Hallway Chats

Introducing Rob Ruiz Meet 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 Notes For 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 yo

Introducing June Liu June 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 Notes Backpocket Ace LinkedIn 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

Introducing Amber Hinds Amber 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 Notes WordPress.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

Introducing Joni Halabi Joni 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 Notes Joni’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 ter

Introducing Toby Cryns Toby 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 Notes https://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

Introducing Evelyn Maina Evelyn 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 Notes https://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 K

In November 2022 Topher went to WordCamp Italy in Milan. While there he had several conversations with attendees and sponsors. Episode Transcript Topher: Hey folks, welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m your host Topher. This week is going to be a little bit different from usual. This last November, I had the opportunity to go to WordCamp Italy in Milan, or WordCamp Italia in Milano, depending on how your mama says it.  While I was there, I got to have some actual in-person hallway chats with a number of people. And this week is going to be an aggregation of five of them. So you’re going to get to meet five really cool people that I have the opportunity to interview, and I hope you find them just as great as I did. [00:00:40]  Hey, everybody, this is Topher. I’m at WordCamp Italia in Milano, and I’m here with- James: James Baldacchino. Topher: James, why are you here?  James: That’s good question. I’m here because I met two of the organizers in WordCamp US who told me it was coming up, and I said, why not? They also asked me whether I’ve been interested in applying to for a talk. My first reaction was, would I do? So I applied, they liked it, and here I am.  Topher: That’s great. So you were at WordCamp US in San Diego?  James: Yeah. That was fun.  Topher: Did we meet and I forgot?  James: Yes.  Topher: I’m sorry.  James: You met a lot of people. Topher: I did. All right. Cool. So how did you get into WordPress?  James: I joined Ellipsis 18 months ago. As simple as that. I’ve been using WordPress personally, of course, like most other people for a long, long time but I never realized there was such a huge community and such huge industry behind it. I have found WordPress incredibly useful. For example, when I was in a marketing job, which had zero budget, and I pulled together a lot of great websites for very low price. I loved it. But I never knew it was a beautiful shock to find out- Topher: That’s a great word—beautiful shock.  James: Yeah.  Topher: When did you first realize the community was like that? Was it at WordCamp Us or did you find the community online?  James: To be honest, the first year of working with WordPress, there was no WordCamp because it was all online because of the pandemic. WordCamps just cemented. But before, what made me realize what a tight-knit community this is was the fact that such a lot of information is shared so freely.  Topher: Ah, yes.  James: And there’s a lot of it as well. I’m coming from industries where if you have information, you don’t publish it, because you don’t want your competitors to know. Topher: Right. Right. Proprietary. James: So it was shocking and it was wonderful. I said, okay, then there must be more to this than what I realize. Topher: And then you went to WordCamp? James: And then I went to WordCamp Europe, which was massive.  Topher: Oh, Porto?  James: Yes.  Topher: Did we meet there and I forgot? James: No.  Topher: Okay.  James: It was huge.  Topher: I was there.  James: That was really good as well. That was my first one.  Topher: Okay. James: It was lovely.  Topher: Wow. So this is your third then?  James: My third then. Yeah, from zero to hero. But nothing compared to heros. Topher: You know, it’s funny people who work for SiteGround go to a lot of WordCamps. But because of the pandemic, there was this big gap. And I would talk to people from agencies and hosting companies and say, “Oh, yes, I’ve been in WordPress for two years now.” Oh, what WordCamps have you been to? None. James: Of course. Topher: You know, Oh, no. That’s so sad.  James: No, I think it makes a massive difference.  Topher: It does. A friend of mine has a WordCamp talk called “And Then I Went to WordCamp”. James: It makes sense. Topher: It does. It makes perfect sense. James: I can completely relate to that as well. Topher: So what do you do at Ellipsis? James: I’m the head of strategy. So my job is helping clients with marketing strategy. That means clients who work with WordPress, that means either agencies or hosts or people who sell the plugins or themes. The core of my role is helping them figure out what marketing strategy they should deploy, what makes sense for them in order to deliver growth and the right type of growth, not growth for growth. Topher: Right. Yes.  James: It’s a wonderful role, which I’m really enjoying. Honestly, I’ve been working in marketing 14 years and the learning curve within WordPress has mean like no other. Topher: Meaning good or bad? James: Good.  Topher: Very good. James: Extremely good.  Topher: Good.  James: Every single day I learned something new and I love it.  Topher: Good. James: I love being told new things and finding out new things and helping clients test new theories and find new ways of delivering growth. And yes, fantastic. I love it. Topher: That’s great. I’m happy to hear it. Where are you from? James: I’m from Malta, which is pretty close. It’s made it even easier to come. Topher: Born and raised? James: Yeah, born and raised. Topher: That’s cool. All right. I’ve been in Milan now for three days and I have not yet met anyone from here.  James: Me too actually. Maybe the hotel check-in guy. Maybe. Topher: Maybe. I don’t know. All right. Well, thank you very much for talking with me.  James: Thank you for your time. Thanks for the invitation.  Topher: All right.  [00:05:53] Hey, folks, this is Topher. I’m here at WordCamp Italia in Milano, and I’m here with— Luisa: Luisa. Topher: Luisa. And what do you do with WordPress?  Luisa: Ooh, with WordPress I work of course, and I work with a community also. The thing that I do most is translations. I am into the Polyglots team. I am one of the… I think we are seven GTs for Italian and we are always translating something and we are hoping to do good and useful job.  Topher: For your work, are you a developer, a designer, communicator?  Luisa: Ah, something in the middle of all those things.  Topher: That makes sense. That is not uncommon. Lots of people do that. Luisa: And also I am a teacher.  Topher: Also a teacher? Luisa: Yeah. But not only web-related things. I teach kids all the things with robotics and coding sometimes. Topher: That is very cool. That is very cool. Luisa: I like it.  Topher: Where are you from?  Luisa: Brescia, which is a little city near here, about an hour from Milan.  Topher: Okay. So have you been staying here in a hotel or do you just drive back and forth?  Luisa: No, no, I have a home, thanks to my friend that lent me this house.  Topher: Nice. Is this your first WordCamp?  Luisa: No, no, no, no. I have been to several WordCamps in the last five years, I think. Six maybe. Topher: Which ones?  Luisa: All the ones in Italy: Milan, Turin, Verona, Rome, and also WordCamp Europe in Berlin.  Topher: I was there.  Luisa: Ooh. Topher: Yeah.  Luisa: We didn’t met. Topher: You didn’t see me? Luisa: I did not know about you at that time.  Topher: I have met many people that were also there and I did not see them.  Luisa: We were many. I remember the main room with the conversation with Marta and we were three thousand and a half or something. Very, very big. I’ve never been in something so big.  Topher: It was very impressive. And the dance. The after dance.  Luisa: It was an amazing event.  Topher: Yeah, it really was. I had another question and I need to remember it. I don’t remember it. What are you doing here? Are you the organizer, a volunteer or…?  Luisa: I’m an organizer and I was in charge of the contributor day.  Topher: Ah. Okay. That’s why I saw you so much. Luisa: That’s why I called you at first.  Topher: So how did you feel contributor day went? Were you happy with it?  Luisa: Oh, we’ve been so happy.  Topher: Good.  Luisa: So many people and a real good job for all the teams. Topher: I was very impressed. I’ve been doing a lot of WordCamps and contributor days and I’ve noticed that about 10% of WordCamp shows up to contributor day. And I feel like that fits for this one. We have 500 or 600 attendees here? Luisa: Yesterday we- Topher: Not yesterday. Today.  Luisa: Today, three hundred and a half.  Topher: Oh, three and a half. Okay.  Luisa: I don’t know if they all show. Topher: How many did we have yesterday for contributor day? Luisa: A hundred. Topher: Okay, so that’s better than average. That’s a third. That’s really good. So well done.  Luisa: Thank you. The place was big and so we could do this. It’s difficult this time to have space to let all the people work safely and in a good way.  Topher: All right. Well, thank you very much for talking with me today.  Luisa: Thank you, Topher, for coming here.  Topher: Oh, you’re very welcome. It was my pleasure.  Luisa: Thank you again.  [00:10:19]  Topher: Hey everybody, this is Topher. I am at WordCamp Italia in Milano, and I am here with- Caroline: Caroline Crossland. I am head of inbound marketing at Atarim.  Topher: All right, cool. What brings you to WordCamp?  Caroline: I joined Atarim only three weeks ago. So this is all very new to me. I’m new to the industry. So technology is one of my passions, but this is my first time working within the industry, within the WordPress community. So I am here to learn as much as I can and soak up information from guys like yourself- Topher: Ah, thank you.  Caroline: …who know everything in this community. And it has been a very welcoming community- Topher: Good. I was gonna ask what you think.  Caroline: …and one that’s really helpful. It’s been notably a diverse group of people. It’s a very inclusive atmosphere. I have been welcomed with open arms and made lots of interesting n

Topher and Sophia met with Benjamin Zekavica and Moritz Bappert, both WordCamp Europe 2023 volunteers. Show Notes Episode Transcript Topher: Hey everyone! Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Topher and my co-host is Sofia.  Sophia: Hello.  Moritz: Hi. Nice to meet you.  Benjamin: Nice to meet you two. Topher: It’s great having you here. Once again, our guests are from WordCamp Europe. Please tell us your names and what your role is for WordCamp. Benjamin: I’m Benjamin. I’m 24 years old, and I’m a volunteer here at the WordCamp. I am the photographer and photographer organizer to take the picture from the SD card to the computer and to give it to the social media team. And I’m really happy to be here today. Topher: Great. Moritz: So my name is [Moritz? 00:05:05] and I’m here for the second time on WordCamp Europe, first time as a volunteer. So I’m excited about that. I was on the sponsors team today, helping the sponsors with everything they needed. And one more shift that I have is as a speakers assistant, so calming down the speakers before their speech, and then guiding them to the stage, and helping with anything else.  Topher: Cool. Did you say this is your second WordCamp? Europe?  Moritz: Yes. I’ve been at one in Berlin in 2019. Topher: I was there. And Benjamin, it’s just your first WordCamp Europe?  Benjamin: No, it’s my second. I was also in Berlin.  Topher: I was there too.  Benjamin: My volunteer is now first time and I’m really happy to be here. Because after COVID it’s now a freedom to have again here with much people to communicate and so on. I’m really happy to have our life back.  Topher: Yeah, yeah. So where are you each from? Where do you live?  Moritz: I’m from the Black Forest area in Germany at the very southwest, bordering France and Switzerland.  Topher: All right.  Benjamin: I live in Aachen. It’s near Cologne. It’s wonderful, small city. Topher: Very nice. It’s morning for us. I don’t want to say early morning anymore because I don’t want to seem like I don’t get up early. But it’s midafternoon of day two for you. How’s it been? Are things going well? Is it smooth? Having fun? Benjamin: I think we are a little bit tired. Now it’s okay. I think it’s completely good for us to work, I think, four hours, if not more, and it’s really good for us. It’s not the full day. And you can choose your shifts. It, for me personally, was relaxed and good. I was really happy because to see the attendees. I was really happy with the speakers that was known for more different things and learned other new technical things. I am really proud about that.  Topher: That’s cool.  Moritz: For me, it’s really exciting in that way. Of course, it’s also exhausting because I’m talking to so many inspiring people and I’m like all over the place. I’m having lots of fun. The party yesterday night was nice. There’s gonna be a party too this night and tomorrow night. So it’s a lot. You need to see how you’re managing everything. But yeah, I’m just here for meeting so many interesting people. And I’m having a great time. It’s amazing.  Topher: Great. Sophia: Nice. Topher: You’re on, Sophia.  Sophia: What?  Topher: You’re on.  Sophia: What made you both seek a role in the WordCamp organizing team? Moritz: For me, I was really interested to get involved more, to talk to more interesting people, to just put myself out there. For example, as a speakers assistant, I have the great opportunity to directly get in touch with some of them. We also get invited to the social last night to the party with all the sponsors and speakers, organizers, and so forth, which was really nice, and many interesting people around. So I think it’s a great opportunity. On the one hand, giving back and investing our own work and effort into a great event. And on the other hand, you also get recognition for it. And it’s lots of fun, you get to know other volunteers.  Sophia: Yeah, for sure. Moritz: So great experience. Definitely gonna do that again.  Benjamin: Repeat it again. I want to add it’s really nice experience because some people, some volunteers, it’s so much problems and I could help them and they could help me. In general, we say you give it and you get it back. It’s a really nice thing what you can expect to be a volunteer. My first time and I was a little bit here, I say, Okay I don’t know if I want to apply for volunteer role because people say it’s so difficult because the English is maybe not so well. But I think here all people want only one thing—to learn and to grow our community. And that makes me so happy. Sophia: Yeah, absolutely. How has the reality of how WordCamp Europe is now…? Like after the organizing, how has that compared to… Gosh, let me rephrase that. So after having organized WordCamp Europe, and this is now day two, how is it going? Like how does it compare to how you hoped it would be? Benjamin: I can say I work here as a contributor for WordPress Core and community team and it’s more online basis. But I think here and volunteer, it’s also nice to meet the people directly here and to help to make the WordCamp better. And if we have more volunteers, then it’s easier for all organizers to organize all good things to make the WordCamp better. And it is important because without volunteers it’s impossible to make the event. Moritz: I mean, I guess what you were asking is also, like, is this event in any sense different from how events work during COVID? I don’t feel that way. For me, it really feels like any event before. It’s been like lots of people. We have great parties. So there’s not any restrictions on that. And I don’t see that people are hesitant in meeting so many people. So it’s really feeling like getting back to normal somehow and feeling great.  I think COVID didn’t really impact this in any negative way. And probably we even learned some things from that and we’re able to improve stuff. So I’m really happy to have in-person events again. And it’s so valuable to really meet people in person and talk to them directly. For me, even as I’m doing much of the stuff online and working remotely, quite often it’s a different feeling. You get different depths really of interactions with all the people.  Topher: So volunteering and organizing is a lot of work. It is different from just being an attendee. You’re not free to just wander around and shake all the hands and eat all the snacks. Would you do it again? Is volunteering better than just being an attendee? Or would you value not having responsibility? Benjamin: I will say yes because I want to come again here and to the next WordCamp because all people wanted to be involved and to help the community to grow up. I think the part is volunteering you have much more exercises to do and you have to help other people. It’s sort of a bit different because you are completely a visitor. But you can also join the community and so on. But like the volunteer, you have more permissions, you can ask directly people to make maybe the next WordCamp better maybe and say directly your opinion to make the next events… The problems was not again to do that. That is a good thing because as well as volunteer you have more to speak out directly to the organizer. Moritz: That’s the point that I see as well, just like being closer at the center of really what goes on behind the event and inside organizing everything. For me, it’s really interesting to see that and to get more involved and to talk to the people behind the scenes, like, either the organizers themselves or speakers, for example. As a normal attendee, I feel more isolated, of course, I can go and talk to lots of people. But as a volunteer, I really feel more as part of the whole. It lets me connect easily with many people, people approached me seeing me in my volunteer t-shirt.  Somehow, you’re also one face of the whole event, so to say, and it feels good. I really enjoy doing my little part to help make a successful event, and this way also getting in touch with much more people. Of course, you have to do your small tasks, it takes some time. You don’t go to so many sessions, but I really value talking to people and doing all the related tasks. So I don’t regret missing any of the sessions also. Benjamin: To add one more thing, I think the good thing as a volunteer, you have a team of mature people. And so it’s funny because all people work together. And we are a team. And that makes me so happy because we have direct communication and work together and that makes your experience much higher. And it’s one thing why I really love to be a volunteer today in this event here.  Topher: Imagine for a moment you’re talking to someone who has been to four or five local WordCamps, small in their city or maybe another city, but just small camps. What’s different about WordCamp in Europe? Benjamin: I think we have same opinion of that I think it’s the huge people here, so many people here. It’s a bit difficult because they have more to organize. It’s a bit smaller group. And it’s a bit easier maybe for the organizer, for the volunteers to coordinate, to see how it works. But here is a little bit bigger, much more attendance was here. It’s a little bit stressful. A little bit. Moritz: I agree. It can be overwhelming, I think. But still there’s so much opportunity because all the people from every place in the world that engage in WordPress topics somehow are here. And you can talk to anyone we have, with any WordPress company you could imagine. It’s so nice.  Like I’m working as an agency with two co-founders and we’re in that since seven years, so we’ve seen lots of plugins and stuff and some blogs of developers or other things that we find useful. This is the place where you can really meet all of those people in person. This is something that is really satisfying for me to talk to the

Show Notes Episode Transcript Topher: Hey everyone. Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Topher and my co-host is Sofia. Say hello, Sophia. Sophia: Sorry. Hello. I was trying to look at the show.  Topher: Okay. Our guests today come from WordCamp Europe. Please tell us your names and what your role is for WordCamp.  Evangelia: Hi, my name is Evangelia Pappa. And for WordCamp Europe 2023, I am one of the global leads this year. So I’m responsible for the teams of budgets, sponsors, and the community team.  Topher: Okay.  Lena: Hi, I’m Lena Lekkou. I’m responsible for the design. I was the design lead team. What you see and what is printed, what is on the website and what is on the social media is from my team. You can blame us or not.  Topher: Oh, I can’t hear you anymore. Oh, there we go.  Hacer: So my name is- Topher: Now it’s not coming through very well. I don’t know. Maybe it’s the angle. Hacer: Maybe. Topher: That’s much better. Yeah.  Hacer: My name is Hacer Yilmaz. I’m a member of the communications and PR team, and sites, I’ve been involved with adding all of the content to the website and also organizing our relationships with media partners.  Topher: Oh, you know what? I’m gonna stop us right now. I’m gonna hit record and start over.  Sophia: It is recording.  Topher: It is? Sophia: Yeah. Topher: No, it’s not. Oh, you are recording? Wonderful. Yeah. All right, then never mind. Okay, great. That’s awesome. I’m glad to have you here. Where are each of you from?  Evangelia: We are at the moment at Athens Concert Hall. This is the venue of WordCamp Europe 2023 otherwise called Megaron.  Topher: Yes. But where do you live? Evangelia: I live in Larissa. It is a city in central Greece. So it is four hours from Athens.  Topher: And Lena, where do you live?  Lena: I live here in Athens in Greece.  Topher: Oh, wow. That’s cool.  Hacer: I live in Portugal.  Topher: Okay. I guess I don’t know why I expected more people from outside Greece. But maybe that’s just a false expectation on my part. Evangelia: Oh, we do have a lot of people from outside Greece. You just hit the jackpot today with me and Lena, two out of three.  Topher: It is a jackpot.  Lena: I must say that as a Greek community, we are very involved with WordCamps and with the community as it is. So this is why you might see a lot of Greeks. Topher: Okay. In general, Greeks are really involved and love organizing events because we have two local WordCamps that we are also planning, a third one in a different city, maybe after WordCamp Europe. However, it’s also a little bit difficult to find people who are able to commit their time and invest being an organizer. You will see this year’s organizing team did have a lot of breaks, in several teams, not only the local team. However, we do have people from all around Europe and also some people from other continents.  Topher: That’s cool. It is early morning for us, not too early, but it’s the beginning of our day and it is mid-afternoon of day two for you. How’s it been so far? Is it going smoothly? Are you having a good time? Evangelia: Yes, it’s the first day of the main event because yesterday we had the contributor day. So basically, the event started yesterday. Today we had talks in three tracks and also two workshops. And at the same time, we had panels, panel discussions that was something really interesting, except for the talks and workshops. And enlightening because we had also panel discussions regarding diversity, getting involved with the community, women and non-binary people positions in let’s say [inaudible 00:04:57] also, like the amazing team that we have, This is like an example on how we should be handling diversity. It was so far a very nice day. Topher: How’s the weather been? Is it nice? Evangelia: Finally it is summer. Because the last week in Greece, it was almost winter. It wasn’t normal for us. Usually in May and early June, it is considered to be summer, but at the moment, we have around 30 degrees Celsius. Last week we had around 15 or 12. It was raining. Topher: That’s cool.  Sophia: So this is a question for all three of you. What made you seek a role in the WordCamp organizing team?  Hacer: So I was also an organizer last year at WordCamp Europe. But before that, I had just been working with WordPress for around three or four years. I was kind of as a freelancer, I am kind of missing in our colleague environment, and the whole social part, let’s say. I know that WordPress has a big community. So I thought maybe that’s something also for me, you know, nice community to be a part of. So that’s why I applied to be an organizer last year. That was also the same reason for this year is because last year I found out it’s a great community. So I just wanted to keep being part of that.  Sophia: Nice.  Lena: If you start with this, you cannot stop, I think. Sophia: Oh, yeah. You can never leave. They never let you go.  Evangelia: To be honest, many of us every year say, you know, This is my last WordCamp. And it never is. Because you might feel very tired during or a few days after the event considering it has been a very intense period before and also during the whole conference. But then you realize, “Oh, my God, all those smiley faces. How can I live without this tension every day of my life? Spending every day working for WordCamp as an organizer?” And seeing things happening- Topher: So what you’re saying is that WordCamps are children. Evangelia: I don’t know. Maybe like that. But you cannot leave that. You cannot. I said to myself I would stop or you know, take some time off to get some rest. I needed vacation really badly sometimes. And then I realized, “Oh, my God, they will start organizing without me. I will have no idea what is going on.” How can I live with that? It’s really strange. Lena: So I agree with both their opinions about this. But something that I have as a reason for working in all these communities is that when I started to work in this industry, it was very hard to make connections and feel welcoming and start not being so introverted. So that’s what helped me overcome this situation and start having connections and working at this industry. So because I feel that at the start it was very welcoming for me, I feel some way that I can do the same for people that are in this position right now. So I feel that I can help people that are now at the start of this journey. And I feel the need to give something back to something like this.  Sophia: Yeah, for sure.  Topher: Think back, if you will, to the first time you volunteered. What did you expect? How does the reality compare to what you thought being an organizer would be like?  Evangelia: For WordCamp Europe or in general volunteering as an organizer for WordCamps Lena: I have the same question, if it’s only for WordCamp or volunteering in general.  Topher: Well, now I want to know how they’re different. So both. Evangelia: I can explain why they’re different. Because my first experience with the WordPress community was back in 2015. So I had nothing to do with WordPress back then. I will be honest with you. I met the community, I saw how it felt like a safe space, a supportive space, a space where people were pushing me to grow. And I found it really important because I felt I belong here. I feel this is my space, my people. So I think I chose to be here. I chose the community, not the tool from the beginning.  So when we started organizing the first WordCamp in Athens, it was a fest for the whole great community, it was very few people coming from all around the country, not only from the local meetup. And it was really impressive to see the event happening from the backstage, because we had never done that before, we had no idea what we were doing. So we were also very thankful that we had mentors helping us out. The WordCamp handbook also organizes so you know, what you shouldn’t be doing, which is sometimes more important than what you should be doing.  It gave me a skill set I never had. Because working as an organizer gives you also knowledge, skill set that you can use also in your daily life, in your work, or anyplace you can imagine. And it also gave me a family. So I selected to stay with this family like forever.  Topher: That’s really good. I like that.  Evangelia: But the difference with WordCamp Europe is that we started as a community volunteering to WordCamp Europe in 2018 in Belgrade. And we said, other countries are hosting WordCamp Europe, we would like to do that in our country, too. So let’s go and see how it is, but not go as attendees. We want to see backstage what’s happening. And if you like it and we believe that we can make it, then we will apply.  So our first experience was that. We traveled all together from Greece. We stayed for a week in Belgrade. We volunteered. We all volunteer to the events. We saw what was happening, we liked it. It was a different taste on the lips because it’s different cultures, different people, different languages. When you are in your country, you can communicate perfectly fine, because it’s your language, everybody will understand exactly what you’re telling them. But when you are in another country, and you have people from all around Europe, there is always a language barrier.  And the way that we try to avoid misunderstandings, I think it makes the community better because it helps people with being more understanding and caring about other people’s feelings. For example, if I joke with you about something, maybe this is a joke for me because I come from this place and it’s funny for us, it’s hilarious, but maybe for you this is insulting. So that’s a very big difference in WordCamp Europe from a local WordCamp because you have to pay attention.  Topher: Right. That’s very,

Show Notes Contact Info: Website WordPress Twitter Episode Transcript Topher: Hey everyone, welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Topher and my co-host today is Sophia. Sophia: Hello. Topher: She waved. Before we get started, I want to say thanks to our sponsor Nexcess. They’ve been good to us for a couple of years now. And I’ve been really, really happy with their hosting. Their servers are really fast. They give me all the special tools that I really like in a host, and they have some really great specialized things for WooCommerce like automated testing, which is pretty unique. I’m not sure of any place else that does that. And they have a Sales Performance Monitor and a Plugin Performance Monitor. So if any of that sounds good to you, check them out, Nexcess, and tell them we sent you. All right, our guest today is Amy Kamala. Welcome. Amy: Thank you. And thank you so much for having me.  Topher: You’re welcome. I did say that right, right? Because you told me just a minute ago. Amy: Yes, you did. Topher: Okay, good.  Amy: You said it right.  Topher: Good. Where are you from?  Amy: I’m from Los Angeles, California, United States.  Topher: Excellent. Born and raised? Amy: Born and raised. I’m from Venice Beach, specifically. Topher: Oh, okay.  Amy: It’s a big place.  Topher: I’ve never been there. Been to a lot of California but never to LA. What do you do with WordPress? Amy: I’ve been working professionally with WordPress since 2015. I’m a full stack developer and I have a master’s degree in Fine Arts. So I work with both development and design and the back end system, Linux and pipelines, development pipelines.  Topher: Wow, that’s super-duper cool. You are way more advanced than me. Amy: Well, I don’t want to give that impression because I don’t know everything by any means. Every senior developer and pretty much every senior in pretty much any industry that I’ve spoken to acknowledges that there’s always more to learn and research is really important. Topher: Oh, yes. I have a soft spot in my heart for Linux. What do you do there?  Amy: Well, I also have a soft spot in my heart for Linux. So I’ve worked for three different web hosts, and two of them are very infrastructure based. The third one is more cloud-based, a little bit less infrastructure. But I’ve spent quite a bit of time working my way around LAMP and LEMP systems, Linux, Apache, or NGINX, MySQL, and PHP, working command line. I would say that Linux command line is probably if we can call it a language, it’s my favorite to work with. Talking to a server or computer is so much fun.  Topher: Do you run Linux on your desktop at all?  Amy: One of them, yes, I do.  Topher: What distro? Amy: Red Hat.  Topher: Okay. I ran Red Hat for a little while until about Red Hat 6, I think. Amy: Really?  Topher: That gives you an idea a long time ago- Amy: What are you running now? Topher: I don’t really run it on my desktop anymore. My oldest stuff that I used to use, it’s not my Plex server and I run Arch on it.  Amy: Oh nice.  Topher: I’ve been running Arch for about 15 years.  Amy: I won’t make any jokes about people that say, “I run Arch.” Topher: That’s all right. I’m used to it.  Amy: Ubuntu would be my second choice. If I were going to switch from Red Hat, I would certainly go with Ubuntu. And I would recommend that for most people. Topher: Yeah. My big deal is rolling release. I don’t think I could ever live without a rolling release again.  Amy: Fair enough. Topher: That’s just a beautiful, beautiful thing. All right, we’re not talking about WordPress at all. We should get back to that.  Amy: Okay. So I became involved in the WordPress community in I think around 2018. I was working for a web host. I started in technical support, actually in social support, which for most people, I think, it’s infinitely easy if you’re personable. If you’re an extrovert like myself, it’s fairly easy to interact with customers and to be kind and helpful.  From social support, I started picking up tech support tickets and asking people questions. I picked a lot of people’s brains. I want to thank everybody whose brands I’ve picked because it’s really helped me a lot in my career and in life. But yeah, I have picked a lot of brains. And I would advise anybody to ask questions, ask stupid questions, ask the same questions, just ask questions, because that’s one of the best ways that you can learn. So anyway, I started in tech support, social support, then tech support. By 2018, I had contributed to the formation of a dedicated WordPress support team at that web host. So it’s a team of 14 WordPress-specialized agents, myself being one of them. And through that, I was spending all my time at that point working with WordPress. My love of command line kind of translated over to WordPress command line. And that really enabled me to maneuver my way around WordPress a lot, especially in the tech support arena, where you have to be really fast, you have to get answers quickly, you have to fix things quickly. WordPress command line was absolutely a key for me in becoming a little bit more advanced and capable. So in about 2018, I was on a dedicated WordPress support team. The hosts that I was working for helped form the make.wordpress.org hosting team, was one of the main contributors at the time to the formation of that particular team. And they were really proud of it, rightfully so. They were sharing their accomplishments in all hands, meeting staff meetings. And so I became aware that this existed through that.  Mike Schroeder was one of the people at the time. He was one of the OG, one of the original WordPress hosting team reps. And that team can be attributed to his hard work. A large percentage of it can be. So because of that, I found out that the WordPress community exists, that it’s possible to be involved in the WordPress open-source project, and I hopped on Slack and joined a wordpress.org hosting meeting.  My first meeting was actually a Slack meeting. It was really welcoming. Everybody was really welcoming because of the hosts that I worked for was involved in the formation of the team, I already knew everybody in the room, almost everybody in the room. One of them I knew his wife, but not him. So it was really comfortable for me to just kind of jump right in.  And I became involved in the hosting team and I’m still involved in the hosting team. This is my fifth year, I think as a make.wordpress.org hosting team rep. I’ve had my hands in other parts of WordPress as well. I’ve helped out with Core a little bit. I’ve helped out with some WordCamps. I’ve spoken at some WordCamps. I’ve helped out with some meetups, especially in the LA area and spoken at some meetups, and been involved with the LA WordPress meetups team. So yeah, it’s been just kind of a… I started out taking notes for the hosting team. I was really proud the first time my notes were posted on make.wordress.org. It was a huge accomplishment.  Topher: Yeah, it’s a big deal. Amy: I felt really special. And I just, you know, kept going and kept going. And here I am. I’m still one of the team reps involved. It’s been a great experience in terms of my career. Topher: Oh, that’s cool. Amy: At certain points, I’ve been worried about being pigeonholed as a WordPress person in the tech industry. Because there’s so much other technology that one could get involved with. But quite frankly, that’s a really beautiful pigeonhole to be in. Topher: It is so big. So much. Amy: It’s a big pigeonhole. That’s right. Right. I think there’s like 800 million WordPress installs on the internet right now WordPress websites, approximately, which is insane. There’s just so many websites that the WordPress application is supporting. You know, eventually I got really familiar with the WordPress foundation values and I feel very aligned with them. Ideas like democratize publishing give everybody a voice. I don’t see how anybody could not be on board with that. But I grew up in Venice Beach, which is probably one of the most liberal parts of the planet. So it’s easy for me to, you know, kind of align myself with those type of ideas. Topher: Sure.  Amy: So, I have definitely- Topher: We’re all a bunch of hippies anyway. Amy: That’s true. The idea of open source, in general, it’s kind of a hippie concept.  Topher: Yeah, it really is.  Sophia: So for somebody who’s very unfamiliar with the concept, tell me the difference between social support and tech support. Amy: I would be happy to. So social support is… it’s still technical support but it’s a little bit more on the social end and less on the technical end, where you’re kind of the frontline, the first line of action on the internet for an organization to communicate with its customers. So you’ll be interacting with customers via Twitter, via forums, via Facebook, via Instagram, social media, essentially. And it’s really important for marketing. A social support rep could make or break the PR of a company for potentially- Sophia: For sure.  Amy: So it’s really important to be, you know, personable, to be mature, to be reasonable and level-headed.  Topher: And you’re able to talk to angry, angry people. Amy: Yeah, angry people. It’s very true. That kind of gave me a system for dealing with people. I have two daughters. At the time, my daughters were babies and toddlers. So there’s a system for hand-  Sophia: Oh. Say that again. Amy: There’s a system for hand- Topher: Every time you say “hand,” it breaks.  Sophia: That literally just happened to me honestly Amy: Really? Sophia: Yeah. Amy: I’m gonna put it on “Do Not Disturb” which I apologize, I should have done that before.  Topher: It’s okay. Sophia: That’s all right.  Amy: So when a toddler is

Show Notes Contact Info: Website LinkedIn Twitter Episode Transcript Topher: Hey everyone, welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Topher, your host today. My regular co-host Nyasha is sick today, so it’s just gonna be me and our guest. Before we get started, I want to say thanks to our sponsor Nexcess. We’ve been hosted with Nexcess for a couple of years now and it’s been extremely good. To put it bluntly, their servers are fast, uptime is great, good communication when there needs to be downtime. A couple of times over the couple of years we’ve had midnight outages for 20 minutes while they redo something. But that’s great. I’m happy with their communication. As a nerd, they give me what I want. I like SSH, I like database access, I like to get under the hood, and it’s all there. They also offer some stuff I don’t use but it looks really sharp. They have WooCommerce automated testing, which is great if you’re running Woo. They have a Sales Performance Monitor and a plug in performance monitor. So if those things sound like something you can use, I recommend giving it a shot. You have to forgive me, I have a slight cold but we’ll press through. Our guest today is Maestro Stevens. Welcome, sir. Maestro: Thank you for having me, Topher. Great to be here. Topher: Welcome. I’ve been looking forward to this. Maestro: Absolutely. Topher: We met quite recently at Buffalo WordCamp for the first time. And then very soon after we got connected because of WordCamp Europe, and now we’re doing this. It feels like within the span of a month we’ve become best buddies. Maestro: Yes, yes. It’s been a short journey but it feels like it’s been forever. Topher: Yeah. You know, I’m impressed that we haven’t run into each other sooner because I mean, we live within 300 or 400 miles of each other. It seems like we would be going to the same kind of WordCamps or meetups in the same communities, you know? Maestro: Yeah, I definitely can see that happening a lot more now that we have linked up at the WordCamp Buffalo- Topher: Oh, yeah. Maestro: That’s where we met in person, got acquainted. Topher: So tell me a little about yourself. Where do you live and what do you do? Maestro: Speaking of where I live, like you said, I’m pretty close to you. I’m in Cleveland, Ohio, currently is where I reside and I am a Brand Webmaster, also coined myself as the Fresh Prince of WordPress, just mainly because I’m striving to bring a fresh perspective to the WordPress community. I started my journey in WordPress back in 2018. But I started my company, which is a creative agency, helping people build websites and brands back in 2015. Topher: Awesome. I’m going to tip my hand a little bit and tell the crowd that this is our second time through this podcast because somebody didn’t press the “record” button. So a couple of my questions I kind of know the answer to but I want to hear them again anyway. You own your business. Are you a solo? You said you had a team. Are they W2 or contractors? Where are you in that growth process? Maestro: Good question. Within the growth process, I started my hiring process about two years ago. Started off with part-timers and contractors. I did the whole, you know, Upwork and Fiverr thing, then I ended up just deciding to outsource overseas permanently, I would say, and just hire and work with people part-time. And then recently this year, I brought on two of my staff members that I’ve been working with for the past two years. They’re the ones who’ve made it through the trials and tribulations. I brought them on full-time, and I pretty much call them my employees or training wheels, if you will. Topher: What was it that gave you the confidence to commit to paying people that much? Like they’re dependent on you now. Was it you just had enough work consistently and said, “Hey, let’s go for it”? Maestro: I would say what gave me the confidence was me, and I don’t know exactly what sources that I use. I was doing a lot of research at that time, whether it was Google or YouTube. But I was just getting a lot of great feedback… not feedback, but great ideas from other people who are looking to take themselves to the next level out of entrepreneurship or solopreneurship and become a real business owner. And they said, you know, you’re going to run into a wall at some point in time between working with people who are coming in and out of your business, or even part-time versus people who are working with you consistently more so full-time because they’re less distracted with other projects. Topher: Oh, yeah. Maestro: You know, and I really thought about that and it really resonated with me because that was one of the big keys of building culture, you know, having the attention. Topher: Yeah, I never thought of that. That’s a really good point. I guess it’s why a lot of companies don’t allow side work—they want your focus. Well, that’s really good stuff. So you’re going to be speaking in two weeks at WordCamp Europe? How long? Maestro: A weeks? Topher: Oh, eight weeks? Maestro: I mean, no. Like a week? It’s less than two weeks. So a week and a couple days. Topher: Oh, a week. Maestro: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Topher: Wow. It is looming? Maestro: Yeah. Topher: What’s your topic? Maestro: My topic is based on templates and templates within the Gutenberg editor. The title is called Fresh Off The Block: Transform WordPress With Templates. Topher: Nice. That’s cool. I get to peek at your slides. And one of the things that I was very happy about is that it’s not just Gutenberg templates, it’s a universal templates in all the WordPress, which is cool because it used to be… that was really only the one that was the PHP theme template. Occasionally we plug in templates, but even though those are theme templates. And now we have so many different things. What are all the different types of templates you’re gonna talk about? Maestro: I don’t want to give away too much of the juice. You know, people are going to be able to watch the replay at wordpress.tv. Topher: That’s right. Maestro: But you know, to your point, some examples are things like PHP templates, other plugin templates, their form templates that you can be using in WordPress. They don’t have to be Gutenberg templates. Topher: oh, yeah, Maestro: Template whether or not you’re using some type of… I know people think of the theme. So there’s templates in Gutenberg itself. But there’s also theme-based templates, which are a different thing than the block-based templates. And even templates outside of WordPress, for example, like design-based templates, whether you use Figma or Canva, before you even get into the WordPress ecosystem and start designing, you know, are you helping yourself create a way of giving yourself a head start? That’s pretty much what they are, are head starters. Topher: All right, folks, if you want to hear the rest, go get yourself a ticket to Athens. Maestro: Yeah. It’ll be amazing. Topher: Is this your first time speaking at one of the flagship of WordCamps? Maestro: I would say yes, it is my first time at one of the flagships. So WordCamp Buffalo was my first time live. So that was a great, I would say, kind of pre-game warmup for something like this. Topher: That’s quite a jump to your second camp being one of the flagships. Maestro: Yes, I will definitely say I’m honored. I’m grateful. I believe I earned this opportunity. You know, it wasn’t just given to me just for the kicks. But at the same time, I know that there are a lot of other great people who applied and they could have done just as a great job as I believe I’m going to do. So I’m just grateful that I was chosen. But I will say that that last WordCamp Buffalo just gave me a lot more confidence that feel like I can’t do this. It’s just be myself. Topher: That’s great. I know a number of people that have just generally increased their public speaking skills, in general, through WordPress, either just talking to meetups or going to WordCamps and speaking or whatever. You know, their first one they’re terrified and by the 10th one they’re doing a whole lot better. Maestro: I can agree with you on that. Topher: So how are you feeling about it? I mean, it’s a big stage. Are you nervous? Maestro: Well, I guess before I answer that, I mean, were you nervous your first big one? Topher: No. No. In general, I don’t really get nervous speaking in front of people, but my first big one was U.S., and that was probably my 20th time speaking at a WordCamp. So it wasn’t that different. But you know, different things make people nervous. Some people are worried about their knowledge of their topic, and other people have that cold and they’re worried actually about all those eyeballs looking at them, you know? Maestro: Yeah, yeah. That’s a good point. I would definitely say based on that, I’m not too worried about the eyeballs. I’m not too worried about my slides or anything like that. I mean, I feel like based on me having prior speaking engagements and opportunities, it’s helped. On top of the fact that, you know, the last one I did was WordCamp Buffalo, it’s all helped compile me to feel pretty confident. But I would definitely say my own doubts will come internally for me. Like, you know, am I going to be good enough? Or will I be too funny or too boring, too this? You know, just those little small things. Topher: Oh, yeah. Maestro: Am I gonna be too serious? Topher: Yeah. I have every confidence you’re gonna do fine. I mean, you’re doing fine here in a podcast in front of the entire internet. Maestro: Thanks so much. Topher: I was gonna ask you… So you spoke at Buffalo and now you have worked with the Europe team? What’s it like working with a very international team with all those different cultures and communication skills and processes?

Show Notes Contact Info: Yoast Profile Episode Transcript Topher: Hey folks, welcome to Hallway Chats. My name is Topher. This week we have another hallway chat that was actually recorded on-site at a WordCamp. This one was recorded at WordCamp Italia in Milan and we were outside in a beautiful courtyard at an ancient university. My guest is Iolanda Sequino. She works for Yoast and was there at WordCamp working the booth and we got into a great conversation and I said, “Hey, we should record this.” So here we are, and you get to listen in.  Hey everybody, this is Topher, I’m at WordCamp Italia in Milano. Today I’m here with- Iolanda: Iolanda. Topher: Iolanda. Tell me why you’re here.  Iolanda: To have fun! No, I’m kidding. I mean, we have lots of fun in WordCamps- Topher: Oh, yeah.  Iolanda: …so it’s not entirely false. I’m here to be part of the Yoast booth. So we talk to people, we answer the questions, we collect questions actually also. It’s also a valuable feedback moment. We also collect the compliments.  Topher: Oh, yes, yes.  Iolanda: And we play games and give prizes.  Topher: Oh, nice. How long have you been in WordPress?  Iolanda: I would say five years. Topher: Nice.  Iolanda: A couple of years as a content writer, and then now with Yoast as a developer of the plugin. Topher: Oh, okay. How long have you been with Yoast?  Iolanda: A little over three years now.  Topher: Okay, quite a while. Iolanda: Yeah. Yeah.  Topher: Developer the whole time? Iolanda: I started as a researcher because I’m a linguist originally. And then, since we, I mean, we need the language, linguistic proficiency to be able to develop the assessments, then we basically grew. My team and I, we grew into this developer role. We’re all linguists actually. Topher: That’s really cool.  Iolanda: Thank you.  Topher: So you’re here at a booth, are you also in marketing at all or do you…? Iolanda: No.  Topher: No. You got picked?  Iolanda: Yeah.  Topher: Did you ask to come or did they tell you to come? Iolanda: I was asked to come.  Topher: Okay. This is your first WordCamp? Iolanda: No.  Topher: Oh, good.  Iolanda: No.  Topher: So you know what you’re coming to?  Iolanda: No, I was eager to come. Topher: What were your past WordCamps?  Iolanda: Netherlands. Actually Italy already, but then we were in the online ones.  Topher: All right, yes.  Iolanda: And already there you got this feeling of how energizing it is to interact with the people. I think it’s the best thing about meeting in person. When you work with technology, I mean, you don’t have that many contacts with people all around the world. And then finally, you get this chance to see, to talk, which is invaluable. Topher: How far did you have to travel to come here? Where are you from?  Iolanda: So I’m from Italy, originally but I live in the Netherlands.  Topher: Quite a ways. Iolanda: I mean, it was a short flight. Doable. Topher: I forget how small Europe is Iolanda: Actually, the size of China. We looked it up this week. Topher: Oh, that’s cool.  Iolanda: Yeah. It was also in fact checking what the size of Europe like. And it’s like China.  Topher: All right. All right. Well, thank you very much for chatting with me today.  Iolanda: Thank you for having me.  Topher: Yes, I will see you.  This has been an episode of Hallway Chats, a part of the HeroPress Network. This episode was recorded in person at WordCamp Italia in Milan, Italy. Your host was 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. 

Show Notes Contact Info: https://www.wp1x1.de/ @MajaBenke Episode Transcript Topher: Hey everyone! I’m Topher. Welcome to Hallway Chats. This episode is a little bit different. It’s another one that was recorded in person, so it’s just me and the guest. Last summer, I visited Barcelona and I spent about a week wandering the city and seeing the sights with Maja Benke, who was from Germany.  We basically just moved from cafe to cafe throughout the week trying food and beverages and just talking about everything. So this is a recording of one of those conversations. Before we get started, though, I want to thank our sponsor Nexcess. Nexcess has been really great for HeroPress. Their speed is fantastic. I love their admin panel, it works great.  And they have some stuff I don’t use, but I admire tremendously. They have WooCommerce automated testing, which is kind of a big deal. Not every place has that. In fact, I don’t know of another place that does have that.  They have a great sales performance monitor, so it can help you with business decisions. And then of a plugin performance monitor, which is actually really hard to do. I know a bunch of plugins that claim to do it well, but they don’t really. The one from Nexcess does a really great job. So if you’re looking for a good host, especially with WooCommerce, checkout Nexcess, they’re great. Alright, so let’s get on with our conversation with Maja. The scene is we were sitting in a cafe, an outdoor cafe. Every cafe in Barcelona at that time of the year had tables and chairs outside. I don’t think we sat inside any of them. So you could just walk down the street and just stop and sit and someone would come and offer you coffee. It was pretty great. So let’s dive right in. Topher: What I really like about that story is that it didn’t work for you, and so you were able to do something else, you know? Maja: Yeah. I don’t know if I would have looked at it this way. I mean, it’s true. Like what I’m really glad about it’s actually… So maybe where it started was like… So I started in landscape architecture, which I really loved and really enjoyed because I really like to design. I also like, especially in terms of user experience, not just in terms of art and do pretty things, but in terms of doing design which means stuff that works for people and they’re enjoying it even in a way that maybe they not even notice that it’s actually really good design because it’s so like normal feeling in a good way. Topher: Intuitive. Maja: Yeah, intuitive. It’s not even look like a good design. So I really like those. And also like plants and being creative, but in an engineer way, you know, not in a blank canvas and you just put color in and you have all the freedom because it’s for me too much freedom. I like to have limits of rules. Especially in architecture, you have a lot of rules that people don’t hurt themselves using those things. So I love this a lot. But I had a lot of problems not being able to travel around.  Topher: So that’s what led you to leave that career and pick something else? Maja: Yes. So this was the main reason. It was actually the main reason why I wanted to change the profession I had. Also, I figured out that the greatest part in being a landscape architect is not the biggest part. It’s actually the smallest part and really small, because the rest is like a lot of paperwork, a lot of like helping building the table matrix, checking that the stuff got billed in a correct way, and also changing the plans all the time.  Because there was a lot of other parties involved that you’re related to so you had to like change your plans all the time, your ideas, and… I don’t know, it was not that fun and creative as I thought.  Topher: sure.  Maja: It was too much limitation. But especially not being able to travel as much as I wanted to. Like, for one time I was working in an auto store and we had a lot of clients coming in looking for equipment for the next travel. So keep asking, “Are you travelling?” And also we were asking, “What were you going to do? What’s the weather temperature, stuff like this.” They were a lot of cool stuff. So I had a little list putting all the cool ideas on I wanted to do and my colleagues were like, “You will never have enough vacation and holiday that you’re able to do that.” And they were like early 20. I was like, “This is too sad. I don’t want to live just to work. I want to work and then I’m able to live and do stuff.” And if even in my early 20s people already told me, “You will not…” I mean if you’re like, I don’t know, 70, and people will tell you, “Oh, you don’t have the time to do all these things,” I think it’s still critical to say that. But maybe it would be a bit more makes sense. But early 20s is like not the time to tell someone they’ll not be able to do all the stuff because they don’t have time because you will have to work so much all the time. You don’t have enough holidays. And I found it super depressing. And I was like, “Nah, I don’t want to live like this. I really wanted to be independent just working and still work something that I’m really passionate about it because… And then not really know what it is. So after my university time, I did an internship and then I found out that I’m not really made for the office and doing this work. Even the university were really cool and creative. So, yeah, I did Camino de Santiago in Spain, so pilgrim way, and found a lot of people who had some unusual work lives. So they were not working the classical job sometimes. I mean, a lot of them did obviously but also there were some who were just, “Yeah, I work sometimes here, sometimes there, and I live there and there.” I mean, usually it was like being a waiter or doing the kind of any job.  And thought for myself, “That would be fine. I don’t have to work at something, I don’t know, where you earn a lot of money or something if you’re not able to… Like, I don’t need to work in something where I need to do a lot of money if I’m not able to have the lifestyle I want, which was traveling and being free. I mean, many people, I think, think money gives you the freedom, which is partly true, obviously. But it’s not freedom if you have to work so much that you can’t really use the money in the way you want. So, I get the input so I was less scared of having not a career or something. I was like, “No, for me it’s more important to be free and live on places I wanted to.” So then I moved to Barcelona being a waitress. It was a cool way to be in Barcelona but still, it was not local independency. So I still had my shift. So when I wanted to go home for like celebration, any birthday or something- Topher: Right, you couldn’t go. Maja: I couldn’t go because I had shifts. So it was still not ideal, but it was good starting point. And then I was thinking, “Okay, so I like to travel, the work that it’s local independency is probably online and digital. What should it be? Traveling and digital? I don’t know, maybe a travel work.” So it was a time where I think in the English community or English-speaking community travel blogs were already pretty common. In a German community, I would say it started already. I mean, there were a few travel blogs, they were also quite big, but they were not that super many. So it was kind of still time to get in and possibly also be able probably to do a big and have a living from it. So I was looking for a platform to do a travel blog. So I was researching how to make a travel blog, or how to make a blog. Like I had no idea from online. Really no clue.  And then I heard this WordPress thing. I was like, “Okay.” So I checked some and saw a lot of websites were using WordPress. I was like, “Okay, I mean, if you can build like this, probably I can do it as well. But we’ll see. I will try to learn how to do… I will try to manage, not even to learn, just to manage to get a blog online.” I think I needed a week to install WordPress on a server because it didn’t know how that works with domain and server, database. Never heard about that either. No clue. And really I needed a week. It’s so funny. Looking back, it’s just so funny. I mean, now I need like, I don’t know, five minutes or maybe even more. Like half an hour probably to set everything. But I was so lost. I needed a week. Now I don’t know if I get to… I don’t know. So yeah, somehow I got the travel blog started.  I think even there was one of the starter themes. I think it was 2011 or 2012 theme. I think it was the one with the pictures that were like full… I think full width? Topher: Yeah.  Maja: And on every page it changed, they had a different picture. But I think it was randomly or something. At least I couldn’t figure out, for a while, how to select the specific picture I want on a specific page. But I was really lost. I had to look up a lot. I don’t know.  I was a bit frustrated because I couldn’t really find any German resources for really low beginners. I mean there were explanations, but they assumed you know what FTP is and stuff like this, and I didn’t know that. So I was a little bit lost sometimes.  So I did a travel blog for like two, three years, tried to make a living from it. I was always working as a waiter besides that. During that time I also lived in England for a while. So I also was a waitress there. And I failed badly because I was really bad in social media, really bad in writing, really bad in doing the- Topher: Travel blogging? Maja: Yeah. I mean, travel blogging it was not that bad a thing, but it was like to get money from it, you need partnerships, for example. And I am just too shy… Or not too shy but… I don’t know. I think it’s really weird to write like a hustle, for example, and say, “Hey, I’m a travel blogger. Can I get free stuff?” I never did that.  I was always kind of incognito. So I just w

Show Notes HeroPress Essay: The good and the bad of open source WordPress Contact Info: http://lesley.pizza @lesley_pizza Newsletter Glue Episode Transcript Topher: Hi everyone! My name is Topher. Nyasha: And my name is Nyasha. Topher: And this is Hallway Chats. Before we get started, I want to draw your attention to Nexcess. They are our sponsor and we greatly appreciate it. I am a user of their services. The HeroPress site is around their servers. And it’s fantastic. I really like it. They’re super fast. They have all the cool tools that I really like as a nerdy web developer. They have some cool stuff I haven’t got to use yet but I’m excited about. They do a lot of cool stuff with WooCommerce. They have automated testing, they have a sales performance monitor, there’s a plug-in performance monitor, and I’m looking forward to checking that out. And you should too.  Now we’re gonna get on with our podcast. And our guest today is Lesley Sim. Welcome.  Lesley: Hello. Topher: I have a question about your name. Is the S hard or soft? Is it Les-ley or Lez-ley?  Lesley: Oh, I prefer Less-ley. So soft.  Topher: Okay. All right, cool. We’re talking about famous people named Leslie or Lesley before you came on.  Lesley: How do you pronounce a famous people’s Ss?  Topher: The one I know most famous is Leslie Nielsen. I mean, it sounds like there’s Z in it. But I’ve known some others. Nyasha: I alternate. Leslie and Lesley. Lesley: Cool. Topher: So tell us about yourself. Where do you live?  Lesley: I live in Singapore. It’s almost exactly on the equator.  Topher: Oh, wow. Lesley: So it’s hot and rainy all the time. Topher: All the time. And your days are the same length year-round? Lesley: Yep, that’s right.  Topher: But it’s near the ocean. How’s the temperature like? Is it miserable hot all the time or is it you get a breeze from the ocean? Lesley: It’s getting there with climate change. It’s getting like really hot, like searing hot. I think most of the time it’s somewhere between 26 and 30 degrees Celsius.  Nyasha: Oh, wow.  Lesley: I’m not sure what that is in Fahrenheit.  Topher: It’s hot. Nyasha: Hot, yeah. I was gonna say that’s hot. Topher: I think 30 is just over 100 Fahrenheit.  Lesley: Yeah. So 78 to 212 Fahrenheit. Topher: Not 212.  Lesley: No, wait, wait. I put in 100. Topher: 86. That’s not bad at all. Nyasha: That’s perfect, yeah. Where I grew up, that’s what the temperature was. I have always wanted to visit Singapore, by the way. That’s definitely on my list of visits. So I’ll call you when I go. Lesley: Yes. I’ll bring you around and show you all the restaurants and great tourist sites. Nyasha: Awesome. Topher: I know all about Singapore because we play Mario Kart and there’s a track there. Nyasha: Pretty nice. Lesley: You feel like you’ve been here already.  Topher: That’s right. We fly up on top of the buildings and race through swimming pools. It’s great. So tell us what you do in WordPress in your own words. I know but I want to hear from you. Lesley: I work on a newsletter plugin called Newsletter Glue. It connects ESPs. So like MailChimp, Active Campaign, Campaign Monitor, MailerLite, all those to WordPress, and lets you use WordPress to manage, publish, send your newsletters.  So you don’t have to be, you know, going into MailChimp and fiddling with the email builder all the time. Instead, you can use WordPress, which you know, people listening to this podcast are already more familiar with, they’re in it all the time. So it makes sending newsletters feel like you’re just writing a blog post, which is really nice. And then you get all the good benefits of having your newsletter archive on your site. So, you know, that means you benefit from SEO. If you have a membership site, you can restrict the newsletter content, and so on and so forth. So basically all the publishing strategies that you’re using for your articles you can now apply to your newsletter. Topher: Excellent. I do use it and I like it very, very much. Lesley: Yay! Topher: There’s actually one support.  Lesley: Personalized. Topher: Yes. The inside joke is that I sent her a lot of DMs. Lesley: One thing that I should mention is that we’re now focused on medium to large publishers, newsrooms, and media companies. So we’ve been having a lot of fun kind of also doing more personalized onboarding customizations, and working more closely with them.  Topher: Okay. So last time your team was just you and a developer. Do you have more people now?  Lesley: We have a support person as well as content marketing person. And we’re kind of onboarding writers right now as well. Topher: All right. That’s cool. So you’re growing. Lesley: Yeah.  Topher: You are currently an entrepreneur. Have you ever worked for someone besides yourself? You ever had a real job? Lesley: Yes, unfortunately. My first job was in Changi Airport, and that was really cool because like, it’s, to me, the best… I wouldn’t even say, one of the best. I would just go ahead and say the best effort in the world. And so kind of, you know, getting the insight to seeing what that operates like and the levels that they operate at was really cool. But then it also turned out that government-type work is not for me. So I moved into ad agencies and I really enjoyed that. It was a lot more fun and flexible. And then I kind of did a hard left, and went and became a freediving instructor for a while. Topher: Oh, wow. Nyasha: Oh, cool.  Lesley: Yeah. That was really, really fun. One of my favorite things about that was actually the teaching and less of the actual freediving. It was really cool because you do these short three or five-day courses with students, and you’re like blowing their mind every time. And so yeah, like just getting to be a part of changing someone’s life, even for a short time, was really rewarding.  Topher: That is pretty great. Lesley: And then I started working for myself after that because you know, once you’ve gone and done that, it’s hard to get a regular job. Nyasha: I bet. Topher: Yeah.  Nyasha: You have a really cool background. I’m like, Wow, that’s so cool. Lesley: Thank you.  Topher: Where did the idea for Newsletter Glue come from?  Lesley: My co-founder and I met on the Indie Hackers job forum. He was looking for a co-founder. At the time, he had built a membership plugin because his background was in membership plugins. He was the lead developer on Ultimate Member. And having gone through all of that, he was like, Okay, I’m gonna come out by myself and try to build a membership plugin that was better than what was out there. And then he quickly ran into other typical developer, founder problems, which is, you know, Oh crap, development is only half the work. There’s all this marketing you have to do. You know, I didn’t do any of the customer research at the start, I didn’t build up any excitement around the launch, all that kind of stuff. So that’s where I came about. I tried to do that and we both quickly realized that there’s a lot more to membership plugins than we expected. So the membership plugin, I guess, like competition or area is already really saturated, there are lots of good plugins out there, and trying to convince somebody to move from a plugin that’s already good and very heavily featured to a new plugin that not as stable and fewer features was really difficult. Even if we tell them that like, it’s a lot newer, has more modern features, it’s still kind of not enough of a push to get them to even try it out. So it really stuck. We were planning on closing the plugin down but during the process of kind of building it out and marketing it we built a MailChimp add-on that sent that post as newsletters. And I wasn’t set about closing the membership plugin down because it never kind of got traction, but I said about the add-on because I was using the add-on for my own Newsletter. I realized I was sad about it because there wasn’t an obvious substitute that I could use. In contrast, there’s so many of these substitutes for membership plugins. And that realization, you know, I thought like, Okay, if I was set to lose the plug-in or that add-on, you know, there’s probably lots of other people who are looking for something exactly like that. So we pivoted, and we kind of made that add-on into a full-blown plugin. And we learned from our mistakes and we did everything different from day one. So I built in public, you know, spent a lot of time on Twitter and Slack channels getting to know people, building a community, all that kind of stuff, and doing lots more customer research and interviews at the beginning to really get to know customers and what they wanted.  So there was so much more traction from day one and it was much more fun. It wasn’t a struggle trying to even get people to try the plugin. Topher: That’s beautiful. And how long has it been?  Lesley: We started in 2020.  Topher: Wow. All right. Nyasha: Nice.  Topher: Quite new.  Nyasha: In the middle of the pandemic. That’s awesome. That’s awesome to hear a success story that came out of the pandemic like that. That is incredibly cool.  Topher: You know, I mean, it must have been right about then that I became aware of you in the community. I started seeing you on Twitter and things like that. Is that when you started getting on Twitter? Why did I start seeing you everywhere? Was that deliberate on your part?  Nyasha: Good marketing. Topher: Yeah, it was. That was exactly what I’m talking about. So we did the memberships again 2019 and, you know, I didn’t get on Twitter, I didn’t do any of that stuff. And then, you know, learned from our mistakes. And starting 2020 I…  So what I did basically was just put in WordPress into

Show Notes HeroPress Essay: How I tried, applied, got involved. Realizing one of my childhood dreams. Contact Info: @Alice_Ridice WordPress.tv Episode Transcript Topher: Hey folks, this is Topher. This week’s episode of Hallway Chats is a little different. This is a live recording from working in Italy last November. Nyasha wasn’t there with me so it’s just me and my guest, Alice. And I hope you enjoy this one because it was really fun to make. We were outside in an atrium sort of place. It was pretty cool.  Before we get started, I want to remind you that our host is Nexcess, and they’re super cool. I’ve been really happy with them. Their sites are really fast, even in the back end without cache, and their panel is packed with power tools that a nerd like me really loves. So give them a shot if you are looking for a good host. And now on we go with Alice.  Hey everybody, this is Topher. I’m here at WordCamp Italia in Milano, and I’m here with- Alice: Alice Orrù. Topher: What brings you here? Why are you here at WordCamp?  Alice: Well, I’m here because I’m part of the Italian community even if I’ve been living in Spain for 10 years now. But I’m still Italian and I love joining the Italia community where I entered into 2015, 2016. And since then, I’ve joined the Polyglots team and I’ve been working with them to make WordPress accessible in Italian. I mean I love the Italian community so every time I can, I just join them at WordCamps or other occasions. Topher: What do you do with WordPress? Alice: I’m a technical translator. I localize plugins and things from English to Italian. But I also work in UX writing. So sometimes I have clients asking me to write the content of their websites or localize it. But generally speaking, I work on the back end of WordPress in the content side of WordPress.  Topher: Are you a freelancer? Alice: Yes, I work as a freelancer. Yeah.  Topher: How long have you been doing that?  Alice: 2015. I opened my freelance position in Spain and I joined the WordPress community at the same time.  Topher: Oh, that’s great.  Alice: Yeah.  Topher: I’ve heard that most small businesses fail after three years. So once you pass that you’re doing well.  Alice: I mean, the WordPress community has been very important for me in this sense because I first joined WP Rocket. I’ve been working with them in- Topher: Yes, I met them. Alice: When you were interviewing me for the first time a few years ago, I was working with them. So that job has been very important to me to meet the international community as well-  Topher: Ah, good. Alice: …starting to speak at WordCamp Europe. That was amazing because some of my co-workers were already- Topher: Experienced?  Alice: …experienced WordPressors and WordCampers. So I received training from them: so how to speak at a WordCamp, how to present your first pitch to a WordCamp. So I really have to say thank you to all the people that I met at the beginning of my journey with WordPress because now I’m the one training people to translate WordPress or to join WordCamps and doing advocacy about it. So it’s very nice. I mean, it’s been a nice journey.  Topher: What other camps have you been to?  Alice: WordCamp Europe a few times, WordCamp Milan, WordCamp Torino. The first time I spoke was at WordCamp Barcelona in 2016.  Topher: I remember that camp happening, and I wished I could go.  Alice: Okay, you were not there.  Topher: I was not there, no. Alice: Okay. Okay. Yeah, that was my first one. Topher: That’s great. Alice: So yeah, usually around Europe, I [inaudible 00:04:16].  Topher: What do you love about WordCamp?  Alice: I love meeting my friends. I mean, it’s awesome opportunity to network on a professional side, but I really enjoy the friendship that I’ve created here in the community. And I value them a lot because it’s not easy, I mean, to explain people what’s your job and explain, Wow, working WordPress. Here, everybody knows that and you meet people with your same values and sometimes you have similar journeys. It’s a very nice way to create friendships and establish relationships also in a professional level.  Topher: What would you say to someone who’s never been to a WordCamp and is maybe nervous about going unsure if they’ll fit in or whatever? Alice: As an attendee? Topher: Yes.  Alice: I think the good thing about the WordPress community is the effort to be an inclusive place and accessible place. Actually, I work a lot with inclusiveness and accessibility. And that’s also thank you to the documentation at the WordCamps and all the things that I saw happening in the WordPress community.  So if somebody is thinking about joining, I always say that there’s really a place for everyone here. And it’s a very friendship environment where everybody can fit in actually, even if you have technical experience, if you don’t. There’s really space for everyone.  I mean, if you look at the schedule for WordPress, you will see how many topics we are covering one day: content, development, a lot of things. So that’s really a place where you can learn to be better at your job, but also make new friends. Topher: All right. Well, thank you very much for talking with me today.  Alice: Thank you. Thank you, Topher.  Topher: This has been an episode of Hallway Chats, a part of the HeroPress Network. This episode was recorded in person at WordCamp Italia in Milan, Italy. Your host was Topher DeRosia. We’d like to thank Sofia DeRosia for the music and Nexcess for hosting our network. If you liked the episode, please subscribe and mention us on social media.

Show Notes This episode of Hallway Chats kicks off a new era with a new co-host Nyasha Green! And this week we talk with Matt Mullenweg. Matt Mullenweg is co-founder of the open-source publishing platform WordPress, which now powers over 40% of all sites on the web. He is the founder and CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Tumblr, WPVIP, Day One, and Pocket Casts. Additionally, Matt runs Audrey Capital, an investment and research company. He has been recognized for his leadership by Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, Inc. Magazine, TechCrunch, Fortune, Fast Company, Wired, University Philosophical Society, and Vanity Fair. Matt is originally from Houston, Texas, where he attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and studied jazz saxophone. In his spare time, Matt is an avid photographer. He currently splits his time between Houston and San Francisco. Matt’s Site: https://ma.tt Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/photomatt Twitter | @photomatt Mike Flanagan’s post about No Sleep. Episode Transcript Topher: Hey, everyone. My name is Topher.  Nyasha: Hey, my name is Nyasha.  Topher: And this is Hallway Chats. For those of you paying attention, you’ll notice that my co-host is not Cate this week. Cate is stepping aside as co-host, and Ny will be joining me as our regular co-host in the future. Ny is the Editorial Director of MasterWP, and a WordPress developer.  Before we get started, I want to say something about our sponsor Nexcess. They have a ton of cool features that I really appreciate. And they’re all over the marketing material. But there are some things they do especially well that I want to call out. Things like really good caching, a super great admin panel that lets me do things myself without needing to wait for support, and being able to SSH between staging servers. It’s those finely polished edges that I love so much. And right now, they’ll buy out your contract with another host, up to $200. So if you’re looking for a great host, check them out. Our guest this week is Matt Mullenweg. Welcome, sir.  Matt: Good to see y’all.  Topher: Good to see you too. When I set this up, I got the time zone wrong because I didn’t realize you’d be on the West Coast. Are you just hanging out or you got a place over there now? Matt: I’m actually right now in the mountains. I’m in Montana.  Topher: Oh, that’s awesome.  Matt: Yeah. I really love mountains. Because there’s something about the idea of something being so rock solid, building, foundations, the air, you know. I really like mountains. Topher: Something you really can’t affect yourself very much. It’s just there. All right. So on the off chance that no one knows who you are, who are you? Matt: My name is Matt Mullenweg. I was born and raised in Houston, Texas, and co-founder of WordPress with a guy named Mike Little. And later I started a company called Automattic, which has now grown to be, gosh, I think about 2,000 people that are around.  Topher: That is amazing to me. Nyasha: It’s awesome.  Matt: And we make wordpress.com, Jetpack, Tumblr, WooCommerce, Pocket Cast for people looking into podcasts. We’re trying to make basically great open web stuff, stuff so good that you choose it because you like it, but then when you choose it, you make the web more free and open.  Topher: Yeah, that’s cool. Nyasha: That is awesome. Can I also say I am a big fan of Tumblr, by the way. I’ve been trying to get everyone to go back to Tumblr. I love Tumblr. Matt: I’m looking at it at the moment right now.  Nyasha: I love what you people have done.  Matt: So I wear different hats in different years. You know, my role changes a lot. Like when Gutenberg started I was really deep into that. But right now one of the things I’m doing is I’m directly running Tumblr as a CEO. And that’s been really exciting to see this beautiful community and so much creativity thrive. It’s been fun to sort of like, as Twitter has its turbulence, to see just droves of users, hundreds of thousands per day come over to Tumblr. Topher: Wow.  Matt: And what we’re doing is trying to create a place for them where they can share and find stuff that enriches their life. Topher: Do you have issues of scaling? Like, did you suddenly, “Oh, look, we have an extra half million users today. Let’s fire up another server.” Matt: We definitely have had some of those. But fortunately, Automattic has been doing a lot of infrastructure for a long time. So we are, I would say, a deep technology infrastructure company. So we’re able to absorb quite a bit of additional… you know, because we host everything from like small blogs, all the way up to like whitehouse.gov hands-on- Topher: Right.  Matt: …so we can handle the very small to the very large. And that sort of security mindedness, network infrastructure, data center, points of presence, everything is definitely coming into play right now when we have this huge surge of interest.  Topher: One of the questions I have here for you is, what does your day to day work look like? What does the CEO of something like Tumblr do? Do you get up in the morning, you sit down at your desk and you code Tumblr? Matt: Well, so right now I’m running… This changes. So right now I am running wordpress.com and Tumblr directly. In the future, I’ll hand those off to other leaders. Right now I’m kind of hands-on with them. So that means I’m looking at products. We collaborate a lot through P2S, much like make. WordPress, where we, you know, write and read as a primary form of communication. And I gotta tell you my favorite thing I do, I’ve done a couple of these already today, is customer calls or talking to people. Topher: Oh, nice. Nyasha: Awesome.  Matt: There’s nothing better… I would say this for anyone listening. Like if your business is stalled, whatever, just, you know, spend some time with your customer to know them and see them in their space.  Someone was screen-sharing with me today like how they manage… They were managing like 1,600 sites and they were showing me how they manage all that and use like Jetpack and other things to it. And that was really cool. And it gave me a ton of ideas for how we can make that easier and better.  Auto updates and staged updates and backups and security and brute force protection and logins. There’s so many things we can do to make that easier. But there’s nothing like really going deep into the weeds with a customer. Topher: You said call. Does Tumblr do phone support or you- Matt: No. We do do… So I hack I have now that Automattic is now over 2,000 people is with all the leads of the business units to join like one customer call pretty periodically. So like Maiorana who’s the CEO of WooCommerce and myself will get together with a customer of WooCommerce and you know, those screenshare show us the admin, show us their orders, talk about what is working well, talk about what isn’t working well.  You kind of have to go high and low. You have to move between like that really, really big picture because you have to sort of zoom out and make sure you’re heading in the right direction, that we’re making the internet more free and open place that we’re like meeting user’s needs that were aligning with our organization.  But you gotta get down to details too. And the details being like, “Wow, that button doesn’t make any sense,” or “I was so stuck there.” Or you know, the wording of things really, really matters. And so it’s a fun dichotomy. But I really enjoy it that sort of pendulum swing between the very, very small details and the really, really wide philosophical aperture.  Topher: Cool.  Nyasha: Nice. So Matt, say I get back into Tumblr 2012 when I was on Tumblr, and I’m writing fanfiction, again, Game of Thrones, Doctor Who fanfiction, you’re telling me like one day I can potentially like hop on the phone with you and talk to you about that? Matt: You might. Actually, something we do at Automattic is that every person who starts Automattic does two weeks of customer support, then every team rotates to do one week per year of customer support. Again, that’s a different version of the same idea which is, like, if something’s not working, again, go back to the people- Nyasha: That’s awesome.  Matt: …and try to understand their struggles and their stories. There’s nothing more rewarding, especially as a builder, someone who codes or designs or writes things, to see how someone interacts with your work and then iterate based on that. It’s really satisfying. Nyasha: I love it. Topher: Ny, you had a question about AI art. Just throw that out there. Nyasha: I did. I did. I really wanted to get your opinion on this, Matt. So AI art is popping up everywhere. I think the latest viral craze is Lensa pitchers. How do you feel about the AI art hype that’s going on right now? Matt: I think it’s pretty incredible. We’re almost living in like a sci-fi novel right now. Like we’re seeing the early versions of super intelligence is booting up, and we’re able to chat with them, with like ChatGPT or play with them with the Dall-E or MidJourney. So think of this as like interacting with the new life form. Nyasha: Oh, wow.  Matt: It’ll send you stuff back, you can interact, you can play, they’re learning. I think it’s really beautiful because we’re able to, you know… I’m just really excited for what it enables people to do. Because what I think of AI art is that it’s not the end state but it’s a great starter, right?  So often you need that kindling, that thing to start the fire, if you’re a writer, or musician or something like that. And that generative process of brainstorming and coming up with ideas or trying different things, how cool is that a computer can try 30 things all at once and show them all to you? And then you can kind of browse thr

Show Notes This episode of Hallway Chats is a little different from previous episodes. Recently Cate and Topher had the opportunity to go to WordCamp Europe in Porto, Portugal, where we had some literal hallway chats. This 4one is with Grzegorz Ziółkowski. Piccia’s Site: https://gziolo.pl/ Twitter | @gziolo Episode Transcript Topher: All right. So tell me your name.  Greg: My name is Greg Ziolkowski. But I go by Greg because it’s just easier for everyone.  Topher: Yes. Yeah. All right. And now what do you do?  Greg: So I work at Automattic and I also do work full time on WordPress Core, and in particular Gutenberg Project. And it’s been five years since I started contributing to Gutenberg. Topher: Oh, very beginning.  Greg: I mean, not start. Like a few months after that. Exactly, you know, five years ago at WordCamp Europe was that first probably demonstration of that. So like three months after that I joined the team. I was working internally at Automattic with the whole community on- Topher: So were hired to work on Gutenberg or you moved to Gutenberg? Greg: No. I asked to be moved to Gutenberg. Topher: Oh, you moved. You asked. Greg: Yeah. I mean, I just like, asked, “How can I be part of the project?”  Topher: That’s one of the things I’ve always liked about Automattic. Greg: I also did some contribution to other products. And it worked, and here I am.  Topher: Great. And you’re still happy with it? Greg: Yes, I am. It took a lot of time to realize the vision. We are slowly getting to the point where it’s something that was like planned. It’s so great to see all the talks showing, all the power of the paradigm of logs, how it works, you know, seeing the excitement about new development over block patterns, block themes.  Topher: That’s really cool. Is there a particular part that you worked on?  Greg: Oh, so you know, it’s been five years, so it’s been different things that are-  Topher: What are you working on now? Greg: Right now, also the last two months I spent as a co-lead for editor test for WordPress 6.0 release. It’s always like more about making sure that everything gets properly moved from the Gutenberg plugin to WordPress Core. But, you know, it changes. I work a lot with the ways how people can build blocks. And that applies to API’s that are exposed to both the core but also to all extenders they’re plugging out, you know, team out also. And also have to develop tools that make it easier. You know, like the transition from PHP to Java it’s quite a journey. Topher: It is. Greg: So we are trying to make it more straightforward so that people can- Greg: That’s great. Topher: …start, like plays that and end slowly, learn how to tackle double. Any sort of like what you had in the past with PHP, like when people started, they didn’t know PHP. Topher: Right. Greg: But also you could play, tweak things in PHP back then. I’m also PHP developer. My first job was in PHP. So I know the experience. It was so easy to work with PHP. Topher: I’m a PHP developer and I’m not a JavaScript developer, so I haven’t made that journey yet.  Greg: I mean, JavaScript, if you use Node.js these days, it’s like PHP as well, like on the server. But as soon as you go to the browser and all the interactivity, it’s hard even for me to catch up with everything, with CSS and getting so advanced and JavaScript trying to take parts of CSS, like animations, and even combine them together to make some nice user experiences that try to replicate what you can do on mobile phones, which drive all that, right? Topher: Right. Yeah.  Greg: So I know. Even for me to catch up is a- Topher: Once upon a time, CSS was my favorite thing. But then I looked away for six months, and when I came back, it was  Sass and SCSS and Grunt and Gulp, and other PHP.  Greg: And all the things to make sure that it looks the same in all browsers, you know, like this prefix is for Firefox, for Chrome and so on. It’s getting even more advanced these days with new specs and new features and… yeah.  Topher: It’s hard. So where do you live?  Greg: I live in Poland. I work from there remotely, so it’s pretty convenient.  Topher: The thing I know most about Poland is the salt mines with the carvings.  Greg: Oh, yeah. Wieliczka? Topher: Yeah. Do you live near there?  Greg: Oh, it’s like three hours away driving distance. I’ve never been there. But it’s very popular. Like most of the family members know the place. It’s just I didn’t have a chance yet.  Topher: I used to live near a great lake in Michigan. I live in Michigan. I used to live near the beach and I never went. It was crowded with the tourists. So we talked about where you live and what you do. How long did you travel to get here?  Greg: Oh, that’s, you know- Topher: Did you fly or train?  Greg: I fly.  Topher: Okay.  Greg: That’s a story because we went to the Baltic Sea on vacation with my family. So it wasn’t like the regular/usual route to the place. So I had to go to the smaller airport. So I had to connect two flights. So it took like eight hours maybe- Topher: Oh, wow. Greg: …to do the connections. But usually, when I fly from home, it is like five hours tops with one connection. I always connect in Germany because from Germany you have many connections to all the cities in Europe.  Topher: I’ve been through Frankfurt.  Greg: Yeah, the same. Topher: I assume this is not your first WordCamp Europe.  Greg: No. Topher: No. How many have you been to?  Greg: So I was to WordCamp Vienna. Topher: Awesome.  Greg: Then WordCamp Belgrade in Serbia and Borkum, Berlin.  Topher: I was there. Greg: And then we head to- Topher: And now we’re here.  Greg: …to WordCamp part of… the European part of the remote. And here we are finally. Topher: Do you go to small local ones? Greg: So I was twice to WordCamp Poland. I spoke once and once as an attendee. I mean, there’s one next week, but I’m inclined by doing vacation thing, so I will miss that one, unfortunately. Topher: Cool. Are you gonna be able to come to WordCamp US? Greg: I think I will skip this year. Although it’s a smaller one than usual. Topher: It is much smaller.  Greg: What’s the reason for that? Topher: Venue. Greg: Venues, okay. Topher: Venues are hard to find right now that things are coming back and everything’s booked. Greg: Everyone wants to book. I’m not surprised to hear. Here it was so nice to see all the familiar faces. Topher: Yeah. But it’s on the beach. Greg: I know. Also flying from Europe to California is a super long flight. Topher: Super long. I did East Coast to Sydney one time. That is super long flight.  Greg: Super long.  Topher: All right. I appreciate your time. It’s nice getting to know you.  Greg: Happy to chat.

Show Notes This episode of Hallway Chats is a little different from previous episodes. Recently Cate and Topher had the opportunity to go to WordCamp Europe in Porto, Portugal, where we had some literal hallway chats. This one is with Piccia Neri. Piccia’s Site: https://designforconversions.com/ Twitter | @Piccia Episode Transcript Topher: So I have heard your name pronounced seven different ways today. So first order of business, state your name. Piccia: Pea-cha.  Topher: Pea-cha.  Piccia: Like peach with an A at the end. And it’s quite interesting. Like for you and me, English Italian, is quite innocuous but you know… I was printing out again the pass today because I couldn’t print it yesterday for some reason, and there was one of the guys behind the desk that was just really, really chuckling. And I was like, “You’re from Slovakia?” He’s like, “Yeah.” And then in Spain, it means the opposite of what it does in Slovakia. And now I now live in Spain. But the way you pronounce this, the way it’s spelled because I’m Italian, it’s not a name in Italy either. I mean, you know, we could go on. But in Spain, they read it Pik-cia. So I tell them Picsy and then… yeah. Anyway, so Pi-cha. Like peach with an A at the end.  Topher: Piccia. Piccia: Yeah. Topher: Cool. I like it. What does it mean?  Piccia: It doesn’t really mean anything. But if it does mean anything, it’s small, tiny. Topher: Make sense. Cool. So I was asked to pick some people to interview, and I deliberately picked people I did not know except for you because I only know you a little bit. And I found that interesting. And I would like to know more about you. So what do you do with WordPress? Piccia: I am a designer. I don’t actually build that many sites anymore, but my mission is to get everyone in WordPress to be design-led and an accessible design-led as well.  Topher: Sure. Piccia: That’s become my mission. Because what I find very interesting is that, what do we do with WordPress? We build products, we build experiences, we build websites. There’s very little talk about design and there’s very few designers even in a WordPress environment, if you think about it. So it should be entirely design-led but isn’t it. And that’s really interesting to me. I think that’s a limitation, I think it should definitely be a design-led because I think ever since I started doing this or I started… because I started using WordPress in… I think my first blog was 2009. It was called One Sketch a Day. I would post a drawing a day. Topher: I remember those. Piccia: Because it was pre-Instagram. And then when Instagram happened I just didn’t do it. I don’t know why, but anyway… So that’s when I first started playing with it but I wasn’t very involved in community.  And then when I really saw the gap, I was like, “No one’s talking about design, this needs to be done.” Because sometimes you would see talks about CSS, and it’s like, Yeah, but that’s not a design, that’s a tool. It doesn’t matter. I mean, something completely different when I talk about design. It’s a mindset. It’s a work process. It’s many things but it’s hardly ever talk about styling. And that’s what people think when they think about design during the speaking. So I saw this real gap. I saw this hole in the community. I mean, there’s a few people… Tammy Lester talks about design, but just very few other people. So I started with that. And then it’s now sort of slowly, not so slowly anymore, moving into accessibility. Because there’s very little of that as well. Topher: Accessibility is design in itself. Piccia: Yes, exactly. And everybody should start from that. But again, it goes back to my concept of design as, first of all, structure. And then when you think about accessibility, you start from structure. It’s a mindset. And to me design is a mindset. So it just works really well with my whole philosophy. It was a big digression from your original question. which was what do you do with WordPress? Topher: No, I don’t think it was a digression at all. I think that’s perfect. Are you in freelance? Do you work for a company? Piccia: I am currently freelance. I am looking for collaborations, in fact. Part-time collaborations are perfect for me. I was with Cloudways for a while, for two and a half years, something like that, maybe three, which was great because we did a lot of content creation that meant interviewing people that had something to say that I thought mattered. And my point always was to promote good design—design that is inclusive. I mean design and marketing as well because they work together. So good user experience, good marketing, good ethics. And actually, yeah, I think ethics is a big issue as well and getting to marketing, and so on. So yes, so I am- Topher: Freelance but looking.  Piccia: But, yeah, looking. Very, very, very curious to see what happens next. Topher: I have been a developer for a long time, five years ago, our process was to have a designer create design and hand that to a front end developer who turned it into HTML and CSS. And then that would go to me as a back end developer and I would turn it into WordPress. And it was very flexible. The designer was free to do anything, and we would just turn it into web. Now with Gutenberg, I’m finding that most themes and block groups and all that have their own opinions about design. And as long as you stay within those opinions, they’re easy to use. You drag and you have a fade and you slide in you have a curve, and you drag and drop widgets.  But if you try to go outside of that, if a designer says, “Well, I don’t want this, my block doesn’t do it,” I don’t know how to do it anymore. Are you finding any issues now with really custom design in Gutenberg? Or is it not being a problem for you?  Piccia: I’m not. And I tell you why. Because my way of conceiving a project is completely different from what you described to me. That would never happen. Because to me, I mean, I’m not saying that everybody should be in the room, that the clients that should necessarily be in the room. But the designer and the developer plan together, they’re in the same room. So that will not happen.  Like, for instance, right now I’m leading… we’re nearing the end of the rebuild of the websites for an Italian museum, which they are very, very proud of that digital content because they digitalized all their catalog. So they’re not doing printed catalogs anymore. They’re like, “That’s the catalog.” And it’s incredible the wealth of material that they have. But you can imagine how organizing all that content, how hard.  And also they’re a very interactive museum in terms of what they do, their events, their initiatives, and so on. So there was a lot going on. But the developer, who they said it’s an agency that love Gutenberg. So the team was me doing the UX, lots of art historians, curators doing the content, a UX writer, and a design team, a design agency who don’t really know the web. I mean, they do design for the web, but I’ve noticed that they’re creative more than. And we were in the same room for a long time, I mean, virtual room. So that never happened. Because first of all, the new UX writer structured the content excessively. So we have all the headings and everything styled the way… not styled but you know, structured the way it should be. Anything that needs to be styled rather than, you know, is given the appropriate tag. Why? Because I had a discussion with a developer and I told the designers, “you have to consider all of this when you design the pages.”  The developer is doing everything by block so that the museum team is going to be trained so this staff can create their own content within limits because we don’t want for that mess to happen. So that’s exactly what I mean.  What you just described, I’m sure that it worked fine for you but that’s not been designed-led. Being design-led is… because done like that designers should not be left on their own either. Because these, you know, I had to stop these people. There were things that the designers would do that showed me, proved to me that the interaction design is not their first thing. So I’d have to steer them in the right direction and did the developer. So I would always ask the developer, “Can we do this? What do you think?” For instance, that we wanted to do accordions? And I said, “I know that there’s a way to make accordions accessible, but otherwise, screen readers have a hard time with accordions. And the developer said, “Yes, don’t worry, I can do that.”  But there was always this conversation going on. And we worked at the sitemap together, because the sitemap also has accessibility consequences, and so on. So it was never going to happen that the designer would say, “I don’t know how that block works.”  But it’s interesting that you bring that up, though, because I think that Gutenberg, in certain ways, has made WordPress less easy. It’s loved by developers but not by that many other people.  Topher: As a developer, I’m not in love with Gutenberg at all because I do feel limited. I don’t know JavaScript. So I don’t know how to make my own blocks, and at the mercy of whatever my theme comes with, or whatever block pattern I borrowed or bought, or whatever, I have, in a number of occasions, used Gutenberg to get close and then open my CSS editor and beat it to death.  Piccia: Yeah, exactly. And that’s not what it’s… that’s not- Topher: It’s not the way it’s supposed to work.  Piccia: No, it’s not tidy.  Topher: So I have found that to be difficult.  Piccia: Correct me if I’m wrong, my feeling is that Gutenberg has… because with all the page builders, I think we got to a stage where I mean developers were right. I mean, a lot of sites built with page builders are a mess. You know, mostly they are.  And I think that we all k

Show Notes This episode of Hallway Chats is a little different from previous episodes. Recently Cate and Topher had the opportunity to go to WordCamp Europe in Porto, Portugal, where we had some literal hallway chats. This one is with Sofie Couwenbergh. Sofie’s Site: https://letmewritethatdownforyou.com/ Twitter | @SCouwenbergh Episode Transcript Topher: So what is your name? Sofie: I’m Sofie Couwenbergh. Topher: Where do you live? Sofie: I live in Lisbon. I’m from Belgium originally, but I moved to Lisbon two years ago. Topher: So you didn’t have to come very far? Sofie: I did not have to come very far. I had to take a three-hour train ride. Topher: Okay, I was gonna ask you about the train. Topher: Are the trains nice? Sofie: There’s different kinds that you can take. One from Lisbon to Porto. You can take one of like the first ones, and that’s quite comfortable. Topher: Nice. Sofie: Although it advertises Wi-Fi, but it doesn’t really work. So it’s always a little bit when you think there’s gonna be Wi-Fi and it’s there for two minutes, and then it falls out. That’s worse than when there isn’t anyway, right? Topher: Yes. Sofie: You just keep trying. Topher: You keep trying. That’s terrible. So I have a few questions. What do you do? But also what brings you here? Sofie: So I do two things. I mainly at the moment do content strategy and writing for businesses in digital marketing. So I work with companies such as Meet Edgar, which is a social media scheduling tool, Paperbell, who has accounting software for coaches, but also with agencies like email marketing agencies, SEO agencies. So for them, I do blog strategy and the actual writing as well as optimization. Topher: You do this freelance? Sofie: I do this freelance, yeah. I have my own company and I have a few freelance assistants working for me. Topher: Oh, nice. Sofie: So self-employed I would say. That’s my main gig. But I also run a travel authority site on WordPress. I’ve been doing that for 10 years. Topher: What is travel authority? Sofie: Well, like a big travel blog, let’s say. Not just an affiliate site, but a proper travel blog. So I used to do a lot of marketing campaigns for tourism boards, for travel brands, etc. And I guess that’s where my journey with WordPress started. Because the first version way back in 2012, I had to figure everything out myself, and I did like to design myself the most basic coding, you know, like changing the color of boxes and things. But now I have a developer who helps with those kinds of things, and I have a custom site. Topher: Excellent. Do you still travel a lot for that? Sofie: Well, the pandemic kind of put a stop to that. So the story is that I kind of… “grew sick” is a bit big word, but grew out of travel blogging, I’d say, or I wanted to do something different or mid-2019. But it was also the most successful time for the travel blog, I would say. So it just seemed crazy for me to drop that or to start something else while it was doing so well. And then COVID came. And whilst it was horrible in so many ways, for me, it was a great opportunity to go and do something else because travel just crashed. I lost 90% of my income with that business. So I very quickly decided, “Okay, this is my opportunity to launch something new,” which I’ve been doing since. And the travel blog is now… Like I use it for passive income. So now it just runs on affiliate marketing advertising. Topher: Sure. Sofie: And I have some people help me keep it up to date. Topher: You are not the first person I met that started with a travel blog and doesn’t really do that anymore. Sofie: Well, yeah. I still do it. I mean, I’m trying- Topher: Another friend doesn’t do it at all. Sofie: I briefly contemplated selling it, so I kept it up to date. And then I thought when travel picks up again, then I might sell it because it was taking up so much brain space. Topher: Sure. Sofie: But it is starting to take off again. And I’m like, “actually, this is a good asset to hold on to. Let me see how I can keep it going.” Topher: And if you start going to WordCamps again. Sofie: Could be interesting. So to come back to your question if I still travel a lot, at the moment, I’m mostly enjoying exploring Portugal. Because I moved here two years ago, but because of the pandemic, even travel within Portugal was a bit harder. So I’m really enjoying exploring different regions here. And I think travel will start picking up again now. This was nice to be able to do my first in-person conference again within Portugal. And what brings me here is that… Well, actually, I’ve known about WordCamp for several years already because I’m a WordPress user. But I always thought like, “I’m not techie enough to go speak there. I don’t know… You know, like that’s not my scene.” But then one of my clients actually kind of motivated me and pushed me and was like, “You know, just apply for a workshop and see what happens.” And I got in. And then the fact that it was in Porto was an additional benefit because I kind of want to expand my network. I’m used to going to digital marketing conferences, SEO conferences, not as much these types of conferences. And it’s so nice to meet people who do things that I don’t know anything about. But perhaps in the future, we could work together on something. Topher: Absolutely. So this is your first one? Sofie: It’s my very first one. Topher: They’re all like this. Sofie: That’s good. That’s good. Then I’ll be back. Topher: They’re all not like this. The small ones are also very much fun, but obviously not the grand scale. Sofie: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Topher: But I’m really glad you’re here. There’s a stereotype that WordPress is all developers and designers. And one thing I’m happy about this interview is that it’s representation. I’m gonna put out a website that here’s a person who’s not a developer or designer still making a great career with WordPress. Sofie: And I’m thinking now that all of my clients use WordPress. So even when I’m doing client work, I’m working kind of with WordPress every day. Topher: Sure. Sofie: And I see the different types of plugins that they’re using, what their setup is like, if they have a custom design, or if they use something like Elementor. So that’s interesting. Topher: That is cool. My wife has spoken at WordCamp and her topic was how to be in WordPress and not be a developer or a designer? Sofie: That’s funny. Topher: Because she is neither, and they appreciates. Sofie: I was surprised yesterday as well. At the start of my workshop, I asked how many people were actually in content. Because I was a bit worried beforehand I had no idea who would be in the audience. Topher: Sure. Sofie: And more than 50% of the people in the audience were in content in some kind of way. So I was like, “Okay, that’s interesting.” I had not expected that. Topher: It’s a very easy way for people who aren’t developers or designers to make a career with WordPress. I mean, if you’re a writer, there you are. You are in. Sofie: True. True. I think there’s so many people who just use it, right? And “just” it’s not the right word. But like you don’t have to actually be creating it to work with WordPress every day. As a user, it’s such an important tool in your kit to have. Topher: I’m a developer and I often lose track of the fact that the purpose of WordPress is not development. That’s all I use it for is to build things. And it’s fun. My wife had the same attitude for a long time, because that’s all I did with it. She’s a writer. And she was like, “Well, I wish I could read stuff on the internet.” And I’m like, “I have a tool. Maybe you could do it.” It could change your whole mindset to think that, oh, WordPress is a writing tool. It’s not a toy that developers build on for fun. So we as developers we often have to stop and remember we’re building a tool for content creators. Sofie: For end users. Topher: For end users, yeah. That’s important. So how much do you actually use it every day? Like how much part of your life is it? Sofie: Good question. I work on my own website even if it’s just like maybe one or two hours a week. So that’s on WordPress. And then for clients, I would say it depends. Most of the writing I do just happens in Google Docs or tools like Ahrefs for SEO research. But when I do an audit, when I start working with clients and checking their setup and checking, especially their blog setup is always part of the process. So it’s really hard to say like, oh, every week, I spent so many hours within WordPress because it’s different from week to week. Topher: Is there a particular part of WordPress that makes it better than other tools? Or is it just as a whole this is the best? Like, is there one thing you need get in there like, “Oh, I get to use this thing today?” Sofie: To be honest, because it was when I started blogging, again, 10 years ago, but this was the standard, I think I briefly looked at… I don’t know if it was Wix at some point, but there was kind of like no question about what to use. And within those 10 years, I’ve never felt like I needed something else. So I’ve never used anything else aside from WordPress because I don’t feel the need and maybe that’s a good answer to your question that whatever I need is there. And if it’s not there, and you know, there’s someone who’s gonna create something that I can add on and it’ll be fine. Topher: WordPress is very different now than it was in 2012. It’s with Gutenberg, yes. Sofie: Which I do not like. Topher: You do not like. I was gonna ask you if it’s made it better or worse. Sofie: I am a very strong fan of the classic editor in blogging. So this is maybe going to sound weird but I write my articles in HTML. Very limited. But I will not write a tit

Aurooba Ahmed is a freelance WordPress developer and contributor. Show Notes Aurooba’s Blog: https://aurooba.com/ Twitter | @aurooba Episode Transcript Topher: Hey everyone, my name is Topher. Cate: And I’m Cate. Topher: And this is Hallway Chats. Before we get going, I want to thank our sponsors at Nexcess, a Liquid Web brand. They have some new tools for eCommerce that really make them stand out from other options. WooCommerce automated testing, Sales Performance Monitor, and Plugin Performance Monitor give you data you need to stay powerful and profitable. And they’re free with every Nexcess plan. Okay, our guest today is Aurooba Ahmed. Welcome. Cate: Hey, Aurooba. Aurooba: Hi. Thanks for having me. Hey, Cate. Topher: Did I get the… not accent… the emphasis, right, on your last name? Is it Ahmed? Aurooba: Yeah, that works. I would say that it’s more about the emphasis on the first name where it’s Aurooba, not Aruba. It’s A-U. Topher: Ah right. It is an A-U. Aurooba: It is. Topher: I’m looking at the spelling. For those of you that are just listening, it’s A-U-R-O-O-B-A. Aurooba: It’s pretty common. Topher: So no relation to the island. Aurooba: No relation at all. And yet I have heard that song many, many, many times. Topher: I don’t know the song. Aurooba: Aruba, Jamaica, oh I wa- Topher: Oh, the Beach Boys. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Aurooba: My gym teacher, the first time he read my name off of the attendance list was like… He didn’t read my name. He just sang the song. Cate: That’s got to be exciting. Aurooba: It gets old after a while but I love it. Cate: I mean, it is a positive association. I mean, I would happily be associated with a Caribbean island where people go on vacation and have a good time. So I mean, there are worse facilities, yeah. Aurooba: 100%. Very true. Cate: And do you live in Aruba? Like are you in Caribbean island? Aurooba: Oh, I would love to go there one day, but I’m in Calgary by the Rockies in Canada. Topher: That’s cool. Cate: And is it warm and tropical there? Aurooba: Only in my mind. Cate: Right. Topher: We realize the Rockies are close to Calgary. Aurooba: Oh, it’s like less than an hour away from my house. I can see the mountains from my bedroom window. Cate: Nice. Awesome. Aurooba: Mm-hmm. But it is not tropical here. It is very cold right now. Topher: One of the first things we’re going to ask is who you are and where you live and stuff like that. So now we know you’re in Calgary. Cate: And we know she is Aurooba. Topher: Yes. Aurooba: That’s true. Topher: Have you always lived in Calgary? Are you a Calgarian? Aurooba: Oh, no, I am not a Calgarian, although I met a Calgarian yesterday. They are a rare breed. I was born in Pakistan, but I never lived there. I spent my childhood in Saudi Arabia in a small port town called Yanbu by the Red Sea. And then we moved to Toronto, Canada, when I was 10. Topher: You even say it like Torono. Aurooba: Oh, I did live there. We moved there when I was 10. And then my dad got a job with an oil company in Alberta in a small town called Fort McMurray, where the oil sands are. And we moved there when I was 15. And then I went to university in Edmonton. Then my parents moved to Calgary partway through my university career. And eventually I also ended up here because I want to be close to them. Cate: Yeah, that sometimes happens. It must have been fun moving from Toronto to Alberta when you were 15. I’m guessing it was- Aurooba: It was a culture shock. Fort McMurray at the time was not a place that you would equate with diversity. Topher: I’m sorry, did you say Canada? Aurooba: Yeah. I mean, it was small but rich because of the oil sands. Then my family was, I guess, part of this influx of people who were coming there because of all the jobs, and so then suddenly became very, very diverse and very, very quickly. Topher: Oh, that’s cool. Aurooba: So it was a very big adjustment for the city, it was a big adjustment for us, for everyone. It was very interesting. Cate: Again, another fun thing to be dealing with at 15. Aurooba: So fun. The stories I could tell. Cate: I will buy you a drink and you can tell me all about it. Topher: I’ll ask about the diversity of Canada, but I have to say Toronto was the most diverse city I’ve ever been in. Aurooba: It is very, very, very, very diverse. Before the pandemic, we went to Toronto at least once a year. We have a lot of family there. I go once a year and yet it is so drastically different every single time. I mean, in terms of the people- Topher: From the previous time you mean? Aurooba: Yeah, yeah. Every time it’s like something has changed in a way that is so obvious that it’s like, “Oh, but it has only been a year. How has this happened? I do not know. This does not compute.” So it’s a pretty cool place. Topher: That’s cool. Aurooba: Yeah. Topher: I have wanted you to do here, as I say, for a long time. And I totally respect why not. But the story is interesting. And so- Cate: No shame. There’s no shame here. Topher: No shame. Not at all. Cate: There’s a lot of things he wish I would have done over the last 25 years that I haven’t done, and I feel no shame about it whatsoever. Topher: So how did you get into WordPress. Aurooba: I already knew how to code in HTML and CSS. But then when I was in grade 11, my dad started up a nonprofit in Fort McMurray, and they need a little website. And he needed to be able to edit it himself, at least a little bit. And so I was like, “There must be a way this can happen.” So I went googling and I landed on WordPress, and it was pretty easy to install. And I made a child three from whatever the default theme was back in 2008, and off we were. That’s how it all started really. Cate: It’s so funny how many WordPress owners end up with a very similar story. You know, it was you kind of figured it out one day, and all of a sudden you have a career. It’s just great. Aurooba: I played with it all through high school. Topher: When did it move from messing around in high school to a career? Like I only met you two years ago? Aurooba: 2019. Yeah. Topher: Yeah. And you’ve been in the community for a while, or at least working with WordPress. Aurooba: Yes. Those are two different things. Cate: They are, actually. Aurooba: Yes. Ah, well, when I was in university, I also helped build one of the residents’ association’s website with WordPress. And that was when I really like sort of started to understand some of the power of WordPress and what it could do. Because of it, I ended up freelancing with a few companies while I was in school, just building sort of internal websites for them. And then when I finished being done in university, I decided that I just wanted to freelance and I just did WordPress. So that would be 2014. Topher: That’s cool. Cate: Have you always worked for yourself then? Aurooba: Correct. I have had three summer jobs. And that’s about as far as it goes for working for someone else? Cate: That’s really phenomenal. It’s great that you’ve been able to build your own business the way that you wanted to build no matter where you’re living. That’s the thing I love about WordPress. I could care less about the software, I could care less about coding anything, but just how many people can build a life that they want regardless of where they’re living, it’s just amazing. Aurooba: It was one of the primary reasons I did it. Because for many, many reasons, I decided that I wanted to always be remote. At a time when remote was not a thing, I wouldn’t have said remote then. I just was like, “I want to work from wherever my computer is.” And the only thing I could think of was building websites or doing some sort of software development and not working for anyone because I didn’t know any companies at the time that did distributed work. I mean, there were some, but I didn’t know them. Cate: No. Even for us, we started out in 2010, we left a paid job to freelance because we didn’t know any companies that hired WordPress people. And it was about 2014 only we found XWP and they were kind of the first one that we knew of that hired remote people to work on some… Aurooba: Cool. Cate: Yeah, it’s been a huge change. But it’s a far more recent change than I think people realize. Aurooba: And yet there have been people who were remote before then too. It just it wasn’t mainstream enough to be easily discoverable. Cate: Yeah, exactly. Topher: So when did you start engaging with the community? Aurooba: It was an accident. I moved to Calgary and I was trying to make some friends. And I found this organization here in Calgary called Chic Geek. They basically support women in tech. And I did a presentation there on Git because they really, really encouraged me to do so and I was trying to get better at public speaking and put myself out there a little. And there was someone there who happened to know about WordCamp Calgary. So they’re like, “Hey, you should do this talk at WordCamp Calgary. It’s Coming up.” So I applied, but I had no idea what WordCamp was. I didn’t know this was like a thing that is everywhere. Aurooba: And I spoke there. And then I met this really awesome person called Christina Workman, who was in the community and introduced me to the community in Make WordPress. That was like late 2018, early 2019. It was totally by chance. Cate: And you stayed. So I’m guessing that you found some things you like about it. I mean, we all know there are things to not like about it. The community sadly is full of people and people are terrible. I know this. I’m a people. I’m terrible. But occasionally- Aurooba: I think that’s every community, right? Like once you get to a certain size, you’re very, very… But no, I always stayed. I think that when I first started contributing, I didn’t know what it meant to really contribute, aside from like being part of WordCamp. And I would say yes to things because I didn’t want to be mean or rude. And four months later, I burnt out so hard that I bas