it accessible. I think there is a lot of interest from a lot of different people on a lot of different make teams in accessibility and in supporting everyone. It’s part of democratizing publishing, right? You get that so that anyone can publish no matter who they are.
But I also think that there is a race to try and get certain things out by certain deadlines. We have this interesting, I don’t know what I want to call it, but it’s like this sweet and sour thing about WordPress. And this applies also to the plugins and the fact that so many plugins can cause so many accessibility problems. But there is to a degree a very low barrier of entry to becoming a WordPress developer. I came in this way, which is that I had a blog, I wanted to learn how to do some things on it, I started Googling, I read tutorials. It’s how I learned CSS. It’s how I learned PHP. It’s how I learned JavaScript. I never was officially taught anywhere, right?
But a lot of tutorials and things out there don’t consider accessibility. They don’t consider HTML semantics. So we’ve all learned on not great information. And so then when we’re rushing to get out new features and we have developers who don’t have bad intentions but maybe also are self-taught and don’t have all of the information, like they’ve never heard of Varia. They haven’t spent hours reading Mozilla developer docs for accessibility, right? So how would they know?
So then they put something out and then someone else tests it who also doesn’t understand accessibility, and then there’s like, hey, this feature, maybe leadership or someone else really wanted this feature to be released in this milestone. So then sometimes it can get put out before it even gets accessibility tested. And so I think that’s where like some of the pace of Gutenberg was just so fast, especially in the beginning, that that’s why a lot of those problems were released. Not because somebody was like, I don’t care about accessibility. It was just people didn’t know better, and there was a “we have to get this thing out by this day.”
The other thing I’ll say is a lot of times, sometimes there’s been feedback. Well, maybe there’s not enough people with disabilities doing testing or volunteering for the WordPress project to audit or flag issues. And so there’s just not anyone available to test stuff before it goes out.
But a thing that is difficult maybe to understand for some people but not for others is that a lot of times people with disabilities get asked very frequently to test or provide feedback for free. A lot of people with disabilities are chronically underemployed. They have a hard time even when they are incredibly skilled individuals like getting jobs.
And so I do think that there is a challenge of this always expectation that anyone who works on the code or on the project is doing it as a volunteer and that we don’t have a way currently in the WordPress community to hire people to work on it unless a company decides to do that and sponsor those contributors. So we would have to have some company, any one of them that has the budget say, “I’m going to hire four blind people full time and just have them testing WordPress.”
So far no company has decided they’re going to do that. So then it does limit because there’s not enough people with disabilities that are just volunteering. But I don’t also know that I think they should be asked to volunteer. I think that their experience and expertise is valuable and they should be paid for that.
Topher: Yeah, I agree. And when I am wealthy, I will do that.
Amber: I know. We are a very small company and we do our best to give back. I always feel like I am never contributing enough to the accessibility team or to other make teams and it’s hard for me to follow around all of the other things that I want to do and I wish I could do more. But I have said, I’m like, “At some point in time, I will feel like we are super successful if we are able to have some number of full-time sponsored contributors to WordPress.” That for me is a success metric that I have for our company. I’ll be like, “Okay, that means our company is doing really well if we can do that.”
Topher: That would be amazing.
Amber: In the meantime, I would hope that other companies who are able to do that might decide to hire some people with disabilities to test versus just, I don’t know, a designer or a React developer or something like that. I don’t know.
Topher: Right, yeah.
Amber: So, yeah.
Topher: You may have covered this. One more question about the Gutenberg accessibility. Elena is the woman in Italy who is blind and loves Gutenberg. Alex, we know, doesn’t like it at all. Do you have any sense about how the community in general feels comparing TinyMCE to, well, not just TinyMCE, but the classic experience to the Gutenberg experience? Are we better now? Or are we still trying to catch up to what we had before?
Amber: I don’t know if I have a sense on, I think, well, I don’t know. I’m trying to think from like the Facebook groups I’m in and things like that. I would say generally, I think most people have adapted and accept that the block editor is it.
So I’ll say personally, because it’s hard for me to give a voice to the entire community, but I’ll say what I think, which is that I like the block editor. I think it is better. In particular, I can give some really concrete examples of things that I love about the block editor.
Topher: You mentioned Markdown.
Amber: Markdown, oh my gosh, I love that. Finally, also Google Docs started supporting that. That is how I write now.
Topher: That’s cool.
Amber: You might have to turn it on in Google Docs, but once you turn it on, yeah. The other thing that I super love about the block editor that I use quite a bit when I’m writing and blogging is the ability to just grab a couple of paragraphs or a section and just rearrange it. When I’m writing in Google Docs, I’m always annoyed that I have to highlight it and cut and paste, I don’t know. I like the whole moving, although I fully admit, from an accessibility standpoint, that could still use some improvement, the whole moving. But the other big thing that I think was a massive improvement was columns.
So we were a-
Topher: I remember. Short codes.
Amber: …a recommended, yeah, studio press agency back in the day. We did everything with Genesis and all of that. And we were using short codes for columns. I remember we would try to train our clients on this, and they would never understand how. Or they’d go in, and they’d try and edit, and they’d be like, “Now everything’s broken on my page.” I mean, that, for me, was a game-changer.
I go back and forth a little bit on this, how much styles should be controlled at the block level, person, theme. On someone’s personal website, it’s probably fine if everything is done in blocks or in site settings or whatever. Same thing with Elementor, right?
Topher: Sure.
Amber: But as you get up in the closer to enterprise or anything where branding matters, that does become pretty problematic, both because there’s not version control, and also, there are some things that are not great. Like, for example, in some of the block libraries, you set your margin in padding on every container. And let’s say, even if you had a client look at the design in Figma or whatever and approve it, then they get the website, they’re all like, “Oh, this spacing is too big.”
Topher: “Change it everywhere.”
Amber: “Can you reduce it from a hund…?” yeah. And now, like, in old school development, yeah, no problem.
Topher: Yeah.
Amber: You go change one variable in your CSS, and it’s all 25% smaller. In WordPress block development, now you’re thinking, “Oh, I have to go through five, 10, 20, however many pages you had in your scope, and however many sections are on that, and manually toggle all of them to be smaller.” I don’t know if that’s a better experience. Certainly not for a developer.
Topher: Not for developers, no. And similar to the header soup thing, you could build a theme that has a master CSS file that does it all right, and your content people can just drag and drop the little grabber for padding on anything they want.
Amber: And I think this is a challenge that WordPress is always going to have, which is that there are two very different audiences for WordPress. There is the DIY blogger, small business owner, that’s doing a lot themselves, and they need these tools, and WordPress built these tools to try and compete with the SaaSes, like Squarespace and Shopify and Wix, that have these tools. And then there is enterprise WordPress. I suspect that if we were able to look at, like, maybe even just the TLDs on the websites using Classic Editor plugin, there would be a lot of .edus or .orgs, right?
Topher: Oh, yeah.
Amber: Or very large companies. And it’s because they haven’t made the transition to the block editor because they’re concerned about loss of branding, loss of brand control, or consistency in design if they were to roll that out to their users.
Topher: Yeah. And it makes sense.
Amber: I don’t know what the solution to that is.
Topher: Yeah. I don’t really either.
Amber: No. I mean, it’s probably hybrid themes, right? Like, probably that’s what it is, hybrid themes where you have block editor in maybe the main content area, but you’re never going to do full site editing for your header and footer. Or maybe even your widget areas aren’t block-based. They’re using classic widgets. And there are some interesting plugins. Like, I think PublishPress is doing a lot with allowing more granular control over who can edit what, even at the block level, I think.
But, yeah, it is a challenge. Overall, I like the block editor. I think my partner, Steve, who’s coming from the dev perspective, is way less enthusiastic about the block editor. We did rebuild our website where people buy our plugin and our courses because we sell screen reader testing courses for people who want to learn how to do that. We did rebuild it, and it’s still technically hybrid, but it has a lot of like FSE-type areas.
And I thought, for the way we built that, which was we didn’t really have designs, except for we had a main shell design, but all of the interior pages, I was like, we’re saving time, we’re running fast, we’re going to get, like, what some components should look like, and then I’m just going to go in and build them out. Having the block-level controls and being able to do margin or borders or padding or that kind of stuff on different containers, it worked really well because I’m able to design as I build and I liked that, but I could see in other situations where that would not go very well.
Topher: Yeah, that makes sense. All right, I’m going to wrap this up. We’ve been at this almost an hour.
Amber: Well, thank you for having me.
Topher: Yeah, this has been really fascinating. I learned a ton, and I really appreciate it. So thank you for coming.
Amber: Yeah, thank you.
Topher: This has been an episode of the Hallway Chats podcast. I’m your host, Topher DeRosia. Many, many thanks to our sponsor, Nexcess. If you’d like to hear more hallway chats, please let us know on hallwaychats.com.
Introducing Joni HalabiJoni Halabi works at Georgetown University where is the web web content manager for the office of the president. She also volunteers on the WordPress Accessibility Day project, managing the translation of transcripts into a variety of languages.
Show NotesJoni’s LinkedIn
WP Accessibility Day 2025
WP Accessibility Day Translation Page
Transcript:Topher DeRosia: Hey everybody. Welcome to Hallway Chats. This is your host Topher, and this week I am with a new friend that I don’t know at all. Can you tell me your name?
Joni Halabi: Hi, my name is Joni Halabi.
Topher: Excellent. And where are you from?
Joni: So, originally, I am from New Jersey, but these days I live just outside the Washington DC area.
Topher: And what do you do for a living?
Joni: I’m actually just coming on the other side of a little bit of a career shift, but for the last few years I was working as a web developer. Most recently with Georgetown University’s web services department, but in the past, I’ve worked with agencies and software companies working on the front and what I lovingly call a middle-end development. So, basically, anything that’s right up before backend development, it used to be me.
About a year ago, I did a bit of a career switch and I am still working for Georgetown University, but I’m working more on the content side of things. So I am now the senior web manager for the office of the president at Georgetown.
Topher: Oh wow.
Joni: I manage our website, I manage a few other websites as well, writing content, redesigning some of our sites to be a little bit prettier, more accessible, nicer looking and so on. So that is my day job.
Topher: That’s cool. How many people manage the content for the president of the university? Just you?
Joni: One. Just me. I’ve actually originated the role. They did not have a web manager prior to me joining the team. I’m embedded in the communications team and it’s wonderful. It’s a very different way of working than working with a development team. Writing human words instead of code. It’s very different, but I love it.
Topher: That’s great. I’m assuming you saw a need and pitched it. What need did you see and how did you pitch that?
Joni: Actually, they started the process. I had already been thinking about leaving the development world for a little while and I just decided after 20 years I was getting close to done writing code. So I started looking around.
I did a little bit of a very informal job hunt and I started looking at our internal job boards and I saw that the president’s office had this opening for a web manager and it just looked really interesting. It looked right up my alley because I didn’t want to leave the web. I really just wanted to leave computer code. And it was wonderful.
They were looking for somebody to manage their websites because the team that I’m on, they are very heavily focused on writing and supporting the president in that way, in that communicative way. But not a lot of them had really deep web experience and they were looking for someone with that kind of experience. So I applied and it’s been wonderful so far. I started a little bit over a year ago.
Topher: I assume you’re working with WordPress.
Joni: Yes.
Topher: So in your role, how valuable are WordPress specific skills? Like could any good writer walk into this or are you particularly valuable because of your WordPress skills?
Joni: I’d like to think that I’m valuable because of my web skills because it’s a lot of… We have a very custom implementation of WordPress at Georgetown, which is great. In my previous role in the web services team, I wrote a lot of custom blocks for WordPress.
So we have a very, very customized version of the post editor, which is where you write everything. I bring that to my role, but also this role needs a really good combination of writing for the web skills, but also designing skills. My goal is to present the content that we have for our website in a way that people will engage with it meaningfully and will actually read the words. Ironically, that means having fewer words because it was a long time ago, nobody reads.
What I really want to do is be able to tell the story that I’m trying to tell with as much visual media as possible. So when I can find videos, when I can find good photos, I’m trying to lean very heavily on the visuals because I know that is really the engaging part. If somebody is visiting our website and they’re not engaged and they don’t really see themselves or at least a piece of themselves in the story, they’re probably not going to read it.
Topher: Right. Yeah.
Joni: Yeah.
Topher: I’m reminded of the old saying, when you want to make a sculpture, you just take a block of marble and cut away everything that isn’t your thing.
Joni: Right.
Topher: And you take a wall of words and get rid of all the ones that aren’t your message.
Joni: Exactly. Yeah.
Topher: That’s cool. One of the reasons we’re talking today is because Accessibility Day is coming up and I would love to hear about how you’re involved.
Joni: I am the translation team lead for WordPress Accessibility Day, which is a 24-hour fully online and free conference that focuses on that intersection of digital accessibility and WordPress. I don’t remember how I heard about the conference originally, but a couple of years ago, I applied to and was chosen to speak at the conference. So I gave a talk a couple of years ago about creating accessible SVGs and using those in a WordPress plugin to create accessible graphs. So it was a very tech-heavy talk.
Topher: Wow, that’s cool. Is that available anywhere online? I’d like to watch that.
Joni: It is actually. All of our conference videos are available online. We record everything and we make all of our videos available after the conference is over. They’re all available online. They’re on YouTube. They’re linked from our website. Yeah, it’s a really great conference.
After I spoke at that conference that one year, like a few years ago, I had gotten, I think an email or I saw a Slack message somewhere where the team was asking if anybody was interested in volunteering or being a team lead. And I said, “Sure, let me join this meeting that you’re having that introduces people to volunteering with the conference.”
At that meeting I had mentioned that in many, many jobs ago, I had worked as a translation manager for a software company. So I was managing the translations of our software and of our websites into 13 different languages. And they said, “Well, that’s cool because we want to translate the captions from all of our videos into different languages. And I said, “Well, that sounds right up my alley.” So I was accepted into that universe and became the translation team lead.
I’ve been the team lead for a couple of years now. And we have been translating mostly into Spanish and French, but we translate into also Italian and Hindi and Hebrew, German, Dutch, Portuguese, quite a few languages. It’s been great.
I initiate the process by generating an AI translated version of our captions, our captions all start in English, and then I hand that AI generated caption file to a human translator and they clean it up with the goal of using the AI to maybe make my human translator’s lives a bit easier. It’s been working well so far. We have, I want to say, like 70 or 80 translations online already.
Topher: Yeah, that’s great. Do you translate or do you manage translators?
Joni: I manage the translators. I have a very difficult time learning other languages, which as a programmer, computer languages are much easier for me than human languages. In the past, I’ve studied German, I studied Spanish, but my brain never really made the flip to being fluent enough to do something like translation or even get anywhere close to it.
I’m fascinated by the way languages work, like the way that they intermingle with each other. Depending on the languages, you can kind of see the connections between different sets of languages, like the Germanic languages. You can see those links, the Romance languages, you can see those links. And it’s really cool. So that’s how I nerd out in this realm.
Topher: That’s cool. I have done a little bit of translation stuff with like pot files and profiles and stuff, and I’ve worked with YouTube SRT files. How do you take a translation and make it into an SRT file? It wants timestamps and all that kind of stuff for all the lines.
Joni: It does. We use WebVTT files. I start out with the VTT file for English and that has all of the timestamps in it. I actually turn that there… I found a tool online that will turn that VTT file as a text file — it’s essentially all text — into HTML and I’m using Chrome’s translate to translate just the words from that file into whatever language I’m aiming for.
So let’s say Spanish. Chrome’s translate function will translate that file into Spanish. I copy that into a new VTT file and it still has all of the original timestamps.
Topher: Okay.
Joni: And then I hand it off to the translator and then they give it back to me. I specifically give my translators instructions to not mess with the timestamps.
Topher: Do not touch.
Joni: Don’t touch them. If we find out later that we need to change them, we can do that on our side, on the conference’s side, but I don’t want the translators to worry about that because sometimes it does get a little weird. German, for example, can expand by up to 40% from the English. Japanese can actually contract about like 20-ish percent from the English.
We haven’t really run into too many issues so far, not on wood. But yeah, I give the translators the VTT files and so far they have done wonderfully with them. Like they haven’t minded that format.
Topher: Okay. That’s pretty cool. It’s not a terribly difficult format. I mean, I’ve edited them. That is super cool. Can you tell me why accessibility is important to you? Why are you here? Why do you care?
Joni: That’s a great question. I care because I want everybody to be able to experience the web and experience the content on the internet. It really started at Georgetown. We were having issues with accessibility on our own sites. One of my primary jobs, like at the very, very beginning of when I started at Georgetown was to help with accessibility remediation. And I really got to see firsthand how much of a difference there is between an inaccessible site and an accessible site.
And we did. At the end of our project, we did make our websites and our templates accessible. Our goal was WCAG 2.0 at the time, AA compliance. And it just makes such a difference. I mean, I’m fortunate enough to be able to use the web in a mostly typical manner. I wear glasses, but I’ve noticed like, as I get older, my eyesight is failing me, so I’ve noticed I have to bump up the fonts. And being able to bump up the font size on a webpage kt’s so helpful for me to be able to just read the content.
I have a seven-year-old, but seven years ago when I had an infant, I was trying to work one handed because I had a baby and I only had one hand to work with and I had stuff to do. I mean, that’s not a typical use case for accessibility, but that is a temporary situation because my child grew. It’s a temporary situation where I really wasn’t able to make full use of my mouse because I’m right-handed, my kids in my right hand, tabbing away with my left hand.
But I mean, it makes you realize like it is so important to make websites and apps accessible to the point where everybody can use them. Because I mean, why not? Why not do it? There really isn’t a logical reason to make something inaccessible.
Kind of like there’s this cartoon, it’s like a one panel comic of a bunch of kids waiting outside a building. I think it’s a school and there’s a bunch of stairs and there’s a wheelchair ramp and you can see there’s a guy in front of the building shoveling the stairs to let the kids be able to get into the building. And there’s this one kid who’s in a wheelchair and he said, “Excuse me, can you please do the wheelchair ramp first?” And the man shoveling said, “Well, let me do the stairs and then I’ll do the wheelchair ramp.” The wheelchair user points out if you shovel the wheelchair ramp, “We can all get in.”
Topher: Yes. Yep. That’s good stuff.
Joni: I mean, it’s so analogous to accessibility online. If you make it accessible for the people who really, really need those accessible features, you’re making it an even better experience for everybody else too.
Topher: That’s a really, really great analogy. I like that a lot. So, you did a great job telling us what accessibility is. I should have asked, but I didn’t. When is it… Is it only online? Is it someplace you can go visit?
Joni: Our live conference is coming up next week as of this recording. It is October 15th and 16th. I think I said this before. It is a 24-hour… Maybe I didn’t say this before. I don’t remember. I’ve been talking about this conference to a lot of people today. But it is a 24-hour online and free conference.
Topher: Okay.
Joni: You can sign up. Like I said, it’s completely free. We have talks going one an hour for 24 hours straight. And fully realizing that people cannot be awake for 24 hours straight, we record all of our conference talks and they will be available shortly after the conference for anyone who misses one of the talks that happens to be at 3 a.m. their local time. You can always go back and watch or rewatch any of our talks.
Topher: Sure. What is the website address? And what is the official title? Again, just saying Accessibility Day, but what is that?
Joni: The official title is WordPress Accessibility Day. This year’s conference site is 2025.wpaccessibility.day.
Topher: All right, cool. I’m going to pull that up right now and look at it and I’m going to spell accessibility, right?
Joni: You know what? I have the same issue sometimes. Like my fingers work faster than my brain does and I type things wrong sometimes.
Topher: Yeah. And I can’t remember if there’s an A or an I in the middle. It did not load for me. Oh, I just get a black page.
Joni: Oh, here, let me put it in the chat for you. WP.accessibility.day.
Topher: Dot day.
Joni: Dot day. Yes.
Topher: If you go to dot com, it doesn’t work.
Joni: Don’t go to.com. That’s not us.
Topher: Oh, okay. I’ll make sure this gets in the show notes and stuff.
Joni: Great. Thank you.
Topher: That’s a good design. I like it.
Joni: I cannot take credit for it, but yeah.
Topher: I’ve heard a lot of people say that you sacrifice design and features if you have to do accessibility stuff. And this was a great example of that not being the case because it’s gorgeous. Oh, and you can even do the light mode and dark mode.
Joni: Yeah.
Topher: Excellent. I’m looking at the site here. Where can I find videos?
Joni: Videos. So if you go to our main website… We obviously don’t have the videos up for this year’s conference because this year’s conference hasn’t happened yet. But if you go to our main site, which is just simply WPAccessibility.day-
Topher: Yeah, help translate.
Joni: Help Translate is right up there. It’s great. If you go right at the very top, if you go to Iur Events, that will take you to a page that highlights this year’s events, but also includes links to our past conferences from 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2020. And each of those archive sites, in the schedule, you can click into the schedule, find a conference or sorry, find a talk that you would like to learn more about, and it will take you to a details page and the video is embedded on that page.
Topher: Yes. I am there now. Accessibility is a civil right. Digital accessibility, legal landscape for the WordPress community.
Joni: That’s a good one. Yeah. They’re all good ones.
Topher: I see that… oh, she’s talking to me. I see the YouTube logo, but this is not the YouTube player. What player is this?
Joni: I have no idea.
Topher: I wonder if it’s Able, that would be really cool.
Joni: I think this is-
Topher: It is Able player.
Joni: I was going to say, I should know this.
Topher: Are you familiar with Able player?
Joni: Only watching the videos on our site, to be honest.
Topher: Oh, okay. My friend, Joe Dolson, is now in charge of it. Somebody else built it and handed it off to him recently, but it’s specifically an accessibility focused media player.
Joni: Yeah. I’ve heard a bit about it. Joe is on our team leads team. So he is very, very involved in WP Accessibility Day too. So I do know Joe.
Topher: That’s cool.
Joni: Oh, I was just going to say, going back to translation, so any of our talks that are translated, if you go to the embedded player on the website, in the bottom right-hand corner, if that particular video has been translated into another language other than English, there is a dropdown that will list all of the languages that the captions for that video has been translated.
Topher: Oh, yes, I see it. I found them first by just clicking the CC, the captions icon, and it also lists them.
Joni: Oh, yes.
Topher: That is really cool. I don’t know any languages other than English and not even that very well, but I love linguistics. I love seeing how languages fit together and translations and things like that. And so this has always been fascinating to me. So I’m envious of your task.
Joni: Oh, thank you. Yeah, it is a lot of fun.
Topher: Yeah.
Joni: And it’s great working with the different translators who have volunteered to help us too. They are an amazing bunch.
Topher: How many do you have? Hundreds and hundreds? Tens?
Joni: I would love hundreds and hundreds. I would love to expand the team. I think I have about maybe 20 active translators right now. Some come in and they only have time to do one or maybe two translations and that’s wonderful. I have others coming in and they’re up to like 8 or 10 translations. So it just depends on who has what amount of time when. But we’re always looking for translation help. So if any listeners are fluent in other languages and they feel like helping us out, that would be wonderful. I would love to have you.
Topher: That would be cool.
Joni: So yeah, you can go to our website, again, WPaccessibility.day and click on the translate link and read all about our translation team and you can sign up to help us out.
Topher: All right. I think it’d be cool… I’m making up a task for you as a developer. Are you familiar with the translation stuff for just WordPress in general, like Polyglots team and all of that?
Joni: I’ve heard about the Polyglots team. Yes.
Topher: I would love to see a video translation tool that is similar, like where you just upload an English… what was it? WebTT?
Joni: VTT. Web VTT.
Topher: Yeah, upload a VTT file and somebody just can go to a webpage, type stuff in and move on. Because one of the things I’ve always admired about the Polyglots team is how simple it is for a translator to do that. They don’t need to know anything at all about the platform. They don’t even need to know that it is WordPress, you know? You just log in… Oh, there’s some English words. Let’s make them Spanish. It’d be cool if a thing existed to do that with video. Or audio, you know, whatever.
Joni: Yeah. That would be interesting. I always wonder how much context one would need to really do a good job because especially some of our talks are more general and other talks are just highly, highly technical. Like the talk that I gave years ago, it was very focused on developers.
Context is always important, but sometimes it’s like-
Topher: Yeah. And when doing translation work in WordPress, the developer has the ability to provide context in the phone, in the code. You don’t necessarily get that with video. Although I suppose it depends on how much work you want to put into it. An English reader could listen through it and add context.
Joni: Right.
Topher: But then you’re getting into a lot of work.
Joni: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Topher: Yeah. Interesting.
Joni: Yeah. It’s interesting. It’s what makes AI translations just not very trustworthy right now. And it’s why I have this dual system of we’ll start with AI, but then I really want human eyes on it because AI, at least right now, either doesn’t acknowledge the context or doesn’t get the context right.
Topher: Right. Well, that’s your task now as a developer to make that.
Joni: In my free time.
Topher: Yes. There’s no free time. All time is expensive.
Joni: Yeah.
Topher: Yeah. All right. Well, we’re going to wrap this up. Thank you very much for coming and telling us about this cool, cool stuff you’re doing. And listeners, if you want to take part in Accessibility Day, WordPress Accessibility Day, you can go to 2025.accessibility.day. Accessibility has an I in the middle, not an A.
Joni: 2025.wpaccessibility.day.
Topher: Oh, I got it wrong. Okay. WPaccessibility.day. All right. Well, thank you for coming.
Joni: Thank you so much for having me.
Topher: Yeah!
Topher: This has been an episode of the Hallway Chats Podcast. I’m your host Topher DeRosia. Many, many thanks to our sponsor Nexcess. If you’d like to hear more hallway chats, please let us know on hallwaychats.com.
Introducing Toby CrynsToby Cryns is owner of The Mighty Mo!, a WordPress and SEO lead generation agency in Minneapolis, MN. He wrote for WPTavern.com and helped plan BuddyCamp, WordUp, and the first few WordCamps in the Twin Cities.
Show Noteshttps://www.linkedin.com/in/tobycryns
https://themightymo.com/
Transcript:Topher DeRosia: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Topher, and I’m here today with Toby and I’m going to make you say your last name.
Toby Cryns: Cryns [CRINES]. It’s a one-syllable German name.
Topher: All right, cool. I know very little about you. I met you when we were both in the Tavern Project. Other than that, I don’t know anything about you. Where do you live? What do you do?
Toby: Yeah, I live in Minneapolis. I’ve owned The Mighty Mo! Design Co. for 18 years and we’re a WordPress and SEO agency. Prior to that, my first job was milking goats-
Topher: Nice.
Toby: …with an umpire for a little league. I worked in politics for one of our two major parties. I was a sports writer for a newspaper. Oh, and then I worked at the University of Minnesota for four years before I started Mighty Mo.
Topher: What role did you do in politics?
Toby: I was a campaign organizer. So I managed a team of at any given day between 10 and 15 paid employees and 20 to 50 volunteers. We canvassed and we tracked data. We basically tried to get people to vote for our guy.
Topher: All right, cool. Why the name Mighty Mo?
Toby: Do you remember the movie Vacation with Chevy Chase? Did you ever see that one?
Topher: Yep. Not in many, many years. Like maybe when it came out.
Toby: In that movie, they drive across the Mississippi River, and he goes, “The mighty Mississippi.” And my dad used to say that. And at some point he started saying ‘The Mighty Mo’ when we crossed the river. So that’s what it is. Mighty Mo for nothing less.
Topher: Nice. What is your role there?
Toby: I run the company. Right now I do all the sales. I have three full-time employees and then a couple of… a bookkeeper and then a part-time social media person right now and designer. I have a project manager who really does a lot of the day-to-day management of projects. I do all the selling, make sure I manage all the bank accounts, make sure everyone gets paid.
I still do a little bit of like development and stuff, but I’m trying to get to a point where I do zero. That’s my goal is to focus primarily on let’s say account, client accounts and whatever that level type of stuff is.
Topher: I am sure you’re aware of the radio station.
Toby: Oh, the Mighty Mo in Missouri? Sure.
Topher: In Montana.
Toby: Oh, it’s in Montana. That’s funny. I wonder if there’s one in Missouri too.
Topher: I don’t know, but it’s a 107 FM in Helena, Montana. It’s Montana’s best place.
Toby: It’s the best place in Montana.
Topher: Nice.
Toby: I think there’s also a Missouri one. There’s also a battleship, I think from World War II or something.
Topher: Oh, I’m sure. Yeah. I think you could do that a lot of Missouri.
Toby: Yeah. I think there’s even a brewery called the Mighty Mo.
Topher: Cool. What WordCamps have you been to?
Toby: I’ve only gone to local ones here. I planned a couple of them. I co-planned the first two WordCamps here. And then I co-planned or I led the Buddy Camp planning team for one of those. I also planned a number of non-affiliated WordPress events. So we did something called Wordup a couple of times and some other things, but all locally here.
Topher: Okay. I’ve been to work at Minneapolis.
Toby: Oh yeah. What year?
Topher: 1912. Boy. 2016.
Toby: Okay. Yeah. Cool.
Topher: Yeah. And then I went to another conference that was in Minneapolis that was not a WordPress… Well, not a WordCamp. You remember that?
Toby: Was it WordPress-related?
Topher: Yes. I’m looking up my history here.
Toby: PrestigeConf probably.
Topher: Yes. I went to PrestigeConf.
Toby: So I spoke at that. So maybe you saw me there. I don’t know.
Topher: Oh yeah. Well, I’m sure I did. I was there. I only went in person to one of them, but we watched the other one on TV.
Toby: Oh, cool.
Topher: Yeah, let’s see. I’m looking it up here. Oh, oh, it’s not on WP World.
Toby: It needs to be on there.
Topher: You know about thewp.world?
Toby: No. What’s that?
Toby: Marcus Burnett made it. Basically it is a list of everybody in WordPress, but on your profile, it has all your WordPress, WordCamp, no WordPress badges, all your contact info, where you can find me, what plugins you’ve made, what photos you submitted, your latest posts from your blog. You can make yourself available as a speaker, and it lists every WordCamp you’ve ever been to.
Toby: And did you say WordPress.world?
Topher: Nope. Thewp.world.
Toby: Ah, cool.
Topher: I attended 63 events. Spoken at 34. You should go to more. They’re good for you.
Toby: Yeah. Cool.
Topher: So, what about personally? What do you do for fun? You married? Kids, dogs, cats?
Toby: Yeah. Married kids. The whole ship, whole kebab. I have three kids, three lovely children, lovely wife. You know, I fix guitars in my free time. And so-
Topher: That’s cool.
Toby: Yeah. There’s a music school down the road that I’ve been… they just moved in a few months ago. I fixed two of their instruments so far. Just for fun. I don’t charge anything for it. But I had a friend drop off this really, really sweet guitar that’s like probably 40 years old and he played it in a music video that I loved. And he also played on my album in 2010. And I was going back, I’m like, “Did you play this guitar on that album?” And he’s like, “Did some research.” He’s like, “I did.”
Topher: Wow. That’s cool.
Toby: Really neat. So stuff like that with these guitars. When someone’s had a guitar for a long time, it has stories that go with it. And this particular guitar was neat because it was just dusty and gunky and never been wiped down with a damp towel, you know? And I was like-
Toby: Oh yeah. Yeah.
Topher: Oh, yeah.
Toby: It’s like an Epiphone Firebird, which is classic-style guitar. It’s like, “You want me to clean this?” He’s like, “No. God, no. I’ve gone 40 years without cleaning it. Why clean now?” Like now-
Topher: Right there is blood from this…
Toby: Yeah, totally.
Topher: That’s funny.
Toby: Guitars are neat like that, I think. I never thought of guitars in that way until a couple of years ago and I’ve been playing for 40 years. Like 30 years, I guess. But just at the last couple of years of like my… I guess just have a different perspective about guitars that it’s like, you know, just like the river of life flows through guitars, you know?
Topher: I was in flight school 35 years ago and my instructor, I don’t know, 15 or 20 years before that, had decided he wanted to learn to play guitar. So he bought a kit and he started building his acoustic guitar.
Toby: Wow.
Topher: And he loved building it. It was wonderful. So he sold it and bought another one. And when I knew him, he was on his seventh or eighth guitar and it was a beautiful 12 string with gold strings and 45 different kinds of wood and mother of pearl inlay and all that stuff. And his kids said, “If you sell that, we’re just going to kill you now so we can take it.” And he still didn’t know how to play.
Toby: Wow. Isn’t that something?
Topher: 10 or 15 years making guitars and he didn’t know how to play, but he had a wonderful time, you know?
Toby: Yeah. You know, some of the most respected luthiers in the world, like professional guitar builders and errors, they don’t know how to play guitar or they don’t know how to play well. It’s like a mechanic doesn’t necessarily know how to drive a race or, you know, the guy building the car, the board plant, maybe he doesn’t drive over 55 miles an hour ever.
Topher: That’s funny. So we were both part of the tavern project. It’s been long enough now. Those who are listening, who don’t know what happened, the lead editor of… the only editor of wptavern.com resigned. She moved on to another job and there was no one. And so Matt, the owner said, he’s going to do a contest and hundreds, maybe thousands of people signed up to be allowed to be in the contest. And he picked five and you and I were both one of the five. I think it was five, right?
Toby: Yeah. That sounds about right. Something like that.
Topher: Oh, just a second. My wife is sending me a note and I will be… just a moment. Oh, come on. It broke. So instead of writing, I did videos. I don’t remember what you wrote about. What was your topic?
Toby: To kind of juxtapose it, so I wrote about kind of longer form, more evergreen topics. So by comparison, some of our colleagues wrote about today’s news in WordPress. Like, this plugin was released. There was a vulnerability discovered there. And I’m not really interested in that stuff from a writing perspective, unless there’s some neat angle.
So my writing was like… I was trying to like… one of the articles, it was trying to figure out what the most used WordPress theme is. And there’s like a bunch of data sets from, and there’s no like definitive answer in WordPress because you know, everything’s disjointed. Who knows how many Elementor sites there are really, you know, like that sort of thing. So I did like an article about that.
I did a couple of accessibility articles that were really interesting to me. Part of it was interesting. Like we have companies that are like… they’re actually trying. They’re investing heavily in accessibility stuff. But when I looked into it, just for me as somebody who’s not an accessibility pro, they missed very, very obvious things that I would… and I asked them about it and the response was… and these are the most popular WordPress plugins. I should say not all of them. Some of them better than others. But there’s two that come to mind that are… you can go to WPtavern.com and read the articles.
Actually, I didn’t put this stuff in the articles. I didn’t want to do a hit piece. It wasn’t really what I wanted. But just the stuff that didn’t go in the article was that I was just blown away by the obvious stuff that was missed by these companies who are really trying and really, really investing.
One of them had a part of their setup process, you install the plugin, the first form is like an email form and it’s… or no, it’s a license. Enter your license here. And to this day, and it’s now been a couple of years, I think, I told the CEO or I told the CMO, whatever, whoever I was talking to, CMO, I’m like, “Do you see this?” I pointed it out to him, he’s like, “Oh yeah, we totally missed that. Well, we’ll fix that.” And it’s two years later, they haven’t fixed it.
And same with this other thing. It was one of the most popular themes in the world. And the default font choice colors were not accessible. And I brought this to their attention, they’re like, “Oh yeah, yeah, we’ll get to that.” And still nothing, you know, two years later. It was like, these are easy things. The code is not hard to write. That’s what I was interested in. I don’t know. I just wanted to write stories that hadn’t been written before that were interesting.
Topher: I’m jumping to the end.
Toby: How about you?
Topher: Oh, yeah, go ahead.
Toby: Did your experience go there?
Topher: You know, I’m going to turn my video off because the audio is chopped up. I’m on Starlink.
Toby: Oh, just asking how your experience at the Tavern went.
Topher: I had… you know what, hang on a sec. I’m getting a spinning beach ball on Zoom. I hope this doesn’t crash. Okay, can you hear me?
Toby: Mm-hmm.
Topher: Okay, good. So, you want to know how my experience was? I had a good time making the content that I did. I was going to cover events. So, I covered an event. I did a five-day series. I didn’t get any feedback whatsoever. I have no idea. I mean, they didn’t pick me, obviously. But I have no idea if it was well-received. I didn’t really get any feedback from listeners either. Like, I have no idea if people were interested in what I had to say. But it was fun to make and it was an exciting time, you know.
I bet a lot of people don’t know that all five of us were in a Slack channel together talking the whole time and supporting each other and helping each other. That was really cool, you know.
Toby: It was really cool.
Topher: I mean, it was a competition and theoretically three of us were not going to get jobs. In the end, four of us did not get jobs. But, you know, it was a very interesting experience. But I’m curious, what were you going to do with Mighty Mo if you had gotten a full-time job writing for the Tavern?
Toby: I like gamed it out a little bit. But I don’t think I would have accepted the job. When I thought through it… because the assumption is, in what we know about the way that automatics policies work, is that I couldn’t run the Mighty Mo.
Topher: Right, yeah.
Toby: And so, if you take that as an assumption, it would be a big… I mean, just like when I just think of giving up something that’s relatively certain for something that’s relatively uncertain and with, you know, less financial upside. As I was thinking about it later, I was like, I don’t know that I would have accepted a reasonable offer from Matt if I had to give up the Mighty Mo. I think I could have done the work and run the Mighty Mo but…
Topher: I was unemployed at the time. And so, for me, it was a possibility of a job. And it was very difficult to not hear anything at all for weeks. First. days, and then weeks, and then-
Toby: Months.
Topher: Yeah, months. And then, do you remember we got that thing from, I think it was JustWorks, said, congratulations on your offer and it wasn’t real?
Toby: Oh, gosh. You know-
Topher: I think we all got that.
Toby: I don’t recall. Yeah, maybe. I just can’t remember.
Topher: They just needed some information. Like, “We need you to fill out a W-9 so we can pay you.”
Toby: Oh, it went through their like automated system.
Topher: It did. Yeah. So I got the email that said, “Hi, we’re going to send you an offer. Get ready today.” I’m like, “Woo, I’m in.”
Toby: Oh, yeah.
Topher: So from that perspective, it was pretty painful.
Toby: I told Matt this too, Matt Mullenweg. By the way, I never spoke with Matt. I emailed him once or twice. I don’t think he ever emailed me. That was the nature of the relationship. And I was totally fine with it. I didn’t ask for anything more than that. But I said this to him too. For me, it was the opportunity of a lifetime. I’ve respected that publication for a long time. And was and remain just really grateful for the opportunity to contribute in that way.
Topher: Yeah. I was pretty excited to see the Tavern continue. And I’m sad that it’s not anymore. I feel like it’s kind of been supplanted. Like, there are other places where I get that kind of information now that I’m very happy with. I would be sad to see them go away now.
Toby: It makes me wonder… the thing about the Tavern, and it’s maybe different, it’s just like, if somebody were to take it over again, it would have to be personality-driven, similar to how it was. You know, like one person in charge. I think Andrea was in charge for a long time. Is it Andrea? I can’t remember, but-
Topher: Sarah.
Toby: Sarah. Right. And so you got to know what kind of content she was producing. And you know, if you like it, then you subscribe. If you don’t, then you don’t subscribe. But-
Topher: You know, go ahead.
Toby: No, you go ahead, sir.
Topher: I don’t know. They’re probably out there and I don’t pay attention, but I don’t know of another big opinion site like the Tavern was when Jeff ran it before Matt bought it. I could see that coming back.
Toby: Yeah. And I think the Tavern would be an amazing… I mean, obviously the Tavern has the history and everything going for it. If they could find the right voice, I would love for them to bring Jeff back
Topher: Yeah. I don’t think that’s going to happen.
Toby: But you know, it would be interesting if they found the right voice, and I don’t know what the right voice would be, but you know, it would turn some people off, but it would have a platform built in on a newer, whoever’s newer site.
Topher: Yep.
Toby: I think maybe that’s the bad thing about seeing it linger. It’s a platform that could do a lot of good if it had the right person writing for it and whatever.
Topher: There’s also a lot of history on there. I don’t know if you were around at the time, but in 2015, I think, I went to work at Pune in India for HeroPress and the community sent me, they did the funding and all of that and the Tavern wrote about it. And I wrote an article on the Tavern about it. And I still refer to that. But you know, I said stuff then and things were said then. The comments are very interesting. There’s a lot of stuff like that.
Toby: I remember like WP Candy, you know, a lot of these sites, they just go away and they were great personalities and had life to them. And probably today some percent will go away. I mean, at the end of the day, a lot of these are, for lack of a better term, unfunded blogs. And that’s maybe what’s made the Tavern last is that Matt Mullenweg funded it and still funds it without a writer.
Topher: But yeah. On wppodcast.com, I have probably, boy, maybe a hundred podcasts. I don’t know, but 10 published regularly. And the rest are just basically archive stuff. Just old episodes. I mean, the WP Mayor podcast.
Toby: Yeah. I remember that.
Topher: I have an uncategorized one. I should figure that out.
Toby: One thing that you and I have in common, I think is we’re both archivists in our own ways. I hear what you’re saying and I’m like, just have a lot of appreciation for that archival work, you know?
Topher: Yeah. Speaking of archiving, I just released this website the other day that I did for fun. And for archival purposes, I made a site called topher.how and… Well, you know, I’ve made content all over the web for years, but on everybody else’s sites. You know, blogging on GoDaddy and making videos for other people’s YouTube channels and stuff. And I realized most of those sites have an RSS feed and they’re mostly WordPress and they have an author RSS feed. So I used WPL import and just hoovered up everything I’ve ever made. And it’s all on there now.
Toby: That’s cool. One thing I’ve heard about the youngest generation that’s coming up now, like the, let’s say, 18-year-olds, whatever that is, they’re doing less social media posting, which is interesting. I mean, I’m 46 and I blogged a ton. I still blog to this day. And there was a whole generation of bloggers.
And then I don’t know what came next, but at some point everyone started to take pictures of themselves and posting it to Instagram or whatever. And it seems like that’s going away. And I’m not sure… because you’d think that the people will want to express themselves online somehow.
Topher: Yeah. Yeah. I wish there was an open source version of Instagram. I know that there are things like it, like Pixel Fed and stuff, but maybe it’s the timing. Like WordPress came out and everybody’s like, “Oh, I can build my own thing.” But it’s so much easier to just go to a website, fill out a form and have a free account.
Toby: I was the co-founder of the WordPress user group here in Minneapolis. I think I started with WordPress in 2003, maybe. Did it come out in 2002? Something like that. So I was really early. It was exciting to be doing something cutting-edge. And it really was cutting-edge for its day. The cutting-edge part was like, you can spin up a website in five minutes. That was the claim to fame back then. A database-driven site that you can then edit and post. And it had the RSS feeds and stuff like that. That was all really cool.
I’m feeling that today in the local AI user group, it’s a similar excitement that the people are expressing and that’s in the room and it’s undeniable. In a way, it’s scary because this AI thing is going to upend everything. But the energy is there. It’s interesting to me.
Topher: That is interesting.
Toby: Like there’s not energy around Instagram or TikTok. Nobody really cares. If they went away today, they’d be like, “I’ll have to find a new platform to look at my photo stream or whatever.” There’s not energy around it. It’s just like something people do basically.
But I’m telling you this AI thing, there’s a real energy there amongst people who know nothing about technology, who are learning it for the first time and building apps and stuff.
Topher: I think people might also care less about hanging on to stuff. Like when people wanted to leave Twitter, they’re like, “Well, how do I back up all my tweets and put them somewhere else?” And I think people today are more like, “I don’t care.”
Toby: Yeah. That’s really neat because… or interesting. I think even some of Matt Mullenweg’s recent comments have kind of focused on the portability of data. And while that matters greatly to you and me, and maybe people of our generation, maybe it’s totally lost on these young people.
Topher: Yeah.
Toby: Yeah, everything’s fleeting. It’s almost like they posted it, they got a million likes and now they want to delete it. Whereas our experience maybe was different. Certainly mine was different. Like I was posting it for posterity. I didn’t post it unless I felt good about it.
Topher: Right. I remember the first time I ever heard of Snapchat and they said, “Oh yeah, you make a post and then it disappears forever after 24 hours.” I’m like, “Well, that’s a bug.”
Toby: Right. Yeah. Maybe that’s what it is. Maybe that’s what people want, the youngsters.
Topher: Times change.
Toby: And the youngsters are going to take over every year. Every year for all of history, the youngsters have taken over one year after the other.
Topher: Yep. All right. Well, we’ve been at this for half an hour now and that’s about how long episodes are. So I’m going to wrap this up.
Toby: All right.
Topher: I really appreciate your time. It’s been fun getting to know you. There’s another WordPress event coming up that is not a WordCamp in Minneapolis. Do you remember what it is?
Toby: Yes. Someconf.com.
Topher: When is that?
Toby: I’ll be going there. I submitted a proposal to speak but I’ll be there regardless. It’s the people who planned the last WordCamp Minneapolis. As far as I can tell, they’ve all kind of joined, done this new thing, SomeConf. They moved the date. I checked yesterday and it’s going to be in April now. I think it was originally scheduled for October.
Topher: Oh, that’s good for me because I can go. Or I can’t go in October.
Toby: Right. Maybe that’s why. Maybe you weren’t going to be there and they’re like, “Uh, when can “ugh”.”
Topher: I think it’s the same weekend as WordCamp Asia.
Toby: Oh, got it. But I know one of the guys pretty well, one of the people who are running it and he’s just a fantastic asset to the community. I don’t know the other planners as well. I just know them kind of just from in passing at events and stuff.
Topher: All right. Oh, where can people find you online?
Toby: You can go find me on LinkedIn or go to themightymo.com. Message me, LinkedIn or email works to Toby@themightymo.
Topher: Are you on Slack?
Toby: No, not really. I wouldn’t message me there unless you don’t want a response for a while.
Topher: All right. I did message you there yesterday.
Toby: Oh, okay. There you go. I’ll get back next month.
Topher: All right. Cool. All right. Well, that’s it then.
Toby: Thank you very much for coming. Thank you, Topher. Really appreciate you.
Topher: Yep. Bye.
Toby: Bye.
Topher: This has been an episode of the Hallway Chats podcast. I’m your host Topher DeRosia. Many many thanks to our sponsor Nexcess. If you’d like to hear more hallway chats, please let us now on Hallwaychats.com.
Introducing Nancy LyonsCEO and co-founder of Clockwork, an enterprise web development company in Minneapolis MN. We’ve known her through the internet for years, and it was a delight to get to talk to her in this episode.
Show Noteshttps://www.nancylyons.com/
https://www.clockwork.com/
Transcript:Topher: Hey everybody, welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Topher, your host, and my regular co-host is Nyasha and she’s here.
Nyasha: Hey, I’m Nyasha.
Topher: And I stepped on her introduction, and I’m sorry.
Nyasha: It’s okay.
Topher: Before we get going, I want to say thanks to Nexcess for our hosting, and for sponsoring us. They’re good friends. They’re good hosts. They have some really cool WooCommerce automated testing. I don’t know anybody else that does that. Automated testing is awesome, and will save you time and money. They have a cool Sales Performance Monitor and a plugin performance monitor to keep your store running super fast.
All right, our guest today is Nancy Lyons. Welcome.
Nyasha: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Topher: You’re welcome. The first time I ever heard of you was my wife and I bought a remote ticket to Prestige Home and we put it on TV. So we watched your talk on TV. And as it was going, it was like, is it too late to get there? How many hours is it to Minneapolis? And we decided we probably couldn’t get there before you were done. Then we came back the next year just to meet you and you weren’t there.
Nancy: That’s rude.
Topher: I’ve been mad at you ever since.
Nancy: I’m just glad that you liked the talk. But I feel like we’ve talked off and on over the years on Twitter.
Topher: Yeah.
Nancy: Like when I realized who this podcast was with, I was like, “Oh, I know that guy. He and his wife are like a power couple of WordPress. Power couple.”
Nyasha: Oh, yeah.
Nancy: Right?
Topher: Yeah. Well, we try. Yeah, I thought it was funny because usually I get requests all the time, all the time from office assistants. Hey, my boss is somebody who is so awesome. You really want to have him on your podcast. I’m just so tired of them, I just delete them almost out of hand. I literally was like, “Nancy? Oh, well, yeah, let’s do that.”
Nancy: Sweet. I’m glad I didn’t get deleted. You know, we are on a growth mission, so we have a relatively new, about 18 months chief growth officer. And one of her tactics in the broader marketing plan is just a podcast campaign. So she’s actually working with a booking agency to identify relevant podcasts where, you know, I might be a helpful guest. And then they’re doing the outreach, which is weird for me too. Like, they do the whole media kit, and then they sell me.
So I actually had a recording earlier today even and it’s weird to do a couple of recordings in the same day because then you’re like, did I say this already? Is this menopause? But it’s actually been fun because I’ve met, you know, people with different businesses and different interests and podcasts focused on a wide variety of things. So it’s actually been kind of fun.
Topher: That’s cool. I really enjoy being on podcasts, too. And I too have done it that often, I think, “Oh, did I already say this? Do they want to hear the story again?”
Nancy: Exactly. Right. I think this must be what early-onset dementia is like.
Topher: So tell us who you are and why you’re here, what you do, and WordPress and all that kind of stuff. Where do you live?
Nancy: Sure. Well, I live in Minneapolis. My name is Nancy Lyons, and I am the co-founder and CEO of a company called Clockwork. Clockwork is an experienced design and technology consultancy. A staple of our businesses is WordPress development.
We also in the last couple of years spun out a smaller agile studio called Tempo. And Tempo is… you know, Clockwork does a lot of work for the enterprise and we roll in a lot of customer experience, user experience, and change strategy consulting, and then we actually build the solutions that we collaborate toward with our clients.
And Clockwork has clients like OPTiM, Ameriprise, UnitedHealth, Ecolab, General Motors. Tempo is actually a studio that was built for startups, small and medium businesses using, you know, obviously a very lean approach, a very lean, agile approach to delivery. So we’re delivering much quicker and WordPress is a staple of that business as well.
So I think it speaks to the fact that WordPress is appropriate for the enterprise and WordPress is appropriate for, you know, startups and small businesses. And having the right partner helps you determine the right implementation of WordPress. So we’re in Minneapolis, but we have clients all over.
Nyasha: That is cool.
Topher: Yeah. I really liked the idea of having the smaller, lean agency for the people who need smaller, lean stuff.
Nancy: I mean, it’s been good for us because also what we’re finding is even larger companies that don’t want to invest a ton of dollars in testing an idea will come through the Tempo doors, and we’ll test and run and prototype some of their concepts with them and they’re not going through this giant process and there’s not so many stops and starts in the process. It’s a much quicker experience.
Topher: Yeah. I noticed LinkedIn says you’ve been running an agency for 21 years now.
Nancy: Hmm.
Topher: I am someone who has been around the agency trail a lot. Especially in the last few years, agencies are struggling to keep people employed lately. Are you still happy with that? I’m not asking if you’re happy if you did it. Are you still happy continuing to do it? Do you see you doing it till you’re 80?
Nancy: I’m barely gonna breathe till I’m 80. So that’s an interesting question. First of all, Clockwork wasn’t our first rodeo. So we had done this before. We actually started-
Topher: I’m sorry. Who’s we?
Nancy: Oh, sure. I have business partners, and I’ve been with them for 175 years. That’s what it feels like, speaking about, you know, something. They actually started up an internet service provider in 1994.
Topher: Oh, wow.
Nancy: And that is how I met them, and ultimately became a partner and the president of that company, which was… Is it okay if we have dogs in the hallway, this hallway chats?
Nyasha: Yeah, of course. We love dogs.
Nancy: He picks now to bark, right?
Topher: Yeah.
Nancy: Sorry about him. That’s Nacho. And he’s very, very, very vocal. I didn’t think for a minute that he would be backing. My apologies. Anyway. So we started in internet service provider in ’94, ’95, built the first website for a commercial client in 1995, sold that company in 2001. We had had an investor prior to that, and worked with that investor pretty heavily, and then walked away from that started Clockwork in January of 2002.
And we called it a startover instead of a startup. We sort of had a better idea of how we wanted to operate. And we’ve evolved over those 21 years. We started out as a web dev shop. And I think the distinction, relative to what you said, is I don’t consider us an agency. When we started we were… I mean, you know, the term is subjective. You can see an agency the way you want to and I’ll see the way I want to.
But when we first started, we were competing with advertising agencies. And advertising agencies saw digital as the bastard stepchild, right? It’s something we put in the basement. There’s too sad, sad developers down there, and we throw creative ideas at them and they execute in line with our expectations and deliver something that maybe is functional but not user-friendly, and maybe delivers on business requirements.
We build software and change businesses. We’re doing a lot. So we don’t do digital marketing. We don’t do banner ads. We’re not doing pay-per-click stuff. We’re not doing any of that. We are doing consulting around customer experience and user experience, product development.
We have a change enablement practice, which makes us different because technology changes big businesses. Businesses are fundamentally changed when we build the solutions for them, right? So we are helping our clients think through how to bring their workforce along to ensure the success of these products. So that’s a little different than what we see in your average dev shop.
But over the years, we have evolved from being considered an agency to really being a consultancy. And now we see ourselves competing with some of the big three. We see us invited to tables where we’re also seeing Slalom or Accenture. And we do as much thinking and innovation work, strategy work as we do development work. So it’s a little different.
Do I love it? Do I see myself doing it forever? I’ll tell you, I don’t see myself working for anybody else for a while. And there’s a reason for that. I think the reason we’ve been around for 21 years is we don’t have a holding company trying to tell us… you know, I mean, we’re still… I mean, I know you can relate to this. I’m going to assume that you can both relate to this, but tell me if you can’t. You’ve been doing it so long, you know what’s up, right?
Topher: Yeah.
Nancy: And some force comes in and acquires the organization, that changes everything because suddenly they’re less concerned about quality, more concerned about bottom line, or less concerned about security, more concerned about budget, or the sale itself.
I mean, my God, when we were acquired the last time, I remember sitting in rooms where all they cared about was the sales pipeline and the closed sales. Not whether or not we could actually deliver the work, not whether or not we had the right people in the right seats to deliver on the promises.
Topher: Yeah, the money.
Nancy: It was all about the money. And that’s just not who we’ve ever been. And you know this too. I mean, I hate to keep saying we’re both old, but come on, we’re both old for the internet. We’ve been around for a long time. I’m like the grandma in internet years. And you know that there’s a lot of people out there that still deliver vapor, that still talk a lot of air, but couldn’t actually execute if their lives depended on it, that don’t understand the nuances of the technology. We are not those people.
And I think that 21 years with this company alone, but that, you know, 26 or seven years cumulatively is really quite something and valuable to our clients. And the fact that we enjoy delivering makes us different. And we enjoy the success that our clients experience as a result of our relationship. That also makes us different.
So, do I want to do this forever? No, because where there is a job, there are people and people are starting to be the hardest part about technology. But I can’t see myself doing it for anybody else anytime soon. So there you go. I think we may find some of the same things we found 25 years ago. And that is it’s really hard to compete when the holding companies own all the talent. You know, when the big monsters own all the talent, it’s hard to compete.
The wage inflation situation that we’re all experiencing is happening because of, you know, the talent wars that are occurring. And it’s hard to create sustainable businesses in the shadow of all of that.
Topher: Yeah.
Nancy: I’m a windbag. Sorry.
Topher: No, that’s all right.
Nyasha: That is okay.
Topher: That is exactly what I was looking for. Do you ever go to WordCamp anymore?
Nancy: I haven’t. I haven’t but I’m not opposed to it. I’m not opposed to it. I go where I’m asked to speak because I like to have a job. I like to be put to work. It’s fun. It’s fun. And you know, I don’t talk about tech hardly at all. I’m really talking about motivating people.
I’m doing a talk on Thursday for the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association, and that talk is about not fearing the robots. Like get in the driver’s seat and stop being afraid. You know, because most of the conversations about developing technology, emerging technologies are ridiculous. Like the idea that we’re suddenly going to be in a sequel to repo man just blows my mind.
Topher: That leads me to my next thing. You do a lot of things besides run an agency. I have an email newsletter, and it’s about 1/10 the length of yours. So I know how long it takes to put something like that together. How do you manage to fit all that in?
Nancy: Well, with help. I mean, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have help. I do have help. I have a secret weapon. Her name is Liz. And Liz helps me with it. Now, I do write it. I do conceive of the ideas. But I’ll tell you between Liz and Nathan, Nathan is the… he’s the proofer. He looks for my typos. So if you ever see a typo in that newsletter, just call Nathan out and I’ll have him drawn and quartered.
I mean, I have a great team. I mean, nothing good happens because of one person, right? I’m grateful that I have a subscriber base for the newsletter. The newsletter I do because I love it and I hear from people every month when I send it out. I really try to make it meaningful and helpful. So that is of just a personal joy.
The book writing is about credibility, but also because I have something to say. It’s like, you know, I wrote that book “Work Like a Boss”, and honestly, it’s a love letter to everybody who just can’t get their feet under them, you know, in the workplace, because the whole book was about having agency and self-empowerment and self-awareness.
Because I think unless you work for yourself, you witness how often people just sort of throw their hands up and act powerless. I don’t think we’re living in a time where anybody can afford to sit in their lack of power and hope things improve.
Nyasha: Yes. That’s amazing. I want to add, like you said earlier that you’re old, you’re not. What you are is a powerful force of awesomeness. And I have to learn from you because you hit on so many things I’m looking for. I want my own business. I want my own agency. I really don’t know how much longer I can keep doing this for other people. I think it takes a wise and powerful person to realize that and know that and to execute it like you’re doing. Like, with the time and everything, I know you have your secret weapon, but I just think it’s amazing. It is amazing what you’re doing.
Nancy: You’re kind. I have a great team. I have a great team. And honestly, I mean, what you’ve just said is exactly sort of my career path in that I’ve always been too much. I’ve always been a windbag. I’ve always been too masculine. So I don’t fit the lady business mold. I’ve always been too opinionated. Right?
So working in a typical situation, there just were never any welcome mats thrown out for me when I was, you know, on the job hunt. When I talk to young folks, I’m reminded of how often I was told I was too much. “You’re too much. You’re too big. You’re too loud, too opinionated, too dyke-y, too all sorts of things.
And I think we’re living in a time where we have to start embracing people’s toos because that’s what makes them exceptional. And it’s exceptional people that are going to help us evolve our businesses and get them to the next level. So I really believe that the traditional ways of work just don’t work anymore. And that’s why work is so broken. That’s why we have quiet quitting. That’s why everybody’s in an existential crisis. That’s why we still want to be taking a nap post-pandemic.
But we live in a system of capitalism. So many of these systems have to be dismantled. But unless we get together and agree to do that, we’re stuck in it. So how do we make the best of it? And I think that’s the opportunity we have.
I don’t necessarily subscribe to the American dream because it’s hustle and hard. It’s exhausting. I mean, unless you’re Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, and unless you’re privileged and White, and you have wealth or whatever, I don’t think the fairy tale is true for everybody. But I do think if you have gumption and hustle, you can carve out enough of a dream for yourself to have a decent quality of life.
And I don’t think that’s true across the board. I hate generalizing. There are certainly people who want things that will never experience them because of their lived experience or their status in life or whatever. But I do think it’s possible to have a decent quality of life and not work for the man.
Nyasha: Oh, I love it. I love it. I love it. Yes. Embracing people’s toos. I’m writing that down. I’ll credit you but I’m writing it down.
Nancy: All right, thanks.
Nyasha: Oh, wonderful.
Nancy: What about you? What’s going on with you all? What’s happening? Are you still doing your publication? Is it HeroPress? Yes. Yes.
Topher: HeroPress. Yes.
Nancy: How’s it going?
Topher: Still going.
Nancy: Nice.
Topher: It changes every few years. So it’ll be nine this year.
Nancy: Wow.
Topher: Just a long time to have anything going on the internet.
Nancy: Anything. Truly.
Topher: Ny and I used to both work at the same agency-
Nancy: Oh, wow.
Topher: …and both have been laid off several times in the last year.
Nancy: No.
Topher: I mentioned agencies are having a hard time keeping people on board. So at the moment, I’m doing my own thing. I’ve been making videos for years about WordPress, about kind of anything. So kind of a niche. I’m good at it. So I hung up my shingle right before WordCamp US. It’s going all right. I’ve got a few clients doing video. I’m making most of my money just building websites for small places. But the video thing is growing and that’s pretty cool.
Nancy: That’s cool.
Topher: Yeah. I hope so. I’m enjoying being my own boss. I’m not even making remotely what I was making when I had a job. So that’s kind of tough. But it’ll come. It’s starting up. It’s only been like three months.
Nancy: Well, I should get your info from you so that I can keep that stuff in mind.
Topher: Yeah. Ny, what are you doing these days?
Nyasha: Well, me and Topher were laid off by the same company.
Nancy: I’m sorry.
Nyasha: No, it’s okay. Topher, when you said several layoffs, I don’t… Topher is such a strong, great person as well because the one layoff from this company nearly broke me. So I’m like, If I had several layoffs, I don’t know what I would do.” But that’s not him. I know what I would do. You gotta keep going. But-
Topher: Three and nine months.
Nyasha: I hate that. And I think a lot of what Nancy said is why… it’s people aren’t embracing people. People don’t have agency. People don’t feel… they don’t feel like people at these jobs. I had a lot of reflection. At first, I looked for work, I was like, I cannot not work. That was my first time ever getting laid off, fired anything like that ever in my life.
So I started doing freelance work, which was awesome. It restored my faith in myself as a web developer because I had lost faith in myself after that layoff. It was like, you can do this yourself. Why are you waiting on somebody? So that’s why a lot of what you said really, really, really, really connected with me. I also got a job with LinkedIn as an instructor there. So I actually got to go record my first course, which teaching WordPress blogs will be out in January.
Nancy: That’s awesome.
Nyasha: Thank you. I was in California. And I still got to do my WordPress stuff. I was a keynote speaker at WordCamp Rochester. I was hanging out with Topher and Cate.
Nancy: Nice.
Nyasha: So I kept myself busy and I kept myself working. And it really was an experience. It was like, you can do this yourself. I really want to start my own business. That’s something I’m planning for the new year. I want to be my own person. Because at the end of the day, if everything collapses around me, I want it to be… I mean, sometimes it’s just going to be random acts of the universe, I guess. But if something collapses around me in terms of income, I want it to be mainly on me. I don’t want to depend on anybody else for income anymore unless they’re a client. So I got a new job and I am working for someone again, but again, in the next year, I’m trying to have my own business.
Topher: Demands.
Nyasha: I’m working for the main demands. But I’m trying to have my own business and make my own income. LinkedIn has actually been a big part of that. They give you a lot of agency there and pay you.
Nancy: That’s great.
Nyasha: I am very optimistic for the next year. I wasn’t at all and now I am. So I’m happy about the future and I’m ready to kick some butt.
Nancy: No, that’s awesome. That’s awesome.
Nyasha: Thank you.
Nancy: I mean, I just heard from a financial expert at a thing I spoke at last week, and they were saying there’s a lot of talk of recession, but recessions historically don’t happen in an election year. So the administration, the current administration, but the government overall has an incentive to not let us, you know, move any lower than we’ve moved.
So I see that as being a positive. So we don’t have to panic, we can focus on the stuff that matters. I think when there’s all this chatter in the ether about the state of the economy, we start to plan for something that isn’t real. That can make us less bold, I think. I don’t think we have to… We don’t have to put on our life jackets because the planes are not going to crash.
I think that’s an important thing to keep sort of close to your chest as you think about starting a new business. Like you don’t have to be afraid because everything’s not gonna fall apart next year.
Nyasha: Oh, that’s so good to hear. Thank you.
Nancy: But I mean, if it does, you did not hear that from me.
Nyasha: Well, it’s because I tried.
Nancy: There we go. Sorry, I was wrong.
Topher: I was actually kind of surprised by the number of WordPress layoffs in the last couple years. Because in 2008 when the recession hit, web stuff boomed. There was so much work because you couldn’t give it away. I mean, you couldn’t pay people enough. The same sort of thing kind of happened with COVID. When everybody went home and locked themselves away, you could still do your web stuff. And this kept going. But then after COVID is when things kind of started to fall apart. And every hosting company and agency I know has laid somebody off.
Nancy: We haven’t. But I will tell you, our crappy year was last year. 2022 was awful. And I think it has a lot to do with pipeline and sales cycles, right? What we saw was a lot of clients got real quiet in the midst of the pandemic. We took advantage of some programs just like everybody else did, and thank God.
I mean, I used to say the government has never helped me ever and I can’t say that anymore because they did. And I’m grateful for it. Though, I wish there weren’t so many people that didn’t need it that gamed the system and created such a quagmire, because who knows how those programs will show up the next time.
But what we did do while we were having a really crappy year, because our clients didn’t know what to expect, and so they got real tentative, and they shut down in our pipeline, had been a little slim during COVID. So it was the sales cycle, right? It was COVID got real slow, everybody was very quiet, clients pulled back. So our pipelines started to dwindle and the cycle came full circle, and the work that we would have done in ’22 just wasn’t there.
But what we did do over the course of COVID that we had started actually pre-COVID was really putting on… you know, getting the training, putting in place the tools so that we could compete with consultancies versus agencies. And that has been like a seven or eight-year journey with a huge piece of that effort and energy happening in the midst of COVID.
And then in ’22, without really having the financial security I would have wanted, I very deliberately hired a chief growth officer and expanded my sales team. Historically… you know, you mentioned a little bit ago that I’ve been doing this for 21 years. The majority of those 21 years, I was sales, and I had one salesperson. And now I have, in my sales department for the first time in my life, or the life of this company, I have one, two, three, four, five people.
Topher: Wow.
Nancy: And that has changed the trajectory of my organization, really taking a leap and investing in sales and investing in a comprehensive sales and marketing strategy and sticking to it and positioning. We also got real, real, real clear on our positioning and who we work for, and what we do for them. You know, regulated industries has always been our space. But we got super clear on financial services, health care, insurance, and manufacturing. And because of that clarity and that strategy, we’re having one of the best years we’ve ever had.
And I don’t like to say that because I certainly network with other agency leaders, consultancy, practice leaders, etc, and I know what’s happening out there. And it’s feast or famine, and I feel horrible about it. You know, we certainly share work. Like we have contractors that we use that come from my network, come from our network of dev shops that have been hit hard.
I definitely think we’re constantly looking at how we can be a good neighbor. And yet it’s hard to hear those stories. It’s really hard to hear what’s happening in the industry right now. And it makes me wonder, like, you know, what’s next? Because I think it would be a sad, sad day if, very much like the ISP space, if the big behemoths came in to monopolize the space.
Topher: Oh, yeah.
Nancy: I think that would be true for the web space too. I think it would be tragic.
Topher: It’s funny talking about what you do during COVID. I recently bought a car, like two weeks ago.
Nancy: Nice.
Topher: And tiny dealership, they had 35 cars, four people in the office. And before we left, I said, “Can I use your bathroom?” And was like, “Sure, go through that door.” And it was a huge warehouse. I mean, the warehouse was bigger than the whole lot. And right in the middle, it was one thing: A 35 foot RV. I said, “What is this?” He goes, “COVID.” They had to do something. They weren’t selling cars. He bought it to renovate and sell.
Nancy: Wow.
Topher: Everybody’s got this thing now when you say, Sorry, hands up to COVID.
Nancy: I mean, COVID changed all of us, right? I’m resentful if I have to wear pants now. I have more social anxiety than I’ve ever had in my life. I don’t like putting out… You know, like tomorrow… I’m thinking about my tomorrow. I have a speaking engagement in the morning. And then I have an event where I’m introducing the speaker. For both of those things, I’m going to have to think about what I wear. And I can’t tell you about how resentful I get about spending energy trying to fit in in spaces, when the truth is I could wear jeans and boots and be fine. But that’s not the world we live in. I mean, trust me, I’m with you. We are people of the internet. We do not dress to impress. We dress for comfort. I know it’s true.
Topher: Right.
Nancy: And yet because of my role in the spaces that I have to be in, it’s not always true. I have to be a chameleon, right? My preference is my genic slacker, get up and you know, where I’m like, Yeah, that sounds good. But I’m only going to get invited into those rooms that may hire me if I show up in a way that they’re comfortable with. And, you know, therein lies the dilemma. I wish I could be Mark Zuckerberg and just… I mean, not entirely. Not all of him, but just not have to care.
Nyasha: I’m with you. Gosh, you are hitting so many things I’ve been thinking about. I’m like, Yes. Like you can ask Topher. I come to WordCamps and I always dress up. And I change a lot of people. Some people notices I change at least twice a day.
Nancy: Oh, sure.
Nyasha: I have many things in a day, day outfits, and my hair is always done. And sometimes I’ll even put on makeup. That’s how I present in the community because I might need something, I might need an opportunity, I might need something. And I’ve been taught that I have to dress up or I won’t be taken too seriously, especially being a woman and a woman of color. And Topher and I we get on this… like you saw me earlier. I have on a yoga cap-
Nancy: I love it.
Nyasha: …and I have a T-shirt and I have a pajama bottoms. Like that’s how I am. 99% of the time that’s how I am. But when I go to WordCamps and I’m out and about, I’m putting on my dressy clothes, and I’m like a fashionista. And that’s not me at all. So yeah, you’re right. Like to get in these spaces, the things we do. But gosh, why do we have to sacrifice comfort all the time?
Nancy: I think it’s different for women. I think you hit the nail on the head. I think it’s different for women. It’s different for women of color. I’m a queer woman. I think it’s different for us, right? We already are breaking the rules. We’re already not exempted. They’re already doing us a favor letting us in this room. So we don’t want to really rock the boat too much farther.
And I think that’s how I was trained. Like you gotta try, you gotta try or they’re not going to take you seriously. And I am getting to the age where I’m like, You know what? Don’t take me seriously. It’s fine. You’ll live to regret it.
Nyasha: Oh, yeah. I love it.
Topher: You’re really great. We should have you on our podcast.
Nyasha: Yes.
Nancy: That’s an awesome idea. You should invite me to a WordCamp. That’s what I’m thinking. Sounds like you have more fun.
Topher: We’re gonna have in Grand Rapids.
Nancy: You tried at one point.
Topher: Yeah. And just didn’t have the inertia. We might try again next year. We considered having a Midwest WordCamp. Sort of Grand Rapids, Chicago, Detroit, Lansing, that kind of thing. It’d be fun to have you come down.
Nancy: I’d love it. I mean, I grew up in Michigan in the Upper Peninsula and I went to Grand Valley for like a minute and a half. So when I was going to college, I supported myself in college by waiting tables, by being a food server and my first food service job was with Marie Catrib’s at Marie Lebanese deli, which was the first one was in Houghton and then it was in Marquette, Michigan. So Marie and her husband Fred, may they both rest… well, I really don’t care about Fred. But Marie I hope she rest in peace.
She was just a lovely mentor and influence in my life. I developed a friendship with her. Actually, I have these very fond memories of doing nature walks with her and her talking about her culture and how she met her husband and how she married her husband and how different it was for her to be a Lebanese woman.
She taught me a lot about the world at a time when I was really young and didn’t really have the cultural view. I understood that there were other countries and I didn’t understand how they operate. Yeah, that perspective. Exactly. I know that Marie’s still exists in Grand Rapids, right? Isn’t it still there?
Topher: Oh, yeah.
Nancy: Because her son Fuad took it over. And he was a tyke. He was a little boy when… and he would come to the restaurant after school and get in the way and whine a lot. But now he’s a grown man running the restaurant. I understand that they maintain all of her recipes. So if I have my druthers, I would like you’d have WordCamp in Grand Rapids, so I can come and eat at Marie’s.
Topher: Marie’s is gone now.
Nancy: Bummer.
Nyasha: Oh, I was gonna say invite me.
Nancy: She made the best food. We’ve lived on it. The best food. It was so good. So amazing. And then she passed away from cancer. And I never got to see her again and thank her. And she divorced her husband. She left her husband somewhere in there.
Topher: Which is why you don’t care.
Nancy: Yeah. I mean, it was a very traditional Lebanese relationship. It may even have been arranged if I remember correctly or forced upon her. I don’t want to speak out of school about somebody else’s family. But you know, I mean, it was interesting to hear. And you saw how he treated her. She was just like furniture. But she was the brains of the operation. So it was fascinating.
Topher: Yeah, that would be fascinating to watch.
Nyasha: We should look into it and see if their son does any pop-ups every now and again. I know a lot of restaurants who closed especially during COVID they still pop up sometimes. And if they do, you all call me. Topher knows [inaudible 00:37:02]anywhere, I will be there.
Nancy: We can go together.
Nyasha: Yes, I love Lebanese food.
Topher: Such a foodie.
Nyasha: Yes.
Nancy: Me too. I do too. I love love. That was my first foray into Lebanese food. And it was hardcore. She made her own pita. We would sit and watch a little pita puff that she made. She was amazing. We both went to WordCamp Asia in Thailand and the food was good. It was pretty diverse.
The hotel we stayed at had a very, very expensive breakfast buffet. I mean, it was multiple rooms and it had a large British section. So you can get beans on toast and stuff like that.
Nancy: Wow.
Topher: It was interesting.
Nyasha: It was amazing. I have not eaten food that good since then. So Topher I’m in a crisis.
Topher: Oh, no. You know, they have Thai restaurants in the U.S..
Nyasha: Yeah, but it’s not the same. I went to my usual Thai spot and I wanted to cry.
Nancy: You were ruined.
Nyasha: I was.
Nancy: It’s what travel does—ruins us.
Topher: Here in Grand Rapids, our favorite Indian place is actually a Nepali place run by a guy from Bhutan.
Nancy: Yum.
Topher: So the food’s pretty diverse. But it’s really-
Nancy: Grand Rapids is a great town.
Topher: Oh, it’s so different.
Nancy: I believe it.
Topher: You should come back. It’s so… You know about ArtPrize, right?
Nancy: I don’t know, do I?
Topher: Oh, ArtPrize has been around for about 10 years now. It’s the world’s largest art competition that has a prize. And they give away $2 million every summer.
Nancy: What?
Topher: And the entire city is filled with art on the streets, in the stores, in the halls of buildings, there’s music, there’s food. And it goes on for a month.
Nancy: I had no idea.
Topher: Yeah. So it’s kind of end of August through September. And it’s fantastic.
Nancy: I gotta check it out, for sure.
Topher: Yeah, yeah.
Nancy: Are you inviting me to Grand Rapids? That’s what I’m hearing.
Topher: Yes, you’re hearing that.
Nancy: “Please come and visit.”
Topher: In addition, every year, we have a festival of the arts, and one of the arts is culinary.
Nancy: Oh, wow.
Topher: We have various festivals through the year. We have Polish festival, Italian festival, etc. But during Festival of the Arts, all of them get out their food carts. So there’s the Polish cart and the Italian cart and the Baha’i temple always has chicken on a stick. It’s just everybody. The Lutherans have a donut truck.
Nancy: Oh, I love it.
Topher: It’s amazing.
Nancy: Sounds like a fat girl’s dream. I’m in. I love all of it.
Topher: All right. So we’ve been doing this for 45 minutes now.
Nancy: Have we made people sick of us yet?
Topher: I don’t know. We’ll see what the comments are.
Nyasha: Never.
Topher: I’ve never had a comment on the podcast, so-
Nancy: You haven’t?
Topher: No.
Nancy: That’s good. That’s gonna be good. Because people only talk when they have something bad to say.
Topher: Oh, yeah.
Nyasha: Oh, yeah.
Nancy: Great. I do an announcement on email list every time we release one, and we get over 50% open on newsletter one. That’s about it.
Nancy: That’s awesome.
Topher: So that’s pretty good. All right. I’m gonna read the outro. This has been an episode of Hallway Chats, part of the HeroPress Network. Your hosts were Nyasha Green and Topher DeRosia. We’d like to thank Sophia DeRosia for the music, and Nexcess for hosting our network. If you liked this episode, please subscribe and mention us on social media.
Introducing Evelyn MainaEvelyn is a very unusual guest in that we brought her into the WordPress community! Years ago when Liam and Tara started this podcast they hired Evelyn as their transcriber. Since then, Evelyn has gotten to know more than 175 WordPressers by transcribing their interviews here on Hallway Chats. Her perspective as an “outsider” was quite heartwarming.
Show Noteshttps://havenscribe.com/
https://glowfaceportal.co.ke/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalyn-maina/
Transcript:Topher: Hey everyone, my name is Topher.
Nyasha: And my name is Nyasha.
Topher: And this is Hallway Chats. We’d like to take a moment to thank our sponsor, Nexcess, a Liquid Web. brand. Nexcess has been a solid web host for the entire HeroPress Network. So if you need hosting, check them out.
Our guest today is Evelyn. Welcome.
Evelyn: Thank you.
Topher: You know, I said that the American ways. Is it right? Just the normal way?
Evelyn: Yes. Right.
Topher: Okay.
Evelyn: Yes.
Topher: So by way of introduction, Evelyn does the transcription for Hallway Chats and a lot of stuff at HeroPress, and has been magnificent. So I feel like she’s already a part of the WordPress community because she read so much of our stuff. But that said, I know almost nothing about you, Evelyn. I don’t know your last name. I know you live in Kenya?
Evelyn: Yes.
Topher: And that you do transcription. That’s it. So who are you?
Evelyn: Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate. My name is Evelyn Maina. I’m an accountant by profession.
Topher: Oh.
Nyasha: Wow.
Evelyn: Yes. So here in Kenya we call it CPAK, and I have a degree in finance.
Topher: Okay.
Evelyn: So I started transcription since 2016. So that’s what I’ve been doing all along. And kind of like I no longer practice accounting.
Topher: Okay. So you’re a full-time transcriptionist now?
Evelyn: Yes.
Topher: Okay. What made you get into that, and what made you fall in love it so much that you quit your current job?
Evelyn: Well, it was actually by accident, I would say. Back in 20… actually 2015 I was working in an insurance company and I got exhausted at some point. I would get anxious and stuff like that, so I decided to take a break from accounting, and from that firm I was working for. And as I was doing that, at some point, I went back to that company to pick up a check that I had left. And a friend of mine told me… because the idea was to take a break for three months, and then get back to it.
Meanwhile, within that three months, the idea was to find another job. And I went back to that company, my friend gave me a contact of a person and she said, “By the way, there’s a way this friend of mine who work online…” She actually said “work online.” She never mentioned transcription. “…this friend of mine who work online, I probably would give you his contact so that you can… I mean, before you find something else to do, just try it out and see how it goes for you.
So at that point, I actually didn’t know what working online was or I had never heard the word “transcription”. So I contacted the friend and it turned out they were doing transcription. I tried it out. When I started I still was looking for an accounting job, but at some point, I felt like it was like a nice thing to do. That’s why I fell in love with it.
I never went back to accounting again because when I started I met some nice people in transcription. The idea of learning a lot of things, I’ve learned a little bit about WordPress, stuff about medical, a lot of things. You can imagine eight years that I’ve been doing this with different people. I get to learn a lot of things as I work. I usually say sort of like a free… It’s like I’m in school for free because I learn a lot of things.
The idea of flexibility is what kept me out of… I never want to go back to eight to five again. No more anxiety. I would say the pay is better than you used to earn back then. So all those factors combined I do not see myself going back there any time soon.
Topher: That’s wonderful.
Nyasha: Nice. You have such a lovely story.
Evelyn: Yeah, thank you.
Topher: My wife did transcriptions for a short while.
Evelyn: Oh.
Evelyn: It was technical stuff and she’s not a computer person, and she quite suddenly started asking me very specific technical questions like over dinner. She’s like, “Wait a minute, where’s this coming from?”
Nyasha: I love people who do transcription work, and I salute you, especially you, Evelyn, because I am.. my southern United States accent I know makes it difficult at times or lots of audio to pick up what I’m saying or the terms I use. So I’m so happy and thankful for you all.
Evelyn: True. True. But I think for the period I’ve done it, because I started in… 2016 was basically kind of orienting myself, getting used to it. So I would say 2017 was when I really officially started and decided this is what I want to do. So I think within that period of time I’ve have come across thousands of… Okay, I don’t know if it’s thousands but well, a lot of accents. And some have gotten used to them.
Well, there are some that you can come across that are quite challenging, but generally, I’m comfortable with majority of the accents that I come across.
Topher: I have been consistently very impressed with how you’ve managed to transcribe not just accents, but accents over a terrible connection. Have you ever deliberately studied accents or an accent to say, you know, I’d like to get better at polish or you know, or something from Asia?
Evelyn: No, not quite. What usually happens is when you come across a client, whether you’re introduced to or whatever means you find them, what happens is they just basically present whatever they have and you struggle with it. Sometimes the quality of the audio is… I don’t want to say horrible but it’s really not so good. And I think because of that you kind of like get… I don’t know. You just get used to it somehow.
Now, when you present something to me, more often than not, I’ll just handle it. It now comes naturally to me to be able to decipher those accents, different accents.
Topher: Very cool. I know you live in Kenya, but that’s all. Do you live in a big city? Do you live downtown? Do you live in a country?
Evelyn: Yes. I live in Nairobi. Nairobi is the capital of Kenya. So basically what happens in Nairobi has a different… we call them estates. I don’t know what to call them back there. Normally use British English. So different parts of the town. So I’m basically about 10 kilometers… You translate them two miles and I usually have a difficult time coverting them.
Nyasha: It’s okay.
Evelyn: I’m 10 kilometers from the CBD of Nairobi, central business district. Okay. Yes.
Nyasha: It’s about 6.2 miles. I’m learning. I’m learning. In Kenya or even our school system we usually use British English so it’s like for example back there you will say a trunk, we’ll say a boot, such thing. So yeah, that’s differences. In terms of distance, we use kilometers back here.
Topher: Cool.
Nyasha: Cool.
Topher: Do you have a family?
Evelyn: No, not yet.
Topher: Oh, okay.
Evelyn: And I understand in the US family means like you’re married and probably children.
Topher: Yeah. It doesn’t have to. You could say like, is your extended family in the city with you, like your parents around, you have cousins?
Evelyn: Okay. Well, I think in my line of work, I’ve noticed when people are saying family they most of the times reference a nuclear family, like have a wife and children. When you say family when you’re here, it’s sort of it could be your mother, your brother. But generally, I would say, I have a mother and brothers and sister, one sister and five brothers. So we are seven of us in my family.
Topher: Oh, nice.
Nyasha: But family of my own, not yet.
Topher: Okay.
Nyasha: That’s interesting because you’re right. Usually, people are asking, Do you have children? Are married? Like, with me, I am married, but I don’t have any children. And when I’m referring to my family, I feel like people assume I’m talking about children. But I have a big extended family or… I’m one of four children but I have 15 nieces and nephews and my mom had 10 siblings and my grandmother had 15 siblings, and we’re all still connected. So that’s my extended family. And they could be a cousin that’s twice removed but that’s still my first cousin to me.
So I love that you talked about that because, you know, people typically do mean like nuclear, but we want to know, like, who are the people in your life that you consider family. It could be even friends.
Evelyn: Yes.
Nyasha: And that’s awesome it’s seven of you all. I know, it was a very interesting growing up, right, with so many siblings?
Evelyn: I love it. It’s so nice having a bunch of siblings around. Although my sister is the firstborn in the family. So kind of like back when I was in primary school, she was married. So I’ve not gotten to experience her as I would have loved but she’s there. She’s more of a mom than a sister. We are so far much apart. It feels like she’s… And then my dad passed when I was younger so sort of like my mom and my elder siblings kind of brought us up.
Nyasha: Oh, that’s wonderful.
Topher: So… go ahead.
Nyasha: I was gonna say, You know what I want to talk about next over. You probably have an idea. I want to talk about food.
Evelyn: Amazing.
Nyasha: So one of my good friends he’s from Kenya and he teases me so often about the food because he knows I want him to cook for me. There is a Kenyan dish I want you to… first I want you to let me know like what Kenyan dishes would you recommend? If I was coming to visit, what would you recommend for me to eat? And then I need you to tell me about Kenyan pilau with the beef and the potatoes because it looks good and I want him to make it for me.
Evelyn: Yes, yes, the pilau. Food-wise, generally, we have dishes that are known all over by everyone. We have the pilau which you have referenced. It kind of like when you visit a home and you don’t find a pilau… It’s considered.. If you’re coming here, it’s one of the things that you must find. More often than not, you’ll find a Pilau. It’s a mixture of rice and meat and some spices.
And then we have Ugali. Ugali is maize flower… I think you call it corn back there. So it’s just a mixture of that and water and then it served we some veggies. So how do you spell it?
Evelyn: Sorry.
Topher: How do you spell that?
Evelyn: Ugali?
Topher: Yeah, ugali.
Evelyn: Yeah, Ugali. It’s U-G-A-L-I.
Topher: All right.
Evelyn: Ugali. But possibly, if you happen to come here and visit you probably won’t… It’s a common dish but you probably won’t find it. It’s not considered special when someone’s special is visiting or just someone visiting you for the first time, you probably you won’t find it but it’s quite common.
Topher: Okay.
Evelyn: Then we have Githeri. Okay, maybe let me just say we have so many tribes and each and every tribe have their own delicacies that they… but then there are those common ones that are known countrywide. Personally, I come from the central part of Kenya, and by tribe I’m a Kikuyu. So our main dish is Githeri. We call it Githeri. It’s a mixture of maize, what you would call corn back there, and beans. And then you just boil and once it’s ready, you can do a lot of things with it once it’s ready. And then we have street food. It’s a lot. I cannot cover the whole of it. It’s so much.
Nyasha: I love it. First of all, I love rice, for me. Second of all, that just sounds so wonderful. And the street food… I was Googling as you were talking and it just all looks so wonderful. The Ugali looks like… it reminds me of American cornbread. And then it’s sort of to me also it looks like Fufu a little bit as well.
Evelyn: Yes.
Topher: It looks like dense grits.
Nyasha: Yeah, like cornbread.
Topher: Well, it doesn’t look like Northern cornbread.
Nyasha: Oh, yeah. You have to get some southern cornbread. But yes, that’s so wonderful. I will put Nairobi down as one of my places to visit. My stomach guides my trip. So definitely on my list of places to go.
Evelyn: And also Nairobi it’s the only city in the world that has a national park, sort of like in the middle of the city or just near the city. So you get to experience that too if you happen to be in Nairobi.
Topher: Ahh.
Nyasha: Yeah, wow.
Topher: That’s cool.
Nyasha: What types of things can you do there?
Evelyn: Sorry.
Nyasha: What types of things can you do at the park?
Evelyn: Animal drives and I think we have lions and stuff like that. All the big five. No, no, we don’t have the… I’m not sure if there are all the big five now. But the big five is like the Lion, Elephant, cheetah. You get to see the animals and just a nice drive in the park.
Topher: That’s cool.
Nyasha: Wow, that is so cool.
Evelyn: It’s so close. It’s so near the city. It’s considered the only national park in the world—I don’t think there’s another one by now. But it is considered the only one in the world that has the national park in the city.
Topher: That’s cool.
Nyasha: Nice. That is amazing.
Evelyn: Yes.
Topher: I was gonna ask you how you got connected to Hallway Chats.
Evelyn: Oh, interesting. Yes. If I recall well, I think we must have met with Liam and Tala… Is her name L or R? I don’t know. I can’t remember. They had posted a job on Upwork-
Topher: Got you.
Evelyn: Back then I used to work on Upwork. So they posted a job and I applied. So that’s how we got connected with them. And then I worked for them for a long while. I can’t remember how long it was until they hand it over to you.
Topher: Yeah. And then we did a terrible job maintaining it for a while. You didn’t hear from us for a long time.
Evelyn: Yeah.
Topher: Well, that’s cool. I am at the end of my list of questions. Ny, do you have anything?
Nyasha: No, I don’t. I’m still thinking about the food. I think it’s just so wonderful. I do have another question. So I know you’ve been doing Hallway Chats for a very, very long time. We salute you and we thank you for your hard work again. You make the show happen, honestly. I wanted to ask you, so in all the time that you’ve been doing Hallway Chats, what has been the… I know you said you’ve gotten to learn a lot. What has been the most, I guess not fun, but I guess it could be fun. What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned while doing Hallway Chats transcriptions specifically? If you can name one.
Evelyn: Okay, all right. I think what I would say the WordPress itself. Most of the people talk about WordPress and I’m kind of like, “I don’t know what to do with it. I feel like joining because everyone talks about the community in WordPress, when you speak to people. And I think it’s such a good community hearing people talk about you go to a place for the first time, you meet a stranger sort of and you connect so well and you are received so well. I think it’s the only community I’ve gotten to hear about where people behave as such, so to speak, because people speak about how well they were received, how… I mean, it doesn’t happen quite often anywhere. Even in church. When I go to church, it rarely you get a stranger talking to you. It’s one of the stories that is so interesting that it makes me sort of like want to join WordPress.
And just to mention, from that, I’ve made… even though I’m not very consistent, I actually managed to create a small WordPress site for myself. Actually-
Topher: Oh, wow. That’s great.
Nyasha: That’s wonderful.
Evelyn: Yes. So I usually do DIY, learn, and implement. So out of the conversations on Hallway Chats, I can’t remember any one that can I reference but it generally that’s what you really talk about. And it’s been so nice to hear people talk about their experiences with WordPress. And because most of the times, they usually pick clients from time to time. I have a small website where… it’s sort of like a profile, my profile. And then I have another one where I do a side hustle I sell skincare products.
Topher: Oh, cool.
Nyasha: Wow.
Evelyn: Yes. And I made them out of the Hallway Chats conversation, even though I’ve not been able to go to any WordPress events, because of… sometimes my job is tight, I would say, but I’ve been able to do that. And it’s been so nice to get to do that myself.
Topher: That’s really amazing.
Nyasha: That is wonderful. And I know-
Topher: This makes me happy.
Nyasha: Me too. Like, Evelyn’s skin looks incredible. You should definitely buy her products. If you can’t see, just trust Ny. Trust Ny. But that’s wonderful. I hope you can hop into… you’ll love the community. I already consider you a part of the community. So when we do WordCamp Kenya, I’m coming.
Evelyn: Yes, please come.
Topher: Nairobi was just this last week, I think, wasn’t it?
Nyasha: Yeah. I think they did do it because I saw some tweets about it. So I will be there.
Evelyn: Yes, yes, yes, please come over. I’ll make sure you get all our types of food and then visit the park and all stuff like that. All the nice stuff.
Nyasha: I am looking at flights right now.
Topher: That’s fun.
Evelyn: I also consider myself part of the community by extension, so…
Nyasha: You are.
Topher: You are now.
Evelyn: Yeah.
Topher: All right, I’m gonna wrap this up. This has been an episode of Hallway Chats, a part of the HeroPress Network. Your hosts were Nyasha Green and Topher DeRosia. We’d like to thank Sophia DeRosia for the music and Nexcess for hosting our network. If you liked the episode, please subscribe and mention us on social media.
Introducing Aisha Adams and Marcus Burnette at WordCamp BirminghamIn February Topher and Cate went to WordCamp Birmingham and Topher was able to interview both Aisha Adams and Marcus Burnette in the hallway.
Aisha’s Links:* https://aishaadamsmedia.com/ * https://wordpress.tv/speakers/aisha-adams/ * https://www.facebook.com/aishaadamsmediagroup
Marcus’ Links* https://mburnette.com/ * https://profiles.wordpress.org/mdburnette/ * https://wordpress.tv/speakers/marcus-burnette/
Transcript:Topher: Hey folks, welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m your host Topher. This week we have an interesting collection of Hallway Chats from WordCamp Birmingham. A few months ago, Kate and I went down to work in Birmingham, and I got to talk with Aisha and Marcus. We’re going to listen to both of those interviews in this hour today.
But before we get started, I want to say thanks to our sponsor Nexcess. They’ve been really good to us and a faithful companion for a long time now. If you’re looking for a good web host, check out Nexcess.
Hey, folks, this is Topher. I’m at WordCamp Birmingham. I’m here with Aisha, and we’re having an honest-to-goodness hallway chat right here in the lobby of the venue. Aisha, where are you from?
Aisha: Hi, I’m so excited to be here. Actually, I’m originally from Birmingham, Alabama.
Topher: Wow.
Aisha: And that is why WordPress, y’all, is so important.
Topher: Good. You said “originally”. Are you still from here or did you go away?
Aisha: I actually live in Asheville. Asheville, North Carolina.
Topher: Okay. All right. Awesome. So I don’t know the South. Is that very far away? Do you fly?
Aisha: It’s about six hours away. Have you not been to WordPress AVL?
Topher: No.
Aisha: WordPress AVL. You gotta come to WordCamp AVL.
Topher: Okay.
Aisha: You gotta try it out.
Topher: I will do that. Did you drive or fly to get here?
Aisha: We drove. Actually, my husband… Whenever I do WordCamp, he’s like, “Let me just drop you off.” So he dropped me off and took a trip to Atlanta without me.
Topher: Oh. That’s not so bad.
Aisha: So I’m here with all my friends and enjoying… Just enjoying being with… It’s been so long since we’ve been together, you know?
Topher: Yeah. Oh, that’s great. So why are you here? What do you do for WordPress?
Aisha: Mostly just have a good time and meet people and learn a lot of things. But I like to get back to the community that gives so much to me. So today I spoke on diversity, equity, and inclusion. And when I’m not speaking on DEI, I’m probably talking about being an influencer using social media marketing to promote your blog. So I have a WordPress blog that has 64,000 followers. And then I also have my business on WordPress site as well.
Topher: How are you measuring followers on your blog? What tool do you use to know that?
Aisha: I actually use my Facebook because it has the highest engagement. I’ve been very lucky… Facebook recently picked me up to do performance bonus.
Topher: Oh, wow.
Aisha: So I actually get pay per view, per click, per share, per comment.
Topher: Wow.
Aisha: Yeah. So that’s been an amazing journey. So Facebook is like the hub for kind of where I do everything. But I also use my analytics. I have… You know Jetpack?
Topher: Yes.
Aisha: So I use the Jetpack plugin to track my analytics.
Topher: Okay, that’s cool. How long have you been doing this? How long you’ve been in WordPress?
Aisha: So a funny story. I was a school teacher and I had a car accident. I broke my neck, my wrist, and my leg.
Topher: Oh.
Aisha: And my car had actually hydroplaned upside down into a body of water. And I was in the water and thinking to myself, “Yes, I don’t have to go to work tomorrow.” So when I get to the hospital, they’re wheeling me into surgery, because I’m in and out, in and out, and I’m telling the nurse, “You gotta call my boss and tell her I can’t make it today.” And she looks at me and she said, “Sweetie, it’s gonna be a lot of days that you won’t make it,” and I got even more excited.
Topher: Okay, that’s your first clue that that’s not the job for you.
Aisha: It’s time. It’s time. I’ve done my time. I love the kids, I’ve done enough. And I’m gonna be a famous writer. So I started a blog and I had a very boring blog, because I was trying veganism and you know how the vegans are. ?
Topher: Oh, yeah.
Aisha: You go vegan, you got to tell everybody about it, how you did it and I would get like two people to my blog and be like, “If I could just get 20 people to my blog.” And a friend of mine reached out to me and he said, “Your blog is really nice, you have a really great platform, but you really have other things that we need to talk about. And right now, you will be more useful to us talking about those things.”
So I started actually writing for activists. So I worked with Black Lives Matter Birmingham-
Topher: Sure.
Aisha: …to tell some of the activism stories that they were working on. I talked to people who felt like they had been done wrong by the justice system. I still share a recipe-
Topher: Were you ghostwriting on their behalf or were you like doing journalism and telling their story?
Aisha: Journalism and telling their story and bringing people in and starting conversations about the things that mattered in my community.
Topher: Yeah, that’s good stuff. That’s better than veganism.
Aisha: Of course. I’m not even vegan anymore. But you could still find some really good food.
Topher: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that is really cool. I like that a lot. I have a personal project called HeroPress that facilitates people telling their stories about, you know, just the same sort of stuff. And it is very fulfilling to… because a lot of people I talk to, they’re like, “Oh, I don’t have a story. I’m not interesting. Why would anybody care?” And there’s an art to drawing that out, saying, “Listen, you are cool. If you do have a story, and it’s important, and you need to tell people. And then when they realize that that expression on their face, like, “Oh, wow, I didn’t know that I had this.”
Aisha: How did you learn about that like the power of storytelling? How did that come to you?
Topher: It’s funny. Now you’re interviewing me. When I was starting HeroPress, I didn’t know what it was going to be. My task was to come up with something. And I was talking to a young man in India, he was a developer, and he came to me frustrated one day said, “My company is failing. We’re not getting contracts from America. We don’t know what to do. What do I do?”
And I said, “I don’t know. I’m not a businessman. I’m not in India. I don’t know any of this stuff. But I went looking for somebody else who could answer that. So I found some business people in India-
Aisha: Oh, wow.
Topher: …who knew how to do it and I connected them. And they will help him. And then I thought, Okay, so this is what I want to do. I want to find people in repressed economies or whatever and help them. But I don’t want to come in as the great white savior and say, Here’s what you should be doing. I want to get people who are their neighbors who already succeeded, and then connect with them.
So that began my journey of finding those people. I go into a community and I find that somebody who’s done something. And often enough, they don’t know they’ve done something. Like, I have a job and I’m working, and like you have it, you’re working, they’re not, so tell them how you did it.
Aisha: So you’re a connector and you’re also an encourager.
Topher: Yeah.
Aisha: That is wonderful leadership.
Topher: It’s very, very fun. Probably because I mean that’s what fulfills me. Everybody loves what fulfills them. That’s my thing.
Aisha: Nice.
Topher: Well, thank you for talking with me. I hope to see you again. Do you get around to other WordCamps?
Aisha: Yeah. I’ve done, of course, WordCamp Asheville and WordCamp Birmingham but also WordCamp Philly and WordCamp Jacksonville and WordCamp Greenville and [inaudible Toron?].
Topher: Do you go to WordCamp Philly proper or do you go to US in Philly?
Aisha: I actually went to WordCamp Philly proper.
Topher: I did that once. Maybe twice. I’ve been to Jacksonville but none of the others you mentioned.
Aisha: I have not gone to worlds yet. I really want to go. So hopefully I will get an opportunity someday.
Topher: Yeah. You should do US. It’s not that far north this time.
Aisha: Okay. Where is it gonna be?
Topher: It’s right next to Washington DC.
Aisha: Okay. So what? Virginia?
Topher: I don’t remember the name of the town. And I’m not sure. It might even be in DC proper.
Aisha: Oh.
Topher: But it’s that close.
Aisha: I love Disney. I spent time there and I’ve been there for a while.
Topher: So. Yeah, yeah. It’ll be fun.
Aisha: Cool. It’s so great talking to you. Thanks for sharing your story.
Hi everybody. This is Topher. I’m at WordCamp Birmingham and I am here with Marcus Burnette. And he’s manning the GoDaddy booth with Jessica. Welcome, Marcus.
Marcus: Good, Topher. How are you doing?
Topher: I’m doing awesome. This is… what are we in? February? How many WordCamps you’ve been to this year? This is your first?
Marcus: Yeah. This is my first one this year.
Topher: All right. I don’t think there were very many in January. So what do you do in WordPress?
Marcus: I am on the GoDaddy Pro field team now. I’ve been working with WordPress for I guess about eight, nine, ten, years maybe. I worked at an agency in Orlando where I’m from for 10 years and we did Drupal work for a little while and then I switched over to WordPress after that. Didn’t like the direction that the Drupal project was going for our business. We were a small agency of four people and we didn’t have the time to take on another steep learning curve. So we decided to see what else we could do and WordPress was where we-
Topher: So what led you to GoDaddy?
Marcus: At the end of 2019 before the pandemic even, the agency that I was at was starting to have a little bit of just financial trouble. So it was just time to look for new work. And I actually ended up getting hired at the SkyVerge on the support team there. And so-
Topher: And then GoDaddy bought SkyVerge?
Marcus: Yeah. So I was at SkyVerge for about six months before GoDaddy acquired SkyVerge. So I came to GoDaddy via the SkyVerge acquisition.
Topher: So you were a developer, but you’re not developing now. Right?
Marcus: Yeah. I’ve been all over. So I started as a designer at the agency. And then because we were so small, took on development as another hat, as they say. And then when I left there, I had two criteria. One, I wanted to work remotely. SkyVerge had always been a remote team even before the pandemic.
And I wanted to not be part of an agency, but help the folks that were in my spot in the agency. So I specifically looked for support work where I was supporting agencies doing the work that I had been doing for 10 years because I knew the struggles that they would face and the ways that they needed help, and so on to be able to support that. So I started with SkyVerge on the support team after leaving the agency.
Topher: So practically speaking, what do you do day to day?
Marcus: So twofold. A lot of it is event-related. Coming into WordCamp is a big part of it. Also, I run a weekly meetup for GoDaddy Pro, where we have folks come on and provide value for our Pro audience. When I say pro audience, I mean folks that are building websites for other people, so agencies, freelancers, that sort of thing.
We have people come on weekly, and kind of share a little bit about what they do and who they work for, and provide some value to our Pro audience. So it’s a mix of that, mix of virtual events and then personal events.
Topher: Yeah, I’ve seen you in a lot of WordCamps. I guess, since pandemic, what’s your average?
Marcus: It feels that way. I have really only been coming to WordCamps for maybe the last year. So my first one was actually Montclair last year right before EU. So I had a chance to kind of dip my feet in with a smaller group before being dumped into the massive WordCamp that is EU.
Topher: Was that your first WordCamp or just your first one for GoDaddy?
Marcus: It was my first one for GoDaddy, but I think maybe only my second one, period, because even though I had been working with WordPress for a while with the agency, I wasn’t really a part of the community at that time. I think I went to one WordCamp Orlando, and then the pandemic happened, and everything got shut down for a couple of years. So Montclair was the first one back, I believe. I was able to go to Montclair. And at that time, I happened to be part of GoDaddy already.
Topher: It’s interesting to me. Before the pandemic, most people in WordPress had been to WordCamp at some point, one or two or five or whatever. But nearing the end of the pandemic, I met people who had been in WordPress for, quote, “years,” few years, and had never been to a WordCamp. Then one-
Marcus: I almost fell into that bucket. Right?
Topher: Yeah.
Marcus: I had one before. And it is interesting. It does feel like I’ve been around for a while working with WordPress, because I have. But I wasn’t really part of the community at that time. And it wasn’t until really towards the middle end of 2019 that I decided that, you know, I want to check out what the rest of the community is about and dip in there. And then all of a sudden, everything shut down.
Topher: So now you’ve been to some WordCamps, what do you think of them? Would you have recommended to yourself five years ago that, hey, you need to get on this?
Marcus: Yeah, I clearly didn’t know what I was missing when I was working in WordPress and not part of the community and part of the camps. And that’s both virtually and online. I mean, the community at camps is great. It’s definitely a different environment. But I wasn’t part of the community online either. And I feel like there’s so much that you’re missing out on if you’re not engaged with the community virtually. And then, you know, if possible, I know it’s not possible for everybody all the time to go to WordCamps, but if there’s one near enough to you that you can make it to.. I know that the WordCamp do their best to keep them reasonably priced so that everyone can attend if they’re, you know, close enough. So I 100% would encourage anybody to go to a WordCamp if they’re able to.
Topher: I have a friend, Andrea, who used to be on the WordCamp central organizing team and she has a WordCamp called “And then I went to WordCamp.”
Marcus: Nice.
Topher: And everyone who’s ever been to one immediately knows what it’s about. You hear those words? You know? Because everything changes when you go.
Marcus: It really does. I mean, I didn’t realize just how much the connections that you make with folks that at WordCamps, really help inspire you in your WordPress work, and give you all these avenues for help when you run into a wall.
Topher: Pretty much. Just today, I met a woman, this is her first WordCamp and she’s been in WordPress two years. I saw her standing by herself, not talking to anybody, which, that’s not right at WordCamp. So I went over and said, Hi. And I could tell that it was already having an impact on her that she’s probably gonna make friends here today that are gonna help form her career, just like everybody does.
Marcus: You don’t realize how much you’re missing out. And you don’t know what to look for when kind of on your own. But when you meet up with folks and they offer, you know, here’s what I do in WordPress, a lot of times its stuff you didn’t even think about. You’re like, Oh, yeah, well, you run this plugin. Oh, that sounds like a really interesting plugin. I wouldn’t have even thought to search for something like that. But now that you’ve told me about it, I don’t see why I haven’t been using something like that the whole time.
Topher: I can remember probably four or five WordCamps over my career where I traveled home thinking, Well, this changes everything. This changes the direction of my career, this changes everything I do, this changes everything. So it’s not just like your first WordCamp opens your eyes. It’s like every one of them as you go, it’s like-
Marcus: Yes. Oh, there’s something
Topher: Ah, wow.
Marcus: It spans everything from WordPress itself to the business around WordPress to how you just meet up with friends in WordPress. It changes your friendships, it changes how you do work, all of that.
Topher: Yeah. All right. Well, I appreciate you talking to me.
Marcus: Absolutely.
Introducing Robert DeVoreBelieve it or not, this is Robert’s second time on Hallway Chats! His first was back in 2017 with Liam and Tara. Since Ny and Topher had never talked to him on here, we decided to give it another go!
Show NotesWebsite | www.wpdispensary.com
Website | www.robertdevore.com
Twitter | @deviorobert
Twitter | @wpdispensary
Transcript:Topher: Hey everyone. My name is Topher.
Long pause
Nyasha: And I’m Nyasha. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
Topher: (laughing) Just pick it up. Just pick it up here, I’ll snip it out.
Nyasha: And I’m Nyasha.
Topher: And this is Hallway Chats.
Robert: And I’m Robert.
Topher: Oh, not you, Robert, yet.
Robert: Oh, okay. Sorry about that.
Topher: This is totally staying in the podcast.
Robert: Good. Good.
Topher: But first I have to say nice things about Nexcess because they’re paying the bills. Nexcess is a great hosting company. I really liked it. We’ve been with them for a while now. And they are paying the bills here at Hallway Chats, which is really great because I’m not sure it would work without it. So if you need a good host, try out Nexcess.
Our guest today, if you haven’t guessed, is Robert. Robert, is it Devore?
Robert: Yeah.
Topher: Okay, I didn’t know if maybe you were French and it was Devoir or something like that?
Robert: No, no. It’s French but everyone, since I’ve been born, pronounces it Devore. That’s the way I go with it. So I don’t know if they switched it up or not.
Topher: Cool. My last name is French too, if you go back far enough, of the rose. But there’s an Italian branch, and I think it means the same thing. So whatever. Robert, you’re here today. You and I have known each other on Twitter for a bunch of years but never really talked deeply. And you live kind of close to me. Like how far do you live from me?
Robert: I think like maybe three or four hours, I think.
Topher: Yeah. Okay. Are you from there?
Robert: Yeah. From suburban Detroit.
Topher: Oh, cool.
Robert: Born and raised.
Topher: Wow. Nice.
Nyasha: I’m sure you’re inviting Topher and I over soon, right?
Robert: Yeah, yeah, whenever you’re in town, just let me know.
Nyasha: Okay.
Topher: You know, we go Ikea all the time in Canton.
Robert: Okay, nice. Yeah, that’s not that far at all. It’s like 20 minutes from here.
Topher: Lucky you. It’s like two and a half hours for us. So who are you and what do you do?
Robert: I do a little bit of everything. I’ve been a freelance WordPress developer, I’ve run affiliate sites. Everything from start to finish I’ve done. But now I’m working full-time at SiteCare for the last almost four years, and still just building projects on the side still, just enjoying the fun of it. Being able to just open something up and come up with an idea and do it, I’m forever going to do that. So if I did sum it up, that would be who I am.
Topher: Cool. I know, a few years ago, maybe a lot of years ago now, you were building a product. Is that still a thing or did you put it away?
Robert: Yeah, it’s still there.
Topher: Cool. Want to tell us about it?
Robert: Yeah. WP Dispensary, I built it at the tail end of 2015 and I kept building it. I have a bunch of pro add-ons that were built for it. I was transitioning it into a whole software company and I was going to offer the hosting. But right now I’m just working through some payment processing issues, trying to get actual company to accept me to allow me to have subscription payments. So once that hurdle’s crossed, it’ll be back to full running again.
Topher: I was working at BigCommerce when things started to break loose for weed. And there’s a lot of question of which of the big outlets would accept payments and which ones wouldn’t and what it would mean for different shops and different states and all that kind of stuff. It was really interesting at the time. I think that’s about when I met you.
Robert: Yeah. I started using Twitter probably the middle of 2015. Then like six months later, is when I came up with WP Dispensary. I was toying with ideas. I built random themes and that one just stuck. Because I was a lifetime user and it was legal for medical here at the time. So it was like, All right, I’m gonna just jump in. I didn’t really see anything that was available other than a few big names. So I was like, I want to give them like an open source solution.
The beginning, if you go back to the very first 1.0 release, it was horrible compared to what it is now. But I mean, I was just toying around with it at the time. So it built up from there and it just kept building and kept building so I’m forever grateful for it because I feel like that’s what actually allowed me to join the space of WordPress on Twitter and have something that differentiated me so.
And the people that I talked to that would use it but not talk about it publicly, I’ve had people come to me and be like, It was cool to be able to talk to someone that was so open about it because they weren’t able to be. So a lot has changed since then. That was like seven years ago now. Eight years.
Topher: Right. Yeah, it really has. It’s just so strange to think it’s been that long.
Robert: Yeah. It feels like just yesterday.
Topher: A friend of mine, her birthday is tomorrow. It’s actually today. She’s in India. She’s 44 today. And she was commenting that COVID started on her 40th birthday. And I thought, Wow, we’re getting to the point where it was years ago now.
Nyasha: Wow. That’s an interesting way to view it. That just blew my mind just now. Sorry.
Topher: It’s pretty crazy.
Nyasha: Robert-
Topher: Yeah, go ahead.
Nyasha: I have a question for you, Robert.
Robert: Yeah.
Nyasha: In my opinion, what you’re doing is one of the cooler things I see in WordPress, combining marijuana and WordPress. Where did you first get the idea to do this?
Robert: It was because I was shopping, looking at different sites that had menus and nothing really looked the way I wanted it to look. And I went, “I bet I could rebuild something like that.” And at the time, I was working with custom post types more heavily. So I separated every type of product into its own custom post type at the time. So it was very, very low budget but it was what I envisioned that it could actually be compared to what they’re doing now. Because you get some companies now, they’re charging thousands of dollars per month just to run their software. So I feel like that’s a rip-off.
I wanted to have an alternative out there so other people could have an actual way to run their business without having to pay, you know, 25, 30 grand a year or more just to be able to have the functioning software, not including all the other hurdles they’re already having to face.
Topher: How far did you take it or plan to take it? Were you thinking of running point of sale in the store or that kind of stuff?
Robert: I toyed with it. But there was so many options already out there that dispensaries were set on. So I went, Okay, they’ve already got the kind of chokehold on that. They were funded companies. So I didn’t really feel the need to jump in first before having some type of solid base. The plan was to actually just connect to various point-of-sale services so you could just use our product for the website and then have everything run through the same point of sale automatically.
So that was the plan at the time. But it’s a closed community unless you got big money and you’re funded and you know the right people, so you don’t get as much of the connection that you would want. So it’s just been that constant hurdles, little stuff like that.
Topher: A friend of mine lives in a small town near me and he feels like… It’s a really small town. It’s just main street basically. It feels like main streets but mostly taken over by weed shops. So he did a little research and found that about half of them are owned by the same company.
Robert: That happens. That happens a lot.
Topher: Just running differently. Seems like it can make it hard for mom-and-pop shops.
Robert: Yeah, yeah. You get multi-state operators that will come in, they’ll pop up their spots right next door to another shop. The place I go to has three other places within viewing distance. So it’s like this one corner. It’s like this one little section. It’s good in a sense because they’re consolidating it in the whole area where they’re at and just putting it in one spot. But then you have like, literal, your parking lots next door to another spot’s parking lot. So it gets weird when you start looking at it like that.
Nyasha: You made me think of a very interesting question. We’ve talked a little bit before about this, Robert, but I just wanted to talk to you again, excuse me, especially since I’m in a kind of different place now. When we first met, when I first met Robert, I was living in a state South Carolina, but you know, they still have very strict laws against marijuana.
I now live in North Carolina, not too far but medical marijuana is legal here, which I didn’t know when I was moving here which is awesome. Oh, how has life changed for you from not only a business standpoint but a community standpoint as well since they legalized marijuana where you are located?
Nyasha: You don’t feel as nervous driving around now. That’s the biggest thing. I got a bag in my car and now I got to worry about getting arrested. If the cop pulls me over and it smells a little funny in here, I’m gonna have to go to jail. Now I don’t have to worry about that because cops drive up and down the street past these places. It is what it is. Now they’re focusing or should be focusing on something more important. So that’s the one thing that’s changed the most for me personally, just being able to move about and not stress as much. Which makes living life a little bit happier because now you’re not worried about one extra thing that you don’t really want to be. So I feel like it’s a good thing. It’s a net positive.
Nyasha: It is. And I’m glad you can feel that level of comfort. I hope it eventually extends to the entire United States. Topher and both went to work in Asia at Bangkok, and I was wandering around on the streets one night because that’s what I do in other countries and we found a weed shop. Their grand opening was going to be the next day, so they did a little soft opening that night. I never told you that, Topher?
Topher: No.
Nyasha: Oh, okay. I’m sorry. So I’ll tell the story. I was trying to go to the WordPress parties, and I didn’t sign up for any in advance, so I couldn’t get into any of the WordPress parties.
Topher: Oh, no.
Nyasha: So I was like, “You know what, this is a free night.” My husband was with me and I said, “Hey, let’s go to Chinatown. I heard Bangkok Chinatown is unreal. Let’s go.” So we hopped in a cab, went to Chinatown. And then we started wandering around, because it was just so much to do with so many people, so much food, so much alcohol, so much entertainment. It was just everything.
We were just wandering, and we saw a shop. It was kind of dark, and it was like glowing green and I was like, “This looks so cool. Let’s go in.” So we go in and we see marijuana lined up on the counter. And they’re like, ‘Hey, welcome in.” Topher can tell you that people were just so friendly in Thailand. They came in and it was like we were like family. And they were like, we are opening a cannabis shop. It opens tomorrow but we did a soft launch tonight. And they were like, “Would you guys like anything?” And then they just let us see. They took us on a tour of the whole shop. They gave us local ready-made craft fruit beer.
Topher: Oh, wow.
Nyasha: They had a weed loft. So we went upstairs and there was a weed loft. They had video games and a guy was playing the guitar. It was amazing and so comfortable. I have video of that. I’ll send you both the video. I was like, Wow, I’m thousands of miles away from South Carolina and you could not have this legally there. You could not have this safety and this comfort. But I experienced it in Thailand. They just legalized marijuana, by the way. I think it was January.
Topher: Oh, wow.
Nyasha: Was it January? If it wasn’t January, it was like recent recent.
Topher: Oh, yeah. WordCamp Asia was in February.
Nyasha: Yeah. So it was incredible. I don’t really partake in marijuana, but I think it should be legalized. I just really with what you said… It was like, you know, people are comfortable. They’re not stressed out about what’s going on and the police can focus on more serious things. That’s why I really, really love what you’re doing. I think making it easier and safer for people to purchase marijuana and use it, that should be the goal that we’re striving for, in my opinion. So I think you’re awesome for that.
Robert: Thank you. Thank you. And I bet you when you were there you probably didn’t see one angry face that whole time. Everybody was happy and having fun. You didn’t have to worry about a fight breaking out. It was a good time, I bet.
Nyasha: You are correct. I’ll have to send you all the videos of just hanging out with these local Thai guys playing God of War and drinking craft beer.
Topher: If you don’t mind, I’ll put that video in the transcript of this-
Nyasha: Yeah, I don’t mind at all.
Topher: …this episode. All right, cool. Robert, I was gonna ask if you go to WordCamps. And then I remember you don’t know.
Robert: No, no, I don’t. I don’t think I’ve ever really done any events ever. So it’s not that I don’t want to. It’s just it’s never worked out. Times in life I either had a kid right around the times where they were having all the ones locally. I’m not really a big traveler, I stay here. Don’t really leave the state or leave this area. So it’s got to be close and then the timing has got to be right for it. And it just hasn’t worked out yet. I’m working on it though. I’m looking into a few.
Topher: That’s cool. We pulled the plug on WordCamp Grand Rapids for this year.
Nyasha: Oh.
Topher: We’re gonna try it for next year.
Nyasha: Topher, that means you have to start WordCamp Michigan. And then we can finally… I’ll come there. I’m a traveler, so I’ll come and we can all hang out.
Topher: It was mentioned.
Nyasha: Nice.
Topher: That’d be a lot of work, though.
Nyasha: Oh, yeah, you’re right. You’re right. That’s our goal, though. We eventually want to do… I just started a WordPress meetup with my mentors in Columbia, South Carolina. And one day we want to have WordCamp Carolina and combine… because North Carolina is our snooty cousin. So that would be fun.
Topher: That’s fun.
Nyasha: That does lead me to a question. Robert, I know you haven’t been to any but it’s kind of hard to escape when one of the bigger ones happens. They’re all over social media. They’re all in the WordPress news. Which one would you be… It could be a flagship major one or it can be a smaller one. Which one would you be most excited about attending?
Robert: It would be less about the event and where it’s at. I think if I’m going to travel, I’m going to just travel to the one that looks most interesting to me. So the right topics, the right people, actually, you know, being at the event or hosting the event, I think that would be more important than the location of it. Or if it’s a big one like US or Europe, compared to a state one or a city one, I don’t think it would really make that much of a difference.
Nyasha: Gotcha.
Topher: Interesting. Has there ever been one where you thought, boy, if I was gonna go that’s the one. I wish I’d gone to that?
Robert: I can’t think of one offhand. Just because I don’t dive too deep. I see the news when it comes through.
Topher: Sure.
Robert: I’ll remember it or talk about it during that time. But then seven other thousand things happen and you know, it just gets lost in the shuffle. So I can’t think of one off the top of my head.
Topher: Well, if you get the chance, I highly recommend that they really change things in the WordPress game.
Nyasha: They are. I can’t wait to go to my first small. I’ve only been to bigger ones.
Topher: Really?
Nyasha: I can’t wait to go to my first small one. My first small one I’m going to WordCamp Rochester, and I can wait.
Topher: Oh, nice.
Nyasha: I guess I can ask you, Topher, how does it feel? I feel like they’ll be more intimate at a smaller one versus a major one. How do you feel about them?
Topher: They are. Actually, I went to Buffalo not too long ago, which is probably going to be similar in size to Rochester. And it’s maybe 100 people. And you get to meet everybody, every single one. At a big camp, there’s a lot of split-off. Like you’d only comfortably talk to so many people in a group at once. So you know, 20 people will go to dinner over here and 20 over there and a bunch of people go to the museum. They all split off and do things. But at a small camp, pretty much everybody sticks together. It’s a one big happy group thing.
We still had three tracks. I don’t know that I recommend three for a really small camp, because it does split people off. With three tracks and only 100 people and not everybody goes to every session, then your talks get low traction. You know what I mean? Because everybody’s trying to figure out where they want to go. We had considered even a one-track conference so everybody was all together all the time.
Nyasha: That’d be really cool.
Topher: Yeah, it’d be cool.
Robert: I think for a smaller one, that would be really cool.
Topher: We’ll see.
Nyasha: I actually don’t know how hard or easy this would be because of the United States, you know, marijuana is legal in certain places and it’s not in others. Robert, in Michigan, have you heard of any canna-tech-type conferences or events going on where you can come and kind of like just talk about cannabis and tech?
Robert: Yeah. They have a couple that’ll pop up. They have other ones that are just more geared towards the cannabis products themselves. I still haven’t went to none of those either. So I’m not targeting WordPress and saying I’m not going to no WordCamps ever. Yeah, basically. Yeah. I’m at the house. Now with a three-year-old too now, I can’t ever leave. He won’t let me.
Nyasha: Ooh.
Topher: We need WordCamp Devore and it’ll be at your house.
Nyasha: Yeah. And we can set up cameras and do it virtually too. That’s what we need. Nice WordCamp Devore Canna-tech Virtual conference. We could put it together. I know some sponsors. That would be awesome.
Topher: I’ve considered the idea of micro camps. Probably three or four times now I’ve tried to join the core contributor team out of WordCamp contributor day. And the idea is that you spun up with track and you pick a ticket and you commit code and you’re a committer. The actuality is it takes seven out of your eight hours to get Docker set up. And then people have long drifted away and no one’s interested in helping and it’s just over.
So I considered a camp of maximum 20 attendees and have it be three or four days. And you go ahead and you spend the whole first day doing Docker, but then you’ve got two or three doing Core, or whatever your theme is. I haven’t done it obviously. I don’t know that anybody has. But I think it’d be an interesting idea.
Robert: Yeah, yeah. I think stuff like that would be beneficial to WordPress in general. Like just people not having to be rely on, oh, it’s a WordCamp officially so now I can focus on this one. Instead, you can make your own little things where it’s now just a coding session about WordPress where you guys are hanging out having fun, but also doing a bunch of cool stuff.
Or, you know, if I went the route where I was like, Okay, I’m gonna combine the weed and the technology together, and we’re gonna have like a weed camp and everybody that likes WordPress and weed comes and hangs out, and you’re 21 and over, here it’s legal, so you can just do it. So anybody that comes to Michigan would be able to use it if they wanted to or buy it from shops.
So I feel like stuff like that would be cool. I just don’t feel like I’m going to be the one to go, “Yeah, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to start that.” I can’t even get myself to a WordCamp or an event. So I don’t see myself hosting and running one like that. But someone else is free to take the idea and run with it if they want to. That would be one I would highly consider going to.
Topher: What would swag be like in a weed camp?
Nyasha: Oh, my gosh.
Robert: Great. It would be great. I mean, if you like it and you’re into it, or you want to, there’s a ton of stuff that you can try and a ton of different options. So it’s not the same as it was 40, 50 years ago. There’s a lot of different things that are available now.
Nyasha: Robert, that makes me remember something we talked about. I know you talked about how the cannabis industry is just going fast and it’s hard to keep up with it. You had your idea in 2015 and you’re still working on it? How do you feel about it like now versus when you had it in 2015 overall?
Robert: I feel overall technology-wise in the way it’s built, it’s a billion times better. And it’s something that I’m actually where I’m proud to show it and say, here’s a product I’m willing to sell and actually, say, put my stamp of approval on it more than just it’s a side project that might live on GitHub for a while. So I’m happy in that sense.
But then I’m also still frustrated that I can’t get everything just moving forward the way if I built the regular WordPress business where I’m like, I’m going to host your WordPress site and offer you some type of maintenance or something like that, they won’t have no problem with that. But since I’m even involved in the industry whatsoever, I can’t do it. They won’t accept it because your cannabis adjacent. I’m not touching the product, I’m not doing nothing with that, it’s just software and hosting, they still don’t care.
Topher: Interesting.
Robert: So that’s something that I’m still frustrated with. But overall, I’m happy with the product itself, and I wish I could get it out and push it out to more people and allow more people to use it and know that it’s a viable option.
Topher: Do you think the weed industry will ever simmer down and become more like the alcohol industry? We have liquor stores, but I don’t have bar on my street.
Robert: Yeah, yeah. Because if you look at the stock market, most of these companies are way, way under and going down further every single quarter. So the product is so mass-produced now, you’re getting things for like dirt cheap in most places. Like when it first became recreational here for a regular to be like 70 bucks for a high-quality one. Now you can spend like 30, 35 to get a really good quality one.
Topher: Oh my gosh.
Nyasha: So the pricing has dropped drastically on everything because there’s so much of an available you can only sell so much. And I think that’s going to allow the good quality products and everybody that likes their main state products that you get will the ones that stick around and all the smaller ones will just disappear and do something else. That’s what I feel anyways.
Topher: I’m a whiskey guy. I’m into scotch. You can make better product by spending years refining it. Like a barrel of Scotch might sit there for 15 years. Aside from having a good strain, is there something you can do to weed to make it 10 times the value of something else, like a super excellent bottle of scotch?
Robert: It’s just the way you grow it. You’ll get certain harvesters that’ll use a lot of nutrients that aren’t really like organic or all that healthy. They don’t flush the products to get all that out at the end. So when you’re using it, you can taste the more bitter tastes. So when you’re doing the right things and you’re putting the quality product out, a user of this product will know it right away. They might try new ones if they haven’t seen your name before, but if it’s not something up to par with what they know, they’re out and they’ll never touch it again. So it’s the good quality. It’s just the way you grow it, how you cultivate it. Certain strength will actually be-
Topher: Organic.
Nyasha: Yeah, yeah, actually. Yeah. 100%. If you can get everything organic for it. It’s better. I’ve done it myself before where I’ve grown with just straight organic product and it worked wonderfully. Everything turned out great with it. None of the chemical taste or… You know, if you don’t want to ingest a lot of chemicals anyway in your normal day, you’re vegan or you’re looking at a health conscious, this is something that you’re going to be worried about.
You’ll see a lot of edibles now are changing over to vegan options and switching things up, because a lot of people won’t use their products if they can’t. So they’re trying to reach more people. So it’s becoming more mainstream. I think that the big thing long term will just be the quality products will stick around and the rest will just be seen in mom-and-pop shops and little places here and there if they can get someone to sell it for them. But it won’t be the nationally known.
You know, like cookies brand. Everybody knows cookies. So it’s just one of those things where you’re gonna stick around because everybody knows you and they love you. And the rest will just fade.
Topher: All right. Nyasha gotta be out of here in a couple of minutes. Anything else you wanted to say, Ny?
Nyasha: Oh, no. That was awesome. Have you all seen the movie How High? When the guy is explaining the marijuana, he’s like, wow, did you go to weed college? That’s how I felt just now because Robert was like, That’s the… I just felt like, oh my god, this is amazing.
Robert: I’ve watched that movie enough times. So it might just be blind conditioning from watching it so much.
Topher: That is the weed college.
Robert: Yeah.
Nyasha: This is wonderful. Thank you, Robert. This is amazing technology that you’re putting out here. I know you’re going to have it done and it’s gonna be great. Just remember us when you become a billionaire.
Robert: When the business grows beyond what I can do myself, I’m pulling from people that I know. I’m not going to try to just outsource to whatever place I can find the cheapest labor. I’m going to find quality people that actually want to help and would be perfect for the roles that I’m trying to fill. So if that’s you, then you know, you might be hearing from me soon. And then you’ll be a part of the billion-dollar business.
Nyasha: Oh, yeah, I have multiple jobs. I’ll add another. You come in on too, Topher?
Topher: Yeah, sure. All right, I’m gonna read the outro here.
This has been an episode of Hallway Chats, a part of the HeroPress Network. Your hosts were Nyasha Green and Topher DeRosia. We’d like to thank Sophia DeRosia for the music and Nexcess for hosting our network. If you liked the episode, please subscribe and mention us on social media.
In November 2022 Topher went to WordCamp Italy in Milan. While there he had conversations with James Baldacchino, Luisa Ravelli, Caroline Crossland, Paolo Scala, and Samah Nasr.
Topher and Sophia met with Benjamin Zekavica and Moritz Bappert, both WordCamp Europe 2023 volunteers.
Topher and Sophia met with Evangelia Pappa, Lena Lekkou, and Hacer Yilmaz, all three WordCamp Europe 2023 Organizers.
Topher and Sophia met with Amy for the first time in this episode. We talked about WordPress, Linguistics, and WordCamp Europe.
Topher and Maestro met at WordCamp Buffalo a few weeks previous, and then conncetted again in Hallway Chats to talk about his WCEU talk.
Topher and Iolanda got some time at WordCamp Italy in Milan to chat about her experiences in WordPress.
Topher and Maja got some time to sit at an outdoor cafe in Barcelona Spain and talk about how she got into WordPress.
Topher and Nyasha had the opportunity chat with Lesley Sim about life before WordPress, free diving, and founding a company.
Topher had the opportunity chat with Alice Orrù while at WordCamp Italia in Milan this last November. Alice is Italian, but lives in Spain.
Topher and Nyasha have a great conversation with Tom on topics ranging from art, design, and artificial intelligence.
Topher and Vassy meetup for a live, in-person Hallway Chat at WordCamp Europe 2022 and talk about her work in Digital Marketing.
In this episode of Hallway Chats we talk with Matt Mullenweg about travel, photography, Tumblr, and a little WordPress.
In this episode of Hallway Chats we talk with Greg Ziółkowski at WordCamp Europe about working on the Gutenberg project.
In this episode of Hallway Chats we talk with Aurooba Ahmed about how she got into WordPress and her ongoing work in making Gutenberg blocks.
In this episode of Hallway Chats we talk with Aurooba Ahmed about how she got into WordPress and her ongoing work in making Gutenberg blocks.
In this episode of Hallway Chats we talk with Aurooba Ahmed about how she got into WordPress and her ongoing work in making Gutenberg blocks.
In this episode of Hallway Chats we talk with Tammie Lister about what it really means to be a web designer these days, the ability of developer to niche down, and the future of Gutenberg and the WordPress editor.
In this episode of Hallway Chats we talk with Jen Swisher about being a long term WordCamp organizer, but also organizing WordCamp US 2021.
The 2021 WPMRR Virtual Summit is kicking off on September 21st and Cate and Topher talk with Joe Howard about why he started it and what it's like to start up a new virtual summit.
Seth is a WordPress designer and digital marketer who has been active in the WordPress community in the Philadelphia for more than a decade. Join us while we talk about podcasting, digital conferences, digital swag bags, and much more!
Aditya hails from Pune, India, and has been working in WordPress for more than a decade, as well as being a WordCamp organizer multiple times and volunteering at other events. Join us as we talk about how he got into WordPress, what he's gotten from the community, and what he's given back.
Dan and Michelle have been working together to make WordFest Live be a top notch, world-wide WordPress conference. We talk with them about it works and the difficulties of making a global event happen.
The DeRosias are the founders and stewards of HeroPress. If you don't already know about it, HeroPress tells the stories of people who have leveraged WordPress and its community to change their lives and achieve their goals. Through these stories, global connections are made and conversations are had that build a stronger community, more employment, and educational opportunities, and easier access to resources.
Stephanie Hudson is a geek, entrepreneur, inventor, and craft beer lover. Her passion is helping grow agencies to scale and thrive through her white label company FocusWP.
Bet Hannon discovered WordPress in 2008 and has been involved in the WordPress community since 2013 at meetups, WordCamps, and on the support team. Bet runs an agency, Bet Hannon Business Websites, where she specializes in WordPress and accessibility.
Patrick Rauland is obsessed with eCommerce. He's created eCommerce websites for clients, worked at WooCommerce in support, development, and product management, and he creates courses on LinkedIn Learning for WooCommerce. He's written several books on eCommerce, and also runs WooSesh, an online conference all about WooCommerce.
Ken Elliott lives in Columbia, South Carolina, where he is a full-time webmaster at a law firm. He's also a co-owner of BKreative Media Solutions, an agency that supports small and medium businesses with digital branding solutions. He's a core organizer of his local WordPress meetup, which is on a bit of a hiatus to the COVID.
Kyle Maurer 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.
Heather Steele is the founder and CEO of Blue Steel Solutions. Heather started her marketing agency 10 and a half years ago because she was tired of seeing great people fail just because they couldn't clearly communicate their value.
Machielle Thomas 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.
C. Shakhawat Sultan is the business development manager at CodeRex. He works hand in hand with the developers and the marketing team to create useful plugins. He is passionate about WordPress and loves to contribute to the community.
Rachel Makool is a senior community manager at GoDaddy and has been there for five years, managing the online community and other community programs. She's been a community professional for over 15 years. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and loves to hike, travel, and she's a collector of many things. She also sells odds and ends online and has done so for 20 years.
Over the course of seven years, Hans Skillrud built a 12-person web design agency in downtown Chicago and then sold it in early 2019, to focus his attention on his new start up, Termageddon. Termageddon is an auto-updating privacy policy generator.
Chris Ford spent the first 20 years of her career working as an agency and freelance designer. 5 years ago, she took a hard left into project management. Today she’s a hybrid project manager and designer at Reaktiv, a WordPress VIP partner.
Winstina Hughes is an Assistant Regional Planner for the Maryland Department of Transportation. She created her first WordPress blog for a Geographic Information Systems assignment, and followed it soon after with one on community development and suburban planning. She has presented at WordCamp NYC, WordCamp US, and WordCamp Austin. A WordPress Meetup co-organizer, Winstina led WordCamp NYC 2018.
Emily Hunkler is the director of growth at GoWP. She lives just outside Atlanta, Georgia with her two daughters and her husband. When not working, Emily loves running both on the road and trails. On weekends, she also loves hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Annejeanette Washington Collins is a teacher at both the elementary and collegiate level. She teaches children at a school in western Florida, and college students in Fort Lauderdale. Annejeanette is a WordPress advocate, blogger, and WordCamp presenter.
David Zimmerman has been working in SEO for about 12 years, five years on his own as Reliable Acorn. Over the past couple of years, he's been speaking at WordCamps about SEO and client management.
Caylin White is the growth manager at GoWP. She's a marketer and an artist who shares her art on CBCinked.com.
Anyssa is a designer and front-end developer from São Paulo, Brazil. She is co-founder of Haste, an agency focused on delivering great user experience with WordPress. Anyssa is also part of the WordCamp São Paulo organizing team.
Pritesh leads growth marketing and operations at BlogVault, MalCare, WP Remote. Previously, he co-founded and sold Uninstall.io. Here's an entrepreneur at heart who loves challenging the status quo. Pritesh says he is a hardcore growth geek.
Cate DeRosia has wandered around WordPress for the last five years speaking, organizing, and being an engaging human. Currently, she's building out a family business and investigating how to expand HeroPress into a new kind of membership site.
Liam Dempsey and Tara Claeys review the past year of the Hallway Chats podcast, discuss their views about success, share advice and announce plans for year 4.
Oliver Sild is a 26-year-old entrepreneur who has built three companies today and is very active in the cybersecurity landscape. WordPress folks would know him as the founder of a website security company called WebARX.
Nigel Rodgers likes helping people with WordPress, whether it's building new websites, fixing websites, organizing meetups and events, and connecting people.
Dean Burton has been working with WordPress as a customer success lead at WP Buffs. He works alongside the team there to make sure that their clients and agency partners are successful.
Danny Rubio is a digital content producer based in Utah who loves WordPress and makes some mean tacos.
Matt Medeiros is the host of the Mattreport.com, and you can find him in his day job over at Pagely.com.
Akshat Choudhary is the founder of BlogVault and MalCare. He's been in the WordPress community for eight years. Mostly a developer, Akshat is also growing his team and dealing with the challenges that come along with that.
Beth Livingston is a former WordPress designer, developer, turned online educator. She helps WordPress folks learn to get projects completed on time, within budget, with features that meet the client's business requirements.
Tom Fanelli is the CEO of Convesio, a new managed WordPress platform. Tom lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife and four kids. Originally from Fort Myers, Florida, he served in the army right out of high school. After serving in the army, Tom went on to music school and then started his tech career in agencies.
Natasha Burtenshaw-deVries is a digital marketing and SEO specialist. She lives near Toronto, Canada and enjoys sailing, hiking, skiing, playing trombone, soccer in Toronto FC.
Shannon Shaffer is a mom, travel enthusiast, book lover, and doer of WordPress stuff. A self-proclaimed geek, Shannon owns Purple Finch studios, a small digital agency located in Pennsylvania. Welcome, Shannon.
Keanan Koppenhaver is the CTO at Alpha Particle, a digital consultancy that helps their clients plan and execute their digital projects.
Allie Nimmons is a self-taught WordPress user who has done the agency thing, done the freelance thing, done the business owner thing … and is now doing the Community thing! She does support and community outreach at GiveWP and is a GoDaddy Pro Ambassador. Her biggest joy comes from talking to other community members about how to maintain and foster positive and inclusive environments on the web.
Allison Smith is a journalist turned marketer who transforms tech talk into irresistible stories. An avid reader, she has a penchant for books, chocolate, and content first design.
Matthew Rodela is a recovering IT consultant who now builds websites for a living. Based out of the Washington DC area, Matthew has found success with his turnkey website service and enjoys sharing his experiences running it with other web consultants.
Shayna Diamond loves WordPress, CSS art, clean-code, accessible websites & building inclusion in the tech community. She co-founded Shift/Enter to help people, especially those who are underrepresented, succeed in technology-related careers.
Joe LoPreste says he's very passionate about inclusive design for WordPress and considers himself a web accessibility advocate. He travels around the US giving presentations to WordPress developers, designers, and agencies about web accessibility.
Monique Dubbelman is an independent UX designer from the Netherlands. She builds websites for small business owners and teaches at the Amsterdam University of Applied Science. When she's not behind her computer, she likes to whisper to earthworms in her garden.
Fairy Dharawat is a cat-loving lassie who writes and draws while diving headfirst into the wonderful world of comics, admiring their adventurous plot lines and intricate illustration.
Stacey Harris is marketing strategist working with entrepreneurs who are tired of spending hours online with no results. Through her podcast, membership community, and agency she supports frustrated leaders in getting results online by building connection.
Paul Oyler is a self-proclaimed crazy, old dude, who wishes it were still the 1970s, but who also loves 21st-century technology.
Reed Gustow is active in his local WordPress community. A local meetup organizer and former WordCamp organizer, Reed has been building websites and teaching WordPress for a long while now. Reed calls Philadelphia home.
Christina Workman is a frontend developer, support specialist, trainer and community leader in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Her favorite things include furry creatures, the colour purple, tea, Wapuu, and Brit TV.
A former MousePlanet MouseStation Podcast co-host, Mike Demo is a lover of open source first, specific tools later. Before joining BoldGrid as a community evangelist, Mike spent years in the financial and insurance industries. He believes in sharing his business acumen and marketing insight. He presents regularly on open source topics like WordPress and Joomla! – where he was a board member of that project.
Courtney Robertson has a background in teaching WordPress, working as a contractor with Modern Tribe, The Events Calendar, and first started using WordPress with version 2.5.
Starting from the back of a van while touring the world with his band, Vito Peleg made the transition from a freelancer to an agency, growing to six figures by the end of year one, and to a team of 12 by the end of year three.
Liam Dempsey and Tara Claeys review the past year of the Hallway Chats podcast, discuss their views about success, share advice and announce plans for year 3.
Eric Karkovack has been a web designer since 1996, back when static HTML and Netscape ruled the web. In 1999, he became a home-based freelancer and has been there ever since.
Miranda Knee is a web developer who strives to build appealing, responsive websites. She's experienced in WordPress and familiar with creating custom themes. Miranda loves to learn and to grow. Outside of coding, she enjoys yoga, sci-fi and fantasy books, movies, and weightlifting.
Lee Drozak is a WordPress teacher, Doer and Fixer, working with small business owners. She gives her client a different perspective for their digital space so that they can find solutions that work toward their business goals.
Carrie Dils is a web developer instructor and freelance coach. She teaches front end web development and WordPress courses over at LinkedIn Learning.
Kerry Carron is passionate about helping others. She educates, inspires, and networks with freelancers, sharing her experience, teaching skills, and offering actionable attitudes to shift mindset in the direction of success.
Michelle Ames says she is an overextended, over-committed entrepreneur, author, blogger and social butterfly. As a WordPress fanatic, Michelle is the Head of Customer Success at GiveWP.
Sophia DeRosia is a young WordPresser who's interested in multiple aspects of life. She's a taskmaster and the chief lover of dinosaurs.
Chris Lauzon a former WordPress guy who helped people build websites. Chris is now a consultant helping various startups and nonprofits ramp up sales and support teams.
Marius Jensen is an all-round work potato with a passion for helping others help others. Marius enjoys flying under the radar and represents the WordPress.org support community.
Alex Sirota is a father, a husband, a son, director of NewPath Consulting, contributor in the WordPress Toronto community, a trumpet player and a University of Michigan football fanatic.
Up until last year, Rahul’s only public speaking had been once – in 4th grade. Last year, he stepped out of his comfort zone and now speaks at meetups and WordCamps about once a month. Rahul is the co-founder and CEO of Scale Dynamix, where he manages thousands of WordPress websites.
Jonathan works in Portland, Maine for an employee-owned company called Qualpay. Jon went to his first WordPress event in 2016 and has been hooked on WordPress and its community ever since. When not working, Jon enjoys hiking, traveling, cooking, and hanging out with his cats and wife.
Sara Cope is a software engineer working remotely for the US Federal Government. She's passionate about education and diversity in tech and loves helping others level up their skills.
David Wolfpaw is a professional web developer focused on helping small businesses by providing ongoing WordPress maintenance and support through his service FixUpFox. He helps organize both WordPress Orlando and WordCamp Orlando.
Charlie Reisinger serves as the director of technology for Penn Manor School District in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. His first book, The Open School House chronicles more than 15 years of open-source learning programs at Penn Manor.
Lisa Stambaugh has been known as “Web Diva®” for over 20 years. She is a knitting enthusiast, curly girl and cookie artiste. That’s not all! She tells is also she is an obsessive wordsmither and musical theatre devotee.
Val Vesa loves social media. He is very passionate about technology and online marketing. Some of his interests include CMS hardening and tech writing. He loves to take photos, go swimming and spend time with his family.
Evan Scheingross has been creating websites since the last century. Daniella Knelman has a 14-year background in higher education. Together, they're now trying to grow Evan's business into something that can sustainably support their family of four.
Tiffany Bridge 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.
Rene Morozowich is a WordPress developer from Pittsburgh, PA. She works with agencies and small businesses and loves planning, organizing in all of the details. Rene is an introvert who loves rollerskating, naps, non-fiction, and talking about money.
William Jackson has advanced degrees in education with a focus on educational technology, social media, and STEM, William has worked for NASA as an internet and technology instructor, and as a technology consultant with the Florida Department of Education. He is a past professor at Edward Waters College.
Birgit Olzem says WordPress is her passion. She is the mother of five, granny of one, a coach and a trainer. She loves to connect people in the WordPress ecosystem and she advocates for mental health awareness and inclusiveness
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.
Max Rice is the CEO and co-founder of SkyVerge where his team builds tools for e-commerce merchants, both large and small. Beka Rice is the head of product at SkyVerge and manages Jilt, an email marketing tool for e-commerce, along with over 50 WooCommerce plugins.
Alastair McDermott is a business strategist and marketing consultant. He helps professional services providers get more visitor website traffic and sell more online. Building websites and software since 1996, Alastair is the author of Running a Website with WordPress: A Quick Guide for Business Owners.
Cameron Jones is a WordPress developer from the Gold Coast, Australia. He currently works for Digital Makers building websites for enterprise clients, and independently, he develops custom plugins. Outside of WordPress, he's busy playing for sports clubs and parenting.
Svetlana Kouznetsova is a user experience and accessibility consultant who is deaf and works with businesses to make their products, services, events user-friendly and accessible to more people. She is a book author and an international speaker.
Dave Smith is the founder of Gravity Wiz and a Rocketgenius developer since Gravity Forms' infancy. He is a fun, friendly guy who enjoys being productive just a little too much.
Chris Jones is a digital marketing strategist and blogger, and founder of Socialbawse.com. He's a big fan of all things Apple and loves WordPress for blogging and websites.
Lindsey Miller is a WordPress pro by trade and a political junkie at heart. When she’s not traveling the world with her husband and two tiny humans, she can be found creating magic for customers at Liquid Web on the Managed WP team.
Sal Ferrarello is a WordPress developer who has contributed to WordPress core, Genesis, and is the author of the Bootstrap Genesis Theme. Along with his volunteer work in WordPress community, Sal has spoken on variety of topics at many WordCamps.
Evelyn is a strategist and designer for Design Powers, Nice Work, and Awesome Women Entrepreneurs. All three businesses utilize her creative expertise to assist clients and colleagues to connect and communicate their services to their desired target market.
Malcolm suggests that he is potentially known and forgotten in the WordPress community. He has done a little of everything with WordPress and is currently the co-founder of PressTitan, a premium managed WordPress posting service.
Michelle and Brett are informal partners in business and in life. Brett is an engineer, Michelle is a designer. Daily, they balance living and working together 24/7 while building their respective businesses.
Jan Dembowski has been volunteering with the WordPress Support Team for the past 12 years. He works for OpenDNS as a systems engineer where he helps the sales team. He is learning to master 3D printing and enjoys the occasional coffee.
Kevin Cristiano is a partner with Tadpole Collective where he works on business development, database configuration, and web development. He's active in civiCRM, an open-source community. He's also deeply involved with organizing WordCamps through the WordPress global community team.
Sally Gradle is a WordPress business owner living in Northern Illinois with her husband. Her hobbies include gardening, knitting and crochet, and cooking.
Meher Bala is a WordPress freelancer from Mumbai, India. She has been working with WordPress for 11 years. She is a foodie by heart and loves to travel.
Vaughan has been working on the web for 20 years, after falling into it by accident, and with WordPress since 2006, which was more deliberate. He's been freelancing since 2014 specializing in web design and web content as Pilcrow and Pixel.
Lisa Ghisolf is a freelance designer & WordPress developer. She’s worked for 20 years in the field and 10 years in WordPress.
Jason Yingling builds WordPress sites focused on results, he's digging deeply into Gutenberg and shares what he learns on his blog at Jasonyingling.me. When not working with WordPress, Jason likes reading Elmo books to his one-year-old, he says, not to himself.
Ian Dunn is a plugin developer who has sponsored to contribute to the WordPress project full time. Most of his work is focused on building tools to support the community, particularly through WordCamps and Meetups.
Chris Hufnagel is a creative freelancing dad of two. He geeks out about solving problems using design and code. Chris stumbled upon WordPress seven years ago and has been freelancing ever since.
Cathi Bosco is a creative professional, nature lover, and visual communications designer working to make the web a better place for all.
Dan Beil has been working with WordPress since about 2009 and has loved every minute and seconds of it. He has been a freelancer, in-house developer, and remote employee.
Andy Fragen is a WordPress hacker and hobbyist. He's an acute care surgeon who is also self-taught programmer doing this for fun while trying to solve problems.
Josh Gellock is the SEO consultant at Expander Digital, an SEO studio he founded in 2014. Through his business, Josh helps other businesses improve their search visibility. When he's not meeting with clients, you can find him biking on trails or fishing on the lake.
Mary Job lives outside Lagos, Nigeria. She is a philosopher by birth. She runs How Do You Tech for work. She loves to travel, take photos, write, meet awesome people, and experience cultures. She loves doing 22 and experimenting with food and listening to great music, and great wine.
Morgan Estes is a Christian, a husband, a father, a WordPress developer, a veteran, and a nerd. He has been working with WordPress since 2009 and first learned PHP by reading the WordPress source code.
Lauren Pittenger is a front-end WordPress designer and developer. Her college degree is in English, but she's always had a strong interest in design – and she has also earned a web design certificate.
Michele Butcher-Jones is the WordPress technical specialist for Thrive Agency. She also teaches beginners WordPress and freelances with her own shop 13 Core. In her free time, she blogs at Can't Speak Geek. She's a lead organizer for the Southern Illinois WP Meetup and runs WP Kids, a Slack group for people interested in organizing WordCamps for kids.
Co-hosts Liam Dempsey and Tara Claeys discuss the first year of the Hallway Chats podcast, and their own definitions of success.
Norma Miller is an international captioner and as such is the owner of the captioning firm White Coat Captioning. Through her company, Norma and her team caption live conferences, seminars, classes, events, and more around the world including more WordCamps than we can count. Norma calls Vermont her home where she lives with her husband and her Yorkie, Mr. Jefferies.
Nadia Williams is a Jane of all trades. An educator by profession, she has always enjoyed technology tools, stumbling into the world of ed tech and WordPress around the same time. Nadia is a teacher, a polyglot, a yogi, a travel addict, and a lifelong learner.
Russell Aaron is a new father, blogger, racing enthusiast, and back-end developer meet support technician. Based out of Las Vegas, Nevada, Russell works at WebDevStudios.
Jeff Matson is the head marketing guy for Gravity Forms and he looks after everything marketing and sales related. Jeff is married to Jamie and they have two dogs. When not working at Gravity Forms or on his own side-projects, Jeff likes to hang out in his own garage arcade.
Pam Aungst is owner of Pam Ann Marketing, and Stealth Search and Analytics. Both offer SEO, PPC, and Analytics services. Pam loves the outdoors. She lives in Northern New Jersey with her boyfriend and 18 year old daughter.
Ebonie Butler has her BS degree in information technology from Drexel University. And in 2015, she became interested in WordPress as a platform to start blogging about metal music. She recently started her first developer position with YIKES, Inc. as a WordPress developer.
Lindsay Halsey and Lori Calcott are co-founders of WP SEO Hub and partners at webShine, a search engine marketing agency in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. They focus on running profitable campaigns for their clients and teaching business owners about holistic SEO practices.
Simon Ateba is a journalist and editor and publisher of Today News Africa on Todaynewsafrica.com – a digital newspaper publishing from Washington DC but focusing on Africa. He was forced to master and to love WordPress in order to thrive.
Yvette is a WordPress enthusiast living in The Netherlands. She attended and volunteered at her first WordCamp in Miami in 2014. Yvette has been on the WordPress Marketing Team since WordCamp Europe in 2017.
Birgit Pauli Haack has been a web builder for the last 22 years and is still fascinated by it. Right now, she is learning JavaScript for the third time and evangelizes for the upcoming release of Gutenberg in WordPress core. By day, she runs her own web agency Pauli Systems.
Mark Wahl helps build teams and manage processes to create digital products and services, often using WordPress! He is Technical Director at the Jake Group, a DC-based digital agency.
Dale Reardon is from Australia and is the founder of My Disability Matters. An online community for the disability sector. Dale is qualified as a lawyer but he asks that we not hold that against him. He loves everything to do with France. Wine, food, and champagne. Dale is legally blind and uses a guide dog, Charlie.
Cory is a full-stack web developer from Waco, Texas. He's the author of Beginning Joomla! Website Development. He's a relative newcomer to WordPress after transitioning from Joomla work. Cory's married, with three children. He loves public speaking and has given more than 15 talks at Joomla conferences and has now even given one WordCamp talk.
Patte Shetler started her WordPress business, Unique Site Helper, three years ago. She loves to figure things out and she loves the WordPress community.
Jeff Large is an agency owner, teacher, and podcaster. He leads his team at Come Alive Creative in producing podcasts for businesses and brands.
Miriam Goldman is a lead web developer at Pondstone Digital Marketing, a digital marketing agency in Ottawa, Canada. She's been a web developer for over 12 years, has been working with WordPress since 2008.
Matt Whiteley is the creator and owner of Whiteley Designs, a one-man WordPress development hosting and maintenance agency specializing in the Genesis Framework. He's married, with a three-year-old daughter and another child on the way in May 2018.
Jean Roth thinks of herself as a creative alchemist because she brings a multifaceted background in marketing, design, writing, and intercultural aesthetics to her design work.
Tessa Kriesel is an agency and community engineer at Pantheon and she's been a web developer for over 10 years. She's the founder of Outspoken Women, she's passionate about diversity initiatives and teaching people to code and mentoring new developers.
Alfredo Navas is a full-stack designer and front-end developer. He's a web artisan and WordPress wrangler who organizes a WordPress meetup where he lives in Costa Rica, and is an organizer of WordCamp San José.
Kathy Drewien lives in Marietta, Georgia just outside of Atlanta. There she rescues abandoned, ugly, orphaned, broken, and non-productive websites for people and businesses who are ready for a change. She's an organizer of WordCamp Atlanta and runs a local WordPress Meetup around there, too. And if that's not enough, she's also an organizer of WordCamp US.
Topher DeRosia is a Christian, husband, father, and WordPress developer in that order. By day, he runs iWitness Design with his business partner. Topher also curates HeroPress.com, a site that tells the stories of WordPress.
Sarah Withee is a polyglot software engineer, public speaker, teacher and mentor, and hardware and robot tinkerer from the Midwest.
Marjorie Ray is a digital strategist and web designer living in Southern Vermont. She is also a videographer, runs a toy company, and co-manages the Brattleboro WordPress Meetup.
Kendall Guillemette is a WordPress technical lead at Kanopi studios. He lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
Bianca Welds is a WordPress freelancer from Jamaica who has been working with WordPress since 2005. She is the recipient of the 2017 Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship for WordCamp US.
John Locke made a mid-life career switch in 2012 and became a WordPress developer full-time, live without a net. Today, he is helping businesses get their SEO on track through his web consultancy, Lockedown Design.
Todd Jones is a content consultant, a WordPress fan, and native Arkansan. He likes everything from art to dirt track racing, and from rasslin' to college football. He loves stories of entrepreneurs.
Robert DeVore is the founder of WP Dispensary, an online menu management software for the cannabis industry. He says he also has a "healthy" obsession with open source, caffeine, pizza and building life on his own terms.
Ani King is a WordPress enthusiast from Michigan who works as a Manage WordPress project director for Liquid Web. She also runs Syntax & Salt Stories, an online journal of speculative fiction.
Corey is Chief Instigator at Coreyweb, LLC – a full-service design, development (& more) agency that works exclusively with WordPress as a CMS.
Maddy Osman creates engaging content with SEO best practices for marketing thought leaders, and agencies that have their hands full with clients and projects. Maddy lives in Denver where she tells us she enjoys typical Denver stuff.
Rich Tabor is a full-stack creative professional. Designer, developer, maker, and writer. He's laid back but he's also hard-hitting. Rich loves learning and bringing on growth through challenges.
Robin Cornett is a work from home mother outside Chattanooga, Tennessee who ended up becoming a developer kind of by accident. She has been working with WordPress for about 10 years.
Russell Heimlich is the lead developer at Spirited Media and works remotely from home. He has two little girls and lives outside Washington, DC.
Growing up as an extroverted nerd has paid off. Alison Knott is a community leader and artist with a passion for WordPress. Her mission is to delight and engage people through raising the bar on web literacy. She is controlled by two tiny parrots.
Mike Hale is a developer at Rainmaker Digital where he helps build the Rainmaker platform. He's also a collector of guitars, bizarre music and enjoys a nice cigar and bourbon in his downtime. He lives in the western suburbs of Chicago with his family and his two dogs.
Within the WordPress community, Dave Kiss has evolved from client work, to plugin development, to now teaching others code and development skills.
Becky Davis runs her own WordPress business and is active in the WordPress community. She has spoken at many WordCamps all over the US and at WordCamp Europe in 2016. She has run the Chicago Northside WordPress Meetup for six years.
Andy McIllwain tackles content and community projects at GoDaddy. He's a fan of the arts, impromptu road trips, user-friendly technology, and helping Canadian small businesses work with the web.
Cami Kaos works at Automattic. She lives, works, and parents in the rainy city of Portland, Oregon.
Kyle Brown consults with business owners to help them learn how to use processes and software to become more efficient, scale, increase profits or just free up time so they have the freedom to do what they want. He is the founder of wpSaaS.net and blogs at kylembrown.com.
Amy Masson is former teacher turned WordPress nerd. She owns a company, Sumy Designs, with her sister, Susan. As a kid, Amy was a member of a competitive jump rope team.
Anthony is a railroad futurist at GE transportation. So unless you think you're on the wrong podcast, we are talking to a WordPress person. Anthony has a lot of experience with WordPress. He’s also a hot sauce enthusiast.
Beth is a Washington, DC based web developer, digital strategist and activist. She builds websites and organizes around open source communities, feminist issues and the intersection of technology and empowerment.
Joe Howard is the Head Buff at WP Buffs. Hailing from Washington, D.C., Joe drinks nine cups of tea every day.
Sara Dunn is the founder and project lead at 11 Web, a remote web agency based in Battle Creek Michigan. Her tiny team of four obsesses over design, WordPress, local SEO, and clients online needs. Sara recently started a video series about specializing.
Calling Surprise, Arizona home, Scott DeLuzio is a WordPress developer with a number of business-focused plugins to his credit. Working from his home, Scott is building his business around the sale and support of suite of WordPress plugins.
Angelina Simms works with brands and provides support to help growing communities. She helps bring awareness to causes that she cares about. Angelina often hangs out in the library where she tells us that she's always in search for the perfect apple cider.
Chris and Jude Wharton at the co-creators of the Success with WordPress series of online courses. Based in the South of England, Chris and Jude are a married couple, living and working together in their own business.
Jessica Reilley is a single mom of two awesome kids. She's a front-end developer and works exclusively with WordPress. In her free time, Jess can be found traveling with her kids in tow, hiking, taking photos, reading or connecting with others.