Cutting through the noise: the sharpest ideas, honest moments, and quotable insights, the real signal from our conversations across OpenChannels FM.
On the lighter side
“All I do these days is set up automations which probably is a bad thing. Taken over my entire role. But think how much time it will save me in the future. We will see.”
— Katie Keith joking about being fully taken over by automation.
“We’re being recorded by a drone. This is the future.” — Adam Weeks live at CloudFest 2026
Tips, insights and commentary
“I think the key first step is to just find something small and repeatable that you can automate, save yourself some time. It’s not just the time saving, it’s the reducing the human error factor I think too. So setting something up with whatever your automation tool of choice is, experiment with it, learn, learn from it, and I’m pretty confident you’re going to end up seeing benefits very quickly.” —James Collins, Scaling WooCommerce Operations with Automation
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“Adding a product to the cart shouldn’t be a negative experience. We should have confetti plastic whenever a user adds something to a cart and not punishing that by making the experience be excruciating. The science behind it is pretty interesting. So that edge caching is most commonly bypassed because the server sets something called a cookie, which I’m sure you’re familiar with. If a cookie is being set on the back end, Cloudflare’s cache will be bypassed… What sets those cookies? That’s the question. And why does it always happen when something is added to the cart?” Aleksandar Miljković, Live at CloudFest: Ecommerce With New Caching for Better Conversions
A Different Model for Plugin Shops
“I didn’t just want to create, you know, yet another plugin shop where you come to the site, you pick a plugin off the shelf, you pay for it for one site, 10 sites, whatever, and your annual or lifetime or whatnot. I wanted to do something a little bit different. So when you come to well played wp, what you are purchasing is a Membership of sorts to the entire library, rather than just finding one or two plugins and buying them separately. You get one license, and that one license covers the updates and support and all of that for all of the plugins in the library.”
— Marcus Burnett, Rethinking Plugins With a Single License for an Expanding Library
