This Week in WordPress #196

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this weekend. WordPress episode number 196. The diverse advert in the tree. It was recorded on Monday the 14th of February, 2022. My name is Nathan Wrigley and as always, I'm joined by some notable WordPress guests this week. My cohost is Michelle Frechette, but I'm also joined by Angela Gin of Automattic and Gustavo Bordoni from the events calendar.

There's a lot to talk about. Gustavo had to join us a little bit later. So he's about 20 minutes in before he arrives. And during the first bit of the conversation. Yeah. Probably the longest time we've ever devoted to one particular topic. We talk about the controversy this week, which has emerged on the word camp, Europe side of things, and the feeling among some community members that the whole event has got a diversity problem.

So we debate that for quite a long time. Then we talk about whether or not there's adverts going to be in the sidebar of the block editor. Is this going to be a problem going forwards? The white house has got a beautiful new website created by tenant. Not only is it beautiful, it is a wonderful implementation of how blocks could be built.

So we talk about that. There's a few jobs go in and we discuss three notable jobs at the moment, cadence blocks. I've got some Lottie animation, goodness happening, and there's a few of our picks of the week as well. It's all coming up next on this week in WordPress. Hello? Hello? Hello there. Hello there.

Hello there. Hello? I say hello a lot. Angela, I'm sorry. It's because the audio takes ages to settle down. So there's a lot of hallowing. And by now the audio will have figured out what a volume to be out. So hopefully that's on it. Hello. This week in WordPress episode number 196, I think that's right.

I feel it might be one less than 1, 2, 9, 6. We'll go with that. One nine, six joined on the call today to talk about WordPress. I have two lovely guests. First of all, my co-host for the show. Who's incredibly good at helping me organize and be up-to-date and be timely and get guests on this, Michelle for chef.

How you doing Michelle? I'm good. How are you? Yeah, I'm really good. Tell us about last week you had an exciting.

[00:02:18] Michelle Frechette: I did. I was on lots of planes last week because you can't fly direct to anywhere, but a hub out of Rochester. So if you're going anywhere else, you must be on at least two planes sometimes more.

But I was in Oklahoma city last week for a post status business partners retreat. And so there were about, I want to say 25 30 of us. I actually never counted out there and along with taking absolutely every protocol we possibly could. We had one additional person in the room and that person was what we called our COVID officer.

And so we had somebody actually in the. Who would tap you on the shoulder and say that massive needs to go over your nose or put your mask back on. You're done talking of are any of those kinds of things. And so she actually didn't have to do that because we were all hyper aware of the fact that nobody wanted to be tapped on the shoulder and nobody wanted to catch COVID.

We showed negative tests pot arrival. We took tests and showed our negative tests and we masked the entire time, except when we were actively eating, drinking, or if we were at the front of the room presenting so that we could be heard a little bit better. But yeah, it was a great

[00:03:34] Nathan Wrigley: week.

Oh, I'm so pleased. It sounds like you have a really good time. There was an awful lot of people that that I know who were going to be in attendance. So great. So nice to hear that you took. COVID thing so seriously and got somebody who yeah. And I can imagine in a room of conscientious people who want to abide by those rules, that job must be basically sitting in a chair and trying desperately to find somebody to tell off.

So good to have them though. Nevertheless, speaking of events, we are going to be talking quite a lot about events. I think probably the large proportion of the show is going to be talking about events and some interesting stuff that came up last week. And to talk about those events, not that this was organized with this in mind.

Angela. Jen is here. Hello, Angela. Hello. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

[00:04:23] Angela Jin: Yeah, sure. I am a sponsored by Automattic and a full-time sponsored contributor within Automattic. My role is head of programs and contributor experience. But yeah, my roots are largely on the community team. So yeah.

I want to talk about WordPress events. I am so therefore.

[00:04:47] Nathan Wrigley: I cannot believe that the sort of timing of this particular story that we're going to live with in a little bit, I'm going to do some housekeeping before that, but there's almost like a, like you were the perfect guest at the perfect time, some synchronicity happening there.

I should add that. In your biography, the short biography, which you sent to us, it says that you love writing, volunteering and eating tap pass. This is no word of a lie. I have not talked about Tappas to anybody. I would say for 10 years. And in a remarkable piece of synchronicity, my son came up to me about 12 hours ago in the evening, just before the evening meal.

And he said, dad, and I said, yep. And he said, what's the point of Tapper's. I didn't really know what to say. Just say it's nice to have a selection of different things to eat. You don't have to be terribly hungry. So anyway, there's more synchronicity where what's the point of tough. It's not an easy question to answer

[00:05:45] Michelle Frechette: for what it's worth.

I invited Angela on the show like more than a month ago. So literally it's serendipitous that the topics that are up on the roster today happened to be something that Angela can speak probably volumes and things. So I really, people might think that we're, blowing sunshine, but the truth is.

Like we try, I tried to get her on the show like a month ago and she had a conflict and she's what are you on next? I'm like, Valentine's day. She was like, all right, I'm signing up. Yeah.

[00:06:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Amazing. Amazing. Sometimes life just falls into your lap. Doesn't it? And today is one of those days. Thank you both for joining us.

I should add that. For reasons which I won't go into, we may well be joined by a fourth guest. We had Gustavo Doni on probably three or four weeks ago with taco from Yoast. And he is going to endeavor to join us later. But for one reason or another, which we don't need to go into he's. Possibly going to be late.

So if Gustavo joins us fabulous, if Gustavo doesn't, then hopefully he'll book in another day, but just to alert you to the fact that may well be happening. Okay. Just some housekeeping before we begin the show and share a couple of comments that come in. First thing to say is this is our website. WP Builds.com.

If you are into WordPress content, we produce this piece. Each week comes out on a Monday. We produce it on a Monday and then we recycle it, repurpose it. And it comes out as a podcast episode tomorrow. And we put it onto our YouTube channel as well. And then we also do podcast episodes on a Thursday.

We're doing them each and every week, interviews and chats with my friend, David Wamsley. If you'd like to keep up to date, you can click the subscribe button here, or alternatively, just fill in this little form here. And we'll email you each and every time we produce a new piece of content, okay.

Trying to get people to join the stream. If you're into that. And you would like to just pause for a moment, take us off your primary screen. Cause I know that's what you're doing. You're focusing very hard on everything that we're doing. Maybe pause that for a moment and go and share WP Builds.com forward slash live.

It's always nice to have more people in the comments than the less people in the comments. So that's WP build. Stop. Forward slash live. And perhaps we can get some people making some comments. A couple of people joined us so far as always Rob Cannes. Very diligent follower of the podcast.

Good morning. Happy Monday. Happy Mondays. I said, serendipity is in a bounds. This is ridiculous. There's a British band called the happy Mondays. And they were around in the 1980s. And I haven't played any of them music for more than a decade. And out of the blue, my daughter said to me on Saturday, have you heard this song?

And it was a song by the happy Monday, so I don't know what's going on, but there's an awful lot of that. Hello, Ian. Nice to see you. In WB. I don't know that I've met you before, but hello? Hello. Hello. Indeed. Greetings says Peter Ingersoll from Chile, Connecticut, and Maya says and now an hour of chocolates are good vibrations.

Excellent. Is what you do, Maya. She does chill out with chocolates or this that's great. I'm quite jealous, but hopefully the chocolates will keep flowing. Let's get into it. Shall we now? Firstly, I am going to put a bunch of caveats in the way we're going to have a topic which may get a little bit, let's say political.

We tend to stay away from politics because we're WordPress, a WordPress based pro podcast. And we don't stray into politics very much, but there is a chance that today those kinds of feelings and political positions may be add. I am possibly going to play devil's advocate once in a while. And so I want to be absolutely sure that nobody is going to kill me and counsel me on social media, because some of the views that I'm going to express may not be my own.

I might just be playing the sort of devil's advocate in order to push the debate along. But Angela, the first piece that we were always going to lead with, whether or not you were on the show is a discussion which you launched on the 8th of February. You can find this piece on make.wordpress.org.

It's called discussion diversity in WordPress events. I could paraphrase this why this happened Angela, or I can just hand it to you. Would you like to take it and run with it?

[00:10:09] Angela Jin: Yeah. Sure. Thank you so much. Yeah, I'm really excited that we. Are going to talk about this for the record in case anybody is curious, this is not the first time we've talked about diversity in the WordPress space or WordPress and fence.

And I also realize that it's not going to be the last time either. But yeah, this came into a focus last around last week when there were some discussions on Twitter, around the diversity of our events, specifically the word cancer organizing team. And as many things do on Twitter, there was a lot of quick conversation and a lot of opinions being voiced.

And we're at this really interesting time where we haven't had in-person events for so long, but we're starting to see some of them and people are thinking about them. And so it's a really wonderful time to actually refocus on the diversity of our Twitter's a great place to have conversations, but it's hard to follow sometimes and really give people a place to fully express themselves.

And so this post came out because we're a global community. Diversity is talked about differently and do differently around the world. And I thought it would be really interesting to bring everyone together and give people a place to share their perspectives and their experience with.

Diversity in WordPress, what makes a space more welcoming? What helps them along? What challenges they see in their communities specifically, and start talking about it because and I mentioned this in the post a little bit. We have a lot of extra ideas around how we can make our WordPress events, more representative of our global community.

But I. Without really understanding how everybody is approaching this conversation. That's what I really want. I want us to all see how, where we are starting from so that we can better approach all of that.

[00:12:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Angela, are you able to describe to us the series of events that led up to this conversation?

What were, I don't mean verbatim. You don't have to quote us the tweets or anything, but what was the general tenor of the messaging around WordCamp Europe? This year 2022 was in June. I believe I can guess the second to the fourth. What was the point of contention? The bits that people or the original poster had they have concerns about.

[00:13:13] Angela Jin: So the original tweet was around the lack of specifically black organizers on the word camp Europe team. And I thought it was real interesting how that conversation unfolded on Twitter. People had a lot of a lot of strongly held opinions on on how that unfolded, how, what should happen next.

And so the working of your team? No, I think it's an interesting challenge that they have in forming an organizing team that comes together. For this event in particular work camp, Europe is one of the biggest by attendees size biggest flagship event. And so it is a very visible event and yeah, there are no black organizers on the word camp, Europe organizing teams.

And so some of the conversation was around like this is a very American view of diversity being imposed on Europe. And then I dunno, it just escalated from there. Yeah. So what I said earlier about us having very different views on diversity around the world, like that's the conversation I want to see people have, like where are we all starting from?

One thing I'll share my last week I had a lot of conversations with people about this and it's been fascinating. I'll tell you. One thing that I thought was really interesting. In the Dutch language I learned that calling somebody black is actually very offensive. And so if you are in the Dutch community and you're going up for organizers and you say we want to have black organizers.

That's actually like incredibly rude locally. And so like when the language of diversity is different around the world, like that's something we really need to understand before we could talk about how we're going to address this issue.

[00:15:29] Michelle Frechette: And certainly in Europe you can't call a black person African American because they're not Americans.

And in the United States alone, we have so many different ways that people prefer to be addressed and that people are addressed by their ethnicities. And then we have a whole bunch of white fragility, not knowing what to say and how to say it. Or we have the other side of things where they don't care.

And they'll say things that are offensive. So we have all of that coming into play here at the states as well. And as somebody who has his half of the team that created underrepresented in tech.com I hope it's okay to say Angela and I had a long conversation last week because she was interested in my take on what's going on.

Also, I'm an organizer, I'm the word camp Europe team. And so that puts me in a very interesting position alongside, along those lines too. And so it's good to know that there are allies and it's good to know that there are people who are actively seeking to make sure that everybody has an opportunity, but more so than that, that everybody is invited to become part of organizing teams.

And hold stakeholder positions in WordPress around the world.

[00:16:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you for that. Michelle, we'll try to delve into different aspects of this topic. Firstly, let's just deal with the, let's just deal with the sort of social media storm and things like that. Now I confess I didn't really follow it.

And so I don't know how heated things got. I don't know if there was a lot of back and forth and what have you and on the whole, Michelle can attest to this. I cannot use Twitter. I'm really bad at it. I don't even understand how it works. So the idea of me following it on Twitter is almost ridiculous.

But did, do you feel that the debate was okay fruitful? Yes. I think we've established that because things have moved and, conversations have been had, was there any sense, Angela, from your point of view, did. Get out of the sort of box of comfort that you would like them to be in. Did it get a little bit hot under the collar or were things maintained in a sort of civil and polite way that you would hope they would be?

[00:17:49] Angela Jin: I should also disclose that I also have not a active Twitter user either. And so yeah, I saw a lot of a lot of opinions strongly held which is a lot of what I see on Twitter. But yeah I'm not sure how to the best person to answer that because I don't use Twitter a whole lot. And yeah, if anything, I'm glad there's a conversation going.

And that's where I'm particularly happy about where things are going.

[00:18:24] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. Okay. One thing to remember too, is that change seldom comes from coming from a place of comfort change, usually comes from a place of discomfort, and it's really good in a lot of respects to have some discomfort happen.

It's not good to have hate and, vitriol and those kinds of things, discomfort is much different than the mudslinging that can happen. But a little bit of discomfort too, as a catalyst is never.

[00:18:56] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you. Okay. That's fine. Okay. In terms of Angela, I'm going to give this one to you first, if that's all right.

And then I would like an equal the exact same question to be posted, Michelle. Sorry. I feel like I'm conducting an interview, but I also feel that on this subject, both of you are so much more well versed in what it is that we're trying to go here. What the, where the target is aimed that it feels like me asking questions is better than just us having some kind of conversation if that's all right.

Angela, what is the target here? What is the thing that we're trying to aim for? If let's say in two years, 18 months, five years, whatever it was, is there a thing that you can pin point to and say, this is the goal. If we can do this and an event, for example, at WordCamp, Europe can be looking like this.

Do we know what that looks like? Or are we still at the point as you described earlier of just trying to figure it out and if we are still trying to figure it out, what are the principles that you're being guided by?

[00:20:01] Angela Jin: Oh that's a great question. What are the principles that I'm being guided by?

I love that. Yeah, so I think we often talk about building WordPress for everyone, right? Like we want to democratize publishing. We want to give everyone a voice online. And so to that end it behooves all of us, anytime we're gathering to look at who's gathered. And I think this is equally important for both social spaces and places where we make decisions as well.

If we're trying to bring this to everybody, Who is not represented in this group who is who is not being given a seat at the table to participate in the conversation, to belong in this community and what can we do to help them find their place here and really make them comfortable to the point where they are engaged and can take on greater roles and help contribute and take on even more visible events like organizing an event.

It's I think one thing that I saw as a result of this conversation we can establish quotas or for organizing teams, which I'm going to say right now. I'm not a fan of, I don't believe in establishing quotas.

[00:21:34] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry, I'm going to, I'm going to have to pause you there because would you explain.

[00:21:38] Angela Jin: Yeah. For example we want to make sure that on any organizing team that we have exactly 50% women and 50% men, just as an example. And so what that says is that we're going to go out and we're going to build a team regardless of who they are five, half men and half women to join this organizing team.

And I think at this point, a lot of communities are progressing beyond that point and thinking about more more what other communities are less represented beyond women. But for the sake of example that's a quota and where that does not work well, is that if we bring people in who.

I don't have a deep understanding of what it is that we're doing here. And we don't give them the tools to succeed. Often that's like education and yeah, deep understanding of how to, for example, organizing their friends. That's a skill that not everybody has. Then we're setting people up for failure essentially, and that creates a more broken bonds within the community.

And it like that is the last thing that I want to do. And this could be an idea is set anybody up for failure. We want to set people up for success. I. Gotten on this train of thought and I've lost my original thought what was,

[00:23:14] Nathan Wrigley: okay. I'll reiterate my question to you. And then maybe you'll be able to pick that one up.

I was basically saying, what is the target? What is it that we're trying to aim for? And if we don't have that distilled and written down in black and white, just yet, what is the sort of general impression of where we want to be going? Have I forgotten the exact wording that I used earlier, but that broadly is what I was transmit.

[00:23:37] Angela Jin: Yeah. So I would love to see communities come together and have organizing teams, speaker, rosters, volunteers that more accurately represent their community at all levels. That's what that is the vision that I want to see. And every time that we gather people together, we pick up moment. Who is not represented here because that's a moving target.

There's always going to be somebody who we want to make sure we bring in and give them a voice in what we're doing here.

[00:24:14] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you. That was really interesting. And I saw Michelle nodding a lot to a lot of that. So I just want to give Michelle her chance to agree or take that subject on a little bit.

Same question, Michelle.

[00:24:29] Michelle Frechette: So one of the things I know you said you were going to play devil's advocate. Let me put the devil's advocate words in your mouth for a moment. If I may,

oftentimes especially I, I do a lot of work around recruiting and jobs and things like that. Oftentimes we think of the fact that we put an application on available to everybody as being. Enough. My, my fictional company has only white people working here. There was an application out there.

A black person could have applied, which is what we do with word camps. The application is out there. Anybody can apply to be an organizer, but the truth is, if you don't see people who look like you, it makes it more difficult to want to apply to work someplace, especially when you're not getting paid for it.

So you're volunteering to do those kinds of works and you don't know what you're stepping into. I was once in this was probably, gosh, my daughter was two. So 28 years ago, I was dating a man. I was invited to his church on a Sunday morning. I walked into a. Church. And I was the only white person in the entire church and I was the most uncomfortable person you've ever seen because I came from a very conservative background church where you sit quietly for an hour.

You shake the pastor's hand on the way out, and you go about your day. This is a three hours service with people dancing in the aisles at amen said yes, brother and preach it. And I sat there like probably red face the whole time. Total fish out of water. Now what I have gone to that church of my own, of course, that where the doors always open to me.

Yes, they were, was I invited in and yet still felt uncomfortable. Yes. That is a situation we don't want to happen to anybody in a WordPress situation. Not only are the doors open, but people should be invited in and then made comfortable and included in every opportunity that is there once they have come through those doors.

So yes, there's the opportunity always there, of course. But do we need to do better at inviting people in and making it be a safe environment for everybody that walks in that. Absolutely.

[00:26:53] Nathan Wrigley: I am just going to pose things because in the background Gustavo Bordoni has his, has joined us and I feel that we're probably gonna keep debating this topic for 20, 20 minutes or so.

So let's just grab, let's grab gusta. Hello. Oh, there you go. It's Gustavo Baldoni. I would normally do this bit at the beginning, but I'm just so that we can get back to where we were because to have a hope, you don't mind me to introduce you quickly. Gustavo is the engineering manager and principal engineer at the events calendar, and develop a behind faker, press a PTE for plugins in the porch in Portuguese, Brazil, husband, and soon to be father.

You can tell us. When we finished the call the S on, in his spare time, he enjoys woodworking and a limpic weightlifting. Yeah, there you go. So Gustavo, sorry that we don't get to do the general chit-chat, but we're going to just carry this conversation on. I imagine that you heard a proportion of what we were talking about, but just to paraphrase, we're talking about the debate, which surfaced last week, where there were concerns about the diversity, the range of people who were contributing to WordCamp in Europe.

So let's carry that on we've had the discussion about what the problem was. We've had the discussion about what we could do perhaps to make it look more like the solution has been arrived at. So Angela down to concrete things. What has come about in the last week? What things are going to be happening as a result of the discussions and the debates during the course of this.

Yeah.

[00:28:30] Angela Jin: I'll share with you that when I posted that, that post on make community, my deepest fear was that nobody would participate because I realized it's a big ask to say Hey come talk about this really personal and charged topic. And share your perspective in this very permanent space.

With more than what's Twitter now 280 characters with more than 280 characters, it's a big ask of people. And I have been so thrilled with how many people just like vulnerably shared what they go through. And I love that the post is being translated into different languages and like we're getting a lot of good response there.

And so I think that's. That's a great step. Let's build that understanding about how we approach diversity, how, what that looks like from community to community. Cause I think that's really important for figuring out where we go next. My other hope is that we feel more comfortable talking about it.

I think, yes, you came here saying that you're going to play devil's advocate.

But like we need to be asking those questions so that we can actually address them. Everybody is in a different place on their journey to talking about diversity. And if we don't create. Spaces to have those conversations and educate people if they are willing to learn that's going to hinder us from our ultimate vision and our ultimate goal.

Yeah, I do want to say one in the many conversations I had this last week, I had a lot of people reach out to me and say, Hey, I am, I'm scared to talk about this because I'm afraid I'm going to say the wrong thing. And I'm afraid I'm going to be canceled. Dire. And that fear prevents us from, I think being in a more open space, a more of a growth mindset.

It's a lot to overcome on the flip side of that. If you are somebody who is coming out and saying, Hey, This is a problem over here, and I don't feel represented in this group. That's also a really big risk for that person. It is real scary to put yourself out there like that. And yeah, we should listen to when those things come up I would love to see more conversation and more understanding and education come out of all of this.

That's one actionable step. I would really cherish in this

[00:31:37] Nathan Wrigley: community. Thank you. I'll go to Michelle and then we'll take some thoughts from Gustavo if that's all right. Michelle, is there anything in your head which would significant as a concrete step, something which we actually can do, perhaps something which you've noticed has happened this week, where you would feel that, okay, this is, this has changed.

Something is different this week than it was.

[00:31:59] Michelle Frechette: Just the fact that we're openly discussing it is a huge step in the right direction. I've seen more people applying to be part of the database and underrepresented in tech.com. We do not track the metrics as of who's using the database. We want that to be open.

So people don't feel like we're keeping tabs on. Who's been invited to do what and that kind of thing. So we have no metrics as far as how the database is being used, other than anecdotal feedback, because we want it to be as open as possible and not have people feel like they're being micromanaged or under a microscope for.

But we know that people are using tools like that now. And I think that is a step in the right direction, too. Especially when you're recruiting. If you're recruiting for an event, go to tools that are out there, turn to Twitter, use the hashtags that are out there. Black tech, Twitter is an amazing thing.

And there are people who have amazing and beautiful voices talking about the things that we're all talking about all the time in technology. Take advantage of that. When you are looking for guests on your podcast and people to be included in your short-term long-term projects, whether you're hiring somebody for a part-time or full-time job, make sure that you're doing recruiting in the right way and not just inviting your friends and the people who look.

[00:33:26] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you, Michelle. That's great. And okay. Just to be very clear, Gustavo has just joined us. He missed at least half of what we were saying. So really Gustavo I'm just after your overall impressions, the story this week was all about WordCamp Europe and what had happened in terms of the people in, in, in the organization team.

It was felt that there wasn't the diversity that may well be desired. And so thoughts on that and what you've seen on social media going on this week. Really?

[00:33:58] Gustavo Bordoni: Yeah. Yeah. So one of the things that I feel like is a interesting kind of like tangent from that particular topic is I'm going to bring it to a little bit how my perspective is to a lot of these things.

I'm from Brazil where I have a very different background but when I come here in the U S I'm very much white. And I don't have a lot of these like very different perspectives on how some of these cultural things affect me in particular. So back in Brazil, we had this major issue with with inviting more people from other communities because Brazil was plural and in terms of like how big it is and how many different people we have.

But we've had this issue and honestly very hard to be able to put the finger and say, Hey, this is the way to solve the problem. It's an ongoing conversation. And I feel like last week, seeing people start talking about the conversation. Being able to have that be part of the WordPress community as like a, as a very important piece of what we do, not just by saying, Hey, people are welcome.

That's not enough in a lot of ways. The most important thing is being able to allow these people that not necessarily have most welcoming like intro to certain communities to have that be a, like a way for them to come in into the WordPress community, which has been all over the globe for so many years.

And I think something that Angela said that was very important is having. Post that is being translated into other languages. We'll S we'll be a big deal for bringing the plurality of the world into this, not just by having the event happen on different places, but by other people, in other languages being aware that this is a thing that's being talked about.

But it's going to take time, like training someone that's new to something it's going to take a couple of years until everyone is fuel safe to talk about the topic without feeling like there's risks and risks that are always really hard to deal with it because some people have fears that like I might not have because of where I come from and how safe I felt when I was younger about my experiences.

Other people might not feel the same and it's hard to judge and say, oh, but I feel safe. Yes. Yes. 'cause everyone else looks at, it looks like you where it is a friend of yours in some capacity. So having that issue like is the, one of the most important steps,

[00:37:10] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Oh, that's great. Thank you.

Okay. Keeping this debate going just for a little bit longer, I think this is probably the longest we've talked about any one thing ever, but it's fascinating. I'm really enjoying it. I had a conversation not to do with diversity. This was to do with accessibility, but it strikes me that the overlap here is worth mentioning.

I was talking to Amber behinds on a podcast episode the other day. And this curious question came to me at what point? Do you say, okay, the accessibility and here I am here, I am about to commit suicide socially. At what point do you say the accessibility of this website is good enough for now? I've done 30% of what I think needs to be done, but I'm better off putting out a website with 30.

W have the accessibility things ticked off than not having a website, which is accessible until a hundred percent of it is achieved. So there's my question. Flip that with diversity. Do we have a roadmap? Are we looking like on a 10 year timescale here? Are we looking on a much shorter timescale?

And if let's say that word come to Europe this time next year has the exact same problem. In other words, the numbers are the same, but they've gone through a different process and it's pretty clear that this is just how it's worked out this time. Do we, is there more of an olive branch that next time?

So I don't feel I've answered that. Asked a particularly coherent question there, but are you getting a flavor of what I'm saying? The it's gotta be a spectrum. I'm guessing we can't go from zero to a hundred percent here tomorrow. And do we, for example, say that event that we really need to slay them on social media because they haven't got there all the way just yet.

So I'm going to throw that one at Angela, and now I'm going to quit social media quickly.

[00:39:08] Angela Jin: I think. I, I'm gonna try and rephrase your question just a little bit. I think what you're trying to ask is

gosh, that is a really

[00:39:28] Nathan Wrigley: tricky question with that. Let me try and re-ask it. If it's not perfect, but an effort has been made demonstrably made, do they get apart? Or do we still get to go out and be, does this arise again next year? If things have been done differently, but the outcome is the same

[00:39:50] Angela Jin: for me.

It it really depends on the efforts made. Cause I think there are reasonable efforts that we can ask everybody to come to consider and build into specifically their organizing practices. However, on the flip side of that, it's not it's not a one and done thing, right? It's not alright, you have achieved perfect diversity for your word camp.

Congratulations. Never think about this again. It's a.

[00:40:27] Michelle Frechette: It's

[00:40:27] Angela Jin: going to be something that I'm certainly going to ask everyone in WordPress to continue to think about. And yeah, as we discover, I'm going to go back to what I said earlier. If we're building WordPress for everybody, we should continually think about whose voice is not being represented in our spaces, because that's the way to build bringing those voices in is the way to build WordPress for everyone.

[00:40:57] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Thank you again, Michelle. My horribly butchered question, but you pick it up on roughly what I'm trying to say there, what's your thoughts.

[00:41:07] Michelle Frechette: So I'm going to pull out a nursery rhyme.

Mother goose said, good, better, best, never rest until your good is better. And your better is best. Meaning there is no perfection, right? So we should always be striving to continually do better. So if next year we don't achieve the same thing, we don't achieve what we're looking for, but we've put forth the great effort.

Then the next year we should look at putting forth a greater effort. And so we are achieving our goals.

[00:41:41] Nathan Wrigley: I like it. I like that. And I liked that you've got a nursery rug in that suburb. Yeah. I think you've summed that up beautifully. Lovely, well done. And Gustavo, one time,

[00:41:54] Gustavo Bordoni: I'm not going to even try to beat it. I'm just gonna,

so the thing that, for me, you mentioned in the beginning accessibility and being a plugin developer on like in leading the team on a lot of these complicated conversations that arise on trying to determine the business part of making a plugin and like being able to enable all of these amazing people that work with events, calendar to have their livelihood be part of this.

There's a big part of all of it that has to do with being able to understand how much is. How much are you willing to say, this is what constitutes a step in the correct direction, right? Because if you're looking at the whole code base, you're talking about 200,000 lines of code that are random.

And if you don't know what you're looking for, there are always things that you can improve. But looking from the perspective of I'm trying to lead that, all of that into the correct direction, I think it's the same kind of topic that we're talking about from the diversities, like standpoint is there's something that constitutes a step in the right direction.

And that's clearly what we're trying to achieve in not necessarily the goal is, should be aspirational, right? Like it should always, as you grow and get better on it, you should be thinking, how can I what's like, how can I raise the bar even further? The bar should never be where you are. It should always be higher and higher.

So that. And accessibility is a really important topic when it comes to that, because it's really hard for us developers to have that be part of our day to day in, because it's such a small piece of the pie of customers that will like actually benefit from that. But it's an important piece that we need to be aware of so that we can say, Hey, how is that taking us in the correct direction?

Or is it like making us even worse on something? And that's the that's way? I think it relates so well with the topic that is not going to be something simple. It's going to take more than a couple of iterations for us to feel comfortable with where we are, because if we say anything else, we're going to be.

Saying that like next year is going to be perfect is going to be, think you're setting such a high bar that people are going to be like, oh, it wasn't good enough. I'm like, good enough. That it never is. If you feel like it's good enough, we lost some. Because the bar is not high enough, and that's where we should be looking for,

[00:44:50] Nathan Wrigley: thank you, Gustavo. That's really cool. They typically, with a short story where we deal with something for 10 minutes, we're able to throw up lots of the comments because they're very much related to what. I talked about a couple of minutes ago in this particular case.

In particular Rob Cannes Courtney and Ian WPDN NWB in particular wrote a lot of comments. So forgive me for not putting any of them on the screen at the time. It was just, it felt on this particular occasion that the conversation was going. And so we didn't put those up. I do. I do. Thank you for your contributions.

All three of you. That's really nice. Thank you. So just to rephrase it, just to recap, I should say Angela's piece over on make.wordpress.org. You can see maybe you're listening to this. It's called discussion diversity in WordPress events. You can go and check it out. There's been some emendation, we've got Indonesian, traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Portuguese language versions of that.

Now I'm guessing that this debate is going to go on. Angela, we often would do this at the end, but it feels like maybe somebody listening to this right now and wants to like, get into your inbox right away. If they want to talk to you. Just go through that particular piece or is there a more direct way that you would welcome?

[00:46:06] Angela Jin: Yeah. If you are comfortable with sharing your perspective, definitely go and comment on that post. If you can help us translate it into a language that is not translated into yet please do reach out. That would be incredible. If you want to chat with me directly, please do reach out to me.

Either yes, through Twitter or you can also find me in the making WordPress slack. I have always in the making WordPress slack, probably a little slower to respond on.

[00:46:40] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much. As part of the as part of the podcast, we put together some show notes and we allow the guests and the co-hosts to share some bits and pieces that they found interesting during the course of the weekend Angeles book, a couple in this week.

And it feels like one of them is probably apropos to mention right at this moment. So let's just open this one. This is a piece again on make.wordpress.org. It's Jill binder on the 3rd of February. The piece I'll just put it on the screen so that people can see it. If they're watching, it's called open invitation, diverse speaker training group hashtag WP diversity volunteers, zoom call.

I confess I didn't get chance to read this Angela cause it dropped in my lap just a little bit too late for me to any time to read it. But do you want to just run through what it is that we're looking at and why you've highlighted it for the show? Yeah. Yeah.

[00:47:29] Angela Jin: Sure. Phil binder has We've been leading the diverse speaker training, working group for a number of years now and has this they have this really wonderful workshop that encourages underrepresented people to become speakers.

And last year, Phil and that working group expanded the programming to include three programs. So yes, the original diverse speaker training workshop but also a support program where people who are interested in speaking can get feedback on their talks meet other people in similar situations and support each other, and also a new program around allyship.

And so this call that Jill is hosting talks about those three programs, the work that's been done so far and how people can get involved. So if that is something you are interested in, this is a great place to get started.

[00:48:35] Nathan Wrigley: I would say it seems to relate to a list that the B at the bottom is the tiny.

Date of the next zoom meeting related to this. So maybe if whatever you've listened to just now has piqued your interest. February the 23rd, I can't off the top of my head, someone up. Oh, it says the word Wednesday. There we go. Wednesday, February the 23rd. So in a couple of weeks, time from five to six UTC, and there's a zoom link on the page and I will try to drop the drop, the make.wordpress.org URL onto the show notes as well.

So very much. Okay. That was a full 50 minutes on one subject. It's something new and unique. And we had nursery rooms and we had a guest dropping in during the middle of it. It's all new, nothing interesting this week. So let's move on. I'm going to do. Do you want to go into this one, Angela?

This is something I know that you had a lot of time for, this is Sarah Gooding, WP Tavern. It's called WordPress community support program recommends cautious spending until in-person events can renew revenue stream. We're obviously been talking about WordCamp Europe and how all of that's funded.

And I, again we're going to have to keep this one a little bit shorter, Angela, if that's all right. But basically it's all around the funding for in-person events. During the course of next year, do you want to just summarize, because I know that you've got a real interest in this.

[00:50:10] Angela Jin: Yeah, sure. And I will summarize it very quickly. There is a post behind Sarah Gooding's post on WP Tavern about basically the funds available on. Funds available through WordPress community support, which is the oversight entity behind all word camps. It largely acts as a thing in many regards.

But yeah, we, since last year because of the pandemic we've had to, we being the community team have had to be very cautious about spending so that we keep the program in anding. So yep. This is just an update about the finances and a reminder to. Organizers that we're going to be pretty cautious about how we spend our funds for our events.

And this is a great time to remind everybody that the goal of all of our WordPress events are to connect to WordPress enthusiasts, to each other, to inspire people, to do more with WordPress and to encourage people to contribute back to the project. So if there are guiding principles around what we should be spending money on that's what I will be asking where camp organizers.

[00:51:34] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Michelle and Gustavo is all right. We move on from that one quickly, just so that we can get into some of it. Yeah. Thank you. A few thumbs up there. That's great. Okay. I think it's time that we had a WordPress drama. We haven't had, we haven't had one of those a couple of minutes, it seems this one is going to be of interest.

Couldn't be more different than the last drama we just had. But maybe that this one pushes your buttons equally. You never know. Just in Tadlock writing this week again on WP Tavern, the pieces called block editor, sidebar panels are the new admin notices. Okay. Let's just rewind. What's the problem in the WP admin that's sacrosanct area that always ought to be clean and clutter-free every so often we have Stavos.

What a shrug every so often somebody takes the initiative and fills your admin area up with a small, medium, perhaps even large advertisement. And it may be that the advertisement is trying to up sell you something. Maybe it's just trying to alert you to the fact that something has been updated or upgraded, but there really isn't any kind of process behind what that ought to a look like.

What kind of language is allowed permissible? What, is it a laptop images or animated gifts looking at you, such and such a company. And now we've got the lovely new Gothenburg interface with our sidebar on the right, which is full of settings or the block or the post or the page or whatever it is that you might be looking at.

And of course this presents a whole new wild west frontier to. But up with all sorts of things. Now, in my book, again, I'm going to crucify myself in my book. If I'm on a post and I click in a block setting or something like that, I really should be looking at settings. I would like to see the settings only for that particular block.

I want to see, can I change the color? Can I increase the putting whatever, but I don't really wish to see is an advert to upgrade. And if you're looking at the screen at the moment, we can see and Justin called it out. It's the exact metrics plugin. And what they've done is they've included a it's pretty benign.

I've got to say, I'm sure it could have been a lot worse, but it's basically a feature which you cannot use has been put into the free version of the plugin. So you can't use it if you're on the free version, but. As if you could use it. But of course, there's this little warning in green, it's fairly nice.

It's fairly benign. And it says, this is a pro feature. In other words, it's an ad. And the community I feel is probably going to be suffering. The consequences of this in the near future. The sky is the limit. This ad is one row. Hi, it's ever so small, but it could have been square. It could have been an animated GIF.

It could have, who knows what it could have brought along for the ride. But I think this is something that we need to be concerned about. I am probably okay. Personally. But I think clients probably don't want to see this sort of stuff. And the piece then goes on to describe are we at the point? And in fact, some of the comments go on to describe, do we need some sort of procedure?

Do we need some sort of protocol here? Do we need an admin notifications? You are inside a WordPress. And because I know that Gustavo is a developer of this, in this case, the events calendar, I'm going to throw the ball straight to him.

[00:55:07] Gustavo Bordoni: Yeah. So I want to bring up the, there is a WordPress feature plugin, or however you want to call it project.

The rupee notify that is trying to solve the notices problem in WordPress. And that is something that I've seen in Twitter, be part of conversations at times. And I'm like, Oh, there's a lot of people trying to solve this problem. As of right now, if you have a, like a, an opinion on it, like scope, put your opinion there so we can push this project forward and actually get it in core.

If it's something that you care that much. My thought processes is always this as a plugin developer, the rule of thumb of everything that we do is the following. There should be a way for you to disable these things that will take no more than one Google search in one small snippet of code in your functions, even on your WP config.

So for example, in the calendar there, we have upsells for certain things that are not in the UI at all. They're all in, for example for example, we have the recurrence for events, right? Like recurring events is something that we offer on our pro version. We see. You can't use recurrence on this.

If you're looking for recurrence, this is a pro feature. You can go there and figure it out. But we have a very clear constant that you can put on your WP config that the stables, all of it, there's no upsells anywhere, right? Like the goal is to try to make it as easy as possible for people to choose to stable, because there's a very weird gray line there that sits between trying to be helpful.

I don't like how this one in particular was done, because it feels like it's like almost a function, but not, it's not warning you, that you could have a something that's interesting, but that you need to have a pro is I think when you're warning someone say, Hey, if you're looking for this feature, this is appropriate.

Or some sort of thing like that. I think it can be beneficial, but I think there's a lot of gray area there. And especially when there's no standards, that's where things become very weird. Wordpress.org has a theory clear standard. You cannot phone home. And I think this is something where we should have some sort of guideline in some sort of direction that talks about this.

But with everything, there's a lot of perspective. And if the plugin developers don't participate on the conversation, then it becomes all the way to the opposite where you can't do anything. And then it becomes a detriment to everyone's business and all of that stuff, which I think is also not good.

Conversation needs to be so notice this for example is one that there is a project we'd have something. Yeah,

[00:58:20] Nathan Wrigley: thank you. That's what I think. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just going to drop an analogy in which Mr. Analogy today, the the, so when I drive around in my car, th the world in which I live is littered with adverts, there are, there's holdings next to bus stops.

The bus itself is sprinkled with adverts. There might be a billboard and advertising hoarding, great big thing, and there it is, and you can't escape them. They're there. And it is obvious that society needs these kinds of things for all sorts of products to get in front of eyeballs. But the point is.

I know where those places are. Like, it's the bus stop? It's the side of the bus. And it's the advertising hoarding over there. There that's the constraint society has decided they live inside of those boundaries and it would be so weird if I don't know if I saw an advert, on the ground or if somebody had put on a.

In a completely unusual place, which was obviously against the rules, like for example, stuck it in a tree or something like that, it would alarm bells would ring and I think that's wrong. And that's what I think here we need a place, a safe place for it. And it looks like Jonathan's WP notify thing that you, and I'll try to drop the, shown that in the show notes as well.

It seems like that's the safe space for it. If you've got an upgrade, we could have some sort of alarm bell icon or something like we do in all these SaaS apps which vibrates and rings. And it says there are notifications and you wouldn't necessarily know that they were advertising notifications.

Cause they could be things about updating things or important security information. So you might go in there and be curious and be exposed to the ads in the same way. But it feels to me that once you've gone, cause this is new, right? This is in the editor. This is not. WP admin place. This is where you are editing content and it feels like we've gone outside.

Somebody stuck the advert in the tree, and they're no longer in, on the bus stop. And what have you. So there we go. This episode is going to be called the advert in the tree. That's that anyways. So over Angela, you got anything you want to say about that?

Yeah, I think

[01:00:32] Angela Jin: I think adding a panel with an upsell without functionality is really frustrating and WordPress people are smart. It's likely a very quick way to lose trust in this community. That's what I've been thinking through.

[01:01:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, my thoughts on this is that like it's we for what, for one reason or another WordPress is a, there is a commercial arm to it.

There is a commercial wing plot, Gustavo, you can tell us you need your plugin to make money. It is not a philanthropic effort from start to finish. There has to be some revenue and that's fine. I guess we just need the boundaries to be set and where these things are.

And it feels to me like we're crossing a bit of a red line. We are crossing the Rubicon has another just coming out on me today. And, once you've crossed the Rubicon, it's very difficult to go back across the room with them. As Julius Caesar can tell you, Michelle.

[01:01:46] Michelle Frechette: I just think it's in poor taste.

At the very most common denominator, it's just import taste. I do understand. I work in a business that makes money on plugins and I work with Gustavo and I understand that we need to have upsells and we need to do those kinds of things, but to have a block that is absolutely non-functioning unless you agree to pay more, almost feels like we're holding the space ransom and you, we are showing you all the things you can't have unless you do more.

And I just think it's poor taste

[01:02:19] Nathan Wrigley: Gustavo. I've raised this on a few episodes in the past. I'm going to throw this one in your direction and see what you think about it. I don't possess one, but apparently there is an Amazon Kindle where you can get a version, which is a slightly cheaper. But it shows you ads.

I think it's called Kindle light or something like that. And periodically whilst your, so it doesn't show it whilst you're reading the book, it's a kin to the editor, but it does show you whilst you're doing all the other things, you're fiddling with the settings, there's a little ad and you're fiddling with which book you're going to read next.

There's a little ad. What do you think about the idea of a cheaper version of a plugin, but it came with the ads in included. In other words, the problem is, I guess you've already crossed the boundary of being in the paid area already. It's I dunno.

[01:03:11] Gustavo Bordoni: Okay. So I think it's complicated because if you think about how plugins make money, the they're not making money out of the ad itself.

Like in the sense of for example Google makes money out of selling the ad itself. So it or Amazon can sell you like. Like the ad itself for them makes money. If they have a third party ad showing up for them, they're making money out of you having that being in your face, right? Like plugins don't make money from, or at least not that I know of they'll make money from the ads themselves, because that's like a prohibited from WordPress core rules and the plugins.

You can't make money from ads on when you install a plugin on someone else's website. So that's where I think there's a slightly different take there, but I think the idea of paying less for, and being able to see ads is I think a okay model as, as long as you're being extremely clear with what you're selling.

And this is what I think Michelle and Angela said is you need to have an understanding with whoever is your customer that will, you're doing. I guess not understanding it's like you have to have a quote unquote, good tastes on what you're doing, because if you were like putting an ad in a weird spot and you're like not a, it's not a contract that you agreed upon, even if it's in the case of the Amazon Kindle or the Amazon fire all of their, a lot of them have Hey, you can pay $60 less for this product, if you agree to have ads forever on it.

And I'm like, depending on what's your use rate. So for example, let's say you're buying one for your kid to go to college. And you're like, Hey, I don't have the money. I don't have the means to buy for two or three kids that I have. All of them. That's an easy, easier way for you to be able to achieve that, right?

There's a place for these kinds of. Middle ground solutions. Think in WordPress, I don't think it fits the structure that we live in, but I think there's always room for experimentation. And we are very young when it comes to a lot of the business side of things in WordPress. There's a lot of room for growth and for exp experimentation and as WordPress core moves faster into like better tools and better things for everyone.

I think that's where things are going to be really important to see is what is WordPress allowing people to do, but what are the not frowning upon? What is the community not frowning upon and say, Hey, this is bad. You shouldn't do this or something along the lines of that. That's why I feel like this particular thing is really important to happen.

People would call it drama. I think it's. For that to happen for people to understand where we stand and how much is too much, otherwise it becomes like a really weird gray area. Everyone does what they

[01:06:35] Nathan Wrigley: want. Thank you for that. And I'm also gonna thank you for something else during the during that little, last little bit, Gustavo, you said the words we are very young and I applaud that I that's been years since anybody's called me young and I'm feeling so much better.

That's now the episode title. I am very young. That's great. But yeah. Interesting stuff. I don't know. I feel to Angela's point I think we are, I think there's a clever bunch of people in the WordPress space and I think maybe they've got areas attune or their eyes attuned to these little spaces and they see this as an affront more than perhaps they would see an, I don't know, an ad buried at the bottom of a Netflix video or something like that.

They might see that as more of a commercially acceptable thing. And maybe we're just very precious about it, but. Anyway, let's move on. I would like to show you a website that I just think is fabulous. It's a, probably a very important project. This is coming from the guys 10 up. We don't often feature a particular website.

We just don't. But this is this is so firstly, kudos to turn up for getting the the gig to make this website. That's not why I'm showing it, but they've got the, they got the gig to create the white house website previously. I, if I remember correctly, it was. Housed on a Drupal website.

I imagine it's been over on WordPress for a little while now, but I wanted to raise this piece just because of that implementation of it, because it looked like I was showing you the white house website. It wasn't I'm going to refresh this page so that the little thumbnail of the video comes back to life.

They've got a Vimeo video on this, and I would urge anybody who is into building blocks and what blocks might be able to do in the future to go and look at 10 ops implementation. So over on the white house website are all these distinct, obvious content areas. Now that may be a row or a column within a row, but each of them has a distinctive look and feel and what tan have done.

And you can see it in this video. I won't bother to show it to you. It's about three minutes long is they have made it so that there is an exact parallel. With what on the screen and how you enter. As an example, there's this section here that you can just about make out. And if you want to amend the text in this little bit, you start typing in there and all the text is written vertically and all of these headers and bits and pieces.

It's just a beautiful implementation for people who probably have no interest in WordPress whatsoever. These are busy people working in the white house. They want to log in, amend something, move something around and click save and be gone. And this does it perfectly. It is exactly. I think that what the promise of blocks were, I don't know if any of you, other guys have seen it or had a chance to watch that video, but if you did and you want to chip in, go for it now, it's just.

That'll be a no,

[01:09:37] Angela Jin: I agree with everything that you just said that I couldn't have said it any better. So

[01:09:43] Nathan Wrigley: I will actually say, I'm going to, I'm just going to pause it there. So for example, somebody is editing this. I apologies if you're listening to this on audio, I'm showing on the screen, the editing experience.

So if you literally click on this bit and the usual block editor bit comes up on the top and you change the text here and you change the sex there and you put the links in and it's just brilliant. They turned it around in five weeks. So this is me just saying Bravo that is full on Q dos.

Thank you. Rob, the new show title. This is not a political show.

And to the point that we were talking about a minute ago, Peter, thank you. Losing trust. We're talking about the adverts in the UI. Losing trust is a big deal. There's the word, right? It's about trust. Isn't it. Recently a set of block extensions got really aggressive and I now don't want them at all mentioning no names.

I honestly don't know who you're talking about, but there we go. We're going to do some jobs. We don't often mention jobs, but I caught sight of three this week. So I thought let's put them in. I confess one of them didn't come from me, but came from Angela, which is nice. So let me share my screen.

There we go. The first one, ah, look at this. Look at this Gustavo. I don't know if if this is coming up. You've got a quality assurance analyst job on the go working over at liquid web for the events calendar. Do you a good start? I'm not putting you on the spot. I am. I'm putting you on the spot.

Do you know anything about this role or is this just so there's more so

[01:11:13] Gustavo Bordoni: on? The events, calendar and. We've always had this huge I guess this huge thing for not not having only dabs test their own code. We want to have someone do the quality assurance and that to some degree makes things a little slower on some ends of the business, but it ensures that we are not breaking backwards compatibility on a lot of things.

And that's an really important piece of the hard business. Especially because we live in the WordPress realm where backwards compatibility is something that's really strongly valued. So this person that would apply for this job would be someone that would be working very closely with one of the teams that we have specifically trying to fix.

And trying to break the plugins before it goes out in the wild with like new features and stuff like this, and working closely with the developers, for automation of how to QA things in a, in an automated way. And some of that stuff, which is really valuable for us, for efficiency and some of that stuff.

[01:12:32] Nathan Wrigley: So it's it's a carry on, sorry. Carry on.

[01:12:36] Gustavo Bordoni: Oh, no, it was just a really interesting job that we have. That is not always, I haven't seen it a lot in WordPress businesses, but it's something that we care a lot in. It has added value over the course of the years to not only have our unit tests and automated tests to go through computers, but also have people look at stuff and say, this doesn't feel quite right when it comes to if I put a really random input.

[01:13:04] Nathan Wrigley: So I love the idea of having a job where you've got to break things. Oh yes. That sounded right up my street

[01:13:12] Michelle Frechette: with Gustavo.

[01:13:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yay. It's full-time the location is remote. I'm guessing that means more or less anywhere is applicable three years experience with at least two of those working remotely, a proven track record of quality assurance with a strong, familiar term familiarity in WordPress.

And you get to work with Gustavo, which is a total win. Next one, I'm just going to mention, I just caught sight of this one backend engineer. This is web dev studios. They are looking for a backend engineer to join their engineering team. Same criteria. Full-time, it's remote, it's 65 to 80,000 us dollars.

You can find that over on their careers, page, web dev studios, so

[01:13:56] Michelle Frechette: refreshing that they actually put the compensation on the screen. Whether or not it's something that you're interested in applying to. That's a good thing. I really wish that more businesses did that. Yeah.

[01:14:07] Nathan Wrigley: Because presumably they know.

And it's not like it's a bit

[01:14:12] Michelle Frechette: and yeah, it's still a big PR. It's a big range, but at least, it's not 40, and if you're looking for 150, you're not going to apply at. So it just gives you a better

[01:14:24] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yeah. Good point. And I'm speaking of all these things, we should mention the WP careers summit.

This is right up Michelle's street. When give us the dates again. Very quickly. April 8th heap relates. Okay. Eight Pilates, WP careers, summit.com. If I'm not mistaken. Yeah. And finally, Angela's brought this one to our attention, a developer educator for Automattic. Yeah. So

[01:14:49] Angela Jin: it's a really exciting role for a full-time sponsored contributor where you get to work alongside other amazing contributors on the training team.

Like Courtney, who I see is watching this as well. And yeah, you'll create technical educational content for learn WordPress which is a big focus for WordPress right now. It's a role that intersects with the community and has a direct impact on future adoption and success with WordPress. And it is with Automattic.

And so if you have any questions about what it's like to work at Automattic, I would be happy to answer those and share my perspective. And I know many of my teammates would also happily share their experiences as well. And it is fully remote. So you can be anywhere in the.

[01:15:46] Nathan Wrigley: So three bullet points.

It says building and managing an online educational platform, collaborating with cross functional teams to plan and execute training strategies, creating exclusive educational content for developers, having a chat with somebody the other day. And I was thinking about the educational side of WordPress.

Now that we've got full site editing. You imagine the quantity of people who go out each day and search for, oh, I didn't know. For example, how do I create a menu in WordPress? Pretty much all of those videos are now wrong and we have an awful lot of people know, but it doesn't look like that anymore.

Oh, okay. So important that we get the education aspect, right? Okay. Let's move over to something a bit jolly. This is quite interesting. I confess that I've never used these. These are Lottie animations, lots of animations. Every time I've come across them. They always look like they're a bit cartoonish, but I am imagining that there are lots of animations for all sorts of purposes, some of them more serious, but they're like lightweight, fun, looking, little animations.

And I just want it to draw attention to the fact that cadence blocks 2.24 has added Lottie animations in its own little block. If you're looking at the screen, it's easy to configure set of settings. You basically can loop them. You can bounce the playback and some various other things, including margins and padding and sizing.

And what have you. But I, I don't know if anybody has anything to add about those. I confess I'm it's unlikely that I personally would use these, but nice feature.

[01:17:18] Michelle Frechette: I just love the cadence is doing so many innovative things within WordPress using their blocks and the theme of.

[01:17:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Nice. Okay. So this is a piece written by Sarah Gooding and a, there you go.

You can find it. It's called cadence blocks. 2.2 0.4 adds Lottie animation block. Okay. We are now. Yeah, we're onto our picks of the week. Not everybody brought one along this week, but I'm going to, I'm going to throw one into the into the mix. It is this one. This is cool. This is called notes along.com.

Honestly, why wouldn't you have this? Put it in your web browser. It's an extension. I should say. It's free. It's free. And what you do is you just add it as a Chrome extension and you create an account, so it's not free because you have to give them your email, but there you go. It's fine.

And Wherever you are browsing on the internet. If there's some little bit that you just thought, oh, I'd like that for later, you highlight it. And then this tiny little icon appears at the point where your mouse is and you click it. And then that portion becomes yellow or blue or whatever it is that you would like it to be.

And from that moment on, if you've got the extension installed, whenever you return to that page, it's highlighted for you and doing this news thing you can imagine right? Every week there's lots of articles, but there are bits within those articles that I would like to remember more than other bits.

Yeah. It failed me this week to be fair. I think their website went down for about, I dunno, a few hours, at the point when I needed it, when I was putting together the show notes. So there you go. And I, but I'm still gonna recommend it because it's worked for months with me without any failures.

So I just think this is really great. Go highlight the internet. And then if you don't wish to return to the page, you can log into their UI and it will show you everything that you've highlighted. I don't know if there's a similar tool. It's probably loads of things like this, but I just thought that for three.

You can go on.

[01:19:27] Michelle Frechette: All right. So I said, it's very good. I also like that. It makes me think I need to go paint something because it looks like the paint samples that you see on the right hand side. Those little cards you get at Walmart or,

[01:19:40] Nathan Wrigley: okay. Okay. Yeah. It's really easy to use. It's beautifully done.

It's simple. There's no settings. There's nothing to configure. You just switch it on and have an account and you're good to go and yeah, it's really nice. What else have we got? Was that something? Yes, this was a pick of the week from.

[01:19:59] Angela Jin: Me I'm just wanting to encourage everyone to go check out a WP briefing, which is a very bite-sized podcast given by Assefa who is the executive director or WordPress? She it's delightful. There are podcasts where he sings, where she has like a blooper reel, but she also talks about really important, hard hitting things in WordPress.

And the most recent one was about the top three goals for 2022. So definitely an important one. If you care at all about WordPress and where it is.

[01:20:43] Nathan Wrigley: It's really nice. I think the thing which you mentioned, which is nice, it's not only that she's got a really engaging way of creating content.

She's very fun, isn't she? But also the fact that it's not a joke. Great big, listen, you could listen to this this one that we're talking about here, episode 24, the three goals, the whole thing rounds out at just over seven and a half minutes, something so small, by the time she's done the introduction, this is probably it's bite size, in other words.

And for those of you, that kind of like podcasts, but don't like the ones that drone on and on, like mine you can you can really get what you need in just a few short minutes and be beyond your way. Of course, as soon as you've listened to hers, what you need to do is cue my not next because that's important.

He said and was that Austin? No. Who gave us this one was issue as well? Angela? No, this is Michelle. Okay. We're looking at national today, national today.com. And I've confessed. I've never heard of this website before, but it's it's this particular piece. It's not that website. It's the national clean out your computer day is that today

[01:21:55] Michelle Frechette: it is today.

So not only is today, Valentine's day is most people are aware. If you go to the national today.com, there are other sites like this, it will show you what else today is notable for. And I happen to, as a single person, wanted to see what else is out there besides Valentine's day. And it's national clean out your computer day.

And this is comes twofold. It's number one, it's organized your files, delete stuff, run those defrags and other things then whatever, and, or, make your computer work better for you, but also. Sanitize it, I guess you would not believe how many germs live under keyboards.

[01:22:37] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, literally.

You mean give it some antique back and

just clean out your computer, but clean your computer. Yeah. I'm not going to add out. Yeah. Okay. Quick straw poll. Who has a keyboard, which is pristinely clean with no evidence of previous key strokes. I'm just going to stare at mine. Mine is shockingly bad. I have really got a mucky keyboard.

I'm not going to hold it up because it will be a point of great shame, but it is incredibly filthy.

[01:23:12] Michelle Frechette: Mine may actually have some key, some coffee droplets here.

[01:23:19] Nathan Wrigley: Let's talk for a confession. How clean is your keyboard, Angela? I'm

[01:23:24] Angela Jin: a bit of a neat freak. And so I do clean my keyboard regularly, but this keyboard, I'm also a very hard typer. Apparently you see like some of the letters are worn out because you typed either tech to hardware. I'd wipe them off too much.

So

[01:23:43] Nathan Wrigley: I want to know this right. Honestly. So I've got a keyboard junior, like everybody else, it's a keyboard and it's got rectangular, sorry, square keys. And there's the metal between the sky. How do you clean those? How do you get in there? You would like with acute CEP and yet

[01:24:03] Angela Jin: you can get special. Q-tips that kind of go in between and clean them out.

[01:24:09] Nathan Wrigley: When when the WP awards was being put on by Devinder and everybody was, everybody could nominate themselves. I nominated myself as the least clean member of the WordPress community. And I think this keyboard temperance strikes it perfectly.

Gustavo marks out of 10 for the cleanliness of your keyboard. No,

[01:24:28] Gustavo Bordoni: mine. Mine. Mine is bad right now. I tend, I, I am actually like, my table is not clean. It's always a Mac, the keyboard. I actually try to clean with some I even have one of those not the can, they're the one that's like a electrical.

So you can blow the, like the stuff that's in it. Yeah. But it never tools to that with everything. So you have to take all the keys out and then clean it. It's an effort. So once a

[01:24:57] Nathan Wrigley: month, I absolutely love the idea of national clean your computer day. I'm going to do it Michelle. Next time you're on the show.

You can ask me whether I'll show you my keyboard or not, and I'll show you a clean keyboard, either that, or I'll just lie and say, it's really

[01:25:16] Gustavo Bordoni: not use just for

[01:25:18] Nathan Wrigley: handy, clean on over here. It's just whip it into shock and then return it to the box.

[01:25:25] Michelle Frechette: I stack all over the picture.

[01:25:29] Nathan Wrigley: It's a picture. Hey Michelle, you you mentioned something a minute ago. You mentioned the fact that it's it's Valentine's day to day. I'm not going to go into that.

I don't know who's doing what for Valentine's day, but Michelle. Contacted me if I don't know if I'm ready for this, Michelle contacted me a few weeks ago and said, we should do something on the on the Valentine's episode. And I put my thinking cap on and a few weeks ago, when it was the Christmas episode with several of us, Michelle was on the call.

We did some reads that we had a little wreath that went round everybody's head. And so for anybody, who's still watching this, I bred.

So what you've got to do is you've got, I know it's a bit awkward. You've got to try to get your head in the sense of like that and what we always do when we finish off the show, we always wait. So obviously that so ridiculous for those of you that are watching or listening, I've put some Valentines hearts on the screen and we're all surrounded by Valentines hearts.

You've all got away. You've, I've got to try and wave as well at the same time. And if we can all wave like that, I will grab a screenshot of that and we will all look like idiots. And there we go. Thank you, Michelle. What a brilliant idea that we're done. We've used the power hour and we're nearly there in 27 or eight minutes.

We're at the moment. So just for me to say thank you so much for joining us. We'll be back this time next week. I can't remember who the guests are off the top of my head, but it will be some lovely guests. They always are this week. Thank you very much to Michelle for sharing what's going on this week.

[01:27:08] Michelle Frechette: I will be announcing by the end of this week, the speakers for WP career summit. So if you haven't registered yet, go over WP career summit.com register for the event. As we said, it's April 8th and some pretty phenomenal speakers and topics coming out.

[01:27:25] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Oh great. Okay. WP careers. So my.com and Angela.

[01:27:30] Angela Jin: This week, one of my focuses is going to be working with the brand new, make a photo directory team. It is the latest new make team. And so we're talking about like handbooks and what that program is going to look like long term. So if you want to get involved, this is a great time to do it. And also contribute your photos.

It's growing so fast. I'm really excited about it.

[01:27:56] Nathan Wrigley: I'm going to contribute a photo of a mucky keyboard. That's my contribution. So whoever search keyboard, photo directory, where that came from.

I repent. I'll do the photo of the clean keyboard. That will be fine. Just start by what's happening with you this week.

[01:28:22] Gustavo Bordoni: Working on a couple of integrations and the events calendar for tickets and payments, which has been pretty interesting and the personal life I'm now in like final few stages of like my wife's like the whole part now it's just, okay, like how much more do we have here?

So this is our last week of work. And she works with Angela. So that's also but it's it's been a really interesting few days now, and just waiting for. For all of that, you kind of land. Cause there's a lot of prep preparation and giving other people work and say, Hey, here's I'm not going to be here for two months.

So a little bit of that. But yeah,

[01:29:18] Nathan Wrigley: That is an extraordinarily extraordinary bit of life. I remember when the, then the same happened to me first time around really trying hard to be present than in the moment and enjoy it. And it's so easy to be consumed by all the other things. I was so glad that you've managed to put the work part of your life on hold for a bit.

That's lovely. Cause that's one giant piece of the puzzle, which it gets in the way, it's going to get in the way of that wonderful experience. So hopefully you'll be able to be mindful of it and enjoy it to the fullest. Oh, that's so brilliant. Like I said, we'll be back next week. I am going to, I'm going to fade us out with the I can't resist.

I'm going to put that back up again and say thanks very much for joining us. We'll be back this time next week. Take it easy.