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…
My name is JC and I make things for the web. I wear a lot of hats but my favorite one is as a WordPress developer. And I am here to tell you about my journey. It was not easy. There were no shortcuts. I had to crawl my way up every single step of…
A couple years ago I noticed that someone had done a talk at WordCamp Brighton called “The Hero’s Journey“. As you can imagine it immediately caught my eye and I went hunting to find this cool person. As it turns out it was Tamsin Taylor from Brighton and she had a great story. As I…
In the early days of HeroPress there were quite a few Indian contributors, for a variety of reasons. India has long been a technology powerhouse, but the WordPress community was just beginning to get traction. I got to meet many Indians and even traveled there for WordCamp Pune. The stereotype that “India is cheap” is…
About a year ago, Christie Chirinos wrote the essay “What I Do Does Not Define Who I Am“. It felt like a big deal at the time, and it was, but like most big deals, it slowly faded from memory. That’s one of the reasons I do these replays, for the benefit of my own…
Have you ever wondered what it would be like if the world you lived in completely changed, turning your life upside down? And for those who have gone through an experience like this, can you remember how it felt to wake up in a world you were not used to? Even though life can throw…
When HeroPress started, a stated intention was to be a voice for people on the fringe of the Western WordPress culture. In my head I thought this geographical, and involved places like Africa and Asia. I quickly came to realize that everyone is on the fringe of something. This month’s HeroPress replay is titled “Doing…
A couple years ago I was at Prestige Conf in Minneapolis. I noticed a young woman sitting by herself, patiently waiting for the talks to start, and thought I’d say hi. Her name was Stacey, and she was a freelance web developer and design expert. She was had recently quit her job to go freelance…
It’s no secret that HeroPress was greatly helped in its early days by people from India. Jeet, Saurabh, Aditya, Alexander, and many others gave deep and meaningful advice on how I, as a white American male, should approach the task I had set before me. This is one of the reasons it makes me so…
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.”…
