Hallway Chats

Topher DeRosia
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Sharing stories and building belonging

  1. JAN 5

    A Chat With Rob Ruiz

    Introducing Rob Ruiz Meet Rob Ruiz, a seasoned Senior Full Stack Developer with nearly two decades of expertise in WordPress innovation and open-source magic. As the Lead Maintainer of WP Rig since 2020, Rob has been the driving force behind this groundbreaking open-source framework that empowers developers to craft high-performance, accessible, and progressively enhanced WordPress themes with ease. WP Rig isn’t just a starter theme—it’s a turbocharged toolkit that bundles modern build processes, linting, optimization, and testing to deliver lightning-fast, standards-compliant sites that shine on any device. Show Notes For more on Rob and WP Rig, check out these links: LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robcruiz WP Rig Official Site: https://wprig.io GitHub Repository: https://github.com/wprig/wprig Latest Releases: https://github.com/wprig/wprig/releases WP Rig 3.1 Announcement: https://wprig.io/wp-rig-3-1/ Transcript: Topher DeRosia: Hey everybody. Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m your host Topher DeRosia, and with me today I have- Rob Ruiz: Rob Ruiz. Topher: Rob. You and I have talked a couple of times, once recently, and I learned about a project you’re working on, but not a whole lot about you. Where do you live? What do you do for a living? Rob: Yeah, for sure. Good question. Although I’m originally from Orlando, Florida, I’ve been living in Omaha, Nebraska for a couple of decades now. So I’m pretty much a native. I know a lot of people around here and I’ve been fairly involved in various local communities over the years.  I’m a web developer. Started off as a graphic designer kind of out of college, and then got interested in web stuff. And so as a graphic designer turned future web developer, I guess, I was very interested in content management systems because it made the creating and managing of websites very, very easy.  My first couple of sites were Flash websites, sites with macro media Flash. Then once I found content management systems, I was like, “Wow, this is way easier than coding the whole thing from scratch with Flash.” And then all the other obvious benefits that come from that.  So I originally started with Joomla, interestingly enough, and used Joomla for about two or three years, then found WordPress and never looked back. And so I’ve been using WordPress ever since. As the years have gone on, WordPress has enabled me to slowly transition from a more kind of web designer, I guess, to a very full-blown web developer and software engineer, and even software architect to some degree. So here we are many years later. Topher: There’s a big step from designer to developer. How did that go for you? I’m assuming you went to PHP. Although if you were doing Flash sites, you probably learned ActionScript. Rob: Yeah. Yeah. That was very convenient when I started learning JavaScript. It made it very easy to learn JavaScript faster because I already had a familiarity with ActionScript. So there’s a lot of similarities there. But yeah. Even before I started doing PHP, I started learning more HTML and CSS. I did do a couple of static websites between there that were just like no content management system at all. So I was able to kind of sharpen my sword there with the CSS and HTML, which wasn’t particularly hard. But yeah, definitely, the PHP… that was a big step was PHP because it’s a proper logical programming language. There was a lot there I needed to unpack, and so it took me a while. I had to stick to it and really rinse and repeat before I finally got my feet under me.  Topher: I can imagine. All right. So then you work for yourself or you freelance or do you have a real job, as it were? Rob: Currently, I do have a real job. Currently, I’m working at a company called Bold Orange out of Minneapolis. They’re a web agency. But I kind of bounce around from a lot of different jobs. And then, yes, I do freelance on the side, and I also develop my own products as well for myself and my company. Topher: Cool. Bold Orange sounds familiar. Who owns that? Rob: To be honest, I don’t know who the owners are. It’s just a pretty big web agency out of Minneapolis. They are a big company. You could just look them up at boldorange.com. They work for some pretty big companies. Topher: Cool. All right. You and I talked last about WP Rig. Give me a little background on where that came from and how you got it. Rob: Yeah, for sure. Well, there was a period of time where I was working at a company called Proxy Bid that is in the auction industry, and they had a product or a service — I don’t know how you want to look at that —called Auction Services. That product is basically just building WordPress sites for auction companies.  They tasked us with a way to kind of standardize those websites essentially. And what we realized is that picking a different theme for every single site made things difficult to manage and increase tech debt by a lot. So what we were tasked with was, okay, if we’re going to build our own theme that we’re just going to make highly dynamic so we can make it look different from site to site. So we want to build it, but we want to build it smart and we want to make it reusable and maintainable. So let’s find a good framework to build this on so that we can maintain coding standards and end up with as little tech debt as possible, essentially.  That’s when I first discovered WP Rig. In my research, I came across it and others. We came across Roots Sage and some of the other big names, I guess. It was actually a team exercise. We all went out and looked for different ones and studied different ones and mine that I found was WP Rig. And I was extremely interested in that one over the other ones. Interestingly enough- Topher: Can you tell me why over the other ones? Rob: That’s a great question. Yeah. I really liked the design patterns. I really liked the focus on WordPress coding standards. So having a system built in that checked all the code against WordPress coding standards was cool. I loved the compiling transpiling, whatever, for CSS and JavaScript kind of built in. That sounded really, really interesting.  The fact that there was PHP unit testing built into it. So there’s like a starter testing framework built in that’s easy to extend so that you can add additional unit tests as your theme grows. We really wanted to make sure… because we were very into CICD pipelines. So we wanted to make sure that as developers were adding or contributing to any themes that we built with this, that we could have automated tests run and automated builds run, and just automate as much as possible. So WP rig just seemed like something that gave us those capabilities right out of the box. So that was a big thing. And I loved the way that they did it.  Roots Sage does something similar, but they use their blade templating engine built in there. We really wanted to stick to something that was a bit more standard WordPress so that there wasn’t like a large knowledge overhead so that we didn’t have to say like, okay, if we’re bringing on other developers, like junior developers work on it, oh, it would be nice if you use Laravel too because we use this templating engine in all of our themes. We didn’t want to have to worry about that essentially. It was all object-oriented and all that stuff too. That’s what looked interesting to me. We ended up building a theme with WP Rig. I don’t know what they ended up doing with it after that, because I ended up getting let go shortly thereafter because the company had recently been acquired. Also, this was right after COVID too. So there was just a lot of moving parts and changing things at the time.  So I ended up getting let go. But literally a week after I got let go, I came across a post on WP Tavern about how this framework was looking for new maintainers. Basically, this was a call put out by Morton, the original author of WP Rig. He reached out to WP Tavern and said, “Look, we’re not interested in maintaining this thing anymore, but it’s pretty cool. We like what we’ve built. And so we’re looking for other people to come in and adopt it essentially.”  So I joined a Zoom meeting with a handful of other individuals that were also interested in this whole endeavor, and Morton reached out to me after the call and basically just said, “I looked you up. I liked some of the input that you had during the meeting. Let’s talk a little bit more.” And then that eventually led to conversations about me essentially taking the whole project over entirely. So, the branding, the hosting of the website, being lead maintainer on the project. Basically, gave me the keys to the kingdom in terms of GitHub and everything.  So that’s how it ended up going in terms of the handoff between Morton and I. And I’m very grateful to him. They really created something super cool and I was honored to take it over and kind of, I don’t know, keep it going, I guess. Topher: I would be really curious. I don’t think either of us have the answer. I’d be curious to know how similar that path is to other project handoffs. It’s different from like an acquisition. You didn’t buy a plugin from somebody. It was kind of like vibes, I guess. Rob: It was like vibes. It was very vibey. I guess that’s probably the case in an open source situation. It’s very much an open source project. It’s a community-driven thing. It’s for everybody by everybody. I don’t know if all open source community projects roll like that, but that’s how this one worked out.  There was some amount of ownership on Morton’s behalf. He did hire somebody to do the branding for WP Rig and the logo. And then obviously he was paying for stuff like the WPrig.

    54 min

  2. 10/22/2025

    A Chat With June Liu

    Introducing June Liu June Liu is the Creative Strategist at backpocket ACE, where she helps projects run smoothly and accessibly. She’s also the co-editor of WP Wonder Women and co-founder of Speed Network Online. Show Notes Backpocket Ace LinkedIn WP Accessibility Day Bio Transcript: Topher DeRosia: Hey everybody. Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m your host Topher, and my guest today is June, and I’m going to make you say your last name. June Liu: Okay. Hi everybody. I’m June Liu. Yep, Liu. It’s the easier way to pronounce it. You don’t want to do the Mandarin way. Topher: I do. What is it? June: “Leo”. Topher: Liu. Okay. Fair enough. June: Yeah. Good enough? It’s not an easy sound to make. I enjoy hearing it as Liu over the Mandarin way, so don’t worry about it. Topher: All right. June: So, it’s good to be here. Topher: Yeah, thank you for coming.  June: Sure. Topher: I had never heard of you before recently when you and Michelle did the speed, not dating, networking thing. And I thought, “Hey, somebody new. We should get to know her.” So I literally know essentially nothing about you. So who are you? Where are you from? What do you do? Etc. June: Okay. My name is June Liu. Let’s start there. I’m outside of Washington D.C. in a little tiny place called Vienna, Virginia, if you’re familiar with it. It’s a small township outside of a very big metropolis area. But it still has a small-town feel, so I’m happy with this area.  The reason probably why you never heard of me because I’ve only really returned to work in the last three years. So that’s…  Topher: Okay.  June: Yeah. I met Michelle working through WordPress Accessibility Day. Last year, I was selected as one of the organizers. And that’s where Michelle and I met. I had the bandwidth to do more for WPAD last year. So I just kind of put my hand up anywhere they said, “We could use somebody.” And I was like, “I got time. I’ll do it. I’ll try it. I don’t know how to do it, but I’ll try it.” Topher: Stand back. June: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Last year too I was also working with Bet Hannon on the sponsorship process of the WPAD event and helping her just getting all that information together for sponsors and contacting sponsors and just kind of working through that process. And it allowed me also, because I knew who the sponsors were, it helped me be a liaison into the marketing team. So that’s how I started working with Michelle there. She was the lead for marketing team last year.  This year, Michelle and I co-lead the marketing team, and I still am on the sponsorship team working with Bet. So that’s kind of my happy place recently.  But as for what I do, I am a marketing consultant. It won’t be too far of a stretch here to imagine that my focus is on accessibility in marketing. What that all means is putting together a marketing campaign. When you put it all together, you want to make sure that you have the accessibility features in mind.  Much like how you do a website and you make sure that you have alt tags in your pictures, you have the right heading, structures, etc. For marketing campaigns, we want to make sure that the message that you’re sending is inclusive, first of all, and then if you have any subsequent links that goes with it, that it is understandable what you’re trying to promote and it’s just not a blank link that says, “click here.” So that’s kind of where my world merge between where my happy place is and what I’m trying to build.  My agency is called Backpocket ACE. It’s a nickname given to me by a former supervisor. So I thought it was a pretty cool little name for a company, and the domain name was ready. So it was mine. How can I resist that?  Topher: Nice.  June: That’s a little bit about me. Topher: Okay. So what I’m hearing is you do marketing stuff. How does that relate to WordPress? Did you just happen to choose WordPress as an area? June: Well, I kind of stumbled upon WordPress about, oh, I guess it was like 15 years ago now. I was working for an association management company. And it was a former client there that said, “Hey, we need to figure out how to get your system to work with our system.” And I was like, “Well, what’s your system?” And they said, ‘WordPress.” That was probably around 2014 or so. Oh, yeah, that’s 10 years or so. Back then, I was like, “Oh, what is that?”  So that was my first introduction into WordPress. And then a few years after that, I didn’t really get a chance to work with WordPress too much more. After that, I left the company and I became a caregiver for my mom. So that was the reason for my long hiatus. But when I came back, I was kind of like, “Well, I don’t want to go back into a corporation. I want to try to do something on my own.” And so I was like, “Well, what little organization, what little group is out there?”  And in the back of my mind I kept thinking, “WordPress. WordPress.” That was kind of the unfinished business and unfinished research that I didn’t get to finish. So I was like, “Well, let’s look into this.” So I found that’s how I kind of… when I said I stumbled onto WordPress, yes.  So I landed on WordPress.com first, like a lot of people, and then realized, no, that’s not what I want. And then I found my way through a couple of friends who introduced me to different networking groups. And then I was like, “Okay, I’m on the right path of creating my own website and, you know, finding WordPress network groups that allowed me to learn more about WordPress, learn about other people and what they do in WordPress and how. And still I’m trying to figure out how I fit into the WordPress world, essentially.  Knowing Michelle has given me a leg up this year. I’m just going to praise her right now for a moment. But she really has given me a platform to find myself and to find my voice. In addition to Speed Network Online, she and I also work on WPWonderWoman, the newsletter. So I get to find out a lot about women in WordPress. And I’m happy to hear that there are so many women that is in the periphery and in the core of WordPress.  I’m very happy to hear that since when I started learning how to code and stuff, I was really just the only woman in a company of pretty much all men. And for me to learn how to do what I did eons ago, it was at W3 Schools. That’s how I learned HTML and CSS. But it was nice to see that there’s so many women involved in WordPress. It’s just nice to kind of, you know, you turn around and you find another woman there. So yeah, so that. Back to Michelle, though, she’s kind of pushed me a little bit and say, “Okay, come on, get out of your comfort zone. You know, you can do this.” And being able to be code lead with her in WPAD, the Accessibility Day event, she gives me latitude to try different things, but she’s right there to support when I need it, and being that sounding board.  So it’s finding my skill set again and being more confident with my own skill set and having opportunities to meet people like you, and then eventually into a podcast. Hey, look at that. Topher: Yeah. June: That’s how I found WordPress. Topher: That’s really, really cool.  June: Yeah, thanks.  Topher: Have you been to a WordCamp yet? June: In 2023, I went to the first… That was my first WordCamp. That’s the one in Washington, D.C. It was kind of like nearby.  Topher: Yeah, WordCamp US.  June: It was nearby. So I was kind of like, “Yeah, I think I’m supposed to go.” I think my stars aligned and I’m supposed to go. So that’s what I did.  I met a lot of people, but it was a star align that I should go. And I’m glad I went. But on the flip side of that is I met too many people that I didn’t know how to follow up yet. Topher: Oh, yeah.  June: When I came back from WordCamp, I was kind of like paralyzed. I wasn’t sure how to advance. Then from there, it was a lot of baby steps, you know, and a lot of trial and error and trying to formulate my voice and then eventually still reaching out with people that I met there and say, “Oh, yeah, I remember meeting you there. I’m not sure if you remember me, but this is what I do now.”  I should back up when I went to that WordCamp, I probably had just come back with the idea of the business, and it had been like three months. So, yeah, so I really jumped in and said, “I had no idea what I’m doing.” But, hey, you know, in that WordCamp, I met lots of people that I’m still in touch with now, and I’m pretty happy with that. And I even got my Michelle and me selfie. Topher: Oh, nice. Excellent. Are you going to Portland in a couple of weeks, days? June: No. No. Unfortunately, no. It’s a little cost-prohibitive. The event itself isn’t that high of a cost for the entry fee. It’s the flight. It’s the hotels. It’s the transportation. Topher: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.  June: And then, of course, my own, shall we say selfish desire to stay in Portland another week. And I have family out there on the West Coast, so I’m like, “Well, I can’t go to the West Coast and not see them, you know?” Topher: Not say hi. Yeah.  June: So that would have extended all my time. And then I’m like, Mm. Hmm. I do plan to do it again one day. It also is, you know, once I have a bit more budget to spend on networking possibilities and events. But it’s in my mind to do so. Topher: The big WordCamps can be very overwhelming. They get easier as you go to more because you see people that you saw last time. And that’s fun. But I would really recommend you try a small one. WordCamp Montclair isn’t that far from you. I

    34 min

  3. 10/14/2025

    A Chat With Amber Hinds

    Introducing Amber Hinds Amber Hinds is the CEO of Equalize Digital, Inc., a company specializing in WordPress accessibility and maker of the Accessibility Checker plugin. She is the lead organizer of the WordPress Accessibility Meetup, board president/co-lead organizer of the WordPress Accessibility Day conference, and participates in the WordPress core accessibility team. Through her work at Equalize Digital, Amber is striving to create a world where all people have equal access to information and tools on the internet, regardless of ability. Since 2010, she has led teams building websites and web applications for nonprofits, K-12 and higher education institutions, government agencies, and businesses of all sizes, and has become a passionate accessibility advocate. Show Notes WordPress.TV Talks Amber’s LinkedIn Equalize Digital WP Accessibility Day 2025 Transcript: Topher DeRosia: Hey folks. Welcome to Hallway Chats. My name is Topher. I’m your host. I’m here today with Amber, and I’m going to make her say her last name because I do that with everybody. Amber, who are you? Amber Hinds: I am Amber Hinds. It sounds like the ketchup, but it’s spelled differently. Topher: Yes. Spelled like a deer. Amber: Yes. Or behind. We made the mistake, though, of giving one of our children a middle name of Beatrix, and so her initials would be her first name, B. Hines. Topher: Yes. Amber: If she were to write it with the initial, and I was like, “Maybe she’ll just never include her middle initial in her signature.” Topher: My sister’s first name is Elizabeth, but she goes by Beth, and so her initials then become BAD.  Amber: Oh.  Topher: She likes that. She likes writing BAD for her initials. Amber: That’s fun. Topher: All right, so where do you live? Amber: I live in a town called Georgetown, which is just north of Austin, Texas. Topher: Oh, all right, cool. My in-laws live 50 miles north of you. Amber: Oh, in like Waco? Topher: No, De Leon. It’s a very, very small town. Amber: A town I’ve never heard of. Is it small? Topher: Yeah, it’s very small. You asked me about being on this podcast years ago. Do you remember? Amber: Oh, probably. I think when I first started my current company, Equalize Digital, I was like, “I should try and do some podcast interviews.” And I think I did a whole round of that maybe in like 2020 or 2021. Was that when I messaged you about it? Topher: It was some time before a WordCamp in Alabama, Birmingham? Amber: Oh, WordCamp Birmingham, yeah, that might have… that was more recently because it was more post-COVID, I think, right? That was one of the first WordCamps that came back. Topher: Yeah, at Birmingham, it had been long enough that I apologized that I never got back to you. Amber: Well, I didn’t remember that, and I’m not mad, so we’re all good. Topher: Good, good, good. All right, what do you do? Amber: I am the CEO of Equalize Digital, as I mentioned, which is a company that focuses on accessibility on the internet. We have a heavy focus on WordPress because that’s where we all started. It’s our love. We have a plugin called Accessibility Checker for WordPress websites, but we do a lot of accessibility consulting and auditing outside of WordPress land as well. Topher: All right, cool. For those unfamiliar, what does accessibility mean? Amber: Accessibility is all about making sure that websites work for people of all abilities. This means it could be anything from someone who is blind or deaf or someone who has mobility issues, people who have dyslexia, certain fonts can make it difficult for them to read on websites. So it’s really about making sure that everyone can access your content and buy things from you if your website is about selling things, even if they are not typically able, or maybe they’re not using a computer with a typical device. They might be using a screen reader or an alternative keyboard. They might not be able to use a mouse. Topher: All right, that’s cool. You mentioned consulting and plugins. First question, do you fix websites that have accessibility issues? And two, do you just build websites and they happen to be accessible? Like if somebody came to you and said, “I need a website,” will you make one? Do you do that? Amber: So the first question, do we fix websites? Yes, if they are built with WordPress. We have come up with what has worked really well for our customers is recurring remediation plans, which you can find information about this on our website. But basically, instead of trying… Topher: Oh, wait, where’s your website? Amber: Oh, our website is equalizedigital.com. Topher: All right, keep going. Amber: And what we do with that is not just copy their whole website to a staging site, work on it for however many weeks or months, and then launch it with all the fixes. What we try and do is break up accessibility fixes into small bite-sized things that can be released quickly so that remediation goes out over time, and then it allows people to spread out costs. So we do do that. We do not these days anymore build new websites with small exceptions. So we…  Topher: I have a million dollars. Will you build me a website? Amber: Probably. I mean, it depends on what it is, right? Topher: Yeah, yeah. Amber: But our background came from being a WordPress agency, and we built a lot of enterprise websites. When we were last building websites regularly, to give you a picture, our starting price was $50,000. Topher: Okay. Amber: And we built a lot of… Interestingly, we got into a niche of building WordPress-powered web applications or portals. There’s actually a talk you can find on wordcamp.tv about one web application we built. The talk is called Uber for Nurses, which is the best way I could think of describing this. But a lot of times… I didn’t know this until we started working with this company. But a lot of hospitals don’t have enough on-staff nurses to do every procedure, like putting an IV in. Topher: Interesting. Amber: And so they will use freelancers, and freelance nurses might go around between different hospitals in a city, just getting an order, like, hey, this patient in this room needs an IV or needs this thing, and they’ll drive there, and they’ll do it, and they’ll get paid to do that one thing, and then they’ll go to a different hospital, or they’ll go to a nursing home, or whatever that is. It’s weird. It’s kind of like Uber for Nurses.  It slightly scares you about going to a hospital. I kind of want to ask every nurse now, “Are you actually on staff here, or are you a freelancer? What’s going on with the situation?” But there is a talk from WordCamp US. My partner Steve and I talked about that application, which has a lot of great screenshots if you want to see more of what I’m talking about when I say we built a lot of WordPress-powered apps. But we do do some websites occasionally, either for existing clients that want a refresh, or we have partners sometimes that will come to us and say, “Hey, we really want to partner on an RFP,” and if it makes sense, then we will do that.  A lot of times we aren’t doing the dev, though. We’re more the accessibility team and consultant on those projects. Topher: Right. All right. That’s cool. You mentioned a partner. How big is your company? Amber: So I have two business partners, one of whom is my husband. And then we have another partner. So Chris is my husband, Steve is our CTO. And he started as our developer, and then we realized that we just worked super well together, and it made sense, and so he came on as a partner. Then we have a full-time developer, an accessibility specialist, a content specialist, a designer. And then we have a handful of contractors that we work with, particularly different people with different disabilities that do testing for us. We actually do user testing sessions where they get on and we record, we walk them through scenarios, and then we provide feedback to customers. Topher: How does that work? Do you have a studio where people come in? Or like I’m assuming somebody with mobility disability doesn’t want to come to your place. They want to do it at home in their living room or whatever. How does that work? Amber: So before COVID, we did run user testing sessions in person at our office in Georgetown, which meant we were typically only working with people who were somewhat local, either to Georgetown or we partnered with Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired. And they would sometimes drive students up to our office.  The wonderful thing about COVID was it forced us to figure out how to be able to run these over Zoom. So we now do user testing sessions over Zoom, which is nice because that means that our clients can attend them as well, instead of just getting the recordings. We used to take a camera on a boom mic and put it up over their head looking down at their computer before we were doing this on Zoom, right?  Topher: Right.  Amber: And sometimes we’d have two cameras, like one over their shoulder, one straight down so you could see what they were doing with their hands on their keyboard, and they would just get the recording. But now they can come on Zoom, which they don’t always choose to, but a lot of them like to because then they have the opportunity to also ask questions of the user. Topher: Right. When I was imagining this, I was imagining having multiple cameras. So you can watch their hands. You can watch what’s on the screen, what they see. How do you mimic that with the Zoom? Or do you not need it? Amber: I don’t feel like we need it anymore, being able to see what their hands

    58 min

  4. 10/08/2025

    A Chat With Joni Halabi

    Introducing Joni Halabi Joni Halabi works at Georgetown University where is the web web content manager for the office of the president. She also volunteers on the WordPress Accessibility Day project, managing the translation of transcripts into a variety of languages. Show Notes Joni’s LinkedIn WP Accessibility Day 2025 WP Accessibility Day Translation Page Transcript: Topher DeRosia: Hey everybody. Welcome to Hallway Chats. This is your host Topher, and this week I am with a new friend that I don’t know at all. Can you tell me your name? Joni Halabi: Hi, my name is Joni Halabi. Topher: Excellent. And where are you from? Joni: So, originally, I am from New Jersey, but these days I live just outside the Washington DC area.  Topher: And what do you do for a living? Joni: I’m actually just coming on the other side of a little bit of a career shift, but for the last few years I was working as a web developer. Most recently with Georgetown University’s web services department, but in the past, I’ve worked with agencies and software companies working on the front and what I lovingly call a middle-end development. So, basically, anything that’s right up before backend development, it used to be me. About a year ago, I did a bit of a career switch and I am still working for Georgetown University, but I’m working more on the content side of things. So I am now the senior web manager for the office of the president at Georgetown.  Topher: Oh wow. Joni: I manage our website, I manage a few other websites as well, writing content, redesigning some of our sites to be a little bit prettier, more accessible, nicer looking and so on. So that is my day job. Topher: That’s cool. How many people manage the content for the president of the university? Just you? Joni: One. Just me. I’ve actually originated the role. They did not have a web manager prior to me joining the team. I’m embedded in the communications team and it’s wonderful. It’s a very different way of working than working with a development team. Writing human words instead of code. It’s very different, but I love it. Topher: That’s great. I’m assuming you saw a need and pitched it. What need did you see and how did you pitch that? Joni: Actually, they started the process. I had already been thinking about leaving the development world for a little while and I just decided after 20 years I was getting close to done writing code. So I started looking around.  I did a little bit of a very informal job hunt and I started looking at our internal job boards and I saw that the president’s office had this opening for a web manager and it just looked really interesting. It looked right up my alley because I didn’t want to leave the web. I really just wanted to leave computer code. And it was wonderful.  They were looking for somebody to manage their websites because the team that I’m on, they are very heavily focused on writing and supporting the president in that way, in that communicative way. But not a lot of them had really deep web experience and they were looking for someone with that kind of experience. So I applied and it’s been wonderful so far. I started a little bit over a year ago. Topher: I assume you’re working with WordPress.  Joni: Yes.  Topher: So in your role, how valuable are WordPress specific skills? Like could any good writer walk into this or are you particularly valuable because of your WordPress skills? Joni: I’d like to think that I’m valuable because of my web skills because it’s a lot of… We have a very custom implementation of WordPress at Georgetown, which is great. In my previous role in the web services team, I wrote a lot of custom blocks for WordPress. So we have a very, very customized version of the post editor, which is where you write everything. I bring that to my role, but also this role needs a really good combination of writing for the web skills, but also designing skills. My goal is to present the content that we have for our website in a way that people will engage with it meaningfully and will actually read the words. Ironically, that means having fewer words because it was a long time ago, nobody reads. What I really want to do is be able to tell the story that I’m trying to tell with as much visual media as possible. So when I can find videos, when I can find good photos, I’m trying to lean very heavily on the visuals because I know that is really the engaging part. If somebody is visiting our website and they’re not engaged and they don’t really see themselves or at least a piece of themselves in the story, they’re probably not going to read it. Topher: Right. Yeah. Joni: Yeah. Topher: I’m reminded of the old saying, when you want to make a sculpture, you just take a block of marble and cut away everything that isn’t your thing. Joni: Right. Topher: And you take a wall of words and get rid of all the ones that aren’t your message. Joni: Exactly. Yeah. Topher: That’s cool. One of the reasons we’re talking today is because Accessibility Day is coming up and I would love to hear about how you’re involved. Joni: I am the translation team lead for WordPress Accessibility Day, which is a 24-hour fully online and free conference that focuses on that intersection of digital accessibility and WordPress. I don’t remember how I heard about the conference originally, but a couple of years ago, I applied to and was chosen to speak at the conference. So I gave a talk a couple of years ago about creating accessible SVGs and using those in a WordPress plugin to create accessible graphs. So it was a very tech-heavy talk. Topher: Wow, that’s cool. Is that available anywhere online? I’d like to watch that. Joni: It is actually. All of our conference videos are available online. We record everything and we make all of our videos available after the conference is over. They’re all available online. They’re on YouTube. They’re linked from our website. Yeah, it’s a really great conference.  After I spoke at that conference that one year, like a few years ago, I had gotten, I think an email or I saw a Slack message somewhere where the team was asking if anybody was interested in volunteering or being a team lead. And I said, “Sure, let me join this meeting that you’re having that introduces people to volunteering with the conference.” At that meeting I had mentioned that in many, many jobs ago, I had worked as a translation manager for a software company. So I was managing the translations of our software and of our websites into 13 different languages. And they said, “Well, that’s cool because we want to translate the captions from all of our videos into different languages. And I said, “Well, that sounds right up my alley.” So I was accepted into that universe and became the translation team lead. I’ve been the team lead for a couple of years now. And we have been translating mostly into Spanish and French, but we translate into also Italian and Hindi and Hebrew, German, Dutch, Portuguese, quite a few languages. It’s been great.  I initiate the process by generating an AI translated version of our captions, our captions all start in English, and then I hand that AI generated caption file to a human translator and they clean it up with the goal of using the AI to maybe make my human translator’s lives a bit easier. It’s been working well so far. We have, I want to say, like 70 or 80 translations online already. Topher: Yeah, that’s great. Do you translate or do you manage translators? Joni: I manage the translators. I have a very difficult time learning other languages, which as a programmer, computer languages are much easier for me than human languages. In the past, I’ve studied German, I studied Spanish, but my brain never really made the flip to being fluent enough to do something like translation or even get anywhere close to it.  I’m fascinated by the way languages work, like the way that they intermingle with each other. Depending on the languages, you can kind of see the connections between different sets of languages, like the Germanic languages. You can see those links, the Romance languages, you can see those links. And it’s really cool. So that’s how I nerd out in this realm. Topher: That’s cool. I have done a little bit of translation stuff with like pot files and profiles and stuff, and I’ve worked with YouTube SRT files. How do you take a translation and make it into an SRT file? It wants timestamps and all that kind of stuff for all the lines. Joni: It does. We use WebVTT files. I start out with the VTT file for English and that has all of the timestamps in it. I actually turn that there… I found a tool online that will turn that VTT file as a text file — it’s essentially all text — into HTML and I’m using Chrome’s translate to translate just the words from that file into whatever language I’m aiming for.  So let’s say Spanish. Chrome’s translate function will translate that file into Spanish. I copy that into a new VTT file and it still has all of the original timestamps. Topher: Okay. Joni: And then I hand it off to the translator and then they give it back to me. I specifically give my translators instructions to not mess with the timestamps. Topher: Do not touch. Joni: Don’t touch them. If we find out later that we need to change them, we can do that on our side, on the conference’s side, but I don’t want the translators to worry about that because sometimes it does get a little weird. German, for example, can expand by up to 40% from the English. Japanese can actually contract about like 20-ish percent from the English.  We haven’t really run into too many issu

    27 min

  5. 08/09/2025

    A Chat With Toby Cryns

    Introducing Toby Cryns Toby Cryns is owner of The Mighty Mo!, a WordPress and SEO lead generation agency in Minneapolis, MN.  He wrote for WPTavern.com and helped plan BuddyCamp, WordUp, and the first few WordCamps in the Twin Cities. Show Notes https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobycryns https://themightymo.com/ Transcript: Topher DeRosia: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Topher, and I’m here today with Toby and I’m going to make you say your last name. Toby Cryns: Cryns [CRINES]. It’s a one-syllable German name. Topher: All right, cool. I know very little about you. I met you when we were both in the Tavern Project. Other than that, I don’t know anything about you. Where do you live? What do you do? Toby: Yeah, I live in Minneapolis. I’ve owned The Mighty Mo! Design Co. for 18 years and we’re a WordPress and SEO agency. Prior to that, my first job was milking goats- Topher: Nice. Toby: …with an umpire for a little league. I worked in politics for one of our two major parties. I was a sports writer for a newspaper. Oh, and then I worked at the University of Minnesota for four years before I started Mighty Mo. Topher: What role did you do in politics? Toby: I was a campaign organizer. So I managed a team of at any given day between 10 and 15 paid employees and 20 to 50 volunteers. We canvassed and we tracked data. We basically tried to get people to vote for our guy. Topher: All right, cool. Why the name Mighty Mo? Toby: Do you remember the movie Vacation with Chevy Chase? Did you ever see that one?  Topher: Yep. Not in many, many years. Like maybe when it came out. Toby: In that movie, they drive across the Mississippi River, and he goes, “The mighty Mississippi.” And my dad used to say that. And at some point he started saying ‘The Mighty Mo’ when we crossed the river. So that’s what it is. Mighty Mo for nothing less. Topher: Nice. What is your role there? Toby: I run the company. Right now I do all the sales. I have three full-time employees and then a couple of… a bookkeeper and then a part-time social media person right now and designer. I have a project manager who really does a lot of the day-to-day management of projects. I do all the selling, make sure I manage all the bank accounts, make sure everyone gets paid. I still do a little bit of like development and stuff, but I’m trying to get to a point where I do zero. That’s my goal is to focus primarily on let’s say account, client accounts and whatever that level type of stuff is. Topher: I am sure you’re aware of the radio station. Toby: Oh, the Mighty Mo in Missouri? Sure.  Topher: In Montana. Toby: Oh, it’s in Montana. That’s funny. I wonder if there’s one in Missouri too. Topher: I don’t know, but it’s a 107 FM in Helena, Montana. It’s Montana’s best place. Toby: It’s the best place in Montana. Topher: Nice. Toby: I think there’s also a Missouri one. There’s also a battleship, I think from World War II or something. Topher: Oh, I’m sure. Yeah. I think you could do that a lot of Missouri.  Toby: Yeah. I think there’s even a brewery called the Mighty Mo. Topher: Cool. What WordCamps have you been to? Toby: I’ve only gone to local ones here. I planned a couple of them. I co-planned the first two WordCamps here. And then I co-planned or I led the Buddy Camp planning team for one of those. I also planned a number of non-affiliated WordPress events. So we did something called Wordup a couple of times and some other things, but all locally here. Topher: Okay. I’ve been to work at Minneapolis.  Toby: Oh yeah. What year?  Topher: 1912. Boy. 2016.  Toby: Okay. Yeah. Cool. Topher: Yeah. And then I went to another conference that was in Minneapolis that was not a WordPress… Well, not a WordCamp. You remember that? Toby: Was it WordPress-related? Topher: Yes. I’m looking up my history here. Toby: PrestigeConf probably. Topher: Yes. I went to PrestigeConf. Toby: So I spoke at that. So maybe you saw me there. I don’t know. Topher: Oh yeah. Well, I’m sure I did. I was there. I only went in person to one of them, but we watched the other one on TV.  Toby: Oh, cool.  Topher: Yeah, let’s see. I’m looking it up here. Oh, oh, it’s not on WP World.  Toby: It needs to be on there. Topher: You know about thewp.world?  Toby: No. What’s that? Toby: Marcus Burnett made it. Basically it is a list of everybody in WordPress, but on your profile, it has all your WordPress, WordCamp, no WordPress badges, all your contact info, where you can find me, what plugins you’ve made, what photos you submitted, your latest posts from your blog. You can make yourself available as a speaker, and it lists every WordCamp you’ve ever been to. Toby: And did you say WordPress.world? Topher: Nope. Thewp.world.  Toby: Ah, cool.  Topher: I attended 63 events. Spoken at 34. You should go to more. They’re good for you.  Toby: Yeah. Cool. Topher: So, what about personally? What do you do for fun? You married? Kids, dogs, cats? Toby: Yeah. Married kids. The whole ship, whole kebab. I have three kids, three lovely children, lovely wife. You know, I fix guitars in my free time. And so- Topher: That’s cool. Toby: Yeah. There’s a music school down the road that I’ve been… they just moved in a few months ago. I fixed two of their instruments so far. Just for fun. I don’t charge anything for it. But I had a friend drop off this really, really sweet guitar that’s like probably 40 years old and he played it in a music video that I loved. And he also played on my album in 2010. And I was going back, I’m like, “Did you play this guitar on that album?” And he’s like, “Did some research.” He’s like, “I did.” Topher: Wow. That’s cool.  Toby: Really neat. So stuff like that with these guitars. When someone’s had a guitar for a long time, it has stories that go with it. And this particular guitar was neat because it was just dusty and gunky and never been wiped down with a damp towel, you know? And I was like-  Toby: Oh yeah. Yeah. Topher: Oh, yeah. Toby: It’s like an Epiphone Firebird, which is classic-style guitar. It’s like, “You want me to clean this?” He’s like, “No. God, no. I’ve gone 40 years without cleaning it. Why clean now?” Like now- Topher: Right there is blood from this… Toby: Yeah, totally.  Topher: That’s funny.  Toby: Guitars are neat like that, I think. I never thought of guitars in that way until a couple of years ago and I’ve been playing for 40 years. Like 30 years, I guess. But just at the last couple of years of like my… I guess just have a different perspective about guitars that it’s like, you know, just like the river of life flows through guitars, you know? Topher: I was in flight school 35 years ago and my instructor, I don’t know, 15 or 20 years before that, had decided he wanted to learn to play guitar. So he bought a kit and he started building his acoustic guitar.  Toby: Wow. Topher: And he loved building it. It was wonderful. So he sold it and bought another one. And when I knew him, he was on his seventh or eighth guitar and it was a beautiful 12 string with gold strings and 45 different kinds of wood and mother of pearl inlay and all that stuff. And his kids said, “If you sell that, we’re just going to kill you now so we can take it.” And he still didn’t know how to play. Toby: Wow. Isn’t that something?  Topher: 10 or 15 years making guitars and he didn’t know how to play, but he had a wonderful time, you know? Toby: Yeah. You know, some of the most respected luthiers in the world, like professional guitar builders and errors, they don’t know how to play guitar or they don’t know how to play well. It’s like a mechanic doesn’t necessarily know how to drive a race or, you know, the guy building the car, the board plant, maybe he doesn’t drive over 55 miles an hour ever. Topher: That’s funny. So we were both part of the tavern project. It’s been long enough now. Those who are listening, who don’t know what happened, the lead editor of… the only editor of wptavern.com resigned. She moved on to another job and there was no one. And so Matt, the owner said, he’s going to do a contest and hundreds, maybe thousands of people signed up to be allowed to be in the contest. And he picked five and you and I were both one of the five. I think it was five, right?  Toby: Yeah. That sounds about right. Something like that.  Topher: Oh, just a second. My wife is sending me a note and I will be… just a moment. Oh, come on. It broke. So instead of writing, I did videos. I don’t remember what you wrote about. What was your topic? Toby: To kind of juxtapose it, so I wrote about kind of longer form, more evergreen topics. So by comparison, some of our colleagues wrote about today’s news in WordPress. Like, this plugin was released. There was a vulnerability discovered there. And I’m not really interested in that stuff from a writing perspective, unless there’s some neat angle.  So my writing was like… I was trying to like… one of the articles, it was trying to figure out what the most used WordPress theme is. And there’s like a bunch of data sets from, and there’s no like definitive answer in WordPress because you know, everything’s disjointed. Who knows how many Elementor sites there are really, you know, like that sort of thing. So I did like an article about that.  I did a couple of accessibility articles that were really interesting to me. Part of it was interesting. Like we have companies that are like… they’re actually trying. They’re investing heavily in acce

  6. 11/16/2023

    Episode 176 – A Chat With Nancy Lyons

    Introducing Nancy Lyons CEO and co-founder of Clockwork, an enterprise web development company in Minneapolis MN. We’ve known her through the internet for years, and it was a delight to get to talk to her in this episode. Show Notes https://www.nancylyons.com/ https://www.clockwork.com/ Transcript: Topher: Hey everybody, welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Topher, your host, and my regular co-host is Nyasha and she’s here.  Nyasha: Hey, I’m Nyasha. Topher: And I stepped on her introduction, and I’m sorry.  Nyasha: It’s okay. Topher: Before we get going, I want to say thanks to Nexcess for our hosting, and for sponsoring us. They’re good friends. They’re good hosts. They have some really cool WooCommerce automated testing. I don’t know anybody else that does that. Automated testing is awesome, and will save you time and money. They have a cool Sales Performance Monitor and a plugin performance monitor to keep your store running super fast.  All right, our guest today is Nancy Lyons. Welcome.  Nyasha: Thank you. Thanks for having me. Topher: You’re welcome. The first time I ever heard of you was my wife and I bought a remote ticket to Prestige Home and we put it on TV. So we watched your talk on TV. And as it was going, it was like, is it too late to get there? How many hours is it to Minneapolis? And we decided we probably couldn’t get there before you were done. Then we came back the next year just to meet you and you weren’t there. Nancy: That’s rude. Topher: I’ve been mad at you ever since.  Nancy: I’m just glad that you liked the talk. But I feel like we’ve talked off and on over the years on Twitter. Topher: Yeah.  Nancy: Like when I realized who this podcast was with, I was like, “Oh, I know that guy. He and his wife are like a power couple of WordPress. Power couple.”  Nyasha: Oh, yeah.  Nancy: Right? Topher: Yeah. Well, we try. Yeah, I thought it was funny because usually I get requests all the time, all the time from office assistants. Hey, my boss is somebody who is so awesome. You really want to have him on your podcast. I’m just so tired of them, I just delete them almost out of hand. I literally was like, “Nancy? Oh, well, yeah, let’s do that.” Nancy: Sweet. I’m glad I didn’t get deleted. You know, we are on a growth mission, so we have a relatively new, about 18 months chief growth officer. And one of her tactics in the broader marketing plan is just a podcast campaign. So she’s actually working with a booking agency to identify relevant podcasts where, you know, I might be a helpful guest. And then they’re doing the outreach, which is weird for me too. Like, they do the whole media kit, and then they sell me. So I actually had a recording earlier today even and it’s weird to do a couple of recordings in the same day because then you’re like, did I say this already? Is this menopause? But it’s actually been fun because I’ve met, you know, people with different businesses and different interests and podcasts focused on a wide variety of things. So it’s actually been kind of fun. Topher: That’s cool. I really enjoy being on podcasts, too. And I too have done it that often, I think, “Oh, did I already say this? Do they want to hear the story again?” Nancy: Exactly. Right. I think this must be what early-onset dementia is like.  Topher: So tell us who you are and why you’re here, what you do, and WordPress and all that kind of stuff. Where do you live?  Nancy: Sure. Well, I live in Minneapolis. My name is Nancy Lyons, and I am the co-founder and CEO of a company called Clockwork. Clockwork is an experienced design and technology consultancy. A staple of our businesses is WordPress development. We also in the last couple of years spun out a smaller agile studio called Tempo. And Tempo is… you know, Clockwork does a lot of work for the enterprise and we roll in a lot of customer experience, user experience, and change strategy consulting, and then we actually build the solutions that we collaborate toward with our clients. And Clockwork has clients like OPTiM, Ameriprise, UnitedHealth, Ecolab, General Motors. Tempo is actually a studio that was built for startups, small and medium businesses using, you know, obviously a very lean approach, a very lean, agile approach to delivery. So we’re delivering much quicker and WordPress is a staple of that business as well.  So I think it speaks to the fact that WordPress is appropriate for the enterprise and WordPress is appropriate for, you know, startups and small businesses. And having the right partner helps you determine the right implementation of WordPress. So we’re in Minneapolis, but we have clients all over. Nyasha: That is cool. Topher: Yeah. I really liked the idea of having the smaller, lean agency for the people who need smaller, lean stuff.  Nancy: I mean, it’s been good for us because also what we’re finding is even larger companies that don’t want to invest a ton of dollars in testing an idea will come through the Tempo doors, and we’ll test and run and prototype some of their concepts with them and they’re not going through this giant process and there’s not so many stops and starts in the process. It’s a much quicker experience.  Topher: Yeah. I noticed LinkedIn says you’ve been running an agency for 21 years now.  Nancy: Hmm. Topher: I am someone who has been around the agency trail a lot. Especially in the last few years, agencies are struggling to keep people employed lately. Are you still happy with that? I’m not asking if you’re happy if you did it. Are you still happy continuing to do it? Do you see you doing it till you’re 80?  Nancy: I’m barely gonna breathe till I’m 80. So that’s an interesting question. First of all, Clockwork wasn’t our first rodeo. So we had done this before. We actually started- Topher: I’m sorry. Who’s we? Nancy: Oh, sure. I have business partners, and I’ve been with them for 175 years. That’s what it feels like, speaking about, you know, something. They actually started up an internet service provider in 1994.  Topher: Oh, wow.  Nancy: And that is how I met them, and ultimately became a partner and the president of that company, which was… Is it okay if we have dogs in the hallway, this hallway chats?  Nyasha: Yeah, of course. We love dogs. Nancy: He picks now to bark, right?  Topher: Yeah.  Nancy: Sorry about him. That’s Nacho. And he’s very, very, very vocal. I didn’t think for a minute that he would be backing. My apologies. Anyway. So we started in internet service provider in ’94, ’95, built the first website for a commercial client in 1995, sold that company in 2001. We had had an investor prior to that, and worked with that investor pretty heavily, and then walked away from that started Clockwork in January of 2002.  And we called it a startover instead of a startup. We sort of had a better idea of how we wanted to operate. And we’ve evolved over those 21 years. We started out as a web dev shop. And I think the distinction, relative to what you said, is I don’t consider us an agency. When we started we were… I mean, you know, the term is subjective. You can see an agency the way you want to and I’ll see the way I want to.  But when we first started, we were competing with advertising agencies. And advertising agencies saw digital as the bastard stepchild, right? It’s something we put in the basement. There’s too sad, sad developers down there, and we throw creative ideas at them and they execute in line with our expectations and deliver something that maybe is functional but not user-friendly, and maybe delivers on business requirements.  We build software and change businesses. We’re doing a lot. So we don’t do digital marketing. We don’t do banner ads. We’re not doing pay-per-click stuff. We’re not doing any of that. We are doing consulting around customer experience and user experience, product development. We have a change enablement practice, which makes us different because technology changes big businesses. Businesses are fundamentally changed when we build the solutions for them, right? So we are helping our clients think through how to bring their workforce along to ensure the success of these products. So that’s a little different than what we see in your average dev shop. But over the years, we have evolved from being considered an agency to really being a consultancy. And now we see ourselves competing with some of the big three. We see us invited to tables where we’re also seeing Slalom or Accenture. And we do as much thinking and innovation work, strategy work as we do development work. So it’s a little different.  Do I love it? Do I see myself doing it forever? I’ll tell you, I don’t see myself working for anybody else for a while. And there’s a reason for that. I think the reason we’ve been around for 21 years is we don’t have a holding company trying to tell us… you know, I mean, we’re still… I mean, I know you can relate to this. I’m going to assume that you can both relate to this, but tell me if you can’t. You’ve been doing it so long, you know what’s up, right?  Topher: Yeah.  Nancy: And some force comes in and acquires the organization, that changes everything because suddenly they’re less concerned about quality, more concerned about bottom line, or less concerned about security, more concerned about budget, or the sale itself. I mean, my God, when we were acquired the last time, I remember sitting in rooms where all they cared about was the sales pipeline and the closed sales. Not whether or not we could actually deliver the work, not whether or not we had the righ

    41 min

  7. 08/24/2023

    Episode 175 – A Chat With Evelyn Maina

    Introducing Evelyn Maina Evelyn is a very unusual guest in that we brought her into the WordPress community! Years ago when Liam and Tara started this podcast they hired Evelyn as their transcriber. Since then, Evelyn has gotten to know more than 175 WordPressers by transcribing their interviews here on Hallway Chats. Her perspective as an “outsider” was quite heartwarming. Show Notes https://havenscribe.com/ https://glowfaceportal.co.ke/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalyn-maina/ Transcript: Topher: Hey everyone, my name is Topher.  Nyasha: And my name is Nyasha.  Topher: And this is Hallway Chats. We’d like to take a moment to thank our sponsor, Nexcess, a Liquid Web. brand. Nexcess has been a solid web host for the entire HeroPress Network. So if you need hosting, check them out.  Our guest today is Evelyn. Welcome.  Evelyn: Thank you. Topher: You know, I said that the American ways. Is it right? Just the normal way?  Evelyn: Yes. Right. Topher: Okay. Evelyn: Yes.  Topher: So by way of introduction, Evelyn does the transcription for Hallway Chats and a lot of stuff at HeroPress, and has been magnificent. So I feel like she’s already a part of the WordPress community because she read so much of our stuff. But that said, I know almost nothing about you, Evelyn. I don’t know your last name. I know you live in Kenya? Evelyn: Yes. Topher: And that you do transcription. That’s it. So who are you?  Evelyn: Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate. My name is Evelyn Maina. I’m an accountant by profession.  Topher: Oh. Nyasha: Wow.  Evelyn: Yes. So here in Kenya we call it CPAK, and I have a degree in finance.  Topher: Okay.  Evelyn: So I started transcription since 2016. So that’s what I’ve been doing all along. And kind of like I no longer practice accounting.  Topher: Okay. So you’re a full-time transcriptionist now?  Evelyn: Yes.  Topher: Okay. What made you get into that, and what made you fall in love it so much that you quit your current job?  Evelyn: Well, it was actually by accident, I would say. Back in 20… actually 2015 I was working in an insurance company and I got exhausted at some point. I would get anxious and stuff like that, so I decided to take a break from accounting, and from that firm I was working for. And as I was doing that, at some point, I went back to that company to pick up a check that I had left. And a friend of mine told me… because the idea was to take a break for three months, and then get back to it.  Meanwhile, within that three months, the idea was to find another job. And I went back to that company, my friend gave me a contact of a person and she said, “By the way, there’s a way this friend of mine who work online…” She actually said “work online.” She never mentioned transcription. “…this friend of mine who work online, I probably would give you his contact so that you can… I mean, before you find something else to do, just try it out and see how it goes for you. So at that point, I actually didn’t know what working online was or I had never heard the word “transcription”. So I contacted the friend and it turned out they were doing transcription. I tried it out. When I started I still was looking for an accounting job, but at some point, I felt like it was like a nice thing to do. That’s why I fell in love with it.  I never went back to accounting again because when I started I met some nice people in transcription. The idea of learning a lot of things, I’ve learned a little bit about WordPress, stuff about medical, a lot of things. You can imagine eight years that I’ve been doing this with different people. I get to learn a lot of things as I work. I usually say sort of like a free… It’s like I’m in school for free because I learn a lot of things.  The idea of flexibility is what kept me out of… I never want to go back to eight to five again. No more anxiety. I would say the pay is better than you used to earn back then. So all those factors combined I do not see myself going back there any time soon. Topher: That’s wonderful.  Nyasha: Nice. You have such a lovely story.  Evelyn: Yeah, thank you.  Topher: My wife did transcriptions for a short while.  Evelyn: Oh. Evelyn: It was technical stuff and she’s not a computer person, and she quite suddenly started asking me very specific technical questions like over dinner. She’s like, “Wait a minute, where’s this coming from?”  Nyasha: I love people who do transcription work, and I salute you, especially you, Evelyn, because I am.. my southern United States accent I know makes it difficult at times or lots of audio to pick up what I’m saying or the terms I use. So I’m so happy and thankful for you all.  Evelyn: True. True. But I think for the period I’ve done it, because I started in… 2016 was basically kind of orienting myself, getting used to it. So I would say 2017 was when I really officially started and decided this is what I want to do. So I think within that period of time I’ve have come across thousands of… Okay, I don’t know if it’s thousands but well, a lot of accents. And some have gotten used to them. Well, there are some that you can come across that are quite challenging, but generally, I’m comfortable with majority of the accents that I come across. Topher: I have been consistently very impressed with how you’ve managed to transcribe not just accents, but accents over a terrible connection. Have you ever deliberately studied accents or an accent to say, you know, I’d like to get better at polish or you know, or something from Asia?  Evelyn: No, not quite. What usually happens is when you come across a client, whether you’re introduced to or whatever means you find them, what happens is they just basically present whatever they have and you struggle with it. Sometimes the quality of the audio is… I don’t want to say horrible but it’s really not so good. And I think because of that you kind of like get… I don’t know. You just get used to it somehow.  Now, when you present something to me, more often than not, I’ll just handle it. It now comes naturally to me to be able to decipher those accents, different accents. Topher: Very cool. I know you live in Kenya, but that’s all. Do you live in a big city? Do you live downtown? Do you live in a country? Evelyn: Yes. I live in Nairobi. Nairobi is the capital of Kenya. So basically what happens in Nairobi has a different… we call them estates. I don’t know what to call them back there. Normally use British English. So different parts of the town. So I’m basically about 10 kilometers… You translate them two miles and I usually have a difficult time coverting them.  Nyasha: It’s okay.  Evelyn: I’m 10 kilometers from the CBD of Nairobi, central business district. Okay. Yes.  Nyasha: It’s about 6.2 miles. I’m learning. I’m learning. In Kenya or even our school system we usually use British English so it’s like for example back there you will say a trunk, we’ll say a boot, such thing. So yeah, that’s differences. In terms of distance, we use kilometers back here. Topher: Cool.  Nyasha: Cool.  Topher: Do you have a family?  Evelyn: No, not yet. Topher: Oh, okay.  Evelyn: And I understand in the US family means like you’re married and probably children.  Topher: Yeah. It doesn’t have to. You could say like, is your extended family in the city with you, like your parents around, you have cousins?  Evelyn: Okay. Well, I think in my line of work, I’ve noticed when people are saying family they most of the times reference a nuclear family, like have a wife and children. When you say family when you’re here, it’s sort of it could be your mother, your brother. But generally, I would say, I have a mother and brothers and sister, one sister and five brothers. So we are seven of us in my family.  Topher: Oh, nice.  Nyasha: But family of my own, not yet. Topher: Okay.  Nyasha: That’s interesting because you’re right. Usually, people are asking, Do you have children? Are married? Like, with me, I am married, but I don’t have any children. And when I’m referring to my family, I feel like people assume I’m talking about children. But I have a big extended family or… I’m one of four children but I have 15 nieces and nephews and my mom had 10 siblings and my grandmother had 15 siblings, and we’re all still connected. So that’s my extended family. And they could be a cousin that’s twice removed but that’s still my first cousin to me.  So I love that you talked about that because, you know, people typically do mean like nuclear, but we want to know, like, who are the people in your life that you consider family. It could be even friends. Evelyn: Yes.  Nyasha: And that’s awesome it’s seven of you all. I know, it was a very interesting growing up, right, with so many siblings? Evelyn: I love it. It’s so nice having a bunch of siblings around. Although my sister is the firstborn in the family. So kind of like back when I was in primary school, she was married. So I’ve not gotten to experience her as I would have loved but she’s there. She’s more of a mom than a sister. We are so far much apart. It feels like she’s… And then my dad passed when I was younger so sort of like my mom and my elder siblings kind of brought us up.  Nyasha: Oh, that’s wonderful.  Topher: So… go ahead.  Nyasha: I was gonna say, You know what I want to talk about next over. You probably have an idea. I want to talk about food. Evelyn: Amazing. Nyasha: So one of my good friends he’s from Kenya a

    24 min

  8. 08/10/2023

    Episode 174 – WordCamp Birmingham Hallway Chats

    Introducing Aisha Adams and Marcus Burnette at WordCamp Birmingham In February Topher and Cate went to WordCamp Birmingham and Topher was able to interview both Aisha Adams and Marcus Burnette in the hallway. Aisha’s Links: https://aishaadamsmedia.com/ https://wordpress.tv/speakers/aisha-adams/ https://www.facebook.com/aishaadamsmediagroup Marcus’ Links https://mburnette.com/ https://profiles.wordpress.org/mdburnette/ https://wordpress.tv/speakers/marcus-burnette/ Transcript: Topher: Hey folks, welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m your host Topher. This week we have an interesting collection of Hallway Chats from WordCamp Birmingham. A few months ago, Kate and I went down to work in Birmingham, and I got to talk with Aisha and Marcus. We’re going to listen to both of those interviews in this hour today.  But before we get started, I want to say thanks to our sponsor Nexcess. They’ve been really good to us and a faithful companion for a long time now. If you’re looking for a good web host, check out Nexcess.  Hey, folks, this is Topher. I’m at WordCamp Birmingham. I’m here with Aisha, and we’re having an honest-to-goodness hallway chat right here in the lobby of the venue. Aisha, where are you from?  Aisha: Hi, I’m so excited to be here. Actually, I’m originally from Birmingham, Alabama.  Topher: Wow. Aisha: And that is why WordPress, y’all, is so important.  Topher: Good. You said “originally”. Are you still from here or did you go away?  Aisha: I actually live in Asheville. Asheville, North Carolina. Topher: Okay. All right. Awesome. So I don’t know the South. Is that very far away? Do you fly? Aisha: It’s about six hours away. Have you not been to WordPress AVL? Topher: No. Aisha: WordPress AVL. You gotta come to WordCamp AVL. Topher: Okay.  Aisha: You gotta try it out.  Topher: I will do that. Did you drive or fly to get here?  Aisha: We drove. Actually, my husband… Whenever I do WordCamp, he’s like, “Let me just drop you off.” So he dropped me off and took a trip to Atlanta without me.  Topher: Oh. That’s not so bad. Aisha: So I’m here with all my friends and enjoying… Just enjoying being with… It’s been so long since we’ve been together, you know?  Topher: Yeah. Oh, that’s great. So why are you here? What do you do for WordPress?  Aisha: Mostly just have a good time and meet people and learn a lot of things. But I like to get back to the community that gives so much to me. So today I spoke on diversity, equity, and inclusion. And when I’m not speaking on DEI, I’m probably talking about being an influencer using social media marketing to promote your blog. So I have a WordPress blog that has 64,000 followers. And then I also have my business on WordPress site as well. Topher: How are you measuring followers on your blog? What tool do you use to know that? Aisha: I actually use my Facebook because it has the highest engagement. I’ve been very lucky… Facebook recently picked me up to do performance bonus.  Topher: Oh, wow.  Aisha: So I actually get pay per view, per click, per share, per comment. Topher: Wow. Aisha: Yeah. So that’s been an amazing journey. So Facebook is like the hub for kind of where I do everything. But I also use my analytics. I have… You know Jetpack? Topher: Yes.  Aisha: So I use the Jetpack plugin to track my analytics. Topher: Okay, that’s cool. How long have you been doing this? How long you’ve been in WordPress? Aisha: So a funny story. I was a school teacher and I had a car accident. I broke my neck, my wrist, and my leg.  Topher: Oh. Aisha: And my car had actually hydroplaned upside down into a body of water. And I was in the water and thinking to myself, “Yes, I don’t have to go to work tomorrow.” So when I get to the hospital, they’re wheeling me into surgery, because I’m in and out, in and out, and I’m telling the nurse, “You gotta call my boss and tell her I can’t make it today.” And she looks at me and she said, “Sweetie, it’s gonna be a lot of days that you won’t make it,” and I got even more excited.  Topher: Okay, that’s your first clue that that’s not the job for you.  Aisha: It’s time. It’s time. I’ve done my time. I love the kids, I’ve done enough. And I’m gonna be a famous writer. So I started a blog and I had a very boring blog, because I was trying veganism and you know how the vegans are. ? Topher: Oh, yeah.  Aisha: You go vegan, you got to tell everybody about it, how you did it and I would get like two people to my blog and be like, “If I could just get 20 people to my blog.” And a friend of mine reached out to me and he said, “Your blog is really nice, you have a really great platform, but you really have other things that we need to talk about. And right now, you will be more useful to us talking about those things.” So I started actually writing for activists. So I worked with Black Lives Matter Birmingham- Topher: Sure. Aisha: …to tell some of the activism stories that they were working on. I talked to people who felt like they had been done wrong by the justice system. I still share a recipe- Topher: Were you ghostwriting on their behalf or were you like doing journalism and telling their story? Aisha: Journalism and telling their story and bringing people in and starting conversations about the things that mattered in my community. Topher: Yeah, that’s good stuff. That’s better than veganism.  Aisha: Of course. I’m not even vegan anymore. But you could still find some really good food. Topher: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that is really cool. I like that a lot. I have a personal project called HeroPress that facilitates people telling their stories about, you know, just the same sort of stuff. And it is very fulfilling to… because a lot of people I talk to, they’re like, “Oh, I don’t have a story. I’m not interesting. Why would anybody care?” And there’s an art to drawing that out, saying, “Listen, you are cool. If you do have a story, and it’s important, and you need to tell people. And then when they realize that that expression on their face, like, “Oh, wow, I didn’t know that I had this.” Aisha: How did you learn about that like the power of storytelling? How did that come to you?  Topher: It’s funny. Now you’re interviewing me. When I was starting HeroPress, I didn’t know what it was going to be. My task was to come up with something. And I was talking to a young man in India, he was a developer, and he came to me frustrated one day said, “My company is failing. We’re not getting contracts from America. We don’t know what to do. What do I do?”  And I said, “I don’t know. I’m not a businessman. I’m not in India. I don’t know any of this stuff. But I went looking for somebody else who could answer that. So I found some business people in India- Aisha: Oh, wow. Topher: …who knew how to do it and I connected them. And they will help him. And then I thought, Okay, so this is what I want to do. I want to find people in repressed economies or whatever and help them. But I don’t want to come in as the great white savior and say, Here’s what you should be doing. I want to get people who are their neighbors who already succeeded, and then connect with them. So that began my journey of finding those people. I go into a community and I find that somebody who’s done something. And often enough, they don’t know they’ve done something. Like, I have a job and I’m working, and like you have it, you’re working, they’re not, so tell them how you did it.  Aisha: So you’re a connector and you’re also an encourager.  Topher: Yeah.  Aisha: That is wonderful leadership.  Topher: It’s very, very fun. Probably because I mean that’s what fulfills me. Everybody loves what fulfills them. That’s my thing.  Aisha: Nice. Topher: Well, thank you for talking with me. I hope to see you again. Do you get around to other WordCamps? Aisha: Yeah. I’ve done, of course, WordCamp Asheville and WordCamp Birmingham but also WordCamp Philly and WordCamp Jacksonville and WordCamp Greenville and [inaudible Toron?]. Topher: Do you go to WordCamp Philly proper or do you go to US in Philly? Aisha: I actually went to WordCamp Philly proper. Topher: I did that once. Maybe twice. I’ve been to Jacksonville but none of the others you mentioned. Aisha: I have not gone to worlds yet. I really want to go. So hopefully I will get an opportunity someday. Topher: Yeah. You should do US. It’s not that far north this time. Aisha: Okay. Where is it gonna be?  Topher: It’s right next to Washington DC.  Aisha: Okay. So what? Virginia?  Topher: I don’t remember the name of the town. And I’m not sure. It might even be in DC proper. Aisha: Oh. Topher: But it’s that close.  Aisha: I love Disney. I spent time there and I’ve been there for a while.  Topher: So. Yeah, yeah. It’ll be fun. Aisha: Cool. It’s so great talking to you. Thanks for sharing your story. Hi everybody. This is Topher. I’m at WordCamp Birmingham and I am here with Marcus Burnette. And he’s manning the GoDaddy booth with Jessica. Welcome, Marcus. Marcus: Good, Topher. How are you doing? Topher: I’m doing awesome. This is… what are we in? February? How many WordCamps you’ve been to this year? This is your first?  Marcus: Yeah. This is my first one this year. Topher: All right. I don’t think there were very many in January. So what do you do in WordPress?  Marcus: I am on the GoDaddy Pro field team now. I’ve been working with WordPress for I guess about eight, n

    18 min
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About

Sharing stories and building belonging

Information

  • Creator
    Topher DeRosia
  • Years Active
    2017 - 2026
  • Episodes
    180
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Show Website
    Hallway Chats