We all have our reasons for the things we do. Money, love, orders, etc. Vladimir Petkov started using WordPress because it solved a problem. As the years went by it continued to solve problems, and he continued to use it. His time to give back didn’t arrive until much later though. His 7 year old…
WordCamps have a unique power to impact lives and careers. Without people and community, WordPress is simply software. But when you add in a large group of passionate people, people who are and are interested, everything changes. There’s excitement, encouragement, and education. Entrepreneurship can be a long and lonely road. Having a solid support community…
Almost exactly two years ago I was looking at Google Analytics Realtime and someone from St. Lucia popped up. St. Lucia isn’t a very big place. In the map on the right you can see a little pink dot in the center. That’s the size of St. Lucia compared to Kansas. The entire country has…
I think I met Ed Finkler at WordCamp Milwaukee in 2016. It was at the speaker dinner, and he sat across from me for a while. He seemed like a pretty normal WordPress developer and several weeks later I asked him to do a HeroPress essay. His answer surprised me. “Well sure, that sounds pretty…
In any post about how WordPress changes lives the word Freedom invariably comes up. Freedom to be yourself, to travel, to grow, learn, even age. This week’s replay is about the freedom to parent. Ines was a young single mother without advanced education during an economic downturn. Things seemed bleak. Through her own hard work…
One of the things that I’ve always loved about WordPress is how it provides things to people. It provides a living to those who have none, it provides community to those without one, and it can provide tools to those who need them. Amanda Rush is blind, and navigates a world that is often hostile…
This week’s HeroPress rewind is by Shady Sharaf from Cairo, Egypt. Shady is really the kind of person I had in mind when I started HeroPress: talented and smart, but isolated. The WordPress community is relatively small in Cairo, given the number of people that live there. So he leans on the international community for…
I don’t actually remember when I met Jeff Matson. As I look back over the last 8 years I know there were times I didn’t know him, and then suddenly he was there, immediately a good friend. And then, for all that I thought I knew him, his HeroPress essay shed an entirely new light…
I’m always fascinated by people who find second careers when they’re at the top of their game in the first one. To be really excellent at something and then switch to something else altogether is fascinating to see. Very often those people bubble to the top of whatever career they venture into. This week’s HeroPress…
A couple years ago I was given possibly the biggest gift the WordPress community has ever given me. The organizers of WordCamp Pune called me to speak, and the community sent me. It was an amazing experience that changed my life. While I was there I met Mahangu Weerasinghe, a wonderful man from Sri Lanka….
