Cutting through the noise: the sharpest ideas, honest moments, and quotable insights, the real signal from our conversations across OpenChannels FM.
Bringing Fun Back Into Building Websites
“I’ve been on a, I don’t want to call it spiritual journey, but it slightly feels like it for about a year and a half now. You know, back in the day, I built WordPress websites myself and did that for customers, did that for myself in the first place, learned all the stuff, made all the mistakes, whatever. And on my way to becoming like a proper grown-up professional person in this world and had to like start making money and stuff like that. I kind of lost the joy of working on websites. And at some point I stopped making websites even for customers. I like left the more developer-y kind of our craft and moved, pun intended, moved to the product side. I’m a product manager now, which is way more fun than it sounds. But on New Year’s Day, 2025, I sat down, was like, okay, I will get my stuff together now and have like a proper website for myself because I’m a serious person. But also I want to have as much fun with it as possible.”
— Simon Kraft, A Journey Back to Enjoying Web Development and Personal Blogging
The Legacy of Fame and Obscurity
“To be like, you know, a person whose name carries on after you pass away. But think about, think about somebody who’s, you know, one of the most famous people of all time. Let’s go for, I don’t know, Alexander the Great. Everybody probably knows that name. I imagine some people have got a handle on what he did and what have you. But if you, if you actually think about it, what do you know of him? Like, actually him? And the answer is nothing. You just know, yeah, you just know that there was a person called Alexander and, you know, and then I don’t suppose he was born in— Hey, you are Alexander the Great. But he became Alexander the Great. You don’t know anything about him. You know, there’s no, there’s no bit that you can latch onto. And so, there’s a bit of that. You know, if I was to court fame and make that the primary reason for my life, you’re not the legacy that you think you have probably isn’t what it actually is.”
—Nathan Wrigley, Fame Then and Now – How the Internet Changed What It Means to Be Known
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The Power of Open Source for Personal Motivation
“Of course I’m passionate about it. It’s why I do what I do every day. I felt like my CV was enough of a statement. The 20 years I’ve spent working in WordPress and open source space seems to punctuate your view on it.”
—Dave Lockie, The Growth of Domain Names and the Future of AI in Internet Identity
Giving Listeners Options: More Than Just an Audio Experience
“My feeling is that I should not be stingy, I guess I could say that word, with providing content with each episode. I don’t necessarily feel the need to— I don’t want to say force, but hey, you got to listen to this because there’s really nothing else here that’s going to tell you anything about it. And yeah, generally a podcast is that, but I want when people land on our episodes, they have options if they don’t really feel like listening to it, or maybe, hey, they landed on it and didn’t realize it was a podcast.”
—Bob. Dunn, Our Guide to Open Channels FM Podcast Network’s Channels, Series, and Blog
