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Síguenos en: Pue eso, un resumen de lo que está pasando con WP Engine y WordPress ¿Qué tal la semana? Semana esther Encontrado código que forzaba mostrar warning php de un plugin Nueva web para cliente Semana Nahuai Terminando de sincronizar las webs y aplicar descuentos de WooCommerce dependiendo de la antigüedad en la otra web. Creación canal de sostenibilidad en el Slack de WP España. Contenido Nahuai Novedades Disclaimer: No somos expertos legales ni pretendemos hacer un repaso exhaustivo sobre todo lo ocurrido. La idea es compartir lo que se sabe de forma ordenada para que cada uno saque sus conclusiones. WP Engine infringe la licencia de marca registrada y Automattic le exige pagar por usarla o contribuir al proyecto de WordPress. Cronologia Desde 2018 Silver Lake (fondo de inversión) es el mayor accionista de WPE Se cambian los términos de uso de la marca WordPress Matt/Automattic se puso en contacto con WP Engine con la propuesta de que pagaran por usar la marca WP o que contribuyeran al proyecto a través de 5ftf, o una combinación de ambos (un 8% beneficios) Matt confiaba en que contribuyeran Matt publica durante la WCUS en el blog de WordPress.org que “WP Engine no es WordPress” (21/09) Matt habla en la WCUS y “saca los colores” a WP Engine públicamente (21/09) Carta de cese y desistimiento de Automattic a WP Engine para que deje de usar la marca (23/09) WP Engine toma acciones legales contra Automattic (23/09) WP Engine intenta dejar de mostrar las noticias de WordPress.org en el admin (24/09) Se prohíbe a WP Engine acceder a WordPress.org (25/09) Acceso a los repositorios de WordPress bloqueadas para WP Engine (25/09) Se levanta la prohibición de WP Engine al acceso de WordPress.org (28/09) Motivos para exigir a WP Engine que cambie el nombre o pague por usarlo Matt considera que confunden al usuario. Poniendo ejemplos como que su madre lo confunde o que WPE tiene planes que se llaman WP core. Automattic es dueña de la marca WordPress y puede decidir cuando se infringe Motivos para “exigir“ colaboración a WP Engine Facturan +400M de dólares al año Solo contribuyen 40h/semana al 5FtF (por los 3.915 h/semana de Automattic, teniendo un tamaño similar) Solo invierten en acciones de marketing (que no se considera una contribución al proyecto) Otros motivos de disgusto con WP Engine Desactiva las revisiones de las entradas de WordPress (una característica del core), para ahorrar dinero. Modificaron el código de la pasarela de pago de WooCommerce (que usa Stripe por debajo) para llevarse la comisión (en lugar de ir a Automattic). Utiliza recursos de la infraestructura del WordPress.org (repositorio de plugins) Ha bajado la calidad del servicio/soporte Qué dijo Matt en WCUS WP Engine extrae mucho valor del ecosistema de WordPress sin contribuir Paga con tu cartera y a la hora de elegir un hosting elige uno que contribuya Utilizó el termino “cancer” para referirse (indirectamente) a WP Engine Otros matices Problema de demonizar WP Engine (Local, ACF…) en lugar de Salt Lake. Problema del doble rasero con el nombre (WordPress.com). Problema de eclipsar la WCUS. GoDaddy fue llamado un “peligro existencial” para el ecosistema hace unos años, en cambio ahora fue mencionado como uno de los que contribuye al proyecto. Newfold Digital paga por usar la marca WordPress en sus planes etc Multidots ha decidido duplicar el número de horas que contribuye al 5FtF y aumentar la donación a la fundación WordPress. Algunas personas se desmotivan para continuar contribuyendo. Enlaces relacionados: WP Engine is not WordPress WP Engine is banned from WordPress.org https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-reprieve/ contributes back 3,915 hours a week WordCamp US & Ecosystem Thinking https://ma.tt/2024/09/wordpress-engine/ https://wpengine.com/blog/highlighting-wordpress-innovation-contribution/ https://www.briancoords.com/the-wcus-closing-i-wish-wed-had/ https://journal.rmccue.io/431/wp-engine-must-win/ https://cullenwhitmore.com/an-open-letter-to-matt-mullenweg/ https://davemart.in/2024/09/25/my-thoughts-on-matts-comments/ https://jamesgiroux.ca/wcus-freedom-isnt-free/ https://www.multidots.com/updates/taking-a-stand-for-the-wordpress-ecosystem-why-we-must-all-give-back/ https://wptavern.com/matt-mullenweg-announces-temporary-lifting-of-wp-engine-ban https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnI-QcVSwMU Tip de la semana Listen and publish YouTube shows as podcasts - Listenbox
Síguenos en: Repasando la siempre maravillosa WordCamp Pontevedra ¿Qué tal la semana? Semana esther Elias -> follow-back tema ACF Pico de altas en TWP (efecto vuelta al cole) Suma y sigue los problemas de WPML (transition queue no carga) Gyncana de dominios y hostings en Ionos Redsys TPV virtual denegado Semana Nahuai Continuando el desarrollo usando la REST API para conectar dos webs WordPress. Investigando si WordPress.org se aloja en un hosting que usa energías renovables (parece que sí). Pensando en formas de hacer el bloque de audio más atractivo (patrón usando imagen destacada, título…). Contenido Nahuai Tema de la semana: 5ª PonteWordCamp Presentación de Sabela prometiendo una posible sorpresa final. Marta Paz sobre emprendimiento cooperativo, ventajas del modelo cooperativo vs empresa. En Galicia cuando redujeron a 2 el mínimo aumentaron mucho las altas de comparativas. Hector de Prada en como crear una startup Identificar un problema Obtener información del usuario (The mom test, libro) Investigar mercado y competencia. Crear MVP. Evolucionarlo. Elegir precio. Conseguir clientes (elegir pocos canales y testarlos). Maria Polaina como usar copywriting para trasmitir tu mensaje. Pablo Moratinos consultoria crecer marca personal Fernando Garcia Rebolledo consultoria Woo Fernando Puente auditoria WPO (Yellow Lab Tools y DNS Speed Benchmark). Pasilleo, gratemente sorprendido por el merchandising que trajo Wetopi. Espacio Conecta con Juan Hernando. Comida fantastica, como siempre. Kahoot y gaita final. Contributor Day, 3 charlas rápidas y mesas de contribución. Estuve liderando la mesa de sostenibilidad en la tradujimos el manual para crear eventos más sostenibles al castellano. Felicitar a los organizadores y voluntarios por lo bien que salió todo. Y agradecer a los patrocinadores por hacerlo posible. Novedades WPdrama en WCUS porque Matt vuelve decir algo controvertido.
At the time of this publication, thirty-thousand plus eyeballs have landed on John Blackbourn's tweet that has sparked an event that goes well-beyond #WPDrama this week.It seems WordPress.com has publicly replicated the .org plugin pages. My peers at WP Tavern and The Repository have covered the many aspects of this debacle. I'm out of energy this week for anything more in-depth, so I'll leave you with these two things:Listen to my latest interview with Jon Clark of StellarWP. We're chatting about marketing automation, YouTube creation, and video games!The following text is are my thoughts on leadership and future of WordPress…There are many leaders in the WordPress space, doing great work, and that work quickly gets washed away through a storm of scathing outrage. When Josepha asked the community in her WCUS 2023 talk, “Why is it important that we are thriving?” The answer was, “because WordPress can change a life.”Words can also change a person's life.Simple words like developer meeting can make a WordPress power user feel like whatever's going on at that table, isn't for them. WordPress entrepreneur can cast a vibe of WordPress but with Shark Tank, and who wants that? Words that attack or summarize a persons worth through petty insults, that can change a life, immeasurably.For WordPress to thrive people must want to contribute. Contribute to code, to design, to meetings, and above all else, to the conversations about our beloved software. It's not about your code, your profits, your 5%, or your lowercase P — it's that you recognize how open source WordPress empowers us.It empowers us to do everything I just said — code, profit, 5% — and through this, it creates opportunity.Opportunity for you, and the people that you impact, through your work, with WordPress. This has a ripple effect. The more people that discover opportunity through WordPress, the wider that ripple spreads to the next person, and to the next person.Though there's an odd juxtaposition this week:A 100-year plan announced at WordPress.com to ensure your life's work is preserved for a generation to come. But, will WordPress last 100 years like this?To ask for a hand in helping WordPress thrive across members of our online and offline community in favor of spreading the larger mission: Democratize Publishing. But is that really the mission we're all on?You have to want this for yourself and for WordPress.I've been a critic of WordPress for a while. Not to be confused with being outright critical of WordPress. My angle has always been perched at the view of, what I call, the blue-collar digital worker.When a leader de-value's someone's position in a community, they aren't knocking down one person, but an entire group of people, that feel like their worth is being ripped from them. “If that person isn't good enough, how am I?” They might ask.When a leader mocks the accomplishments of one person, there's another person standing right behind them trying to find footing to reach that very same height of success. “Why should I continue if this isn't good enough?” They might ask.This is not thriving, this is soul crushing. Leadership loses the very thing they need in order for WordPress to thrive: Trust.Trust that people want to wake up and go do WordPress. Whatever doing WordPress means to them.Trust that we're all on the same shared mission of The Four Freedoms and to Democratize Publishing.Losing trust means you lose belief from the people on the mission with you. Sure, people will continue to write Iines of code for WordPress, because they need to survive. WordPress isn't going to get replaced anytime soon, and most humans aren't going to walk away from it as a means to their survival.But they will fall out of love for it, what it meant, and what it could be. There's no parade for leaders at the of this mission. We arrive home, shut the door, and put our laptops away.How was your day with WordPress?Two people started WordPress. Thousands of people have contributed lines of code to WordPress. Tens of thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands!) have spread the good word of WordPress — faults and all.WordPress is amazing because it can change a life. I believe it. I am it. You are it.But after this week, I can't help but ask: Will WordPress thrive, or simply survive the next 100 years? ★ Support this podcast ★
Reflections and highlights of WordCamp US 2023 from Matt Medeiros, Seth Goldstein, Shambi Broome, Bud Kraus, Jeremy Freemont, Mike Demo, Patrick Rauland and Katie Keith
Our final recap of WordCamp US with Topher DeRosia, Raquel Manriquez and Cory Miller
Adam joins me for a candid conversation about WCUS and some reflections from being both an attendee and a sponsor.
In WooBits this week, recapping WCUS, launch of WP Includes, WordPress for Enterprise, future of swag and Avalara Next virtual event.
It’s filled with laughs, insights and simply good times when co-hosts Robbie and Robert take over the mics at WCUS 2023.
It's filled with laughs, insights and simply good times when co-hosts Robbie and Robert take over the mics at WCUS 2023.
It looks like the days of automatically sharing WordPress.com content to Twitter are over. Automattic announced that customers will no longer be able to auto-publish to Twitter via the Jetpack Social plugin.You may recall that WordPress.com's access to the Twitter API was suddenly suspended in April. While it eventually came back online, changes to Twitter's policies have made the continued use too expensive.Automattic says that Twitter's price increase is “prohibitive for us to absorb without passing a significant price increase along to you, and we don't see that as an option.” Bye bye birdie.Links You Shouldn't MissThe Beaver Builder page builder plugin has been on the market for 9 years. The WordPress landscape has changed dramatically in that time. For instance, page builders are now seen as competitors to the native Block Editor. What does that mean for the future? Matt Medeiros spoke with Robby McCullough of Beaver Builder for an in-depth discussion of the topic.There's news to report regarding this summer's WordCamp US. The first round of ticket sales started on May 1 and quickly sold out. Another round of sales will be coming soon. Meanwhile, there will be a different approach to event programming. Organizers are targeting “experienced, seasoned, professional speakers at the top of their industries who are not currently active members of our unique community.” They've put out a survey for suggested speakers and topics. A traditional call for speakers will also be announced in the near future. The event will take place from August 24-26th in National Harbor, MD.WordPress community member Michelle Frechette has launched WP Speakers. It's a free resource that connects speakers and event organizers within the WordPress ecosystem. In a press release, Frechette notes that "As well-connected as I am in WordPress, I couldn't even imagine how much more difficult it might be for someone who didn't know a lot of speakers personally. So WP Speakers was born."WordPress agency Human Made has recently published articles detailing their experimentation with AI. Now they're hosting a virtual event to examine how this technology will impact the content management system (CMS). Word on the Future is a virtual event and will take place on May 25. ★ Support this podcast ★
If [an employer] can't afford not to operate without suspicion and distrust, what does that tell you?Dan KnaussDan and Ny talk about their WordCamp US experiences both good and bad. Their conversation focuses on accessibility and disability. Ny had an experience with Uber at WCUS that made her agree with Dan's preference for traditional and preferably unionized taxi companies or public transit. They both reflect on the accessibility challenges and failures Michelle Frechette shared in Five Days Without a Shower before turning to an important article by Piccia Neri that was published at Post Status this week.Piccia's article considers the value of salary transparency in hiring and job listings after asking WordPress employers why they don't advertise a salary range in listings. Ny is optimistic pay transparency will soon be the norm in US law. Dan is optimistic the WordPress community can make the changes it needs out of empathy and regard for others plus the motivation to build a high-quality, professional workforce. They both close out this episode by expressing gratitude for the WordCamp organizers and volunteers who made WCUS possible this year.
Adobe set to acquire Figma If you're a designer or UI specialist in the WordPress world, chances are you already know about the Adobe/Figma deal. A $20 Billion dollar deal in cash and stock – 40 times Figma revenue – shocked us and launched more memes, probably using Photoshop, than we've in the tech space since…well about 4 months ago. 4 Years ago, Figma donated an organizational membership to WordPress.org. Will you continue to use Figma? Tweet at us. In Mullenweg's recent WCUS address, he snuck in the mention of Automattic's new cloud service – wp.cloud. It looks to be infrastructure for cloud providers wanting to serve up some WordPress hosting, leveraging .com's sprawling CDN & other technology. Products like Jetpack already use .com's CDN as part of their services, as I'm sure other products like VideoPress do. I reached out to Jesse Friedman, who leads the wp.cloud initiative, for an interview. Here's a sneak peek of that, which airs next week – subscribe so you don't miss it! Hosting news continues with WP Engine jumping into the WordPress flavor hosting with a new WooCommerce offering. While Siteground surprises us with their Easy Digital Downloads speciality hosting. Next up (listen to the podcast for more): Michelle Frechette with the Community Minute & Amber Hinds with the Accessibility Minute! Links you shouldn't miss There's a handful of other links you shouldn't miss this week. These links should help you stay informed around the moving and shaking of WordPress: Matt Mullenweg WCUS Address This is a direct recording of his livestream session. If you missed it or want to hear the audience Q&A round, click to tune in. Why WordPress and Wix will Always Be Worlds Apart The WP Minute's Eric Karkovack, breaks down a detailed comparison on how much WordPress & Wix differ. Help Test WordPress 6.1 The WordPress 6.1 Beta is out! Remember, don't complain…explain…your issues by testing the latest version before it's released. From the grab bag Some of these links might interest you – dive in! ACF 6.0 is releasedWebP pulled from 6.xSyed Bahlki makes an interesting prediction about the future of WordPressMatt Cromwell launched WP Product Shop Talk Twitter Spaces. Subscribe to The WP Minute as this show will be exclusively syndicated through our podcast feed. Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today: Eric KarkovackDaniel ShutzsmithRaquel Landefeld
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 12th September 2022.
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 12th September 2022.
There's always new people coming in, being embraced and accepted, [and being] shown the wayCory MillerIn this episode, Cory and Michelle talk about their takeaways from WordCamp US. The Post Status Huddle ahead of the conference was a great experience for them and many Post Status members. Michelle explains her experience with some accessibility challenges. Cory stresses the need for empathy and awareness about these issues. What everyone agrees on: we love getting together as a community! WordPress is an industry, and it is people. The people come first. Cory also talks about his and Post Status' interest in serving its agency-based and European members.
Today's episode is a recording from the official WCUS 2022 livestream found in this video. We've extracted the Matt Mullenweg session which includes some of his outlook on WordPress 6.1, community, and a Q&A session from the audience. If you had a chance to attend WCUS, send us a tweet about your favorite session or experience. Photograph by Daniel Schutzsmith
Cory interviews Ryan Welcher, a Developer Advocate at Automattic focusing on the Gutenberg Project, as a special follow-up to our last episode, titled “We Like Gutenberg, We Swear!”. We talk about his WCUS talk, being a Developer Advocate, how to write to post meta with custom blocks, scaffolding with the @wordpress/create-block package, the convenience of ACF fields, and more. ## Links Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/ryanwelchercodes YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/RyanWelcherCodes Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryanwelcher Website: https://ryanwelcher.com Discord: https://discord.gg/RYtFaYbMRM (03:34) WCUS 2022 Extending WordPress with SlotFill: https://youtu.be/ql4hhXWcdik?t=27235 (08:34) Twitch repo: https://github.com/ryanwelcher/twitch (30:28) HTML Walker proposal: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/08/19/a-new-system-for-simply-and-reliably-updating-html-attributes/ (33:34) @wordpress/create-block package: https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/reference-guides/packages/packages-create-block/ (1:03:50) Query Block variations PR: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/43632 (1:04:55) Twitch Code Repo for custom field block: https://github.com/ryanwelcher/twitch/tree/trunk/plugins/custom-field-block/src (1:05:09) Integrating a custom post type into Gutenberg and Full Site Editing: https://youtu.be/vr3wgD9IZRA ## Upcoming WP Events WordPress Accessibility Day, Nov 2-3: https://wpaccessibility.day/ WordFest Live, Nov 18: https://www.wordfest.live/
"So it's hard for people in the community to kind of branch out and communicate online. So imagine how hard it is for people who are new" —Nyasha GreenDan and Ny are looking forward to attending WordCamp US this week, which is a first for them both. In a slightly more casual conversation touching their usual topics — the business of WordPress, careers, and community — they share the things they're looking forward to seeing and doing at WCUS and in San Diego.Some of the WCUS sessions they're interested in have to do with WordPress security and bug bounty programs, cross-cultural communication, WordPress and performance, and getting young people into WordPress. Other tech and open source conferences also come up, as Ny is planning to attend All Things Open 2022 in Raleigh, North Carolina.Finally, Ny and Dan discover they both have non-tech backgrounds and started reading J.R.R. Tolkien at an early age. Ny talks about learning several languages and reading The Hobbit in Latin.
Editor's note: How I imagine the background music to WordCamp US 2022 News The new default theme, Twenty Twenty-Three, will be a stripped-down base theme with many style variations built by the WordPress design community. This theme is being released to make theme development exciting again. Jump over to the Gutenberg times to read about variations and see the latest on the “good and bad”. WordPress.com has announced that they can build and design a website for new business owners, in four business days or less. If you are on a budget, the cost is $499, plus an additional purchase of the WordPress.com premium plan. It will be interesting to see how this will grow and if it has any impact on the WordPress professional freelance community. Security Wordfence PSA: on September 6, 2022, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team was alerted to the presence of a vulnerability being exploited in BackupBuddy, a WordPress plugin that has around 140,000 active installations. This vulnerability makes it possible for unauthenticated users to download arbitrary files from the affected site which can include sensitive information. There is minimal sharing about the details of this vulnerability as it is still an active threat. If you are interested in reading more jump over to the Wordfence website. Sarah Gooding over at WPTavern wrote an article that WordPress' Security Team announced it will be dropping support for versions 3.7 through 4.0 on December 1, 2022. Events WordCamp US has started! Michelle Frechette writes about how to make the most of your Wordcamp US experience with fewer participants and dealing with COVID restrictions. Use the official #WCUS hashtag to follow the online WCUS conversation. If you are there, say hi to Raquel Landefeld who is our community lead at the WP Minute. If you are a new camper, go listen to the Matt Report and Gina Marie Innocent to get more ideas on how to make the most of your WordCamp experience. From Our Contributors and Producers Phil Crumm has a thread on Twitter that the WordPress community is uneasy about the growing pace of acquisitions. His hot take may be correct as the news that GridPane has completed a seed round of funding, including a significant strategic investment from Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, WooCommerce, WordPress VIP, and Jetpack. Another acquisition Rocketgenius, the company behind Gravity Forms, has acquired Gravity Flow and Gravity Experts. The acquisition will help the Gravity Forms community by strengthening the portfolio of WordPress product offerings.
News WordPress continues to work on core template changes to refine the creation experience. Many more options will be released with WordPress 6.1 that will continue to improve website building. You can explore the enhancements now in the Gutenberg plugin. Sarah Gooding over at WPTavern wrote an article about how the WP-Optimize plugin was being accused of cheating their page speed performance tool. Before the dust settled, there was a follow up article covering the details about WP-Optimize denying the cheating allegations. If you are interested in the specifics around the performance gathering and analyzing the techniques both articles are worth a read. Sarah Gooding was writing a lot about performance last week. She had another article about how WordPress is placing WebP by default on hold for WordPress 6.1. There were many objections from lead developers and the image upload has been controversial since it was announced. WooCommerce If you are a WooCommerce user, there is a Store Editing Roadmap update for Q3. A lot of work has been going on for the last few months and you can quickly see what is coming Now, Next and Later. Events WordCamp US is right around the corner. Make sure you look for Raquel Landefeld who will be representing the WP Minute and don't forget that you can sign up for the live stream if you are not attending in person. The speaker call for WordCamp Buffalo is open. This WordCamp will be an in-person event and held October 22, 2022. Submissions must be in by September 11th, 2022 for speaker slots. Next up! Michelle Frechette with the Community Minute - “Attending a post-covid WCUS” Richard Tabor teases his upcoming WCUS talk: A New Era of WordPress Themes is Here: Block Themes From Our Contributors and Producers Sam Munoz shares that the WP Engine Builders have become a community that is unique and special. Go check them out on Twitter and become part of the builder team. Tom Mcfarlin has written a post about using the block editor as a developer. It has not been the greatest experience. Most of the frustration comes from standards that are not in place and documentation that is scarce. This often happens with major changes and updates in WordPress. Take a few minutes to read his article. It is organized and steps you through what you will need to develop blocks and it has many great reference links. Can we please stop saying “Gutenberg' now? Fränk Klein's post on the HumanMade website makes a good point of how Gutenberg is confusing. Is it a project? Is it a plugin? Is it an editor? Not for developers? Some kind of historic timeline in the multiverse that is human history? The bottom line is to be specific when r
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 15th August 2022.
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 15th August 2022.
What's it like to enter this WordPress community media space, especially as the editor of a publication with many voices, personalities, and perspectives?My friend and dialogue partner, Nyasha Green, is six months into her role as Editorial Director at MasterWP, so today we're talking about what that's been like for Ny, what she's learned, and how we look at the WordPress media space we both work in.Unsurprisingly we talk about conflict, communication, personality, and the importance of in-person events. That brings up WCUS — a first for both of us — where we'll meet each other and a lot of people we've only known remotely. It also sounds like I might get roped into a karaoke duet. (Not if I can help it!)
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 27th July 2022.
The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 27th July 2022.
This week's WordPress news for the week commencing 25th April 2022.
This week's WordPress news for the week commencing 25th April 2022.
This week's WordPress news for the week commencing Monday 21st March 2022.
This week's WordPress news for the week commencing Monday 21st March 2022.
About RickI lead the developer relations team for strategic accounts at MongoDB. My responsibilities include defining technical standards for the global strategic accounts team and consulting with the largest customers and opportunities for the business. My role spans technology sectors and as part of my engagements I routinely provide guidance on industry best practices, technology transformation, distributed systems implementation, cloud migration, and more. I led the architecture and design effort at Amazon for migrating thousands of relational workloads from RDBMS to NoSQL and built the center of excellence team responsible for defining the best practices and design patterns used today by thousands of Amazon internal service teams and AWS customers. I currently operate as the technical leader for our global strategic account teams to build the market for MongoDB technology by facilitating center of excellence capabilities within our customer organizations through training, evangelism, and direct design consultation activities.30+ years of software and IT expertise.9 patents in Cloud Virtualization, Complex Event Processing, Root Cause Analysis, Microprocessor Architecture, and NoSQL Database technology.Links: MongoDB: https://www.mongodb.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/houlihan_rick TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: The company 0x4447 builds products to increase standardization and security in AWS organizations. They do this with automated pipelines that use well-structured projects to create secure, easy-to-maintain and fail-tolerant solutions, one of which is their VPN product built on top of the popular OpenVPN project which has no license restrictions; you are only limited by the network card in the instance. To learn more visit: snark.cloud/deployandgoCorey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of “Hello, World” demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking, databases, observability, management, and security. And—let me be clear here—it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself, all while gaining the networking, load balancing, and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build. With Always Free, you can do things like run small-scale applications or do proof-of-concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free? This is actually free, no asterisk. Start now. Visit snark.cloud/oci-free that's snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. A year or two before the pandemic hit, I went on a magical journey to a mythical place called Australia. I know, I was shocked as anyone to figure out that this was in fact real. And while I was there, I gave the opening keynote at a conference that was called Latency Conf, which is great because there's a heck of a timezone shift, and I imagine that's what it's talking about.The closing keynote was delivered by someone I hadn't really heard of before, and he started talking about single table design with respect to DynamoDB, which, okay, great; let's see what he's got to say. And the talk started off engaging and entertaining and a high-level overview and then got deeper and deeper and deeper and I felt, “Can I please be excused? My brain is full.” That talk was delivered by Rick Houlihan, who now is the Director of Developer Relations for Strategic Accounts over at MongoDB, and I'm fortunate enough to be able to get him here to more or less break down some of what he was saying back then, catch up with what he's been up to, and more or less suffer my slings and arrows. Rick, thank you for joining me.Rick: Great. Thanks, Corey. I really appreciate—you brought back some memories, you know, trip down memory lane there. And actually, interestingly enough, that was the world's introduction to single table design was that. That was my dry-run rehearsal for re:Invent 2018 is where I delivered that talk, and it has become since the most positive—Corey: This was two weeks before re:Invent, which was just a great thing. I'd been invited to go; why not? I figured I'd see a couple of clients I had out in that direction. And I learned things like Australia is a big place. So, doing a one-week trip, including Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth. Don't do that.Rick: I had no idea that it took so long to fly from one side to the other, right? I mean, that's a long plane [laugh] [crosstalk 00:02:15]—Corey: Oh, yeah. And you were working at AWS at the time—Rick: Absolutely.Corey: —so I can only assume that they basically stuffed you into a dog kennel and threw you underneath the seating area, given their travel policy?Rick: Well, you know, I have the—[clear throat] actually at the time, they just upgraded the policy to allow the intermediate seating, right? So, if you wanted to get the—Corey: Ohhh—Rick: I know—Corey: Big spender. Big spender.Rick: Yes, yes. I can get a little bit extra legroom, so I didn't have my knees shoved into some of these back. But it was good.Corey: So, let's talk about, I guess… we'll call it the elephant in the room. You were at MongoDB, where you were a big proponent of the whole no-SQL side of the world. Then you went to go work at AWS and you carried the good word of DynamoDB far and wide. It made an impression; I built my entire newsletter pipeline production system on top of DynamoDB. It has the same data in three different tables because I'm not good at listening or at computers.But now you're back at Mongo. And it's easy to jump to the conclusion of, “Oh, you're just shilling for whoever it is that happens to sign your paycheck.” And at this point, are you—what's the authenticity story? But I've been paying attention to what you've been saying, and I think that's a bad take because you have been saying the same things all along since before you were on the Dynamo side of it. I do some research for this show, and you've been advocating for outcomes and the right ways to do things. How do you view it?Rick: That's basically the story here, right? I've always been a proponent of NoSQL. You know, what I took—the knowledge—it was interesting, the knowledge I took from MongoDB evolved as I went to AWS and I delivered, you know, thousands of applications and deployed workloads that I'd never even imagined I would have my hands on before I went there. I mean, honestly, what a great place it was to cut your teeth on data modeling at scale, right? I mean, that's the—there is no greater scale.That's when you learn where things break. And honestly, a lot of the lessons I took from MongoDB, well, when I applied them at scale at AWS, they worked with varying levels of success, and we had to evolve those into the sets of design patterns, which I started to propose for DynamoDB customers, which had been highly effective. I still believe in all those patterns. I would never tell somebody that they need to drop everything and run to MongoDB, but, you know, again, all those patterns apply to MongoDB, too, right? A very—a lot—I wouldn't say all of them, but many of them, right?So, I'm a proponent of NoSQL. And I think we talked before the call a little bit about, you know, if I was out there hocking relational technology right now and saying RDBMS is the future, then everybody who criticizes anything I say, I would absolutely have to, you know, say that there's some validity there. But I'm not saying anything different I've ever said. MongoDB announced Serverless, if you remember, in July, and that was a big turning point for me because the API that we offer, the developer experience for MongoDB is unmatched, and this is what I talk to people now. And it's the patterns that I've always proposed, I still model data the same way, I don't do it any different, and I've always said, if you go back to my earlier sessions on NoSQL, it's all the same.It doesn't matter if it's MongoDB, DynamoDB, or any other technology. I've always shown people how to model their data and NoSQL and I don't care what database you're using, I've actually helped MongoDB customers do their job better over the years as well. So.Corey: Oh, yeah. And looking back at some of your early talks as well, you passed my test for, “Is this person a shill?” Because you wound up in those talks, addressing head-on when is a relational model the right thing to do? And then you put the answers up on a slide, and this—and what—it didn't distill down to, “If you're a fool.”Rick: [laugh].Corey: Because there are use cases where if you don't [unintelligible 00:05:48] your access patterns, if you have certain constraints and requirements, then yeah. That you have always been an advocate for doing the right thing for the workload. And in my experience, for my use cases, when I looked at MongoDB previously, it was not a fit for me. It was very much a you run this on an instance basis, you have to handle all this stuff. Like three—you kno, keeping it in triplicate in three different DynamoDB tables, my newsletter production pipeline now, including backups and the rest, of DynamoDB portion has climbed to the princely sum of $1.30 a month, give or take.Rick: A month. Yes, exactly.Corey: So, there's no answer for that there. Now that Mongo Serverless is coming out into the world, oh, okay, this starts to be a lot more compelling. It starts to be a lot more flexible.Rick: I was just going to say, for your use case there, Corey, you're probably looking at the very similar pricing experience now, with MongoDB Serverless. Especially when you look at the pricing model, it's very close to the on-demand table model. It actually has discounted tiering above it, which I haven't really broken it down yet against a provision capacity model, but you know, there's a lot of complexity in DynamoDB pricing. And they're working on this, they'll get better at it as well, but right now you have on-demand, you have provisioned throughput, you have [clear throat] reserved capacity allocations. And, you know, there's a time and place for all of those, but it puts the—again, it's just complexity, right?This is the problem that I've always had with DynamoDB. I just wish that we'd spent more time on improving the developer experience, right, enhancing the API, implementing some of these features that, you know, help. Let's make single table design a first-class citizen of the DynamoDB API. Right now it's a red—it's a—I don't want to say redheaded stepchild, I have two [laugh] I have two redhead children and my wife is redhead, but yeah. [laugh].Corey: [laugh]. That's—it's—Rick: That's the way it's treated, right? It's treated like a stepchild. You know, it's like, come on, we're fully funding the solutions within our own umbrella that are competing with ourselves, and at the same time, we're letting the DynamoDB API languish while our competitors are moving ahead. And eventually, it just becomes, you know, okay, guys, I want to work with the best tooling on the market, and that's really what it came down to. As long as DynamoDB was the king of serverless, yes, absolutely; best tooling on the market.And they still are [clear throat] the leader, right? There's no doubt that DynamoDB is ahead in the serverless landscape, that the MongoDB solution is in its nascency. It's going to be here, it's going to be great, that's part of what I'm here for. And that's again, getting back to why did you make the move, I want to be part of this, right? That's really what it comes down to.Corey: One of the things that I know that was my own bias has always been that if I'm looking at something like—that I'm looking at my customer environments to see what's there, I can see DynamoDB because it has its own line item in the bill. MongoDB is generally either buried in marketplace charges, or it's running on a bunch of EC2 instances, or it just shows up as data transfer. So, it's not as top-of-mind for the way that I view things in… through the lens of you know, billing. So, that does inform my perception, but I also know that when I'm talking to large-scale companies about what they're doing, when they're going all-in on AWS, a large number of them still choose things like Mongo. When I've asked them why that is, sometimes you get the answer of, “Oh, legacy. It's what we built on before.” Cool—Rick: Sure.Corey: —great. Other times, it's a, “We're not planning to leave, but if we ever wanted to go somewhere else, it's nice to not have to reimagine the entire data architecture and change the integration points start to finish because migrations are hard enough without that.” And there is validity to the idea of a strategic exodus being possible, even if it's not something you're actively building for all the time, which I generally advise people not to do.Rick: Yeah. There's a couple things that have occurred over the last, you know, couple of years that have changed the enterprise CIO and CTO's assessment of risk, right? Risk is the number one decision factor in a CTOs portfolio and a CIO's, you know, decision-making process, right? What is the risk? What is the impact of that risk? Do I need to mitigate that risk, or do I accept that risk? Okay?So, right now, what you've seen is with Covid, people have realized that you know, on-prem infrastructure is a risk, right? It used to be an asset; now it's a risk. Those personnel that have to run that on-prem infrastructure, hey, what happens when they're not available? The infrastructure is at risk. Okay.So, offloading that to cloud providers is the natural solution. Great. So, what happens when you offload to a cloud provider and IAD goes down, or you know, us-east-1 goes down—we call it IAD or we used to call it IAD internally at AWS when I was there because, you know, the regions were named by airport codes, but it's us-east-1—how many times has us-east-1 had problems? Do you want to really be the guy that every time us-east-1 goes down, you're in trouble? What happens when people in us-east-1 have trouble? Where do they go?Corey: Down generally speaking.Rick: [crosstalk 00:10:37]—well, if they're well-architected, right, if they're well-architected, what do they do? They go to us-west-2. How much infrastructure is us-west-2 have? So, if everybody in us-east-1 is well-architected, then they all go to us-west-2. What happens in us-west-2? And I guarantee you—and I've been warning about this at AWS for years, there's a cascade failure coming, and it's going to be coming because we're well-architecting everybody to failover from our largest region to our smaller regions.And those smaller regions, they cannot take the load and nobody's doing any of that planning, so, you know, sooner or later, what you're going to see is dominoes fall, okay? [clear throat]. And it's not just going to be us-east-1, it's going to be us-east-1 failed, and the rollover caused a cascade failure in us-west-2, which caused a cascade—Corey: Because everyone's failing over during—Rick: That's right. That's right.Corey: —this event the same way. And also—again, not to dunk on them unnecessarily, but when—Rick: No, I'm not dunking.Corey: —us-east-1 goes, down a lot of the control plane services freeze up—Rick: Oh, of course they do.Corey: —like [unintelligible 00:11:25].Rick: Exactly. Oh, we not single point of failure, right? Uh-huh, exactly. There you go, Route 53, now—and that actually surprised me is DynamoDB instead of Route 53 is your primary database. So, I'm actually must have had some impact on you—Corey: To move one workload off of Dynamo to Route 53 [crosstalk 00:11:39] issue number because I have to practice what I preach.Rick: That's right. Exactly.Corey: It was weird; they the thing slower and little bit less, uh—Rick: [laugh]. I love it when [crosstalk 00:11:45]—yeah, yeah—Corey: —and a little bit [crosstalk 00:11:45] cache-y. But yeah.Rick: —sure. Okay, I can understand that. [laugh].Corey: But it made the architecture diagram a little bit more head-scratching, and really, that's what it's all about. Getting a high score.Rick: Right. So, if you think about your data, right, I mean, would you rather be running on an infrastructure that's tied to a cloud provider that could experience these kinds of regional failures and cascade failures, or would you rather have your data infrastructure go across cloud providers so that when provider has problems, you can just go ahead and switch the light bulb over on the other one and ramp right back up, right? You know? And honestly, you're running active, active configurations and that kind of, [clear throat] you know, deployment, you know, design, and you're never going to go down. You're always going—Corey: The challenge I've had—Rick: —to be the one that stays up.Corey: The theory is sound, but the challenge I've had in production with trying these things is that one, the thing that winds up handling the failover piece is often causes more outage than the underlying stuff itself.Rick: Well, sure. Yeah.Corey: Two, when you're building something to run a workload to run in multiple cloud providers, you're forced to use a lot of—Rick: Lowest common denominator?Corey: Lowest common denominator stuff. Yeah.Rick: Yeah, yeah totally. I hear that all the time.Corey: Unless you're actively running it in both places, it looks like a DR Plan, which doesn't survive the next commit to the codebase. It's the—Rick: I totally buy that. You're talking about the stack, stack duplication, all that kind of—that's an overhead and complexity, I don't worry about at the data layer, right?Corey: Oh, yeah.Rick: The data layer—Corey: If you're talking about—Rick: —[crosstalk 00:12:58]Corey: —[crosstalk 00:12:58] data layer, oh, everything you're saying makes perfect sense.Rick: Makes perfect sense, right? And honestly, you know, let's put it this way: If this is what you want to do—Corey: What do you mean identity management and security handover working differently? Oh, that's a different team's problem. Oh, I miss those days.Rick: Yeah, you know, totally right. It's not ideal. But you know, I mean, honestly, it's not a deal that somebody wants to manage themselves, is moving that data around. The data is the lock-in. The data is the thing that ties you to—Corey: And the cost of moving it around in some cases, too.Rick: That's exactly right. You know, so you know, having infrastructure that spans providers and spans both on-prem and cloud, potentially, you know, that can span multiple on-prem locations, man, I mean, that's just that's power. And MongoDB provides that; I mean, DynamoDB can't. And that's really one of the biggest limitations that it will always have, right? And we talked about, and I still believe in the power of global tables, and multi-region deployments, and everything, it's all real.But these types of scenarios, I think this is the next generation of failure that the cloud providers are not really prepared for, they haven't experienced it, they don't know what it's even going to look like, and I don't think you want to be tied to a single provider when these things start happening, right, if you have a large amount of infrastructure deployed someplace. It just seems like [clear throat] that's a risk that you're running at these days, and you can mitigate that risk somewhat by going with a MongoDB Atlas. I agree, all those other considerations. But you know, I also heard—it's a lot of fun, too, right? There's a lot of fun in that, right?Because if you think about it, I can deploy technologies in ways on any cloud provider, they're going to be cloud provider agnostic, right? I can use, you know, containerized technologies, Kubernetes, I can use—hell, I'm not even afraid to use Lambda functions, and just, you know, put a wrapper around that code and deploy it both as a Lambda or a Cloud Function in GCP. The code's almost the same in many cases, right? What it's doing with the data, you can code this stuff in a way—I used to do it all the time—you abstract the data layer, right? Create a DAL. How about a CAL? A cloud [laugh] cloud access layer, right, you know? [laugh].Corey: I wish, on some level, we could go down some of these paths. And someone asked me once a while back of, “Well, you seem to have a lot of opinions on this. Do you think you could build a better cloud than AWS?” And my answer—Rick: Hell yes.Corey: —look them a bit by surprise of, “Absolutely. Step one, I want similar resources, so give me $20 billion to spend”—Rick: I was going to say, right?Corey: —”then I'm going to hire the smart people.” Not that we're somehow smarter or better or anything else than the people who built AWS originally, but now—Rick: We have all those lessons learned.Corey: —we have fifteen years of experience to fall back on.Rick: Exactly.Corey: “Oh. I wouldn't make that mistake again.”Rick: Exactly. Don't need to worry about that. Yeah exactly.Corey: You can't just turn off a cloud service and relaunch it with a completely different interface and API and the rest.Rick: People who criticize, you know, services like DynamoDB, like—and other AWS services—look, these things are like any kind of retooling of the services, it's like rebuilding the engine on the airplane while it's flying.Corey: Oh, yeah.Rick: And you have to do it with a level of service assurance that—I mean, come on. DynamoDB provides four nines out of the box, right? Five nines if you turn on global tables. And they're doing this at the same time as they have pipeline releases dropping regularly, right? So, you can imagine what kind of, you know, unit testing goes on there, what kind of Canary deployments are happening.It's just, it's an amazing infrastructure that they maintain, incredibly complex, you know? In some ways, these are lessons that we need to learn in MongoDB if we're going to be successful operating a shared backplane serverless, you know, processing fabric. We have to look at what DynamoDB does right. And we need to build our own infrastructure that mirrors those things, right? And in some ways, these things are there, in some ways, they're working on, in some ways, we got a long ways to go.But you know, I mean, it's this is the exciting part of that journey for me. Now, in my case, I focus on strategic accounts, right? Strategic accounts are big, you know, they're the potential to be our whale customers, right? These are probably not customers who would be all that interested in serverless, right? They're customers that would be more interested in provisioned infrastructure because they're the people that I talked to when I was at DynamoDB; I would be talking to customers who are interested in like, reserved capacity allocations, right? If you're talking about—Corey: Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that. You're developer advocacy—which I get—for strategic accounts.Rick: Right.Corey: And I'm trying to wrap my head around—Rick: Why [crosstalk 00:17:19]—Corey: [crosstalk 00:17:19] strategic accounts are the big ones, potential spend lots of stuff. Why do they need special developer advocacy?Rick: [laugh]. Well, yeah, it's funny because, you know, one of the reasons why it started talking to Mark Porter about this, you know, was the fact that, you know, the overlap is really around [clear throat] the engagements that I ran when I was doing the Amazon retail migration, right? When Amazon retail started to move to NoSQL, we deprecated 3000 Oracle server instances, we moved a large percentage of those workloads to NoSQL. The vast majority probably just were lift-and-shift into RDS and whatnot because they were too small, too old, not worth upgrading whatnot, but every single tier, what we call tier-one service, right, every money-making service was redesigned and redeployed on DynamoDB, right? So, we're talking about 25,000 developers that we had to ramp. This is back four years ago; now we have, like, 75,000.But back then we had 25,000 global developers, we had [clear throat] a technology shift, a fundamental paradigm shift between relational modeling and NoSQL modeling, and the whole entire organization needed to get up to speed, right? So, it was about creating a center of excellence, it was about operating as an office of the CTO within the organization to drive this technology into the DNA of our company. And so that exercise was actually incredibly informative, educational, in that process of executing a technology transformation in a major enterprise. And this is something that we want to reproduce. And it's actually what I did for Dynamo as well, really more than anything.Yes, I was on Twitter, I was on Twitch, I did a lot of these things that were kind of developer advocate, you know, activities, but my primary job at AWS was working with large strategic customers, enabling their teams, you know, teaching them how to model their data in NoSQL, and helping them cross the chasm, right, from relational. And that is advocacy, right? The way I do it is I use their workloads. [clear throat]. I use their—the customers, you know, project teams themselves, I break down their models, I break down their access patterns when I leave, essentially—with the whole day of design reviews, we'll walk through 12 or 15 workloads, and when I leave these guys have an idea: How would I do it if I wanted to use NoSQL, right?Give them enough breadcrumbs so that they can actually say, “Okay, if I want to take it to the next step, I can do it without calling up and say, ‘Hey, can we get a professional services team in here?'” right? So, it's kind of developer advocacy and it's kind of not, right? We're kind of recognizing that these are whales, these are customers with internal resources that are so huge, they could suck our Developer's Advocacy Team in and chew it up, right? So, what we're trying to do is form a focus team that can hit hard and move the needle inside the accounts. That's what I'm doing. Essentially, it's the same work I did for [clear throat] AWS for DynamoDB. I'm just doing it for, you know—they traded for a new quarterback. Let's put it that way. [laugh].Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Sysdig. Sysdig is the solution for securing DevOps. They have a blog post that went up recently about how an insecure AWS Lambda function could be used as a pivot point to get access into your environment. They've also gone deep in-depth with a bunch of other approaches to how DevOps and security are inextricably linked. To learn more, visit sysdig.com and tell them I sent you. That's S-Y-S-D-I-G dot com. My thanks to them for their continued support of this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: So, one thing that I find appealing about the approach maps to what I do in the world of cloud economics, where I—like, in my own environment, our AWS bill is creeping up again—we have 14 AWS accounts—and that's a little over $900 a month now. Which, yeah, big money, big money.Rick: [laugh].Corey: In the context of running a company, that no one notices or cares. And our customers spend hundreds of millions a year, pretty commonly. So, I see the stuff in the big accounts and I see the stuff in the tiny account here. Honestly, the more interesting stuff is generally in on the smaller side of the scale, just because you're not going to have a misconfiguration costing a third of your bill when a third of your bill is $80 million a year. So—Rick: That's correct. If you do then that's a real problem, right?Corey: Oh yeah.Rick: [laugh].Corey: It's very much a two opposite ends of a very broad spectrum. And advice for folks in one of those situations is often disastrous to folks on the other side of that.Rick: That's right. That's right. I mean, at some scale, managing granularity hurts you, right? The overhead of trying to keep your costs, you know, it—but at the same time, it's just different, a different measure of cost. There's a different granularity that you're looking at, right? I mean, things below a certain, you know, level stop becoming important when, you know, the budget start to get a certain scale or a certain size, right? Theoretically—Corey: Yeah, for there's certain workloads, things that I care about with my dollar-a-month Dynamo spend, if I were to move that to Mongo Serverless, great, but my considerations are radically different than a company that is spending millions a month on their database structure.Rick: That's right. Really, that's what it comes down to.Corey: Yeah, we don't care about the pennies. We care about is it going to work? How do we back it up? What's the replication factor?Rick: And that—but also, it's more than that. It's, you know, for me, from my perspective, it really comes down to that, you know, companies are spending millions of dollars a year in database services. These are companies that are spending ten times that, five times that, in you know, in developers, you know, expense, right? Building services, maintaining the code that runs—that the services run.You know, the biggest problem I had with MongoDB is the level of code complexity. It's a cut after cut after cut, right? And the way I kind of describe the experience—and other people have described it to me; I didn't come up with this analogy. I had a customer tell me this as they were leaving DynamoDB—“DynamoDB is death by a thousand cuts. You love it, you start using it, you find a little problem, you start fixing it. You start fixing it. You start fixing—you come up with a pattern. Talk to Rick, he'll come up with something. He'll tell you how to do that.” Okay?And you know, how many customers did I would do this with? You know, and it's honestly, they're 15-minute phone calls for me, but every single one of those 15-minute phone calls turns into eight hours of developer time writing the code, debugging it, deploying it over and over again, it's making sure it's going the way it's [crosstalk 00:23:02]—Corey: Have another 15-minute call with Rick, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah.Rick: Another 15—exactly. And it's like okay, that's you know—eventually, they just get tired of it, right? And I actually had a customer that tell me—a big customer—tell me flat out, “Yeah, you proved that the DynamoDB can support our workload and it'll probably do it cheaper, but I don't have a half-a-dozen Ricks on my team, right? I don't have any Ricks on my team. I can't be getting you in here every single time we have to do a complex data model overhaul, right?”And this was—granted, it was one of the more complex implementations that I've ever done. In order to make it work. I had to overload the fricking table with multiple access patterns on the partition key, something I never done in my life. I made it work, but it was just—honestly, that was an exercise to me that taught me something. If I have to do this, it's unnatural, okay?And that's—[laugh] you know what I mean? And honestly, there's API improvements that we could have done to make that less of a problem. It's not like we haven't known since the last, I don't know, I joined the company that a thousand WCUs per storage partition was pretty small. Okay? We've kind of known that for I don't know, since DynamoDB, was invented. As matter of fact is, from what I know, talking to people who were around back then, that was a huge bone of contention back in the day, right? A thousand WCUs, ten gigabytes, there were a lot of the PEs on the team that were going, “No way. No way. That's way too small.” And then there were other people that were like, “Nah, nobody's ever going to need more than that.” And you know, a lot of this was based on the analysis of [crosstalk 00:24:28]—Corey: Oh, nothing ever survives first contact from—Rick: Of course.Corey: —customer, particularly a customer who is not themselves deeply familiar with what's happening under the hood. Like, I had this problem back when I was traveling trainer for Puppet for a while. It was, “Great. Well, Puppet is obviously a piece of crap because everyone I talked to has problems with it.” So, I was one of the early developers behind SaltStack—Rick: Oh nice.Corey: —and, “Ah, this is going to be a thing of beauty and it'll be awesome.” And that lasted until the first time I saw what somebody's done with it in the wild. It was, “Oh, okay, that's an [unintelligible 00:25:00] choice.”Rick: Okay, that's how—“Yeah, I never thought about that,” right? Happy path. We all love the happy path, right? As we're working with technologies, we figure out how we like to use it, we all use it that way. Of course, you can solve any problem you want the way that you'd like to solve it. But as soon as someone else takes that clay, they mold a different statue and you go, “Oh, I didn't realize it could look like that.” Right, exactly.Corey: So, here's one for you that I've been—I still struggle with this from time to time, but why would I, if I'm building something out—well, first off, why on earth would I do that? I have people for that who are good at things—but if I'm building something out and it has a database layer, why would someone choose NoSQL over—Rick: Oh, sure.Corey: —over SQL?Rick: [crosstalk 00:25:38] question.Corey: —and let me be clear here—and I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone who, basically me a few years ago, who has no real understanding of what databases are. So, my mental model of a database is Microsoft Excel, where I can fire up a [unintelligible 00:25:51] table of these things—Rick: Sure. [laugh]. Hey, well then, you know what? Then you should love NoSQL because that's kind of the best analogy of what is NoSQL. It's like a spreadsheet, right? Whereas a relational database is like a bunch of spreadsheets, each with their own types of rows, right? So—[laugh].Corey: Oh, my mind was blown with relational stuff [unintelligible 00:26:07] wait, you could have multiple tables? It's, “What do you think relational meant there, buddy?” My map of NoSQL was always key and value, and that was it. And that's all it can be. And sure, for some things, that's what I use, but not everything.Rick: That's right. So, you know, the bottom line is, when you think about the relational database, it all goes back to, you know, the first paper ever written on the relational model, Edgar Codd—and I can't remember the exact title, but he wrote the distributed model, the data model for distributed systems, something like that. He discussed, you know, the concept of normalization, the power of normalization, why you would want this. And the reason why we wanted this, why he thought this was important, this actually kind of demonstrates how—boy, they used to write killer abstracts to papers, right? It's like the very first sentence, this is why I'm write in this paper. You read the first sentence, you know: “Future users of modern computer systems must have a way to be able to ask questions of the data without knowing how to write code.”I mean, I don't know if those were the words, but that was basically what he said, that was why he invented the normalized data model. Because, you know, with the hierarchical management systems at the time, everyone had to know everything about the data in order to be able to get any answers, right? And he was like, “No, I want to be able to just write a question and have the system answer that.” Now, at the time, a lot of people felt like that's great, and they agreed with his normalized model—it was elegant—but they all believe that the CPU overhead at the time was way too high, right? To generate these views of data on the fly, no freaking way. Storage is expensive. But it ain't that expensive, right?Well, this little thing called Moore's Law, right? Moore's Law balanced his checkbook for, like, 40 years, 50 years, it balanced the relational database checkbook, okay? So, as the CPUs got faster and faster, crunching, the data became less and less of a problem, okay? And so we crunched bigger and bigger data sets, we got very, very happy with this. Up until about 2014.At 2014, a really interesting thing happened. If you look at the top 500, which is the supercomputers, the top 500 supercomputing clusters around the world, and you look at their performance increases year-to-year after 2014, it went off a cliff. No longer beating Moore's Law. Ever since, they've been—and per-core performance, you know, CPU, you know, instructions executed per second, everything. It's just flattening. Those curves are flattening. Moore's Law is broken.Now, you'll get people argue about it, but the reality is, if it wasn't broken, the top 500 would still be cruising away. They're not. Okay? So, what this is telling us is that the relational database is losing its horsepower. Okay?Why is it happening? Because, you know, gate length has an absolute minimum, it's called zero, right? We can't have a logic gate that's the—with negative distance, right? [laugh]. So, you know, these things—but storage, storage, hey, it just keeps on getting cheaper and cheaper, right?We're going the other way with storage, right? It's gigabytes, it's terabytes, it's petabytes, you know, with CPU, we're going smaller and smaller and smaller, and the fab cost is increasing. There's just—it's going to take a next-generation CPU technology to get back on track with Moore's Law.Corey: Well, here's the challenge. Everything you're saying makes perfect sense from where your perspective is. I reiterate, you are working with strategic accounts, which means ‘big.' When I'm building something out in the evenings because I want to see if something is possible, performance considerations and that sort of characteristic does not factor into it. When I'm a very small-scale, I care about cost to some extent—sure, whatever—but the far more expensive aspect of it, in the ways that matter have been what is the expensive—what—the big expensive piece is—Rick: We've talked about it.Corey: —engineering time—Rick: That's what we just talked about, right?Corey: —where it's, “What I'm I familiar with?”Rick: As a developer, right, why would I use MongoDB over DynamoDB? Because the developer experience [crosstalk 00:29:33]—Corey: Exactly. Sure, down the road there are performance characteristics and yeah, at the time I have this super-large, scaled-out, complex workload, yeah, but most workloads will not get to that.Rick: Will not ever get there. Ever get there. [crosstalk 00:29:45]—Corey: Yeah, so optimizing for [crosstalk 00:29:45], how's it going to work when I'm Facebook-scale? It's—Rick: So, first of—no, exactly, Facebook scale is irrelevant here. What I'm talking about is actually a cost ratchet that's going to lever on midsize workloads soon, right? Within the next four to five years, you're going to see mid-level workloads start to suffer from significant performance cost deficiencies compared to NoSQL workloads running on the same. Now you—hell, you see it right now, but you don't really experience it, like you said, until you get to scale, right? But in midsize workloads, [clear throat] that's going to start showing up, right? This cost overhead cannot go away.Now, the other thing here that you got to understand is, just because it's new technology doesn't make it harder to use. Just because you don't know how to use something, right, doesn't mean that it's more difficult. And NoSQL databases are not more difficult than the relational database. I can express every single relationship in a NoSQL database that I express in a relational database. If you think about the modern OLTP applications, we've done the analysis, ad nauseum: 70% of access patterns are for a single object, a single row of data from a single table; another 20% are for a row of datas—a range of rows from a single table. Okay, that leaves only 10% of your access patterns involve any kind of complex table traversal or entity traversals. Okay?And most of those are simple one-to-many hierarchies. So, let's put those into perspective here: 99% of the access patterns in an OLTP application can be modeled without denormalization in a single table. Because single table doesn't require—just because I put all the objects in one place doesn't mean that it's denormalized. Denormalized requires strong redundancies in the stored set. Duplication of data. Okay?Edgar Codd himself said that the normalized data model does not depend on storage, that they are irrelevant. I could put all the objects in the same document. As long as there's no duplication of data, there's no denormalization. I know, I can see your head going, “Wow,” but it's true, right? Because as long as I can clearly express the relationships of the data without strong redundancies, it is a normalized data model.That's what most people don't understand. NoSQL does not require denormalization. That's a decision you make, and it usually happens when you have many-to-many relationships; then we need to start duplicating the data.Corey: In many cases, at least my own experience—because again, I am bad at computers—I find that the data model is not something that is sat out—that you sit down and consciously plan very often. It's rather something—Rick: Oh yeah.Corey: —happens to you instead. I mean—Rick: That's right. [laugh].Corey: —realistically, like, using DynamoDB for this is aspirational. I just checked, and if I look at—so I started this newsletter back in March of 2017. I spun up this DynamoDB table that backs it, and I know it's the one that's in production because it has the word ‘test' in its name, because of course it does. And I'm looking into it, and it has 8700 items in it now and it's 3.7 megabytes. It's—Rick: Sure, oh boy. Nothing, right?Corey: —not for nothing, this could have been just as easily and probably less complex for my level of understanding at the time, a CSV file that I—Rick: Right. Exactly, right.Corey: —grabbed from a Lambda out of S3, do the thing to it, and then put it back.Rick: [unintelligible 00:32:45]. Right.Corey: And then from a performance and perspective side on my side, it would make no discernible difference.Rick: That's right because you're not making high-velocity requests against the small object. It's just a single request every now and then. S3 performance would probably—you might even be less. It might even cost you less to use S3.Corey: Right. And 30 to 100 of the latest ones are the only things that are ever looked at in any given week, the rest of it is mostly deadstock that could be transitioned out elsewhere.Rick: Exactly.Corey: But again, like, now that they have their lower cost infrequent access storage, then great. It's not item level; it's table levels, so what's the point? I can knock that $1.30 a month down to, what, $1.10?Rick: Oh well, yeah, no, I mean, again, Corey for those small workloads, you know what? It's like, go with what you know. But the reality is, look, as a developer, we should always want to know more, and we should always want to know new things, and we should always be aware of where the industry is headed. And honestly, I've heard through—I'm an old, old school, relational guy, okay, I cut my teeth on—oh, God, I don't even know what version of MS SQL Server it was, but when I was, you know, interviewing at MongoDB. I was talking to Dan Pasette, about the old Enterprise Manager, where we did the schema designer and all this, and we were reminiscing about, you know, back in the day, right?Yeah, you know, reality of things are is that if you don't get tuned into the new tooling, then you're going to get left behind sooner or later. And I know a lot of people who that has happened to over the years. There's a reason why I'm 56 years old and still relevant in tech, okay? [laugh].Corey: Mainframes, right? I kid.Rick: Yes, mainframes.Corey: I kid. You're not that much older than I am, let's be clear here.Rick: You know what? I worked on them, okay? And some of my peers, they never stopped, right? They just kind of stayed there.Corey: I'm still waiting for AWS/400. We don't see them yet, but hope springs eternal.Rick: I love it. I love that. But no, one of the things that you just said that I think it hit me really, it's like the data model isn't something you think about. The data model is something that just happens, right? And you know what, that is a problem because this is exactly what developers today think. They think know the relational database, but they don't.You talk to any DBA out there who's coming in after the fact and cleaned up all the crappy SQL that people like me wrote, okay? I mean, honestly, I wrote some stuff in the day that I thought, “This is perfect. There's no way that could be anything better than this,” right? Nice derived table joins insi—and you know what? Then here comes the DBA when the server is running at 90% CPU and 100% percent memory utilization and page swapping like crazy, and you're saying we got to start sharding the dataset.And you know, my director of engineering at the time said, “No, no, no. What we need is somebody to come in and clean up our SQL.” I said, “What do you mean? I wrote that SQL.” He's like, “Like I said, we need someone to come and clean up our SQL.”I said, “Okay, fine.” We brought the guy in. 1500 bucks an hour, we paid this guy, I was like, “There's no way that this guy is going to be worth that.” A day and a half later, our servers are running at 50% CPU and 20% memory utilization. And we're thinking about, you know, canceling orders for additional hardware. And this was back in the day before cloud.So, you know, developers think they know what they're doing. [clear throat]. They don't know what they're doing when it comes to the database. And don't think just because it's a relational database and they can hack it easier that it's better, right? Yeah, it's, there's no substitute for knowing what you're doing; that's what it comes down to.So, you know, if you're going to use a relational database, then learn it. And honestly, it's a hell of a lot more complicated to learn a relational database and do it well than it is to learn how to model your data in NoSQL. So, if you sit two developers down, and you say, “You learn NoSQL, you learn relational,” two months later, this guy is still going to be studying. This guy's going to be writing code for seven weeks. Okay? [laugh]. So, you know, that's what it comes down to. You want to go fast, use NoSQL and you won't have any problems.Corey: I think that's a good place to leave it. If people want to learn more about how you view these things, where's the best place to find you?Rick: You know, always hit me up on Twitter, right? I mean, @houlihan_rick, that's my—underbar rick, that's my Twitter handle. And you know, I apologize to folks who have hit me up on Twitter and gotten no response. My Twitter as you probably have as well, my message request box is about 3000 deep.So, you know, every now and then I'll start going in there and I'll dig through, and I'll reply to somebody who actually hit me up three months ago if I get that far down the queue. It is a Last In, First Out, right? I try to keep things as current as possible. [laugh].Corey: [crosstalk 00:36:51]. My DMs are a trash fire. Apologies as well. And we will, of course, put links to it in the [show notes 00:36:55].Rick: Absolutely.Corey: Thank you so much for your time. I really do appreciate it. It's always an education talking to you about this stuff.Rick: I really appreciate being on the show. Thanks a lot. Look forward to seeing where things go.Corey: Likewise.Rick: All right.Corey: Rick Houlihan Director of Developer Relations, Strategic Accounts at MongoDB. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an upset comment talking about how we didn't go into the proper and purest expression of NoSQL non-relational data, DNS TXT records.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.
Coach Heather Stone Leads with Empower Coach Stone is entering her 16th season as Head Coach of the Western Connecticut State University Softball program. Heather has led the WCUS program to 5 NCAA appearances, a 2007 ECAC New England Championship during her tenure at her alma mater. Additionally, Coach Stone is a member of the WCSU Athletics Hall of Fame (2001 inductee). "Leadership is about accountability first. The hardest thing is learning how to be a good teammate, especially when you're sitting on the bench for the first time. You're part of something bigger than yourself and, if you want to be part of it, you have to realize that." 00:32: Episode Introduction and Roll Call - I've had the pleasure of leading leadership training and team building programs with the WCSU Softball Program in 2020 and 2021 and quickly developed a great appreciation for Coach Heather Stone and her ability to lead, inspire, and empower her athletes. 09:42: Leadership in Action - We learn about Coach Stone as a leader through our discussions on: The current state of the WCSU Softball Program Establishing team culture and expectations The strengths of the 2022 WCSU Softball Program and potential roadblocks they may face during the upcoming season Coach Stone's development as a leader throughout her 20 year coaching career The importance of accountability and confronting the "fear of failure" in leadership 33:35: The Leadership Journey - We learn about Coach Stone's playing career, early coaching career, her time in the US Military, and how she leverages her personal experiences in her leadership. 53:49: Finish the Drill - Our conversation closes with Heather sharing (1) her favorite team and athlete, (2) her dream dinner guests, (3) the best leadership advice she's ever received, (4) her current inspiration, and (5) words of motivation for coaches and athletes! Learn more about Coach Stone and the WCSU Softball Program: Visit the WCSU Softball Website Follow WCSU Softball on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram Musical Credit to Matt Jaskot Find out more at https://lead-with-empower-podcast.pinecast.co
This episode is sponsored by Ninja Forms About Cate DeRosia: Cate is a serial volunteer who has helped organize everything from her local meetup to WCUS 2021. Currently, she’s helping with marketing and communications for Big Orange Heart and WordFest Live and is leading the expansion of HeroPress and is the cohost of the Hallway […]
This week's WordPress news for the week commencing 16th August 2021
The first time I met Andrea was at WCUS 2016 to talk about making the Rochester meetup "official." I mentioned doing a WordCamp "someday." She said, "why not this year?" And the rest is history. So happy to have her as a colleague and friend.
In this episode of Post Status Draft, David Bisset talks with Angela Jin. Angela joined Automattic in 2018 and is one of the community organizers for the WordPress open source project. She has been helping organize, start conversations, and setting policies for WordCamps over the last few years.David recorded this interview around the time that WordCamp US 2020 would have normally taken place in St. Louis, Missouri. WordCamp US organizers decided to cancel the event months before it would have taken place due to COVID-19. There were questions about what led to that decision. Why didn't it become a virtual conference, like WordCamp Europe? What are organizers planning for future WordCamp US events and WordPress education in general?David sat down with Angela to get a better understanding of the WordPress community and its needs during a pivotal time of change. Join us as we discuss what the future holds for the conferences, meetups, and other social gatherings we've enjoyed in the past.LinksAngela Jin (Twitter)WordCamp US 2020 Official Cancellation NoticeLearn WordPressSponsor: PagelyPagely offers best-in-class managed WordPress hosting, powered by Amazon's Cloud, the Internet’s most reliable infrastructure. Pagely helps big brands scale WordPress.Thank you to Pagely for being a Post Status partner!
The first time I met Topher DeRosia was watching his talk at WCUS 2016. I was in awe of the ability of WordPress to connect so many people worldwide, and Topher's ability to use WordPress to tell their stories. HeroPress has helped inform how WPCoffeeTalk works. It's my pleasure to tell Topher's story here!
Find us: Head to our community page to register & join the MindfulCommerce community as an expert, brand or merchantInstagram: @mindfulcommerceFacebook @MindfulCommerceContact Us - info@mindfulcommerce.ioWhere to find MoreTrees:MoreTrees - WebsiteMoreTrees - TwitterMoreTrees - InstagramMoreTrees - FacebookLinks Mentioned in Episode:ShopifyWooCommerceExpandlyZapierIFTTT (If This Then That)Wilkinson SwordMy Green ChristmasZoomShownotes:Krissie Leyland 0:00 Hello, and welcome to the mindful commerce podcast, a place where we talk to ecommerce brands, service providers and developers who care about protecting our planet. I'm KrissieRich Bunker 0:11& I'm Rich, and we're your hosts. This podcast is an extension of the MindfulCommerce community.Krissie Leyland 0:18The MindfulCommerce community is a safe place for ecommerce brands and experts to connect, collaborate and explore opportunities to work together to unleash the power of ecommerce as a force for good.Rich Bunker 0:30You can join by going to mindfulcommerce.io and clicking on 'Community'. See you there!Krissie Leyland 0:36Today, we're talking to Niki and Alan from MoreTrees. You probably know that carbon dioxide is one of the biggest drivers of climate change and we know we should be playing our part in reducing and negating carbon emissions. So MoreTrees are a tree planting app. MoreTrees not only helps offsets your emissions, but it comes with tons of other benefits too. Every tree planted helps the planet & it reduces extreme poverty and combat deforestation. We're going to be talking about what inspired Niki and Alan to start MoreTrees, how that makes it super easy to offset your carbon for e commerce businesses of all sizes, but also we want to know exactly how offsetting with MoreTrees can help with those four benefits I just mentioned. So, hello to both! How are you?Niki Tibble 1:33We're good, thank you. How are you?Alan Wilson 1:35Great, thank you.Krissie Leyland 1:38Could you start by introducing yourselves and tell us a little bit more about MoreTrees?Niki Tibble 1:44Yep, definitely! I'll let Alan go first.Alan Wilson 1:57Okay, so background-wise, I'm a "techie"... so about boatloads of software and startups for years. My last startup was called Expandly, and that's an ecommerce platform used by "one man bands" up to global companies like Wilkinson Sword. So it's a multi channel ecommerce system and so that's where my background is: building tech for ecommerce and other industries.Niki Tibble 2:30Yes, and I am Niki. My background is copywriting. I have a copywriting business, writing for all sorts of different sectors. I think the most obscure thing I've written about was calculating your construction overheads. But predominantly, I work with ecommerce platforms, tech, and sellers with their content. So that's my background and I've worked with Alan, on previous projects before. Alan came up with the initial idea.Alan Wilson 3:03So originally, I went to a meeting and they were planting trees for every person that attended the meeting. So I thought "That's just a great idea! There's actually companies that plant trees and it's good for the environment." For a meeting, just think of the people that come there for traffic and stuff... I thought actually, that could be a good thing in the future! So then, I told Niki, "I'll get this fantastic idea and get this button in every meeting room around the world. People just come in, press a button, then it all connects to my API, they plant a tree, and it's all gonna be great! And then Nikki said that it's a crap idea.Niki Tibble 3:47I did, I'm not going to lie. I thought all I could envision was this big red X Factor style button, where people are just hitting it in meeting rooms... horror stories of disgruntled employees, hitting it 1000s of times. Which you know, would be fantastic for the planet but then these businesses are planting millions of trees unknowingly. But I really, really liked Alan's thinking behind it and I knew as a business owner that I wanted to do more to help the planet. You see things on Netflix, you read the papers, you see in the news all about climate change and you want to do more. But actually knowing what to do, having the time to do it, understanding the different parts was just difficult for a business owner. You know Krissie, it's a hot topic in ecommerce–people are talking about what you can do all the time, but actually, the options aren't always that obvious. So we definitely felt that there was a gap in the market for a tech lead solution to just make it easy for businesses to plant trees and to do something positive for the planet without it costing a lot of money & without it taking up time. But also to open it up so that ecommerce in particular, involve the customer so that when you plant a tree for them, they're actually being told about that tree. Then they get an email telling them about it so that there's no concern that someone saying they're doing something they're not actually doing.Krissie Leyland 5:18Yeah, that's really nice. Something you said there made me think... There are lots of different offsetting apps out there now. So when you first had your initial idea was that not the case?Alan Wilson 5:35I think that some apps out there offset but I think overall–there's some neat apps as well, there's some really neat carbon calculation apps–but I think it's still a very early fragmented marketplace that is very confusing for a lot of companies and organizations. Wales, within the very small industry as at the moment, is starting to see more of them emerging. I think it's actually quite a very, very early marketplace currently.Niki Tibble 6:07The amount of people we speak to say,"Oh I didn't realize something like that existed." So I mean, there are fantastic apps and ways to do it out there but a lot of people don't actually realize that they are out there, which is a problem.Krissie Leyland 6:21I agree. Maybe it's because we're involved in it, and so it can pop up. But the thing that I noticed about MoreTrees was like, you work with different projects. So it's obvious where your money is going, if you offset with more trees. But do you want to talk a bit more about the projects that you work with?Niki Tibble 6:47To us, it was important that we work with the right tree planting partners. So unfortunately, it's not me and Alan putting on our wellies and grabbing our spades and going and digging in the garden... our garden's not that big. It was important to us that the people that we were partnering with would be the people that our customers would want to partner with. It also meant that, planting trees and offsetting carbonare the primary focu. But actually, there's a lot more that these projects can do to extend the benefits so we make sure that anyone that we're working with on the projects are actually planting trees that are going to be making a difference. They're helping with reforestation, or they're providing agroforestry trees to provide food and sources of income, but also that they're benefiting the local communities. A lot of our projects are in impoverished areas where actually the trees are providing an income, they're teaching these people a skill that they can use, and they're protecting the local area. For example, some of the projects they've got problems with flooding, they're planting the right trees to deal with that. Areas that have suffered deforestation need reforestation to give wildlife places to come back to. So for us, it was a lot more about just picking projects that weren't "just trees": It was actually making a wider impact. It's trees and more.Krissie Leyland 8:17Nice. Perfect. It's really interesting to think that planting a tree can help combat poverty. How exactly does it? What are the links? Someone clicks on "offset with more trees" and then what happens?Niki Tibble 8:40Yes. You click & you buy your trees. Then at the end of each month, we we pull them all together, and we tell our different partners and projects how many trees. When you go into the platform, it defaults to the most needed tree and the most needed project, but you can also pick a specific project and tree type. So at the end of the month, we collect those together & instruct our tree planting partners. They work with local villagers, educate them and provide them with the tools, the equipment & the knowledge to plant these trees. They also fund forest guards to actually protect the areas and they're there for a while so it's not just a quick plant and run. They're helping them grow these forests and and they don't leave them until they're in the position to want to be able to carry that on themselves. You read the stories & get the feedback from the fields and it makes you feel lucky inside knowing that you're doing so much with just a seed, effectively. Krissie Leyland 9:43I love that. It's so nice.Rich Bunker 9:45It's so much more than planting trees than you can imagine, to be honest which is great... lovely projects at work. What stands out is your favorite project.Alan Wilson 9:57I like Madagascar because of the film... Nikki, you have a favorite, don't you? I think I actually like them all. There is Madagascar and stuff but the ones that do more than the poverty alleviation as well as environment, really strike a chord with me as much. You can buy offsets and as you'll know, those just prevent people from cutting down trees and stuff. They're just not as good as planting a tree and given the income to the farmers as well.Krissie Leyland 10:42So something that just has more meaning behind it than just planting a tree.Alan Wilson 10:47More meaning and also as I say, the offsets that you can juust pay someone not to cut down a tree can be a verified project... it's great that the trees not being cut down, but it's actually developing more the whole concept. The ethos is getting the more trees out there and actually creating more of these great carbon capture species out there.Rich Bunker 11:13Yeah, there's funds out there that support people not knocking down trees and educate them of why it's a good idea not just to cut trees down, as you see fit, willy nilly, yeah. Alan Wilson 11:28Yes, it's great. Exactly but also, I do believe more in getting more trees planted. But anything that helps us is the way forward.Rich Bunker 11:38Amazing. So how does it work? What's the app? How does does the money get sent to the project and what's the tech involved in in the background? Alan Wilson 11:51We've built a platform. So it's not like a sort of front end website or a Shopify store, it's a whole entire platform. We've got a whole process: when we add projects, we add them in our back end, system adds it to the platform and then as a user, you come onto the platform. You can either just quite quickly plant a tree within minutes. If you haven't got any credits in your account, you can pay straight away for that tree–that's one pound a tree–or you can preload credits. You can preload, say 100, and then you can plan them all automatically as well. You can either plan for yourself or other people. If you buy a plan for your customers, you can see right away the plan. You put the name, email, and quantity and then that emails will send the user the certificate. So you can either do that, just manually typing them or you can upload them via CSV or via the API, which we have.Krissie Leyland 12:52So for MindfulCommerce–obviously, we already use MoreTrees, but I'm doing it manually at the moment–eventually, we're going to connect it with our payment system.Rich Bunker 13:10Yeah, the automation takes the decision out of it. It's done.Krissie Leyland 13:14No manual work. So easy.Niki Tibble 13:19There's no reason to not plant trees, because it's just done for you. So why wouldn't you do it?Alan Wilson 13:28We used to have an API and we have some larger companies already using the API and doing it that way. So that takes a bit of development. We're also developing an app for the app store's at the moment. So we have multiple of them in the pipeline, which won't be that long. We also use a great tool called Zapier and Zapier is fantastic. It's an easy integration tool that connects straight to Shopify, eBay and Zoom as well. So basically you can connect your Shopify store and connect your MoreTree account in minutes. You could prefund your MoreTrees account and then for every order plant a tree or you can see for every order over 50 pounds plant a tree. The scope of it is huge so literally, for every street payment, make a "plant a tree for every invoice" and it just goes on. We have customers who are setting themselves up in minutes. It's incredible. Currently, I get an email every time someone plants. So I wake up in the morning and see all these people planting through the night. They haven't actually planted obviously, it's just the automation of their systems where the process are coming through. So we just got it made quite easy and that Zapier is really, really useful.Krissie Leyland 14:51Definitely. I love Zapier.Alan Wilson 14:55Nikki, you have one don't you? We have them for people doing mortgage companies and stuff. Do you have a good example of that?Niki Tibble 15:04Yeah, we've got this great company and they've just love it. I messaged them the other day and just said, "Oh, how are you getting on? How are you finding it?" And he was like, "We absolutely love it! We've drawn a massive tree in our office (I presume it's on a whiteboard wall) and every time we plant a tree, we go up and write it on it. It's like attending this massive competition in the office. We love it, we just can visually see all these trees. Everyone's running up and writing that they've planted another one." I think it's fantastic.Krissie Leyland 15:40What was that? It's if somebody signs up to a mortgage deal, then?Alan Wilson 15:45That's what they do. So automatically in their system, someone signs up for a mortgage deal and it automatically plant them a tree. Then the customer gets the emails with the certificate that the tree has been planted as well. It sounds like from what Nikki says, that their senior sales team also flags it on a whiteboard as well.Krissie Leyland 16:09I think they can just look at it every day and be like, "look what we've done!" I love it because–obviously me and Niki work together in other means–I received an invoice from Niki and was like "Ooh! I feel good about paying this invoice and planting!"Niki Tibble 16:27Every time anyone pays an invoice there, I plant my little tree. It's just little things and it's so much fun because everyone's thinking of different ways that they can plant trees. It's almost become a bit of a competition where people are like "what innovative way can I think that someone planted trees?" Pop quiz winners the other week, for example. There will be different things people come up with, it's like, wow.Alan Wilson 16:49I planted 11 trees when Scotland beat England that weekend.Niki Tibble 16:52Alan set a Zapier to plant a tree every time it rains, didn't you? And I said, I said good that you're not still in Scotland.Krissie Leyland 17:09So what are some of the kind of businesses that you've worked with so far?Niki Tibble 17:18With our backgrounds, we have built the platform with ecommerce in mind. So we have lots of online sellers who are either selling by their Shopify, WooCommerce, or any other platform. We've got a lot the typical businesses that we expected when we first set up MoreTrees. I might speak for myself Alan, but I've been amazed at the variety of people that are using it. We've got window cleaners, personal trainers. accounts and what else?Alan Wilson 17:52Clothing brands. Ecommerce brands in sustainable clothing. There seems to be so much of them coming up, which is great.Niki Tibble 18:01Yeah. People building the fancy garden shed. All sorts. It's just been amazing that so many different people want to get involved for so many different reasons.Krissie Leyland 18:13Fancy garden sheds? (laughter)Rich Bunker 18:23What will it become when people go back to working in offices? Hmm...Alan Wilson 18:32I think one of my first case study business was a company called My Green Christmas. They do Christmas cards and stuff. We didn't know them at all and it was really good. All of a sudden, they were integrated and then we saw these trees going out for every order over 30 pounds. So they effectively help drive their sales so that people pay not that much, but they're really good company and good people. So that was a really good daily sort of case study.Krissie Leyland 19:09Yeah. And a big boost I guess during Christmas.Alan Wilson 19:13Exactly. They're a young team as well, and they've done fantastically well.Krissie Leyland 19:19And I bet Niki, that you're writing case studies.Niki Tibble 19:22Yes, which is nice because there's so much to talk about. People want to get involved. You know, people really love using it, and they want to talk about it. They want to share that they're doing it, which is lovely. And then you really do see this viral effect, where you know, we've had a customer who's come to us saying, "Oh, one of your existing customers planted my friend a tree, and they told me about it when we went for coffee, and now I'm planting a tree." So there's an really nice knock-on effect and also then businesses and ecommerce sellers have this amazing platform to encourage their audience to live a more sustainable life. I was speaking to someone on Friday, and their setup setup was a bit a bit complicated. The people they were sending the tree confirmation email to wasn't actually the personnel planting the tree for. So we were batting things backwards or forwards about how they could do it. I said to them all, "Possibly, we could see if we could set it up so that when you planted a tree for someone, they didn't get the email from us saying that they planted the tree." And this person said, "No. I want to tell my customers and show them how easy it is to plant a tree. I want to send them your way, because I want them to find their own trees." I think it's so great that we've got so many brands that actually want to plant trees themselves and they actually want to encourage other people to get on board and do it as well, so that we can all make a bigger impact. Yeah, that's been really nice as well.Krissie Leyland 20:58A network of tree planters. A community.Alan Wilson 21:04I think it's a network of good people as well. That's been the best part about MoreTrees. We meet so many good, good people, instead of a lot of the harsh realities of what's going on in the world. It's a lot of good people.Krissie Leyland 21:19Yeah, it must be really refreshing. We find that, don't we?Rich Bunker 21:24A lot of really positive people recently.Krissie Leyland 21:28Positive and inspiring, just like you two.Niki Tibble 21:33That's the great thing about MindfulCommerce: you have a community of people who are doing something pretty much off their own back, because you know, at the end of the day, currently people don't have to do anything. But there's always people that want to do something for the better good.Rich Bunker 21:50I guess there's a social shift for people as well. David Attenborough has been a champion of bringing that to people, especially in the UK's forefront, and wider globally. So hopefully, that is a social shiftand a movement that will stay. People will look after their environment a bit more.Krissie Leyland 22:15What a legend. Quick, get him on the podcast.Niki Tibble 22:21During a Zoom quiz yesterday, I found out that he's the reason that tennis balls are bright yellow? Something about making them visible on TV. It was either true or false: David Attenborough is the reason those tennis balls are bright, luminous orange or yellow. He is just wonderful in all different ways.Krissie Leyland 22:50Every time I see a tennis ball...Rich Bunker 22:55Touching on the integrations, you mentioned Zoom, Shopify, WooCommerce... What are the other integrations you've got and is there anything coming up in the pipeline?Alan Wilson 23:07The Zoom one. I mean, that's that's a really neat one where people say "for every person who joins the zoom–every attendee for the meeting–will automatically plant a tree." We're finding that more and more popular.Niki Tibble 23:19That's the original idea, Alan, your original meeting idea... (laughter)Alan Wilson 23:22Exactly. Just virtually, it saves me from having to visit every office in the UK. So I realized my mistake, now Niki. But yeah, this week we've got a new subscription and "auto top up" will be liv. By the end of the month, we will have WooCommerce up live. Shopify and other carts that we're working on will very quickly follow after but, we're going to launch on one foss, which is WooCommerce. Then we have If This Then That (IFTTT) which is another sort of Zapier type API platform, which is great, which we're working on. I mean, ultimately, being a techie, I love that part of it: just making it easy. I love integration and all the amazing ideas you can do with it. So eventually, "every Uber ride, plant a tree", and "everything you spend on your card, plant a tree", etc. They're coming very soon.Rich Bunker 23:23Integrating some of the challenging bank tasks. "Deal with your savings, you can plant a tree". There you go.Alan Wilson 24:40We need to give you a commission now, for that idea.Rich Bunker 24:44It's helping more people.Alan Wilson 24:46Exactly, no, it's a good idea.Rich Bunker 24:52Is it just you Alan, tapping on your keyboard, coding away or have you got a teamAlan Wilson 24:59My last app, I built the whole platform initially, and then had raised a couple of million pounds, built a big team and done it that way. So this time, I built an MVP myself to learn how it works–so all the lessons from last time–but then I've got a development team that I use, and I've known for 10 years. I basically paid them to build it. I just architected, designed and worked out how it would work. They've been fantastic. They do the development, Nikki tests it, and then makes it live.Rich Bunker 25:40The collective mind is always more efficient.Alan Wilson 25:43I mean, the development-wise, it's hard to build a business and develop. That's what I learned from the past. You spend so much time. There's so many talented developers out there. If you can just harness them the right way, then it gets easier. I think what you mentioned about a lot of products out there, competitors are just front end shops and stuff and some of them are even just Shopify stores. So, what we actually have is a platform that is scalable, and can plant hundreds of 1000s of trees a second. Not right now, but we've got the technology there to scale it so that it can plant massive amounts of trees and grow in scale... to large enterprise customers.Krissie Leyland 26:33I had one question for Niki, actually. It is probably going back a little bit about the project: Are you looking for more local projects? At the moment I see Madagascar, and other areas, but as we're in the UK... I just wondered.Niki Tibble 26:54Yeah, so that's a high, high high on my to do list. We are actively looking for a UK project. The biggest challenge for us is getting that at a price point that people will want to pay for. Currently on MoreTrees, you can plant trees for a pound but obviously, in the UK cost of labor and things like that, it just costs more. So we're just trying to find a project where we can get that price to where, though it will be more than planting a tree in Madagascar, it's still a price that's reasonable and that businesses will actually say "Actually, I'm willing to pay that bit extra to have a UK project" rather than being the difference between 1 pound and 20 pounds. Most people just can't afford to make that that purchase for their customers. So if anyone listening knows of any UK projects that could be a good fit, then please do let us know. Hopefully we could help.Alan Wilson 27:52We're very close with a couple.Niki Tibble 27:55Yeah, they should be shortly announced, but we're always welcome to more. Alan Wilson 27:58That will be up to the customer, then. It'll be up to the individual or business that's using MoreTrees. If you want 20 trees planted, but they're not in the UK, that's fine.... Or if you want one in the UK, and it's a 20 pounds We're trying to get it a lot cheaper than that as wel but it's an understandable labor cost in the UK. So the idea is to give everyone the choice and transparency of what you want to do.Rich Bunker 28:24I suppose, yeah. I mean, the idea is to plant more trees and that could be more that you support the project by your donation rather than planting a tree. But it's nice to get that "Oh yeah, I've planted a tree today by buying some item" or "I just want to plant a tree today and given some money to find the tree."Alan Wilson 28:44Exactly, I think there is a large scope for different people out there as individuals, small businesses or enterprise businesses. That's what we will provide: the choice of what you want to do, and here are the options for you.Niki Tibble 29:00A lot of people have different motivations. So I 've spoken to people who like the fact that it's good for the planet and is offsetting carbon, but actually, they said that they're much more motivated by the poverty alleviation or the wildlife side and things like that. So yeah, it's having a range of projects that suit different people's motivators.Rich Bunker 29:28You just mentioned carbon there, and that's something I wanted to ask: Is it obvious how much carbon planting a tree somewhere is offsetting, for like a business if their goal is carbon offsetting? Can they use your platform to basically offset carbon as well as do good planting trees?Alan Wilson 29:49We've got some verified carbon credits coming. The tree planting is expensive. Currently it is voluntary, so you can still pass your ISO and everything using MoreTrees. If you're a large company and using it for your scrn... again, it's still voluntary but there's a carbon tax coming out in future as well, so that that could affect that. So we do offer additional carbon credits and in different variety. It's the Woodland Carbon code ones in the UK, so you can buy WCUs, but they start at like 12 pound a credit. So the way we estimate the carbon is by what the partners said they estimate: 300 grams per tree over the life cycle of it. The difference with that: UK WCU has to be verified over the years. Ultimately again, you're paying for scientists. That difference between one pound and 12 pound for a scientist to validate and ensure it has already happened in the past. If you buy it in the UK, and then you have to wait for the five years or so that it is completely validated that the carbon has been sequestered. As opposed to say, planting 12 trees. It is an estimate based on the planting partners. Do they have audited and validation for it but it's not the same as the WCU one.Krissie Leyland 31:33I'm just thinking: if I'm an ecommerce business, and I know that my carbon footprint is 'x, y, z'. And then I've started to offset trees with more trees. Is there a way of kind of seeing you know how far you've got to be carbon neutral? or carbon positive?Alan Wilson 31:58We have a small calculator. There's obviously some great tools out there and some great tools developing. I'm developing one myself as well. Again, it's that scenario of you've bought a product, and you maybe have brought in Turkey, then you've imported it from Turkey. But also even if you manufacture in Turkey, you've then got the person who's created the cotton... where did that cotton come from and who's the liability of the ownership of that carbon that was used to deliver the cotton there? So I think it's a very early industry as well. Currently, there really isn't a good full carbon calculator tool that is easy to use, and really does understand it because it goes to the massive level.Krissie Leyland 32:56What it could do is just estimate what your carbon footprint is and just maybe offset more than you think you need to. Then hopefully, you're at a higher level.Niki Tibble 33:11On the platform, when you sign up, there's a dashboard that tells you all your stats. It tells you your estimate of how many trees you planted or gifted and it gives you an estimate of what that is in carbon, according to what our projects have been audited at.Krissie Leyland 33:30So based on that, then, what are some milestones that you've reached that you're really proud of?Niki Tibble 33:39As you know, when you start a business and you're like, "Oh, god, no one's gonna use it1" then you get your first customer that you don't know... So that was a big milestone, when it wasn't my mom planting a tree. I mean, it happened really quickly. I think it was the next day, wasn't it Alan.Alan Wilson 33:58Yeah. I mean, we kept saying, "how long is it gonna be before someone tells someone to tell someone who wants a tree?" Yeah, Nikki's mum's our first customer. So Nikki's mum, when she she planted the first one: it was five o'clock in the 14th of October... then we did a soft, soft launch, wasn't it Niki? Niki's mum posted on Facebook and then 24 and a half hours later, the first person who had no connection with us started planting trees, which is great. So a lot quicker than we thought.Niki Tibble 34:37Yeah, that was a nice milestone. And I think the first person that automated a tree without any input from us–we didn't talk them through the setting up, they just went they did it–that was, for me, that was a big milestone to think we've actually created this system where you can just plant trees automatically. And it works and people are doing it without us having to build the tech for them.Alan Wilson 35:01That you didn't have to deal with tech? (laughter)Niki Tibble 35:10Yeah it was because I didn't have to do any of the tech. That was the actual milestone for me. (laughter)Krissie Leyland 35:10Do you get notified when someone does that on their phone?Niki Tibble 35:17Yes, we have it popping out whenever trees are planted. And it's getting to the stage where it's like, "I can't cope."Krissie Leyland 35:26Really? That's amazing. I'd be like up first.Rich Bunker 35:38Yeah, amazing.Krissie Leyland 35:44People–what, sorry, were you going to say something?Alan Wilson 35:47No, no, no. Just other milestones. I mean, we've planted tons of thousands of thousands of trees. It's just really been, I think, overall it's just a milestone in terms of doing that business that is good. My previous business is great business and ecommerce, but it's about growth, customers and making customers good. But this is just about everything. I think its customers, partners, end customers, our customers... Just everything has just been so great. I think so. I think pushing towards environment has been good, it's just been brilliant.Niki Tibble 36:23And it must be like what you two feel with MindfulCommerce, where you've taken something where you're making an actual impact, you know, genuine difference. As opposed to, before obviously copywriting I love and I can bring joy to people at work... but to actually make a positive impact on the planet is just heartwarming.Alan Wilson 36:45Actually... just as we've talked, someone just planted 100 trees.Niki Tibble 36:48Woo!Krissie Leyland 36:48Yay!Rich Bunker 36:49Well done on that!Alan Wilson 36:55We do have a bad news story... On our early days with some test customers. So my Auntie Barbara...Niki Tibble 37:03Oh, yeah...Alan Wilson 37:04...we asked some people to test that out and then my auntie dedicatedly bought five trees, and then she gives a four star review.Krissie Leyland 37:21but Five stars!Niki Tibble 37:23She says she doesn't get five stars.Alan Wilson 37:26Yes, I replied. So I thought she must have done a mistake. "What are you doing? Why'd you give us four stars?" She was like "I never give a five star son"Rich Bunker 37:37She's clearly one of those poeple that's a bit like myself, "there's always room for improvement!"Alan Wilson 37:43She's only gonna get a four star Christmas present this year. (laughter) Everyone else's gave us five stars.... But yeah.Krissie Leyland 38:03I think we've asked quite a lot. Anything else that you'd like to cover?Niki Tibble 38:10No, I don't think so. Alan?Alan Wilson 38:12No, no.Krissie Leyland 38:13Where can people find you if they have any questions about planting trees with MoreTrees?Niki Tibble 38:18So our website is moretrees.eco and there's loads of tons of information on there. And we're always hanging around in live chat, as well.Krissie Leyland 38:29Do you have an email? And are you on social media?Niki Tibble 38:33Yeah, so the email is team@moretrees.eco and all our social media handles are moretreeshq.Krissie Leyland 38:41Perfect. Thank you! There's a question there about how can people get started but I think we've kind of covered that to be honest.Alan Wilson 38:54 It's just easy. I mean, that's the beauty of it. You can if you want the pre top up credits, you can. You can automate if you just want to buy it there straight, and then it is really, really quick. And Niki has done some nice little User Guide videos and stuff.Niki Tibble 39:08Yeah, what we haven't covered is that the process, the sign up is free. Then you can plant trees for yourself. You can either plant the most needy tree and most needy project or you can select the specific tree and project type. Then if you're planting for your customers, you can either do it manually, which is just typing in their name and email address by a spreadsheet. So just Bulk Upload, which is the same details (name and email address) or you can use Alan's wonderful API's and Zapier integrations to do it all automatically. It really is that simple. In fact, we actually have to add in a step to make it harder to plant trees because people were saying, "well, I wasn't ready to plant trees. I didn't know I was going to plant a tree!". Because when you do it for someone else, they get a customized message, which you can tailor in the email settings. People were like "I didn't realize. It was too easy. I hadn't set up my message and I wasn't ready." We had to add another little step saying, "Are you sure?" because people found it too easy. You have to make it harder to plant trees...Krissie Leyland 40:20But it's good because it made me personalize the email and I thought, "Oh yeah, this is better." (laughter) Thank you very much. This has been great.Niki Tibble 40:29No, thank you.Alan Wilson 40:29Thank you, appreciate it.Niki Tibble 40:32I mean, I think MindfulCommerce is such a brilliant idea and a great community.Krissie Leyland 40:37Thank you! We could we could maybe do an event or something together soon.Rich Bunker 40:44We hope you enjoyed the episode today. If you did, you're probably like being in our community. There's a whole host of exciting things going on.Krissie Leyland 40:51So don't forget to join by going to mindfulcommerce.io. Click on 'Community' and register from there.Rich Bunker 40:57If you liked this episode, please share, leave a review and remember to subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In our third and final speaker track, we're looking at development! We'll hear from Akshat Choudhary, Leo Losoviz, and David Baumwald about smart updates, using GraphQL, and working on a major Core release! Enjoy! Thanks to Nexcess and GoDaddy Pro for Sponsoring this series! Talk Topics Updating WordPress The Hard Way Akshat Choudhary BlogVault MalCare Akshat on Twitter Publishing REST endpoints using GraphQL queries in WordPress by Leo Losoviz Patricipating In A Major Core Release by David Baumwald
In our third and final speaker track, we’re looking at development! We’ll hear from Akshat Choudhary, Leo Losoviz, and David Baumwald about smart updates, using GraphQL, and working on a major Core release! Enjoy! (more…) Source
After taking a break last week to talk to Hugh Lashbrooke, we're back with the Business Track. Chris Ford, Laura Byrne-Cristiano, and and Patrick Rauland will all be giving you great advice for working with clients, workflows, and money management. Thanks to Nexcess and GoDaddy Pro for Sponsoring this series! Talk Topics: Building a Design Process During a Pandemic by Chris Ford Reaktiv Studios Chris on Twitter Teaching Your Clients Gutenberg: Think Like a Content Creator by Laura Byrne-Cristiano Bet Hannon Business Websites Laura Byrne-Cristiano | Twitter Financial Self Defense - or - How to Prepare Your Business for any Disaster by Patrick Rauland Patrick Rauland | Twitter
After taking a break last week to talk to Hugh Lashbrooke, we’re back with the Business Track. Chris Ford, Laura Byrne-Cristiano, and and Patrick Rauland will all be giving you great advice for working with clients, workflows, and money management. (more…) Source
A long standing tradition of WordCamp US is to have multiple tracks to cater to different folks in the community and the first few episodes of this series will be no different! This week, it’s the User track. (more…)
A long standing tradition of WordCamp US is to have multiple tracks to cater to different folks in the community and the first few episodes of this series will be no different! This week, it’s the User track. (more…) Source
Our Threat Intelligence team disclosed numerous vulnerabilities this week, including a critical vulnerability in the Divi and Extra themes as well as the Divi Builder plugin. In total, this vulnerability affected over 700,000 sites. A vulnerability found in The Official Facebook Chat Plugin created a vector for social engineering attacks as it allowed an attacker to pose as a site owner via chat. Object injection vulnerabilities discovered in the Newsletter plugin affected over 300,000 sites. We also look at the charges brought against 3 people in connection with the recent Twitter hack. The WordCamp US organizing team made the difficult decision to cancel WCUS this year amid online event fatigue.
Die Sommerpause ist rum und nun geht es wieder im Zwei-Wochen-Takt weiter. Es gibt einiges zu berichten aus der letzten Zeit. Heute haben wir dann wieder Verstärkung von Udo Meisen, unserem Haus und Hof Rechtsexperten. Er wird uns ein wenig zu den Auswirkungen des Privacy Shield Urtleils erzählen. Außerdem sind heute wieder Robert Windisch und Sven Wagener wieder mit dabei.
We’ve all heard, “free as in beer,” but what does it even mean? You know you have a valuable solution, product, or service, but how should it be priced? What is your product business model? Is it all free, freemium, or premium only? Do you finance with the equity in your home, an SBA loan, or exposure?Business models are Jason Coleman‘s favorite topic. We are lucky enough to be joined by him for 45 minutes on this episode. Remember, the last 15 are the Tool or Tip of the Week.Don’t miss this episode if you want to continue the conversation on what really funds open source. (Hint: it’s not open source fairies.) There were so many quotables, you just have to watch!WPwatercooler SponsorsServerPressThank you for being a preroll sponsor, ServerPress! ServerPress is the maker of DesktopServer, WPSiteSync, and so much more! https://www.serverpress.com. (It works with WooCommerce now!)Beaver BuilderThe best drag and drop page builder. $99 for unlimited sites. Try today. Used by Over 1M Sites. Professional Designs. 100% Responsive Templates. Theme Compatible. Highly Customizable. Content Page Templates. Live, Front End Editing. Web Developer Friendly. https://www.beaverbuilder.comKinstaIf you are tired of unreliable or slow hosting check out Kinsta.com, who takes managed WordPress hosting to the next level. Powered by Google Cloud, all their plans include PHP 7.3, SSH access for developers, one-click staging area, 20 global data centers, free SSL, free CDN and 24×7 expert support who will also migrate your site free of charge. https://demo.kinsta.comJason Coleman – Entrepreneur, Husband, AuthorJason and Kim Coleman were high school sweethearts and formed their businesses together. Currently, Jason is the CEO of Stranger Studios and Paid Memberships Pro. He’s also a published author. They both have college degrees and knew that business building was their path. You can read Jason’s blog here.(Side note: Jessalyn interviewed Kim Coleman at WCUS in 2017.)Jason Coleman worked in the 2.0 app area and built quite a bit of proprietary software. Soon after he found WordPress. He had an eCommerce plugin that he didn’t license under GPL and saw that as a missed opportunity. Around 2011, 2012 Jason niched in the membership website market. Because the work was repeatable, he started charging more.“Don’t combat the big guys in the space they’re winning.” Jason ColemanSo many of us in WordPress are accidental freelancers or hobbyists or employees. Jason’s passion is not only to help his local community, but to help WordPress developers set themselves up for success at Day 1. Be on the lookout for his presentation at WordCamp Orlando in 2019 on WordPress.tv. (His slides and spreadsheet resources are here.)What are the WordPress Product Business Models?It feels like there are many business models. But with WordPress products you have three: premium, freemium, and free. You can also have a free product and charge only for support. That’s the way PMP went for quite a while. But it’s important to set goals. Make sure your goals are achievable and realistic.Premium-only plugins don’t have the competitive advantage of being listed in the WordPress Plugin Directory. This was the opening in the market that Jason Coleman saw as a huge opportunity. There were many premium plugins for membership, but none in the free/freemium space.Currently, PMP has a freemium model. Check it out in the directory; don’t forget to check out their add-ons, too.Supporting Open Source with Agency WorkMuch like the story of LifterLMS, PMP was subsidized and supported by agency work. You have to plan in order for your WordPress product to become self-sustaining. That plan must include profit. Make projections with a percentage and stick to it. He believes 30% profit is reasonable.Freelancers have an advantage. When doing client work, WordPress developers are used to building something and standing by it. Not many people stand by something they have built. It’s the pride in craftsmanship that is an advantage.“A lot of freelancers move into products because they have the skill to [support something they built].” Jason ColemanHow Long Before PMP Was Profitable?Like most businesses, Paid Memberships Pro was self-sufficient and in the black by year three (2015). They reached a point where their forecasts (huge fans of spreadsheets) required they dive in to PMP 100%. To do this they paused their agency work for three months.When Should You Raise Your Prices?Using your goals, decide when it makes sense. This is one of the reasons why Jason Coleman loves spreadsheets so much. You can tweak prices to see when you meet revenue and growth goals. Don’t worry about the people who will be upset. They will always be upset.“There will be backlash no matter what you charge.” Jason ColemanInstead of focusing on current customers in your projections, focus on the future customer. Mature businesses worry about churn, where most startups need to focus on future customers. Don’t forget about your current customers. Be sure to grandfather in their pricing. Loyalty, after all, is very important.Tool or Tip of the WeekThis Tool or Tip of the week is brought to you by Fat Dog Creatives. If you’re a service-based business serious about growth, Rhonda Negard is your rebranding and web design thinker, a strategic design specialist. Check out her website at FatDogCreatives.comJason Coleman recommends the distributor plugin by 10up. This allows you to syndicate content to one central site. This is good for people who publish all over the place.Jason Tucker recommends the Peak-a-View app. This tool allows you to safely hand your phone to a kid or client and allow them to only view one album. There was a big write up on it at 9to5mac.com.Bridget recommends Sarah Beth Yoga on YouTube. It’s organized by focus (bedtime yoga, morning yoga), type, and by minutes (10 minute, 15 minute, etc.). Bridget is finally doing 20 minute yoga. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Time starts now! Frank Hill met Steve McQueen in 1963 as a youth attending Boys Republic in Chino, California. Over the next 17 years, Frank developed a close relationship with McQueen, spending a significant amount of time with the Hollywood icon. During our 60-minute conversation, Frank shares many never-before-heard stories about "The King of Cool," including tales of speeding cars (and bikes), fist fights, and run-ins with police. Help me grow Speeding Bullitt by sharing the podcast on social media, and leaving a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts.
Inspired by a Q&A question posed to Matt Mullenweg at WCUS, this week Jack and I discuss GPL clubs: what they are, why people use them, and why they are bad. This episode is sponsored by Intagrate, the Instagram WordPress plugin which automatically creates posts from your Instagram images and videos on your WordPress site. …
Life Updates Kyle: I'm going to Ireland. Adam: I'm going to Ireland too! ?!? Back from WCUS 2019 WordPress News Post Status is releasing a resource for everyone who wants to find work in this industry Open.film — The documentary Changes Mendel Kurland is joining Liquid Web Adam Pickering sold Astoundify and has joined Gravity…
This WordCamp, I heard some pretty tough feedback from other attendees, especially from veteran campers that have been attending WordCamps for years. In particular, I heard that the venue was too spread out because it was so big, the speaking rooms and events felt “disconnected” from each other because you had to travel far to […]
Mark and Kathy connect in person on Halloween in St. Louis to talk about what's happening at WordCamp US. We review what's new at WCUS, some of the more interesting sessions, and all of the fun activities Wordfence is bringing to North America's largest WordCamp. Kathy and Mark also tear down the 4th wall to talk to award-winning Director Sean Korbitz, the creative force behind OPEN | The Community Code, the movie about the WordPress community that premieres Saturday, November 2.
Updates Kyle: Raking leaves! Adam: Long/fast week. The Monster Squad + documentary: Wolfman's Got Nards News: Our WCUS coffee gathering. RSVP: getoptions.com/coffee Changes: Mark Davies is new CFO of Automattic Wearing/Drinking/Reading? Adam: WCUS 2017 / Coffee / W magazine. Kyle: WCUS 2018 t-shirt / WCA2 2017 hoodie / orange juice / Traction Question 1: With holidays…
Angela Jin is a powerhouse when it comes to building community, organization, and passion for people. She's a lead organizer for WCUS 2019, and as an organizer, I got to work with her. Doing a WPCT episode with her let me get to know her even better. I'm pleased to be able to introduce her here!
Life Updates: Kyle: Life good. Adam: Gotcha! surprised Kyle at WC Jackson. News: Come to our WCUS get-together for coffee. Shoutout to the Women in WP podcast. Changes: Sal Ferrarello joins WebDev Studios Tessa Kriesel – leaves CircleCI, joins Tugboat & launches Devocate Wearing/Drinking/Reading? Adam: WC Miami / Coffee / Ask by Ryan Levesque Kyle:…
For transcript, links, show notes, video and more visit: https://pagely.com/podcast/episodes/ep-3-tessa-kriesel/ Tessa Kriesel is the Community Manager for CircleCI and founder of Outspoken Women and Coders of TMRW. She wears many hats but the consistent theme of her work is empowering under-represented minorities to learn to code and transition into rewarding & high-paying careers. In this interview Tessa shares her public speaking experience, how she copes with impostor syndrome, a beautiful "where are they now" story of a former student now gainfully employed as a React Developer, her experience chairing the speaking selection committee for WCUS, the criteria they used to balance diversity with content and more. Enjoy!
Síguenos en: ¡Buenos días! Un lunes más estamos aquí hablando de desarrollo y WordPress y hoy concretamente sobre JavaScript. ¿Qué tal la semana? Semana esther: Otra semana más muy tranquila, adelantando temas para clientes y contenidos para poder desconectar un poco en agosto y buscando un "poltergeist" en el dashboard de un cliente. Contenido esther: un nuevo módulo en la Zona DPW sobre crear informes para clientes automáticamente a partir de hoja de cálculo. Semana Nahuai: Terminando con el proyecto chulo de las últimas semanas y encantado con la respuesta a la encuesta a suscriptores de Código Génesis (en la que utilizó el addon de «Survey» de Gravity Forms). También participó en su primera reunión con los Genesis shapers, en la que se habló entre otras cosas de la posibilidad de crear un Starter Theme para Genesis. Contenido Nahuai: Mostrar el menú principal de forma condicional en Genesis. Tema de la semana: porqué y cómo aprender Javascript Hoy, coincidiendo con que la semana pasada se organizó la JavaScript for WordPress Conference por Zac Gordon, y la que supuestamente íbamos a comentar, hablamos sobre Javascript y su importancia en nuestro trabajo como desarrolladores. Javascript ha sido durante mucho tiempo un lenguaje algo menospreciado y relegado a crear efectos, animaciones y en general "cosas chulas" en el front-end, junto con la librería jQuery que le dio aún más potencia y facilidad de uso. Es tremendamente práctico para crear efectos y jugar con CSS en cabeceras, menús y animaciones, así como para validar datos, o cualquier verificación en el propio navegador antes de enviarlos al servidor, pero lo cierto es que tiene un potencial enorme más allá de las típicas librerías que solemos utilizar. Desde que en la WCUS del 7 de diciembre del 2015 Matt lanzará su mítica frase de "Learn JavaScript, Deeply" y su relación con el editor de bloques parece que este lenguaje ha renacido y con fuerza. Frameworks como React, Vue o Angular se han vuelto casi imprescindibles para los desarrolladores más fuertes en front-end y un reto para los que no lo necesitamos en nuestro día a día, pero si queremos dedicarle algo de tiempo para aprender. Nuestro objetivo es dedicarle por fin algo más que buenas intenciones a esos cursos comprados, y mejorar nuestros conocimientos, abriendo nuevas opciones de desarrollo. Si vosotros también estáis en ello, os recomendamos seguir al mencionado Zac Gordon y a Miguel Ángel Durán. Novedades Estamos empezando a plantear un Evento Genesis Framework a finales de año en Barcelona. En breve crearemos un formulario para que podáis darnos vuestra información sobre si os interesaría acudir y en ese caso formatos, fechas y contenido que os gustaría. Se están abriendo convocatorias para las WordCamps que vienen después de verano: Pontevedra, Valencia, Sevilla, Granada... ¡Animaros! El tip de la semana Pues no teníamos ninguno preparado, pero aprovechamos el problema que tuvimos con una etiqueta dentro de una capa con display:flex para que tengáis en cuenta que ese tipo de disposición afecta a cualquier etiqueta que viene después, incluido una negrita. Menciones Muchas gracias a Jordi, Julio, Jesús, Nuria y Luis Dardon por sus comentarios en la web, a Simeon en Twitter y a Vidania por su mención en la esperada vuelta del newsletter de Aprende Gutenberg Volvemos la próxima semana con mucho más ¡Feliz Semana!
Life Updates Kyle: Had a scary dream. Moving forward with WCA2 and WC Jackson. Accepting Speaker apps for WCA2. Adam: Back from WC PHX. Loads of new work coming in. Good, bad? Busy. Managing client expectation. Selling stuff. Chair. Desk. etc. WordPress News. WordPress 5.1 released. Wearing/Drinking/Reading? Adam: Woo Ninja shirt, WC Chicago Hoodie, WCUS…
On this, the final episode of season 1, Micah takes on Nashville, TN to document his first WordCamp, WCUS 2018. Join him as he gets up close and personal with the passionate community behind WordPress (including a special conversation with, none other than, the co-founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg) in order to understand “Why WordPress?”EPISODE TRANSCRIPTThis season was brought to you by WPMU DEV!Build faster, better, and more secure WordPress sites. Optimize WordPress performance and make on-going site maintenance simple with WPMU DEV.Use this link to try our hosting and the rest of WPMU DEV's products FREE for 30-days.Featured Interviews:Miriam Schwab, founder of StratticBirgit Olzem, freelancer and WordPress coachMorten Rand Hendriksen, Senior Staff Instructor at LinkedIn Learning Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and founder of Automattic See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Ecommerce platform provider BigCommerce recently released an ecommerce plugin for WordPress with a really unique approach. The plugin leverages the BigCommerce platform to offload many of the workloads required for ecommerce sites in order to let WordPress focus on delivering great content with awesome performance.This was big news in the WordPress community and was even featured during the State of the Word talk at WCUS. For this episode of PressThis, we've invited Topher DeRosia of BigCommerce to share how their solution works and how they think about the opportunity of offloaded ecommerce to help WordPress ecommerce sites.We're super excited for the chance to chat about this exciting development in the world of WordPress ecommerce. If you're looking for new ways to use WordPress to generate revenue from direct sales or on how you can help customers of your freelancer or agency business win with WordPress and ecommerce, listen to this episode of PressThis now!
Ecommerce platform provider BigCommerce recently released an ecommerce plugin for WordPress with a really unique approach. The plugin leverages the BigCommerce platform to offload many of the workloads required for ecommerce sites in order to let WordPress focus on delivering great content with awesome performance.This was big news in the WordPress community and was even featured during the State of the Word talk at WCUS. For this episode of PressThis, we've invited Topher DeRosia of BigCommerce to share how their solution works and how they think about the opportunity of offloaded ecommerce to help WordPress ecommerce sites.We're super excited for the chance to chat about this exciting development in the world of WordPress ecommerce. If you're looking for new ways to use WordPress to generate revenue from direct sales or on how you can help customers of your freelancer or agency business win with WordPress and ecommerce, listen to this episode of PressThis now!
In this episode of PressThis we do a recap of all the things you missed at WordCamp US in December 2018 in Nashville. Get the latest on the State of the Word, happenings from around the show, and the best content at WCUS. Scratch your FOMO itch, and get relive WCUS on this episode of PressThis.
In this episode of PressThis we do a recap of all the things you missed at WordCamp US in December 2018 in Nashville. Get the latest on the State of the Word, happenings from around the show, and the best content at WCUS. Scratch your FOMO itch, and get relive WCUS on this episode of PressThis.
Join us around the virtual WPwatercooler on an upcoming episode!https://www.wpwatercooler.com/eventsThis episode brought to you by ServerPress makers of DesktopServer and WPSiteSync.https://www.serverpress.com/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Brian Krogsgard. In this episode, I am joined by Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic. Just after releasing WordPress 5.0, and on the heels of WordCamp US, Matt and I review the event, the release, and discuss how he thinks things went, what could have gone better, and what he sees ahead. We also dig into WooCommerce, various plans around core development processes, Automattic, and more. I hope you enjoy. Full transcript is coming soon. Episode Links Matt's blog Automattic WordCamp US State of the Word Post Status's coverage of WCUS 5 Stages of Grief Sponsor: iThemes iThemes makes great WordPress plugins, themes and training to help take the guesswork out of building, maintaining and securing WordPress websites. I talk to iThemes CEO Cory Miller during the break to hear about what they are working on, and excited about for the coming year. Thanks to iThemes for being a Post Status partner.
Life Updates Kyle: Had a nice time at the annual Sandhills Development team retreat. Adam: Working. Kid to turn 18 this month! Crazy! Oh.. and got 2 really nice testimonials! One for the dev work my agency did the other for the podcast! WordPress News Someone from this podcast speaking at WCUS!! (It's not…
Everyone knows DesktopServer. But it wasn't magic. In this episode, Jason and Bridget are joined by Marc Benzakein. He'll talk about how DesktopServer went from a development project to a common and popular workflow solution. Join in the live chat to ask questions.Interested in getting your product or service in front of our viewers and listeners? Check out how to sponsor an episode of one of our shows.Bridget Willard – https://www.linkedin.com/in/bridgetwillard/Jason Tucker – https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasontucker/Marc Benzakein https://serverpress.com@marcbenzak | @serverpress Gregg Franklin – handles 90% of the customer service because he’s so good with peopleDavid JeschStephen Carnam Branding is something you have to do for yourself personally as well as the company you are with – Marc has been told he’s the face of ServerPress because he’s gone to so many WordCamps, but he also has his own “brand” You want to know who these people are, you want to know that they’re people of integrity and you want to know what their mission is Marc has known Gregg since 1989 – they both worked in the video department at Circuit City! Gregg always made sure to be very knowledgeable about the products and he was very good with the customers, but he was also very competitive! If an agency’s specialty is WordPress, it makes sense to go to WordCamps – the first year Marc was involved with ServerPress, he did 26 WordCamps (2014), basically one every other weekend! Kept up a similar pace the next few years. Marc went to WordCamp San Diego before he even became involved with ServerPress and that’s when he first fell in love with the WordPress community. Phoenix was the first WordCamp that he spoke at. Other than Southern California, ServerPress’ footprint was very small at that time. When he went to speak at Phoenix, he gave a talk/workshop that was 2 hours. There were about 100 people in the room and it went without a hitch! Marc had planned for almost every contingency, but nothing happened. Phoenix was bigger than WordCamp Miami at the time so he knew he had to be on his game! They were a bootstrap company with not a lot of capital. How do they get their name out there? Branding is more important than “marketing” at that level. “You get to control your marketing, but people control your brand. They get to decide what they think of you whether you like it or not.” What did they want people to think about ServerPress:We’re at every single WordCampWe’re an established company in the community They decided to provide lanyards with their name and logo on it and the WordCamp’s logo on the other side – but after about a year were asked to stop doing that – he knew when they did it the first time, they might eventually be told to stop! (reminiscent of what happened with Pantheon branding the hotel elevators at WCUS 2016) Andrea Middleton (from the WordPress Community team) called him (and was SO nice), and politely encouraged them to stop, which they agreed. Jason: you should provide power strips in the rooms with your logo on them! People would LOVE you!Marc: better idea – take your sponsor table and just fill it with power strips. People would hang out there all day long! Bridget: almost all businesses in the WordPress spectrum are self-made, small businesses. But they are the ones that are sponsoring the local community, the meetups – they are making an investment in the people which keeps them in the WordPress ecosystem. This is why one of Bridget & Jason’s main goals with this show is to give people actionable ideas to improve their marketing and learn how to reach their audience better The question you have to ask yourself is: What is our return on investment? It’s not a concrete, easy number when you are involved in WordCamps. Money/profit is the scorecard that most people look to. But for small businesses in the WordPress ecosystem, the people, the loyalty and community that you gain are the ROI. They will sell your product without you asking them to do it – you are providing something that is so valuable to them that they have to preach it from the mountaintops – you are giving them so much more value than they expected. Marc started programming on a mainframe computer at the age of 10, – he’s smart but he feels lucky that he gets to work with 2 of the smartest people he knows representing a great product! 2017 was a tough year for DesktopServer – Apple had more security updates than ever, Microsoft had more security updates than ever and they had to react to all of it. Also, PHP7 came and they had to react to that as well. It was a perfect storm – a year of being reactive rather than proactive. It was because of their branding and the loyalty that they built up among their customers, that people were willing to give them grace and work with them during that time. What can we do to make our customers feel like they are getting the value for what they are spending? They appreciate that they have such a loyal following and fanbase. Bridget: you can either make your influencers or find your influencers and ServerPress “made” their influencers. Marc has never had a partnership like this one. They have a deep respect for each other. It might be fate … it just worked out! There needs to be some overlap between the roles, but not so much that everyone is stepping on each other’s toes. Marc handles operations, business development, billing, marketing, etc. Gregg handles customer service and people. Dave/Steve speak their own language and understand each other. They make sure not to step on each other’s toes. They all have their jobs pretty well defined and nobody wants to take over anyone else’s! It’s all a matter of having a healthy amount of respect for each other and boundaries. Within the company, Marc has the nickname of “The Mayor”. There have been times that they’ve all talked about the direction that the company should go and it often came down, in the end, to “What does Marc think?”, but everything at ServerPress is really a consensus. Everyone has a say. They have disagreements, but they end up with a better end-product as a result. They don’t let their egos get in the way of building a better product and building a better company. What you see is what you get with them. They are exactly who you see on a weekend at a WordCamp and during the week at ServerPress. People don’t care how big a company is, they want to have some sort of personal connection to the company. This is why they go to so many WordCamps – they want to have that same connection to their customers. If I treat people with respect and honesty, I can be the same person inside my company and outside, personally.Tip of the WeekMarcNew plugin for ServerPress that automatically backs up your databaseGoogle Photos – https://photos.google.com/ BridgetRevive Old Posts plugin – bring up older content from your blogs and recycle it – great for sharing evergreen posts, lots of custom settings Jasonhttps://agenda.com/ – Note-taking app that ties into your calendar – you can write notes about specific events that you are attending. Supports markdown.https://developer.apple.com/design/awards/https://overcast.fm/+K8lgFR3dk Rene Ritchie and Serenity Caldwell speak with the creators of Agenda — a WWDC 2018 Apple Design Award winning note taking app for Mac. They discuss Agenda as well as this year’s major announcements from a developer and end user perspective. —Show notes contributed by:Cheryl LaPrade – @yaycherylSherie LaPrade – @heysherieThe post WPblab EP103 – Bootstrap to Commonplace: Talking Branding & Grass Roots w/ Marc Benzakein appeared first on WPwatercooler. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
WordPress is a diverse and inclusive community. So why do we have specialty Meetups? Do we need one? In this episode, Jason Tucker and Bridget Willard invite the founder of Women Who WP, Jen Miller to talk about this important subject.Jen Miller – the WPblab unofficial show producer! Started a specialty group called WomenWhoWP – geared toward women, but open to everyone! The setup is a little different than a traditional meetup because “woman dialogue differently”. Yvonne originally coined that phrase. They wanted to be able to share and grow and dialogue together regularly! Why do you need a woman’s meetup? Men don’t see how much they dominate the conversation (and how much more they are represented in tech – Bridget was one of only a few woman at a recent Developer meetup). The way women relate at meetups is far different than the way men do. Men also ask questions differently – women tend to include more social details and stories, and men tend to get straight to the point. Friendship is when you say “oh my gosh – me too!” Women feel comfortable sharing when they feel others understand them or can relate. As their group has grown, more of those women have started attending the regular WP meetup as well! Bridget has a mug on the show that happened because of WomenWhoWP – it came from a friend at WordCamp Mumbai – Meher is doing a WWWP group in Mumbai. WWWP is now worldwide – women are excited about it! They saw in their own meetup, they & other women in the group didn’t get to spend much time talking together, so they decided they needed to set aside time to really relate with each other. WWWP meetings happen over food at restaurants. They have discussions over dinner so by the time the presentation happens, everyone feels like they’ve bonded and created friendships. How you are physically in a room and your body language matters – it makes a huge difference in how people relate to you. https://www.boldgrid.com/boldlife-episode-6-bridget-willard/#more-14611 They have made it a really big deal to encourage each other not to describe themselves as “just” anything… (just a blogger, just a designer, just a writer, etc…) They work hard to validate each other. Wherever you are in your journey – it matters! What you are doing matters. Ages at their local WomenWhoWP meetup range in ages from 22 – 70! You can’t have mentorship if you only hang around the people who are your age. They’ve even had visiting 12-yr-olds! It’s amazing what every individual who comes contributes to the group! They all have something unique to add. The group spends time each month also sharing the new things that each of them learned. Amy Hall in the chat: “It’s the acceptance that makes it awesome” – it’s so true – that’s what make the WordPress community special. Women at the WWWP meetups get to really know when another – they know you when you walk in the room and they care if/when you show up. There was one time where Bridget wasn’t going to attend one month (she was late, having a bad day, etc.) but then she went anyway and when she walked in everyone was excited to see her and made a big deal out of welcoming her into the group. They treated her like family and made her feel wanted/needed and made her day. They have a general, business, design, developer and WWWP meetup in their area – all specialty meetups that all cater to certain people. As a community grows, and if it’s big enough and invested enough, it’s a great way to help grow and expand specific skill sets. Make sure to get your meetup connected to the WordPress meetup Chapter Program so that people will be able to find it more easily. Zeek Interactive sponsors the Women Who WP meetups by providing the location. At WCUS, they have a special LGBTQ afterparty – sometimes it’s just great to connect with your tribe – the people you identify with. The original meetup started by Zeek spawned a whole bunch of spin off meetups that followed a similar format. It’s important to have a format and a plan – when Jason visits other meetups, sometimes they can feel a little aimless. It’s such a big difference to attend one where there is a schedule and format. That’s what makes the meetups at Zeek Interactive and WWWP meetups so great! As Jason’s meetup grows, he’s noticing there is a growing divide between those who are on a developer level and those who are just beginning and figuring their way around. It’s around this time in any meetup where it’s a good time to ask yourself – is it time to start a specialty meetup? They encourage every Women Who WP chapter to have 3 organizers. That way if someone needs a month off, they are able to take the time without worrying about the group. That way they are able to keep continuity in the group and keep things flowing. It helps to have a team and share the responsibilities (and the spotlight!) It helps balance the load and plays to each individual team members’ strengths. Mentoring people and allowing them to grow into the position while they have you as a safety net is really important. The group should be able to continue and move on even when one of the team leaders isn’t available and has to move somewhere else. We should be like “sourdough starters”! No one likes to say it but a lot of people like to ‘control’, but if you’re controlling, you’re not mentoring and your stifling the development of your community. They aren’t telling people what to say or how to be a part of the group, they are modeling and mentoring and the group members are learning by example. Jen: “We’re not in this for us, we’re in this for them – for this community”. They’re doing to expand the audience so everyone can learn together. There are starting to be some specialty WordCamps – maybe someday even a WomenWhoWP WordCamp?! It’s possible! WwWP had a booth at WCUS and because of that visibility, groups in other countries were started. One of the things they do that’s really different is they invest in the community. When members write on the meetup community page (on Facebook or meetup.com) that they can’t go, the organizers make sure to ‘like’ the comment and reply to them to let them know they’ll be missed! (sidebar: please put your face (an actual photo) on your Meetup profile so organizers recognize you! And everyone else!!) We may be meeting once a month, but we’re keeping things going even outside of our meetups. Intentionally, the organizers choose not to sit together. They’re there for the other people who attend the group, so they distribute themselves around the room. That way, everyone feels like they have access to the leaders. It can be a challenge in some rooms to sit apart but try to be intentional about it! It’s important to make sure you’re always talking to new people in the room. If you want to be a meetup leader, you have to sometimes go out of your comfort zone – talk to people you wouldn’t normally – stretch yourself! There’s a twitter thread started by Dwayne McDaniel today talking about “what’s your favorite part of speaking”… Bridget’s answer was: “I speak because I teach. My passion is that moment on someone's face where they get it. When I speak and they feel empowered. When they come up and say, “That's it?” And I'm like, yeah. You just tweeted.” We try to hit all the topics so that everyone can learn something different. Even seasoned developers. A lot of times in WordPress, we learn what we need for the project, but not in depth. Jen took a Front End Development course at Udacity through Grow with Google scholarship. She learned to code. She’s been in WordPress for 10 years so she had an understanding of html/css/javascript but never in a systematic approach. It really helped her to see all the parts in an incremental way and gave accountability as she progressed through her learning. It’s been great! She’s learning more and more and that’s not something she always to get to spend a lot of time on. It’s helped her and her community! It made her feel good because she realized any one of the women she’s connected with could also do this! Last week at WordCamp San Diego she actually spoke about Gutenberg! One of the really interesting things that happened, is during the final project she was having trouble getting some of the code to work. She asked the lead developer to look at it and he sent a message back saying thanks and that “he learned a lot” from her problem because he had to go research it, which helped him to level up too! It raised his respect for her and her for him. Jen would never have taken this on if WomenWhoWP had never happened. She’s doing it to show people that they don’t need to put themselves in a box – they can learn new skills. Just because they are great in one and feel set, it doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t try to enhance their skills or try for something they don’t think they can get. Jen didn’t think she has the relevant experience to be accepted, but she was! Take the risk – go after something your really want to learn! Tools of the week:Bridget – https://www.touchnote.com/us/ – it’s an app to send your photos as postcards, printsJason – https://www.decksetapp.com/ – a way to do presentations for Mac, makes slide decks really easily without having to do any design work. It is done entirely in Markdown format. Costs $29 – $116 for a team.Jen – https://www.udacity.com/ – she loves their learning style and they do so many different subjects in their Nanodegree program | https://codepen.io/ – to store all of her code snippets (includes editor that allows previews too) ______________Show notes contributed by:Cheryl LaPrade – @yaycherylSherie LaPrade – @heysherieThe post WPblab EP99 – WordPress – Do we really need a specialty Meetup? appeared first on WPwatercooler. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Life Updates Kyle: Life is good. WCUS was great. Adam: All the things: juggling 4 projects, 3 developers, all spread out.. Getting close to KitchenSink Episode 200… WCUS was great. Launching/launched new service WordPress News Sara Dunn picked a niche! Thanks for the iTunes reviews! Nateconley123 Jordanmroth People on the Move / aka Changes…
Staying up to date on the evolution of WordPress can be critical to the success of your digital strategy. In this episode of PressThis, co-host Steven Word reports "live" from WordCamp US on the latest developments in the future of WordPress. Learn what's next, what the controversies are, and valuable information you can use to help optimize the future of your WordPress digital experiences. If you missed WCUS or were there and just too busy networking, don't miss these amazing insights into the future of WordPress. Listen now!
Staying up to date on the evolution of WordPress can be critical to the success of your digital strategy. In this episode of PressThis, co-host Steven Word reports "live" from WordCamp US on the latest developments in the future of WordPress. Learn what's next, what the controversies are, and valuable information you can use to help optimize the future of your WordPress digital experiences. If you missed WCUS or were there and just too busy networking, don't miss these amazing insights into the future of WordPress. Listen now!
Life Updates Adam: Busy w/Client work. Heading to WCUS! Kyle: Busy w/work. Heading to WCUS with family! WordPress News. New 10up product Tailor Page builder to be discontinued. Why video backgrounds suck by Yoast Wearing /Drinking / Reading Kyle: “Word” shirt (InMotion Hosting) — empowered by WordPress hoodie // Homebrew American IPA .. GiveWP pint…
You wrote something. Now what? You can automate. You can schedule. What works best? How do you start? In this episode, Jason and Bridget will give their tips and tricks to help get you going.Jason Tucker and his 12-yr-old daughter Jessalyn ( https://jessalyn.blog/) will be attending WCUS together for the first time! (https://jasontucker.blog/10107/wordcamp-us-2017-eyes-12-year-old)WomenWhoWP will have a booth at the WCUS Community Bazaar! – Bridget will be there, say hi!Sharing and content management go hand-in-hand – whatever info you put into that CMS you are going to need to share – to get your story out there!Too many of us have a “shoeless joe” approach of “if we build it they will come” – it doesn’t work that way in real life – you need to be intentionalWhen blogging (and communicating on social) your voice and tonality need to match – that’s what makes you authentic. Don’t use authenticity as an excuse to be a jerk though! How you treat your audience matters.Automation can be a problem – it can lack authenticity, you need to pay careful attention to what is being shared/posted – does it match your tone / your voice? Example: a politician that has a search that auto-posts any tweets mentioning her name (with no oversight!) … even bad tweets got retweeted! Or another example is if someone has automation and they’ve passed away.Automating is not a bad thing if it’s authentic to who you are (i.e. if you’re a programmer/coder, etc.)Only 2 things automated on BridgetWillard.com – Postmatic (for commenting) and Revive Old Posts (auto tweets her own articles in a specified time period). Bridget believes in a hybrid solution of automation and hand-edited posts.Another option (though controversial!) is to take advantage of the bots that auto-retweet hashtags of interest to your audience! The risk is that many people won’t follow them because the account is obviously a bot!If Bridget really likes an article, she’ll pull a sentence and share it on social media, and then choose another sentence and share it on a different platform, etc. (twitter, facebook, linkedin…)Bridget would love if Revive Old Posts would make a meta box with alternate titles so it could reshare the same content with different text!Scheduling posts can be helpful too – can also rearrange your info for repeat posts manually.Better Click to Tweet plugin – helps you pull out quotesEach social media platform has it’s own culture, you need to tailor your posts to that platform and not post the same thing on all of themSetting automation is not a bad thing if it’s in a controlled environment – if you have it set to pull from your own content or from sites that are trusted.MashShare https://wordpress.org/plugins/mashsharer/ – social media share buttonsThere’s nothing wrong with clicking your own buttons/links! Go ahead and click the share buttons on your blog posts – half of what Bridget built into her site was for her own use, to make it easier to share her content!How you share means the “full context” or the “30,000 ft view”Snowbird ad: utilized a 1-star review saying that their slopes were “too advanced” to market their ski slopes (full 2-page ad w/ large photo of the mountains and valley)https://medium.com/words-for-life/a-ski-resort-used-a-1-star-review-in-its-brilliant-ads-so-now-im-inspired-945ba7f31fe9Snowbird prides themselves on being an advanced ski resort so a 1-star review stating it was too hard was the perfect and most simple advertisement! They restrained themselves from adding a lot of design or copy and just let the review (and a powerful photo) speak for itself.When you’re sharing content, don’t forget to also share other people’s content – it shows that you care about more than just yourself, and encourages others to share your content (don’t live in a vacuum)Pay attention to what people are saying about your brand and leverage it! Rachel Cherry posted she had “tattoo-level” love for Slack HQ and they caught wind of it and created an ad around it! Rachel Cherry https://twitter.com/ruder/status/676165067549900800When you are sharing content multiple times, try reframing how you present it – say it in a different way to catch a new audience.Gary Vaynerchuk makes content for Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc. that’s similar but different enough that it works best for each platformTailor your content for your audience! When you are traveling to a different country or city, like Paris, you behave differently because of what the ‘natives’ expect. Think the same way with your content. If you sharing on twitter, post one way, on facebook, post another way. The same content presentation does not work for all audiences and you run the risk of fatiguing them!Carol Stephen: http://yoursocialmediaworks.com/social-media-different-platform-different-languageSwipeable on the iOS App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/swipeable-instagram-panorama/id1209900326?mt=8Instagram is not for memes – they’re really best on facebook!Snapchat is a bit more casual/natural – don’t need to be as polishedJust start somewhere – start with one platform and use it for a few minutes each day. When you get used to it, add another platform and go from there!Don’t try to imitate the biggest person on social media that you can find – 9 times out of 10, they have a team behind their account and you’ll run yourself ragged trying to catch upThere is no crazy secret to getting a lot of followers – be kind, be polite, be conversational, be interested. Reply to people! What would you say to people if you were having a conversation in person? Build relationships! From relationships come referrals Win-win! Show notes contributed by:Cheryl LaPrade – @YayCheryl https://merrymintdesigns.com/Sherie LaPrade – @HeySherieThe post WPblab EP88 – Content Marketing: How you share makes the difference appeared first on WPwatercooler. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
In this episode, Jason Tucker and Bridget Willard, along with you in the chat room, will reminisce on the show, the community, technology, and even their own careers. We'd love to have you join in.Celebrating Two Years!!Late September 2015 – Bridget was working as an office manager for a construction company. Jason said there was a new video / chat platform called Blab.im and decided he wanted to give it a try and suggested Bridget join him!Bridget said “I don’t know anything about WordPress” and Jason said “That’s why I want you to do the show!”Started as a 90 minute show and has since been trimmed back to an hourBlab.im allowed anyone to pop in as a random guest during the show and they had guests from countries all overWas originally just a WordPress focused show, so any topic around WordPress was fair game, has since evolved to focus on WordPress marketing and social mediaJust as Jason was starting to get tired of / annoyed with Blab.im … it went away! It was the perfect time to try a new platform – tried Firetalk and eventually landed on Google / YouTubeJason has been using Google Hangouts for about 5 years, so decided to keep using the platform for WPBlabHaving a show whose content is totally dependant on people showing up and asking questions proved very challenging, so moving to have a set topic with guests just made senseOriginally almost felt like a virtual meetup, where the audience was heavily involved in the content of each showBridget will be appearing in the Women Who WordPress panel at WordCamp Seattle this weekend (as a freelancer). She will also appear at WordCamp Rochester and will be at WCUS for Contributor Day with the Marketing team.Both Jason and Bridget have switched jobs since starting and Bridget is now freelancing. Bridget has also now travelled to two different countries!Started ‘Community Connections’ spin-off this year with Bridget Willard and Jen Miller – highlighting members of the WordPress communityWhere do Jason & Bridget want to be in the next 2 years?Bridget hopes her life is personally and professionally drastically different! She also hopes she’s seen Iceland and learned how to do something WordPressy, like make a plugin! She hopes she finally understands DNSJason is looking forward to some big new projects at workWhere did you think you’d be now, 20 years ago? Are you there, did you surpass it, fail to meet it?Bridget – I’ve exceeded my college education, but I don’t believe in 10, 20-year plans – when you meet people and experience things, your goals/dreams keep changing! “The more you experience in your life, the more your dreams change!”Jason – knew he’d be married and have a couple kids and be doing the kind of nerdy stuff he does! He’s happy with where he’s ended up and enjoys doing the podcasts and keeping up with his friends without having to be in the same room The coolest thing Bridget has learned is that she can do whatever she wants to do and succeed if she sets her mind to it, and her friends believe that she canShow notes contributed by:Cheryl LaPrade – @YayCherylSherie LaPrade – @HeySherieThe post WPblab EP87 – A Look Backward in Time appeared first on WPwatercooler. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
This week on WPblab we speak with Andy Lara on how he build an in-person community online for the Vox Podcast with Mike ErreAndy Lara – Creative Director – VOX CommunityCohost of Vox Podcast – http://www.voxpodcast.com/@andy_lara twitterMike wanted to create a place where he could talk about and say the kinds of things that aren’t as easy when you are bound by the rules of a church so he thought a podcast might be the way Started out first online, but grew into an a communityEvangelism / Doctrine / Theology … conferences, meetups, retreats etc … there is a lot of commonality between how churches function and how the WordPress community functionsIn marketing nowadays, people don’t want the hard sell – the way you evangelize a product or a community is much the samePodcasts are one of the best things out there for transparency / reaching your customers & audience that a lot of small businesses aren’t doing. It’s a very low-budget way to create authenticity.Mike and Andy started a podcast in Mike’s office where they were looking and talking to each other and not at the camera. He moved away and they had to move to talking directly to the camera and it increased the audience exponentially! People want to see faces, they want you to be talking to them!Especially in the tech industry, a lot of people are isolated, working remotely or on their own and are missing out on the human connection which makes it even more important to reach them on a personal levelIf you are just listening to a podcast and not doing something with it, you’re wasting it … you need to use the info, interact, give backStarted a church via the podcast … started with 80 church ‘planters’ and was able to launch with over 300 people because they were already engaged via the podcast. They knew the culture and the DNA before they ever showed up in person.About 50,000 downloads per month for their podcast – people all across the nation tune inThe podcast is largely discussional, two guys hashing out the issues of the dayTheir ability to sit down and do a podcast, helps them to take these big philosophical discussions and make them more accessible and conversational … it’s also a resource that they can point people to in the churchWhen we put our souls into our brands – that has meaning. When we offer up who we are in our podcasts, that has meaning. It’s like when Matt Mullenweg sits down and does his talks at WCEU or WCUS. It puts a human face on what he does.Giving integrity back to the audience – they believe their listeners are actually smart, they keep the podcast real and don’t try to hard to make it perfect and glossyThey built in a hefty feedback model where any member of the team can give feedback to Mike, even though he’s the pastor … everyone has something valuable to offerIn a community, it’s important to create a space where people can feel like they belong – you have to allow people to speak and be heard – when they feel safe and they have trust, they will speak upConversations and relationship are the things that transform us and make us into better and healthier peopleTreat your community volunteers like real people, make them feel that their contribution is meaningfulGive your volunteers roles a real job title to make them feel important. Also limit trials to 6 months to show how people fit. Give them ownership in the process.The post WPblab EP83 – Starting an In-Person Community Online w/ Andy Lara appeared first on WPwatercooler. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
This week I share an easy way to move your site to a new host. Upcoming Events No WordCamps. Happy Holidays! Segment 1: In the News Videos from WCUS, Ann Arbor on WordCampTV.com WordCamp Europe Calls for Host City Applications for 2018 Segment 2: Using cPanel Migration to move hosts. Segment 3: Tool of the Week…
This week I share an easy way to move your site to a new host. Upcoming Events No WordCamps. Happy Holidays! Segment 1: In the News Videos from WCUS, Ann Arbor on WordCampTV.com WordCamp Europe Calls for Host City Applications for 2018 Segment 2: Using cPanel Migration to move hosts. Segment 3: Tool of the Week…
Today we talked about WordCamps!! How are they beneficial, who should go, do they impact the Divi community at all? We share our own experiences and also have a bit of a birthday bash for our dear friend and colleague Geno Quiroz of Monterey Premier and Quiroz.co. Hosts present: Sarah Oates - Endure Web Studios / FB / @endureweb Geno Quiroz - Monterey Premier / FB / @montereypremier David Blackmon - Aspen Grove Studios / FB / @aspengrovellc David Elster - Explain Like I'm 5: WordPress Tim Strifler - Divi Life / FB / @timstrifler Terry Hale - Mizagorn Ink / FB / @mizagorn Tammy Grant - Sunflower Creatives / FB / @yourblogplace Kathy Kroll Romana - Viva Design Studio / FB / @vivachick Leslie Bernal - A Girl and Her Mac / FB / @agirlandhermac https://youtu.be/IJ3BYsiAHQA
Today we talked about WordCamps!! How are they beneficial, who should go, do they impact the Divi community at all? We share our own experiences and also have a bit of a birthday bash for our dear friend and colleague Geno Quiroz of Monterey Premier and Quiroz.co. Hosts present: Sarah Oates – Endure Web […] The post EP10 – WCUS Recap, How Getting Involved in WordCamps Has Helped the Divi Community appeared first on Divi Chat.
Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Joe is away this week, so Brian goes solo. Brian highlights WordCamp US and A Day of REST and describes why you should attend these events. He also tells the story of his first ever WordCamp San Francisco (the precursor to WCUS). Then, he interviews Mike McAlister, of Array Themes, and they talk about the process of building a commercial WordPress theme from the ground up. The interview with Mike starts around 14 minutes in. Topics & Links Event Links WordCamp US A Day of REST Brian's post on A Day of REST Brian's first WordCamp SF Post Status and Pagely party Join the Post Status Club Podcast on the REST API Interview with Mike Array Themes Previous interview with Mike Typecast for testing typefaces Typewolf for type inspiration and resources Playing with type Brian's 2010 article on the profit ceiling in the theme market
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