How Contributing to WordPress as an Agency Helps the WordPress Project – with Brad Williams

[00:00:00] Speaker A: I generally start podcasts now, asking my guests to introduce himself. But Brad, do you need introduction? [00:00:11] Speaker B: No. Of course I do. You know what's funny, and I'm sure we'll get into this and I'll do my little intro here in a second, but you and I are very kind of old school in the WordPress world, right? So the one thing I've noticed in the past three or four years is there are a lot of people that do not know you or me or the crew that's kind of been around for like 15 plus years now, you know what I mean? So anyways, I'm Brad Williams. I'm the co founder of a WordPress focused agency called Web Dev Studios. Been doing that and we're actually in our 15th year, if you can believe it, just to talk about how old we all are. I can 15 years we've been doing this. [00:00:49] Speaker A: I can't believe it's. 15 years. I saw it happen at the time. [00:00:52] Speaker B: I know it's a wild ride to think where all of us were back when we first met and the things we were doing and then all the things that's kind of occurred from that point to this point, and here we. [00:01:02] Speaker A: Are still doing it. So what would you say you're most famous for? Because I know there's another thing that people could possibly know you from most famous for. [00:01:14] Speaker B: Well, there's a couple of things maybe that people might know about me. On the WordPress side of things, I've co authored five WordPress development focused books in the Professional WordPress series. So the most recent being Professional WordPress Plugin Development, second Edition came out a couple of years ago. So I've published some books, some physical books that you can flip through paper. Of course, there's the ebooks and Kindle versions, but having an actual tangible thing in my hands that I spent many hours on with a great group of people is a pretty cool experience. And to be able to share that knowledge in kind of a well rounded way in a book has been great. So certainly that I would say on the WordPress side, outside of WordPress, one thing I was known for is I measured my son with cheesesteaks ever since he was born. So I live outside of Philadelphia in the suburbs. Cheesesteak, if you're not familiar, that's the kind of official food of Philadelphia which is basically chopped steak mixed with cheese. Whiz is the traditional and onions. Right. Very simple, but very good. So when my son was little, I started measuring him with cheesesteaks every couple of weeks and I did it monthly. And then about the two year mark of me me this, it got picked up and kind of went viral for the five minute viral or a couple of days it was all over the internet and then it was done. It was fun. It was fun for my son, fun for me, and now I do it once a year because he's getting older and that's about all he'll allow. So fun little. [00:02:50] Speaker A: Kids will, weirdly enough, start to form their own opinions at one point. What they like and don't like, I never understood. [00:02:56] Speaker B: Yes, sir. Been down that road, my friend. He's seven now and he's still allowing it. So I'm hoping I can get to about maybe 13 or 14 before I start getting some real pushback on that annual photo. [00:03:09] Speaker A: That sounds about right. [00:03:10] Speaker B: We'll see. [00:03:11] Speaker A: So awesome. You are known, I would say, for me, probably started with books. I think the very first one I had, I think you even sent me a version of it, come to think of it, to review. [00:03:30] Speaker B: Man, what a nice guy I am. [00:03:32] Speaker A: Yeah, you are. [00:03:34] Speaker B: I might have. I mean, the first book was like I mean, I want to say it was 2010, so talking 13 years ago for that first book. So, yeah, I sent out a lot of review copies and just want to get the Word out there. And honestly, there's a lot of resources around WordPress now. Right. But if you think back 13 years ago, there weren't. There was a lot of information online, but it was very scattered, it was all over the place. And with open source in development especially, it changes pretty rapidly. So a tutorial from four or five versions ago may not be exactly accurate. Right. And that is a challenge in writing a physical copy book. But the big goal for me and what I believe we accomplished is to kind of get all that information in one spot, right, one place. To kind of give not only a top to bottom read of really how to do proper development in WordPress, but also a good reference that you can always consult and go back to as you're working through it. So it helped kind of get all that in one spot. And the feedback, especially from that first one, was extremely positive because there just wasn't anything out there like that. At the more advanced kind of technical level, it was more about the writers, the bloggers. So this was about how to build with WordPress. [00:04:48] Speaker A: You had a whole bunch of, I would almost call them flimsy type books like My Dutch Seeping Through. Sorry about that. But none of that was really helping you. Maybe from zero to something. But no, I think your book at the time was revolutionary. [00:05:11] Speaker B: Well, I appreciate that. It's the book that I needed at the time, and honestly, it was a bit stressful. One thing, I was in the military, I was in the Marines right out of high school. And that kind of set me on a good path, right towards just getting my head on straight and kind of getting in a good path in life. And part of that is I like to just dive headfirst into things, especially if I don't know them. So when I signed up to do the book. Primarily I got the gig because of I was a pretty active blogger at the time and writing about WordPress development. So I had a really active blog I could show of recent articles and stuff I'm writing about. So that helped. But there was many topics in that book that I didn't even know. Cron is one that specifically stands out. I had never worked with Cron within WordPress and how WordPress uses Cron and scheduled tasks. So it's not the scheduler. I had never worked with that and I had to write a whole chapter about it. It's a little made me a little bit nervous, right? So I had to really spend some time research and make sure I knew what the hell I was talking about. And sometimes you just got to dive in head first, man, and figure it out. And that's what I've done that multiple times in my life. I did it when start a web dev. I did it when I wrote the book. And sometimes you got to get out of your comfort zone and you'll figure it out. [00:06:26] Speaker A: I'm assuming that the research was mostly revolved around actually diving into the code. [00:06:33] Speaker B: Because had to I mean, the best resource for WordPress is the code. You know, back then it wasn't as documented as well as it is now. Now there's basically a process that any new functions, any new code entered into the WordPress core software has to have written documentation that PHP doc block unit test, if appropriate. It has to have that to be included. So if you've never looked at WordPress, start opening up some files, start looking at it when you're in WordPress and you're in whatever screen you're in the admin, post PHP, go find that file and open it up and start skimming through it. And you'll be amazed at how much you'll learn just by looking through the core files. You'll find functions and APIs that you maybe didn't even know were there that you might need. So it's a great way to learn and it's very helpful now with the documentation that's included. [00:07:25] Speaker A: Oh yeah, the difference between now and then is just almost like it's a different CMS. And I guess in a way it is. But the amount of documentation you can find now and then with developer workers.org having stuff explained much better than Codex workers.org ever did, it's a lot easier to jump into understanding if reading through code isn't your thing. [00:07:55] Speaker B: So it is. [00:07:56] Speaker A: I have a question. I remember and you said as much when you said co founder of Webdesk Studios. You started one of first larger WordPress agencies at the time. What was that like at the time? [00:08:15] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, talking about diving ahead first, it was 15 years ago, 2008, April of 2008. So a couple of weeks prior. But I was living in Indiana, just in Indianapolis, working at a big ecommerce website. I was the it director. And I'd always had this kind of itch to do my own thing. Even when I was in the Marines, I kind of wanted to do my own thing, but I got out and I was like, let me get established, let me get a job and build on this career after the military. And I did that for four or five years and around 2008 is the time I decided that I was going to jump. The planning happened prior to that, but 2008 is when I finally made the move and sold my house, packed up my whole life and moved out east to start the company. Looking back, it was kind of crazy. Like, again, I put myself in this position where I didn't really have an opportunity to fail. Like I had to succeed because I was living in my friend's loft in New Jersey. I went from like a 2500 square foot house in Indiana, which is a very kind of inexpensive state to live in in terms of the US to New Jersey, which is like the most expensive state. If you also remember, this is in the middle of the collapse, or economic collapse is starting to form. [00:09:26] Speaker A: At the time it was of course. [00:09:28] Speaker B: We didn't know that was coming, but that's what happened 2008 to 2009. So looking back, it was insane. I had about $2,000 in my bank account, you know what I mean? It was just looking back, I'm like, I don't know what I was thinking, but I didn't have any other option. It had to work. So we're just know legit coffee table startup of a little bit of money in the bank and let's go out there and grind and find some clients and start building cool things. So happened very organically. [00:09:57] Speaker A: Sorry, who were your co founders again? [00:09:59] Speaker B: So myself and Brian Messeliner, who we met when we were in the Marine Corps, and we were developers in the Marine Corps. So Marine Corps actually taught us to write code, even though it was a bit older code, like Visual Basic Six and Ada and some things. But they taught us coding and concepts, which once you kind of understand the concepts of programming, you can springboard into pretty much any language, right? It's just a syntax thing mostly. So him and I started the company and it was again, very organic. He was still working full time somewhere else, so he had kind of 1ft in the door, but I was all in. So we just started grinding. And I think the timing of when WordPress started to take off really aligned with when we kind of started the company and started to grow. Because like you said, WordPress back then was very much blogging software. There weren't custom post types that didn't exist. So we were building things in very interesting ways, but we were still pushing the boundaries of WordPress. Like we built a car dealership website back in 2009, which nobody was doing that stuff using WordPress. And it was all like if you wrote a blog post and checked the car category, then it knew what template to load to show off that car. Right. That's how we were kind of getting around the rules of WordPress at the time. But yeah, there was no funding. It was all organic. It was very much just kind of bootstrapped and let's figure this out. And it just continued to grow. And of course, when WordPress really exploded around the 3.0 release with custom post types and multi site and all that great stuff, we were right there at the front lines and then all this amazing stuff just kind of landed in our laps. So very lucky. I think the timing, obviously, and just kind of having the there is no plan B plan, if you will. Yeah, it had to work and so we made it work. [00:11:41] Speaker A: I recognize very much of it in a similar fashion when looking at how that period went for me as well. But I think in end of 2005, I'd finished moving over all of my existing clients from Mambo and Joomla over to WordPress, because 1.22 introduced Pages, which was a godsend to me. [00:12:09] Speaker B: That's how old we are. He's talking using WordPress before pages existed. [00:12:14] Speaker A: Yeah, I played with it before, never really used it. Like not on a Life site, like actively using it. But one, two, two made it real for me. And then 2006, I started really ramp up. Yeah. And like you said, the hacks you had to figure out to just to display different type of content which was in the blog, not wanting to use well, not wanting to show it in the blog. Yeah, you had to get very creative. [00:12:45] Speaker B: You did. [00:12:48] Speaker A: I was going to say, if you look back at the I mean, WordPress will be 20 years this month, right. So I'm sure you've looked back like, what are the most significant things that you think has changed in either WordPress or the WordPress community over that period since you first started and now? [00:13:12] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I mean, obviously a lot's changed, right? I mean, if you look at the core software, we talked about kind of growing from a great blogging platform to a really great content management system, right. Like just those leaps and bounds to make it more of a robust solution have changed things, I think one big glaring thing, we talked about how we've been doing this for a long time, right. So there's always new people coming into WordPress in the community, which is great. That's what you want, right? You always want fresh faces and ideas and getting more people involved. The one big thing, especially being on the agency side, is if you look at just the overall money that's in WordPress, a lot of people don't really talk about this, but just think of the economic size of the WordPress footprint in terms of money out there, right, in terms of spend or capital or whatever. But this is a multibillion dollar industry now, right? I mean, it is between premium themes, plugins things like what I'm doing, my company building amazing experiences for massive brands. It is a multibillion dollar world in WordPress and that has obviously changes things, right, when there's so much money at play and so many things on the table. Because I still think by and large we're all pretty friendly in the community. But it's very different when there's a lot more money involved in how competitors look at each other and how they maybe work with each other or not. And it's gotten a little more cutthroat certainly than it used to be. And that's just the natural growth of something like WordPress becoming insanely popular and just a lot of money being poured into it. Right. So I think that's been a big change. Mean, back when we just started all going to WordPress and stuff, we were literally all just figuring this out together, right? I mean, collectively, like the WordPress community, we were kind of figuring this all out together in real time and figuring out how we could use WordPress or what we could do with it. And would larger companies and media sites want to use WordPress ever? Right, well, we all made that happen again collectively as a community got WordPress in the enterprise. So it is running about half the internet, you know what I mean? So a lot's changed and money changes things, for better or worse. It does, right? [00:15:21] Speaker A: Yeah. I think I remember connecting with you and this is probably 2008, 2009, trying to figure out a solution and I probably hurled it at Twitter, just at anybody who wanted to listen. And I think you responded by saying, oh, I have a function for that, I've done this before. Here you go. And I think that is one of the earliest memories that I have, that somebody shared something without any financial motive while it was being used commercially. You use it commercially yourself, but you were happy to share. I think that for me was one of the very first times that I realized like, oh, wow, that's a very different mindset than from what I grew up with. [00:16:10] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't think I've ever shared. [00:16:12] Speaker A: That later with you, I think. [00:16:13] Speaker B: I think yeah, I don't think you have that's cool to hear, man. I appreciate that. It's the open source mentality. Right? And I think one of the reasons I was drawn to open source because initially, I think when you first hear about open source, it's confusing, right? It's like, what do you mean it's open source? Anyone can get access to my code. Like, no, that's not what it means. The code is available, but anyone can just access your server. Right. I think looking back at it, the reason I was really brought into open source initially because I grew up learning Web development. Obviously, I learned in the Marines a little bit, but I was really self taught after that. And it was primarily in forums and message boards in, like, the early 2000s, which were extremely active back then. That was the Twitter or the platform of the day. You found your message board community. Right. In this case, I found some Web development communities primarily on SitePoint. That's where I learned most of everything early on, was through SitePoint forums, which were massively popular back then, and forums. You're just helping each other, right? I went from asking a ton of questions to answering a ton of questions over time. And back then, I was doing all, like, classic ASP and starting to get into some net, but it was still pretty new. And I started to earn awards. I'd get, like, the ASP Developer of the Year award and stuff, just by answering questions, helping people. But ultimately it was making me a better developer because I was helping people. And by doing that, I was continuing to learn and grow and push myself. And that transcends directly into open source, right? Helping each other and learning together and oh, did you try this or that? Did this work? No, that didn't work. Like, it's the same thing, right? It's just a new medium, new way of doing things. [00:17:52] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:17:52] Speaker B: I think a lot of us kind of that grew up and learned to code kind of online, in message boards, in forums, in ways like that. Open source is just a natural transition because, again, if we're not all helping each other and helping the platform grow, the project will die. Right? That's just the nature of open source. And we've seen other massive platforms that kind of die off because the community kind of died off or lost interest or whatever reason decisions were made that people didn't agree with and they walked. That's kind of I'm curious, were you also in that early 2000s meshes board world of web development? [00:18:31] Speaker A: I tried. I started out with Mumbo, and for those who don't know what mumbo is, it was a precursor to Joomla. Joomla is a fork of mumbo. And I didn't find the community very welcoming, which made it hard for me to really dive in. And I've been playing with stuff online since before I had broadband, but the day I got broadband was the day the world opened for me. That is February 1, 1996. I remember it because it was the. [00:19:16] Speaker B: First of the month and a 2400 bitrate modem, like dialing in. [00:19:22] Speaker A: Before that, I had the fastest what was it? Fifty six k. Six fifty six k, yeah. And after that yeah. Where did I find my information? I tried to get into those communities, but not very welcoming, not very like, Here, let me help you out. It didn't warn my heart, so to speak. And I remember so you were probably one of the first persons that actually shared, like, a proper solution with me, but the first person to actually share a piece of code. Very simple. Just CSS. Because at the time, I kind of knew CSS, but I didn't really know CSS because I'm an auto. Didct is that the word in English? So I learn just by doing, not necessarily by reading the manual. [00:20:13] Speaker B: I'm very similar. [00:20:15] Speaker A: I started using Detour, which was Brian Gardner's theme, one of his themes he released early on. And I tried to figure out something, and I couldn't figure it out. And I think he published his email address somewhere or something. So I sent him an email saying, I really can't figure this out. And I got an answer within a day, and it was the answer I needed. I was like, Holy crap, this is amazing. And that was very welcoming. And that was further solidifying my entry into WordPress. But before that, I had a tough time finding the information I needed. In the beginning, you had way more bloggers than you have now, because, like you said, there's money now, so that means there's different interests. I mean, people blog about different types of stuff, but in the early days, people shared way more solution type deals. One of my favorite authors still today is Justin Tadlog. He would go into depth. He would explain not just, here's how you do it, but also explain why you did it like this. And I remember seeing solutions he offered at the time he offered them, I no idea what I'm going to do with this. And then seven months later, client asked, can you do this? And I went like, I've seen a solution for this. Let me grab that URL and reproduce. And there you go. It worked. So learning code for me, started rough, really. When I deep dived in, the WordPress became fun. Like, 2008 is when I'm in full steam, pushing forward. [00:21:57] Speaker B: Yeah, the community aspect is extremely important, and I definitely consider myself like either an extroverted introvert or an introverted extrovert. I've never quite sat down to figure out the difference. But I have tendencies that go both ways, right? If I'm in a comfortable setting, I'm extremely extroverted, right? But if you put me in a room with 50 people, I don't know, I'm not right? I'll be quiet and I'll listen. I'll take it in. People talk to me, I'll talk to them. But I'm not going to generally put myself out there. And so going to a conference or anything, even a meetup, can be very intimidating if you don't know anybody. Extremely intimidating for many of us. So I know early on I struggled with that, too. I remember going to DrupalCon and sat in a lot of really great presentations, but didn't really connect with anybody, didn't really talk to a lot of people because I just wasn't comfortable doing that. And I didn't really have any in my mind, I had no value to bring because I was just dipping my toe in drupal, which obviously we know that's not true, right? Everybody has value they can bring. And especially if you're fresh into a project, you have a lot of value you can bring because you have fresh eyeballs. That not like us that have been staring at WordPress for 15 years. Getting back to kind of putting yourself out there. Some of the advice I give to people WordPress is extremely welcoming, which is another reason why I think it's grown so much. Because you go to events, there's so many opportunities even for extremely introverted people to find their click or to sit down with people at lunch and have a nice conversation and also to get away and go decompress. And that's completely acceptable. And we even talk about it because we know like, hey, if I'm at an event all day long talking, I might just step away for an hour or so and go back to my room and that's fine, perfectly accepted. And everyone a lot of us do. Uh, but find those. I actually, I was just at WordCamp Phoenix. It's only my second event know, Pandemic. And um, and I met a guy named Kurt and he was a, you know, gave me some interesting advice that works really well for him and I thought it was great. So I'll share a he said he's extremely introvert too, right? And I was like, I had no idea. This guy was super chatty, talking to everybody. He's like, he would go to events, walk around a couple of laps, not talk to anybody, basically call his wife and say, yeah, it's not that great, and leave. And he was like, he just kept doing that. And he's like, I need to put myself out there. So what he started to do is he would volunteer because when he has a set job job and he would always try to volunteer at the front desk when the check in. Because when he has a set job, he was like a totally different person because now he has a reason to be talking to people, right? He is volunteering, he is helping. He has a reason to be talking to people, which is the only excuse he needed to really start opening up and interacting with people. And I was like, that is actually really good advice. Like, if you're a little bit concerned, volunteer. It's a really safe space with really welcoming people and it's a great way to get out there. And then you're going to have a job that is going to basically require you to have some type of interaction and I bet you're going to have a much better experience at events if you try that. So I thought it was great advice. [00:24:50] Speaker A: I would say the vast majority of my interactions have come from either organizing or volunteering meetups and work camps. It's the best way to get acquainted with whomever is at such an event. And it certainly helps in terms of allowing you, but also the other to step over that certain barrier that's always there, especially if you are part of the organization, because they think you know everything about the event, which you've never organized before. [00:25:22] Speaker B: So you're the expert. Can you fix my printer? [00:25:26] Speaker A: Be the expert. Yeah, you're my new best friend. Help me out here. [00:25:29] Speaker B: I look what and those local communities, too, you mentioned meetups, that's another great way they're starting to come back. Many of them have been virtual for a while, but they're starting to come back in person. Another great kind of safe space, if you will, because it's your local community, it's people that live where you live that know the same places, you know, and maybe know the same people. So it's in my mind a little bit less intimidating to start there because it's local, it's friendly, it's usually much smaller groups, and then you can kind of expand to larger events. But the events are all starting to come back. I expect next year to really kind of explode. There's a lot this year, but next year, I think is when we're going to really see a resurgence of the events that we kind of have grown to expect to see every year. [00:26:13] Speaker A: Yeah, it's still relatively slow, but at least it's coming back. I'm very happy for that. So I don't get any said this on previous podcasts, but I don't get a lot of joy from online events. I'm happy to present on them and do panels and all that sort of stuff, but attending doesn't work for me. [00:26:34] Speaker B: Yeah, I think about towards the end of 2020, I was kind of burnt out on that and it hasn't really come back. Like you said, I won't really attend them. There might be a presentation I might go back and want to watch about a specific topic. But it is it's draining because we're doing this all day long, right? We're on video, we're on calls, and then to say, okay, now in the evening, you want to sit on and watch more videos on your screen is like, no, I absolutely do not. [00:26:59] Speaker A: No, I need downtime. [00:27:00] Speaker B: Thank you very much. I need downtime. But it does expose those events to the global audience. And the nice thing about it is they're always recorded. Even at Word camps, I tell people, like, I almost never go to presentations because the Hallway Track, as you know, I'm sure we're big fans of the Hallway Track, right, which is just hanging out in the hallway and talking to people. That's where I get a lot of value out of camps. You can't really reproduce that at home. But what I can do is go back and watch those presentations at home. So I skip a lot of the presentations unless I really want to support a friend or a team. Member or something, and then I'll watch them later because I want to talk to Rimkiss in the hallway. I want to talk to meet people and see what they're working on and how can we help? [00:27:44] Speaker A: Would you say that the change that we've seen over the last 15 years, where one of the contributing factors you mentioned is the money, right. There's companies in the WordPress sphere that have over 200 people that need to be fed and the families that go with that. So the dependency to make money is much higher. Would you say that has been a positive net positive or net negative or is that a hard question? [00:28:14] Speaker B: It's a big question because I don't want to make it sound like companies growing and making money is a bad thing because it's not, right? We want to be successful. We want our team members to be successful. I don't take it lightly that Web Dev supports 50 plus team members and their families. That's a massive responsibility that as an owner, we have on our shoulders. Every decision I make and everything I do, I have that in my mind, right? Like even those really hard decisions, if you have to let somebody go or something, right? Those are the worst things you have to do. But what I remember is how that situation is impacting all these other team members and their families. Can I help them? So it makes it while not an easy pill to swallow, it makes it a little easier knowing that you got to do the right thing to protect your team, right? So I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing across the board, but inherently when there's more money, there's more shady things going on. There's certainly more scams and just people clicking on links, getting hacked, whatever. There's just more of that because WordPress has a massive footprint, so it's a huge target and there's a lot of money in this industry, so it's ripe for the picking in terms of trying to get one over on people. So I don't think it's a bad thing. I think it's just it changes things, right? And I think you need to be aware of that, especially when you're talking to people and you're meeting people and you look at things online. Is it all ask, ask, take, or are we kind of, like you said, helping each other out, helping what do they say? Like, rising tides raises all ships or something that's open source. So I look at those companies and those people. If all you're doing is taking, that starts to become obvious. You know what I mean? Taking from the community, taking trying to get money or selling products that aren't great. Or like if you're just taking and not giving back, then that starts to be a big red flag for you. [00:30:05] Speaker A: So that's an interesting one because if you look on the third podcast I had with Matt, Matt Madeiras, he mentioned something along the lines of there's 8000 people who are in the core, core of the WordPress project community. Obviously, the number of users and agencies and everything that you can possibly think of there is way larger than that. I dare not think in percentages, but perhaps it's only 1% to 10,000. I don't know. There's a lot of at least, so I know a lot of agencies just start with that example that do zero giving back to WordPress as the project. They just take take they're extremely verbal in their communications, trying to get more clients and very much on that Hustle mode, I guess. How do you experience that? [00:31:12] Speaker B: Yeah. It is out there, right? Yeah. Again, WordPress is huge. Like you said, it's hard to know how many people use it or just how many people work with it. Those are massive numbers either way, right? So I'm sure there's a lot of agencies and companies out there that just use WordPress, right. And they don't do anything beyond use it for their clients. We're very much big fans, proponents of open source, and we always have been. We're passionate about it. It's one of the reasons we went all in on WordPress in early 2010. And it was a risky call because we were doing a lot of other stuff too, and we got rid of all the other stuff and just focused on WordPress. I guess I'm trying to get my thoughts good. I think Matt's point around the 8000, he's not wrong, right? WordPress is huge. But in terms of the people that really care about it, really care about the direction it's going, really care about decisions that going to be made, that is a small group, but that is a hugely important group. Right. Because we are helping direct WordPress, whether you realize it or not, whether we're working on core, helping with Core or not, we're all helping shape WordPress in some way. At Web Dev, we've always wanted to make sure we're giving back and not just taking. And when Matt introduced matt Mullenweg introduced the Five for the Future initiative back in almost ten years ago, this is 2014, when he announced that. And the idea is that companies that are using WordPress, if they could give back 5% of their time to the project and contributing back to the project, imagine how much WordPress would grow and how quicker it could potentially grow if we're all just giving back 5%. So we took that to heart and we've been contributing to Five for the Future since the start, since 2014. Yeah. Now we do it. It's the last Friday of the month, company wide, everybody contributes, right? And we contribute to the project. And I take that in a much broader when I say contribute to WordPress, I look that as a much broader circle than I think some people do, because many people look at that as just contributing a WordPress code or on one of the official teams of WordPress. And if you're not doing that, it's not contributing. I don't agree with that. The way I look at contributing, the way we talk to our team about it, is you're putting something out there, you're helping. It could be knowledge, it could be information, it could be whatever, but you're putting it out to the public to help them at some point, right? So if you write a blog post about how to work with a gutenberg block editor that is 100% contributing to WordPress, in my opinion, right? You're sharing knowledge. You're putting more information about good information about WordPress out in the world that's contributing. So I've been working on and we're going to post our 15 year blog post. And so I did the math and the numbers. So we've contributed almost 12,000 hours that we've logged to our Five for the Future initiative within our company. Now, it's actually even bigger than that because we have JC who helped organize WordCamp Asia. She put way more time in than the one Five for the Future day a month. But just as our official initiative under Web dev almost 12,000 hours, which you can do the math on, whatever your hourly rate is, that's not chump change. That's a decent effort we put in and we're better for it. You know what I mean? It's a win win. Our team is better for it. It gives them a really day to work on their passion projects. It's an awesome benefit that we talk about. We brag about, we tell all of our new potential sales or our calls with potential new clients. We talk to them about it. We brag about it because it shows our passion for what we do. We're not just taking, I don't just want your money, I want to give you the best. I want to exceed your goals across the board, set you up in the best possible place with WordPress, and then the sky's the limit and I want to be your partner ongoing. So I want that to come across from our initial conversation with everybody we talk to because that's how passionate we are and it's a win win. [00:34:59] Speaker A: That's an amazing number of hours and you expanded on already. But I was going to say that it has to be much larger than that because if that's just the logged hours, right? [00:35:11] Speaker B: That's just the logged hours on those Five for the Future days. So I would love to see more people do that officially. I know other companies could. Other companies, especially well known WordPress companies, contribute a lot? What we don't see is kind of formality around the Five for the Future piece. And I think that is an area that I would like to see more of because we've actually even helped coach companies. We've had companies reach out and say, we would love to do this. Can you talk to us about how we're doing it great, let's hop on a Know. And we've done that with multiple companies in WordPress and said, this is how we do it, this is what works for us. Might be different for you, but this is how it works for Know. So we're helping spread that knowledge and trying to get more people involved. We're very active on social media, I'm sure you've seen, and especially on those five for the future days, we want to brag about what we're working on. So we ask our team to tweet so we can put it out there to, again, try to get more people interested and involved in the idea of contributing to WordPress. So it's a good effort, I really hope, to see more people over time get involved. [00:36:04] Speaker A: What's the one thing that would need to happen for this to be adopted by a larger crowd other than them understanding what it is and what the goal is. [00:36:14] Speaker B: Honestly, I think one of the biggest issues is Matt Baldwig needs to talk about it more. I think that's number one, right? He brings it up about once a year at State of the Word, and that's Know, I really think he just needs to talk about it. You know, talk about it, tweet about it once a month, or really prop up companies and I'm not doing this just for self promotion, but prop up companies like Web Dev and say, look at what they're doing, it's working for them. You should be doing this. And Matt has a massive audience and a huge reach. If he just talked about it a little bit more, I guarantee you it would take off more. But he's not super active on social and he does tweet here and there, but I wish Matt would put a little bit more push into that publicly, outside of just State of the Word. [00:37:00] Speaker A: That's a very good point. I think that would help. Indeed. So if you look at the again, I'm going to cite the 15 years because that is a huge milestone. [00:37:15] Speaker B: Very proud of it and you should. [00:37:17] Speaker A: Be, especially how you've done it and with what you've achieved while doing it. You've seen as you and your company were maturing, you've seen WordPress mature. What is the one thing you're most happy with right now? Like, I'm so glad we have this versus 1015 years ago. [00:37:38] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. There's been some big features or changes, however you want to look at it. You got full site editing, you have Gutenberg and the Block Editor. Those have been very like, game changers. Whether you like them or not, they've changed the game one way or the other. Mean it's a tough one. Well, I do actually like Gutenberg and it's taken me a while to get to that point. When it was first released, it was very rough around the edges, I think we all agree, and it wasn't something that we were comfortable using for clients because of that. I don't want to build something on a house of cards, right? And then it changes every release. And now we look like we don't know what we're doing because the project didn't have a clear direction, I guess, at some point. But we definitely warmed up to it over the years. And now there's so many great tools that even make it easier, like doing ACF blocks and stuff, that just make it easy to roll out blocks without having to do the crazy react absolutely solution. Yeah, you can roll out really powerful websites with code and utilize in the block editor. Of course, you can do it without code. There's a lot of options there. But we work with very large projects and very big brands. Almost everything we do is very customized. So the no code solution is not really a solution for our type of clients. But I think the Gutenberg one is a biggie. It's taken me a while to get there, but we're certainly there and have been for a while. And now that I've seen how our clients really react to it, it's good. It still has more to go. It's not all the way there, in my opinion. I think the UI needs some serious help to make it a little bit more intuitive, a little bit easier. But the power that it gives our users without having to bolt on another page builder or something that adds all that overhead to give them that drag and drop is huge. This is a good question I like to ask. A lot of people come to us, say, hey, I want to use beaver builder. And again, nothing against page builders. There's a great space for that, just not generally in the enterprise where we're at. But the one thing I say is when someone says, I need a page builder, I like to ask a question. Okay, well, let's really dig into why you need a page builder. And when you start peeling back that onion and asking those questions, what you realize is they want drag and drop on their content. They're not talking about their menu, they're not talking about their footer, they're talking about the content. I'm like, Great, you don't need a page builder. You just need a really good Gutenberg integration, right? And then you drag and drop. You can do all that directly in the content. So it really satisfies a lot of the need for really robust content creation in a very quick way. So I'm happy with where we've come at this point. I wish we got here a little bit quicker, but I'm very excited about kind of where we're going to and again, tighten it up because it's open source. Sometimes you just got to ship it and keep iterating. And people may not agree with that, but version one is the hardest thing to get out the door. So it had to get out the door and iterate and now it's in a much better spot. [00:40:28] Speaker A: Yeah. So Gutenberg is a great example of opening up a new realm of possibilities. I would say that I get a similar types of requests and similar types of answers in terms of what they actually need from a page builder, the drag and drop part. And it's still a little ironic to me that that particular part inside of Gutenberg the block editor is still too rough because we still don't have proper drag and drop. Right. [00:41:05] Speaker B: It's a little clunky. Right? It's a little clunky, yeah. [00:41:07] Speaker A: It works with the list view. But then also if you open up a new column and you already have a paragraph you want to slide into the column, you need to first add an empty paragraph so then you can slide in paragraph. You want it there. [00:41:21] Speaker B: It's a little doesn't make quirks quirks. You got to learn and kind of understand the workflow there. But that's the area I'd really like to see it improved is the drag and drop. Just the visual kind of side of it is one of the reasons WordPress got so popular early on, in my opinion, is the intuitiveness of it. Right? Like you could log somebody into Word, press that's never used it before, sit them down and say, create a post, publish a post, and they would be able to do know now it's a little bit harder. Right? Publish a post. Yeah, they could probably do it, but it's a little bit more complex than it used to be because WordPress is a little bit more complex, but that's the reason it's taken off. And that's one of the reasons we are drawn to it so early on. Because when we train our clients on WordPress versus Drupal or Joomla or something else that we were like, they got WordPress like that. You know what I mean? The other stuff they did not. And then they would want us to really customize the admin and this doesn't make sense. And it's like now we're getting way out of scope here, right? Yeah, it'll get there. We got to keep iterating. That's the most important thing is just keep moving that needle forward. [00:42:25] Speaker A: I see 2023 as the year where it starts to mature. I see a lot. So from six one to six two, I really saw some fine tuning, especially around the site editor itself, but also for the block editor, there's a lot of fine tuning where there's stuff just making more and more sense. And I would say six three was going to probably six four as well is going to be continuing that trend. If you activate Gutenberg as the plugin. Now you'll see what we're getting. It's quite nice how it's becoming something I'm happy to promote instead of my personal philosophy has always been, if we can stay native, please let's stay native. But I also have clients who they just needed beaver builder or elementor, and. [00:43:17] Speaker B: It'S a good solution. I love beaver builder. It's an amazing team, great group of people over there. [00:43:21] Speaker A: But as soon as you start thinking, I need performance or I need to be able to lock it down more, or any of those things that are more important for sites where there's 1015 editors and high availability yeah. [00:43:40] Speaker B: When you start spending more time, like disabling features, then you might want to kind of rethink if that is the best path forward. And we did use some page builders for a while, and that's what ended up happening. We were spending as much time turning things off and removing permissions so that the client didn't be the client. [00:44:07] Speaker A: As in many things. I agree with you on what is the most exciting thing about WordPress now, like what has happened in the last 1015 years. Sure, there's been custom post types, there's been the Rest API. There's all types of and those are biggies. [00:44:25] Speaker B: Those are game changers, too, in their own right. So I think Gutenberg just kind of hits all sides of it, right. Rest API is insanely powerful and much needed. But most WordPress projects do not use it. Right. They don't need it. [00:44:39] Speaker A: Correct. [00:44:39] Speaker B: But the ones that do, which is a lot of the projects we do, thank God Rest API in there now. Right. [00:44:47] Speaker A: So that's on the code side of things, what is the thing you enjoy most in the community side of things? Because the community as a whole has grown enormously. And I'm going to preface here with something I personally don't like about it. What's happened is that there's a lot of the OGS, maybe not the right word to use here. Those who were active in the early beginnings are kind of disappearing from the project. I miss some of those voices. But in terms of changes that we see in the community itself, what strikes you the most? What is the thing that you go like, okay, I'm glad we have this now, or that is happening? [00:45:30] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I've always been a fan of what we're doing here, right? Like podcasts and just putting out content. I've been a fan of just the media side of WordPress. I was early, early on, just to date myself even more. I was on the first episode of the WordPress weekly podcast back when Jeff Row first launched WP Tavern way back when. Had no idea what I was talking about. If you listen to it, I think at one point I even recommended modifying the code. It's fun to look back at that like, wow, this is before I even started web dev. I'm on this, talking about WordPress like, I know what the hell that's talking about. Now. If you think about it, there are so many we talked about knowledge and information around WordPress, like development. Otherwise there's so much great kind of content around WordPress. It's not just like the WP Tavern on one podcast out there, right? There's like ten different pretty active sites talking about WordPress and 1020 30 podcasts that are active. And obviously I'm not consuming at all and most people aren't, but I like that there's a lot out there. It's active and this type of stuff is really fun and this has always been a bit of a passion of mine, just kind of talking tech and geeking out and so it's an itch I've always enjoyed scratching in my books. The reason it's interesting because the last chapter is always a resource chapter, right? And I talk about where to find more information. Like we talk about obviously Slack and we talk about the Developer Handbook and some different areas. But also I like to highlight the sites where you can get a lot of WordPress information and news and active podcasts. And I remember in each of the five books I would go to update that list and almost all the podcasts would be gone. And usually like, one of the media sites, which is usually the WP Tavern would still exist and all the other ones would be dead. Things just kept kind of dying off between each iteration. But now it seems like especially in the past couple of years, and maybe this is pandemic related, there's just like a lot more of these sites have popped up with really thoughtful members of the community, really kind of putting thoughtful pieces out there and kind of asking interesting questions to get conversations going. I definitely am enjoying that side just because it's always something I've enjoyed with them. [00:47:41] Speaker A: So you're basically saying you're happy for me to finally have started a podcast. [00:47:45] Speaker B: I am. I mean, I subscribed to your newsletter and you're putting out great content. Like, I like this stuff, you know what I mean? I don't want the generic mass distribution email to 500,000 people, you know what I mean? I like the more intimate stuff like you're doing and you still have a pretty decent subscriber list, but it's your thoughts. It's like, this is interesting, that's interesting. Hey, this caught my eye and you sharing that information and me knowing you and us being friends, I value that stuff way higher than I do some mass distribution lists and whatever links they're putting in there that are probably sponsored and they're not telling me, you know what I mean? I love that kind of the more intimate side of it and there's so many great tools to do this. We're podcasting on Wave and I've never used it before and it's great, it's easy. [00:48:25] Speaker A: Yeah. So I think the rise of podcasts and I think YouTube as a whole as well, is something I've been looking at for the last two, three years, but probably even longer. Just never found time for myself to dedicate, like, okay, and now I'm actually going to do it. The move to media from slowly away from so we went from blogs to social, and now we're slowly going back to blogs and podcasts, newsletters and YouTube, all of these different avenues. I guess YouTube still is social, but it feels different. I like seeing that for probably the same reasons. There's more interaction, there's more in depth sharing of knowledge. And yeah, it's why I jumped into it. Finally. [00:49:30] Speaker B: About time. [00:49:32] Speaker A: I know, man. And the time is the thing, right? You have to have a continued focus. I think that's probably the toughest thing to okay, I'm going to grant myself, I'm going to give myself permission, actually spend X amount of hours per week to do this because that's what it took. And the weird thing is, for me personally, this is how I started. Like, you started sharing as soon as you started learning. I did the same thing. So around 2008, I started a worker's blog was in Dutch, and I started sharing all these types of things and solutions or even translating existing ones from English just so the Dutch audience would have a chance to do a better type of WordPress. And that whole sharing thing. Yeah, I'm happy it's happening more and more again. My only wish is that people will start to blog more again. [00:50:32] Speaker B: Yeah. I wonder if that's going to make a resurgence. I was wondering that too, especially with the Twitter situation. Like you said, less people are on Twitter. It's kind of in this weird state. It feels like something else needs to fill some kind of void and we're all kind of waiting to see. But is it blogging? Like, is blogging going to kind of resurge? And I'm just as guilty. I fell off years ago too, and I don't other than some random blogs on our company website, my personal blog has been dormant for a long time now. [00:51:00] Speaker A: I published close to nothing in 2016. 17 and 18, probably 19 as well. Just didn't feel the inspiration to do so. But I would like for that to have a resurgence. But I have some conditions I'd like to include as well. And that's like activity, pub, indie web stuff. Fetaverse. What is the proper English pronunciation of that? Fetaverse. [00:51:30] Speaker B: Metaverse? [00:51:31] Speaker A: No, fetty first. Like what mastodon does. Essentially the collection. It's like the hive mind you sort of create. [00:51:41] Speaker B: Right. It makes sense. [00:51:43] Speaker A: If we're doing this again, then include this. Mike is going to hate me for not remembering the name, but Mike McAllister started that blog post where he essentially said, this is something I would like to work on, and then got a hold of other people saying exactly. So I'd like to help. How can I help? Openpress. You think he called? Oh, so Mike is going to be proud of me again. Good face. [00:52:11] Speaker B: Sounds like you need to have Mike on the show. [00:52:14] Speaker A: I will have him on the show. [00:52:15] Speaker B: Get some clarity because it does sound interesting. [00:52:18] Speaker A: Yeah. So if we're doing this again, then please include this, these types of protocols, because that makes it so much more like if I comment on something on Twitter or Maston that has been published on the blog, you want to have that as a unified conversation, right. Somewhere you need to have a way to sort of communicate between the various channels. That's a problem I think we need to solve because it's been too scattered and we need to find ways to bring it back into yeah. [00:52:50] Speaker B: Remember back in early blogging days, there were so many different tools that just don't exist anymore because people stopped blogging, right? Like Pingbacks and Trackbacks were like all the rage. And that's how you know if people were talking about you or linking to you. And then we all had our blog roles of our friends and people we followed. And then there was a service, I'm trying to remember the name of it, but it was a way that it kind of made it more social between the blogs. Right? Like what was it called? Blog Spotter? I don't know. [00:53:16] Speaker A: Not blog. [00:53:16] Speaker B: Something like that. Blogger? No, these are services. I don't know. It's some tool. But anyways, it was a way to kind of take all the blogs because everybody's very active 15 years ago blogging and essentially have a network, in a sense, of the blogs you follow and to get updates and stuff. And all that stuff has just kind of fallen off. Like, nobody does any of it anymore. Right. Pingbacks and Trackbacks are just disabled. Nobody wants them. People even stop commenting on blog posts. They don't comment as much as they used to. [00:53:42] Speaker A: Yeah, they're happy to vent on Twitter or Facebook or whatever, but are we becoming old? [00:53:49] Speaker B: Is that part of part it is. This is the thing. Just take a step back. There's so much crap going on in the world right now, and so many people are just angry about everything. And a lot of it has to do with change. Right. If you take a step back, people inherently, humans inherently do not like change. Right. We get very used to something, and if you change that on us, we don't like it, most of us. And a lot of what's going on in the world and even the stuff we're talking about here, a lot of it has to do with change, right? Like, things are changing and evolving and we're in technology, so that should not be a surprise to any of us that things are always going to change, right? Yeah. We had the Web Three a couple of years ago where that was all the stuff, and now it's kind of people trying to figure out what direction that's going. But now AI is just literally taking over everything. You hear everybody's an AI expert. It's going to involve all aspects of our life, which is going to have clearly going to have an impact. [00:54:46] Speaker A: Right? [00:54:47] Speaker B: What does that. Mean for us? What does that mean for you and for me and for building websites and writing code? We don't know yet, right? We don't know. Is it going to take over what we're doing? I doubt it, but I don't really know. It's hard to predict the future, certainly. So I think a lot of it is just for the older crowd that's been around, whatever that is that you're doing. Things start to change, sometimes they get uncomfortable. But thing we got to remember is we're in technology, right? We didn't jump ship when responsive web design came out, right? We embraced it because it changed the game in a good way for us and for the mobile web. So I'm looking at these things like AI is how can we help and benefit from it? But sometimes you just have to say, change is good, even if you don't necessarily agree with it. Gutenberg, a lot of us were not into it at first, right? We're like, what is this? What is it doing? It's changing everything. It's a little bit clunky, but ultimately now look at us, what we just talked about. Like, we're both kind of on board with it, know, and we wouldn't have said that a couple years ago. So you even got the old G's on, right? So it's, it's like sometimes I like to step back and say, is it just because it's a change? And I'm not used to it. Okay? How many times has Facebook changed their UI? And every time everybody talks about how awful it is. Every single time, it's like every three or four years, oh, this is awful, I can never do this, blah, blah, blah. And now it's like, well, this is just what it is and that's what we use. [00:56:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I was going to say people hate change. They did the change for better because there's probably more interaction or whatever Facebook's goal is. But yeah, no, I'm sure that's part of it. So, looking to the future, you already mentioned it AI. Have you seen Joe? Foils from human made demo. [00:56:26] Speaker B: I have, in fact, me being a podcast addict, I guess. I just had a podcast where we had him on as a guest talking about some of the cool stuff they're doing with Gutenberg. And mean. That is the idea of they're working on a concept where it's essentially an AI helper tool built directly into the WordPress block editor, into gutenberg, where you can essentially give it commands and you could say, write. Out a summary of whatever this topic is or give me some bullet point headings for this topic and it will spit it out right there in your gutenberg block and away. You so. Or put all this data into a table and it does it for you. That's just scratching the surface of how this is really going to change. And I know it's a bit of a race at this point to who wants to be like the AI expert or company, whatever within WordPress. But I think there's going to be a lot of know it's a Wild West right now and everyone's trying know. Do you understand that reference? Cause I kept saying this to people that are not in the US. When I say it's the Wild West, does that mean anything? Do you know what that means? Yeah. [00:57:27] Speaker A: So I've read Lucky Luke growing up. [00:57:30] Speaker B: Yes, I said that on another podcast and it was all with people from Europe. And I'm scratching my head after I'm like, I don't even know if that reference makes sense. People not in the US. [00:57:38] Speaker A: I think the difference is if you've grown up in a country where English is subtitled, you'll know, you'll know, like in Germany they dub it and then a lot of references like this, cultural references, they get lost. I'm guessing this has to do. But yes, wild West, I'm familiar. [00:57:58] Speaker B: Yeah. So it is right now. And everyone's trying to figure out how can we use this and how can we do it with our clients or how can we build products and how can we integrate this? And there's got to be a lot of interesting options out there for us to integrate and work with and it's all everyone's just trying to figure it out now. So I'm excited to see where it all lands and to experiment and explore it. I'm using it kind of as an admin assistant tool, if you will, right now. And hell, I even use it to spit out. I used it to prototype a plugin just to take screenshots for a proposal. And I could have done it, but guess what? I gave it a couple of prompts and I had the screenshots I wanted. I just copy paste into my install and bam, I got the screenshots and put them in my proposal and done. So it saved me 1520 minutes maybe to do that myself. Did you get a nice little helper that's still out? We're still waiting, so fingers crossed it'll be a better story if we land it. Or when we land it, I should. [00:58:46] Speaker A: Say when you land it. [00:58:49] Speaker B: But that's the thing. It's like how code these things, it's not just about actually doing the code for the projects, but I'm using it. And interesting, we're all trying to figure out how we can use it to better our professionalizer. At least dipping our toe in it a little bit because it's fascinating. [00:59:05] Speaker A: Would you say that if you're not on board now, you're too late? [00:59:09] Speaker B: No, it's very early. In my opinion. There's no tried and true products out there yet in WordPress or services. But you guarantee they're coming? I think it's a really ripe opportunity for anyone looking to get into the product space, services space, or just bring something to the table for your clients, like in our world, to set us apart from everybody else. Right? So everybody's talking about it. It's clear everybody wants to get the keywords out there, you know what I mean? And the search engines. And if you're searching AI I hope I come up if it's AI and WordPress, but it's the next hot thing, and it's not going anywhere. It's here to stay. And it's going to be a part of our lives. It's going to affect all of our lives. It's going to affect our children and how they are in school. And if they're that Plagiarism situation, and what does it mean if it's AI produced that wrote your report? Is that plagiarizing? Is that allowed? Are they going to be able to detect it? Is this going to affect everything? [01:00:02] Speaker A: I think it's already affecting everything. Some of the stuff is just not visible yet. But if you just look at Plagiarizing so if you feed it your type of writing, your tone of voice, if you feed it that and then you present it with a text, like rewrite it as I would have written it, what is even Plagiarism then, right? [01:00:25] Speaker B: And that's the massive gray area this introduces, because you're right and that's exactly what's coming. Google and Microsoft, they all have their own AI, right? Their own departments. Google's already announced it's coming to all their apps, right? So there is a world that's coming very soon to where I'm going to have AI, right, in my Gmail, and it's going to know how I respond to emails. It's going to look at my sent history, and it's going to be able to write emails in the voice of Brad very quickly just by scanning my history of sent emails. And I can't wait for that day because I want AI to take over my inbox. And if it says, is this how you want to. [01:01:02] Speaker A: I'm most curious about what Apple is going to do because they have not said a word. [01:01:10] Speaker B: Apple's like that strong, silent type, right? You know, they're there. You know, they're definitely working on it. It's just a matter of when they decide they want to drop this massive announcement. Is it going to be some of a big event? Is it going to be just something that they just dropped? They're such masters at the release of information, like nothing we've ever seen, especially from a marketing angle. It's coming. [01:01:31] Speaker A: What siri does. Siri was never the best AI voice tool, whatever those things. [01:01:41] Speaker B: But assistant, I guess, I don't know. [01:01:43] Speaker A: Right now, it's just antiquated. Like, I ask it and it'll tell me there's something on the web I can present you. Oh, that's not what I asked for. [01:01:52] Speaker B: They were the first, right? I think they were the first, if I remember right, like Echo hadn't or Alexa hadn't came out yet, the Echo. But Siri was the first that did that within the iPhone. And I think it was like iPhone four or five when they first introduced Siri. But then amazon saw the potential of actually making a device and doing something similar. We could sit it and talk to it, not just be on your phone, but yeah, I agree. Now, imagine those are all going to get upgraded, right? Like, my home is all Google, so I have everything smart, even the kettle, which you would appreciate. We could just say, turn on the kettle and it fires it up in the next room, you know what I mean? And my watch will tell me when it's ready to go, right? So I have a very smart home, and eventually it's going to get to where it's more conversational, like you said, where it's more, hey, Google, how's it going today? What's up? What's on the schedule? Anything interesting going on? We're just going to have conversations. It's not going to be like barking orders at a machine. [01:02:46] Speaker A: I'm all in on Apple and I essentially start my day on asking the mini HomePod in the bedroom, like, what's the weather? What's the you know, the first basic question? I don't care too much about news, but what's happening around me if I'm indecisive on what to wear. Small little things that make life better. But, yeah, I think there's exciting times ahead of us. AI, WordPress, the growth of WordPress, which is still happening, and I'm here for it still, like, 18 years in, I'm still very there. [01:03:30] Speaker B: And honestly, this stuff keeps it exciting, which is why technology field. It's why we're in technology, right? We wouldn't be here if we didn't if we're not curious, we need to learn. I want new things. I want new technology. I want game changers to come. I don't want to be doing the same thing in five years that I'm doing right now. I want that needle continuity to be pushed in all aspects of technology. So this is what keeps it fun for all of us and doing it 15 years and hopefully another 15 more. [01:03:57] Speaker A: Right, well, cheers to that, Brad. Yeah, with my cup of tea. Cheers to that. [01:04:05] Speaker B: This is 09:00. A.m podcast, baby. Like I said, Remkes. You're probably the only person to get me on a podcast at 09:00 A.m.. [01:04:11] Speaker A: It's been lovely having you on. [01:04:14] Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, this has been great. Really appreciate it.