Quick Overview

So many WordPress luminaries, not enough time. Now you’ve exhausted the extensive back catalog of Code Poet interviews, articles, and resources (wait, you did that didn’t you?), you’re probably on the look out for other places to fill your head with WordPress awesomeness. Luckily enough, WProll has an (updated daily!) Top 100 of “the most popular & useful blogs about WordPress measured by their influence, reach and relevance” just waiting to give you another reason to put off finishing up that client site.

Image based on Vintage Ethiopian Medals by A. Davey, CC-BY-2.0.

How did you get started with development, and when did WordPress come into the picture?

Like a lot of developers I’m completely self taught. Most of my childhood was spent without access to a computer, when we did finally get one around age 14 I dove in headfirst and quickly found building things was something I really enjoyed. The first real website I built was for my father’s Stone Masonry business. (It’s still online if you want a giggle — http://derbyshirefireplaces.co.uk. I’m particularly proud of the “This Web site is best viewed with Mozilla Firefox and a resolution of 1024×768 or above.”)

I spent the next few years mainly focused on front-end development; not being very good at design I got really into the web standards movement and spent a lot of time in the CSS Beauty forums having arguments with people about whether it was ok to use Dreamweaver for development. I discovered WordPress around 2005 (version 1.2 – 1.5) and spent the next year or so doing it on the side as a bit of a hobby (I had a day job at this point). At the beginning of 2007 that all changed, I quit my day job and decided to go full time as a freelance WordPress developer. Looking back now makes me realize what a risky decision that was considering how little I actually knew about the industry or the craft.

I spent a few months building pretty bad websites for small companies, some with WordPress, others just static, then late in 2007 my luck changed and I literally fluked my way into a full time contract position doing WordPress development for a large US company. At this point I wasn’t really even sure what a function was. I won’t bore you with the details but in WordPress terms I started the contract as a boy and left it as a man, with experience leading the development of large WordPress powered sites. I’m proud of the things we built there — they were somewhat ahead of their time (come find me in the bar after a WordCamp if you want to hear me wax on about it).

Tell us about how Human Made and how that came into being.

At the same time that I was contracting as a WordPress developer my younger brother Joe Hoyle was also becoming interesting in web development. We started working on projects together and after a couple of years doing this it just got to the point where it made sense to start a company. This was back in early 2010 and we’d just finished working with Aardman Animations, someone we were proud to be bringing over to WordPress. We incorporated Human Made Limited on April 29th 2010.

From the beginning our aim with Human Made was to do great WordPress work. As we’re both developers we’ve always focused on the quality of our work as a differentiator rather than our sales skills; when we were freelancing, work generally found us and since becoming a company this hasn’t changed.

How has the business changed over time?

Human Made has changed fairly significantly in three ways over the past few years. Firstly, we’ve grown. We’ve grown the number of people who are part of the company from two (my brother Joe Hoyle and I) to 10+ (as of this writing). We’ve grown in terms of the level of work we produce — from staying up all night trying to figure out how to get Gallery2 integrated with WordPress, to producing sites for some of the world’s most recognizable companies as a WordPress.com VIP partner. We’ve also grown in our ambitions, from wanting to build a company that could let us do what we loved (making things with WordPress) to wanting to create a company that can compete with the best.

Another big change the business has undergone has been a move from building things purely for other people, to also building things for ourselves. This started with WP Remote, which slowly turned into a fairly popular service and served to whet our appetite for the challenge of building and marketing our own products. We now have a couple of products under our belt with even more planned.

The final big change we’ve undergone has seen us becoming an active part of the WordPress community. We attended our first WordCamp in 2011. That was a catalyst and since then we’ve attended, sponsored and got drunk at every WordCamp we could get to. I was also greatly honoured to be invited to attend the inaugural community summit in 2012. I wish we’d got involved sooner.

You’ve worked with some illustrious clients. What do you think has been most important in winning their respect and ultimately contracts?

Respect is something that is won over time — you rarely start a project with the total respect of a client, especially when most clients have likely had bad experiences with other agencies / freelancers in the past (as ours often have). We win the respect of our clients by being honest and always trying to do the best work we can — good clients respect that. We’re proud of the fact that our clients tend to stick with us over the long term, sometimes for years, it’s a good sign that we’re getting things right.

When it comes to winning new work, the biggest single determining factor which we’ve found has been our existing client / project list. Our sales strategy (if we have one) is to make it obvious to the client that we would be the best choice. If the client sees we’ve worked on similar projects for similar clients in the past and that those previous clients are still with us, gave us a good testimonial, or even better, are happy to chat to the new client and sing our praises, then that’s much better than us just going on about how good we are.

What would you have done differently if you were starting out now, in 2013?

I would have got into the community straight away. When I first started out I was fairly unaware of the WordPress community and even when I did become aware, I was more of a watcher than a participant. In some ways this was a conscious choice and had some benefits; it meant that I didn’t get on the wrong side of any of the great debates / controversies that have swirled up at various times, debates on topics I wasn’t expert enough in to make a positive contribution. The downside is that I missed out on meeting a lot of great people and probably took a bit longer than I might have to learn my craft and discover the parts of it which interested me the most.

Of all of the projects you’ve tackled, which are your proudest of and why?

That’s actually a really difficult question, as clichéd as it might sound, I’m proud of a lot of different projects for different reasons. Sometimes it’s the complexity of the work that I’m proud of, sometimes the quality of what we’ve been able to deliver, other times I’m proud of how we’ve worked around things like budget or time constraints. If we don’t have something to be proud of in each project we do, then I’d see that as a failure.

If pushed I’d probably say that I’m most proud of our free web app WP Remote. It’s hard not to feel proud when you see people using something you’ve built, even if it makes us no money! Some of my proudest moments are meeting people at WordCamps and hearing that they use and love WP Remote.

You’ve built a strong team over time. What do you typically look for when you’re bringing in a freelancer or new team member, and what sets them apart from the competition?

Hiring great people is hard and I still have a lot to learn, however I do think we’re lucky in that we have WordPress community which makes identifying great people a hell of a lot easier. There are several traits which I look for when hiring that are also often shared with the kinds of people who get involved in open source, be it in code or the community. There’s no need to have rounds of boring and ineffectual technical interviews if the person you’re hiring contributes to open source, you can already see their code!

We currently see ourselves as a distributed company which just happens to have an office. At the moment all our growth is going to be distributed and that also opens up our options a lot. Ultimately we try to hire people who care about the quality of what they are putting out into the world, people who have a passion for what they do and who want to get better, no matter how good they already are.

How important, if at all, has the WordPress community been in your work and business?

My first few years working as a WordPress developer were spent outside of the WordPress community. I was completely unaware of its importance back then, although I’m sure the reason I had enough work was because of all the great evangelism the people participating in the community were doing — thanks guys!

These days the WordPress community is important to both my work and our business in a countless number of ways. It supports nearly everything we do and is hard to narrow down to a sound-bite or list. Being part of something as large, vibrant, and downright incredible as the WordPress community feeds my passion, it’s a daily inspiration and a constant reminder to aim higher.

It’s also important in several practical ways, for one, it’s much easier to hire people when they all go to the same conferences as you and take the time to get up on stage and prove their expertise. The community fosters a sense of belonging that would be impossible to reproduce as a company on our own, leaving our developers exciting and proud of what they do.

Being part of the WordPress community lead us to meeting Noel and building happytables. It’s also how we first met several of the developers who now work with us.

Tell us about happytables, and the problem you’re trying to solve there. How is serving the means of many users different to serving the needs of a single client?

The problems we are trying to solve with happytables are pretty simple, however that doesn’t mean we take it easy when solving them! It just means we get to focus on solving them really, really well. The obvious core problem, and the catalyst that brought happytables into being, is that most restaurant websites are really, really bad. Happytables co-founder Noel Tock details some of ways in which they suck on a cute website he runs at http://better-restaurant-websites.com.

The cause of all these bad restaurant websites is also fairly simple — most restaurant owners aren’t web designers so they struggle to build themselves great websites. Neither do most have a huge budget they can spend hiring a great web designer and finally, most of the services that purport to allow people to create a website for their business are usually rather generic and often aren’t very good themselves.

With happytables we solve all three of those problems. By building a solution aimed specifically at the needs of restaurants we can focus on giving them the features they really need without any cruft. This has the added benefit of making it really easy to use — most restaurant owners get a site up and running in under an hour. Because it’s a hosted solution we can operate at a scale which means the cost stays low for individual restaurant owners but we can still deliver them a really high level of value.

In some ways it isn’t that different from serving the needs of a single client, I’m a big believer of building sites for the users and the client is rarely the user of the site they’ve hired you to build. Just like with a single client build it’s important to focus on the vision you have for the project and say no to features that don’t fit within that.

If you could pinpoint three of the most important things that have made a difference to your business since you set out, what would they be?

1. Co-founding. You gain far more than you lose if you find the right partner.
2. Being focused. There are so many opportunities out there and it’s so tempting to try to do everything. Be that offering every possible service instead of the just the one or two that you’re actually good at or building product after product without ever really finishing any of them. If you want to aim high then you have to focus.
3. Products. We love working with clients, but building our own products is another level of experience entirely. The chance to refine over the long term, to experiment, to be truly creative within the constraints as you see them; it’s wonderful. Try it.

Quick Overview

Let’s face it, it can get lonely sitting in your code bunker hammering out sites into the small hours. Sometimes it’d be nice to hang out at a regular watercooler and catch up on what’s new. Only a watercooler where everyone talks about WordPress, rather than what happened on TV last night, or whether the section manager is ever going to discover a more powerful anti-perspirant. With WPwatercooler’s video podcast goodness, you can sit in on regular WordPress roundtable discussions without ever leaving your seat. Watch it live, watch it after the fact, but, seriously, watch it already.

Image based on Water Cooler by IdleFormat, CC-BY-2.0.

How did you first get started with web design and development? Is it something you expected to find yourself doing a few years ago?

I graduated in architecture and after a few years struggling in the interior design field, I decided to change areas. Back at that time, it was 2000, web design seemed to be a promising career, so I took the chance and studied a postgraduate course in Hypermedia Design. At the same time I started working at a web agency and I’ve been working as a web designer ever since.

It’s not something I expected to find myself doing a few years ago — it’s been almost 12 years I’ve been doing this I mean, it’s been a long time! But before 2000, definitely not, my dream was to work with animation.

As an illustrator and graphic designer, do you think that you bring things you’ve learned or experimented with in those disciplines over to your work with WordPress or are they distinctly separate?

I think web design owes a lot to graphic design, therefore any work with WordPress does too, but I believe it’s a different discipline. I’d rather compare web design to architecture than to graphic design, mainly because of the relationship between architects and engineers versus designers and programmers. To design a website it’s really important to understand how it’s built, the possibilities, what can be done or not. I know that in graphic design you need to have an understanding of the printing process, colors, type of papers etc., but it’s not so much dependant on the technology behind it. About illustration, it’s something I’d like to bring more often to my designs, I don’t explore the possibilities that much, however what I’ve learned about colors and composition with illustration are reflected on my work, yes.

When did you first start working with WordPress, and what made you choose it over the other options available?

I started working with WordPress in 2007. A few years earlier I did a website for a traditional Catholic Festival in my native town, as a volunteer. It’s annual and they desperately needed to renew their website, but they had no money to pay for it. The programmer who worked with me before had disappeared and I didn’t know anyone else who would do the job as a volunteer. So I searched the internet for a solution where I could do the job all by myself and at the same time give the festival organizers the freedom to update and run their site independently. I was looking for a solution which respected web standards and that was free. When I found WordPress I thought it was fantastic, I didn’t know anything about PHP, MySQL, I didn’t know to write a line of code, but I just didn’t need to! There was great documentation and almost all of my doubts were already answered in the forums. I could do everything on my own. The other options I tried were Plone, but there was too much to learn, and Mambo (there was no Joomla yet) which generated terrible HTML. So there wasn’t a better choice than WordPress!

Tell us about a WordPress project you’ve worked on recently that made you proud. What did you enjoy and find most challenging about it?

We’ve just launched a redesign project called Catraca Livre. I did the design, HTML, and CSS. It’s a calendar for free or low cost events. It’s becoming very popular and it gets between fifty and a hundred-thousand visitors every day. Their Facebook page has been liked almost 1,500,000 times so far, too. Catraca Livre was one of Hacklab’s first clients — their website has been running on WordPress since the beginning of 2008. As it grew, its interface needed an upgrade to address mobile devices and the code needed improvements to deal with the growing audience. Besides, it needed a better search mechanism so the users could find events easier.

What I enjoyed the most was the fact the client liked the idea of a very colourful site and they gave me a lot of freedom to work as I chose. I really love bright colours and on this job I got to play with them.

The two most chalenging parts of the job from a front-end point of view were making it responsive while at the same time fitting the client’s dynamic workflow. Its homepage has a very flexible layout and its system lets its administrators choose from a set of three different types of rows of features: With one, two or three categories. Inside each row, they can choose from many different combinations of layout grids. It wasn’t easy to make it responsive, mainly because it depends on some editorial policies too.

The client’s workflow is crazy and from the beginning of the project they changed their main categories countless times. Because of this, it was difficult to make a perfect main menu. Sometimes it was best to make it horizontal, sometimes vertical. We launched it horizontal, but I believe we’ll need to rethink it soon.

From the development point of view, the most challenging part was to integrate a search server based on Solr. It allows users to find events near them by a geographical search, or filter the events by a variety of parameters. And all of this at an incredible speed.

What hard-won advice would you give to someone just starting out in life as a designer?

I read this article by Nathan Peretic at A List Apart and I couldn’t agree more with it. It’s about writing a proposal, but there’s a lot of good advice in it that I heavily recommend anyone starting out in this career to read. My favorite quote is this one:

Why should you be selected for this project? Because you’re the cheapest? The quickest? Because you promise to do more than the other guys? Maybe. Sometimes those are the reasons, but they’re also the levers you least want to rely on pulling. Website design and development are services and not, on the professional level, commodities. Providing a commodity is an exhausting, unsatisfying, deadening experience. Doing what you love, on the other hand, working as an equal partner with smart, respectful clients is invigorating.

Do you have a typical client or a particular niche you work with, or do you find that you’re working on all kinds of different projects in a given year? Would you change anything about that?

At Hacklab we like to position ourselves as a business with social concern; we believe in Free Software and we like to publish our solutions whenever we can. We also like to work with innovative projects. So though we’ve worked with different types of clients, most of them have a little bit of those values. What I’d change about it is that I’d like to work just for clients who shared those values.

Tell us about your work in the Brazilian WordPress community, and how that’s infleunced your professional or personal life?

I started the community in 2008 with Anderson Clayton, a guy from Rio de Janeiro. In the begining it consumed a lot of my time! I did a lot of everything, I translated WordPress, bbPress, BuddyPress, plugins, ran the website, moderated the forums, organized WordCamp, meetups. I had help, but I was on the front of all these activities. As I worked as a freelancer, I had plenty of time for that, but because of WordPress, more work came in and I started working with the guys at Hacklab.

So in 2010/2011 I had to let it go a little, and it was good because other people came in and started helping me out with the translations, etc. In 2012 I came back, mostly helping organize the two WordCamps we had, in Curitiba and São Paulo.

The influence on my professional and personal life was huge; since I had the idea of translating WordPress I haven’t stopped working, and what’s best, I’ve received some sort of recognition I didn’t have before. This interview, being featured in Matt’s State of the Word talk last WordCamp SF, and participating at the Community Summit are a great honor to me. I’ve met many interesting people, I’ve made great professional contacts, I’ve made good friends. There’s a feeling of fulfilment that is the best part, which is to know that with a relatively small effort I’ve helped many people and I’m part of this great thing that is WordPress .

What can people do to get involved with localization, submitting patches, or otherwise improving WordPress, and why should they bother?

There are many channels available. I think the best way is to go to any of the make blogs and see what’s up. But if people don’t think they have the time, they should at least adopt the pratice of sharing their WordPress knowledge and experience by publishing their code under GPL. They should bother because WordPress belongs to them, they should own it and make it better everyday. Knowledge is something we should cherish and share so everyone is able to profit with it, not only a small group. That’s why WordPress is great.

How did you first get involved with WordPress, and what brought it into your life?

So I had been dabbling with open source platforms in high school around 2006. Mostly WordPress, and a few others I can’t bear to mention. Although I didn’t really get involved with WordPress until early 2009, while studying Computer Science at Rutgers University, when I had taken an entry level programming job for an ad I found on Craigslist.

The job description wasn’t WordPress specific but mentioned open source solutions which was something I was interested in. Within a week of applying, I interviewed with Brad Williams, CEO and Co-Founder of WebDevStudios, and got the job as their first developer hire.

From that moment on my WordPress career was kicked into overdrive. At WebDevStudios, not only was I involved with building really cool things for clients with WordPress, I was releasing plugins on the WP.org plugin respository and heavily involved with the WP community both helping out with meetups in the area and attending various WordCamps. I actually attended seven WordCamps across the country from 2009 and 2010: Mid Atlantic ’09, Chicago ’09, New York ’09, Boston ’10, Miami ’10, San Francisco ’10, and New York ’10.

These first two years have definitely shaped who I am today. I learned a lot in a short period of time and made a lot of really good friends along the way.

You’ve worked as a developer with WebDevStudios and more recently (up to the present) as a Support Ninja at WooThemes. What did the one bring to the other, and how are they most different?

I actually wrote a blog post around this over at WP Realm titled What Makes a Great WordPress Support Specialist.

In the article I write about my previous experience as a developer and involvement in the WordPress community was a huge benefit to my transition into the support world:

“…having a technical background and general knowledge of WordPress coding standards and best practices is a HUGE win. This has really helped me. With a stronger background in WordPress development and involvement in the community, I’m able to not only provide knowledgeable answers but am confident that they are up to par with WordPress coding standards. In other words, done the right way.”

With that said, being strictly support I feel that I’ve fallen out of the loop a bit and am looking for ways to stay involved and keep my WordPress and coding skills fresh and up to date. That’s something I’d never want to let go and am currently involved with developing a few plugins and projects on the side.

At WooThemes you’re a Support Ninja. What interested you most about taking on the job, how have you made it your own, and what’s surprised you most about what it entails?

Short answer is that I’m passionate about helping people and love WordPress so it’s a perfect fit.

While working at WebDevStudios we had Support & Maintenance packages for clients which I also managed alongside client development. It wasn’t really the same thing as what I’m currently doing at WooThemes but I learned that I enjoyed helping users with WordPress and when I saw the opening at WooThemes I knew it was the job for me.

As of April 1, I’ve been at WooThemes officially for a year supporting our customers. I think that’s what surprises me the most. Not because I’d expect to be somewhere else but because I still love what I do.

Most people may view support as a boring, tedious, repetitive task but I’ve learned to really enjoy it. Each and every day has it’s new challenges and obstacles for me to take on. Not only am I solving problems and pointing people in the right direction, I’m also learning things on the way so it’s really a win win. Most of all, I strive to deliver happiness. Who doesn’t love that?

I actually gave a talk about this earlier this year at WordCamp Norway titled Help Yourself by Helping Others, which you can find on WordPress tv. If you can deliver happiness in every aspect of your support you’ll only benefit and this is something we try to do at WooThemes.

You work remotely for WooThemes from Norway. What tips would you give newbs to the whole work-from-home thing, and what do you wish you’d known when you first started working remotely?

My biggest advice to those who are new to working remotely would be to make a work schedule and try stick to it. If you aren’t strict to this you’ll easily find yourself working all the time so try to have a healthy work-life balance. This also ties into what I would have liked to have known when I first started working remotely. I’ve just started to find a nice balance.

Also, I definitely miss the social aspect of working in an office but yearly trips where you can meet your colleagues, like our annual WooTrip. Also, meetups and WordCamps in the WP community definitely make up for it. It’s definitely not for everyone but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Not everyone can work from home, the local coffee shop, or even from an airplane which I’ve now done a few times. Incredible!

At what point does a WP outfit need a dedicated support person (or people), and what can bootstrappers just getting started do to make their support at least as good as it can be in the meantime?

Right away. Support is easily the most important aspect of your business, even if you are just starting out. You obviously need to have a product or service, but definitely don’t overlook support or throw it under the bus.

Again, don’t just do customer service or support, focus on serving happiness to your users/customers and you’ll be doing things right.

Conversely, where do you see people going wrong with customer service, and what are the consequences of that?

The biggest issue I see is people have a wrong view around support. I bet most people even cringe when they hear the word. Will you have horrible experiences and miserable clients? Of course, but let it go and focus on the users and customers who actually appreciate your help.

Here’s a quote from Mark Forrester, WooThemes co-founder, that really hits the nail on the head: “Customer support is the opportunity to convert a disgruntled customer into a loyal product evangelist by over-delivering and creating a memorable human connection with a digital brand.”

Remember, support isn’t a bad thing or a headache for your company. It should always be viewed as an opportunity to benefit.

You’re also the author of some awesome plugins. Which are you proudest of, and what itch were you trying to scratch with it?

I’m definitely most proud of CollabPress. A plugin I released in January of 2010 which, at the time, was BaseCamp on WordPress. There was a need for a project management plugin in the WP community and I decided to make something. We used it at WebDevStudios internally and a few others were as well. I think most successful plugins are those you can both use and benefit from yourself and release to the public as well. Open source, it’s a beautiful thing.

Although I can’t take all the credit. CollabPress 1.0 was a complete rewrite, once custom post types were introduced in WordPress, and Brad Williams, Boone, Eric Andrew Lewis and Christopher Cochran have put a lot of hard work into it as well.

Eric is actually the lead for v1.3, which released last week, and it’s a complete UI overhaul. I love the project and look forward to it’s bright future. You should definitely check it out.

Which three essential plugins would you recommend to WordPress designers and developers up against deadlines, but trying to ensure that their client’s site doesn’t get borked within a few weeks of installing them?

Tough question!

With WordPress being used for so many different types of sites even picking three plugins is difficult these days. Here’s three, you’ve definitely heard of and are most likely already using, I’d use on almost every setup:

1. Jetpack — While I usually turn most of the features I don’t need off, Jetpack has a few great tools out of the box like stats, short URLs, easy embed, etc. I love it.
2. W3 Total Cache — Site speed and performance optimization is a must these days. W3 Total Cache is a great caching tool for your WordPress site. Speed up those load times!
3. WordPress SEO — I’m not an SEO guy, never have been and probably never will be, but it’s important for the success of your site and WordPress SEO does a great job optimizing your site to best SEO practices with WordPress.

What would you say are the three most important skills or characteristics of a kick-ass world-level support person?

A kick-ass world-level WordPress support specialist needs to:

1. Not only passionate about WordPress but also involved in the community and loves to give back wherever he/she can.
2. Be a “people person”, i.e., friendly and easy to communicate with and who can help even the most un-grateful person with a smile.
3. Have some sort of technical background & skills whether it be HTML/CSS, JS, and/or PHP. Knowledge of WordPress coding standards and best practices is a HUGE win.

from http://wprealm.com/blog/what-makes-a-great-wordpress-support-specialist/.

Last up, how important has your involvement in the WordPress community been to you and your career so far? How would you convince someone up against deadlines that giving something back to the community is worth their time?

It’s been everything and still is. WordPress is truly an amazing platform, it’s the best. But, I don’t believe the success of WordPress is directly related to the product itself. It’s the community that separates it from the rest.

Just last week I had the privilege of organizing an online WordPress event called WordSesh. WordSesh was 24 hours of live WordPress presentations. It was fully free and it’s one and only purpose was to teach people about WordPress. It had over 34 speakers, from all over the world, and with events like WordSesh, meetups and WordCamps I’m really proud to be a part of a community that always comes together to better WordPress.

If you aren’t involved in the community already you are missing so much. For starters, you could regularly attend a local WordPress Meetup, go to a WordCamp. And if there aren’t any near you, you could even look into starting your own like I did here in Norway. The connections you’ll make and knowledge you’ll learn are priceless and well worth your time.

I would also make sure to check out make.wordpress.org to see how you can give back to WordPress. It’s not always easy to find time in our busy schedules to give back. I wish I had more time to, but every little bit helps and let’s continue to make WordPress the most popular tool on the internet.

Quick Overview

Whether you totally missed the free 24-hour-streamathon of WordSesh, or just want to catch up on the infinite payload of WordPress wisdom shared by its participants, you’ll be pleased to know that the whole thing has been captured on YouTube for your viewing pleasure.

Image based on Words by Alby Headrick, CC-BY-2.0.

How did you first get into using WordPress?

I started using WordPress in 2006 in the web 2.0 and blog boom when I was looking for a good learning resource for new web technologies. I tried a few CMSs, but decided on WordPress. I have been creating custom CMSs for my clients with PHP and MySQL since 2001, so using WordPress was comfortable from the beginning. Needless to say, WordPress is still the best resource for people to learn the latest web development techniques.

How did you get involved in the WordPress community?

My first contact with the WordPress community was submitting a bug fix to Core trac. I also created a .org account with the silly ID “tenpura” (I never imagined I would be so involved in the WordPress community in the future). Later, my bug fix was merged into the Core code and some people appreciated my work. This experience opened my eyes to open source community contributions and influenced the work I am doing now.

Tell us about how you contribute to the WordPress community.

In 2007, I worked with some peers to start ja.wordpress.org. Since then, I have been maintaining the site and ja packages, answering forum questions, and organizing WordCamps. As the local community grew, my contributions became eclectic. I’ve constantly contributed to core trac since I started using WordPress. The WP Multibyte Patch plugin might be my most unique contribution. It transforms WordPress into a perfect Japanese version of WordPress not only in language, but also in functionality. Some of the functionalities common to other languages have already been merged into Core. This was a discussion topic at the WordPress Community Summit 2012.

When did you set up Tinybit Inc. and what have you learned since then?

In the late 1990s, I worked as a freelance web developer. At this time, I mainly used Perl to build CMS-type systems (e.g. shopping carts, job matching sites). In 2000, as my number of clients increased, I started Tinybit Inc.

For years, we’ve been making and selling online journal aggregation/single sign-on systems for universities, hospitals, libraries, and think tanks. I’ve learned that the niche market is good with regard to this business. After I encountered WordPress, our company started using WordPress to make our clients’ websites. However, we hadn’t mentioned WordPress as our company specialty for a long time.

In late 2011, we moved our offices to Sapporo from Tokyo and reorganized our business line, finally finding our niche business in WordPress, which is “WordPress Support” (Sound too ordinary? Perhaps; but I rarely see anyone do this correctly.) The concept is support for everyone — from small site owners to WordPress pros — we help them in any way we can.

So far, most of the inquiries are from small business owners who build WordPress sites by themselves or small web-dev companies who build WP sites for their customers. A few years ago, none of my old clients knew anything about WordPress, but today in 2013, most of their corporate sites are built with WordPress. This makes me feel that WordPress has truly become the de facto standard for a site building tool. I think more and more professional helping hands might be needed by this new generation of WordPress users.

Tell us a bit about the project that you’re most proud of.

Running School+Q is a runner community featuring the Olympic gold medalist runner, Naoko Takahashi as a coach. The site is one of the first commercial use adoptions of WordPress by a big enterprise in Japan. It is also a successful sample of a multi-user blogging community.

Tell us about your involvement in WordPress Internationalization (i18n).

In short, WP Multibyte Patch is an i18n version of the hotfix plugin. The current version contains 15 enhancements and bug fixes for Japanese installs. Some people, like Andrew Nacin, suggested that I do this in Core and I think it’s a nice idea; but before we go too far, I think we need to research other languages and organize common problems and language-specific issues in order to determine the most appropriate way of implementation and one that will make everyone happy.

How has contributing to open source affected your work, life, and learning?

This is a difficult question. It has definitely changed the way I think and how I work with people, but, in reality, contributing to open source and business do not always go together. I still don’t know the best approach for accomplishing both.

What motivates you to stay active in the WordPress community?

I’ve known WordPress since its humble beginnings. The community is still growing fast and so many talented people are working hard every day to make the software better; I see no reason to stop watching it.

How did you first get into WordPress, and (presumably later) BuddyPress, and what was it that pulled you in?

Like many, I went the hand rolled route to start blogging. It was somewhat of a “rite of passage” to develop your own. I was lucky enough to be a member of the blogging network 9rules back then. This was an amazing collection of people focusing on creating great content. A few others in this community were using WordPress when it was still a fledgling platform. I took a bit of time to be convinced I could do what I wanted to do theme-wise — but once I worked that out, the simplicity sold me.

BuddyPress was a slightly different story. I was creating WordPress themes and had a chance to create some BuddyPress themes. I had time to dive into what then was quite a learning curve to create themes. Over time as I learned that communities was where my heart was, my work reflected this passion and I moved to creating using BuddyPress full time.

When did you set up Logical Binary, and what have you learned since then?

Logical Binary was set up initially nearly 12 years ago as a way to showcase the work I was doing. It for a while was name only, my “web presence” only fully forming in 2005. I’d been doing freelance by word of mouth for a few years mixed in with agency work and needed a home online. Logical Binary, the site, grew from a need to take things a bit more seriously and focus on a business.

What I’ve learned over the years is to focus on what you love, and that niché is good. I’m not someone that can do everything — if you are then great but I design better when focused. Playing to my strengths is focusing on community design.

Talk to us about your strongly held belief in “design for humans.” Where can design go wrong when it loses sight of this idea?

I think my passion for designing for humans comes from my love of psychology, which I studied up to A-level and has impacted my entire life. Some of my first experiments on my own site were with theme switches by mood. It was a perhaps naive way of exploring back in 2006, but it was my first step outside of the single experience and thinking about who was using the site.

Design goes wrong when it assumes the operator at the end is the same. As a designer it’s easy to assume everyone will think like us — we’re not “every man.” I’m very into asking stupid questions of interfaces — this is when you see the gaps. Using the word “Submit” is a prime example — how unfriendly is that? Or a page that you land on with everything at the same level, everything shouting at you for attention. Where do you look? Our brains can’t handle it. We need paths, we need emotional feedback from what we interact with, we need guidance and we need common manners on sites.

You’re a heavy contributor to open source projects. How has that fed into your work life, opportunities, and learning?

I got my first taste of the ‘net from the Linux community many years ago. This was long before WordPress so when that showed on my radar I was already sold on open source. Whilst I’m not religious, I have one belief in life and that’s karma. I truly believe if I didn’t give back I’d not get anywhere near as much as I do in work life, opportunities, and learning. You truly do get out what you put in. The ease with which people share information is mind blowing and we should never forget how special that is.

I had the pleasure of attending BuddyCamp in Miami recently and it blew my mind. At one point I was told that there were several hundred people watching the live stream. This really filled me with energy to do more, create more, and get more people involved in BuddyPress. I truly believe that I’d not be where I was without the community, and I’m thankful every day for being part of this and those I’ve met. We’re united by a love for WordPress and BuddyPress, by an obsession with open source — this is a powerful thing.

What are you most proud of having contributed to BuddyPress, and what are you most excited about in terms of its future?

I’m most proud to have been able to contribute as a designer to BuddyPress. This may sound odd but it’s a misconception generally you have to be a developer to contribute. This is far from true of course. WordPress has blown this myth away but in some ways it hung around BuddyPress for a bit longer.

An exact contribution is tricky. I’m proud of organizing the default theme CSS file. I learned from looking at people’s code and hopefully this has helped other people. I’m also proud to have been part of the Status theme and Turtleshell project. I think above all I’m just stoked to be part of the BuddyPress project in a small way at this time.

I’ve described BuddyPress before, in terms of age, as starting school. It’s a young project but growing. I’m excited about getting more people involved beyond just developers. For BuddyPress to grow I really believe that not just developers should be part of its future and present. It’s really cool to see what can be built that isn’t using everything — maybe it’s just activity, maybe just groups, using BuddyPress as a platform, as an API and as a starting point to building a whole host of things with a dash of community — now that’s exciting.

As a specialist in BuddyPress, how would you explain the key benefits of making use of it over other alternatives a client or fellow designer might be considering?

BuddyPress, I’ve said before, is social lego. You can use as much or as little as you want. You pick the tools and create the community. That’s the big benefit at the start. You can, since the release of 1.7, do all this with a flick of a switch on your existing WordPress site. Default in communities only gets you so far. If you want to build, grow, and allow your community to take off, you need to go beyond default. BuddyPress lets you do this. It lets designers be free to create, it lets developers be free to build.

BuddyPress also has a very powerful community behind it full of passion, and an open sharing of information at its core. If you build on BuddyPress you get an entire community behind you from the start. I’m not ignorant to other solutions but no other option really allows for such ease, unique communities, and support of resources.

One of your many projects is buddydesignlabs.com. What were your goals in starting work on “lab” style projects, and how are they different from your contributions to BuddyPress itself, or the work you do for clients.

Buddy design labs is aimed at being an open-ended project for me. In it, I want to explore what could be for BuddyPress. I probably will develop some ideas into plugin form but I truly have no set goal. The reason I wanted to just indulge in pure speculation and exploration was that it frees me to think outside client projects. I’m not constrained by anyone’s requirements and that’s quite a powerful experiment.

The format I’m choosing is of a blog post. It shows my sketches and mockups and reminds me a lot of the sketchbooks we kept as art students that documented the work we did. In many regards that’s what this project is becoming for me. I used to love my sketchbooks and am growing as fond of Buddy design labs for the same reasons. It’s about musing, putting things out there, and seeing what happens.

You’ve worked with some really diverse clients. What would you say unifies them, and more broadly, what attracts you most in a potential client project?

Most get to me by word of mouth. I have to take a moment here to thank those who pass work on to me the BuddyPress core team specifically are amazing at spreading work among the community. Community is really the unifying element.

What gets me to take a project is understanding. Communities don’t just grow on trees, you have to understand their complexity and that there are no easy wins. Yes, it’s rewarding and powerful to have a community but it’s something that needs work. Not all communities are successful and sometimes I have to be honest about that to the prospective client and not take a project.

Out of all the work you’ve done, which project are you proudest of, and what challenges did it present to you?

I am most proud of being part of shift.ms. The current design isn’t my work but we’re going through a redesign and this is what I’m most proud of. As a client they’ve been very open to taking a step back and re-analyzing every part. It wasn’t an easy process but everyone involved had the community goals at the heart of every decision.

We’ve gone through focus groups, inspiration collection, wireframes, and are currently in the prototyping phase. I’ve had a lot of my own assumptions challenged during this process, too. The one that comes to mind is tag clouds. They’ve in many ways gone out of fashion; their users, though, love them. This backed up the fact that sometimes we should just ignore what is “trendy” and focus on the user. We’re brewing up some interesting takes on many traditional community functionality we’d have only thought of by going through this process.

Finally, you’re one of the organizers of WordCamp Europe. What’s the big idea there, and what are you most excited about?

WordCamp Europe is a celebration of the European WordPress community. It’s a two-day event in an amazing venue which several of the organizing team (myself included) visited for another conference in December. There’s a really strong community in Europe and we hope that this event highlights that.

I think I’m most excited about the focus being on Europe and showcasing all the amazing things we as a community do. I really think the time is right for an umbrella WordCamp like this.

How did you get started with web development, and when did WordPress enter the picture?

I got caught in the web before the first bubble in 1999 as a teenager in Montréal. My first exposure to code was Flash Actionscript 4.

That was soon forgotten and I started teaching myself C#. I built a simple CMS out of it, only to move to PHP thereafter. By mid 2000, I put the project manager’s hat. I gradually dropped coding and concentrated on organizing teams.

WordPress first came to me while I was in the Congo in 2005. I entertained my first blog on a platform built by a friend.

The “5 minute install” promise of WordPress piqued my curiosity. I was quickly sold and I knew that WordPress would be a game changer.

Tell us about Wysija and the problem you’re trying to solve with it.

Wysija is a newsletter plugin for WordPress that was first released in early 2012. It’s a freemium solution.

Me and my 3 partners in crime wanted to fill a gap: what newsletter solution can be more flexible than Subscribe2 or Feedburner’s email alerts and yet, not force users to leave WordPress.

There were 3 challenges:

• build an easy to use drag and drop editor
• make the installation easy
• keep it essentially free

What made you decide to build a product on top of WordPress, rather than as standalone software?

There are dozens of great standalones. Great, but users want an integrated solution within WordPress.

Once you’ve trained your friends, family or clients to use WordPress, you don’t want to teach them yet another third party application.

How did you arrive at the business model for Wysija, and what was the thinking behind it?

For some reason, I can’t imagine another model than freemium. Here’s why:

• I’m personally averse to buying Premium plugins myself, believe it or not.
• We need a lot of users to quickly to build a better product.
• The “competition” already use freemium models.

How do the challenges of supporting a product compare to those of dealing directly with clients, as a service provider?

I grew tired of answering phone calls from clients. Consider me relieved at having a product instead of a service.

Supporting a product is very intense nonetheless. Yet, it’s quintessential to our success and I regard it as our number one marketing tool. When you have a product, it’s OK to make some mistakes, but it’s fatal not to respond to your users.

What pitfalls do you think entrepreneurs and designer/developers might face when making the leap from service to product?

Good question. I get it all the time at WordCamps. Many developers are tempted, and yet afraid to make the leap.

Here’s my own unordered list:

• Committing to your product is a full time affair.
• Underestimating support, or disliking it.
• Working alone, because having a partner is tricky, will get you nowhere.
• It’s about the experience, not the features.
• Your users know what they want, they don’t always know what they need.
• Yes, you’ll be poor for a while. But you’ll be exhilarated and happy.
• Sell from day one, don’t wait.

What’s been your approach to branding, telling your story, and setting Wysija apart from the pack?

Your product needs to speak for itself. Build an experience and user interface that is easy and fun. Your users should feel they’re using something special.

As an author, you need to be reachable and transparent. Humans love to hear about other humans. When people write to you, or ask for help, they are friendlier when they’ve seen your photo. Go to WordCamps, and meet your users — it’s gratifying.

Then, it’s all about service. Provide fast and friendly support.

Your website has to look professional so your visitors know you’re serious about it.

Acquiring users is difficult. Try to make every single one of them loyal ambassadors of your product.

What do you look for in a plugin or WP-powered product you’re considering using, and what makes you run a mile?

I look for plugins that have, in this order:

• Regular updates.
• High number of downloads.
• Support reputation.
• Best compromise between features and user experience.

What part, if any, has the WordPress community played in your work and the success of your business?

The WordPress plugin repository is how people find us. More than Google, word of mouth, and sponsoring WordCamps combined.

I consider the repository as the most important community tool because it offers the support forums, the reviews and star ratings. More importantly, it’s not commercial.

Sponsoring WordCamps hasn’t given us a lot of traction, but we do it nonetheless.

Talking at WordCamps has a definite impact. Then again, the crowd is composed of enthusiasts and hardcores. An infinite group.

WordPress is used by the masses. They’re actually everywhere around you, in your daily life. They are unknowingly part of the movement. I’m thrilled when I stumble on someone who uses Wysija, yet knows absolutely nothing about it or WordPress. This is when I feel we’ve reached the core of the community.

What are the three most important things to keep in mind when supporting a premium product or service?

Premium or free, you should always support your users with this in mind:

• Answer within 48 hours, possibly 24 hours.
• Be courteous and friendly.
• Get to the bottom of the problem and fix it.
• Ask for a review when finished. See our reviews, as example.

Additional tip: ever noticed how girls always say they’re sorry when you tell them something bad happened?

They’re right! Say you’re sorry, even if you have nothing to do with the problem itself.

What are you proudest about Wysija, in terms of really distinguishing it from the other options available for creating and maintaining mailing lists?

Its simplicity. This said, you still need to be a geek to configure it. This is part of our ongoing battle to add features while keeping it simple.

I’ll leave the last words for a Matt Mullenweg quote:

“The goal is to reach simplicity and not to be simplistic.”

Today we talk about how WordPress has changed over time, the merits and challenges of Open Source software, WordPress security, digging into the guts of WP, and more development goodness than you could shake a bundle of sticks at.

What was your background before coming to WordPress development, and how did WordPress first come into your life?

My first experiences with the web were at the very beginning of everything. In the early-/mid-1990s, I was the Systems Manager for one of the first ISPs in Huntsville, Alabama. Early on, we just offered dial-up access to a Major BBS system, which was connected to a Linux box, which provided gateway access for things like email, usenet newsgroups, file transfers, and a gopher interface. This was in the 0.99.x days of the Linux kernel, and the question of whether to pronounce ‘Linux’ with a long or short ‘I’ sound were just starting. And the World Wide Web was still an academic experiment that nobody had heard of yet.

But it wasn’t long before this cool new program called ‘NCSA Mosaic‘ started making the rounds, and the GUI interface for hypertext documents was much cooler than the text-based menus offered by gopher. Mosaic was followed by Netscape Navigator (and later, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer), we upgraded our systems, offering direct SLIP and PPP connections, ISDN service, shell accounts, and customers could create their own homepages.

It was in these early days that I first heard of this CGI script called PHP/FI. At this time, “PHP” stood for “Personal Home Pages” — it was only later that it was renamed to mean “PHP Hypertext Processor”. One of my first experiments was to use PHP and MySQL to create a database-driven news site for our customers, which I loosely modeled after Slashdot. It was my first blog-like system, pulling articles from the database newest-first, and displaying them ten-per-page. I didn’t even bother to make an article editing system, I just used PHPMyAdmin to add new entries to the database.

A few years later, we were starting to see open source blogging software. There were things like Movable Type, PHPNuke, Drupal, and even Slashcode which were fairly well known, and a lot of smaller projects. When I decided to set up a blog of my own, the first system I tried out was one of these lesser-knowns, named MyPHPBlog. I even became a code contributor to that project. But the lead developer was slow to integrate changes and push out new releases, and I became frustrated with it. For a while, I considered creating my own blogware from scratch, but I didn’t really have enough free time for that, so I was also keeping my eye out for other promising projects. I had started looking at b2, and it looked really interesting, but it seemed that its developer had more-or-less disappeared, and other people were forking the code already, or talking about switching to something else. I was already aware of this kid called Photomatt, and he was talking about forking b2 into a new system, with the blessing of b2′s creator.

So I think in March 2003, Matt asked me if I was interested in joining in on this WordPress thing he was kicking off. At the time, I was super busy at work, and replied that I just didn’t have time for it. But in April, things were a little more calm, and we were still exchanging emails about it, and I said that I could try to join in and at least contribute some ideas, if not code. Soon after, I was doing things like adding HTTP 304 browser caching support to the RSS feeds and expanding the XML-RPC API with support for the Movable Type and metaWeblog APIs. I remained an active core contributor for at least the next year or so. And I’ve tried to stay active in the community up to the present day.

As a “Developer Emeritus” of the WordPress platform, and a former Core Developer you added elements to WordPress, such as XML-RPC API support and Post Custom Fields, that are still fundamental today. Which are you proudest of?

I think I ‘d have to say Post Custom Fields. At the time, I was very interested in metadata systems, and I had been experimenting with things like FOAF (the Friend of a Friend data format) and other RDF vocabularies. When I first mentioned the idea of postmeta for WordPress, the other developers seemed to think it was a mildly interesting idea, but were not as excited about it as myself. I knew that it would open the doors for some really fun and interesting possibilities for plugins, though. But even then, I didn’t imagine just how many different ways people would end up using it. Eventually, we also got metadata for users and comments, too.

I’m proudest of that because I love seeing how many different plugins and themes rely on it now, and for all the creative ways people have put it to use!

What are you most and least enthusiastic about the way that WordPress has changed since you first got involved?

I am most enthusiastic about the massive uptake of WordPress. At last count, it’s powering something like 18% of the top 1 million sites? I think *anyone* would have to be impressed by that. And anybody who has ever contributed the least little bit of code or idea to WordPress can say, “I’m a part of that!”

I am least enthusiastic about some of the recent dogmatism we’ve seen over the “100% GPL” guideline for WordCamp contributors. I think the idea of barring someone from organizing or speaking at a WordCamp simply because all of their code is not available in a “100% GPL” fashion (e.g. in a split-license situation where the PHP code is GPL, and the CSS/images are under a different license — which *is* allowed under the GPL interpretations we’ve seen), is just too harsh, and only serves to divide the community.

It would be one thing to ask speakers to only promote “100% GPL” projects at a WordCamp. It’s quite another to bar them from speaking about *anything*.

You’ve developed and contributed several plugins to the WordPress ecosystem. Is that something you’d recommend doing, and are there any caveats to go with that recommendation if so?

I highly recommend it. Sometimes the simplest of ideas can take a life of their own and become popular. If you think of an idea for how to add a feature to your site, and can create a plugin to implement it, you might find that you weren’t the only person to want that feature. Declare it GPL, submit it to the plugin repository, and then have fun obsessing over the download counts!

The caveat is, on the internet, there are plenty of people with lots of time on their hands who like to point out faults in others. If you are not an expert coder, someone is likely to point out flaws in your code, and sometimes they might do so in a very unkind fashion. If your skin isn’t thick enough to put up with that, and you tend to take criticism of your work personally, it can be very depressing when somebody tears your code apart and tells you that You’re Doing It Wrong! If this happens, try to use it as a learning experience. Find out how to Do It Right, improve your code, and update. Life is all about constantly learning new things. When I first started learning to play trumpet in 7th grade, I sounded pretty terrible. But I practiced, and got better, and in high school I was in the symphonic band and marching band, and had solo parts. It’s the same with coding, and putting your code out for the public to see is like playing a concert in front of an audience.

As your career has developed are there certain types of projects or clients you’ve gravitated toward more, and if so how are those different to the type of projects or clients you were interested in a few years back?

That’s a hard question. I’d *like* to be doing full-time work involving WordPress. But unfortunately, the job market hasn’t been able to lead me in that direction. As a result, lately I’ve been gravitating more towards front-end work (JavaScript and CSS) than back-end coding. With the semi-exception that I’m also interested in the node.js server, though I don’t use that in my work, and I don’t have much time to play with it on the side.

In the past, I have stayed almost exclusively in the back-end of web development, dealing mostly with overall business logic, database interactions, integrating other data systems and sources, etc. But more recently, the browser has become a much more interesting platform in its own right. The power of modern HTML5, JavaScript, WebGL, and other associated bits makes for a very fun playground to explore.

You’ve presented (and will be presenting, at WordCamp Atlanta 2013) on WordPress security more than once. What would your top three tips be for locking down a WordPress installation, and more generally, what are the most overlooked security issues you see developers make?

Fortunately, WordPress itself tends to be pretty secure. Even when we do see point-releases for security problems, most of them have been ‘privilege escalation’ types of things, where you’d already have to be a validated user in order to take advantage of them. Random, anonymous internet users wouldn’t be able to get into anything.

Tips?

1. If your site doesn’t need the ability for new users to register an account, don’t turn that feature on. And don’t create user accounts for anyone that you do not *absolutely* trust. And when you do, only give them the access role they *need* (‘Contributor’, ‘Editor’, etc). If your site *does* need registered users, make absolutely sure that you have a backup system in place. Back up your database, and also any theme or plugin customizations, and maybe your media uploads if those are important. BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP!
2. If your web host makes you use FTP to transfer changes to your site, don’t do that (“You’re Doing It Wrong!”). Use a secure file transfer method like FTPS, SFTP, or SCP. If your host doesn’t support a secure file transfer method, it’s time to figure out how to move your site to a service that does. The FTP protocol transmits your password in cleartext, and while you might think the chances of somebody intercepting that information are small, I can assure you that it happens all the time, often to people who do know better.
3. If your web site is mission critical (whether for a business or just because it’s important to you), try to evaluate the reputation of any themes and plugins you add to your site. *For the most part* plugins and themes you download from wordpress.org should be pretty safe. Especially if there are a lot of downloads and good ratings. If there seem to be some bad ratings, read the forums and see if there are valid complaints that you should be concerned about. For third-party sources, if you aren’t sure of the reputation, ask around the community (on Twitter, in the wordpress.org forums, etc.).

Programmers don’t like to re-invent the wheel. Instead, we like to take an existing wheel, share it, improve it, re-share it, improve it some more, and so forth. This is how WordPress came to be. And because of that nature, WordPress contains within it a toolbox full of utility functions that solve common problems, ready for developers to use. This includes many functions to help you code more securely. One of the main things to learn about is the ‘esc_*()‘ family of functions.

Also, for plugin or theme option pages, learn about the Settings API.

Security is such a broad subject, it’s nearly impossible to convey the complexity to someone who doesn’t already have some technical background. You have to consider every piece of a system — not just the WordPress source code, or even just the themes and plugins you add. Because that all sits on top of PHP and MySQL, which have their own security concerns. And PHP is running alongside a web server, which might be Apache, Nginx, IIS, or something else. And those are running on a server, which might be one of several different flavors of Linux, or FreeBSD, or Windows, or who knows what else. And those servers might also be running other services, like SSH, FTP, email, IRC, etc. And if there are other users on the server, they might have installed other software that you don’t even know about. And there are the network routers, and load balancers, and the DNS system, and…! The internet is a vast system, and while individual pieces of it can be somewhat simple, they are woven into a whole that is extremely complex.

You continue to be active in the WordPress community, including presenting at WordCamps. What keeps you involved, and why would you recommend getting involved with the wider WordPress community to someone just starting out?

I suppose my continued involvement largely comes from the fact that I was fortunate enough to be so deeply involved in the early days of WordPress. I enjoy looking back and seeing how far WP has come over the years — how the features and interface have evolved. And even though I can’t always spend as much time working with WP as I might like, I also enjoy guiding newer community members to an “aha!” moment when they understand how to make WP do something they need.

The vast majority of the WordPress community are some of the most helpful and friendly people you could hope to meet. If you ever have a question about how to do something, all you really have to do is ask — on the support forums, on Twitter, the WordPress Stack Exchange, etc. You will generally get answers to your questions by someone who really knows what they’re talking about pretty quickly. And by using that opportunity to learn, and then later pass along some of your own knowledge to somebody newer than yourself, you have a chance to pay it forward.

What are the biggest benefits and challenges you’ve faced working with Open Source software? Does one outweigh the other for you?

The biggest benefit to working with Open Source, especially as a developer, is that I can modify the code however I see fit. There are very few closed source applications that let you do that at all, and if they do, it’s only if you pay a hefty licensing fee and sign strict contracts. As a user, you generally get the benefit that bug fixes and new features are released at a much higher rate than with closed source products. Since the source is available to all, many developers are able to investigate bugs and determine the best way to fix them.

The main challenge, though it’s lessened these days, has been getting companies to utilize Open Source alternatives to closed source commercial products. Most corporations are strongly attuned to Risk Management. With Open Source, you often (but not always) are not dealing with a centralized entity with contracts to hold them accountable should something go wrong with the product. Many companies consider this a very high-risk problem. You find it much less with the kinds of products associated with web development (web servers, database servers, browsers, etc).

You’ve previously advocated getting stuck into the guts of WordPress. What do you think are the least understood or most under-utilized aspects of WordPress as a platform, and how should designer-developers be making better use of them?

I’m not sure I have a good answer for that. I can say that some of the features that *I* am not as familar with as I’d like to be are the WP_Rewrite class, Custom Post Types, and Custom Taxonomies. I’d really like to find time to dig into those more, and find some interesting ways to use them for my own projects.

Maybe I can side-step the question a little bit here, and suggest that if you’re just getting started with learning to write plugins or themes for WordPress, you obviously have to start with the action/filter hook system. Find some simple examples to work from, experiment, learn the basics of those. Poke around in the WordPress source, and find places where it calls do_action() or apply_filters(). As you dig around, you’re very likely to see an action or filter that you never knew about, that might spark ideas for how you can use it for your own needs.

Once you understand the hooks well, start looking at the various files in the wp-includes directory. See how WP uses the walker classes, how the XML-RPC server class can be extended to add new API calls, how the image editor classes are used. Or you can start with your theme files, see how each piece of content is put into place, and what filters it goes through along the way. When you start looking at the code on your own to figure out how it all fits together, you are bound to learn something new and surprising. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone through the WordPress source, trying to figure something out, and said, “I didn’t know we had a function to do *that*!”

What’s the biggest difference between web development as a job and web development as a hobby? Can one feed into the other, or should they remain distinct?

Generally speaking, web development as a job will often limit which technologies and platforms you get to work with. On the one hand, by focusing on those core pieces, you will become very proficient with them. But on the other hand, web development as a hobby lets you explore wherever your interests take you. In my current gig, I’m dealing with Drupal, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and some of the more common parts of CSS. But what I’d *like* to be playing with node.js, websockets, WebGL, HTML5 canvas, CSS animation, and Arduino systems. And of course, WordPress.

I think for most people, the two do feed into each other. Obviously, the things you work on as a hobby outside of your job let you explore new areas. This can lead you to have new perspectives, new ways of thinking about and approaching problems, and this will almost always improve your overall skills and ability to do your job. And likewise, the focus you get through your work lets you gain a deeper understanding of your core tools. You get a similar benefit here because that strong reinforcement of knowledge keeps your skills honed and ensures that you are able to solve problems quickly. You can often extrapolate that knowledge and apply it to the new things you are trying to learn in your hobby life.