Screenshot WordCamp Philly 2020 Code Differently Panel

Rejoining the WordPress Community

Hey friends – it’s been a while since I wrote a blog post on my own site. Rather than making promises to update regularly and dropping it, or stressing over some elaborate content calendar… I think I’ll just keep it short and simple.

The last that I was really active in WordPress was before we began our family. I endured 3 miscarriages, had a son born 6 weeks early due to my preeclampsia, and then had a second son born less than 15 months later.

So – mom life… lots of that. And healing mentally and physically from that endeavor.

Work Work

I can’t say enough about how much I’ve loved working around the boys’ sleep schedules. I have contracted for 3.5 years in tech support and content creation with The Events Calendar by Modern Tribe. The flexibility was ideal for our family during that time. I’ve really increased my skills with code and understanding of agencies in the WordPress product space. I have grown personally as I have become a connector from developer-speak to customer/client perspectives.

This summer, I also accepted a teaching contract with Code Differently to launch an introductory WordPress user track for our paid student interns. Our students walked through installing WordPress through every setting in the admin dashboard interface, to premium plugins and themes. They learned also about the overall WordPress community and how to participate on teams. We even rated and reviewed the Hello Dolly plugin. The highlight of it all, half our students were able to participate in a panel discussion about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion while learning WordPress. I am so eager for our panel to make its way to WordPress.tv and will publish the video here as soon as it is.

This renewed my effort and need to access lesson plans from the WordPress training team. That fits in perfectly with the launch of the new Learn WordPress site. The training team specifically creates lesson plans and teaching materials for others to use while instructing WordPress. If you’d like to contribute, please swing by the team site and I can help get you connected.

Pondering These Perspectives

  • Rather than perceived competition, focus on collaboration. Shift the mindset from me vs. them to providing value no matter the outcome. Build others up. It’s just a better way to live.
  • The workforce is global. My coworkers are on every continent except Antarctica (to my knowledge), work asynchronously most of the time, and enjoy the diversity among each other.

More to come

I’m writing curriculum today for a Front End Web Developer Bootcamp that will include

  • HTML
  • CSS
  • Javascript
  • PHP
  • WordPress
  • Task Runners
  • Communicating with Designers
  • An Agile/scrum approach in our course