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.”…
One of the things I’ve loved most about HeroPress is getting to know people far away. It’s getting harder and harder to name a country where I can’t say “Hey, I have a friend there!”. This week I’m in Australia for WordCamp Sydney, and I’m crazy excited about all the people I’m going to meet….
Being a remote worker makes it easy to hide from a world that you find scary or dangerous. If you’re never in the presence of other people they can’t hit you. Retreat becomes so easy. Marius Jensen from Sola, Norway grew up in a society that did not care for him, and made him want…
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…
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…
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…
