A Builders Path to WooCommerce with Meg Phillips

Abha: Hello and welcome. I’m Abha Thakor. And in the studio today, we have Meg Phillips. Hello, Meg.

Meg: Hey Abha, thanks for having me.

Abha: Meg’s joining us from sunny United States today. I can see the sun pouring in as into her studio as well. So it’s going to be a nice, joyful, happy a conversation. I can see, especially with all that sunshine.

Meg: It is unexpectedly warm today. So I think it’s, we’re in March, and I would say it’s in the 70s at least and not very breezy. So, it looks like a springtime, summertime day for sure here. It’s gorgeous out.

Abha: Well, thank you for, for taking time out of your day, to join us for Do The Woo and to talk about all the things about Woo that you love, but also your own story. I’m sure it will inspire many, many people who are going to be listening to this.

Meg: Yeah, I’m glad to do it.

Abha: Meg, whereabouts in the US are you based? Because I can see water behind you and a marina and lots of exciting things. So whereabouts are you?

Meg: Well, today I’m not at home, but I am based out of a town called Avon, on an island called Hatter. So I live in the outer banks of North Carolina on Haterras Island in a village called Avon. That is because my husband is a captain and so we are always on the water. His job requires us to be, so you find us today, actually in Southport, North Carolina, and we’re at the Southport marina because my husband just finished a yacht delivery for a client, so I had to pick him up.

Abha: See, one of the great things about this podcast is that we are definitely adventurous. If you’re listening to this and do you think, “Hey, I’ve got a story to tell about being a WooCommerce builder,” then you definitely want to come and join us because today, we’re at a marina. In fact, before this podcast, we were offered that Meg would do the interview from inside a yacht. So, if you can meet that or you’ve got a more unusual recording studio and have a great WooCommerce story, then do get in touch.

Meg: Well, you spurned a thought that I think is inspiring. It’s just that I think the beauty of the WooCommerce and the WordPress community really lines in the diversity of the folks who have contributed. So, it’s not an accident that I’m in a marina and I’m the author of Charter Boat Bookings. So, I live this every day and I also live WordPress and I also live WooCommerce every day, but the whole other half of my life is charter boats. That’s something that proprietary systems that aren’t open sourced and don’t rely on a community, I think that it’s really hard to manufacture that sort of authenticity.

So, I don’t have to meet with a team of charter boat captains to learn what they do. I know it, I live it, I breathe it, I love it and the same is true about WordPress and WooCommerce. So, I think that these builder stories are extremely inspiring and I think they’re important. They’re important to lay a foundation of the reason why open source makes sense and given time, makes the most sense of any sort of software development, because you get the diversity of people to bring to life a product that they truly live. I think that’s amazing. So I didn’t stage this, but it just is.

So it just is that I happen to be my husband’s on the other side of a yacht delivery that is shipwrecked on the beach and oh, by the way, I’m doing Do The Woo because I’m Charter Boat Booking’s author, it’s true. It’s real. Well, so you made me spew my authenticity speech.

When the developer itch came along

Abha: Well, you’ve talked about both and for the people who’ve not heard about this before, let’s give them a little bit of a background. So WooCommerce is obviously something you feel really passionate about, and it’s lovely to hear that in your voice. And also, you’d been a developer that started with both WordPress and Woo, which is just amazing. I think that makes it an even more special journey. Meg, how long have you been a developer now?

Meg: So, I picked up PHP, HTML, JavaScript and CSS in 2009 when I was pregnant with my first child. In the yachting industry, we like to say that the best village pump is a scared man with a bucket. But what that means is just that when you really have a reason to be motivated, you can do almost anything. I was in a career that required a whole lot of travel. It was very high stress and high energy and I was looking down my life and thinking I’m now a wife. I’m going to be a mother soon and I need something that’s going to be a little different in my life.

I had this opportunity and I thought, “Okay well, if I pick up PHP and HTML and CSS, maybe I can do something a little different.” So, that was in 2009 and I did quite well with it. In 2013, I took a job with a small agency. I was pregnant with my second son and that was the first time that I was introduced to WordPress. Until then, I built everything from scratch and the very first thing I built that was significant was a piece of software to manage a charter boat business, a bareboat charter boat business. But it was straight PHP, just the typical web stack with no framework at all and not even a JavaScript framework. This was long time ago, so people were talking about jQuery and using it, but I remember going to my first PHP meetup and they were like, “Well, what do you think about jQuery?” I was like, “I don’t know, because I don’t know what it means.”

So, then I joined that small agency in Manteo, North Carolina on the outer banks and the agency owner used WordPress for everything. The first project that I got in that agency was building a WooCommerce site for a brew pub called Outer Banks Brewing Station. But my very first WordPress site was actually also a WooCommerce site. I don’t think I ever built another site without WooCommerce.

So people often ask me questions about, “Well, what if you don’t use WooCommerce?” I’m like, “Well, I don’t know because I sell stuff.” So, I tend to have it there in the background and I like the fact that it gives a little bit of sure user abilities. Well, you wouldn’t want to do it if there was a performance reason that you didn’t, but if you don’t have a performance reason that you wouldn’t, then WooCommerce brings a lot to the table.

Abha: Definitely listening to you and having worked and seen some of your projects in the past, it isn’t just about providing a software solution for you. It’s more about actually a whole experience. Coming into WooCommerce, and now everything you do is Woo-related, and it’s really lovely to hear that every WordPress site you do is, has a WooCommerce element, but that’s not where your career started and eCommerce obviously, and commerce generally, has been a really important foundation for you.

I guess to hear someone talk a about the joys of WooCommerce who’s come from a commerce background and sales, I think is even more special. So, let’s go backwards into your journey, do a bit of time travel together. So, let’s step back before you discovered web and PHP, as if there was life before PHP.

Meg: Is there life before PHP?

Abha: I’m not sure. I think sometimes there is life with PHP, but normally I have to be in a very closed, dark room and nursing a headache, when I’m thinking that. Just take a journey with me, let’s travel back to when you started off your career in sciences and in the serious sciences too.

Meg: Oh my goodness, that’s a long time ago.

Abha: That’s a long time. Yeah, I said we’re going to do a bit of traveling.

Meg: Holy cow, we are. Most people don’t know that about me.

Working in manufacturing, the serious sciences, research and technology development

Abha: See, I do my homework. In terms of, you’ve always gone into professions where they’re not necessarily professions that were common, were something that women and girls are encouraged to join, because you’ve worked in manufacturing, you’ve worked in the serious sciences, in research and in technology development. I think the list is endless, Meg. At every point you’ve found something new and you’ve been at this at the cornerstone of innovation.

Meg: Yeah. I would say that’s kind of the thread. That’s the common thread, is I am creative, but I’m also analytical. So, I have this real dorky cover on my Mac that says, Right brain, left brain.” I love it because it reminds me of who I am and it reminds me every time I open my computer to stay in the center of my lane, right. I’m probably not the best engineer to deploy a project necessarily right into production, but I need to stay in my lane, and my lane is that I am very good at using my creativity and my technical acumen together as a tool that I think gives me an ability to see opportunities that others don’t and so I have always … My career is this unusual mishmash of extremely technical and extremely creative, and early before I found my lane, I thought, “Oh well, I have to be the world’s best polymer chemist because that would be the coolest thing ever and I could create new molecules and then I would solve all of the world’s problems.”

So, I did graduate school in polymer chemistry and before that I was at the National Lab and I did work on lithium polymer battery fuel cell project. I did work on all kinds of heavy science and I went back to graduate school, but between the two, between the National Lab and graduate school, I went to work in fashion at Eddie Bauer, at the headquarters. Then I went back to graduate school and then I went back to fashion. So, I spent my early 20s really waffling, trying to find a lane where I could use both sides of myself. I think that landing in technology and software has given me an outlet for both, because everything that I do with WooCommerce and with WordPress is as creative, not just innovative creative, but visually creative because I have that part of me as well.

So visually creative, innovatively creative, but also the engineering part of it. I find myself, if I stay in something that’s almost too purely art, I get bored and I’m not as good as really great artists. You know what I mean? I can remember when I was in the fashion industry, I would meet other people, men and women that were just extreme, jaw-droppingly talented at fashion sketching and coming up with new ideas and putting personality into garments, that I could never quite find that. I wasn’t quite there, but when it came right down to taking that and making it into a garment and I could do that extremely well.

So the same is true, I think, where I am now. I can see opportunities in user experience that sometimes get missed, but they are usually based in something extremely technical that I see from an engineering perspective, oh if we did it this way, we would have an opportunity to play with a UX that’s different. Does that make sense?

Imagine something and you can build it

Abha: Definitely. Having had the pleasure of working with you on projects, the engineering definitely comes through and I think it’s also worth highlighting just because you may transfer from one career to another, your skillset may actually be not only usable, but may be enhanced, or it might actually get its freedom in what you find. I think that’s the joy of working with things as a developer, like WooCommerce, is that you have that freedom of innovation to a degree, but you also have the enthusiasm and the energy of other people that you can think, “Oh okay, we can stretch the boundaries. We can do something different. We can make it … ” think outside the box is actually … is obviously the buzzword but I think from what you’ve shared already and our other guest as well, and my own experience, with WordPress, with WooCommerce, with a lot of open source software, you can imagine something and then you can build it. Both of us also build AI solutions and work in that area, I think we’ve definitely seen that, and in voice recognition and how that is coming into not just the specialist area that we’ve both worked in, but also now into WooCommerce and later on into WordPress in much more detail.

Meg: Yeah, I think that there’s a big opportunity in open source. I don’t know how to describe it other than those silly shows, where they’re cooking shows and what is that one where it’s super high level serious, like at the top end of gourmet? Anyway, the point is that at the beginning of the show, they’re walked into this pantry and inside the pantry is almost every gourmet ingredient that you can ever want to use. These chefs are given a scenario, they’re given a creative direction with no limits and this infinite pantry. I feel like that’s what open source is.

So, you’ll find in open source that there are a diversity of packages that can all fit together. There’s an infinite diversity of people and perspectives. Different internationalities, nationalities, different locales, different genders, different life experiences, different problem solution sets. When you throw all that into the pantry, you can come out with something really amazing. But if you didn’t have the pantry, you wouldn’t have the shoulders of the giants to stand on. I think that’s what open source-

Abha: Exactly.

Meg: It’s what open source gives to the world. I’ve been writing a lot and I’ve learned something about myself and maybe it’s maturity, maybe it’s age, but I’m learning to lean into big questions that I have in life. One of those is why am I so intrigued by open source? What is it about open source that drives me or makes me think it’s good? I’ve been trying to process through writing, the right way to deliver that message. It struck me that open source is a good citizen. So, it’s not so much that it’s about how much money you do or don’t charge for the product that you’re building or creating. It’s about the fact that a good citizen thing to do is to continue adding your little bit of shoulder on top of the shoulders that you’re standing on, so that you’re paying it forward to the next generation of developers because it … and in retail and in yachting, we say, there’s the mall theory or the tide lifts all ships.

So, the mall theory in retail is that it made a lot of sense to put all the clothing stores together in one mall because if you needed clothes, you went to the mall and you were likely to find what you wanted. I think that’s sort of what open source is to the world for software in technology. I think that it’s important for individuals, for groups and for big corporations to continue putting back into that foundation, to accelerate innovation.

Abha: I love the shopping mall allergy. I thought that you might get that in somewhere and for those who are listening to this podcast and can’t see Meg, she’s sat in a glamorous location with boats and yachts and beautiful sky behind her wearing dark sun shades and looking very glamorous and talking about shopping malls and high quality ear buds as well. There you are, I’ve got those in, but it shows that there is not one perspective of what you have to be like to be good at development, or to be interested in development. As you said, it’s about that richness of the community that is behind Woo and behind WordPress and that is what innovates, what drives enthusiasm. It keeps us all happy and connected, and it is incredibly special.

Thanks to our Pod Friends GoDaddy Pro and Yoast

Visual merchandising and storytelling in eCommerce

Abha: We’re going to travel a little bit more now, along your journey. So, we’re going to actually go from where you were working as a polymer chemist, to then going and deciding to work in commerce. When you were working in commerce, obviously you’re working in fashion and for some big brands at the time, are there things that you’ve learned there that have made you a better, stronger WooCommerce developer?

Meg: Absolutely. This is another thing I said, I was processing and writing, I’ve been processing the idea of visual merchandising and storytelling in eCommerce is something that I feel very passionate about. I don’t know that I’ve leaned into it enough. I haven’t tried really hard, but I have spent a lot of time trying to find other brands that are doing it. So, I worked in product development in women’s wear and men’s wear and intimate apparel, which isn’t kinky stuff, it’s just bras and panties is and sleepwear. I actually only worked in sleepwear and active, for big billion dollar brands. So, I learned a lot about visual merchandising and I learned a lot about merchandising. I learned a lot about product development. I learned a lot about how that whole industry comes together. It certainly informs my perspective on what the retail experience should be when you’re shopping online and particularly at a place where we are in time.

In 2020 some things happened that changed the world. I don’t think we’ve yet righted the ship to get back to normal all the way, and I don’t know that we ever will go exactly back to where we were in. Maybe that’ll be a good thing, and maybe it won’t be, we’ll see in the end. But one thing that I think it forever changed is shopping. So, shopping was already changing but I think that the COVID lockdown experience changed it more, and it accelerated the growth of eCommerce and online shopping in an instant. I would like to see how that continues to evolve.

So, I think it changed in a lot of ways, but one of the ways that I noticed in particular is that a lot of small businesses entered eCommerce when they weren’t in eCommerce before. They were brick and mortar, and they didn’t really have a big reason to be in eCommerce and now all of a sudden, they’ve gone into eCommerce. I think that the tangibility and the personability, and the shopping experience is not about buying and selling. For many people, it is the social interaction of their day, particularly older people and younger people who are in the stress years of parenting with toddlers, the women at the market might be the friendliest non-toddler voice you speak to every day. I can attest to that personally, my husband traveled a lot when my first son was born and literally the only adult I would get to talk to would be the folks at Target or at, the grocery store, and that was like lifeblood for me.

There’s this whole experience associated with shopping that’s not just about buying and selling. So, I think that we are going to continue as an industry to mature, I think that we’re going to continue to learn how to build those experience and while I do think that it’s a little bit hokey, the whole metaverse thing, I think that even right now where we are in WooCommerce right now, where we are in WordPress, we have a great opportunity to lean into that and create experiences that build community in the same way that having brick and mortar shopping spaces do.

I think that’s something I’m personally right now interested in my life and in my world, because I do think that a lot of small businesses didn’t make it through, and so we don’t want to isolate people. We want people to continue those relationships and lean into what can we do as the folks who know how to use these the best, or maybe most familiar with these tools, to help small businesses continue that relationship online?

Abha: It all helps, it’s certainly what drives me in terms of helping businesses that would otherwise have just not … not be here, but have a great idea, have a great energy and WooCommerce just does give that opportunity, which is fantastic. So Meg, let’s take a fast forward trip now. So, we’ve talked about working in commerce and the lessons for eCommerce, but you’ve also talked about the importance of having and working on solutions that tackle isolation.

Taking on isolation to produce, create and find solutions

Let’s go to 2020, and just before the pandemic hit. You felt very strongly about isolation and you decided to produce, create, and generally find solutions for a problem that you were facing and also hopefully, to help others. So, tell us a little bit about your Call for Code adventure and how that it started.

Meg: So, my children’s school was shut down because of COVID and I built an app called SchoolListIt, and it is a web application that uses the WordPress rest API. It’s designed to also use other API like Google for education and Microsoft for education, I guess they call it Google Classroom. The idea was really to build one tool that felt like, and functioned as, the user experience of a social media site, because parents, most every parent in every location, at least across the United States, understand the idea of a feed. So the idea was to create a class feed from the diversity of tools that are getting thrown at parents at that time, at that moment in time.

Every different school district, every different classroom, every different teacher was using a different set of tools to communicate to parents what assignments were do and when, and SchoolListIt aimed to give the parents a solution, one central place that they could go in understandable format, mobile friendly to tell them what is due and when, for every child in the household in a way that was completely decoupled from private and personal student information.

Where it gets really tricky in education is that the performance grades and those kinds of things, the identity of students, those pieces of information are protected and rightly so. SchoolListIt aims at getting only the information that’s universal by classroom and it makes the assumption that the adult who is in charge of making sure that the schoolwork is getting done knows which class and at what grade level their students are participating in. So, it just creates a little social media newsfeed of what’s due and when, simple as that. I thought it was good and so I entered it into Call for Code and it did quite well. I’m very grateful for the opportunity that was afforded me to participate in open source in a bigger way outside of just the WordPress community and to … I felt like in a way I was being an emissary, so I was bringing WordPress and WooCommerce and other parts of open source all together in this one piece of app and for a really good cause. So, what a great experience.

Call for Code, an international competition

Abha: So, Call for Code’s obviously an international competition, and it must have been a bit unnerving really, to put yourself forward at first in that. The Call for Code is run by IBM and Linux Foundation and a couple of other partners, and as you said is about doing tech for good. When you entered that, did you think that you could end up as one of the top five global winners for 2020?

Meg: Honestly, I looked at it from the other perspective. What is it, the funny saying that people say? Is you can never win if you don’t try? That’s not clever at all. There’s a more clever way to say that but essentially I would say that I was more nervous, like trying out for cheerleading in fifth grade than I was entering my app to Call for Code, because I actually thought I had a chance at getting cheerleader in fifth grade, but I knew I didn’t have a chance of getting Call for Code. I just thought that maybe, just maybe, if the right person saw what I did, they could understand the vision that I had, it might help somebody else. So, I believe strongly in open source and I think as an open source developer, sometimes our strongest talent is hidden in a house on the beach, on Hatteras Island and we never knew it was there.

So, that’s an example, is I was out there designing this app in my head that could help thousands of parents across the globe, millions, maybe billions, but how was I going to get anyone to listen to me? So, I figured that what could it hurt? All they could tell me is that no. All that I could do is get told no. I believe that it was a a fated thing because I didn’t know a lot about Call for Code until I built this app and it met the spec and I was like, “Why not? It’s good. I think it’s good. Maybe they’ll think it’s good too.” So, and I think that’s what open source teaches us, I think, that when it really shines is when we give opportunity to hear the genius of someone who might have otherwise not been heard.

Abha: I think having read some of the stories around this, not only did you build a solution from scratch, you wrote all the code, you didn’t outsource that, and you did all this while homeschooling three children and working from home in the middle of a pandemic. It’s just pretty awesome.

Meg: Well, when you put it like that, it sounds supernatural, but I can promise you that I’m not that special. I’m like millions of other moms fathers and people, you just pick up your big girl pants and different people have different nervous energy. So, when I’m faced with something that I don’t understand, it’s therapy for me to try even if it’s just one tiny little part, I felt I needed to do something to fix the pandemic. So, in my own little way, I thought I could fix it with this app.

For me, it was therapy. I would say that people, at least in the WordPress and WooCommerce community, we say code is poetry, you hear that a lot around here. But I would say for me, code is therapy. It’s the same sort of therapy as sewing. I don’t know if there are many folks in our audience who like to sew, or understand sewing, or have ever tried it, but sewing is this beautiful problem solution, instant gratification.

So, I need a pretty outfit. I’ve got this fabric back there. If I cut it right and I drape it well, and I stitch it together beautifully, I’ve built a solution to my problem and it only took me a couple hours. That for me is what code does for me. I find that if I go for too long without sitting in front of my text editor and hacking away, even if it’s badly written code, sometimes I build things that I call prototypes, which in other words means I cut every shortcut and didn’t really follow best practices, but it looks really cool. I didn’t do that with SchoolListIt, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m just saying, it’s that therapeutic thing that I’m doing, is I’m looking at something in my life that I would like to be better and I think that I can build this one little thing and it’ll be better.

Even if, maybe it’s not, it fixes something in me. So, I built SchoolListIt as a way to cope with the pandemic, I think as much as anything else. So, people make it sound like I’m a hero, but in reality, I was a really scared mom and I wasn’t sleeping at night. So, rather than eat Ho Hos and Ding Dongs, I built an app.

Abha: And why not? And Call for Code, it is that special. It invites developers and problem solvers from around the world to build and contribute to sustainable open source technology projects. That is exactly what you did. Some of these projects address social issues, some address humanitarian issues, and to get from hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of entries to being in the top five globally and being celebrated as that, and now an ambassador for that, hopefully inspiring a next generation of developers, is pretty amazing.

The power of responsibility for developers

Meg: What I would like to say to other developers is threefold. One is, people talk about power is responsibility. So, those of us who can write code, we have a super power that 80%, 90%, what maybe 99% of the population out there doesn’t have, particularly if we understand open source and understand how to use open source in a powerful way. If we can use all of those building blocks in that pantry that we discussed, to solve a problem that we have a unique perspective on. I don’t just think that we can do that, I think that we should do that and it’s our responsibility to step up and pay a little bit into this community that gave us the skills.

So, I don’t know about others that are listening to this, but I am a product of the open source world. So, while I have an engineering degree, it’s not in computer engineering, it’s in a different kind of engineering. I am able to do these things because of the devotion, the volunteering, the millions of hours that millions of people all across the globe have contributed to open source. Therefore, I feel like it’s my part of this equation to use those skills to do good things. And while I don’t always know what good things are, sometimes it’s obvious.

As a mom with two kids in seven classes, it was obvious to me at that moment that someone needed a tool like this and it wasn’t just me that needed the tool. So, the one thing is contributing to open source isn’t just a privilege, it’s a responsibility, I think. At least for me, I view it that way, it’s sort of like servant leadership.

Then the second thing is that just because I may not think I’m the most genius developer in the world, it doesn’t mean that any other developer had that same solution in mind. So, I have this bad habit of assuming somebody else thought that before I thought that and that they surely have already built it. What I learned with SchoolListIt is that they didn’t think of that and I built it. And if I hadn’t built it, maybe no one else would’ve thought of it and been brave enough to come to the table and say, “Hey, this kind of a thing could help a lot of people.”

I would say that not only should you look at it as a gift that you’ve been given that you should use responsibly, but I think also, don’t underestimate your own creativity and your unique perspective in the world. Nobody else shares my life experiences exactly. That empowers me to help other people in a way that is unique. So, don’t ever underestimate yourself in your own creativity.

Taking on the role of Developer Advocate at WooCommerce

Abha: In terms of that great inspirational comment, we’re going to go right back to the current day because we booked you for this podcast and after that, your job changed. So, you’re now actually not only talking and inspiring people about WooCommerce as a developer, but now you are actually going to be working on WooCommerce full-time as a commerce developer advocate.

Meg: Yes, and that’s a big responsibility, but I think I’m perfect for it because I’ve been doing that anyway, as much as anyone would listen to me. So, I feel like this is just another one of those fated moments that I have gotten the opportunity to be right in my lane at this moment in time. We talked about that early in the conversation, that before I was maybe mature enough to hear what my soul was telling me, I did a lot of flip- flopping and belting back and forth, but marriage, motherhood and age, all come together, that I’m now able to hear what my soul is telling me is where I need to be at a particular moment in time. I feel very strongly that this is a moment in time that WooCommerce and WordPress are uniquely positioned to actually pay out on the big idea to democratize commerce.

I think that now is the time and I certainly want to do every bit of my part that I can do to share that with other developers across the globe so that they can appreciate their role in that. I’m really excited about that and I hope that I can live up to the greatness of the responsibility and that I can fulfill my role in the community. Yeah, I’m excited and I’m looking forward to all of what that can mean.

Abha: We’re going to look forward to hearing more about that in the future too, and also you celebrating and sharing, the wonderful Do the Woo podcast to people that you go and talk to.

Meg: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I’ve been binge watching because I think I was under-watched or under-listened rather in Do the Woo, so I’ve been going back trying to binge watch and listen to really old things and then really newer ones. I think it’s good to get a perspective on how that’s evolved over time. So yeah, I would say everybody, give a listen,

Abha: Meg, thank you for joining us. If people listening to this, obviously we’ll have some links on the website about the different things that you’re doing, and we can add one for the Call for Code so people can hear and learn more about that, but where would people find you on the web?

Meg: Right, so I am Meg Phillips 91. So, if you Google MegPhillips91, you would probably first find my personal blog and then Charter Boat Bookings, which is the plugin that I wrote is on mspmedia.org. Yeah, so you can find me. I’m on Twitter, I’m not all that active on Twitter, but I am there and I’m MegPhillips91 there I’m megphillips91@gmail. You can get me anywhere with MegPhillips91. So track me down, I’m MegPhillips91 in the WordPress community as well.

Abha: And no doubt on the WooCommerce Slack as well, that people can track you.

Meg: Yes, I’m MegPhillips91 there too.

Abha: So Meg, thank you very much for joining us today and sharing your very inspiring story. We wish you well in your new role as developer advocate and look forward to all the adventures that you will have there.

Meg: Well, thank you. I hope that we will do this again some day.