WordPress Gutenberg, the Beginning to the Present

Jonathan (00:01):
Welcome to another episode of Do the Woo. I am your co-host, Jonathan. And with me is Tammie Lister. How are you Tammie?

Tammie (00:10):
I’m good, thank you. How are you? And how was your break?

Jonathan (00:14):
My break’s been really good. How many episodes have we co-hosted at this point? I don’t recall. It’s been a couple.

Tammie (00:21):
It’s been not many. Yeah, but we’re getting into the swing of it.

Jonathan (00:25):
Yeah, it’s been good. I’ve been looking forward to this. I had a good break and one of the things I did differently this year, which was a new experience for me was just all just taking a proper two weeks over Christmas and just mid-December to say, okay, I’m going to do what I can to just not think about WordPress in particular, with the exception of some conversations with so many of my closest friends are in this space, so it’s like you can’t, but not thinking about it. Actively worked on puzzles, did some legos. It was a good break. How about yourself?

Tammie (01:01):
I stayed in the community, but I really like creating things over the holidays. It’s a time for me where I find I always, there’s personal projects that you don’t do. It’s like do them by the end of the year, otherwise you’re not going to do them. So I did a lot of that, a lot of reflecting and trying, a lot of experimenting with things. I always find that the Christmas is part of that for me. I also did offline stuff for me. You’re saying puzzles and Lego, for me, it was knitting and I finally, finally cracked crocheting, which has the most mundane thing in the world. Although you can do some amazing crochet patterns with chat GPD, just saying, yeah, yeah, you can actually ask for knitting and crochet patterns via, and it’ll give you them. It’s really good.

Jonathan (01:48):
So I’m curious with crocheting, it’s been a long time, actually, my grandmother was very into it, so as a young child I was into sewing and I have some good basic context. Are you at a point where can you do other things while you do it? Will you watch TV or listen to something?

Tammie (02:06):
So knitting is something that I’m getting a lot better at and I’m trying to level up my knitting, but my crocheting is still, I kind of try and knit crochet, if that makes sense because I’m trying to, it’s very different. So that’s something that I’m trying to do. I just want to make you make cute little animals and things like doing crocheting and that’s what I’ve been trying to learn. So it’s just really good because, so it’s still coding. It’s one of the most ancient forms of coding still, and it still has that part of your brain, but it keeps that binary going. But it allows you to not be stoned at a screen, which I think is really important.

Jonathan (02:46):
One of the things that I’ve found, so one of my favorite modes is to be working on a puzzle while listening to a book or thinking about a problem. And I just find that especially enjoyable. There are occasionally times where it’s like it requires a higher degree of concentration, but rare. So I’ll just kind plug away at it while taking some other inputs, at the same time.

Tammie (03:08):
I do a lot of that when I paint, because painting takes a long time. Anyone that thinks that painting takes a short time’s not painting, particularly when I do larger canvases. And if you are really getting into that the time it takes mixing colors, you can think a lot while you’re mixing colors and doing it. So that for me, or waiting for colors to dry to then do other colors and things. So that’s very much measured. But all these things are really good because they take you away from that problem. It’s the same as it used to be. That thing whenever I used to try and code and it’s the best advice you never give yourself when you’re facing a problem. You will never want to walk away from a problem but your best walking away from that problem to then go back to it. So switching that task that still has that same hit of those things helps you.

Jonathan (04:00):
So I was pretty disappointed to miss a state of the word. I’d been planning to go out to Spain that didn’t work out for a few different reasons. Bob was there a good number of folks that we know were out there. And that was right about the time where I said, okay, I’m going to take the two weeks off. So I am feeling been pretty out of the loop. There was some good coverage on the tavern kind of recap in it, but let’s kick off with state of the word. Any highlights of it that stood out to you?

Tammie (04:30):
So I, I’ve been to quite a few, but I actually really liked watching. I did the remote watching it in the kind of chat with other people. I kind of enjoy that. I got into the habit of doing that and it’s a very different experience, but I also really like that it means there’s something about having to travel that time of year is a lot sometimes. So for me it was really nice, some of the highlights, there were so many For me as someone that’s had been involved in this project, it feels like we’re not done, but we’re kind of coming to a point not using the word Gutenberg. It’s so important because it everything is core. We have been slowly doing that more and more, but it really felt that as part of this state of the word, it also it is being framed as the admin redesign, but it’s step one of the redesign. And I don’t actually think it’s redesign. I see it more as a componentization and a systemization because the design, yes, it’s going to have a new look a hundred percent, but that’s the default look. And it’s having those native components that then you can detach and then take into anything so exciting. And then I guess the other one which we can talk about is the data liberation, which sounds like it should be a superhero thing.

Jonathan (06:10):
Before we touch on that, I’m curious for your perspective. You were at the heart of Gutenberg from the beginning and I remember one of the things I’m curious for your perspective on is timelines and there were initial expectations about what this was going to look like. I think it’s fair to say that the majority of people involved just underestimated what it would take. But looking back retrospectively for a moment, look at where we’re at now and the current state and what’s coming. And if you’ll just step back in time to those first couple of years where you were actively involved, are there anything that stands out to you of why has it taken so long? What are some of your thoughts and reflection on the journey that we’ve had so far to this point as we look at the year ahead.

Tammie (07:01):
Hand on heart, I don’t think anyone thought about where the end was going to be. I just thought we needed to change. And I’ve kind of reflected on that. You need to make that first push of the snowballs to make the snowman kind of thing. That was very seasonal for the northern hemisphere, but you need to do something and that was it. We needed in action. We can have these perfect visuals and one of the problems we’ve had within this project is we create these perfect visuals, we put them up on a site and then we make it like that or we don’t quite make it like that. And then we have problems with that. And I think we’re moving away from that a little bit, or at least I hope we are. And I think the phases is good. The fact that we are now saying, Hey, we need to not just be so fixated on the phases is really, really important because time changes, things are going to take longer.

(08:01):
I wouldn’t, GPT didn’t exist. I didn’t know I was going to be asking it for crochet patterns back before Gutenberg even started. I was worried about the first game of Zelda coming out again. I was super excited. That’s how dated we’re talking, right? And won the second Zelda game now. And we waited a long time for that one. So it’s a long time the pandemic hadn’t happened. And so all of these things, society has changed. People have changed. And I think what we now know is ecosystem and what WordPress needs will change, but the fundamentals don’t change. The fundamentals are we need a system, we need to be have components, we need to have a space where people can grow from. So I think that that’s about right. I don’t think the people who were creating it necessarily had, or at least in conversations I had, were very rigid about timeframes or just apart from needs and wants to do it to, you couldn’t predict. There were so many things along the way that caused problems from what language were we going to use from and for scenes, it’s like if you were going to try and fulfill the things, we probably would never have done it. It’s one of those brave things that you have to just leap and trust for sometimes.

Jonathan (09:23):
So I’m curious because how many years has it been now? Is it like seven years at this point? I’m fuzzy on that.

Tammie (09:35):
Fuzzy on the years as well, but it’s a while before the pandemic.

Jonathan (09:40):
Yeah, it feels like about seven now. Maybe you underestimate or overing, but it’s a good chunk was I think you’re giving us a couple of clues about the why, but I’m curious on your perspective now. To me, so much of what we see in retrospect is the momentum building that’s been around it. But if you look back to that moment, that decision, there was a lot of pushback where it’s like why change things, why break what’s not broken, et cetera. But what are your thoughts on the why was that energy?

Tammie (10:14):
But every single person who came to the projects at the start had their own background. We’ve also got to maybe remember that quite a few people came from theming. That’s something that’s often lost in the translation. I myself did, Mathias did. So we had seen what didn’t work. Theming was very much a litmus test, still is on what works or doesn’t work because it was impacting the front and very much impacting the back. And then people were creating frameworks to try and get around the problem. And we knew people were working around WordPress. I was very lucky to get to see at scale the problems of WordPress and see an enterprise and listen, I tweeted over the holidays, one of the ex posted whatever we’re calling it, I dunno, our post. One of the biggest things that I reflected on that I got during that time was the feedback, because you only know your perception, particularly as a full-time contributor who’s fixating on the problem. I knew there was a problem. I knew that themes were doing too much. That was one of my big motivations was experience themes that we were having to work around the WordPress way. But I didn’t know all the problems because I wasn’t in all the spaces and you just have to listen.

Jonathan (11:38):
So you saw some of the problems at the time, you had that theme background themes doing too much because to me in retrospect, Gutenberg as a project was there’s been a whole of additional momentum attached to it. A lot of carry on effects of it. It wasn’t just about the editor, but you had to pick something.

Tammie (12:03):
No, but you have to start with writing. So the thing is, if you think about it, everything starts with the letter. Everything starts with the cursor. To be honest, one of the most beautiful things that I come back to, and it’s always a memento for me, even from an artistic perspective, is like the pulsing cursor. I come back to that all the time because no matter what that pulse has to feel, right? And wonder what application you’re using to write. It doesn’t matter what theme you have, doesn’t matter what you have. So we had to get edit flow, right? We had to get it. That’s why we had to start with blocks. We had to get the blocks. And then from that we had to work out how people didn’t have to necessarily know styling or where there was just enough styling or where there are, and you’ve seen this as the project’s evolved where tools were added and that was too many tools or where an interface was added and that was too complicated an interface.

(12:58):
And that refinement in public, it’s really, really difficult. If you think of a stone mason, bear with me here. When Neil’s seen someone chipping away at a bit of rock and crafting something, it’s not pretty. Really not when someone’s chipping away, they do big hacks initially and that’s like the first strokes and then they refine it. And then the tiny, tiny little chips that they’re doing and the tiny refinements they’re doing now, we’re not at the tiny refinements yet at all, but we’re kind of midway. You can see the shape, you can kind of see it’s got a nose, it’s got some ears. And now we’re starting to get that people use the word refinement a little bit. Sometimes there’s a problem. But you see that with the editor. The thing that I was very focused on for a while was how does that flow, how does it feel? Then we were focused on the styling and where’s just enough CSS and all those things. So yeah,

Jonathan (13:59):
One of the things I think that’s interesting is in a proprietary ecosystem, if someone were, because it’s unfair to contrast, I mean we can contrast whatever we want, but it’s overly simplistic. If you contrast a proprietary ecosystem like a platform, if you imagine them trying to do a new editor and it took seven years, there would be this like no. Well, what would happen is that people would more than likely vote with their money and say, well, we don’t want any part to do with this. Whereas in WordPress you can’t really do that.

Tammie (14:33):
But it hasn’t just been a new editor. And I think that’s also the important thing to remember. It’s a new editor, a new language base, a new structure, a new infrastructure. It’s like the shipper thesis comment. It’s the iceberg. And I think this is just an editor. I love that term as well.

Jonathan (14:56):
And I think part of this is that I think there’s some uniqueness to the nature of our ecosystem where again, if you were to a new software stack entirely in a proprietary situation, seven years would be a long time. And I mean let’s look at this even as a, I would argue that this is a decade long transformation. We’ve got years left into this and on the other side of this, we are looking at this ship of thesis, thesis, whatever it was, where the question is like, is it the same ship if you replace everything anymore? And I can see that and I’m optimistic. And I think what I find more interesting is actually what it’s done to us as an ecosystem and the challenges and opportunities that it’s presented. And yet the experience actually does matter a lot because at the end of the day it comes back to are we creating in WordPress?

Tammie (15:51):
But you can’t do it. So this is something at the beginning, we made some pretty broad strokes quite quickly because my art, I go back to that. When you first get a canvas, you white it out or you dark it out. Wherever you’re base your primary canvas, great, you do that big, broad strokes, doesn’t matter. You’re flicking it out, the wall doesn’t matter. And then it gets more refined. The same happens with ideas and product. It’s a big Disney cruiser that we’re rotating with WordPress here. So if we were to make any and when we have as a project collectively made any big strokes, it’s significant. So we have to think about that. And we have, there’s a learning, there’s an evolving and there’s a thinking about products, and this is going into key with the redesign. It is not just that we put something in there and that’s something that has changed with this project.

(16:51):
We put something in there, we put it in beta, we or beta choose your word. And then we do rail, which is a whole new concept for us as a project. And not having our designers and developers do dev rail. We actually have people who are good at it, do devra, and then we get people to create with it and then we get people to know about it. Then we actually educate that the thing is there as well. And then people can use it to do it. We haven’t done that even necessarily with things like native components, if you look at plugins and things like that. So we have a lot to do there. There’s a lot. So many times I look at something and I’m like, oh, why are you not? Because the education, so there’s a lot of size to this. It’s an open source project that we don’t have to do, but proprietary software doesn’t have to do that. The extensibility might be just like you plug it in, you maybe have an API, you don’t have to this we have full ecosystems and products and stacks on top of us that need that information.

Jonathan (17:57):
So one of the things I’m curious about, I have some thought I want to talk about WooCommerce in a moment, but one of the things I’m curious about is one, in an open source ecosystem, you have this concept of ownership where people, whether they recognize it or not, people have this innate sense like, oh, this is mine, this WordPress thing is ours. So for you personally, and those first couple of years of the project, there was a lot of public pushback of, hey, we’re changing things. Like, hey, this is, you remember the star ratings on the Gutenberg?

Tammie (18:34):
I’ve applied to a lot of them as well.

Jonathan (18:36):
Yes. How was that for you when you had this sense of, hey, we’re going somewhere, this is important, you can see it, but there’s so much pushback from the stakeholders. How was that for you to navigate?

Tammie (18:48):
So I think in hindsight, you always, your psyche will take some hits just because of a person. You’re a human being, you have a heart, you have pulses, you have emotions. But also I had some really awesome emotions and feelings of what we were doing. I won’t do something that I don’t believe is right or at least I desperately tried to know that I’m doing something right. I’m not perfect. I’m an imperfect human. If I was perfect, I would be lying because every human, so I always try and do the right thing, particularly by a project that I’ve been in for such a long time. So many people were in this project, we weren’t about to step on the thing which we cared about. Stepping on your heart, we weren’t going to do that.

Jonathan (19:42):
How did you know that it was right? If you look at, and we’re talking about the transformation.

Tammie (19:47):
I was seeing the problems because I was used. So you have to also, this is part and this, lots of us who were involved in the project had been it such a long time and had been creating from the project for such a long time. And I think some people didn’t even know that because this project is really easy to hide in whether you think or not, particularly if you’re not geographical or if you are more of a quiet human or you’re one of the, yeah, it, it’s easy to hide in this project whether you like it. It’s less easy now I think for some people, but still it’s relatively easy, particularly back then. And we were a lot less connected. And for me, I was hiding behind themes quite happily. And I was seeing every time someone changed a theme, it wasn’t just changing your clothing, it was trying to remove arms and legs to change clothing. I literally describe trying to remove body parts to put a jumper on. That’s what it felt like because it was so dramatic. And that’s what I never want it to feel like if we put a theme on or to have to know advanced CSS to be able to style a button, that’s ridiculous.

Jonathan (21:03):
So let’s take the WooCommerce ecosystem. So one of the things that’s interesting about WordPress is how ecosystems develop within it. There are people who live and breathe in WooCommerce that don’t actually think much about WordPress, which is interesting. So you have this large ecosystem with strong sort of commercial ramifications, people whose livelihoods affected. It’s one thing for it to be a blog. And we’ve seen WordPress evolve to be much more to have entire businesses built around it. And WooCommerce is an example of going right at that, people using WordPress to create entire businesses. So from your perspective, as you were going through that Gutenberg journey, when did WooCommerce first start and this idea of the impact to other ecosystems within WordPress? When and where and how did that play into the experience?

Tammie (21:59):
For me, it’s always been at the start, but that’s just because I also have a background from Buddy Press. So my background has always been in and also outside and in extending and in putting sites together and hoping all the plugins work, praying all the plugins work, wishing all the plugins work, and then releasing it and then discovering, oh no, like you right? Everyone back in the day, there would always be something that wasn’t compatible and that was the best will in the world. There’d be some styling you’d need to do or some custom or whatever. So for me it was always, and I’m still driven by this, that it should everything from a product building perspective, having all the pieces together so that you can choose what you use. You don’t have to use everything. It’s choose what you use. I think Woo is critical to me because the moment that people can build on top of it themes is also critical to me because woo themes always a really good example of what a theme was forced to be, if that makes sense. So themes had to become framework because I used this way, we used to say the WordPress way is it was cute and lovely. I actually almost want to use that term as a negative thing, particularly from a product and a development perspective because I think we accept, we just say, oh, it’s a WordPress way.

(23:30):
Why should the difficult path be the WordPress way? Why should we have to work around WordPress? Because we don’t have to now we just think we do and we’re maybe not seeing that WordPress has changed and it’s got native components and it’s got these things or we can have extensibility.

Jonathan (23:47):
That’s a great point. If I think about WordPress at its origins, what’s always stood out to me is it got people to success. It was that famous five minute install to a point of success. You could have a blog up and running. It might just be the Kubrick theme, but you were rolling.

Tammie (24:04):
I love Kubrick though.

Jonathan (24:07):
I have a lot of good feelings, a lot of nostalgia associated. The point though was it was five minutes to success if back then the WordPress way had been hours or days to success. Like, oh, this is just how you do it. Well, we wouldn’t have grown the way that we grew. We got people to results.

Tammie (24:25):
I would’ve never, yeah, I dunno about you. I’m fairly sure, same when someone said to me, they said I was holding together a CMS with hope. That’s what I was doing. Most insecure thing in the world, right? I’m sure you were as well. I have my own PhD, PCMS, I should not have my own P-H-P-C-M-S. I dunno what the logins were. They were not secure. And someone said to me, Hey, have you heard this WordPress thing? I was like, this what? Super new whatever. It’s got theming. It didn’t have theming spoiler. It had something that was loosely called theming. And then I was able to, it wasn’t even five minutes. It really, really is interesting how we said five minutes and it was less than five minutes. So I’m keen what you did you have that same start as well because I think most people had that start and we’ve forgotten about that.

Jonathan (25:21):
Yes. And so that’s been coming up for me more lately because we are very far from that. So I love the WooCommerce ecosystem from a product perspective today. I appreciate that the marketing team is honest about this. When you go look at Woo Express, it says something to the effect of days to set up, but then you’re good to go. And it’s honest, but I think it is, there’s a challenge with that where you can’t imagine a proprietary counterpart like Shopify claiming like, Hey, you’ll be up in days for better or for worse. And I think it’s, if I look back to the early days of WordPress, that wouldn’t have worked. And we can say, oh well it’s different now, but I think there’s still something there about getting to a results successfully. And so for me, the question becomes, well what is the WordPress way today? And I think we’re missing the point if it’s the way that we’ve done things. Because when WordPress came onto the scene, the way that we’ve done things previous to that, blogging was a lot more complex. It wasn’t easy and accessible.

Tammie (26:41):
Part of the WordPress way that you have a problem. It’s easy to, we kind of lost that way I think. And we lost that way because we forgot about it. It wasn’t lost. It wasn’t changed it. And that’s even because we, there’s a lot of life that’s happened recently for everyone I think. And I think part of it was you have a problem. WordPress may be the option for it. It doesn’t always have to be the only solution. But generally if you know WordPress, you can create a plugin or you can create, if you are a product, if you have the skills you can create if you want to, you can probably create a business in this space doing something. You can go to a WordCamp. I’ve kind of shared this with other people, the lack of WordCamp, job boards and things like that. To me it’s the fact of we’ve kind of lost that experimentation and that’s really what a lot of this was.

(27:48):
That’s what excites me. That’s what keeps me going. I’d love to kind of after I finish this note, keeps you going. But what keeps me going is that, and innovation is one, but for me it’s also the heart of it is we have a solution, we have a problem, we know that we can do it better together. We know we can experiment to do it. We know we’re not. We can use these things native components, maybe we can try this. Core has always been about just trying something. The amount of times I have made a bad commit as a core committer and being super supported and I’ve just fallen, if I was a human walking, I would’ve fallen on my done one of those comedy falls. But that’s okay because I’ve been supported because that’s what our community does. It allows me to grow and experiment and we need more of that because we need to give the product spaces and then our ecosystem space. So Woo is a good example of that. Woo came from that of a need to do that and then allowing people to have the spaces in these niches to grow and experiment. I’d love your opinion. That was super wide.

Jonathan (29:00):
What I loved about Gutenberg from its onset and what I continued to see is this injection of it and the energy to solve a set of problems, even if we were fuzzy on it. And it’s like, but there’s been this energy and this momentum that even with all the pretty vocal objections initially within our smaller circle, the objection wasn’t as wise as a lot of people thought because people recognize, okay, there’s progress here, making progress on something. I think what I find especially inspiring because taking some time over the break gave me an opportunity to think, okay, why I’m coming up on 19 years in this space. Why am I still drawn to this? A close friend was asking me, what is it about WordPress? And for me it is our ecosystem and all this what I would describe as these latent pockets of energy throughout the space where people have taken ownership and created, they’ve created products. We get to see products on a regular basis that have been in progress for years that we’d never heard of that have developed in this community or this.

Tammie (30:09):
Or someone can spin somebody up in a lunchtime equally.

Jonathan (30:13):
Or just so quickly. And there’s something about that to me where it’s like, oh, this is wonderful. It’s part of why I have so much confidence in the longevity and the resilience of our space. And now I look at it from this lens of like, okay, that’s fantastic. There’s so much energy here. There’s a lot more. When you look at a proprietary ecosystem, for instance, I tend to associate that with homogeny there’s a lot of risk if the company goes under or the team loses motivation. Whereas in WordPress it’s like there are thousands of teams and that have interest in this project. And what I’m intrigued by now is how do you support that sub ecosystems like WooCommerce, I think offer great opportunities to gather interest around particular sets of problems. And my heart though remains in our ecosystem as a whole where it’s like, okay, how do we take WordPress as a whole and grow and strengthen and better support and connect what we have to allow more innovation and growth in ecosystems like WooCommerce?

(31:22):
And it’s a big question and at least for me in my personal interest, the key is to keep asking the question. I struggle personally with disappointment and when things don’t work the way that we want to, that’s part of what drove me asking about your early Gutenberg experience. And I think when we look around us at all the shared ownership in the space, there’s so much that we can work with and then it becomes like, okay, where do we take action? Gutenberg was a series of actions that were difficult that you couldn’t have an end in sight. I think like you said, if we could see that this is going to be a decade of work to affect this transformation, it might’ve been a lot harder to start it. And it’s like that’s not the job.

Tammie (32:09):
It would’ve been harder to start it and probably, I don’t know who would’ve started it. You have to be naive part of what you were saying as well. It is the time to solve the problem. I go back to themes just because it’s top of my mind at the moment. Themes have been this thing with me where I almost want to call them something different, call them, I don’t know, hamsters because they have been a thread for out and they’ve been a thing that I have been passionate about, like package styling that you can just change and it’s beautiful art. And we stopped that. It became homogenous. I love that word that you use. It just became and as a theme maker, I was making myself and it just became like that and it became disheartening and I didn’t want to do it anymore. So many theme people and with everything we have now, we are at that like, oh, so many of us old theme in a beautiful way.

(33:13):
I was super excited now and wasn’t the alignment is right now we have the tools, we had to have the foundation. So some of these problems, it’s about that. I don’t want to use the term lives because I don’t think that people have multiple lives in different projects. As someone that’s had a life, when I’ve done art, a life when I’ve done different things and I’m phasing in and out of things, I will never say, this is the only project I’m ever going to do in my life. Because that’s a very broad stroke to say. But a lot of us are putting in quite a lot of time into these things and we’re getting life skills and we’re doing a significant amount of dedication. And when you are doing that, being able to move around the ecosystem, being able to grow and adapt, being able to find space to do that, being able to create your own things, being able to collaborate with people on things, being able to move companies, being able to stay within that space, keep those skills within that space, go out and then come back in.

(34:12):
I’ve done that is really important. And then being able to look at next generations is the another one. We are talking about that growth and innovation. I feel very old sometimes when I’m talking about future, but there’s so much more we can do to make sure that people have this potential. If they want to take this potential of this project, the next generations can have that in whatever form they want it as well. There’s a lot there, but it may not be the time for the thing you want. You may have something you’re burning passionate about. And I see a lot of this across all areas of the project. Someone’s like, we’ll find something like, I’ve found a spoon. This is the most important spoon in the world and this needs fixing. And then they don’t get it fixed and then they get really upset. But if you just maybe think that it wasn’t the time to fix that spoon and put either hold onto that spoon or come back to that spoon, put it down and you can come back to it. Just log where the spoon is or come back with others, bring friends, never go alone, then you will be able to fix the spoon. So it’s that kind of way of seeing it as well.

Jonathan (35:21):
I want to touch on this idea of generation for a moment. So I have a 13-year-old son. My favorite game of all time 20 years later remains the age of Empire series. It’s a real time strategy series and there’s a tournament happening. This, I’ve been kind of keeping an eye on the games and on the way to school I asked my son to, I was driving him, asked him to bring up Twitch and watch the game. And I saw, because I was interested, he indulged and he was asking questions about it. And this weekend I’m going to show him some of the final games in the series. And I suspect because there’s some similar concepts, it has the support of Microsoft. It’s here though, because there’s been such a rich community of investment for these previous decades. And when I look at that, I had this moment of reflection, I would love my children to take an interest in that and carry it forward.

(36:19):
It’s okay if they don’t, but it’s like I could see in him watching me, he could see my passion for it. And in similar vein, if I think about WordPress in our ecosystem, so both of my kids have had their own WordPress sites and they appreciate that from an objective perspective, they’d have been better off in terms of speed and whatever, just setting them up on some proprietary platform. But no, I wanted them to experience WordPress. And I think it’s important for me now to think, when I think about this idea of the WordPress way, what is it that I’m conveying to them? It’s not about the code,

Tammie (36:56):
It’s not about the logo, it’s not about WaPo, although Wapos super cute. It is to me what it is is potential. For me, it’s potential. I go back to potential, which goes back to its experimentation, which goes back to back in the days, there was always a way you could turn up at a workcamp. You could get your jobs for the next whatever quarter. You could collaborate with people on things. You could find ways solutions for things. And you could hack on some code or support in any other way that you wanted to be. It documentation design. No matter what, you could do it. It’s really simple.

Jonathan (37:46):
I took my son to WordCamp US last year. It was his first WordCamp. He enjoyed it a lot. He enjoyed the swag, he enjoyed the pinging pong table at the blue host booth. That’s where he spent a good chunk of his time. And he’s asked me multiple times since about when’s the next one. And on the way there, he read the milestones book to give him some kind of history and context for it. And I could see it wasn’t right now, the technology itself is not directly relevant to his world. They’re using his friends, they use mobile phones, websites are not as big of a thing, but the community itself and this what would bring all these people together, I could see that that was interesting to him.

Tammie (38:28):
And the people are still there. That’s the thing. I find reading milestones, I’ve reread it recently and I found it really interesting because it’s very othering. You know, were there in sections, but also it is the essence of people just coming together to solve things which matter. And that’s super important. And if the next generations do that, awesome. So that to me is what we’ve got to be doing here. And that’s what gives me the innovation for this year. For me this year is really about how do I create things? How do I take everything we’ve got? How do I make it easier for people to create? How do I start just doing that experiment? You can say experimentation, but you need to do experimentation, you need to make things. I dunno, what’s your year going to be like? How are you going to take this energy into the year?

Jonathan (39:25):
It’s a good question. I think what I’ll describe as the app store problem remains a top interest for me of how do we help these great products get discovered within the space in a way that’s not reliant on centralization, but how do we do it in a decentralized way? That remains really interesting to me. And I think my focus now is like, okay, what’s the best path to getting there? And I think my learning from this previous year is that the answers are often a lot closer than you think. And I find it’s in community, it’s in listening, it’s in trying things and experimenting and letting that momentum build. Because if you focus too much for me, I tend start with the end in mind. And if you focus too much on the specifics, I think it’s easy to miss out on a lot of things that can really surprise you along the way when you’re listening and paying attention and building.

Tammie (40:27):
We’ve also got a trust fall in this community. And that’s scary, right? We’ve got, it always is. Although it’s really easy for my dog, my border colleague can just, maybe that’s a lesson we need to be more like dog and we need to learn that to not engage our brain so much and just go and trust that our community is going to hold us and we’re a lot better off than we think we are in this space. And that is not gloss over problems because just like any community, it is always not sunshine, rainbows and unicorn breath. But we are strong when we create and do things together and we’re strong when we are doing forward and we’re focusing on building, if we are constantly picking and that kind of thing, that’s not strength, that’s critique, constant critique. But that delight you express when you see something built. We also both got really excited like you do. I can’t hide my excitement. I become like a toddler. I am ridiculous. And you are doing it too. It’s just the way just to see someone just creating something. It’s so good. And to just be able to do more of that.

Jonathan (41:53):
Yeah. Tammie, I’m looking forward to the year. I’m looking forward to another year in the Do the Woo community. We have a new website coming out sometime in the near future. If folks want to connect with you, what’s the best way for them to reach

Tammie (42:06):
Out? So it’s karmatosed on all the things at the moment.

Jonathan (42:12):
And your WordPress site?

Tammie (42:15):
My WordPress site is tammylister.com.

Jonathan (42:19):
Awesome. And for me, you can find me on jonathanwold.com and SirJonathan, on most of the things. So Tammie, thanks for joining me. See you next time.

Tammie (42:30):
Thank you so much. Bye.