Understanding What It Means to Be a WordPress Developer

Zach: Welcome to Do the Woo, the WooDev Chat. I’m Zach, I’m here with Till and Carl. How are you two doing?

Till: Good, man. How about you?

Carl: I’m doing good. You?

Zach: It’s been really an interesting month, well, two months since we have done this, hasn’t it been?

Carl: Time is a very fluctuating thing for me. We do once a month, so technically, it should have just been a month. We moved it, we skipped one month because of Ukraine, but we did have a podcast since then. We had Trip J.

Zach: We did. We had John James Jacoby on. That was a good time. If you haven’t listened to that episode, go back and listen to that episode because we talked about really important things. Till, what have you been working on?

Till: I’ve been working on serverless Laravel, which has been quite fascinating. And now I understand why Carl started eMIR and why he wants to move WordPress onto serverless, or at least offer this to these people with higher needs than just a little spin up WP. No, what’s Konstantin’s service called? Sail?

Carl: Sail. Sail is great. I did an article where I used Sail. I think it’s basically the server, spiritual version of YMIR, because it’s a DevOps platform too, you deploy… with Spin-up, it configures all your server and you can manage servers and things like that, which Sail does too. But you don’t use it to also deploy WordPress projects. So that’s where we’re a bit similar.

But I did an article actually for the eMIR blog where I use Sail because I was like, this isn’t a serverless thing. For me, at least from a content marketing strategy, I just want it to be basically WordPress and AWS blog. Do you want to do cool stuff with AWS and WordPress, then I will write about it. And so that was basically it. With Sail, I was like, okay, how do we do page cashing with cloud front and doing the globally distributed page cashing, so didn’t need serverless to do that. You just needed CloudFront. So I just showed how you could do it with a regular server.

Till: And if you put Cloudflare in front of that, you can save a lot of money. Depending on your traffic. I hope everybody does that. I do it with everything.

Zach: It’s interesting that you mentioned that because we just over on the Cloudways side, started an enterprise partnership with them.

Carl: If you use the Cloudflare plugin and you want to do page cashing with Cloudflare, you need the enterprise to do that.

Till: Which starts at $5,000 a month.

Carl: CloudFront’s getting a bit better. I used to pay for CloudFront and now I don’t pay. So they definitely bumped the free tier, but it’s definitely price. Everybody that I talk to, they’re like, can I use Cloudflare? I’m like, of course you can use Cloudflare if you want, because it’s cheaper, right? But as a AWS solution, I just have to piece everything together. But at the end of the day, the whole point of the product itself is to just do the server listing. And if you want to use other components for different parts, then you’re free to do that.

Till: So speaking of real developers, real world WordPress developers, I’m not sure, what’s the topic today, just in general developers?

Carl: Developers.

Zach: Yeah, so today we’re going to be talking about the definition of a developer in the WordPress space. We’re running this dev chat, but a lot of people are confused about what a developer actually is. And I guess there’s some ambiguity in the WordPress space because a lot of people who are builders think that’s development. In my opinion, it’s not.

Till: What’s a builder?

Zach: That’s what we’re here to talk about today.

Till: Like a page builder?

Zach: Yeah, people who use plugins or can configure the WordPress admin. They’re groups of people who consider themselves developers because they can do that.

Carl: I mean, I think we wouldn’t be developers if we didn’t have opinions about what it is to be a developer, so…

Zach: Absolutely. And this is going to be a very opinionated episode everybody. So your definition may be different than ours and that’s okay.

Carl: I don’t think any of us three have the same one. I’m willing to do a bet on that right now.

Zach: So where I draw the line is if you write code, you are a developer.

Till: Mmmm.

Zach: That doesn’t mean you write HTML, right? HTML is not necessarily a development language, but if you write code, we’re talking JavaScript on the front end or PHP on the back end in the WordPress space, then you’re a developer. If you know how to use CSS, you are a front end developer, maybe. Do you also know JavaScript and HTML. Okay, well then you’re a front end developer. If you know PHP and some SQL, then maybe you’re a backend developer, but I don’t know.

Carl: I wish you guys could see Till’s face right now. Priceless. It’s so good. It’s so good.

Till: Physically uncomfortable.

Zach: I really want to know what Till is thinking.

Till: Well, yeah okay. What I’m thinking is that I know a few people like CEOs of companies in our space, not to mention any names like Tom or, that’s a very broad name. So nobody knows this and they still like hack around. They update the config and they change some PHP values. And maybe even add a little script at a bottom of the page because they’re hot fixing something. But to your definition that wouldn’t also be developer because they’re writing PHP or changing this. And where’s the line between a builder. I know hackers, the wrong word, I usually call it someone who hacks things together. That’s a very broad… it’s a bad term I’d say right now. Yeah, my question would be where’s the line from a builder to maybe a bit more of an advanced builder who also knows how to patch some things, copy a little snippet from stack overflow, but doesn’t really… couldn’t do it by themselves.

Zach: That is an interesting distinction, right? If you can copy and paste some code into your functions, PHP file that someone else tells you does something, you’re not a developer. You are just somebody who can copy and paste somebody else’s code that they developed.

Till: Hmm. Yeah, okay fair enough.

Zach: So if you can write it from scratch, then you’re a developer. Can you build your own plugin? Okay, yeah you’re a developer. Can you build your own theme? Okay, you’re probably a developer. Creating a child theme and putting some code somebody else wrote in the functions PHP file. Not a developer.

Till: Yeah, fair enough. I’m just going to be very transparent here. I don’t care about the definition because to me, even if when people ask me, what do I do? And nobody would understand the normies that I talk with outside my home. It’s just that I make things. And to me, it’s someone I can make a creator, whether this is copy and pasting from stack overflow, using the WordPress full page editing or developing things. Sure, clearly there’s distinction, but I find all of us not to be already undermining this year, but we all just make things. And that’s what matters to me at least, as opposed to drawing lines and distinctions between who does what. But yes, I think your definition is pretty good. Someone who knows how to write code, maybe it’s a bit of experience, a couple of weeks on doing things from scratch. That’s probably something I would add to that. Can you start with a blank document source file and create something from it? Maybe that’s a developer.

Zach: Well, and let’s face it. The single most important developer skill is the ability to use documentation well, right?

Carl: Or write documentation.

Till: That’s senior level stuff.

Zach: Now that’s another skill entirely, right? That is a really important skill, but it is another skill entirely, but utilizing documentation well and understanding the language constructs, understanding what a if then statement, conditional statement does, understanding what a loop does, understanding all of those things and then how to implement them into something that you’re building. You may not remember the structure of how you do that in every language that you work in, right? I used to do work in C#. I could not pick up a visual studio today and write a .NET application in C# without extensive documentation, because it’s not what I do every day.

Carl: Yeah. I’ve been thinking, I like Till’s answer. I’m also not on the… I’m not very controversial either. I like the creator aspect. I think… Zach’s pointing at himself, but I’d like the creator aspect. I like the idea that if you’re a developer… I think I’ve given a lot of talks and talked to a lot of people. And I think what a lot of programmers did as a kid, at least for an old fart like me at this point, is play with Legos. So if you loved Legos as a kid and you loved building stuff, loved building, if you got the castle or like the pirate ship and you built the pirate ship, but after that, if you tore it all down and you start building your old stuff with it. I always talked about like programming Lego, but for like… the digital version of Lego, because you can build stuff you can… literally, if you can think about it, you can maybe build it.

So I find that’s the coolest aspect of being a developer. I think people lose themselves a bit in the weeds of trying to figure out, well, are you a real? Are you senior? Or are you expert? I think you lose yourself a bit in the weeds and that, and I think, especially in WordPress, because the skill gap is so huge… but I think that’s always been one of WordPress strengths. Because if we go with Legos, one of the most intimidating things with other programming languages is, how do we start? With WordPress, it’s so simple to get in and actually build something.

That’s one of the reasons for example, Laravel is really popular, because it’s easy to build something, it’s… to get something you have an idea, you want to build something. And I think that’s really good, but it brings with it some negatives, which is if it’s super accessible, then your skill level starts lower. So that’s always… I don’t know what… I see a lot of nodding but I think that’s what I think about a lot about developers. It’s not whether you’re one or not, it’s like, where are you on this spectrum of skill and where do you want to go? Not everybody wants to be a crazy ass developer.

Till: If you’re a Laravel developer and you want to switch to WordPress for whatever reason, you will very quickly get a job, probably I don’t know. Again, I don’t want to put any labels to what mid-level senior you would jump into, but you will have a lot… a different set of knowledge coming into this as opposed to a WordPress developer who wanted to upgrade, which was me in the early 2000, no two… whenever, a long time ago where I wanted to write better, more beautiful, more poetic software, not appeasing, pleasurable. I wanted to look at what I made and feel pleasure and be excited and proud of it. And I never really had that feeling with WordPress and I learned that in the Laravel ecosystem and I could then bring it back into WordPress later. But I definitely had to level up my skills because it was pretty, it’s a bit of a patchwork sometimes with WordPress, but still it’s developing. I would agree there, certainly.

Zach: I find that the types of developers that I want to work with, the people that I used to hire, they’re the ones that can make code look elegant, right? That are able to take a concept and distill it down to a point where, just by looking at the class or looking at the plugin files, you can see what they were trying to do. And I find that a lot of times, people who are less experienced as developers and maybe this is the difference between junior and senior developers is people who are less experienced, tend to write more messy code. They don’t consider it to be a work of art the way a senior developer would. And I think that artistry is a very important part of writing efficient code. It seems that code that is elegant also tends to be more scalable, code that is elegant tends to be more maintainable.

So, that’s the whole reason why we have frameworks like Laravel, why we have these stalwart concepts in the programming world like model view controller, that is a huge stalwart piece of development history that created a separation of concerns that when done right, looked elegant. And so I think that is definitely a defining factor in transitioning from being a more junior developer to a more senior developer is reaching that level of artistry, that level of elegance that you just don’t have until you have enough time in the language to get there. And if you want an example of elegance, look at how the Laravel framework is written. That is the most elegant framework I have ever seen.

Till: Yeah, it’s nice.

Carl: It’s funny because I’m not sure,I agree so.

Zach: Really?

Carl: Yes.

Zach: I mean that’s okay. That’s, perfectly fine.

Carl: No, but I think there’s elegance and developer accessibility. Laravel, I think is the master of developer accessibility. I would argue probably even more so than WordPress at this point. Because WordPress, I feel used to be, I think really, really good at developer accessibility, at thinking true. How do I make it easy for developers to do things? They had APIs. They still care. But you can notice if you’ve been around for a decade more like I have, you can see that there’s been a change of focus on that respect, especially with the JavaScript side becoming more important and onboarding people that want to use Gutenberg and things like that is not easy. It’s not straightforward. The tooling’s not simple. It’s not accessible.

Especially compared to where you’re… the skill level that most people are going to enter WordPress from based on its reputation. I think Laravel does so much better of a job. Even on the JavaScript side of onboarding people.

For elegance, I don’t find the magic methods, the facades to be elegant. They’re great developer experience things. The fact that I need an entire package so that my PHP storm can even understand what Laravel is doing and where I should be looking at code, to me is a sign of not elegance, for example. It’s a sign of, oh, this is a lot of magic. How much magic are you using? Magic is great. Magic makes the developer experience amazing. It does not necessarily make the code easy to understand or introspect. Or if you’re like me who likes digging in, it doesn’t make it easy to do that.

So I think that’s why it’s always a tricky thing because it’s also a personal question of taste. But I think for me that’s always been where I respect because I use Laravel. YMIR’s built in Laravel. I would recommend Laravel and I’m a symphony guy through and through. For me, symphony components is the elegant, if you’re a hardcore object oriented, designer, patterns and all that stuff. You love symphony components. They’re encapsulated, they’re easy to use. You can take the ones you need like, oh, I need to process Yamo there’s a component for that. I need to do a console application, there’s a component for that. It’s very good, but it’s, their developer experience sucks compared to Laravel and that’s the fact. So to me, it’s the better contrast between the two because Laravel uses symphony components, but its developer UX is 10 times better.

Till: You also mentioned onboarding, which I thought is a good point. Getting started with Laravel or X framework is really well done with a dummy project. And they walk you through the 4, 5, 6, 10 components. How do you create routes? What’s a route, what’s a controller? And just really dumb it down for someone who gets started. I really enjoyed reading that initially or following something like Laracasts from Jeffrey. It’s just a good resource to get started and being walked through these concepts and doing something new. And I don’t know if WordPress has that. Maybe I just never looked it up because I didn’t need it. But speaking to this developer onboarding, it’s certainly some frameworks do a really good job at it.

Carl: They have good documentation where the functions… You can always go online and find documentation on a WordPress function. I think they’ve done a really good job at that. I think the onboarding is true. Like if you read about Gutenberg, that’s constantly comes up that the API isn’t stable, it’s hard to get started. They’re doing work, it’s not to discredit that they’re not trying to improve it. But I think, and it’s the same thing I think with WooCommerce. WooCommerce is a ginormous piece of software and Zach can probably speak to it way more than either of us, than me and Till, but I think onboarding for WooCommerce, if I want to make an add-on for WooCommerce. Is there even documentation for that?

Zach: There is, especially for things like payment gateways, where standardization is more common, but there’s definitely documentation on the dev on the Woo developer site for how to structure a WooCommerce extension or what the requirements are for passing muster for being in the marketplace and all of that. The standards that they’re expecting. But I would argue that those standards are still too low, just because I can’t count on every single plugin in the marketplace to be scalable, to be modular, to not have conflicts with other plugins from the same marketplace. To not have issues with layering. If you layer one plugin on top of another where there’s never going to be a conflict. I mean, we don’t have that guarantee.

Till: Persistent uptick caching.

Zach: Yeah, I mean, when I started out as a WordPress developer, I used to think that transients were just a place to dump things that you didn’t want to have to go to the database every time for. That’s not exactly true, right? There’s a time and a place for using a transient properly. But when you’re in an environment or a platform like WordPress, you make mistakes. You do things that aren’t architecturally sound. And then you learn when a site goes down because your code was the reason that 500 errors started showing up.

You learn really quickly that, oh, well, that’s because I did this wrong, right? That’s because I’m hammering the database way too frequently. Or I used this plugin from this untrusted source that I had never used before, because it accomplished the function that I wanted. And that’s a huge difference between builders and developers, right? We build things to create the function that we want. We don’t choose code based on its functionality. We write code to fit the functionality we want. That’s the difference. You choose a plugin because it does something you want it to do. I write code because it accomplishes a goal.

Thanks to our Pod Friends OSTraining and NitroPack

Carl: I want to dial it back a bit towards the question, which is… I think one thing that I like to use, you use builder, I like to use a term solutions integrator. No because to me that’s… Till’s laughing. But I think it’s a really good way to think about sometimes how people… I think that’s where the distinguished, that’s where people I think, think developer, non-developer is like, okay, I want to take Elementor and Yoast and a bunch of things, make them work together, build a site and make it look good and then deliver it. And that clearly is not the role of a developer, but I think you can still be a solutions integrator, if you’ve talked to somebody that does SAP integrations, I can guarantee you that they know how to code, I think of my friend, Patrick, who’s running Woogo stores and he’s trying to make 15 WooCommerce plugins work together.

And trust me, you need to know how to code too. I think there’s just a bad rap to this idea of a solutions integrator. I think you just have to be honest a bit with the fact that that’s what I’m doing. It’s people that come to you and talk to you and say, oh, I’m a developer, but really they’ve never done it. That’s where people get a bit touchy about it. I don’t know what you guys think.

Till: But if they call themselves a WordPress developer, then it’s totally applicable, I think. No, actually your term of solutions, it sounds like an insurance broker. It’s a very convoluted term.

Carl: Oh yeah. It’s a very enterprise-y term.

Till: Yeah, but integrator is good.

Carl: But I just think about it that way, because each plugin is a solution to a problem. And you’re basically trying to integrate these different… especially I feel like WooCommerce takes that to the extreme, because you’re trying to build an eCommerce and you’re like, okay, I need to be able to print labels. I need to be able to do drop shipping. I need to do this, this, this, I need to support these payment gateways.

Okay, well, I know this in extension does this, this, this, and like Zach said, you put them all together and you’re like, why is everything on fire now? And then you’re basically the firefighter and that’s your job. And you need to know code to do that. I would argue if you have to go and figure out everything that’s broken and how to fix it, you are a developer, but it has this dirty aspect to it because you’re just piecing all these plugins together. But I think that’s part of being in WordPress. It’s part of being in WordPress, is a lot of your projects are not bespoke. I mean, I don’t know about you two, have you done a lot of bespoke projects where you barely didn’t use any other external plugins or paid plugins?

Zach: I’ve done a few like that most of the time, no. There’s a balance between writing custom code for the things where it makes sense and utilizing existing solutions because they’re existing solutions that you’ve tried before that you know work well. I’m not going to write a custom form plugin, anytime soon, there are plenty of those, right? I can implement gravity forms or ninja forms or fluent forms or formidable forms or WP forms or any other of a number of plugins that have forms in the title, right?

Carl: Yeah, forms is a funny one because the person that did symphony forms, wrote his master’s thesis on it. Forms are hard, they’re freaking hard. It’s actually a really hard problem to do well.

Zach: But that’s not something that I want to crack.

Carl: Yeah no, exactly.

Zach: I don’t want to write a date handling library ever in my entire life.

Till: Yeah, it’s sadistic to deal with dates in any way, shape or form. Again, people know I make software and then they ask me some questions or they need help with a website or some, something like that.

Carl: Can you build my website?

Till: No, I’m trying to hire you to do that right now.

Carl: No, but that’s what everybody asks me. It’s like, can you build my website? I need a personal website. I’m like, can you build it?

Till: Yeah.

Carl: I don’t think you realize that I work in enterprise and charge several three figures, not with starting with a one per hour. And they’re like, oh, okay.

Till: What I’ve done, maybe 10, 15 years ago is said cool yeah, let’s do something and I would code something. Maybe use WordPress, maybe moveable type before then, whatever it was. But what I’ve noticed in myself the last 10 plus years is that my recommendation now is you want to start a shop, I sent them to Shopify. If they want to start a website, I sent them to Squarespace or whatever. These are the two that I know, or for the needs that my friends have. And seeing these abstractions on top of problems become more popular. I think also, maybe hopefully going to change the labeling around the whole developer thing. In the beginning, you had to code everything in WordPress and you needed coding. Now you can be a builder because there’s so many plugins and supporting elements or modules around WordPress, whether it’s a CDN from your hosting company in the beginning, you have to set it up.

Now it’s $5 a month with cloud waste or whoever, and the integrations from your solution integrated there, everything is becoming a lot more integrated and accessible and easier to use these, I think that you both probably remember the transition from regular web traffic to TLS or HTPs. And when Google required it, everybody was scrambling because nobody set it up in the beginning, but now it’s just standard and it comes with it. You probably can’t even access your website without TLS anymore. I don’t know.

And seeing this transition from things are really hard. You need to know how to code your real WordPress developer or not to solution integrators or builders can get away with a lot and they can make a lot. And I think I can only assume in the next couple of years, unless there’s nuclear war or something like that, things will get easier. And even for us who probably have a lot of these skills and we can code whether we want, I want to use preexisting solutions. I want my life to be easy. At least now I don’t get too much joy out of spending 40 hours doing it.

Carl: I mean, that’s YMIR’s entire premise.

Till: Yeah, exactly. I was getting there.

Carl: That’s my entire marketing. It’s basically, do you really want to care about your server or do you just want the host, your website and that’s it. Obviously that’s the hosting premise as well, but I’m just like… It’s basically that and yeah, I agree. I had an example and then I forgot, so.

Zach: I’ve reached a point in my career where I don’t want to do the things that suck anymore. I want to focus on the fun problems, the interesting solutions, right? I don’t want to do the things that I’ve done before. I brought up dates earlier. How many people on this panel want to convert a epoch date to a non Gregorian calendar?

Carl: I mean, I’ve built a calendar scheduling in WordPress, and I can guarantee you that’s about as fun as forms. Oh, don’t overlap, schedules all the whole thing. So much fun.

Zach: Well, and there are places in the world that don’t adhere to a Gregorian calendar. There are still places in the world where a priest from the community wakes up and tells you what day it is. Like that is a thing where there are areas of the world where that is just, they don’t live on the Gregorian calendar.

Till: The Mars Rover, now you need to add relativity to your date calculations.

Zach: Yeah, I mean with space travel things get weirder, don’t they? But that’s just one of those things where I would never want to tackle that problem myself. I worked on an electronic medical records solution many years ago with my friends at digital primates in Chicago. And that was one of the biggest problems that they tackled working on that project. I was doing UI design. So I wasn’t involved in that portion of the project, but I remember the conversations around non Gregorian dates just being a complete mind blowing conversation on all of these various things that can cause a date to not be the date you think it is. I don’t want to tackle that.

Till: Maybe that’s the definition of a real developer and we are not actually real and what even is real, but someone who says like, yeah, I want to build a timezone dates library. I want to deal with timezones. I want to deal with calendars. And they do this open source for free for the last 15 years on GitHub. Maybe that’s a real developer and we are just frauds.

Carl: I mean, even when your building your creation, I think definition at the beginning is not under attack, but I remembered what I wanted to bring up is no code solutions. So no code solutions is increasingly allowing people to build really complex businesses and applications with actually no programming skill. To me that’s also a solutions integrator, but basically it’s all powered by Zapier. You have a website, you enter a form with Typeform. That form goes into Zapier, Zapier triggers this. This adds a field to an air tables, which does some other thing. And then you can build complex workflows with that. It’s mind boggling actually what people come up with and they’re not developers and Shopify’s a good example too. You can build your storefront and then you tie in Zapier to that, and then you can tie it to different systems. And what language would I even use with Shopify? I don’t care.

Zach: I have an interesting question. So we’re on the topic of no code. What about assisted coding? Are you still a programmer? If GitHub’s co-pilot has written half your code?

Carl: Do you either or of you use co-pilot?

Till: I do, yeah.

Zach: I haven’t gotten in yet.

Carl: Okay, so we have one person. I don’t use it, our common friend me and Till, Patrick uses it. He sends me screenshots of it all the time. He’s completely mind boggled. He’ll write up the beginning of a function. In WordPress, it’s ad setting and he’ll write 90% of it. And it’s written well. I mean, I don’t know. I’m not too sure. I’m not in an existential crisis around GitHub’s co-pilot. I think most people are like, this is really cool. I’m mind boggled with AI stuff. I’ve been… since DALI came out, I’m completely…

Till: You mean two or one?

Carl: Two, I think it’s two, mostly that I’m seeing artwork with. But I shared one with Tom McFarland yesterday, somebody made a Fort be with you in DALI and honestly, mind blown, everywhere, little [inaudible 00:35:28] it’s just so amazing. So, I feel the same way about co-pilot.

Till: Yeah and co-pilot is still rough and it’s not going to do your whole job for you, but I think your point of DALI-2, we’re just not quite there yet, because it’s maybe also not that big of a need or we’re not the trucking industry being undermined by autonomous drivers. But I think at least I see the transition from, I have to do everything for my friends to no, just use Shopify or Squarespace and so on.

Carl: Well, I have a question for you two. Actually I mean, related to co-pilot. I’m personally not that excited with co-pilot, not because of its capabilities, but just because I like writing code, I actually like writing. So it’s like an auto complete when you’re like writing an email, sometimes you’ll press tab, but most of the time, I just want to write, so one of the reasons I’ve not really been interested in installing it is I don’t really want to start typing something. And I don’t know if you can just turn it on, on demand so Till can answer it.

But one of the things that I was thinking about is I just don’t want every time I type something that it just spits out the entire solution for me. I just like writing it. I like writing it my way, especially. I know for a fact it’s going to just spit it out, WordPress style and I’m not going to like it. So, but that’s part of the reason too, for copilot. Is it really an efficiency thing or is it just stack overflow on crack here where it’s like, you’re not too sure what you’re doing, but it’ll do the whole thing for you.

Till: Yeah, but we’re getting very philosophical here. My wife for example, is a hobby potter, hobby ceramicist I don’t know what the right term is. She does it for fun. She doesn’t want to do it as a production person who makes 50 mugs in a week and slaves away and just gets $50. But now she makes these mugs or plates and butter dishes and cooking dish holders and all of these things. They’re beautiful little pieces of art and buying a mug for $5 at IKEA that is well made. It looks okay, is a difference than buying a mug of either someone you know, or you don’t know, probably has a lot more value if you actually even know this person and they made it hand. But even just buying it from an artist and you know they made it by hand and it took them probably a whole day to create this one thing that you drink some tea out of is valuable to people, or at least it is to me.

And I think to most people where convenience and everything is cheap and accessible, cool. That’s awesome if you want to start a website and when we talk about get a co-pilot and your desire, to someone that’s just write code, of course, there’s also this, this pleasure part coming back in and wanting to write pleasing code and having a good time. But also valuing something that took human time. Now this is very philosophical and method has nothing to do with actually getting worked done or charging for it, but just being a developer, I just had the same experience where like I moved our off Heroku to serverless AWS similar to eMIR just it’s not written in WordPress. And I did it myself and I really enjoyed this whole process. I discovered a lot of flaws in my code that were very inefficient, then I had to fix them.

And it was a very enjoyable process to me. What you can accomplish a lot with no code, maybe most things you don’t need to, and you don’t need to be a developer to run a WooCommerce store at scale. I don’t think you do if you use eMIR or if you use a decent solution of a decent hosting company, or you can outsource it, but the whole idea of still writing code as a creative outlet and a self-expression, I think it’s certainly a big part of my life.

Carl: I talked a lot about that with my YMIR. There an article, we can link it, but it’s called, I just want to work. It’s something like, I just want to work in my garden. It’s just talking about building software, like gardening. I don’t want it to necessarily… a bit… I really relate to what you said about your wife Till. I wrote about that in my year and review about YMIR. I don’t want YMIR to be as big as Cloudways or, I mean again, we don’t talk in absolutes, but I think there’s something. I just like this idea of being able to work on code, build something that brings joy to a couple of people, obviously enough to sustain me, but it doesn’t have to be a giant thing. It could just be a smallish thing that allows me to just survive and continue writing code and be happy and that’s it. And I think there’s value to that too.

Zach: Well, and I think that’s the difference between coding for craft and coding for commerce, right? There are a lot of people that code just to make money. And that’s great. There are reasons for that. Everybody needs to make a living, but coding for craft, I find to be far more enjoyable. Coding because I want to write an elegant solution to something that’s what brings me to the table. That’s what makes me want to get up and do what we do. Have I always had the flexibility to do that? No, absolutely not. I started in the trenches. We all started in the trenches, right? And then you reach a level with your craft where you can self select into coding for craft rather than coding for commerce.

And it’s a very freeing place to go. So I think what we’ve learned today is that it’s really hard to define exactly what a developer is.

Carl: Well, it’s a personal thing also.

Zach: And it is absolutely a personal thing. Do we look down on people who build things by putting together themes and plugins? Absolutely not, right? There is a reason for being an integrator, being able to architect a solution that works for your customers. In the end, the title that you give yourself matters little. It’s the results that you create for the people that are paying you to do the work. So it’s been great talking about the definition of a developer with the two of you.

Till: Actually I’m going to cut you off there. I’m going to say one more thing that I didn’t want to throw out right in the beginning and not to give advice at all, but what I’ve seen over the last 20 years is that we talked a lot about code, no code, all of these things. Humans who move programming languages around and make things with it, developers, real developers, what pursuers doesn’t really matter. The people that I’ve seen as successful are the ones that focus half the time, 50% of their day to day, their job, the communication, whatever it is.

On the human aspects of holding their client’s hands and talk them through the emotions of being concerned and scared because they don’t know what the developer’s doing and not to completely extend this podcast, but the human side of being a developer and working with other people. Working with your clients and cultivating these, I think soft skills is a bad word, but these emotional or interpersonal aspects of it is also often not discussed. And the people that I see very successful, they understand that part that it’s not about, oh, you want to write eloquent, elegant code with Laravel or WordPress. It is also understanding that human side and…

Carl: There’s a meme … It’s soft skills to pay the bills. But yes, I agree 100% with what you said.

Zach: Yeah, and maybe that’s a topic for us to come back to in the future. Something where we can help those of us who maybe earlier in our journey as a developer, to understand more of the necessity, not just the benefit, but the necessity of cultivating those soft skills in your developer life and as part of your career. Because I don’t know about the two of you, but when I started as a developer, I was socially awkward and I had to learn, right? I had to learn to be who I am today through doing. And I will say that when I moved from the flash industry to the WordPress industry, and that’s a whole another story, I spent a year working for Apple, working on the phones as tech support, AppleCare for iOS products and the five weeks of training that they gave me on empathy and soft skills changed the direction of my career.

So if you have a chance to learn more about that before we get to an episode about it sometime in the future, by all means, take that chance, develop those soft skills, because it will completely change the way that you interact with your clients, with your peers, with everybody. So we’ll leave you with that life changing statement. It’s been fun as always, thank you both for joining and being co-hosts on this as always. And we’ll see you in a month.

Carl: See you.

Zach: Bye.

Till: Thank you.