North America

When I was a kid not a single girl said “I want to be a web designer when I grow up”. Mostly because there was no world wide web. There weren’t video games either, until I was in junior high school and Pong came out. Back when I was a kid, girls mostly thought about…

I’ve been a web designer since 1996. In some ways, it’s hard for me to fathom. Those were the days of Netscape Navigator and table-based page layouts. I wrote every bit of HTML by hand on a seriously-underpowered computer and a tiny monitor. Definitely a far cry from where we are today. I was completely…

I’m jolted awake to the sound of the tones going off in my room. I knew that I hadn’t been asleep long because we’d already run a late call and it was still dark outside. Running to the truck, I hear the address come out over the radio for a medical call. It’s the third…

My Mom used to say that things you remember from your past the most are things that had an impact on who you are today. Negative or positive, they affected you in a way that helped create the person you are. The Early Days Her father said to her, “Jean, you are always welcome but…

I remember when I was about 10 years and my mom got our first ever computer. She went to the store and got a bunch of CD’s which I was hyped about because I knew some of them were games. She gave me a yellow box that had “Microsoft FrontPage” on the front and said,…

“A place is only as good as the people you know in it. It’s the people that make the place.” ― Pittacus Lore, I Am Number Four This quote is a large part of the space WordPress holds within me. Coming from a career in Civil Engineering and a background of Industrial Technology WordPress as…

I never meant to become an activist. I swear. It was an accident. And yet here I am, celebrating my one year anniversary of leading the Diversity Outreach Speaker Training working group in the WordPress Community team. We are causing waves in the number of women and other underrepresented groups who are stepping up to…

With this story, as with most things in my life, I never really know where to start. Because of that strange sense of time and action I’ve always been quite fond of the quote from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland “Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”…

People were paying me to write code two years before I had wifi in my house. Home wifi would have cost $45 a month. The cable company wanted a $100 deposit to create my account. It wasn’t going to happen, I could get wifi with a cup of coffee for $3 (including the tip) at…