The Importance of Product Testing in WordPress

Abha:
Hello, and I’m Abha Thakor and we’re here for another The WordPress Way. It’s our second of our new shows. So today we are going to be in two different countries. We’re going to be having participants from India and from the USA. So stay with us and find out about how even when we’re in different places and we come from different backgrounds, we can still have lots in common as the people on today’s show will reveal. We have on the WordPress way today we have Pooja Derashri from India and has a background in development. But’s also one of our contributors, the training and the test team. So WordPress, hello, we have Brian Alexander all the way from Oregon in the United States. And again, a very person that you will see very often in WordPress in the test team, but also doing other things from graphic design and development and some digital marketing too.

And then we hop back to India and we’re joined by Anand Upadhyay as well. And who is from the wonderful, beautiful state of Rajasthan in India too. Hello. And we’re going to kick off today’s program, not talking about development, but talking about product. And because I know products and product testing is something that is really, really important to all three of you who are here today. And you all have a passion for it in your world, in your business world, but also in how you support the project. And we’ve had an interesting chat before we came onto the studio today about food. And you would expect this from me and do the woo because if you’ve been keeping up that we’re planning a whole lot of shows, we’ll be talking about all things woo and cooking at the same time. So make sure that you catch the items that people are going to mention today because we will be cooking them live at some point.

They’re all looking at me going, oh no. But yes, it’s going to be fun. It’s going to be fun. Part of our WP recipes idea aims to help spread cultural inclusion across the world, get people to understand different cultures and swap recipes in the name of healthy eating. Though I’m not sure one of the items that we’ve got featured today, it’s so healthy, but we’ll forget about that. She says with a piece of chocolate ready to eat after the show. Okay, so product testing, people who contribute to WordPress may not think testing has a lot to do with WordPress and contributing, but I’m going to go to Brian. First of all, Brian, when did you discover that there’s a whole testing side to WordPress?

Brian:
Well, when I first joined the project as a sponsored contributor, I was pointed toward the test team as a place where I could kind of learn the ropes of how the community worked and such. And there were a lot of contributors there who were willing to help me and show me where to go, what to look at. And I found testing as a good introduction to learning about WordPress and how core works or how the whole ecosystem works. And so I do have a passion for testing. I like to try to break things. And so I worked with different contributors who kind of gave me a little bit of information and I went and started to test around. I had some difficulty initially setting up a development environment in order to do some testing, but some of those things are becoming a little bit easier with things like WordPress Playground and WP now quite a bit faster to set up. But that was when I first was introduced to testing within WordPress.

Abha:
Brian, for people who’ve not heard about WP Playground, can you just tell us a little bit more about what that is and what it means for people who are contributing?

Brian:
WP Playground allows you to launch a full instance of WordPress just in your browser, so you don’t need to set up a development environment and jump through all of those hoops instead of the famous five minute install, it’s a five second install and you can install plugins themes, you can test those and there are also some helpful utilities on the playgrounds site that let you test Gutenberg and WordPress develop core PRS directly in the browser.

Abha:
So that’s direct product testing really Yes, but in a very quick installation. And is there help information for how people get that set up?

Brian:
I’m going to get this path wrong probably, but we can correct it in the show notes. I think that it might be developer dot WordPress dot org slash playground might be a place to start.

Abha:
Cool. And I’m just going to just very briefly to Puja Puja, do you know if we’ve got anything on training at the moment that would help people on WP Playground? And it may be that could be something for the future?

Pooja:
Yes, definitely. There are few feature tutorials available on training team Learn for Presto talk website where people can find the video, contain the video tutorial and the lesson plan format where all detailed videos available around WordPress WordPress playground so they can watch and learn.

Abha:
That’s the perfect answer and it’s always the right person to ask. And the WordPress playground website is wp.org/playground and it’s got all the documentation and as Puja said, it’s also things on learn WordPress dot org. So if you’ve heard this and you think, aha, I want to go back and have a look at this because these people are talking about it. So thanks for that. So while I’ve got you there, you’ve obviously been involved in the training team for quite a long time, and you’re a developer by background. When you were doing your development training, was product testing seen as quite an important part of that and part of the learning process?

Pooja:
Yes, definitely. When we do testing, we need to learn many things and many things around WordPress needed to be tested. It’s important to deliver a good product. So testing will be a good way to deliver a nice product to have mass audience and mass users. So yeah, definitely testing is the first key which we need to do to delivering good product.

Abha:
And I know that testing is something that is part of your heartbeat that you believe in absolutely is a key thing to working in tech. What is it that fascinates you so much about testing, not just products, but also customer service testing?

Anand:
As I’m running a product development company, so it’s a WordPress plug in developing company. So testing is one of the key role plays a very key role in the success of any product because when you’re delivering a product, it has to be a bug free. And if you are developing a WordPress plugin or anything, any software, there are different scenarios If you have to test a product, like when we test our products or when we test even WordPress also like now it supports so many WordPress PSV versions. So you have to test in all the test case scenarios, you have to cover all the scenarios, all the test cases. And so testing plays a crucial role. When you’re delivering a prayer to the moss, there’s something, a very important thing.

Abha:
And this people listening hadn’t already realized, we have three people who love testing and you could too because there’s going to be lots of opportunities we’re going to be talking about during the show about how you can learn how to test if you don’t do that already, learn more about product development and the role testing has in that and in a release cycle, but also there’s an opportunity to do it as a community. And lots of people that we’ve spoken to as passive do the woo, have found that learning together by testing together, by testing on a common issue. So it could be that at a moment we’re encouraging people to test on certain aspects of 6.5 for WordPress, the next release that will be coming out. And there is a sense of camaraderie about doing that because in the studio today we’ve got four different countries plus people in the background, so five different countries and all of us are engaged in testing in some way and quite often the same materials, but all of our setups, all of our usage is likely to be different. And Brian, you’ve talked about this before as when you were test team rep as well and in dev chat about why it’s important not just for one person to test but for different things and to get those tests early. What would you say to people who’ve never done it but who have the setup? And for people who are new, why come and help do this?

Brian:
I think that both you and Anon kind of touched on that there are different versions of PHP. Everybody has a different computer setup. So all of these diverse environments and we’re really pointing at, we’re testing for over a third of the internet for websites. There is a huge diversity in hosting platforms and configuration. And so every test is valuable to validate that it works in a particular circumstance with particular configuration. So it is vital that we have a lot of different tests, every test matters and it’s very important. And sharing that test information is also very helpful because it builds confidence in the software and there might be a scenario that you tested that other testers didn’t think about before and that might trigger something in their mind where they’ll say, oh, what if I test this other scenario? And you may through those various little tweaks and adjustments, find something that reveals a bug somewhere. So it is very important for you to think outside of the box and not consider just a single consolidated environment where WordPress happens. It happens all over the place in so many different flavors and shapes and sizes.

Abha:
I think that idea of actually every test does matter. I know I’ve been testing release candidates for a couple of years, but I know with Brian’s help, there are a couple of scenarios where I know plugins that I have installed may have an issue. So when I’m testing, I’ll make sure I test that environment as well. And because I raised, okay, I get this, people like Brian were able to say, okay, try these tests the minute you’ve done that and if you still get it, then this is how you fix it and how you report it. And it really made a difference because it’s not obvious necessarily the situations you’re going to get. And I think things like learn WordPress where you’ve got videos really help. And Brian, you are also quite pivotal in creating the new test guides that we have, which I can harshly recommend to people.

Brian:
There’s a lot of knowledge that is passed around folks in the community and I think that this affects each WordPress team to a different extent. There’s information that is passed from team reps to team reps or maybe conversations or methodologies that happen during team chats and all of that information. If it can be encapsulated and put into the handbook, then that information can be more easily accessed. We spend less time explaining and more time just pointing and being able to discuss the core problems and be more efficient in our testing efforts.

Abha:
Absolutely, and Do the Woo’s infamous Bob, we’ll be very pleased that I can link this back to one of my favorite topics cooking because it is the same with cooking and that with recipes passed down over time, things can improve, things can change, things can become a whole new item. And that’s the same with what we are doing when we collaborate together is that we can try new things, we can share those ideas and we can learn a little bit more. So I’m going to take us down this cooking angle, so just humor me please and prepare to be hungry for the folks who are listening. So Puja, I know you love cooking as well as testing and training and doing all the thousand million things that you do to help the WordPress project in addition to co-founding a web development company as well and working on plugins. But when you are cooking, do you find that it is time to think about solutions to things that maybe when you’re in front of a computer that you may not be able to do?

Pooja:
It happens sometimes when I cook I focus and I’m more concentrate on my dish, so my concentration gives me the solution. So at some point I came across, yeah, this thing in testing or somewhere in the project can help me if I do this kind of solution. So yeah, it happens many times with me.

Abha:
And this is why we’re going to see PooPooja in our cookery show as well. So Pooja, you tell me what is your favorite dish to cook?

Pooja:
It’s rajasthani dish, dal baati and it’s like big ball made by wheat flour or Lantus very delicious rajasthani dish.

Abha:
And how hard is it to make?

Pooja:
We make a wheat flour balls and then bake it. It is filled with Lantus, the mix of many Lantus

Abha:
And it’s yummy by the sound of it. Okay, so we’re going to do a step by step I think for that recipe so that people can follow along and we’ll be talking about solutions when we make that one and an because I know you love cooking as well and I’ve had to put you on the spot to find things that you are going to be able to share. I didn’t tell him that he doesn’t have to make them, but with a camera. But hey, he loves product testing and new adventures, so I’m sure he’s not going to say no to that. So what is your favorite dish to cook?

Anand:
Yeah, as I already shared, the favorite cook is same as the Pooja, but as you’re interested that I, sure I cannot mention the same thing. So there is another recipe called, we call it Gatta. It is a kind of curry, so it is made with the ground floor and then we make a dough and make it in its long shape and boil it and then we prepare a curry and then it is served with that cur also.

Abha:
Do you have lots of spices in it?

Anand:
Yeah, in India, especially in our region, you cannot find any dish without a spices.

Abha:
So do you want to just tell me a couple of spices? It’s a reason for my question.

Anand:
Yeah, we call it a major ingredient. It’s called, we call it masala. It’s a kind of mixture of many spices. So I don’t know what are all the ingredients in it, but we get it as a combined form in our region it’s called Guam Masala, so that is one of them.

Abha:
Now I talking about recruiting some more component maintenance as a core team rep and strangely enough we use the example of Guam Masala because Guam Masala is made up of lots of different spices including coriander, and sometimes the product has turmeric in it. If you buy it from one area, sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes it has venue Greek in it, sometimes it has ginger in it. And all of these things can vary depending on where you’re from, which obviously is part of WordPress too because WordPress, for people who don’t know, it’s also available in lots of different languages. So we’re saying the same thing. Software does the same thing, but it’s described in different ways because it’s described in local languages, but also all these different spices are a bit like components, aren’t they, Brian? They make up what the product is. So it’s a way of thinking about components because people keep saying to me, what is that?

Why would I want to be a component maintain and why have I got to test a component? I did a let’s started 6.5 tests just before Christmas and people say, you’ve mentioned people can volunteer to test components. I say, why would I want to test a component? I want to test WordPress. But actually those components are a bit like spices. They make up WordPress and they offer the different features and they offer the different tastes of WordPress. They’re all nodding at me. So they’re also thinking about the garam masala and the curry and the different things as well, but they’re nodding at me. So Brian, do people who want to come and do something, but they have a specialist area. For me it’s bulk edit. That’s my component and I have a particular interest in getting that resolved for the end user and the about information as well. That’s my spice, that’s my passion, my component or component something for testing that are really important and that are part of modern day testing rather than just people always looking at the whole product.

Brian:
Absolutely. It’s hard to encompass the scope of WordPress when we say testing in WordPress because that’s just the very tip of the iceberg. As you mentioned, components altogether comprise what is WordPress and testers have different personalities, different tastes and different preferences and what they’re interested in the project. And so there are numerous components. There are other aspects of WordPress as well, such as the learn site training, handbooks, documentation, mobile apps. There are so many things across the WordPress ecosystem that need testing that it’s really kind of a choose your own adventure as to what you are interested in and if you do have a passion for a particular component such as bulk edit and that can very, very well be what you do most of your testing on where you pay most of your attention.

Abha:
And obviously anybody who wants to come and test bulk at it, please, we have regular component testing sessions. I thought I had to get that in, so I’m going to Thanks for that Brian. And see you are now talking cookery as part of WordPress. I told you you’d be a convert. So I’m going to go to a, you’ve talked in the past and I’ve worked with you in documentation team as well about how if products need to grow, they need to be tested, you need to think about customer support and what the customer actually that experience is all about. And I know that’s why you’re a parcel of the documentation team as well. Can you just share a little bit about the documentation and how you get involved with that, but also why knowing how to test the product helps you in doing documentation?

Anand:
Right. So I have been involved with the documentation, what make workplace documentation came from last around one year. So I think in less than one year. So from the past many years I was trying to find out where in which channel I can contribute to both and I can. So I’ve tried many channels. I have done core contribution also, and I have tried to enter in the marketing channel also, but somehow I didn’t find my perfect date where I can better match. So I joined the documentation team. I realized that this is the area where I can contribute from contribution. My aim is to give back to the community, but there is also another goal is to learn something new. So I’m come from the development background, but I want to learn something new through contribution as well. So contributing to documentation, I have given me a good chance to understand how such a large documentation project is managed and I’m still learning a lot to the team.

So this is how I got into documentation and yes, documentation is important. Part of any product, any product without documentation is like you have just given something to your end user and told them to figure out how to use anything. But if you have a solid documentation, it can help the users to understand the things, how they can use it. Yes, documentation and testing can go side by side as well because if you are working in documentation, if you are working and testing, you have to explore the product. If I’m a writing documentation for any new feature and any announcement of any new feature or existing feature, then I have to explore the things. And yes, I have also reported issues while doing documentation. Also, that thing also happened and

Abha:
It is important and I think anybody who wants to get involved with documentation for WordPress actually being able to use the software, and that doesn’t mean as a developer level, but actually being able to look at what you’re describing makes such a difference. It isn’t just about editing something that is static. It is about actually how do I use this? Where do people have problems? I was co-lead for documentation for 6.4 and we’re still working on end user documentation. Nothing would make me happier in WordPress than to have more people working on end user documentation so that as close after a release has launched, we’ve got that up and ready. And the same for training. So if you were listening to this and you think actually I’ve come from a developer background or maybe a related background and you feel inspired by test and documentation, there is a clear route here for you to help and get involved with the project and make the software really, really important in how it helps people because it is about empowerment. Brian, you’ve just typed into the channel, but documentation is a gift to a community. Do you mind just elaborate a bit on that?

Brian:
Yeah, consider someone who is not as familiar with WordPress or is having a problem with their website or is a developer who’s just getting started. All of those different roles benefit from having strong documentation, strong updated documentation. Think of how many forum posts might not have been logged because it was clearly stated how to use a particular feature in the documentation or perhaps uncovering bugs as you said, because that that’s all part of it is validating your documentation in a way you’re testing what your assumptions are and if those assumptions are incorrect, then you’re assuming the wrong thing or there’s a bug in the system. So that definitely becomes a gift to the entire community as a resource that doesn’t require one-on-one time or tying up one person. It’s very inefficient for one person to answer all the questions.

Abha:
That’s why in WordPress we have a multifaceted approaches and we have meetups. And if you don’t know about meetups and you’re hearing this already, there are meetups for both do for WooCommerce and for WordPress. Sometimes they’re combined into having similar people and they alternate their on their month cycles. So if you find that documentation takes you to a certain level but you need a little bit of extra help, then there is this free resource we’ve talked about, which is learn dot WordPress dot org. But also there are meetups and Anand, you actually co-run a meetup, don’t you? Yeah,

Anand:
I read the WordPress, we WordPress meetup, we try to grow the WordPress community in our city and also in the next Sunday we are organizing a beginner workshop of our WordPress also so that we aim to join to attack the newcomers who are not so much aware about WordPress or don’t know how to explore its power. So we are trying to organize a beginner workshop so that we can attract so a lot of new people to join in the community

Abha:
And many meetups have their own Slack instance as well. Slack for people have not used. It is an instant messaging tool that WordPress uses. It uses other things too, but at the moment that seems to be the majority of use and you can talk and chat, follow up and gain ideas and tips from that too. So we’ll share the link to your meetup as well. Brian, do you go to a meetup or have been involved with one?

Brian:
Yes, being in the United States, if local, if there’s a WordCamp US meetup then I’ll try to make that one. I’ve also been to WordPress, sorry, WordCamp Europe when it was in Porto. So I volunteer when I go to those meetups and I also participate in the contributor days because that gives me the most FaceTime with members of the community and the ability to talk about, for example, entry pathways into WordPress, whether it be for development or testing or marketing or whatnot. It’s great to have those conversations and be able to connect with other people based on a shared love of WordPress.

Abha:
And of course we have WordCamp Asia coming up too. We’re going to doing some pieces around that. We do the wound, so do keep an eye out on that. And WordPress WordCamp Europe will also have contributor days where you can find out, learn about all these different teams that we’ve been talking about today and more. And Pooja there are learn WordPress meetups as well, aren’t there?

Pooja:
Yes, there is a learn meetup where on every week twice or twice Meetup happens. And that is the completely online you can join anywhere just with a Zoom link. So yeah, it is a very nice way to join the online workshops and there is a discussion group happens and you can learn via join these meetings.

Abha:
So there are so many ways to learn and to get involved really that we could just talk all day about these things, which is great. But going back she would expect too, of course to our recipe ideas. We haven’t heard Brian’s recipe yet. So Brian, what is your favorite thing to cook?

Brian:
Abba, you’ll appreciate that. My favorite recipe is something that was put together through testing.

Abha:
I love it.

Brian:
I went on a trip to Porto Vallarta in Mexico and we went to a shop that had shrimp tacos and they were the most fantastic shrimp tacos that our family had ever had. And so when we came back home from our vacation then began the testing of trying to replicate the flavors and the ingredients. And so making a sauce, there’s a Chipotle adobo sauce that’s very spicy that you use with it frying the shrimp using chopped cabbage, Mexican style cheese, and also using hand pressed tortillas. So there are a lot of things and I think that I still make tweaks each time to try to capture that essence of that memory.

Abha:
And actually my brain is still focused on the cheese and the hand pressed tortilla. So I’m trying to get my brain back to do the work. But those tweaks are actually what product development is also about and creating those memories because I know when I train people in product development and marketing side of that and the communication side of it, one of the things that we look at is how do you create that memory or go into that memory someone has of something they have done with a product that has allowed them to get a certain result. Now that result might be to have the most amazing meal and to have everybody in the room going, which is wonderful, you are an amazing cook. Equally that result could be something of it’s allowed someone to access a piece of equipment that they would not be able to do otherwise because of a accessibility issue.

So there’s all sorts of things, but also we talk about tweaks during the release cycle and we talk about actually we can make this better, we can evolve this tool, we can make this aspect of WebPress even better. And for those who’ve been involved in the FSE experiment and thought site editing, it has been about tweaking things as well as revolutionizing. And sometimes revolutionizing comes from our focus on let’s collaborate and make something our product or our community even better, even stronger, even more available to more people. And I know Anand is nodding because this is one of his favorite topics too and I’m going to come back to you Anand to as well.

So Anand, you’ve talked about how for product testing is important in terms of how we create flexible solutions and that’s also about people keeping an open mind when they’re dealing with customer services because actually finding that solution for a specific case in mind only doesn’t allow you to think outside the box doesn’t allow you to grow. So when you are working in your company and when you’re working with others and talking at Word camps, how do you focus on thinking about multiple perspectives while you’re planning and developing solutions?

Anand:
So when we are working in the product, so the operators, you can be used at different kind of scenarios and the kind of products we have that people are using in different scenarios. So we get a lot of different perspective from the customer support also because the customer support is that point of your business where that connects to directly with your customers. Because if you have developed a product with your team but team is not connected with the customer, then you’re going to get the right perspective. So from there we get a lot of ideas and we understand what are the areas in which our products are used.

So we have to incorporate that thing also in our testing strategies. So as a product is used by the users and we get the feedback we have, our testing strategies also evolve a lot because we know that there are different cases where our plugins can be used. And if you are working on WordPress then many people are using different kind of plugins, different kind of servers and different PHU versions. So it kinds have a lot of permutation combination that you have to test with, but sometimes it’s not possible. It’s also,

Abha:
And that equally applies if they’re working in WooCommerce because they could be using different PHPs, different servers, different environments. They could even be testing in different environments. So Alan, in terms of developing WOO products as well, what is the mindset that you find works the best for thinking about what will work in a WooCommerce environment?

Anand:
If you’re developing a WooCommerce product for WooCommerce, then you first have to think about how it’ll align. It’ll work with all the extension that people are using. Cause if anyone is using WooCommerce, then you can make sure that he’s also using a lot of other the WooCommerce extension there as well. So you have to first make sure that your product integration doesn’t break the integration that other plugins are having with the WooCommerce. So the first thing is you have to make sure that you are following the best practices set up by the WooCommerce you are using, not doing any blackhead techniques, you are using the light hooks that are provided by the WooCommerce and implement the things accordingly because you don’t want other integrations to break just because of your plugin, but if you are doing the following the best practices, then you are on the good side. Otherwise you have to step back and think that no, this is the fault of my product and I have seen that many plugins are not following the best practices and because of this, all the integration breaks from and can cause a chaos also. So there’s something that every WooCommerce developer has to think about it.

Abha:
And now especially now compared to when I got started, there is a lot more help available on those best practices. So you’re not having to learn as much ad hoc as you used to. I did computer programming from an academic perspective first and that I think helped me understand with WordPress and with Wu that you need to look for what best practices were, but they weren’t always documented and of reason for having documentation and now I find that it is a little bit easier. So there are things out there and I know everybody on this podcast is nodding at me. There’s lots of information out there about how to do things the WordPress way and the WooCommerce way and it does make a difference. And I now know that also there are opportunities to learn a big plug for the developer blog. We have a lot of wonderful use case studies that are coming out in that now about how you can do your coding in a certain way so that you are following better practices.

And I think we’ll have more of that. I do invite everybody here who’s in the podcast and those listening to look at whether you could write for that and you could share your expertise in how you use proper coding techniques you use the way WordPress has learned and evolved to use in your own development because it does help and it does mean you have less work to redo. Obviously products change and we all know the pain that goes with that when as a customer or a user we’ve got to do some more things but hopefully as things start to get a bit easier, now we’re on to phase three, we’re Gutenberg, it should be a little less of a fear factor in terms of change. So do check out those things and I’m going to definitely talk to Anand about how we can get some of what he’s been talking about on the developer blog as well.

I’m going to jump over to Pooja. You’ve had a really interesting journey because you’ve started life as a developer and you’ve gone into all sorts of different things. I know one of things that you have said is from contributing you’ve learned how to do other things like SEO, you’ve learned how to do copy editing, things that you weren’t in your training when you trained to be a developer but a part of working with product now they’re really important and you’ve been able to use those skills in the business too. But isn’t that a bit like as we learned to cook from being little, I dunno about you or the other people on the show, but I certainly am a much better cook now than I was when I was little or as a teenager when you first start throwing dinner parties and you have to do little cheats to actually work out solutions. But do you think that as you’ve got more into not just contributing and a wider product knowledge through WordPress, that that has made you a better developer?

Pooja:
When we contribute to WordPress in any project, we learned a lot and we also implement these learning in our daily life. And as you said, I learned many things and used many cheat sheets, many copy editing things and I implemented this in my cooking as well and it improved in my cooking as well. So learning doesn’t rely on one thing. If you learn anything you will apply is apply to another thing and your simultaneously both things will improve and by the combining effect you’ll be a better version of yourself, not only in cooking but also in the professional life, personal life and in the contribution journey as well.

Abha:
Because all these things we learn along the way is what makes us more effective. We’re all 3D people and 14, if someone would say and that we have different ways our brains learn and the more different stimuli, the more different other things that we do. It can all help how we approach working with customers that Anna just talked about. We approach testing that Brian has talked about and how we approach learning as Pooja’s talked about and thinking of things that we do that are slightly different to our roles as developers, designers, communicators. Brian, you have five hands?

Brian:
Yes, I live the Portland urban farmer lifestyle in that respect. So I think after moving to Portland, it took me two years before I finally installed a chicken coop and got my first batch of chickens. And they’re incredible creatures. They’re very cool, they’re very strong, they’re very fast and quite resourceful on the few times when I have mistakenly not closed ’em up at night or there was some type of predator in the yard and they jumped up into the trees. So they’re quite amazing creatures and it’s also very nice to have a constant supply of fresh eggs and particularly during times when egg prices go up in the stores and we don’t really sweat it, just keep them happy.

Abha:
So you see all those people out there who think people who work in it are boring, they just haven’t watched the do the woo shows have. They just need to come here and have it, save it, save it to your podcast favorites and you’ll get to know all these things. And I know I little birdie told me that you like growing and experimenting with flowers and vegetables.

Anand:
Yeah, I love gardening. I own backyard garden so they try to experiment with flowers and vegetables, but I’m more on the flower side because I think they need less care than the vegetables need. So yeah, I love growing the seasoned flower as well. Throughout the year we get different kinds of flowers in the backyard, so it’s kind of a calm place where we can sit around in survive surrounding the flowers and all other greenery.

Abha:
Juno, I think we should have a photograph on the WordPress way when we feature different countries because part of my passion and focus for do the Woo is making sure we increase diversity and inclusion and in what we share when we have lots of cross-cultural stuff. So I think we need a picture maybe not of your back garden. I appreciate you may not want to share that, but you live on the foothills of a very beautiful place. Do you want to tell us a bit about where you are?

Anand:
Yeah, so very nearby to where I lived in the place. So just around you can get just 500 meter in one direction, then you can find a mountain range on hourly mountains. It’s a nice place to track and small hiking as well. I can share the pictures of when in the winter season and in the rainy season all the mountains are covered with the clouds and it’s an amazing, amazing view and I can also see the same view from my office also.

Abha:
Well I think as part of when we do these international trips, I think we are going to have to have some photos that go on the podcast page as well. And of course that means that I get to share WP photos. So if you’ve not heard of it already, WordPress photos, you can submit your photo of your beautiful views where you are. And I’m hoping you’re going to do this right after this podcast recording too and help people know how wonderful the places are that we all work in. My final question is linked is linked to this topic as well and from all of you, where do you go for inspiration when you’re not developing, when you’re not graphic designing, you’re not coding, what is it that inspires you, that makes you feel that you can return to something and with more vigor and interest and focus and that you could share with other people so that maybe they could try it too? I’m going to start with Brian.

Brian:
Folks listening may not be able to or not going to be able to see this, but my office is full of drum equipment so that is my happy place is sitting behind the drums and playing along with my favorite music or trying out new beats and grooves. So that definitely where I go for inspiration.

Abha:
Brian, I’ll be coming to you. I’ve written a do the Woo piece that needs a drum beat so I know that we’ll be using your drums for that.

Brian:
It’ll be fun.

Abha:
Pooja, where is your place?

Pooja:
When I find to be more concentrated, want to be away from the coding or something else, then I usually go to my garden in my backyard and spend some quality time with nature and with flowers and the place where I live at full most.

Abha:
Absolutely. I think that’s lovely. And having that sense of being connected with the ground and nature is really important. And apart from the foothills, which we know are amazing and we can’t wait to see that photograph, where is it that you go to refresh to help you refocus on the day job and fact, we can’t say day job anymore, can we? Because we all work different times of the day in the modern tech, but where do you go?

Anand:
So for such, for this reason I try to connect with different people. So when I think that I need to get more inspiration and more different perspective of many things in the life that’s happening in the life, I try to connect with other people so that I can get involved in some kind of community and all this thing. So that gives me time to discuss with new people and find their perspective. Work camps is one such one touch place. I love to go because when I’m going to work camps I am away from my day job but it’s still working, still getting a lot of inspiration from the like-minded people. And we have recently returned from the webcam Nepal and where I met with a lot of amazing folks and it was also an amazing trip too because it was an amazing beautiful place. We went for hiking and when we were going for the hiking, we are also talking with the fellow people from the Nepal community and talking with. So working, meeting new people, getting in touch with them, learn about their perspective about life and work gives me a more inspiration.

Abha:
What a wonderful answer. You’ve all had wonderful answers and from everything that you’ve said, there will be some follow-ups, which is great. And we have got some developers from WooCommerce from Nepal that will be joining us later in the year as well. So Ananda, I will be chatting to you about that too on our show page when this comes out, we will have contacts for these wonderful people so you can follow them and find out more about the things that they’re doing and also details of how you can volunteer yourself to come up and be part of this podcast. We’re particularly keen to continue our focus on inclusion in the WordPress and the WooCommerce communities. So if you are from an area that we haven’t featured as yet, please let me know. I am Nonstop News UK on Twitter. You can catch me on the make WordPress slack. I think I’m the only Abba on there and say, do come and let us know. You’ve seen how much fun these people have had. You’ve seen how much there is relaxation and food. So why would you not want to come on this show? Don’t you agree? I’ll ask my guests. Would you recommend that they come on this show and come and share?

Anand:
Sure, I’ll surely recommend anyone who wants to have a live chat, enjoy and talk about WordPress and especially the food. I think this is going to be constant in the show.

Abha:
Absolutely. And it builds us up to our next show as well. And of course we’ve got just for anybody out there who’s saying she didn’t talk about craft today, well don’t worry, we have that to come in our next episode next month. And for those who’ve already started on the various do the Woo Craft projects, and yes, there are some, we’re trying to bring together different cross from different cultures and do a little, do the woo bit in it as well. So do let me know and we will bring that to you soon. That’s it for us today. Do come and join us next month and of course you can catch any of the do the wear shows and we’ve got lots for you to learn, enjoy, share, and just relax too. So why not come and do the WordPress way and let’s buy from us today.