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.

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.

Do you remember when you first encountered WordPress, and the point that you realized it was something you’d work with professionally?

I first remember hearing about WordPress in the mid-2000s, when a few friends at CUNY were doing some pioneering work with WPMu. I used WordPress a little around that time while teaching Ethics to undergraduates: I had them keep philosophy journals on public wordpress.com blogs, which allowed for better peer review. In 2009, I was asked by my friend Matt Gold to help out for a few hours a week on his CUNY Academic Commons project. CAC was built on WordPress and BuddyPress (then in beta), and needed someone with some real technical chops. Despite this fact, he asked me to help. I knew nothing about WordPress or PHP when I started (just a bit of HTML/CSS). Within a few months, I’d written and released my first plugin. Within a year and a half, I’d quit my job to do WordPress consulting and development full-time.

You’re a Lead Developer for BuddyPress. How did you get involved with it, and what itch was it scratching (or not quite scratching) for you at the time?

I started using and developing for BuddyPress through my work on the CUNY Academic Commons. The team behind the Commons wanted to remain true to the for-the-public-by-the-public history of CUNY itself by using free software. At the time, BuddyPress was really the only social networking tool that was free (in all senses) and that integrated well with the other tools we wanted to use. When I started building features and fixes for BuddyPress, it was only fitting that the Commons leadership would encourage me to contribute them outward, either as distributed plugins or as upstream patches.

What are you proudest of having contributed to BuddyPress?

Much of BuddyPress’s recent development has been focused on transforming BP from a somewhat quirky, largely standalone system, to a robust, modular, scalable plugin that feels — both to users and developers — like a natural extension of WordPress. I’m quite proud of the work that I’ve accomplished toward this goal over the last couple release cycles.

In BP 1.6, for example, I made some modifications to the way that directory pages are built that reduced database overhead by up to 75%. In BP 1.7, I’ve replaced our aging, labyrinthine member query methods with a BP_User_Query class that is modeled on WP_User_Query, and improves query performance by a factor of three or more. These sorts of big changes — along with countless smaller improvements — make each version of BuddyPress more pleasant for the end user, more scalable for big-time implementations, and more approachable and fun for WordPress developers.

How important has getting involved with the WordPress community been for you, and how would you convince someone up against deadlines to give something back to that community?

My involvement with the WordPress community has been transformative in more ways than I can count. Working alongside numerous other developers has dramatically improved the breadth and depth of my technical skills. I’ve created a reputation and a niche that’s allowed me to be extremely selective about which clients I work with. I’ve met a lot of great people, some of whom I’ve come to consider close friends. And I’ve been able to contribute (however modestly) to a larger policital and philosophical cause that is extremely important to me: the development of software tools that allow individuals and organizations to reclaim pieces of their online lives from commercial entities and proprietary tools.

Nearly anyone who has done this kind of work in the open and has given things away — plugins, themes, tutorials, blog posts, forum support, whatever — will have anecdote upon anecdote about how this kind of openness tends to lead to unexpected and wonderful results. That said, I can understand why some are reticent about giving things away. We all have bills to pay. And, sadly, there is no cosmic karma guaranteeing that each act of generosity be repaid in kind — every developer of freely-available WordPress tools can tell stories about hours lost, and gray hairs gained, while interacting with unreasonable and ungrateful users. So, if someone were unconvinced that community work is the smart thing to do, I’d try to impress upon them that it’s the right thing to do: if every person who’s benefited from free software gave, say, 5% of their time back into free software, the world would be a far, far better place.

What was the thinking behind Commons in a Box, and what problems did it first set out to solve that weren’t being solved effectively elsewhere?

The CUNY Academic Commons has been a model for many colleges and universities, both conceputally and technically. But reproducing and customizing something like the Commons — built on thousands of hours of development, testing, trial, and error — is no small feat. The extensibility and modularity of platforms like WordPress and BuddyPress are what make them so powerful. But these same qualities also make it daunting to set up a complex system of interacting plugins, themes, and other modifications.

The goal of Commons In A Box is to ease these difficulties. Commons In A Box does a couple of things, on your behalf, that help you get from a blank WordPress installation to a full-featured community site. First, we provide a curated list of plugins that are powerful, and we whitelist versions of those plugins that are known to work well together. We then fetch and install those plugins for you. We provide a theme that’s tailored for academic and non-profit communities, and which provides a robust set of tools for customizing layout and appearance without knowing CSS. And we handle upgrades for those plugins and themes, so that you don’t have to worry about whether, say, a new version of BuddyPress will break your site.

In short, we provide users with a head-start: instead of taking hours (or days, or weeks) to research, install, and configure WordPress plugins and themes, one can quickly get to work fostering community engagement.

What have you learned through iterating on Commons in a Box, and what might you consider doing differently if you could start again knowing everything you do now?

Technically, I think that Commons In A Box is pretty solid. Ray was the primary developer of its core functionality, and did a fantastic job building something that can easily be maintained and extended. And our theme developers, PressCrew, built a theme that strikes the perfect balance between ease-of-use and flexibility, without making any sacrifices on elegant design.

My biggest challenges during the development of a relatively large project like Commons In A Box were related to management. Most of the time I devoted to the project was not spent writing code, but doing code reviews, managing deadlines, leading testing, handling communication, and so on. I discovered that, while I like (and think I’m good at) playing a leadership role in a public volunteer project like BuddyPress, leading a grant-driven project like Commons In A Box takes a whole different skillset. I don’t really have the chops, or the desire, to do project management for my day job.

With Commons in a Box, Anthologize, Participad, and in a lot more of your work besides, there is (or seems to be) a real emphasis on community publishing. Which comes first for you — community or publishing — or are the two inextricably bound together?

The core idea that motivates my work with free software is that users should have control over what they do and produce online. It just so happens that I came to software development through BuddyPress and WordPress, so that my professional emphasis has been on tools for web publishing and community. In another universe, I’d be working on a different kind of free software

That said, community and publishing software are particularly important insofar as they both enable kinds of activity that are central to the way we conceive ourselves: the things we write, and the connections we make with others. Those who develop these kinds of software, then, have a special privilege and resposibility to respect user freedoms.

What roles do you see WordPress and BuddyPress playing in the ongoing transformation of education, and does it make a big difference that they’re Open Source?

Education (especially the liberal arts college experience) is often described as the process of turning youth into citizens. When a student takes a course in philosophy or physics or history, she’s gaining a set of tools for participation in society, for representing herself and her needs in a respectful relationship with the world around her. The rise of free software parallels this conception of education in a nice way: things like WordPress and BuddyPress are tools that enable students to become fully realized agents, individuals with control over who they are and what they create.

From a philosophical point of view, it’s far more important that these tools are free (as in speech) rather than that they’re open source. Most students are not technically inclined, and the idea that their favorite piece of software was developed using a given methodology is probably not very interesting to them. What does matter is that free licenses like the GPL protect their rights to use the software as they see fit.

More concretely, the ideas behind free software are very much in keeping with the public-engagement goals of universities, especially public ones. That means that schools are, more and more, embracing free over proprietary software. This has a cascading effect: students are creating content using software they’ll continue to use after leaving the university; the university is free to modify the software however they’d like for their own purposes; development funds go toward hiring free software developers who are generally local to the university and sympathetic to its purpose, rather than toward huge licensing fees paid to faceless software companies. It’s an amazing trend, and I’m proud to be playing a role in it.

Do you see a point at which educational and other organizations will be able to ditch proprietary networking, teaching and knowledge sharing solutions for Open Source alternatives? What, if anything, stands in the way of that happening?

I think it’s already happening, little by little. About five years ago, the CIO of one of the CUNY campuses told me they couldn’t support WordPress because “they didn’t have a Linux person on staff, and they never would”. In the fall of 2012, I helped this same campus move its externally hosted, guerilla WordPress installation to a Linux server supported internally by the IT department.

Leadership in campus IT is extremely conservative. For university CIOs, “free and open source software” has traditionally meant software that’s insecure, feature-weak, unreliably, and — most importantly for them — unsupported. In the last few years, the zeitgeist has shifted, at the same time that free software itself has gotten better. The marketplace that provides services and support related to free software, from big companies like Red Hat and Automattic to individual consultants like me, has played a big role in making free software seem less like a gamble to
these very risk-averse individuals. People on the academic side of the university — faculty, deans, provosts — generally don’t need much convincing to be sold on the practical and moral benefits of tools like WordPress, so as CIOs gradually find the idea of free software more palatable, there’s a potential for the floodgates to really open on its use in universities.

Has working at CUNY afforded you development opportunities that you might not have been able to give time to if you working in, say, corporate or startup space?

Definitely. CUNY has historically been a very particular kind of social justice institution, catering to a huge underserved subsection of New York City. So it’s been a fantastic place for what I’d call “activist software development”: the building of tools that are conceived to suit our specific needs, but are also designed from the start to be given away.

As I’ve done more and more work outside of CUNY as a freelancer, I’ve found that this same spirit — the desire to serve through building — exists within educational institutions all over the world (though sometimes not as openly as at CUNY). I’m really pleased that I’ve been able to do contract work for a wide variety of schools, playing my part in spreading the good news of free software.

On a personal level, I don’t think I’d deal well with corporate or startup culture. I get bored easily, and thrive on learning new things and dealing with new people. My preferred lifestyle is to spend 30 or 40 hours a week doing interesting and highly varied work, and to spend the rest of the time with my family. Pumping out 60-80 hours weeks working on a single app as part of a startup? That’s a young man’s game

What are you most excited about working on next, and what would you like to see happen longer term for WordPress and BuddyPress in your context?

By design, more and more of my work has been about tool-building, rather than website-building. This kind of setup has worked really well for me, satisfying my dual desires to keep my work varied and to have maximum impact. I’m currently in the process of working with a couple of different colleges on new tools to make WordPress and BuddyPress work better in the academic context: from beautiful BuddyPress portfolios, to full-featured BP file management, to group RSS curation in WP. Beyond the next six months or so, I don’t know what I’ll be doing — but that too is part of what’s exciting!

One of the long-term goals I have for BuddyPress is for it to play a meaningful role in rethinking a truly distributed social web. Today, so much of our social content is locked up in centralized silos like Facebook and Twitter. BuddyPress eases this centralization at a small scale, by enabling niche communities, like schools, to set up their own internal networks. But I can imagine taking this idea even further. BuddyPress (much like WordPress already is) could be a tool for individuals to take control of the social content they produce around the web. BP could aggregate content you leave elsewhere — a comment on someone else’s blog, say — while federating with the BP installations of your friends and colleagues. The open standards that will make this kind of personalized, decentralized social hub possible are starting to mature, and I’m anxious for BP to play a role in putting this kind of control within the reach of the masses.

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.

How did you first get involved with WordPress and what drew you in?

In early 2005 I was using my personal site to test out a bunch of the available CMSs. I tried WordPress, Drupal, Mambo, Xoops, PHP-Nuke, phpBB, Typo3, and probably a few more that I can’t even remember at this point. I was trying to stick to the PHP-based options, since that’s what I knew. WordPress was the perfect mix for me. It was easily extensible and easy to use.

Two years later I was doing client work using WordPress and I ran across a bug. I fixed it for the client, and then started trying to figure out how to get my fix into Core. I remember reading a bunch of existing tickets in Trac, and asking several questions before actually opening my first ticket (#4433). The patch didn’t follow coding standards, was created with diff not svn diff, and it doesn’t look like it was relative to trunk, but Mark Jaquith recognized that it fixed a legitimate issue and committed it. That was it. The hook was set.

After that I started following WordPress development more closely. I wasn’t especially outgoing, so it was mostly lurking at first, but I’ve been getting progressively more involved ever since.

When did you first start working with WordPress commercially?

When version 2.0 came out in late 2005 I started seeing it as a viable solution for clients. WordPress now had rich editing, static pages, a decent default template that I could use as a starting point for whatever I built (yep, I’m talking about Kubrick), and it supported plugins. It took me a little while before I found the right projects for it, but by mid-2006 I had used it on several client projects.

Tell us about your involvement with WordPress Core and the community. Has that influenced your professional work with WordPress?

At this point I’d say that I’m pretty heavily involved in the community. The community itself is getting bigger though, so I try to focus my involvement into the areas where I can make the most difference. I’ve contributed code to every version of WordPress since I started on 2.3. I attend all the dev meetings in IRC, try to help review patches, etc. I’m even co-leading the 3.6 release. I also speak at WordCamps as well as other events, especially when they’ll let me talk about getting involved in WordPress.

And yes, it has drastically influenced my professional work. At first it mostly affected how I positioned myself in the market, allowing me to know more about WordPress and what was coming down the pipeline. Then I started getting work referrals from other community members that knew the quality of my work because they saw it in Core. Eventually this allowed me to be more selective about the work that I took, giving me the flexibility that every freelancer wants. The biggest change though came within the last year when I partnered with two other WordPress contributors to start Range, a WordPress design and development company staffed completely with WordPress contributors!

How can people get involved in helping out with WordPress as an Open Source project, and when or why should they?

There are a lot of reasons why you might want to get involved with the WordPress project. Sometimes it’s as simple as profit. WordPress currently runs 17.5% of the internet or more than one out of every six sites! This is up nearly two percent in the last year, with steady growth. It powers tens of millions of websites. If you’re a designer, developer, business consultant, or work with the web in any way, WordPress is a huge potential market. That’s great, but how do you differentiate yourself and stand out from all your competition? When you get involved with the WordPress project — you increase your WordPress skills and even learn about new or upcoming changes. Just by getting involved, you become more valuable to your clients.

Another reason is a little more altruistic, and is what actually drew me to contribute. If you help make WordPress better, it’s not only better for you, it’s better for everybody. Your contribution will help someone else out, and someone else will contribute something that will help you! In the end, everyone benefits.

Once you’re ready to help, there are plenty of places to get involved including translation, documentation, events, support, accessibility, user interface or user experience, testing, and development. A great place to start is the Codex article on Contributing to WordPress.

Tell us about WordPress 3.6 and what you’re proudest about as a co-lead of the release.

WordPress 3.6 is still under heavy development, but so far I definitely think it’s our work around post formats, lead by Helen Hou-Sandi and Range’s own Pete Mall. It’s been such an underused feature, that has such potential! We’re going to be revamping the post screen to make them easier to use, standardizing the way extra data for each post format is stored, and even creating fallback output so all themes can use them. Then, we’re going to add the icing on the cake by really showcasing them in Twenty Thirteen, the new default theme that will also be shipped with this release!

What are the three most important lessons you’ve learned since setting up shop?

Make sure you clearly set expectations up front, and be specific. No matter how well you think you understand what a client wants, it’s likely that you’re not quite right. Documenting exactly what is going to be delivered will help. It gives the client the chance to make corrections, gives the client something that they can hold you to, and helps prevent scope creep by giving you something that you can hold the client to. I can’t stress enough how important this is.

Charge what you’re worth. Undercharging isn’t just bad for you. When you undercharge you attract the wrong clientele. You end up with projects that don’t challenge you or interest you and you end up underperforming. Your poor work doesn’t allow you to charge more, and the cycle ends up being self-perpetuating.

Lastly, work with the right people. This applies to both clients as well as contractors or employees. A client that really matches your goals and abilities will be a happy client, and one that doesn’t only cause grief. Similarly, working with the wrong contractors or employees can kill your reputation. Remember, you’re putting your name on whatever they do. It is well worth it to take your time and make sure you’re always working with the right people.

Do you prefer to work solo, as part of a team, or both depending on the circumstances?

I love working on my own. I really do. I distract easily, take a long time to get back on task after being distracted, and I hate both waiting on other people to finish something I need as well as the feeling that someone is waiting on me. I’m also not bothered that I’m the only one in my office at home. I don’t feel the need for personal contact to come through work, I have friends for that.

Having said that though, there is a huge drawback to working solo, and that’s stagnation. You’ll never learn as quickly, or as much, than when you have other great people to learn from. This is something that I didn’t even realize I’d get from the community when I started contributing to WordPress, but I did. Working on WordPress with people like Mark Jaquith, Ryan Boren, Andrew Nacin, Pete Mall, and many more, has made me a better developer. Working with people like Sara Cannon, Jen Mylo, Lance Willet, and Helen Hou-Sandi has given me a better eye for usability. This was one of the driving forces behind starting Range. We get better just by working closer together.

Tell us about Range and the impetus behind joining forces with fellow WordPress luminaries Sara Cannon and Pete Mall. How does this fit into the other work you do?

First of all, Pete and Sara are awesome! Who wouldn’t want to work them?! Honestly though, we’d all been running our own companies for a while. We’d trade work back and forth some, but we realized there was a lot more potential there. By teaming up we’ve been able to create an amazing team capable of handling much more than we could ever do individually. And the best part is, we all have the same desires to give back to WordPress and have been able to make that an integral part of what Range is! Which means that instead of Range getting in the way of my contributions, it actually helps to enable them. There’s no possible way that I could be co-leading the 3.6 release without their support.

What advice would you give someone just getting started with working with WordPress professionally?

The WordPress community is a great tool. Use it to your advantage. Take the time to get involved and to connect with other WordPress professionals. There’s a huge wealth of knowledge there, and it would be crazy to ignore it.

Finally, as a self-confessed beer snob, could you recommend some choice beverages Code Poets should be seeking out?

My two favorite beer styles are the dark heavy beers with layers and layers of flavors, such as the porters and stouts, and the bitter hop-heavy beers like the IPAs. For the darks, you really can’t beat the barrel-aged Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout, but you should definitely try the Big Bad Baptist Imperial Stout as well. Also, look for a place that serves beers on nitro instead of just beer gas. They’ll often have something like the Left Hand Nitro Milk Stout, which is phenomenally smooth on nitro.

For the IPAs, just look to the West Coast. Almost everyone there is doing it right including Stone, Green Flash, Alpine Brewing, and many more. Some of the team-ups between these breweries are absolutely stellar.

Also, if you use untappd my username is aaroncampbell.

How did you first get involved with WordPress, and what was it that drew you in?

I started doing front-end design work as a hobby in 2000 — back then, I was working primarily in static HTML (Dreamweaver, FrontPage, et al) and that progressed into working with some of the blogging systems of the time — mostly Movable Type and Greymatter. The b2 blogging platform was in my periphery, but not something I’d ever used before, until a friend of mine brought it to my attention in 2003 under a new name, WordPress. I got the “Try it…you’ll like it!” sales pitch from my friend, so I did. Movable Type was my primary platform at the time, and I was pretty frustrated with the system and having to rebuild all archives anytime I made a change to the templates or CSS…which, today, is not something we can imagine, much less tolerate. I tried WordPress in 2003 and fell in love with the simplicity of it.

How important (or unimportant) has being involved in the WordPress community been for you to date, and how, if at all, has that changed over time?

Though I’ve been a WordPress user since 2003, I didn’t really get involved in the community until around 2006, or so. I was never really used to a platform having a “community” — Movable Type didn’t really have one, certainly not one that extended offline; and none of the other platforms I was using at the time did either. So the whole community thing was a relatively new concept to me, but a very valuable addition to my personal and professional life. Even now, after 10 years, I am sure that I am not AS involved in the community as I would like to be. For me, the biggest challenge is finding the time for volunteering in the areas of the community that interest me.

My primary community involvement revolves around WordCamp and Meetup events because I do enjoy sharing my experiences and knowledge with other users, and on the flipside: learning from those far more skilled than I. I enjoy the give and take those events have to offer. Last year (2012), I think I spoke at a total of 12 WordCamps and four Meetups. My involvement in these events have affected my professional life, as well as my personal life in extremely powerful ways. Professionally, I have made some of my strongest contacts for business and collaboration through these events and, personally, I have made some of the strongest friendships with people — some of whom I consider as close as family.

All in all, I think involvement in the community, on any level, is going to benefit you professionally because there is always something more to learn. Discovering how other developers are using WordPress and finding out what their workflow is has been invaluable to me, as I learn and grow as a developer. I have learned more from the likes of Brad Williams, Cory Miller, Dre Armeda, Mark Jaquith, Michael Torbert, Ryan Duff, Andrea Rennick (and so many more I’m not mentioning) on developing with WordPress and entrepreneurship just by simply listening — either to their official talks, or just general WordPress banter over lunch or drinks. There are folks at these events who really, really know their stuff and the advantage to having access to brains like that is huge. That is one of the many things I do love about the WordPress community is that users, at any level, do have access to the brains of people that really know what they are doing with WordPress. Developers, core commiters, themers, etc., — they are accessible in a way that I’ve not seen in other communities — and that is a very valuable thing.

What challenges did you face when you first set about working professionally with WordPress, and what would you have done differently in retrospect?

I learned WordPress by breaking every WordPress site I could get my hands on — mostly my own. I don’t have any formal (or informal) training in programming, design, development, etc. I just knew I found it fascinating and fun, so I just decided if I just took a leap — feet first! — I would eventually figure it out. I would say the years between 2003-2005 in WordPress, for me, were years of breaking and fixing…and then breaking and fixing. Back then, WordPress core was this big mystical beast that I didn’t understand. It worked, and for that I was grateful — but I didn’t understand it at all. I just went about my way, developing sites on a wing and prayer! I had the front-end design skills down — I could do graphics, I had a solid understanding of HTML markup and I could code up a mean stylesheet, but my first few years in WordPress themes and templates, I was flying by the seat of my pants, and my work definitely reflected that. I should publish the code from some of my early, early work for everyone to have a hearty chuckle at, because it is entertaining to me to go through some of those files.

In retrospect, I would have reversed my process and started out trying my best to understand core. I would have spent more time in the Codex and whatever documentation was available at the time and I would have participated more in the support forums and mailing lists, interacting with other developers to really learn the platform from the ground up. I also would have definitely invested in some practical courses or books on the basics of PHP, MySQL administration and then extended to JavaScript and jQuery. Figuring it out “on the fly” is actually fun (if not sometimes very frustrating), I enjoyed the challenge of it, if I’m honest. However, if I had it to do over again, I would have abandoned my “cowgirl” coding practices and prepared myself with a bit more education and study. Maybe then I could have understood why things were breaking and could probably have saved myself hours of headaches trying to make them work again. Education and knowledge brings confidence to your craft, and I didn’t always have the confidence that I do today.

How has writing books about WordPress informed your design and development practice and vice versa?

Speaking of doing things on the fly! If you would have asked me 10 years ago if I ever imagined myself the author of a suite of books on a software program, my answer would have been a very confident: NO. And yet, today I have four books out. Three of them in multiple editions, at this point. So, I guess life throws curve balls in your direction and sometimes you have to go with it.

When I was first asked, in 2006, if I would be interested in writing a book about WordPress, for new users, I was pretty excited. I knew WordPress pretty well, by then — from a users perspective, at least. The first edition of my first book, WordPress For Dummies, hit the shelves in 2007 and it did well, however the readers of the book wanted more out of it than information and instruction on how to use WordPress to publish content. The reviews started coming in from people wanting to know how to create themes, how to develop plugins and how to use WordPress as a CMS. For the second edition of that book, my editor also wanted me to add more meat to the book, to give readers what they were asking for. This really forced me to step up that education process I spoke of in the previous question. By 2006, I knew themes pretty well and was already doing client projects that involved using WordPress as more than just a blog (eCommerce shops, magazine/media outlets, etc.) — so I needed to put all of that information in the book in a way that was easily consumable by the reader. The second edition came out with chapters on developing your own theme — including a step-by-step walkthrough on creating a theme from scratch using basic template tags and theme practices. That remains the most popular part of the book today, almost seven years later.

That book is currently in its fifth edition, undergoing the sixth as I type. Keeping up with rapid WordPress development in print is not the easiest thing to do and it’s really forced me to keep up to date with ongoing development, changes, new features, deprecated features, etc. I strongly believe this has made me a better developer because now I’m looking at things a lot more closely and critically than I was five or six years ago. Professionally, I’ve improved my ability to advise my clients on best practices and keep them abreast of changes, upgrades, features, etc. I, also, had to really look at my code with a very critical eye and make sure that what I was doing was current and in line with today’s best practices. It was eye opening, humbling, and very valuable to go through that process — but necessary because I needed to make sure that what I was publishing was the most current and best way to get the desired outcome. As a result, my code on my own projects started to improve a great deal — so it benefits me as an author, but also as a developer to be involved in this book project.

Is it the job of a designer/developer to inform or educate their clients as they work together, or is that beyond the call of duty?

I strongly believe that education is a critical piece of client services. It will always depend on the specific project you’re working on, but I don’t think a designer/developer, involved in client services, can get away from educating their clients in one aspect or another when it comes to WordPress. Support is key and it doesn’t matter if you are doing custom work for hire, or if you are in product development; everyone, rightly, expects support. With support, comes education.

I think any developer or designer who says that client education is not their job is in for some pretty tough client relationships.

As a female entrepreneur, have you found any additional challenges along the way in what has been typically perceived as a male-dominated field? Is the WordPress community any different to the tech community at large in that respect?

This issue is brought to my attention on a regular basis, more within the past year, as the topic of inclusivity and diversity is brought more to the forefront, particularly in the area of events and conferences. However, that is about the extent of my experience with being a woman in the WordPress community and the tech community at large — I hear about it. I read about it. I recognize that women in technology have experienced challenges along the way, however I cannot say that I have, personally, nor have I ever really witnessed blatant sexism or harassment in my own corner of the tech world.

I find WordPress, the platform as well as the community, to be filled with progressive types…people who are forward thinkers and people who are not always satisfied with the status quo. I believe that progressive attitude and approach toward development tends to bleed over into other aspects of their personalities and lives, as well — so, without question, it extends to the acceptance that women are as capable and talented as their male counterparts. Other female members of this community may want to weigh in on their experiences — I can only speak to my own and say that if I have ever witnessed a moment’s pause over my gender in this community, I didn’t notice it or it wasn’t brought to my attention. In the WordPress community, at least, it seems like a non-issue, to me. However, that does not mean that we should be happy with maintaining that as status quo. I think the WordPress community is doing much to the effort of keeping it that way and presenting a model to the tech world, at large, on how life should be for women in tech.

I am very grateful to be part of a community that has never made me feel “less than.” I’ve only ever experienced open minds, willingness to teach and to learn and acceptance from both males, and females, alike in my 10 years.

Ok, ok — there was this one time at a very recent WordCamp when I was attending a speakers’ dinner…I introduced myself to a developer (male) and explained what it is I do and got this response: “You develop in and write books about WordPress, AND you’re a WOMAN?? Wow — that’s awesome.” Yeah, I happen to think that’s pretty awesome, too! So, maybe I have experienced a handful of…let’s call them “teaching moments.” But nothing on the scale of some of the things I’ve read about out there — and nothing that couldn’t be resolved by taking some time for a little one-on-one education so the next time that guy runs into a woman developer, he won’t act like he’s seeing a three-headed purple giraffe. If I were a betting woman — I’d bet that guy now has a full grasp of the concept that woman-as-developer != alien life form.

Regarding experiences I’ve read about in other communities, my feeling is this: If you don’t want women to feel different, or awkward, in your community — then don’t treat them differently. I start by making the assumption that open communities are open to anyone willing and wanting to join and I, personally, don’t wait for permission to do so. Don’t treat me with kid gloves. Don’t treat me like an anomaly that needs to be coddled and specially cared for. Don’t offer me special discount pricing for your event just because I’m a woman. Don’t paint my tech books pink or wrap code in butterflies and bows in an effort to help me understand it better. Don’t put me on your speakers’ list to fill a quota — do it because you think I have something to offer the community, because of my skills, talents and experience — not because I wear a bra instead of a jockstrap. Being a woman is not a qualification for a job or a speaking slot, anymore than being a man is. If you tell me you’re filling a quota by having me involved — you’ll find my resignation in your inbox faster than you can say “Girls Rule and Guys Drool.” This isn’t rocket science — it’s about common sense, respect, and decency. Any community, tech or otherwise, that struggles with those three basic human traits have far larger problems than girl germs and cooties.

The WordPress community excels at fostering an open environment and speaks for itself with the amount of very very talented, capable and kickass women involved in the project and community. Ongoing efforts that continue to promote and showcase that is a testament to the open environment that is fostered here and opens the door wide open for women, in fact — anyone from any walk of life, to feel welcomed, accepted, and invited, at any level.

How conscious have you been of positioning yourself and your work, and has that changed over time? Does good work market itself, or is marketing something that needs as much attention as designing and development?

It was in 2004-2005 when I started doing client work in earnest, and in the Fall of 2005 when I quit my full-time job as a Registered Nurse to do client work full time, working from home. Back then, there were but a handful of design shops that were doing WordPress work and word of mouth travelled fast. In those days, I got most of my work based off referrals and having my published work in a portfolio that was accessible to anyone thinking of hiring me were the only marketing I needed to do to keep me busy on a full time basis. That was then…

These days — you can’t spit on the internet without hitting a shop that specializes in WordPress development. The competition is much heavier than it used to be and shops really need to stand out from the other to keep up. That being said, I’ve never been much of a “marketer,” either and today, I still rely on word of mouth and referrals for the primary source of my client work. I think a good body of work does speak for itself — but find it also gives other people something to speak about. Networking works so much better than outright advertisements and old fashioned cold calls. Although, I do have to say that one of the largest projects I was involved with over the past 12 months has come to me as a result of an old fashioned cold call — which is something that was an isolated incident; cold calling is not something I’m fond of doing, nor is it a regular practice of mine.

I have a bit of an advantage over most, however. The books I write are a great marketing vehicle and I get a fair amount of referral work from that. Not every shop or freelancer is going to have the benefit of a book under their belt, so they do have to find their own niche to make a splash in the industry and start people talking and referring projects in their direction. I do find that another benefit of being involved in this community is the networking abilities that are out there. Every shop and freelancer who offers products or custom client work is a source of referral and collaboration. Being involved in the WordPress community is a great marketing tool that people may not have considered, but if I were still a freelancer today; my contacts in the community would probably keep me busy on a full-time basis, so much so that I wouldn’t have time for traditional marketing.

What advice would you give to someone looking to make a career change and get involved more heavily in professional design and development with WordPress?

Three things: education, community, and collaboration.

The education advice goes back to my earlier answer in terms of preparing yourself with the knowledge you need for success. Things are much different for you now in 2013 than they were for me in the early 2000s because WordPress has not only grown as a platform, but the education and resources around WordPress have grown as more and more people use it. Get to know the best practices and integrate them into your workflow so that they become habit and become the rule, rather than the exception. For each theme and each plugin that hits the interwebs, the more best coding practices we have in place, the better WordPress, and the community and users are for it. Use the Theme Check plugin to discover what your theme may be lacking and learn about deprecated functions and how to update them, turn on WP_DEBUG to discover any errors, notices or warnings in your code, read up on the recently published official Theme Guide from WordPress.com, check out the Codex for plugin practices, localize your themes and plugins — I could go on. But learning the best way to go about your work and keeping up with standards will put you on the path of success with your projects.

Getting involved in the WordPress community is also very beneficial for all the reasons I’ve already outlined in this interview: networking, learning, teaching, exposure, etc. Don’t discount how very beneficial it can be to be involved with some of the brightest minds who shape the development and future of the platform you are working with. Getting involved in Trac and helping squash a few bugs can go a long way in your education process, as well as help the platform evolve and grow for everyone’s greater good. Stepping up to speak at a WordCamp or local Meetup will help you meet people who are trying to achieve the same goals you are — these events are great for that.

Finally, collaboration has been a big part of my work for the past several years in this community. Don’t look at your competitors as competitors — rather, look at them as potential opportunities for collaboration, resource and knowledge sharing. I have discovered time and time again that my competitors are not my enemy, as they may be in other industries. On the contrary, some of my most respected peers and closest friends are competitors in this business in one way or another — but we all bring a little something different to the table. I have learned from so many of them, and hopefully vice versa.

What are you most proud of having worked on in your WordPress career to date?

Hands down, the books that I’ve published on WordPress are something that I am particularly proud of, mainly because of the huge amount of effort involved in writing a static book on such a dynamic platform.

Having designed or overseen the design of over 1000 websites now, how has your design process evolved over time and what do you consider to be essential — or inessential — to every job?

A bit about design vs. development — I do both and over the years my process has changed on how I approach both.

When I refer to the “design” of a project, I am referring to the front-end work that goes into it — primarily the graphic design, HTML markup, and CSS. Through the years, design is a never-ending college course for me. I am self-taught, so am accustomed to self-learning, and in design, things are always evolving and changing. I started out as a static HTML designer who did table-based designs and mocked up graphic concepts in PaintShop Pro. These days, I use Photoshop tools for design mockups, I abandoned tables for CSS in 1999. Every day since I started designing is a learning process for me, as I think it’s important for anyone working in this field to keep up with the evolving technology. One of my favorite resource sites for this is Chris Coyier’s CSS-Tricks. More recently, probably within the past two-three years, I’m finding myself doing less and less design and more and more development as clients are approaching me with their design work already completed. I’m still doing some of the front-end CSS and markup work, but in terms of graphic design work, I’m doing so much less of that these days. I think that is either because clients are becoming more and more educated and skilled in areas they didn’t used to be — or my client pool is made up of larger entities who employ in-house designers and agencies that do their branding for them. Probably a little of both.

From a development perspective, I think I described a little of my pain early on in my career in an earlier answer. Over the years, I’ve added new techniques and tools to my workflow that have greatly improved my efficiency and skill. Version Control is not always something that I always employed, for no other reason than the fact that I just didn’t get it and I was always so busy, I didn’t take the time to learn it. Once I got it, I could kick myself for the years that I didn’t use it and now cannot imagine living with out it (big shout out to Brad Williams for knocking me over the head with it until it sunk in). Now, I’m comfortable in both Git and SVN — but I used to read tweets from people like Mark Jaquith and he’d tweet something about “cowboy coders” who code on production sites without using version control…yeah, that was me. These days, I sing the praises of version control and would say to any developer who is not using to make it part of your regular work flow immediately — it is never to late to learn it and employ it and you’ll be happier for it.

You recently decided to merge your company eWebscapes with WebDevStudios. What motivated the change, and what new business affordances are you most excited about now that the wheels are in motion?

Funny thing about WebDevStudios is that, up until very recently, they were always a competitor of mine in the custom WordPress space. Looking back on the earlier question where I discuss competitors being a potential for opportunity and collaboration — this is a good example of that. Brad, Brian, and I met in 2009 at a WordCamp I organized in Chicago, and have been friends since then. Over the years, I always envied the fact that WebDev operated as a team, whereas I primarily operated as an individual who occasionally outsourced to freelancers when the project load got too heavy. I operated eWebscapes like that for almost 12 years and I think it was in 2010 that it began to dawn on me that I could probably accomplish a lot more as part of a team, rather than on my own. Through my experiences collaborating with other shops, like iThemes, for example — I really began to appreciate a team environment of collaboration and cooperation and in 2010, I started to quietly look for a team to either merge with, or join because I could see the benefit. I like the collaboration. I like the ability to bounce ideas off other developers — use them as a resource, and also be a resource for them. I was missing that in my work. Brad, Brian, and I started talking about merging, in earnest in 2012. By then, I was drowning in work at eWebscapes — not only with client projects, but also managing other projects that I had my freelancers working on, as well. The projects I was managing and developing were not small projects — so it was quite a challenge to do it all on my own. Merging my client base with WebDev’s client base is a win for everyone involved and merging talents and resources is, as well. It was probably the best move I could have made and am more than thrilled to have done it…I’m hoping Brad and Brian feel the same way!

We officially merged in January 2013 and have been spending the first couple of months of this year transitioning, which hasn’t been painful at all. In terms of the future — I’m excited at WebDev. Brad and Brian are both brilliant developers, along with every single member of the team. I’m really proud of what they’ve accomplished so far and proud that they are blazing the trail in the area of using WordPress as an application framework, a topic that Brad is speaking on at WordCamp Miami in April 2013. They have developed some pretty amazing apps using WordPress, and BuddyPress, at the core — unfortunately I am not yet able to disclose those projects, and the apps are not currently public, but I can say that I’m excited at what is currently brewing at WebDevStudios, proud to be a part of it and excited to be involved in the development process, as well.

How did you get involved in working on the web?

I started working on the web almost accidentally. My degree was in Rhetoric, so I expected to go find a job as a technical writer or something like that early on. Only in retrospect does it sound so ridiculous to me that I was so willing to convince myself I would be happy writing technical manuals . I had studied in South America twice in college, and then worked in cigar humidors selling cigars to get myself through college.

I had this diverse set of knowledge that didn’t necessarily add up to a career. Graduating in 2009 during the recession didn’t make things any easier. However after hustling for about three months, I ended up getting two jobs on the same day. One was for a startup doing software as a service (SAAS) compliance monitoring for Salesforce and related apps.

I got hired to do market development on the phone for them. I was literally making about 60-80 calls a day to CIOs and CTOs, trying to sell them enterprise software. Simultaneously, I was also working at Tech Ranch Austin, an incubator for early-stage tech startups, the company that I ultimately ended up deciding to focus on.

From day one, I was organizing Tech Ranch Austin’s online branding, producing their content, and building their community using social media as a way to start relationships with local startups and entrepreneurs. The goal was to create a community of startups who would share expertise and insight with one another as they built successful, bootstrapped companies.

Overall, I brought about 120 startups through the doors in less than two years. With the perspective of a few years, I could say that 10-15 of those companies are growing and either have funding or bootstrapped and are turning away funding sources.

One of my favorite startups from Tech Ranch is called Aunt Bertha. It’s a social venture that created a network to help people find local social services. Basically, they make it easy for you to find out which food, housing, and employment programs are in your community and whether or not you’re eligible for them. They work closely with social workers and non-profits, but are a for-profit venture.

What are the three most important things that working with startups has taught you? In other words, what advice do you have to share with entrepreneurs?

Man, it’s really hard for me to give advice to an entrepreneur since I’ve only ever run my own consulting services business. I can only speak to the entrepreneurial struggle to a certain degree, at which point I have to stop talking and start listening.

One thing I notice is that wanna-be entrepreneurs wait for permission to act. They’re looking for some external validation that will give them permission to act. These folks never get off the ground. The entrepreneurs I know that are successful literally cannot see the world any other way, and they burn with an internal fire that is a bit imbalanced, to be honest. They can’t help it.

Another piece of advice I’d give is to stop focusing on building the next social network. We don’t need more, what we need are innovations in productivity, transportation and energy, food, healthcare, and production. WordPress counts as a tool of production, IMO, because it allows people to easily express and produce value.

But I think the next innovations in energy and healthcare are the things that will usher in the next revolution of productivity and economic growth. If those don’t happen, we’re going to plateau. That’s a bit heavy, but I think it’s true.

If I had to pick one more piece of advice I’d recommend that entrepreneurs have absolute faith in themselves, and be ruthlessly critical of the mistakes they make, but balance that with a clear vision of the world as they want it to be. And if you find yourself with enough self doubt — that it’s easier to do nothing, then you don’t have to be the entrepreneur. It’s a lonely, tough road, and it can be painful. The only way to see yourself through it is to believe in your vision and believe you’ve got the tools to make it real.

You’ve worked closely with tech startups in the past. Were any WordPress-based? What qualities did the founders have that made them successful?

WP Engine was the first WordPress-based startup that I have been part of. In fact, Tech Ranch Austin insisted on using Drupal for their website, despite my strong recommendation to the contrary.

Again since I haven’t started a product company of my own, other than a small consulting operation, any observation I make is based on my perspective, not as an actual founder. Your mileage may vary.

I think that successful founders have a lot of things in common, to the extent that most people can pick them out of a room. You can start to tell who the successful people are going to be once you start to look around.

Successful founders are always looking for ways to give. They almost always approach situations with the belief that everyone can get more than what they need and want from a given arrangement. The unsuccessful companies were led by people who were constantly afraid they were getting screwed over, and so they were more concerned with protecting things than growing.

You can’t do both, and if you’re focused on giving and infinite resources, you find them. If you’re focused on not getting screwed over, that’s ironically what you’ll be faced with.

Growth requires vulnerability as a founder because growth requires change and adaptation to the business. I’ve seen WP Engine double in employees since I joined, and I’ve had to adapt to the company to keep up. This is even more dramatic with founders who start a company with one idea, and then must evolve as the company grows.

The founders who are more concerned with protecting what they have, have the potential to get in the way of their company’s growth. Whether that means they don’t want to hire people or let the right investors help them grow, or they don’t evolve their products with the right customer feedback, or any number of things.

Startup entrepreneurs also have a maniacal drive to get things done. The first few years of a startup often are chaotic, disorganized, and seem hopeless. I’ve experienced those mornings from time to time when I was making something new happen in my life. I’d wake up miserable and feel locked to the bed, but I’d get up regardless.

Successful entrepreneurs are the ones who keep getting out of bed even though they’re exhausted and scared out of their minds. They simply aren’t willing to stop pursuing their dream until they’ve made it real, and any pain of starting a company pales in comparison to NOT starting the company.

As I said, my opinion should be taken with a grain of salt. However, I have observed hundreds of startups, successful and unsuccessful, and most recently, I’ve been able to work closely with the founders of WP Engine and observe how they operate. It’s been incredibly informative, and I’m very grateful to work closely with our entire team. I learn new things about myself and how to be better at what I do everyday, and that is the most important thing.

It’s less important to ask, “When are you going to start your own company,” and more important to know that you’re in the right place, growing every day, you’re challenged, you work with people you enjoy, and the company you’re part of is doing something that you think actually matters to the world. You can be fulfilled without being an entrepreneur. But I think being an entrepreneur is the only path to freedom.

Tell me about your work as a Brand Ambassador at WP Engine. What does the role entail, and what do you like most about it?

I started at WP Engine as the guy who ran the blog and did all the social media work. I had previously made myself a promise that I wouldn’t have a job that was primarily Twitter-based again in my life, but here I found myself, and frankly I was loving it. What I discovered at WP Engine was through strategic Twitter use, I was able to create strong connections between our customers, our support guys, and make the customer experience a defining characteristic of our company and our brand.

After a few months of focused effort, the @WPEngine Twitter account was listed as one of the top five Twitter accounts to follow in WordPress, and was the only company account in the top five. This was because I made a point of using the account to give back to the community and provide best-practices and useful links, rather than just market the hosting. That’s part of the ethos of WP Engine: company growth will happen as a direct result of serving your community.

I love my job because I am a writer at my core (I even have a typewriter tattoo), and I get paid to be the guy who develops the content around everything we do as a company. The fact that I’m the go-to guy to write status updates when we have to mess with our servers makes me happy beyond belief.

Then the fact that I get to go spend hours every week writing blog posts about really interesting topics just blows my mind. THEN, I’m the guy who gets to travel to WordCamps and meet awesome folks in the WordPress community and that just makes my head explode sometimes.

Here’s the inspiring thing about working with WordPress folks. Everyone in WordPress is doing something they absolutely love, no questions asked. Many of us used to work big corporate jobs, but our work with WordPress has set us free from corporate drudgery, and WordPress allows us to choose our projects, choose when we work, how we work, and all the while, we’re often making even more money than we did previously.

WordPress people are living and working on their own terms, and everyone in the community has this brilliant independent spirit. The only way people “conform” is to the way the community insists that we remain unique individuals. The fact that we can all be fully ourselves and that it only contributes to our success is part of the magic of WordPress and open source.

I take great pride in the fact that WP Engine makes it possible for thousands of people to build amazing things on WordPress. We’re just serving their creativity and their entrepreneurial spirit.

You read PROLIFICALLY. Name your three favorite books: what did you learn from each one that made it a favorite?

That’s a hard question. I don’t know that I have three absolute favorites, but I’ll pick from ones that made a huge impact.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. This book takes months to finish, and you can’t rush it. It’s like sailing from Los Angeles to Australia. You just have to lie back and be patient, and you’ll get there eventually.

I’ve never read a book that so fully developed characters and taught me so much about philosophy, religion, and how to live a good life. The book made me fall in love with Russian literature, and to date is the only book where I’ve cried in the final pages (don’t tell anyone), both because the ending was so beautiful, but also because I knew the book was over.

Pre-Commerce by Bob Pearson. If you sell anything online, you have to read this book. My boss, LA Lassek, recommended it to me, and it was an early sign that I was going to have a ton to learn about business from her. The book is required reading because it explains how the internet has put the power back into the hands of our customers.

We have to respect their power in the buying cycle and create trust if we want our products and services to be part of their lives. Basically, the book explains that we can no longer “sell” anything to our customers because they won’t be sold to. However, we can help them “buy” something, and they’ll become loyal customers for life.

Betterness: Economics for Humans by Umair Haque. This book espouses my economic philosophy that companies must not just be profitable quarter to quarter, based only on money in the bank. I think the only companies that will survive in the future will be the ones that provide returns not just for shareholders, but for their customers, their communities, the environment, and their employees.

I think as humans, we have it within ourselves to build businesses that create virtuous cycles of wealth, change the world with innovation, and also enrich the lives of everyone who works in those companies. I think “good work” is such a healing thing for our lives, and anyone who has ever gone from a soul-sucking job to a fulfilling one, knows exactly what I’m talking about.

Good work will change your life and provide an outlet for human potential and creativity, and lead to happiness and health, if not wealth as well. I think the future innovation that will change the world and raise our standard of living will be in areas of solar energy, health care, and education, and I look forward to seeing those innovations if not also being part of one of those companies in a few years, long after I’ve spent my time at WP Engine. (For the record, I’ve still got a lot to accomplish at WP Engine .)

How did you start working with WordPress?

I blogged a lot in high school using Blogger, but eventually got tired of it, found my old posts embarrassing and overly revealing, and just generally stopped blogging at all as I became a very busy adult. In 2008, while I was in graduate school, I was helping a friend tweak some things on his Blogger-powered blog when he asked me if I’d ever heard of WordPress. I hadn’t, so I took a quick look and figured I should give blogging another try. I used a one-click installer on my web host, as there is no way I would have known how to set up a MySQL database/user on my own at the time, and immediately fell in love with having the ability to make pages, something Blogger was missing at the time. Soon I was so enthralled by how much more sense WordPress made to me that I completely forgot my friend had been the one who introduced me and suggested to him that he switch! (He hasn’t, for the record. Maybe someday.)

The next year, I started working at the school (a music conservatory) as a web developer. Eventually I was tasked with a blog project for Polyphonic.org, immediately thought “WordPress!” and set to work learning about making a theme and choosing plugins for functionality. When I think about the things I did now, I cringe a little, but everything starts somewhere, and there were definitely some things that weren’t easy, like vBulletin integration. I had started to keep an eye on the development of WordPress so I’d know what would happen with an upgrade, and the introduction of custom post types got me thinking it could be a cool thing to use for the site at large instead of maintaining their basic custom CMS.

We never did get there for Polyphonic, but custom post types, along with the multisite merge functionality of WordPress 3.0 got me seriously thinking about using it for the main school site, and the cost and ease-of-use won everybody else over. As always, there are plenty of things I’d do better now, but I learned an unbelievable amount about WordPress and the web in general and went to my very first WordCamp as a direct result — WCNYC 2010, specifically because it had a higher ed track. There I got to hear some crazy smart people give talks, like Boone and Nacin, and was really impressed by the sense of community. I was hooked.

You’re active in the WordPress.org community. Tell us about how you contribute. What’s the best way for new folks to get involved?

I contribute in a few ways — quite a bit of it is contributing to Core, whether via code, Trac gardening, or more project management style tasks. I also speak at WordCamps, have a few plugins, and drop in on the forums on occasion. I recently became a guest committer to Core for the 3.6 development cycle and am the feature lead for post formats UI, so I’m looking forward to continuing and deepening my involvement. I’m really fortunate to work for a company that recognizes the value of giving back to the community and donates a significant portion of my time to the project.

For new folks, I’d start by looking at all the different ways there are to get involved. There’s Core code, of course, but every area is just as valuable: support, documentation, WordCamp and meetup organization, plugin and theme development, accessibility, education/outreach, and probably more that I’ve missed. There’s almost certainly an area or three where your skills would be useful and valuable. I would recommend that everyone spend some time helping out in the forums — what users are doing and thinking about is extremely revealing, and it’s good to get accustomed to all kinds of interactions, good and bad. I think the experience helps with everything else, especially when it comes to core code contributions. It’s easy to lose sight of what all these different kinds of users are doing with WordPress or are expecting it to do, especially if, like me, your job is doing client work that often doesn’t involve a blogging component at all.

Tell us about a favorite project you’ve worked on? What about it did you love? What was the most important thing you learned from it?

There’s a project that I’ve been on since I started with 10up in August 2011: LearningWorks for Kids. It’s a site that ties video games to learning skills and disabilities with articles and guides to various games and web applications. A lot of what I like about this project is its concept, but it’s also been a great challenge for me because it’s so feature-packed and has taken me into many areas of WordPress development. We just launched the final stages of a second phase of development, that revolves around a membership component. This means I’ve been working with memberships and payments, of course, but also bbPress for forums, Gravity Forms-powered assessments and quizzes, tons of user and custom post type integrations, and some pretty complex taxonomy queries for relating various content types in order to present recommendations to members.

I think the thing this project has most shown me is how much can change in your coding and general work style over time because I’ve been on it consistently for so long — almost a year and a half! In particular, I’ve learned a lot about front-end development and general code maintainability by realizing what I shouldn’t have done as features have been added and further developed. I also learned a lot about task management and client communication. As frustrating as it is to glare at my past self over what I thought was a good idea at the time or very un-DRY code, I like having reminders about how much I have managed to learn as encouragement to keep going.

To learn more about Helen, follow her on Twitter and visit her website.