Bridging Innovation and Community in a Hackathon

Jakob:
Jakob. I am head of development at Greyd. We are a small plugin company and we have a plugin that is aimed at the target audience of agencies, freelancers, but also larger corporations that we try to tackle the issue. What if you not only create one website or manage one website? What if you have hundreds of them and you need to manage them and optimize them and share contents and all these kind of things? That’s what we do. That’s Greyd.

Jessica:
Yeah, and Jessica, I’m also developed Greyd, but I do the technical side of it more, a bit more at this point, but I’m also a co contributor and yeah, we’re working here together on this product and also trying to make purpose.

Adam:
Fantastic. So the three of us, we find ourselves in a hotel room here in Roost, Germany. Is that how I say that? I don’t know. Is that correct? At Cloud Fest, we’re beginning at the hackathon and you guys are sponsoring the hackathon. Why would you do that?

Jakob:
To give back, meet friends? So we’ve been to the hackathon. I’ve personally been to the Hackathon last year for the first time. Jessica is a veteran at that point.

Jessica:
Yeah, I’ve been here to four times. Four times.

Adam:
And how does this compare to all four times?

Jessica:
So the venue here is definitely more modern, but I like all the themes of all the hotels. So I’ve been now in three different hotels here staying in the hotel rooms, but we’ve also been last year at DeSanta Isabel and all hotels are very detailed in their theming to what they’re actually about is a lot of furniture and bigger and small details. And I think it’s a very interesting concept, very refreshing from a standard hotel, which is always very basic and things so special and I think it’s a Greyd place to do Greyd things at a heck of fun,

Adam:
Do Greyd things. Have you seen any Greyd things happening so far?

Jessica:
Yeah, I think all the projects are doing pretty well. There’s very interesting concepts of what the project leads have proposed, what they’re working on, either if it’s really core WordPress thing or advancing outside of the WordPress space together with a WordPress connection. And yeah, I think so far everyone seems to be busy.

Adam:
Very nice.

Jessica:
It’s always very buzzing in there. So there are a lot of conversation.

Adam:
We are so glad that you guys have decided to invest in the hackathon to make it happen. Tell me, what are you doing here? Why is this important?

Jakob:
So first of all, we are hacking here, so we’re trying new stuff and having brief projects and see what we can do in 48 hours, which is always really challenging, but always really, really Greyd experience. But what we’ve learned in the last year and last years in general was you meet a lot of people here. You meet a lot of friends potentially, and you just connect with people and that is really, really valuable even if you just learn something new, something some perspective that you didn’t have before because you’re always in your bubble. And I think that is what we enjoy so, so much about these types of events that there are so many different people coming together and they’re all working set on one goal inside their projects, but everybody is working on improving something about or ecosystem about the web or about accessibility, ai, whatever. Everybody’s trying to improve it and that’s a unique experience and why we sponsor it because yeah, we got back a lot from that. We got back experience, we got back feedback, we got back friends, I met Jessica at a conference first and that we want to give back to the community. We want to keep these things going. This is Greyd.

Adam:
That’s very cool.

Jessica:
At the hackathon, the way the hackathon works gives you the opportunity to work with people you usually do not work with
On your day-to-day basis. So you get to see other perspectives, you get to see other people using different tools that you didn’t know about or have heard about it but never seen them in action. And I think this is also a very Greyd opportunity as a product company to see, okay, can we get something from that? Is that something that maybe we want to change in our day to game daily business life that can maybe improve us in the future? So I think this is also not just about meeting cool people. Yeah, that’s definitely a point. But also this technical factor of working together, trying out different skills. If you’re usually a developer and then suddenly you see find yourself in a position of project management

Speaker 1:
That

Jessica:
You maybe do not come across that often in your day-to-day life, I think that’s a Greyd opportunity to even push yourself on other and also see other people pushing themselves and maybe someone you meet can at the end give you a good connection to someone else and then even better business opportunities.

Adam:
Very, very cool. So we’re here at the hackathon, the beginning of Cloud Fest and Greyd is here. What are some of your objectives? What are some of your goals of being here at cloudfest in general?

Jakob:
Obviously being seen is one of them, but also see other people and having business connection because as one of the focuses that I really like about cloudfest is the business focus. We give business talks here. Business talks. We really talk a lot about business and connect to the audience, which are agencies, the agency, K is a Greyd example of that and that is a connection that we really, really value here.

Adam:
Yeah, very nice. So here at cloudfest, is there anything specific that you’re looking for, things that you want to do for your customers, potential customers? Tell me a little bit more about

Jakob:
What are your goals? So we have a couple of customers that we invited here. So we wanted to give back a little bit to them and they give them the opportunities to be here and experience what other Greyd companies and solutions are out there. We actually do discuss some project with them because some people approached us, okay, we will be a cloud first. We have really Greyd business opportunities that we see you guys could potentially be a part of and that’s exactly the conversation we want to have here. And obviously at meet to new people, we always meeting and giving demos to lots and lots of people every time we go into these events and a lot of opportunities come out of that, even if it’s just getting to know

Adam:
I love that doing a demo, there’s no better way to actually see, okay, how can this better my life? Because at the end of the day, the user doesn’t really care about any of this stuff. They have a problem, they got something that you’re hopefully a tool that will help them save time, make more money, simple things like that. Tell me about grades specifically and how that benefits people. What is your objective to be like? What message do you want to share

Jakob:
To those people? So essentially when you build a website and you are part of a website building projects, you essentially do a lot of the same steps over and over again and you’ve iterating above those steps. And what we want to provide to our customers is a way of reusing pretty much everything you’ve did before. So you want to reuse all your components that last time you created all your templates, all your content types, and that’s what we want to add to the user. But also then if you think about it, and you could even synchronize those types of projects, you can let those projects communicate to each other. So what we are doing from a product perspective is we’re having different sets of content and the content could not only be an article of Host, it could be a wire frame, it could be a template, it could be just a post type, it could be essentially everything and you can reuse and share those content types across all your projects at once and all your websites so you can build entire infrastructures and optimize them and share those assets, which saves you a lot, a lot.
That’s what in a nutshell we are trying to do and trying to give to our customers. Just again, anything to add to that

Jessica:
And it’s like this is one part and I think there’s also this website management part beyond just sharing content, post types, whatever, and also enhancing the blog inside editor with additional features that are not present in core yet or probably will never be. And just giving even more opportunity to build with native WordPress without having to rely on an additional patron.

Adam:
That’s really helpful. Is there anybody that either of you can think of that grade has really changed how they work or improved their workflow or really made a difference to how they make money on the

Jakob:
Internet? I think a really good example is a smaller agency in Germany that we started really, really early with and there were essentially just two guys building websites. But what they were able to do using our solutions, essentially they cannot take on really, really large scale projects because obviously they upgraded the team and they upgraded their entire process to work with our solution and have new employees and so on. But now they can really build large scale, you could say enterprise type platforms with our solution by just being a small little agency that since somewhere in town in Germany and that is what they’re now capable of and they’re always trying to give us feedback and requesting, oh okay, we do that and this and this. That’s one experience that I really always like to share because that’s what we are trying to do with everybody. Yeah, that’s a smile on I face.

Jessica:
I think another one would be franchise company.
So we have to have a couple clients and there basically what a franchise is is like you need a website for every shop or store or whatever type of franchise you have that is local in, I dunno, I think the biggest one is like 250 franchisees and they all need a website at some point and with that we call it global content. So the sharing of the data, the design and everything, this company just save so much money they do not have to reinvent and same website over and over again. They just configure it and then everything is already there. It just needs to be put together and domain needs to be on top and that’s it basically. So they streamline the way of creating a website for the next franchisee in just like half a day. Do not need to hire an agency again and need to set up everything again and do this, do that. It’s just a little bit of configuration and they’re good to go.

Adam:
Wow, that’s fantastic. Alright, so we’re here. It’s currently the hackathon. For those who are not familiar, cloud Fest takes part in your RPA park at the theme park and the roller coasters personally, are you guys planning on riding any of the roller coasters during Cloud Fest?

Jessica:
Absolutely not.

Adam:
Absolutely not.

Jessica:
Do not get me on any roller.

Adam:
Jessica. I do. Are you? I love to rock the roller coaster. Okay, so one of the traditions that Cloud Fest has is while people are riding up the rollercoaster, I was talking to Christian, he’s one of the people who organizes Cloud Fest and he’s getting ready, he doesn’t like roller coasters either, but he says he is going to go on, it’s one of the rollercoasters blue fire I think, and they’re going to, while you’re going up it’s give your pitch. So would you do that? Would you go on a rollercoaster before you go down over the edge and give your pitch for grade? I

Jakob:
Mean I’ve been to that specific rollercoaster and you really do have two or three seconds, 100 kilometers per hour or something that’s like the acceleration is crazy, the excitement about this rollercoaster specifically. But yeah, why not? Actually we tried it last year, but yeah, it was just a fun exercise. Okay, describe me what you’re doing until now. We accelerate three seconds and yeah, you can briefly do one sentence and that’s it. And

Adam:
That’s it.

Jakob:
Yeah.

Adam:
Okay. So Jessica, you’re not going to go on the roller coaster. Correct. Alright, so what cites you about your work at Grayden?

Jessica:
I think it’s the versatility of different things. It’s not just like we do work in the block inside editor. It’s not just we are doing this specific solution in the WordPress backend to manage your website. It’s like a combination of everything. So one day I’m more focusing on this particular part of the plugin and the next day I have to fix a bug in a completely different part of it. And I think this is what makes me so excited because not every day is the same and not every day is one very specific thing. It’s multiple things that the product offers and that we can always improve because every software can always be improved. And I think this is fairly similar to WordPress itself because it has so many things that you can do with it, so many areas that you can work on and it’s really Greyd to work on a product that kind of embraces the same philosophy. I love.

Adam:
Same question to you. What excites you about Grade?

Jakob:
To be honest, the people. I mean I love the solution we’ve built and yeah, it can always be improved. There are always issues to solve, but backlog is always there. But I just do love working together with talented people from different areas. I mean we have started as just a couple of people that some of them did know work this very well, but some of them did not at all. And yeah, we got to know a lot of talented people over the years and started to grow on the team and that’s actually what really excites me the most about working at grade.

Adam:
That’s fantastic. Is there anything else that you would like to share with our audience about what’s happening at grade?

Jessica:
Yeah, right now we’re trying to move forward in terms of extensibility at the WordPress project, which means that we, of course in our day-to-day work, we often come across things like our clients would like to have this functionality and that we look at it and say, okay, we can do that, but it would be cool if Core WordPress would give us an opportunity to make this even easier so that we do not have to reinvent the wheel just because it’s not there yet. And this is what extensibility is basically about. It’s like giving more points of entry for plugin developers to native workers to enhance it even further. There are some spots that you can hook up to and get your plugins in, your functionality in. There is definitely much room for improvement in this case and that’s what we are trying to work on and I get some sponsor time for this so I can work on core WordPress itself. We’re also sponsoring Tammy Liston to join me in that workforce. So yeah, that’s what we are currently up to in the next couple months.

Jakob:
Greyd, thank you. Yeah, you framed it very, very well, Jessica. So we have received a lot of feedback and we have a lot of the real life solutions and problems that our clients have. And what we are trying to do right now is we’re giving that back to WordPress and putting that feedback in a place and having a discussion where it’s hurt because potentially obviously we want to solve those problems, but what if we not only solve them for our clients, but we solve them at the root source at the core, and why not have that discussion? Why not trying to integrate something into the core that solves the problem for all of the users and that therefore automatically benefits us because it benefits the ecosystem and at the end of the day then our clients profit from it. So why not giving back? And that’s what we’re trying to do right now.
We’re trying to heavily get not our opinion essentially about the opinion or the feedback from our clients into WordPress core and seeing, okay, what could be potentially improve there? What could we as this plugin company improve, but what could WordPress improve? Because we don’t want to be a proprietary software that only builds their own solutions. We want to improve the core solution and then just extend it a little bit further. That’s what we’re trying to do. Not trying to get rid of the core. That’s never a philosophy. We trying to extend the core, but to extend it, we have to prove it at some points at least. Well

Jessica:
Yeah, I think it’s not only about us, but it would improve every product that tries to enhance WordPress core itself. So it’s not just us that we would like to see those changes happening. It can benefit any other agency that’s doing custom work for their clients. It can be any other plug company that maybe has some other functionality that we do not have. So it’s not just beneficial for us as a company but for the entire ecosystem essentially that everyone can then use these points of entry in the side of it.

Jakob:
That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to do this in public and there are actually agencies, there are other clients, just really well-known agencies contacting us, Hey, we want to help. We see issues as well. We have feedback and we want to help tell us how we can help and we get things going and that’s what we’re trying to do. Get people together who have experienced different issues and trying to solve them altogether, share their feedback and have a discussion and then we see where this go.

Adam:
I’m excited to see where it’s going. Well as we wrap up. So excited you guys are here at cloudfest supporting that. The hackathon, if someone wants to get in touch with you, tell us how do they find you on the internet.

Jakob:
So just look our website up like Greyd. And then you will find all the contact details you need. I’m not that visible in public. I’m on Twitter, Twitter XI know I’m on LinkedIn and stuff, but I think the people you should contact and look up are more the Jessicas of the, how do they find you, Jessica?

Jessica:
Yeah, they can find me either through grade on my website, Jessica to ship.com. I’m just Jessica on Slack, on the WebPress Slack, Twitter as well. X LinkedIn. Everything’s on my website essentially.

Adam:
There you go. Well thank you guys both for joining. Do the Woo. And it’s been a pleasure to get to know a little bit more about Grade, what you guys are doing here and what you’re doing here is fantastic, Seth. So thank you guys so much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.