


<p>And there is another news part of it, April 8th, talking about scale, right? April 8th, what happened there was NASA live-streamed the solar eclipse, the one in 35 years, and there&#8217;s only one traffic number that I know about, and that is between four and a half hour span, one billion requests made to the NASA.gov website, with a large majority served under 400 milliseconds. So this is a real scaled operation. I don&#8217;t think that many other websites get, in that amount of time, so much traffic. How did that feel, Gary and Stacy? You probably were watching as well.</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> Oh yes. I traveled to view the Eclipse in person and I took my laptop with me. So as I was sitting there waiting, I was tethered and kind of watching traffic increase and yeah, stunning. Certainly the busiest site I&#8217;ve worked on.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> How did you see the solar eclipse, Stacy?</p>



<p><em>Stacy Holtz:</em> Yeah, same. I was not traveling, but I was running back and forth between my kitchen and the back deck to put my glasses on and view it, and then come back and check on everything, and make sure our user community didn&#8217;t need any support of any kind. So definitely it was a fun day.</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> And I will say, some of the reason that we were able to handle that kind of traffic is there was plenty of prep. Obviously eclipses don&#8217;t sneak up on us, so we knew it was coming, and both on the content creator side and the technical side, we were able to posture ourselves for this expected increase in traffic and extremely thrilled with how it all went.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, that&#8217;s awesome. And the latest web news about NASA, of course there are others, plenty of news and you can all check it out on NASA.gov, but the latest news is that NASA got the Webby Awards for the new live stream site. Congratulations to you all and the team. That&#8217;s wonderful. So what is that live site about? What was that? How did that come to pass?</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar: </em>Yeah, so NASA Plus is pretty cool. NASA, of course, everybody has a streaming service, so why shouldn&#8217;t NASA, right? So plus.nasa.gov is NASA&#8217;s streaming service. The neat part is it&#8217;s a WordPress site, and so WordPress functions is the control room for content creators to put together playlists and spotlight content. Any live event that takes place is run through and both live on plus.nasa.gov. And higher traffic stuff is co-streamed on www.nasa.gov. But you can install the plus, well you can sell the NASA app on any device and have live-streaming. It&#8217;s cool. Very cool. And the part that blows my mind every time I fired up on my Apple TV is that it&#8217;s just hitting the WordPress rest API. That&#8217;s pretty wild to me.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, yeah, no, I can see that. Yeah, it&#8217;s really pushing the envelope on that, on the rest API, definitely. Yeah. So take us back to now, not how did this come to pass? Well, NASA 20-year-old content, I think they started way in 2000, well maybe even earlier, with putting stuff on the web, but so what was the project like? What was the scale of the project? When you went in there, how did you it to even scope it?</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> I was fortunate to join the project after some decisions had been made, CMS had already been chosen. There was a long conversation around that before deciding on WordPress. And so, I joined when development was very much in process. But I think even before that, it&#8217;s worth pointing out that the first domino that caused all this was the 21st Century Idea Act that talked about modernizing websites. And so, NASA certainly, a technical organization, every group center, club, cafeteria, all had a website, because it was important to have this information available. And they get that part innately and ended up where many agencies, both federally and otherwise have ended up, in that they have a sprawling footprint across the internet. And the Idea Act, further pushed by a memo &#8217;23, &#8217;22, last year, basically said we got to make this better for users. And so, NASA really went after that and found partners that could help them get to this point.</p>



<p>So when I joined Lone Rock Point, development was already in process and there were lists of things that needed to happen before launch. Like there&#8217;s thousands of sites that needed to be consolidated and we have content across four different major versions of the WWW site, and a lot of minor things that we&#8217;re also resolving at WWW at different addresses, that all needed to come in to make this thing live. There were some sections that to the federal law, the URL had to change the same, so there were perma link structures that needed to be considered, and it was this just massive checklist of items to get through, page after page of how do you account for that, how do you account for that? And on top of it, a really specific goal of giving content creators the tooling they needed to really tell the story, and give a compelling introduction or compelling reason for people to read and see what they have to say. So a very tall task. An exciting task. Exciting task.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, definitely. So when did it start? It was a process that took I think months if not years to put together. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Stacy Holtz:</em> I&#8217;m not sure of the official date. When I started the project, it was already in progress, and they were still making decisions around the CMS. So I joined it before Gary, but it was already in progress. So I honestly don&#8217;t know when the official timeline of that was.</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> I&#8217;ll say the 21st Century Idea Act was written in 2018, so shortly after that, I mean we&#8217;re 2024 now. Shortly after that, the planning had to happen and NASA had to start getting it together, because an agency of that size, there&#8217;s a lot of momentum to account for.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, there are also budget questions there. You need to kind of wait until the next budget round comes, and so it&#8217;s a year past before you get anything on the books. Yeah, definitely get that. Yeah. So you mentioned there were in your introduction, I read something like, what&#8217;s the Space Station Research Explorer?</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> Oh yeah. So Space Station Research Explorer is awesome and was a fun, I&#8217;ll say problem to solve. As I mentioned, there&#8217;s some federally required things by laws, PDFs here and there, and some digital cost analysis here. One of those, Space Station Research Explorer, is literally taking from the ISS data from research projects, and consolidating and writing reports. And that lived on a URL that conflicted with other permalinks, and also had some really strict requirements around where images existed and specific cell files, because they&#8217;re packaged up and used in other systems internally at NASA. So in many cases you&#8217;d say, &#8220;Well great, we can just redirect,&#8221; but not really an option in this case. So there&#8217;s a whole routing and URL management system within WordPress, separate from WordPress, to deal with the logic of the Space Station Research Explorer. That was sort of my toe in the water on the project was, this thing has to work, and get that working so we can get to launch. The first of many of those in the checklist.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Also, there are other things on the website that are really astonishing, and have a huge amount of data we handed that&#8217;s for instance also the mission, I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s called Explorer as well, but the mission database where anybody can look up a prior NASA mission, and see who were the astronauts, what was the purpose of the mission and all that, that also needed to totally, it&#8217;s in a database, but it need also revamped for that. So I&#8217;m assuming that&#8217;s also part of the project?</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> And I&#8217;ll share that some of this stuff is not, it&#8217;s old content, but it&#8217;s continually updated. There&#8217;s a piece of content from the history office called the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, and to this day it&#8217;s still updated as different artifacts are discovered that people who worked in the project took home, and are sharing and finding. We have better technology now to try and understand some of these garbled transmissions.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Oh, yeah.</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> Yeah, so there continue to be updates there, and it&#8217;s a highly trafficked area of the site that had to be migrated in as well, and recognize the effort that volunteers across the globe are making on that.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, you mentioned thousands of public sites. How can you even have thousands of public sites? That&#8217;s really interesting. But when you say the cafeterias and all the offices, they all had public sites, so it kind of gets together. Then 456 users that log into some part of the website, and they&#8217;re mostly content creators, I would assume. And then, I read in one of the blog posts that you built 55 custom blocks. Yeah. So how did you approach the development that went from, so you had a design company I would assume, or was it also done in your agency that design steps to come to that?</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Block and Theme Development</h3>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> Yeah, great question. So design actually happened in parallel while CMS was being chosen. So the design system we use is called Horizon Design System, and a design agency put this together, very ambitious design system. They tried to account for every use case they could think of within NASA, without being informed by what can the tool we&#8217;re using actually do. And so, Design System was, I&#8217;ll air quote finalized, like design systems never finalized, but finalized around the same time the CMS was chosen, give or take a little bit.</p>



<p>During the implementation, actually developing this, there was a lot of discovery of, oh gee, this wasn&#8217;t considered or accounted for, because there was no way the design company could have discovered or accounted for it. How do we deal with that? And so ultimately, if we had completed the entire design system as specked out, I wonder how many blocks there would be? Probably hundreds. So many compelling ways to tell the story. We ended it at 55 by virtue of, I mean at some point the things got to launch, we can&#8217;t build forever, but also these are the pieces that are necessary broadly to accomplish what needs to be accomplished. Since launch, a couple more blocks have been added specific to streaming.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. Oh yeah, totally get that. So there&#8217;s this underlying question that probably any agency has that needs to talk with clients about it. So what&#8217;s the decision between, okay, using core blocks versus creating custom blocks. I can see that there are not a whole lot of blocks like tabs, or accordions in core, so I get that those definitely needed to be created, but what are other blocks that you built?</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> Yeah, I would say that there&#8217;s a lot of blocks that allow relating content to other content. So selecting related content either automatically or dynamically, identifying you might want to continue reading on. In some cases that&#8217;s accomplished with custom blocks by virtue of the design system needs. So the design system sort of dictates that to accomplish this, we need to give content creators X amount of control that aren&#8217;t available in core blocks. Even things like imagery, so we&#8217;ve extended the core image block quite a bit to account for not just captioning, but credits, descriptions. There were some needs to link to, in some cases an image article, in other cases to link to the raw image that&#8217;s dynamically chosen when the block&#8217;s in use. So there&#8217;s a lot of, one of the major goals was provide compelling content and continue providing compelling content. And so, to that end, the blocks serve that purpose and go beyond what core would need specific to NASA&#8217;s needs.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. Speaking of imagery, there is this image, the hundreds and thousands of media assets, mostly probably images and videos, and know that the Hubble Telescope and now James Webb Telescope, they produce tons of images. I don&#8217;t think that goes through the WordPress media library, or am I&#8230;</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> Correct. Yeah, so NASA has an internal CDN that&#8217;s used. Some of that stuff, it makes sense to bring into the media library and scale for use.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. What&#8217;s the CDN?</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> Content distribution network, so like an S3 bucket, or some other place to store it that-</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Just for the purpose of our listeners, we all have sometimes a bit of a jargony. Just wanted to make sure. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> Sorry, I&#8217;m still living in my own head in my own life.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> I know how to stop you. Yeah, CDN. Yeah. All right. Yeah, so it has its own CDN and then, but there&#8217;s still a link to the article, so that is probably custom development as well.</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> Correct. And that CDN is embedded, so if you&#8217;re in the media library, external or internal, of course you can still upload and use as appropriate. And even looking specifically at the media library, there were needs, there&#8217;s a lot of PDFs, contracts, and other information that gets updated, and one of the needs our content creators have is they need to be able to replace this thing. I&#8217;m not even sure where all it&#8217;s being linked from, so it&#8217;s not as simple as saying, &#8220;Upload a new thing to the media library, redirect.&#8221; Yeah, it&#8217;s complex. It&#8217;s complex. A lot of business logic behind it. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, I can imagine.</p>



<p><em>Stacy Holtz:</em> It&#8217;s not like you upload your own, you think in your own WordPress website or wherever, you upload your image and maybe one or two other people use your image. You think about, you have hundreds of content creators and they&#8217;re looking for a specific image that was uploaded, and it&#8217;s used in multiple places, or the PDF is used in multiple places. You as the original person who uploaded it, have no way of knowing where it was uploaded. So you have to be able to account for that, right? If they need to update something on the PDF, make changes to that, that it gets changed everywhere.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, I can see that. And that definitely needs to scale quite a bit there, because it&#8217;s also geared towards NASA and the use case there. Were there any blocks where you considered maybe later on we could kind of public source them, or open source them and make them available for the wider WordPress community?</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> Yeah, there&#8217;s definitely an ongoing conversation that I think it&#8217;s in the public web experience office. I think it&#8217;s intent to get to the point that we can open source, and I will say, not that there&#8217;s probably anything compelling or earth-shattering there that will change the world for developers, more so that this is a way we solve the problem. And I don&#8217;t know, I like spinning up projects like that. I think it&#8217;d be fun. If I wasn&#8217;t working on it, I&#8217;d probably be cloning it. So I don&#8217;t know when it&#8217;s available, hopefully soon. Obviously many hoops to jump through, but something on the horizon.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. Wonderful. Wonderful. No, I can see in one of the posts and we link all the posts that I&#8217;ve mentioned here to the show notes for later, for your own perusal, dear listeners, but I read in one of the posts that you had a tabbed block where you can have the tabs on top, and then four page, and then have different content in the tabs, but then you also could move the tabs around, so you create your own tabs and all that. So that was a pretty neat block to see and how it works, and it would be really cool to have that, at least for those who also have these huge publishing needs, or have a need for not only have a linear content creation or launch page, but wanted to have some additional ways to highlight things. Yeah. So you mentioned it multiple times. The CMS was chosen. What was the leaving CMS?</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> Drupal.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Drupal?</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> Yep.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Drupal 7?</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> Yes.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> There were some migration issues there, I would think.</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> To say the least, yeah.</p>



<p><em>Stacy Holtz:</em> Well, and Drupal it somewhat of a different data model, and that site was headless.</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> Which of course is a continuing conversation for us in WordPress land, and I think there were some interesting things to learn from that in the sense that publishing there was effectively creating JSON files that were being consumed, and so you weren&#8217;t necessarily hitting a rest API, you were hitting a static file. So from a speed perspective, it was very fast.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> So the data came out of the database into a JSON file, and then that was consumed by the CMS, is that what I&#8217;m understanding?</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> By the front end, yeah. So you would publish it on the front end. Yeah, the front end would consume it, correct, yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Okay.</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> Yeah, and that content was of course the most current content, but that site also had to accommodate the previous designs as well, that were not migrated to the new design system at that last move. And part of that were all these micro sites that, maybe 10 or 15 pages that have a specific use case, but didn&#8217;t really fit any of the existing design patterns, but also told a pretty interesting story, useful information for the public and whatnot, all fell under that roof. From a migration perspective, I&#8217;ll give you a huge shout-out to Andrew Norcross, who was my colleague at Lone Rock Point, spearheading migration. The migration system is, it&#8217;d be really cool if we could just bring this stuff in and stick it right into blocks, and say, &#8220;Hey, content creator, make sure this matches what you think it is, and let&#8217;s go.&#8221; In addition to bringing content in, there was sort of a re-strategizing about navigation.</p>



<p>So the information architecture itself changed entirely, so it wasn&#8217;t even necessarily a one-to-one, because many different people had many different responsibilities across the system. We had content that was duplicative, or incomplete, or disagreed with each other just by virtue of age, and the information hadn&#8217;t been updated to the other person was updating, what have you. So the migration worked in two phases. First content came into the staging area, and the staging area was a safe place, custom post type, where content editors could come in and it would make the first pass at trying to convert to blocks, core blocks, basically, none of our custom blocks.</p>



<p>And from there, content creators could apply the custom blocks and really figure out how to retell the story in the current system, and it gave them an opportunity to say, &#8220;Where does this actually fall in the new system?&#8221; And eventually get it to the appropriate post type, in the appropriate category, owned by the right people.</p>



<p>Now, if you think about that, you go, &#8220;Well, that&#8217;s cool, except it&#8217;s possible that something had come in and it previously had three or four URLs as consolidating down to one.&#8221; So every piece of content that came in, we have an old URL for, in some cases that remain the same. By and large, they change, but then there&#8217;s also these pages that no longer exist that need to be accommodated for. The URLs still exist in search results and old links, and what have you, and that all has to kind of burn down to a logical system where we handle redirects.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. So the content creators must have come in pretty early in the project, because when they converted to blocks, they needed to already know how to do that. So training or the outline and the processes, they needed to work in parallel, I would think. Did that work, Stacy?</p>



<p><em>Stacy Holtz: </em>Yeah, so early on, we had a sandbox available for the content creators, so as blocks were released and information was coming out, you have to keep in mind too, we were learning this alongside the content creators. It&#8217;s not like we could go out and Google these new custom blocks, have them built, and how does this work? We had to work closely with the development team to learn all these little great settings and fun things that had been provided for us, and so we started small, and that we would bring in smaller groups of content creators, and work with those groups. And then they could help then train their teams, and so we didn&#8217;t have to necessarily bring in hundreds of people at a time. We tried to start small and work our way out to have a bigger outreach, to help everyone get comfortable learning how everything worked.</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> I think the metaphor we&#8217;re all familiar with is building the plane walls in flight, but we were building the rocket after it left the launch pad.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> That&#8217;s how Gutenberg is built, right?</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> WordPress.</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> Well, to that end, the best way to understand what users want, is to get something in their hands and get feedback. So it&#8217;s a very real feedback cycle and helps refine the product for what&#8217;s actually necessary, for sure.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> And also, it really helps to know what the people actually will do the work two years from now kind of start out and need to learn how to do it, and how that works for them in their publishing floor, and content creation is really the meat of the matter, yeah. So 70,000 pages before I divide that by 465 users, is that each user would roughly deal with 150 pages, which probably isn&#8217;t the case. Some have more and some have less of course, but that is a big amount of time to spend with a new system when you have to get some pressure on it, and sooner or later it needs to get live, and then that&#8217;s not all of it. Then you have other, as you mentioned, the image resources and the PDFs. And then there were also, did I read this right? 845 podcasts or episodes?</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> I&#8217;m pretty certain that&#8217;s episodes.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Episodes, okay.</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar: </em>Yeah. Yeah. There&#8217;s only a few that are regular that continue to be published. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. Okay, good. Yeah. And you also needed integration with other systems. I&#8217;m thinking that NASA has huge technical systems that also need to integrate with the CMS or with the website. As you mentioned though, this, what was it? The Space Station Explorer.</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> The Space Station Research Explorer, yeah. And technically the back end of that is using MSSQL database. And so, there&#8217;s this wrapper in there in WordPress that&#8217;s making an external call to a Microsoft database, which is kind of cool. As part of that process, you can&#8217;t just log in to WP Admin. Within NASA, there&#8217;s a card-based system, so the SAML integration required the big one, SAML, I don&#8217;t know, don&#8217;t ask me what it stands for. I don&#8217;t know.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> It&#8217;s a single sign-on kind of security thing.</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> Yeah, exactly.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. Okay.</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> Yeah, you have to put in your card and pin, and lick the screen, and count to 10 backwards, and all that. Yeah, yeah. All sorts of fun stuff. The really cool integration that I am excited about is, search.gov. So we&#8217;re familiar with WordPress internal search. One of the challenges here is that there&#8217;s multiple sites at play, there&#8217;s NASA Plus, there&#8217;s www.science.nasa.gov. It&#8217;s actually another installation, a WordPress. It&#8217;s not multi-site, but it&#8217;s using the same systems.</p>



<p>And so, all this content needs to be searchable somewhere. GSA, General Services Agency, federal government provides a search index for federal agencies. And so, we worked really closely with search.gov to drop in a faceted search and replace WordPress for search. One of the benefits is that working with GSA, they&#8217;re doing what every search engine does, and they&#8217;re indexing content. So by virtue of working with them, there&#8217;s some pretty good SEO things that Bing and Google like, but also good practices to make it easy to identify content and understand, and that becomes more and more necessary the fringe content that&#8217;s not content creator direct type stuff.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> So it probably also didn&#8217;t help that Matt Cutts was part of the GSA for a long time, who was the spam fighter at Google, and he left Google to go to the General Service Agency, or to the universal data place. And I also know that Andrew Nason, one of the core lead developers, work there as well. So yeah, there are some great technical minds in there as well.</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> Yeah, that&#8217;s an agency that can do mighty things for sure.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> You mentioned the mobile apps, the iOS app, as well as the Android app from NASA, in conjunction with the live stream, but you can also just see the website there, or navigate the website there, but that&#8217;s also headless then?</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> Yeah, correct. That&#8217;s just using the rest API.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Okay.</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> And then, yeah, go ahead. Sorry. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> No, so you build both mobiles up natively, and then just go out and pull the data from the rest API. That&#8217;s right.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Content Creators</h3>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> There&#8217;s another team that does the apps. There&#8217;s an apps team within, that we worked pretty closely with, and by and large, you&#8217;re hitting regular WordPress rest endpoints. There&#8217;s a couple of custom endpoints we rolled, but generally it&#8217;s built-in endpoints. One of the fun use of rest endpoints that I think is pertinent here, I talked a little about science and the WWW site being two different sites. As a content creator, sometimes you span, you&#8217;re working on content that spans both, and so you need to be able to link between the two, so the sites communicate with each other by the rest API. And so the blocks, when you&#8217;re linking to content, when you&#8217;re searching for content, you&#8217;re searching both sides to link to the appropriate content within blocks. So as a content creator, there&#8217;s not an apparent difference between sites other than what do I have access to? What am I allowed to edit?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, interesting. Totally interesting. Yeah. So now the site is built or somewhat built.</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> It&#8217;s like the internet. It&#8217;s mostly done. It&#8217;s like the internet.</p>



<p>Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, internet is a fad, right?</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> It&#8217;s a great fad.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. I wonder when it&#8217;ll take off, right? Yeah. Websites are similar to these Japanese design models. It&#8217;s called wabi-sabi. It&#8217;s never finished, it never lasts, and it&#8217;s never perfect, but we really want to go get close to it, and now it comes the content creators in that the blocks are built, the migration comes in. It&#8217;s kind of, yeah, what&#8217;s next? Stacy, how did you approach the whole, okay, people need to unlearn things before they can learn new things. And even that, people at NASA are probably ahead of the technical curve, but they&#8217;re all humans. They hate change, so how did that go? So they want to get their work done, they want to get the work back to the same time or faster than before, and now they are all crashing to a halt, because they have to learn this new thing.</p>



<p><em>Stacy Holtz:</em> So that&#8217;s a really interesting concept to think about. I think we all kind of came in thinking, &#8220;Oh, it&#8217;s WordPress, we&#8217;ve totally got this,&#8221; and go into these training sessions and office hours, and realizing that all of our content creators have mostly been using Drupal and are very familiar with that system. And so, we were missing a key part there, because some of us didn&#8217;t understand how they had been using it before, and so we had to take a step back and help bridge that gap between we understand this is how you&#8217;re doing it before, but now this is how we do it going forward, and things that maybe we might take for granted. I think one of the things I noticed was that all the different settings and options that they had in the block itself, and each block has its own set of very specific settings, and so it really was just sitting down and taking that time with the content creators, and creating learning resources.</p>



<p>We&#8217;re talking videos, handwritten ones, and making sure that they got into the hands of the content creators. And we learned early on too, that just creating them and throwing a link out there, and saying, &#8220;Here you all go. Here&#8217;s the newest learning resource,&#8221; really wasn&#8217;t working, because the content creators are so busy. For a while there, they were creating double content right before we got to where we were launching. They were having to maintain content in two different places. And so, we started hosting office hours, and one-on-one support, and just making ourselves available all the time to support them, and make sure that they got the information that they needed in a timely manner, to help ease that transition and ease that frustration. It is frustrating, right? I&#8217;ve been doing it this way, now I have to learn this whole new thing, and I&#8217;m excited about it, but I&#8217;m still frustrated, because it&#8217;s just one more thing that I have to do.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. So there must have been, and each person probably had a different timescale on that, or timeline on that, but there is a point where you say, &#8220;Okay, this new thing isn&#8217;t so bad, let&#8217;s kind of dive in.&#8221;</p>



<p>But the resistance is, because I have to get this thing done, but the new thing, it takes me so much longer because I don&#8217;t know yet well enough. When was that? What was that click that made people think, &#8220;Oh, this is better. This makes me more creative?&#8221; That&#8217;s an assumption of mine, but&#8230;</p>



<p><em>Stacy Holtz:</em> I think it was different for everyone, because some people picked it up super-fast, because they had more time to devote to it, or maybe they had used WordPress before. They were super familiar with it, so the learning curve wasn&#8217;t quite as steep for them. Maybe it took longer for something else, because they were already buried in other things, and I&#8217;m the only person that manages this content, and I manage X, Y, and Z. So I&#8217;m the only one man show over here, and I have to do all these things. And so, I think it just really depended on the person in the group. Overall though, the majority were very excited about it and still are. And when we roll out, when the development team rolls out an enhancement, something that we&#8217;ve gotten feedback on, we make sure we share that widely with our user community. And they&#8217;re all very excited, because they&#8217;ve been working on it since it was, they started in the sandbox, and it was feedback that they gave, and yay, now we have this new piece of functionality and we&#8217;re very, very excited about it.</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> I&#8217;ll add onto that, one of the now of being live is that we have the space and expectation to build that way. As we were getting to launch, it was get everything in, every block we can, as polished as we can get it before we get live. Once we got to beta, we had to transition into this place where we take a more refined approach. When it&#8217;s not public facing, content creators will tolerate some disruption, some, but I mean that&#8217;s reasonable. They&#8217;re understanding that things are going to break. We&#8217;re still actively developing. Once we entered beta, that changed significantly. And now, as new features roll out, there&#8217;s space for feedback and exposure prior to it going live in the system, and I think that&#8217;s made a tremendous difference in users&#8217; competence in the system and sense of stability.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, I definitely can see that. Yes. Yeah. So you mentioned that you had a lot of tools at hand to communicate changes, but it wasn&#8217;t only&#8230; So office hours, was it a monthly or a daily thing, or where 450 people? Yeah, it&#8217;s definitely in a new system. They probably want you right by them. Each one of them wants, &#8220;Sit next to me and show me this thing.&#8221;</p>



<p><em>Stacy Holtz:</em> Yeah, so we set it up as an open, it was an open invite, and everyone was included and we just held it once a week. Actually, we still have it, and us as the web support community, all of us who are supporting, we would just go and we would be there, whether someone showed up or whether someone didn&#8217;t show up. I think the first one that we held, we hit the panic button when the ticker was going up to, we had over 200 people in office hours, and we were sending out like, oh my gosh, we&#8217;re going to need a little bit more support in here, just to help manage. If someone had a really complex conversation that someone could then take them to a breakout room type of situation, and sit down with them, and help them work the problem, but we didn&#8217;t abandon the other 199 people that were in the room.</p>



<p>And we were finding the process. We got to the point where we were putting up agendas and things like that, and this week we&#8217;re going to be demoing this. This was just released and come with questions. And so, it was definitely, we&#8217;ve refined as we&#8217;ve gone through it and it&#8217;s gotten better, as far as keeping it streamlined and being there to support our users. And then, we also would set up one-on-one support. We made ourselves available. We still do that. Send us an email, send us a Teams chat. If you need something, we&#8217;re here to sit down with you and work on this.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Wonderful. Yeah. It mentions also, you also had a weekly blog newsletters that gone out? I think that-</p>



<p><em>Stacy Holtz:</em> Yeah, we do a weekly blog and a newsletter, and we have a subscriber list that the newsletter just goes out to. It is an email blast, and then we have an internal site that the weekly blog goes up on. And then, in all of these channels that we&#8217;re communicating with our users with, we post all of these links. We cross post them everywhere, so that way people have visibility, so that they had the information in hand, and so they didn&#8217;t feel like, &#8220;We have to ask, we weren&#8217;t given the information. We have to ask.&#8221; And then it&#8217;s given to us. As soon as we have it, we share it, and then it&#8217;s always living there, so they can go back and look, &#8220;Right, oh, you&#8217;re right, this was released or this was changed,&#8221; or something like that. So that has been a really valuable resource to support the users as well.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, and I can imagine that at the beginning you didn&#8217;t have any FAQs, but those definitely started coming in quite a bit.</p>



<p><em>Stacy Holtz:</em> Just on and on and on and on. It was crazy. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Do you also have a central point where you collect them, so people can look them up? I always have been a little bit worried about FAQs, that they don&#8217;t have, yeah, you can&#8217;t sort them.</p>



<p><em>Stacy Holtz: </em>Yeah, so we started off with that and admittedly, I think our FAQs are probably a little out of date, but we have a form that we use, that users can submit feedback requests, or a bug report, or anything like that. And then it gets categorized and we all get a chance to review it, and decide who should take point on this specific issue, so that way that we don&#8217;t ever want our users to feel like they asked for some help of some kind, and it just fell into a black hole, and no one ever got back to them. And that can happen when you have multiple communication channels. They posted it somewhere, nobody saw it. So having this, &#8220;Please put your request here in this form,&#8221; is really useful, because then it does get dropped into a spreadsheet and we can track it, and we can see what happened to it. We don&#8217;t want to lose track of that.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, wonderful. So when you say that they&#8217;re still really excited about it, so what are the things that they are really excited about with the new block system, and how they built their sites, or how they built their articles and all that? What makes the life easier in terms of the new site versus the old site?</p>



<p><em>Stacy Holtz:</em> I don&#8217;t know that I&#8217;m qualified to make that comparison, like new versus old. I think that we can see though, just looking at the new site and how the content creators are sharing content with the spectacular images, and all of the well-written articles and content that I think it kind of speaks for itself, right? It&#8217;s its own showcase and I love watching them. Everything that is created is so visually appealing and I really enjoy looking at it, and it&#8217;s a lot of fun for me.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. Well, the website is really spectacular. With all the images and all the, it flows very nicely in finding your content there. So when other people would follow, maybe not that big of a project, because that&#8217;s pretty rare, but having similar publications that kind of need to migrate over. Were there any surprises that you, and that&#8217;s both of you, any surprises where you said, &#8220;Hm, that would have been nice. I didn&#8217;t think of that?&#8221;</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> Yeah, because the main site is launched, but the consolidation efforts continue. And as much as each site is unique, we can identify some patterns and some concepts that each of these different sites have and group them conceptually, and say, &#8220;How do we deal with a site that&#8217;s like this?&#8221; And start assigning them that level, so that everything is not custom. We can build some broad tooling that deals with that. I say that realizing that in this sprint, that&#8217;s what I&#8217;m working on. We have some existing old set of content that no one&#8217;s going to continue old, but continue to own, but it&#8217;s important that it remains online. And how do we get it out of an S3 bucket somewhere and effectively into WordPress is a question.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> How about you, Stacy? Do you have any surprises that you kind of thought, &#8220;Oh yeah, that is really something?&#8221;</p>



<p><em>Stacy Holtz:</em> I don&#8217;t know, I&#8217;m sure that I do, Birgit. I&#8217;m going to have to pass on that one though, because I&#8217;m sitting here thinking about it. But I&#8217;m sure that I do and I&#8217;ll think of it later, but at the moment, on the top of my head, I can&#8217;t.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Well, you can always ping me on the, just like, &#8220;I got my surprise.&#8221;</p>



<p><em>Stacy Holtz:</em> Figured it out.</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> I do want to throw out a developer tip though. I had this revelation. Working on the site as a developer, you&#8217;re obviously working with local development content. It&#8217;s probably weird and an image of a cat or something, and it&#8217;s placeholder stuff. I feel like a lot of developers do that.</p>



<p><em>Stacy Holtz</em>: I know where this is going.</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar: </em>And when we entered beta after all this mayhem, I sat down on the couch at the end of that day, and I pulled it up on my phone, and actually looked at some of the content that the content creators put in place. And I got to have the experience of a new site user of being inspired, and really in awe of what they put together. It was so cool. And I scrolled on my phone while Netflix was on in the background for hours that night. That was what I was doing on my phone, was looking at this beta site that ostensibly I&#8217;d been aware of, but I&#8217;d been so focused on my portion of it. So I&#8217;m really thrilled they have the opportunity to work with people that can put this compelling content out there, and assemble it in such beautiful and meaningful way. It&#8217;s very cool.</p>



<p><em>Stacy Holtz:</em> Agreed.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> So now you say they are ongoing, you&#8217;re doing additional and ongoing migrations, but you also are working on new development, new blogs, or I know that the agency is also working on the block theme for government agencies. So what&#8217;s next for you and for the NASA site?</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> Yeah, next is I think you asked if there were more blocks coming, and I think the answer is it depends. There&#8217;s still…</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> That&#8217;s a normal developer answer.</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> Yeah. Well, some of it depends on where some of the current blocks evolve to. So the bug fixes and enhancements that we continue to work through in our sprints are in some ways fundamentally changing how some of these blocks work. And we may solve other issues without needing to create new blocks, because there is a fire hose problem. If you have so many custom and you can&#8217;t find that one, you sort of have to limit a little bit. Like you said earlier, sites are never done. And so, that&#8217;s definitely part of it. There&#8217;s ongoing work. A lot of the ongoing work is around content at this point. And so, that inherently is getting some of this content that&#8217;s not so easy to find, or is external, or couldn&#8217;t be handled at the initial pass, getting that into the system appropriately, so that it&#8217;s in search results, it&#8217;s available in all blocks to be used and embedded. Those are really the areas of focus and growing, the footprint of the WWW site.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Are you also trying to figure out how to use the new APIs that come in with the Gutenberg or WordPress, like the block bindings with the custom fields, the block hooks, and then the interactivity API? Is this also something that you&#8217;re working on, or is there something that you say, &#8220;Okay, well let&#8217;s wait for a year to settle everything, and then kind of see how that comes in?&#8221; Because Gutenberg changes every two weeks, but you&#8217;re not using the plugin in production, I would think.</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> Correct. We&#8217;re using Block Editor to merge to Core, yeah. Yeah. The answer is it&#8217;s a little complex. So if there&#8217;s a use case for those pieces, yes, we will definitely make use of it. I hedge my answer, I&#8217;m a developer, but also because I think the real answer is some of that we&#8217;ve baked in our own way in some systems, and what would be nice to move to the way core it, there&#8217;s a lot of momentum in the existing way. If it&#8217;s not broke, don&#8217;t fix it type attitude.</p>



<p>So I would think long term, yes, there will be a concerted effort to identify. We need to be more in line with Core. That&#8217;s definitely the goal. WordPress is very powerful and one of the benefits of WordPress is that there&#8217;s a huge community behind it. So from NASA&#8217;s perspective, using WordPress means that I can bring in other or different disciplines to work on this stuff. And the closer we adhere to the way Core does things, even if we were doing it prior to something being merged to Core, course correcting to that is the right way to do it. And I think that there is effort to do that. At this size, it doesn&#8217;t happen quickly.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> So Core now&#8230; Well, it&#8217;s still not in Core, but it will come in 6.6 days. Well, patterns have been in core for a long time, and I&#8217;m assuming some of the design systems are translated into patterns for the NASA website. But now with WordPress, you can also create your own as content creator, create your own patterns, and then make them sync over certain sites. Is there functionality that you will roll out, or that you kind of guardrail a little bit, so not to disrupt the system?</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> Yeah, believe it or not, the initial work was done pre-patterns being available. So we have a very similar concept of, you create a new piece of content and it drops in a bunch of blocks, but I mean it&#8217;s effectively the same thing, but our implementation. So yeah, that&#8217;d be wonderful to be able to share stuff like that. I&#8217;ll say the easy way to do it, people literally, not between sites, but within the same site, people will copy and paste content and say, &#8220;That&#8217;s a great way out. I&#8217;ll copy and paste that entirely, and then replace it with my stuff, or adjust accordingly.&#8221; And it&#8217;s cool. That works well, honestly. So yes, it would be awesome if we could exchange patterns, but we do it the poor man&#8217;s way.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> The analog way, right?</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> Yeah, right, right. Sneaker net. It&#8217;s sneaker net.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. So would you say, Stacy, what&#8217;s next for content creators on NASA in terms of needing more stuff from development? Are there, what are the new requirements that, the new ideas that come out that challenge the developers?</p>



<p><em>Stacy Holtz:</em> Yeah, I think that those come in through the, oh, it would be really nice to have this, something like this. And that can be kind of hard for me to list out for you, of what all those things are that our content creators have thought of. &#8220;Oh, I have this piece of content and I would really like to be able to do X, Y, Z with it.&#8221;</p>



<p>But I can tell you as those are reviewed, or we think about these pieces and parts for our content creators, that they&#8217;re always excited about the new things that come, or even if it&#8217;s just a tweak to an existing block. Like, now you can do this with this block, and it&#8217;s like, &#8220;Oh wow, that&#8217;s really cool. That&#8217;s something that I wanted.&#8221; So I see that for the community is always really receptive and open to the new ideas, and great at sharing feedback and letting us know what they need.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> All right, I think I&#8217;m out of my questions. I learned so much from you two. So is there anything that you wanted to share with your experience that working on the site, that we haven&#8217;t talked about or that you didn&#8217;t get to say all that you wanted to say?</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> I think the last thing I&#8217;ll throw out there is, one of the things we&#8217;ve heard is like WordPress is at scale, or WordPress isn&#8217;t enterprise ready, or blah blah blah. And that&#8217;s, I mean, obviously Balderdash, but to see it succeed at this scale has been a ton of fun. My background is agency and previous agencies, I was slow to get in the water on block editor, and what it accomplishes for content creators is significant. We&#8217;re very much headed in the right way, right direction.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Excellent. Stacy, any&#8230;</p>



<p><em>Stacy Holtz:</em> I don&#8217;t have anything else to add.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> All right. Okay. Well, this was fabulous. Thank you so much for coming on the show and letting me ask you all the questions about this phenomenal project that you had on NASA.gov, and all the other sites, the live stream and all that. Dear listeners, I will have all the information that I had in the show notes for this 100th episode, and I&#8217;m really happy that Stacy, you and Gary were celebrating with me the 100th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog. It was fantastic. Thank you so much.&nbsp;</p>



<p>As always, dear listeners, the show notes will be published on Gutenbergtimes.com/podcast. And if you have questions or suggestions, or news you want us to cover, send them to <a href="mailto:Changelog@Gutenbergtimes.com">Changelog@Gutenbergtimes.com</a>. That&#8217;s <a href="mailto:Changelog@Gutenbergtimes.com">Changelog@Gutenbergtimes.com</a>. And I wish you all a great weekend.</p>



<p><em>Gary Kovar:</em> Thanks for having us and congrats on a hundred episodes. That&#8217;s awesome.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Thank you.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Sun, 19 May 2024 21:59:53 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:19:"Gutenberg Changelog";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:44;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:129:"Gutenberg Times: Site builders showing off, Gutenberg 18.3, Alternatives to Meta boxes, Blueprint gallery — Weekend Edition 294";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:35:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/?p=28473";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:133:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/site-builders-showing-off-gutenberg-18-3-alternatives-to-meta-boxes-blueprint-gallery-weekend-edition-294/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:24278:"<p>Howdy,</p>



<p>It&#8217;s really fascinating that Germany has four bank holidays in the month of May, all close to the weekends. So we got to make some nice weekend trips. The latest to Venice, Italy visiting the exhibition space of<a href="https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2024"> Biennale Arte 20224</a>, with the &#8220;Foreigners Everywhere&#8221;. We saw incredible creative work from many countries around the world. </p>



<p>It was good to get away from the computer for a few days and walk through one of the most beautiful cities in Europe and eat great Italian food. </p>



<p>And now back to the exciting update on WordPress, Gutenberg, and Playground. Many great videos to watch and tutorials to read! </p>



<p>Have a wonderful weekend. </p>



<p>Yours, 💕<br /><em>Birgit</em></p>





<div class="wp-block-group has-light-background-background-color has-background"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow">
<p><strong>Table of Contents</strong></p>



<ol><li><a class="wp-block-table-of-contents__entry" href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/site-builders-showing-off-gutenberg-18-3-alternatives-to-meta-boxes-blueprint-gallery-weekend-edition-294/#0-word-press-release-information">Developing Gutenberg and WordPress</a></li><li><a class="wp-block-table-of-contents__entry" href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/site-builders-showing-off-gutenberg-18-3-alternatives-to-meta-boxes-blueprint-gallery-weekend-edition-294/#0-p">Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners</a></li><li><a class="wp-block-table-of-contents__entry" href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/site-builders-showing-off-gutenberg-18-3-alternatives-to-meta-boxes-blueprint-gallery-weekend-edition-294/#2-word-press-6-0-1-and-6-1-scheduled">Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks</a></li><li><a class="wp-block-table-of-contents__entry" href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/site-builders-showing-off-gutenberg-18-3-alternatives-to-meta-boxes-blueprint-gallery-weekend-edition-294/#3-building-themes-for-fse-and-word-press">Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor</a></li><li><a class="wp-block-table-of-contents__entry" href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/site-builders-showing-off-gutenberg-18-3-alternatives-to-meta-boxes-blueprint-gallery-weekend-edition-294/#wordpress-playground-blueprints">WordPress Playground + Blueprints</a></li></ol>
</div></div>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="0-word-press-release-information">Developing Gutenberg and WordPress</h2>



<p>Over on the Developer Blog, <strong>Justin Tadlock </strong>published the monthly round up of <a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2024/05/10/whats-new-for-developers-may-2024/"><strong>What’s new for developers? (May 2024)</strong></a>. Highlights are Community Blueprint Gallery, WordPress 6.6 Roadmap and separate style variations for color and typography. The article also includes a ton of information on user-facing updates theme builders would need to know about. Plugin and tools developers find updates to WordPress components library as well as HTML and Interactivity API. </p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide" />



<p>First-time release lead, <strong>Jason Crist</strong>, published <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/05/08/whats-new-in-gutenberg-18-3-8-may/"><strong>What’s new in Gutenberg 18.3? (8 May)</strong></a> and highlighted:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/05/08/whats-new-in-gutenberg-18-3-8-may/#full-page-client-side-navigation-experiment">Full page client-side navigation experiment</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/05/08/whats-new-in-gutenberg-18-3-8-may/#allow-negative-values-for-margin-controls">Allow negative values for margin controls</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/05/08/whats-new-in-gutenberg-18-3-8-may/#add-defaultfontsizes-option-to-theme-json-incrementing-theme-json-to-v3">Add defaultFontSizes option to theme.json (incrementing theme.json to v3)</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/05/08/whats-new-in-gutenberg-18-3-8-may/#add-publish-flow-in-site-editor">Add publish flow in site editor</a></li>
</ul>



<p class="has-accent-color has-light-background-background-color has-text-color has-background has-link-color wp-elements-f177aa95d38cec3bee70ac6dc4e58ab3">🎙️ Latest episode: <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-100-nasa-wordpress-block-editor/">Gutenberg Changelog #100 – NASA’s New Website – the Switch to WordPress and Block Editor</a> with Stacy Holtz and Gary Kovar, Lone Rock Point</p>



<p>In their post, <strong><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/05/09/core-editor-improvement-upgrade-your-designs/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Core Editor Improvement: Upgrade your designs</a></strong>, Anne McCarthy provides insights into the design tools updates coming to WordPress, already available via the Gutenberg plugin.&nbsp;She shares a short overview of the feature and a demo video:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/05/09/core-editor-improvement-upgrade-your-designs/#variations" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mix &amp; match style variations</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/05/09/core-editor-improvement-upgrade-your-designs/#negative" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Create overlapping designs with negative margins</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/05/09/core-editor-improvement-upgrade-your-designs/#grid" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Embrace the Grid</a></li>
</ul>



<p>Enjoy the great videos! And all feedback is welcome on the post or on GitHub. You can also join the <a href="https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C015GUFFC00">WP Slack #outreach channel</a> to get your questions answered and to discuss things with others.</p>



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<p>Once armed with your knowledge, you could also use the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2024/05/09/early-opportunities-to-test-wordpress-6-6/"><strong>Early opportunities to Test WordPress 6.6</strong></a> with detail test instructions for about nine different features: </p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2024/05/09/early-opportunities-to-test-wordpress-6-6/#data-views">Data Views</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2024/05/09/early-opportunities-to-test-wordpress-6-6/#overrides-in-synced-patterns">Overrides in synced patterns</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2024/05/09/early-opportunities-to-test-wordpress-6-6/#zoom-out-view">Zoom out view</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2024/05/09/early-opportunities-to-test-wordpress-6-6/#unified-and-refreshed-publish-flow">Unified and refreshed publish flow</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2024/05/09/early-opportunities-to-test-wordpress-6-6/#mix-and-match-typography-and-color-palettes-from-all-styles-variations">Mix and match typography and color palettes from all styles variations&nbsp;</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2024/05/09/early-opportunities-to-test-wordpress-6-6/#grid-layout">Grid layout</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2024/05/09/early-opportunities-to-test-wordpress-6-6/#new-patterns-experience-for-classic-themes">New patterns experience for Classic themes</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2024/05/09/early-opportunities-to-test-wordpress-6-6/#negative-margins">Negative margins</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2024/05/09/early-opportunities-to-test-wordpress-6-6/#rollback-autoupdates">Rollback autoupdates</a></li>
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<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="0-p">Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners</h2>



<p><strong>Rich Tabor</strong> built a <a href="https://rich.blog/dark-mode-toggle-block/"><strong>new block: Dark Mode Toggle</strong></a>  that adds a toggle between light and dark modes on your website. He shows off this block on his blog. You can also <a href="https://github.com/richtabor/dark-mode-toggle-block">check it out on GitHub </a></p>



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<p>The recording of the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeEhLFWIgv0"><strong>Website Speed Build Challenge &#8211; Nick Diego and Brian Gardner</strong></a> is now available. <strong>Jamie Marsland </strong>invited two theme builders to rebuild the site of <a href="https://pixelgoat.io/">Pixel Goat </a>with WordPress. Both using Gutenberg only.</p>



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<p>In the article &#8220;<a href="https://alexstandiford.com/articles/blog-posts/i-built-a-knowledge-base-using-the-block-editor-and-whoa"><strong>I Built a Knowledge Base Using the Block Editor and Whoa</strong></a>,&#8221; <strong>Alex&nbsp;Standiford</strong> shared his experience of creating a knowledge base solely using the WordPress Block Editor. Standiford started on this journey as he found existing solutions either lacking essential features or too complex. In this article, you learn about the process of developing the knowledge base, highlighting how Standiford utilized various block patterns and custom blocks to design an efficient and user-friendly interface. &#8220;Building the actual theme required that basically unlearn everything I know about theme development. After some annoyingly difficult adjustments in my mentality, I was able to get a decent WordPress theme together.&nbsp;&#8221; he also wrote.</p>



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<p>In the latest video from the Learn.WordPress team, Wes Theron shows how to build <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tr0nxCBDaM"><strong>Advanced WordPress Block Layouts.</strong></a> </p>



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<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="2-word-press-6-0-1-and-6-1-scheduled">Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks</h2>



<p><strong>Daisy Olsen</strong> just published here course <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/learning/introduction-to-wordpress-block-themes/what-are-wordpress-block-themes-and-why-build-them"><strong>Introduction to WordPress Block Themes</strong></a> on LinkedIn. It gets you from zero to hero in 17 Lessons and quizzes. It covers using the Create Block Theme plugin and how to make the design choices via the site editor and stylebook. Olsen also covers the adjustments you need to make the navigation block transferable, so your theme can be used on other people&#8217;s site</p>



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<p><strong>Jessica Lyschik</strong> recorded her process for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoUPhbhxLmo"><strong>Turning a Adobe XD Design into a WordPress Block Theme</strong></a> using a design provided by Lesley Sim of Mailerglue.com. Sim <a href="https://x.com/lesley_pizza/status/1790332657475461374">shared some frustrations</a> on X (former Twitter)  trying to replicate her site with the site editor. Lyschik was the co-lead developer for the Twenty-Twenty-Four default theme, she used to build the site and share  tips and tricks, including how to make it accessibility-friendly.</p>



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<p><strong>&nbsp;<a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">&#8220;Keeping up with Gutenberg &#8211; Index 2024&#8221;</a>&nbsp;</strong><br />A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test, and Meta team from Jan. 2024 on. Updated by yours truly. The previous years are also available: <strong><strong><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index-2020/">2020</a>&nbsp;|&nbsp;<a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index-2021/">2021</a></strong>&nbsp;|&nbsp;<strong><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index-2022/">2022</a></strong></strong>&nbsp;|&nbsp;<strong><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index/gutenberg-index-2023">2023</a></strong></p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="3-building-themes-for-fse-and-word-press">Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor</h2>



<p>During the latest edition of the WordPress <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKDl_gB-IwY"><strong>Developer Hours: Alternatives to Custom Meta Boxes in the WordPress Block Editor</strong></a>, Nick Diego and Ryan Welcher discussed ways on how to create a block editor experience for data that has conventionally handled by meta boxes. </p>



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<p>A new tutorial arrived at the WordPress Developer Blog! <strong>Justin Tadlock</strong> walks you through the steps to <a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2024/05/06/building-a-book-review-site-with-block-bindings-part-1-custom-fields-and-block-variations/"><strong>Build a book review site with Block Bindings, part 1: Custom fields and block variations</strong></a>. In this first part, you learn how to register custom fields, connect them to blocks, create block variations for paragraph block and create a nice data input UI in the block editor.  And stay tuned for Part 2.  </p>



<p class="has-text-align-right"><a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/news/subscribe/"><em>Don&#8217;t ever miss a developer blog post again. Subscribe!</em></a></p>



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<p><a href="https://twitter.com/gogarrio"><strong>Greg Ogarrio</strong></a> writes about the <a href="https://wpvip.com/2024/05/14/reasons-love-wordpress-gutenberg-editor/"><strong>4 Reasons to Love the WordPress Gutenberg Block Editor</strong></a>&nbsp;on the WordPress VIP blog. He emphasizes Gutenberg&#8217;s user-friendly interface, its flexibility with blocks, and the improved control it offers users over their content layout. Additionally, Ogarrio mentions the wide range of customization options available which are accessible even to those without advanced technical skills. He also highlights the active development and community support surrounding Gutenberg, ensuring it constantly evolves to meet user needs.</p>



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<p>Did you check out the <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/block-development-examples"><strong>WordPress Block Development</strong> <strong>Examples Repo</strong></a> lately? You&#8217;ll find 25 examples of how to build different blocks for different use cases, among them a Recipe Card, an interactive count-down, block with post metadata and so on. The latest addition is a plugin on how to add a modal to update post metadata, as an alternative to conventional WordPress meta boxes.</p>



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<p><strong><a href="https://twitter.com/davidfcarr">David F Carr</a></strong>, developer of the <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/rsvpmaker/"><em>RSVP Maker plugin</em></a> and online publishing expert, shared his approach of <strong><a href="https://davidfcarr.com/transforming-a-single-wordpress-block-into-a-block-variation-with-innerblocks/">Transforming a Single WordPress Block into a Block Variation with InnerBlocks. </a></strong>&#8220;The virtue of block variations is they allow you to inherit all the best qualities of an existing block while adding a few tweaks, such as an InnerBlocks template or additional controls.&#8221; he wrote. The real-world examples and the shared code will &#8220;shortcut the process for someone else who might face a similar scenario.&#8221; Carr hopes. </p>



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<p><strong>Aurooba Ahmed</strong> and <strong>Brian Coords</strong> shared their journey <strong>Exploring the Interactivity API in WordPress</strong> in  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZnJvnpLf2A">Part 1</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5hUuyXMW_0">Part 2</a>. You&#8217;ll learn  what the new API entails, how to use it and the challenges they encountered. They also cover the HTML directives, how to use them with custom blocks and how to hydrate date. </p>



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<p>On his Live stream, <strong>Ryan Welcher</strong> built a to-do app  with the Interactivity API. You can follow along in two videos: </p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWUE2StCp_M">Building a To-Do app with the Interactivity API</a></li>



<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiH9lnoYPHQ">Final touches on the Interactivity API To-do app</a></li>
</ul>



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<p><strong><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/need-a-zip-from-master/">Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg&#8217;s master branch?</a></strong><br />Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review. </p>



<p>Now also available via <a href="https://playground.wordpress.net/?blueprint-url=https://gutenbergtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/playnightly.json">WordPress Playground</a>. There is no need for a test site locally or on a server. Have you been using it? <a href="mailto:pauli@gutenbergtimes.com">Email me </a>with your experience</p>



<p><img alt="GitHub all releases" src="https://img.shields.io/github/downloads/bph/gutenberg/total?style=for-the-badge" /></p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="wordpress-playground-blueprints">WordPress Playground + Blueprints</h2>



<p>Not entirely related to the block editor or Gutenberg, though increasingly popular, is the <a href="https://wordpress.org/playground/">WordPress Playground</a> tool for testing, development and demos. Plugin developers use it for the Live Preview on the WordPress plugin repository, I use it for the Gutenberg Nightly. Playground gives you WordPress in the browser. No need for PHP, Apache, or Nginx or Database. <a href="https://playground.wordpress.net">Just click on the link and work with WordPress. </a></p>



<p>On the Developer Blog, Ronny Shani published two articles about WordPress Playground:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2024/04/05/introduction-to-playground-running-wordpress-in-the-browser/">Introduction to Playground: running WordPress in the browser</a> and </li>



<li><a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2024/04/25/how-to-use-wordpress-playground-for-interactive-demos/">How to use WordPress Playground for interactive demos</a>. </li>
</ul>



<p>This week, the Meta team announced a new community project: <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/meta/2024/05/15/the-blueprint-gallery-share-your-wordpress-creations-with-playground/"><strong>The Blueprint Gallery: Share your WordPress creations with Playground</strong></a> &#8211; a space to find and share examples on how to configure WordPress Playground for various scenarios, depending on the use case. </p>



<p>On May 28, 2024, I will also part of the <a href="https://www.meetup.com/learn-wordpress-online-workshops/events/301036465/"><strong>Developer Hours: Creating WordPress Playground Blueprints for Testing and Demos</strong></a> together with Nick Diego. It&#8217;ll take place at 15:00 UTC (9 am EDT) and will be recorded. We will talk through some examples in the Blueprint Gallery. </p>



<a href="https://www.meetup.com/learn-wordpress-online-workshops/events/301036465/"><img width="600" height="338" src="https://i0.wp.com/gutenbergtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/600_521082144.webp?resize=600%2C338&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-28643" /></a>



<p class="has-text-align-center has-small-font-size"><em>Questions? Suggestions? Ideas? </em><br /><em>Don&#8217;t hesitate to send <a href="mailto:pauli@gutenbergtimes.com">them via email</a> or</em><br /><em> send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph</em>.</p>



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<p class="has-text-align-center has-small-font-size">For questions to be answered on the <a href="http://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast">Gutenberg Changelog</a>, <br />send them to <a href="mailto:changelog@gutenbergtimes.com">changelog@gutenbergtimes.com</a></p>



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<p>Featured Image: Gondoliers in Venice photo by Birgit Pauli-Haack</p>



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";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:1:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:61:"HeroPress: HeroPress In Bolivia, WCEU And European Parliament";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://heropress.com/?p=6814";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:165:"https://heropress.com/heropress-in-bolivia-wceu-and-european-parliament/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=heropress-in-bolivia-wceu-and-european-parliament";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:12215:"<img width="1024" height="683" src="https://heropress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/8366437dda3c8568.03141111-1024x683.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Strange button panel on a rusty elevator" /><div class="wp-block-kadence-spacer aligncenter kt-block-spacer-6814_fc5ce6-1e"><div class="kt-block-spacer kt-block-spacer-halign-center"><hr class="kt-divider" /></div></div>


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<h2 class="kt-adv-heading6814_7c7c0a-bd wp-block-kadence-advancedheading">HeroPress In Italy</h2>



<a href="https://heropress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/wceu_updates.jpg"><img width="1024" height="296" src="https://heropress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/wceu_updates-1024x296.jpg" alt="WCEU Latest Updates" class="wp-image-6680" /></a>



<p>WordCamp Europe 2024 is just a few weeks away! We also have some exciting news to share!</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
<p>WordCamp Europe has been granted a prestigious patronage from the European Parliament.</p>



<p>Patronage is a way for the European Parliament to grant its moral support to a selected number of non-profit quality events with a clear European dimension.</p>
</blockquote>



<p>You can <a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2024/wordcamp-europe-receives-patronage-from-the-european-parliament/">read more about this</a> on the WCEU website.</p>



<p>Who are we going to see at WCEU? Stop by the <a href="https://heropress.com/slack/">HeroPress Slack</a> and let is know, I&#8217;d love to touch base with you!</p>
</div></div>

</div></div>


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<div class="wp-block-kadence-column kadence-column6814_798646-1d inner-column-1"><div class="kt-inside-inner-col">
<h2 class="kt-adv-heading6814_e4e08b-65 wp-block-kadence-advancedheading"><a href="https://heropress.com/">HeroPress.com</a> &#8211; <a href="https://heropress.com/essays/from-blogging-to-wordpress-communities-a-bolivian-tale/">From Blogging to WordPress Communities: A Bolivian tale – De Blogger a comunidades de WordPress: Una historia boliviana</a></h2>




<div class="wp-block-image is-style-default">
<img width="300" height="300" src="https://heropress.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/carla-300x300.jpg" alt="Carla Doria Medina" class="wp-image-3624" /></div>


<p>We have far fewer HeroPressers from South America than I&#8217;d like, which is one reason I&#8217;m so grateful to Carla Doria Medina from Bolivia.</p>



<p><em>Soon after finding there wasn’t any community, I started to dig more information about what was needed to organize one. I talked about the idea with some colleagues and they provided good insights. But I was still debating inside myself, who would start it? Was it me? It couldn’t be. It was true I provided technical support for blogs and websites, but I knew nothing about coding, plugin or theme development. It had to be somebody else, an expert WordPress developer,  <strong>not me</strong>.</em></p>



<p>Carla&#8217;s essay is <a href="https://heropress.com/essays/from-blogging-to-wordpress-communities-a-bolivian-tale/">available</a> on <a href="https://heropress.com">HeroPress.com</a>.</p>
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<div class="wp-block-kadence-spacer aligncenter kt-block-spacer-6814_ed973b-c1"><div class="kt-block-spacer kt-block-spacer-halign-center"><hr class="kt-divider" /></div></div>


<div class="kb-row-layout-wrap kb-row-layout-id6814_cac35c-b3 alignnone kt-row-has-bg wp-block-kadence-rowlayout"><div class="kt-row-column-wrap kt-has-1-columns kt-row-layout-equal kt-tab-layout-inherit kt-mobile-layout-row kt-row-valign-top kb-theme-content-width">

<div class="wp-block-kadence-column kadence-column6814_eac30b-2e inner-column-1"><div class="kt-inside-inner-col">
<h2 class="kt-adv-heading6814_6ceabb-1e wp-block-kadence-advancedheading"><a href="https://wppodcasts.com">WP Podcasts</a></h2>





<a href="https://wppodcasts.com"><img src="https://heropressnetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/pocket_casts_single_315.png" alt="Pocket Casts image" class="wp-image-4316" /></a>



<p>There were <em>Twenty-five</em> WordPress podcast episodes released this week!</p>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://kitchensinkwp.com/podcast-e533-interview-with-tara-claeys/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=podcast-e533-interview-with-tara-claeys#new_tab">Podcast E533 – Interview with Tara Claeys</a> from <a href="https://wppodcasts.com/podcast/kitchensink-wordpress-podcast/">Kitchensink WordPress Podcast</a></li>



<li><a href="https://unbilleteachattanooga.com/episodio-262-vivir-del-seo-con-sofia-calle/#new_tab">Episodio 262: Vivir del SEO, con Sofía Calle</a> from <a href="https://wppodcasts.com/podcast/un-billete-a-chattanooga/">Un billete a Chattanooga</a></li>



<li><a href="https://wp-tonic-show-a-wordpress-podcast.castos.com/episodes/913-wp-tonic-show-growing-a-personal-brand-online-successfully-in-2024#new_tab">#913 – WP-Tonic Show: Growing a Personal Brand Online Successfully in 2024</a> from <a href="https://wppodcasts.com/podcast/wp-tonic/">WP-Tonic</a></li>



<li><a href="https://dothewoo.io/all-you-need-to-know-about-wceu-2024-with-organizers-hacer-liza-and-piermario/#new_tab">All You Need to Know About WCEU 2024 with Organizers Hacer, Liza and Piermario</a> from <a href="https://wppodcasts.com/podcast/do-the-woo-a-woocommerce-podcast/">Do the Woo – A WooCommerce Podcast</a></li>



<li><a href="https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/the-sdm-show/episodes/Episode-415-Why-You-Should-Attend-In-Person-Events-e2jlgfe#new_tab">Episode 415: Why You Should Attend In-Person Events</a> from <a href="https://wppodcasts.com/podcast/the-sdm-show/">The SDM Show</a></li>
</ul>



<p>There are new episodes every single day, so be sure to stop by <a href="https://wppodcasts.com">WPPodcasts.com</a> and search for things that interest you!</p>
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<div class="kb-row-layout-wrap kb-row-layout-id6814_fce59e-73 alignnone kt-row-has-bg wp-block-kadence-rowlayout"><div class="kt-row-column-wrap kt-has-1-columns kt-row-layout-equal kt-tab-layout-inherit kt-mobile-layout-row kt-row-valign-top kb-theme-content-width">

<div class="wp-block-kadence-column kadence-column6814_d18914-5a inner-column-1"><div class="kt-inside-inner-col">
<h2 id="wpphotos" class="kt-adv-heading6814_f065c6-a1 wp-block-kadence-advancedheading"><a href="https://wordpress.org/photos">WP Photos</a></h2>



<p>Here are some of the great photos submitted to the <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos">WPPhotos</a> project this week!</p>




<a href="https://heropress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/495664213703fc9e1.45235693-scaled.jpg"><img width="1024" height="768" src="https://heropress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/495664213703fc9e1.45235693-1024x768.jpg" alt="Dramatic storm cloud formation over a highway," class="wp-image-6823" /></a><a href="https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/">CC0</a> licensed <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos/photo/4956642137/">photo</a> by <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos/author/topher1kenobe/">Topher</a> from the <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos/">WordPress Photo Directory</a>.



<a href="https://heropress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/286643595656cd71.30348543-scaled.jpg"><img width="1024" height="719" src="https://heropress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/286643595656cd71.30348543-1024x719.jpg" alt="Close-up of an Italian Stiped Bug (Graphosoma italicum) against a blurred green background." class="wp-image-6822" /></a><a href="https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/">CC0</a> licensed <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos/photo/2866435956/">photo</a> by <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos/author/werkform/">werkform</a> from the <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos/">WordPress Photo Directory</a>.



<a href="https://heropress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/13066410673d67185.48364473-scaled.jpg"><img width="1024" height="683" src="https://heropress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/13066410673d67185.48364473-1024x683.jpg" alt="Close up of a grasshopper." class="wp-image-6821" /></a><a href="https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/">CC0</a> licensed <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos/photo/1306641067/">photo</a> by <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos/author/creativemz/">creativemz</a> from the <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos/">WordPress Photo Directory</a>.



<a href="https://heropress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/36166459e30d2c216.21440976-scaled.jpg"><img width="1024" height="683" src="https://heropress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/36166459e30d2c216.21440976-1024x683.jpg" alt="A seagull standing alone on a sandy beach." class="wp-image-6820" /></a><a href="https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/">CC0</a> licensed <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos/photo/36166459e3/">photo</a> by <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos/author/nilovelez/">Nilo Velez</a> from the <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos/">WordPress Photo Directory</a>.



<a href="https://heropress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/749663dd750d260f3.91441057-scaled.jpg"><img width="1024" height="683" src="https://heropress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/749663dd750d260f3.91441057-1024x683.jpg" alt="Typical Spanish road sign over a yellow wheat field." class="wp-image-6819" /></a><a href="https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/">CC0</a> licensed <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos/photo/749663dd75/">photo</a> by <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos/author/nilovelez/">Nilo Velez</a> from the <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos/">WordPress Photo Directory</a>.



<a href="https://heropress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/130663dac7543d114.47420552-scaled.jpg"><img width="1024" height="768" src="https://heropress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/130663dac7543d114.47420552-1024x768.jpg" alt="Cloudy Afternoon in Village with Sunset" class="wp-image-6818" /></a><a href="https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/">CC0</a> licensed <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos/photo/130663dac7/">photo</a> by <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos/author/rafs45/">Sayemur Rahman</a> from the <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos/">WordPress Photo Directory</a>.




<p>Be sure to check out the <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos/">hundreds of other great photos</a>!</p>
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<div class="wp-block-spacer"></div>



<p>The banner at the top of this post is a <a href="https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/">CC0</a> licensed <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos/photo/8366437dda/">photo</a> by <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos/author/nilovelez/">Nilo Velez</a> from the <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos/">WordPress Photo Directory</a>.</p>





<p>That&#8217;s it for this week! If you&#8217;d like to get this post in your email every week, <a href="https://heropressnetwork.com/newsletter">make sure you sign up</a>!</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://heropress.com/heropress-in-bolivia-wceu-and-european-parliament/">HeroPress In Bolivia, WCEU And European Parliament</a> appeared first on <a href="https://heropress.com">HeroPress</a>.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 17 May 2024 18:00:41 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:46;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:80:"Do The Woo Community: What’s Happening with Do the Woo at WordCamp Europe 2024";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=83509";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:76:"https://dothewoo.io/whats-happening-with-do-the-woo-at-wordcamp-europe-2024/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:134:"You can meet us at contributor day, our sponsor table, or the many other side events going on. Plus have a one-to-one chat with BobWP.";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 17 May 2024 11:21:32 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:47;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:83:"Do The Woo Community: Growing International Online Sales with Christo Christodoulou";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=83547";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:82:"https://dothewoo.io/growing-international-online-sales-with-christo-christodoulou/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:185:"Adam chats with Airwallex's Christo, discussing its benefits for WooCommerce and WordPress merchants, including multi-currency accounts, cost-saving solutions, and community engagement.";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 16 May 2024 12:04:17 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:48;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:85:"WPTavern: #120 – Alexander Gilmanov on Transitioning From Developer to Entrepreneur";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:48:"https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=155830";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:99:"https://wptavern.com/podcast/120-alexander-gilmanov-on-transitioning-from-developer-to-entrepreneur";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:47670:"Transcript<div>
<p>[00:00:00] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name Is Nathan Wrigley.</p>



<p>Jukebox is podcast which Is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, one person&#8217;s story about the struggles of transitioning from a freelancer into an agency manager.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL in to most podcast players.</p>



<p>If you have a topic that you&#8217;d like us to feature on the podcast, I&#8217;m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the form there.</p>



<p>So on the podcast today, we have Alexander Gilmanov. Alexander comes to us today from Belgrade, Serbia. He&#8217;s a full stack developer with a rich heritage of freelance and agency work. His company officially launched in 2014 and they&#8217;ve continued to work with clients as well as creating a range of WordPress plugins, and their own SaaS apps.</p>



<p>Slightly unusually for this podcast, I decided to break the content up into two parts. You&#8217;ll hear the first part today, and part two will be coming out in the next episode.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;re a developer and are in the weeds of writing code, perhaps you&#8217;ve thought about a change of direction. This could be changing the place where you work, but it could also mean starting an agency and moving towards a more managerial role. This is what Alexander did, and this podcast charts, his journey. The highs and the lows, the epiphanes and the moments of regret.</p>



<p>We explore Alexander&#8217;s transition from hands-on coding to strategic management. He shares insights into his initial roles, where he juggled multiple tasks and managed client expectations as a freelancer. This foundation, not only honed his technical skills, but also prepared him for the complexities of leading a business.</p>



<p>We talk about how Alexander&#8217;s management style has evolved over the years. Starting out,</p>



<p>he faced the typical challenges of delegation and supervising a growing team. Trying to understand individual personalities and communication styles to create a functional working environment. His approach emphasizes the need for breaking down large tasks into smaller, more achievable goals. A method that has proven instrumental in managing both projects and people effectively.</p>



<p>We also discussed the critical role of autonomy in the workplace, particularly how Alexander has learned to trust and empower his employees based upon their experience levels, leading to greater productivity and satisfaction for everyone.</p>



<p>He reflects on the key lessons learned from the earlier phase of his career, where he underestimated the importance of project managers. And how this realization led him to restructure his business operations to optimize efficiency and output.</p>



<p>It&#8217;s a fascinating conversation, and if you&#8217;ve wanted to start an agency, but have concerns about what that might bring, this episode is for you.</p>



<p>A quick note before we begin the recording quality on Alexander&#8217;s side, wasn&#8217;t superb, but I&#8217;ve done my best to make the audio as easy to listen to as possible.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com forward slash podcast, where you&#8217;ll find all the other episodes as well.</p>



<p>And so without further delay, I bring you. Alexander Gilmanov.</p>



<p>[00:04:07] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> I am joined on the podcast today by Alexander Gilmanov. Hi, Alexander.</p>



<p>[00:04:18] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> Hi. Thank you for having me.</p>



<p>[00:04:20] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> You are really welcome. You were brought to my attention, actually, what I&#8217;m about to say is not entirely true, and I&#8217;ll tell you why in a moment. But you were brought to my attention recently by Tammie Lister, who was recently on this podcast, and she mentioned that on a different podcast, she had been chatting to you about a subject which is going to be the main course of the podcast today. It&#8217;s all about moving away from being a developer, into being a manager.</p>



<p>But the reason that I have known about you, if not spoken to you before, is because of the products that you&#8217;ve got in the WordPress space. And so let&#8217;s talk a little bit about that. First of all, Alexander, would you mind just introducing yourself? Maybe talk about the plugins that you&#8217;ve got in the WordPress space, just so that we know a little bit about you.</p>



<p>[00:05:04] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> Of course. Yeah, so as you already mentioned, I am the founder and CEO at the software products company. My own background used to be full stack development, a little bit of desktop development, and web development, and WordPress development. And I had a transition from being a developer to becoming a manager, and the founder, and the CEO of the company. Currently we are at 43 people, and still growing.</p>



<p>So yeah, it was quite a journey. But before talking with Tammie and Jonathan, I didn&#8217;t realise actually that it might be of interest, and it might be useful to some developers out there, that are maybe also considering switching to managerial roles, or becoming founders.</p>



<p>Then a couple of words on the products. Our first product that helped us to start the company was wpDataTables. It was initially a data management, but more a table plugin, a plugin that helped you create interactive tables on the website. Later we added charts, data management, database management, and now it does more and more in the area of data management, data visualisation, data manipulation, and so on.</p>



<p>The other plugin that probably more people know is called Amelia. It&#8217;s a booking plugin, mostly appointments, bookings for businesses like salons, healthcare industry, home services, photographers. We have so many different use cases. So practically, any business that provides certain services within certain timeframes, and can use scheduling tools, accept online bookings, online payments, and there are lots of things around it.</p>



<p>And our third product is called Trafft. It is actually something like a SaaS version of Amelia. It&#8217;s not a WordPress plugin, it&#8217;s a standalone platform, but we do have a native integration with WordPress. And the reason for that, why we decided to make it as a separate product, was because we saw that once businesses get to grow, they no longer want to manage the website, and the bookings from the same dashboard, from the same place.</p>



<p>And also, many of them don&#8217;t want the burden of monitoring, backing things up, et cetera. Everything that an average WordPress hosting, many hostings don&#8217;t do that. And we do that for them on our platform. So yeah, that&#8217;s in short what we do.</p>



<p>[00:07:39] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> That&#8217;s great. Thank you. A really interesting collection of products there. We are going to be telling the story really though of a part of your life. We&#8217;re not going to get into the personal things, but we&#8217;re going to talk about a real change in your life. Your move away from being a developer to being a manager of, currently, a company of 43 people. Which is no small task, I&#8217;m sure.</p>



<p>You were saying to me, before we hit record, that you weren&#8217;t really sure that this story would be of interest to people. And obviously I&#8217;m in disagreement with that, because I&#8217;ve got you on the podcast to have that conversation. But there&#8217;s going to be a very large amount, I would&#8217;ve thought, of developers who listen to this podcast, people who are writing the code, working in an agency.</p>



<p>And maybe there&#8217;s a proportion of them who are thinking about, well, what could I do with my life differently? Do I always have to be a developer? Is that something that I can move away from? And maybe management, owning a company, running a company, and all of that, would be of interest to them. So, okay, let&#8217;s rewind the clock. How far are we going back in time, before you had an intuition that development, for you, wasn&#8217;t going to be the rest of your life?</p>



<p>[00:08:48] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> I can&#8217;t think of an exact moment in time when it clicked. And also, I really have hopes that I will get the chance to code again one day. I really miss it, to be honest. But I would say, for me, it was a transition from being a developer, to being an entrepreneur and a founder. And being a manager is just one of the roles within being an entrepreneur.</p>



<p>I think, almost from the beginning of my career, I did have an ambition of creating something of my own. So it was out there more or less all the time, I just didn&#8217;t know how to do that. I transitioned through being a developer. I didn&#8217;t start my company right away, but I created my first plugin, my first piece of code, and started selling it. And this was maybe the moment when the exact transition happened.</p>



<p>But some changes in the mindset, I would say, happened before that, because I was freelancing a lot. I was doing a lot of freelance development back in my hometown, for some local companies. Later started working on some platforms like, I&#8217;m not going to call the names, but there are many freelance based platforms where you can get either a website, or part of the website to develop, as a freelancer.</p>



<p>And I think being a freelancer really trains you for being your own manager. And that&#8217;s the first thing you learn, to first manage your own time, your own budgets, expectations of the client, all that. It helps you to start managing other people.</p>



<p>[00:10:20] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> I think that managing other people is quite a skill. So being able to manage your own time is one thing, I&#8217;m okay at that. But if that were to stretch beyond the confines of my own life, I think that would be really difficult. And my guess would be that you&#8217;ve probably, in the growth of your business, you&#8217;ve probably had moments where it&#8217;s gone really well, and the management of the people has gone really well.</p>



<p>Equally, I&#8217;m sure that there&#8217;s moments where you&#8217;ve looked at yourself and thought, oh gosh, this is not going so well. Are there any kind of fundamental skills, looking back over the last period of time, you think that you are equipped with? Whether that was through education, or whether that was just through the genetics that you were given. Are there any things that you think, looking back, okay, this thing equipped me to be a boss, and without that thing, have a long, hard think about acquiring that thing?</p>



<p>[00:11:14] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> Yeah, there were a few things in my career, and my personal life that helped me with that. And I think there are two parts of that. First is, I&#8217;d say managing tasks and understanding the whole, and then dividing the whole into subtasks. Seeing the wider picture, and then dividing it into details, is like one skill.</p>



<p>Very important for a manager, for a product manager, whatever you name it. I mean, it can have different variations. It can be just developer manager, or like engineering manager. But more or less, this is the fundamental skill.</p>



<p>You need first to understand, what are we working on? What is something we want to achieve, the end value? We want to give our users, our customers, and then divide it into independent tasks. This is not something that to get equipped with, I&#8217;d say.</p>



<p>For me, I think the first very large project was my PhD study, because it&#8217;s project that lasts for, for me it lasted almost four years. It had lots of components, very different ones like writing the study itself, writing the software, preparing the scientific part, writing scientific publications, leading some courses in the university, finding opponents in the scientific world.</p>



<p>All of this takes a lot of time. Most of the things won&#8217;t go as planned. You need to take a step back 9 out of 10 times. This trains your brain to approach this very calmly, not rush things. This creates sort of a skillset you need to manage. First manage yourself, then other people.</p>



<p>This is, I&#8217;d say, more or less a hard skill. Something you can manage through project management software, task lists, checklists, this sort of thing. But more importantly, you need to understand how to communicate with people. How to talk with people. How to explain things to people. So all of this falls under soft skills.</p>



<p>And I think it was one of the key things for me, because I always worked with computers. And then you start working with human beings that don&#8217;t have algorithms, don&#8217;t have buttons, procedures. You have two developers, but both have different characters, and you need to approach them differently.</p>



<p>And yeah, this is also not something I&#8217;d say you come equipped with, and you need to learn that. For example, initially I tried to solve every issue that arises with an email. And sometimes when I was a little bit scared of something or frustrated, I would write a very angry email, and write it to the whole company and say like, this is your final warning, and things like that.</p>



<p>And it took me maybe a year or two to realise that it&#8217;s actually the wrong way to solve things, and I only create internal pressure and frustration for people, and create more distance between us, and ultimately doesn&#8217;t serve the end purpose.</p>



<p>So yeah, for me, as a developer, it was maybe one of the hardest parts. To have internal meetings with the team, to speak with people one-on-one, in the team meetings have retrospectives, share openly what maybe frustrates me, and allow them to share openly what frustrates them, and not be afraid that I as a boss, as a manager, will punish them somehow. So I&#8217;d say those are the categories of skills you need to develop to become a manager.</p>



<p>[00:14:36] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> I think that&#8217;s really interesting. You know, you talked about the PhD, obviously this giant four year project, where you can imagine the goal, the goal line, the finish line, four years away, and you&#8217;re on day one. You know that this giant thing is stretching out ahead of you, I guess it is a process of just, okay, breaking it down. What can I do this year, this month, this day?</p>



<p>And that atomising of it all, just sort of trying to distill it into different jobs, that&#8217;s really important. I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;m good at that. I&#8217;m sure that my characteristics aren&#8217;t very good at taking in the whole, and breaking it down in a calm way. But having that capability, I guess could be learnt. But learning and having that capability over time, really important.</p>



<p>But also, like you said, the human element is maybe even more important at the end of the day. Because you&#8217;re not going to get anything out of your coworkers, your employees, if they don&#8217;t feel compelled to work with you, and for you. If there&#8217;s just tension or, goodness, even hatred, then the whole thing is going to collapse like a house of cards.</p>



<p>But forgive me, dear listener, you are listening to this. I have this intuition that developers, now, this is not going to be the case for everybody, but I think that developers can have a certain tendency to, there&#8217;s just a way of being a developer, isn&#8217;t it? There&#8217;s a certain mindset which works effectively with code, and it doesn&#8217;t always translate into working with humans.</p>



<p>And so being able to stop yourself and say, oh hang on, that is not an algorithm standing over there. If I tell it to do this thing, it might go off and do something entirely unexpected, and I need to be able to accommodate that. I need to be able to understand that. So identifying that in yourself is, yeah, it&#8217;s pretty impressive.</p>



<p>And the fact that you&#8217;ve been able, over time, to unpick that in yourself and say, well, hang on Alexander, slow down. Don&#8217;t write that email because they&#8217;re not an algorithm. Think about the human, we&#8217;ll see where this goes. Okay, this is really interesting.</p>



<p>[00:16:33] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> Just one thing came to my head. One thing I remembered while we were talking. One of the switches I had in this process was, at first when I started working with a team, the team of developers, I tried approaching those people as processors, servers, something like that. And like really giving them detailed instructions on what we need to do, and how we need to do this.</p>



<p>And then when something didn&#8217;t quite work out, I think, okay, maybe the instruction isn&#8217;t detailed enough, so let&#8217;s take every step, and give an instruction for every step. And in the end, it turned out to be harder to prepare all those instructions, instead of just doing things all by myself.</p>



<p>It&#8217;s sometimes easier to write a piece of code myself, than to create an instruction on like how the coach should look, where to put all the classes and methods, and all that. And this is something, it didn&#8217;t come overnight. I realised that, first of all, you need to hire the right people for the job. So you can&#8217;t just hire a student and give a senior grade task, and expect it to be delivered.</p>



<p>Then when you have the right person, yes, you do need to give them guidelines, and the end goals, and the problem, and good description of what we need to achieve in the end, but you don&#8217;t need to guide them all the way through. And especially for developers, when you are managing developers, you are like taking away all the juice from their job if you&#8217;re giving them too precise instructions. Because they want to create, they want to think of their own architecture, how they write their own elegant code. And if they receive an instruction, like if they&#8217;re a script or a server, it&#8217;s just not interesting for them.</p>



<p>[00:18:08] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> I think that&#8217;s really interesting. The idea being that, obviously as a manager, you have to manage. There has to be a certain amount of that. But also there has to be an element of, okay, here&#8217;s the task, just go ahead and do it. Not prescriptively writing the exact instruction for every single facet of that job.</p>



<p>Obviously, enough instruction so that the job can be understood by that person, but not standing over them every minute of every day just worrying about whether it&#8217;s going to be achieved. I guess the better employees will figure that out for themselves. They&#8217;ll go away, they&#8217;ll have autonomy, if they&#8217;re confused, they&#8217;ll come back, you can have a conversation. It&#8217;s not always top down that works most effectively.</p>



<p>[00:18:48] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> I would say you need to approach different employees differently. So when interns just join us, developer interns, actually they do want this kind of instruction. And it&#8217;s better to have someone mentor them, do peer review, give them guidance, and provide instructions for how to develop a task. They would actually enjoy it much more because, if they join a company after, for example, graduating, and they didn&#8217;t yet have some practical coding experience, they want this from the company. They want to get some guidance, some mentoring, some senior developer to evaluate their code, and point the mistakes.</p>



<p>But as they get more senior, actually autonomy is a very important motivation factor. And if you take it from them, you demotivate them. Because seniors want to research modern technology, libraries, services. And if they receive instructions like, use this library, the task gets too dull for them.</p>



<p>[00:19:48] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Yeah, so having a handle on each employee, and judging where they are in the hierarchy of all of that. So, like you said, somebody that&#8217;s new may want to be shepherded and guided much more, because they are really unfamiliar with the company culture, the expectations of the work that they need to output on a monthly basis. But as experience develops, and your relationship with them grows, I guess, you know where the boundaries lie a little bit more, because you&#8217;ve built up that relationship.</p>



<p>You know that if you give them an incredibly difficult task, and don&#8217;t give them too many instructions, they can do it. But that other person over there, they might need a bit more shepherding, even though they&#8217;re, I don&#8217;t know, more senior. Okay, so getting to know your employees is a crucial part.</p>



<p>Now, I have to say, Alexander has shared with me some show notes which are amazing. It&#8217;s very rare that the guest goes into such enormous detail, and so I&#8217;m incredibly grateful for that. I know that it&#8217;s also so that you can structure your own thoughts about blog posts, and things in the future about this topic.</p>



<p>But one of the sections which I thought was of most interest was how you charted your personal journey from, well, the different kind of work that you did. So from being a freelance, to working with friends. And I&#8217;d just like you to jump through that history for us, because it may be that somebody listening to this is somewhere on that ladder of different things. And the evolution that you&#8217;ve gone through over time, beginning with freelancing, maybe it&#8217;s hard for you to sum all of that up, but I&#8217;m going to hand it over and see if you can do that.</p>



<p>[00:21:11] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> So yes, I mentioned initially, and as you mentioned right now, I started with freelancing, and it taught me a lot about managing. Because management, especially when you&#8217;re not the owner, and when it&#8217;s more like an agency work, where you develop something for clients, is about organising tasks, about organising time, maybe managing others. But it&#8217;s also about managing the client&#8217;s expectations, understanding what they want.</p>



<p>And this is sometimes the hardest part, especially for freelancers. People keep coming back and saying, they know what they don&#8217;t want, but they&#8217;re not sure about what they want to achieve in the end. And getting a specific requirement out of this conversation is very hard. But it&#8217;s also a very tough school, and it helped me later in the journey.</p>



<p>And as my freelancing evolved, at one point the projects started growing, and at one point it wasn&#8217;t just small website that I could develop in three, four weeks. It was something like a web app that people want developed maybe in a month or two, and this is something I cannot deliver on my own. I had to start thinking about building a team back then.</p>



<p>And I had a couple of friends, and naturally we started working with them. And because they were my friends, we were relatively similar in the coding styles. We understood each other really well. The management part came very natural. So I would just prepare the requirements, divide it between three of us. And we sat in the same room, and it was very easy to think. And actually the first experience was very inspiring. We were able to deliver things. We scaled the development and it went well.</p>



<p>[00:22:50] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Can I just interrupt there? Just very briefly. Do you ever look back on that time and think, I wish I&#8217;d stayed there? Because that sounds like a really, a nice environment to work in. I mean, obviously, you know, the financial reward of that probably isn&#8217;t quite so great. Maybe the complexity of the work that you can take on, maybe isn&#8217;t so great. But I imagine there&#8217;s a lot of people who are there and thinking, well, actually that&#8217;s okay. I&#8217;ve got my friends around me, the code is something that we can all share and understand, life&#8217;s good.</p>



<p>[00:23:19] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> Sometimes it is. For me particularly, it wasn&#8217;t, because it was still early in the journey, the level of projects wasn&#8217;t something which I wanted to have. The good thing is, one of the friends is right here with me today in the office, so he stayed with me on the journey.</p>



<p>[00:23:36] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> It does sound, from what you&#8217;ve just said there, that you&#8217;ve always maybe been driven by growth, complexity, a difficult challenge.</p>



<p>[00:23:44] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> Yeah, that&#8217;s the entrepreneur gene, I would say. There is something inside entrepreneurs that always pushes us to develop, to grow, to find for what&#8217;s next, all the time.</p>



<p>[00:23:55] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Okay. So, sorry for the interruption. You were working with your friends and I&#8217;ll let you continue.</p>



<p>[00:23:59] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> When we could work on the same project, it was great. But at certain points they had projects of their own, because they were also freelancing. And I started my first experiments with hiring other freelancers that I didn&#8217;t know. Finding them through job ads, tried finding them through also freelance platforms like subcontractors. Tried finding them through recommendations. And that&#8217;s where my first real life entrepreneurial and managerial challenges came in.</p>



<p>Most of the managers go through all these steps. They find a guy that, he&#8217;s the right guy for the job. We start working, everything is fine for the first few days, and then he disappears, or he delivers something that is far from what was agreed, or he&#8217;s constantly late, or they try to cut corners. Developers can identify pretty easy when logic is mixed with templates, or things like that. Which is much faster to code, but then it doesn&#8217;t scale, and creates constant problems for ongoing development.</p>



<p>Yeah, all those things started happening to me, and the first failures came when some of them disappeared completely, like two days before the deadline, without sharing the code with me. Things like that happened, and oftentimes I would say it&#8217;s just easier to stay freelancing on my own. If you want something done right, do it yourself. Yeah, this is kind of the belief that is common between many people, but I don&#8217;t find it to be true today.</p>



<p>[00:25:28] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> I&#8217;m going to interrupt there just summarise, if that&#8217;s alright? So the journey begins with you freelancing. The freelancing then gets mixed up with friends and colleagues, and people that you know. Then the complexity of that, because you&#8217;ve got projects and you need more people, you have to begin finding people. And so at this point, problems start to occur because the people don&#8217;t do what you expect them to do. So maybe there&#8217;s a story in there about how you communicate with what are essentially complete strangers, you know, what&#8217;s the level of that?</p>



<p>But also, you know, they&#8217;ve just got their own agendas, and they miss work, they cut corners, and what have you. And so all of a sudden, you want to grow this business, but you&#8217;re now, everything&#8217;s collapsing around you a little bit, because of unexpected problems that the first time around you wouldn&#8217;t anticipate. You&#8217;re not going to go into it thinking people are going to let me down, presumably. You&#8217;re going to go into it thinking, well, I&#8217;m going to hire somebody, they&#8217;ve got a good reputation, they&#8217;re going to deliver me quality code, and then life gets in the way, and all of these problems occur. Okay, right. Keep going, this is great.</p>



<p>[00:26:32] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> Thank you for summarising. I didn&#8217;t plan it so much in advance, so I might be jumping from one thought to another. So yeah, this is the time in my journey where I realised that I am actually lacking some experience in large scale projects, in larger teams. I don&#8217;t know how the really big projects are developed.</p>



<p>And back then when we worked with friends, when I worked as a freelancer, most of those projects didn&#8217;t survive after 12 months initial period. Those were very early startups, and most of the time I felt like we are developing stuff for the trash can practically, because we are working hard on it, and then the project isn&#8217;t funded anymore, and just basically dies.</p>



<p>And that&#8217;s why I decided to take a break in this entrepreneurial journey, and moved to a larger city, joined a large German company, a MarTech company, and stayed with them for three and a half years. It really helped me structure the thinking, and understand how project management, and the development process, and the continuous integration, many other things in large scale projects.</p>



<p>How do all these things work? And this is probably the first time in my career when I encountered, real project managers. Before that it was more or less informal, unofficial, people that started their own startup were managing the project.</p>



<p>And in this company we had teams of five developers. Every team had a project manager. We were using a specific development process with sprints, with tasks assigned, with a way to test the tasks, staging environment, development environment, all of these. Many of those things we previously, we did intuitively. In this larger company, I had the opportunity to learn it from the inside, and it really helped me.</p>



<p>[00:28:21] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> So, I don&#8217;t know how to phrase this question. I&#8217;ll try my best. Did you begin working for this larger agency intentionally to learn? Or is it that you now look back and realise that you learned? Because I&#8217;m imagining, again, people listening to this, maybe they&#8217;re in the moment that you were, where there were lots of freelancers, and it was all a bit of a muddle. And they&#8217;re looking to fix that problem.</p>



<p>Your way around that was to go and work for three years. I mean, three years is a good long time, isn&#8217;t it? Where you would be surrounded by people who already had the structure. You would learn it by osmosis, it would be part of your daily work to figure all this stuff out, with the help of others.</p>



<p>So, did you deliberately go knowing that you were going to do it for a short amount of time to learn the processes? Or is it just that after three years you thought, oh, look what I&#8217;ve learned?</p>



<p>[00:29:11] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> It was, I&#8217;d say a mix of both, but more so it was intentional. At one point I looked back and I like, okay, we&#8217;ve delivered 50 websites maybe, and two or three small platforms that never survived. Do I really have the experience and seniority, and the level of knowledge and understanding that I wanted to. And when I honestly admitted that I don&#8217;t, I realised that, okay, maybe I shouldn&#8217;t be rushing into entrepreneurship. Take a step back, join a company that had it figured out.</p>



<p>And initially when I joined the company, I thought it was going to be only about maybe 4, 12, 18 months. But the company was so good, and people were so good. At one point after the first year, I didn&#8217;t even think about getting back to the entrepreneurial journey, because when you have everything figured out around you, even when you do have these entrepreneurial genetics, it&#8217;s nice to have the pay date on the first of every month, and you have predictability, and you have other people worrying about things. So that&#8217;s one of the reasons why I stayed for three years there and not for one year.</p>



<p>[00:30:16] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Can I ask, okay, after three years, why then change? Was it just the entrepreneur in you, who just couldn&#8217;t quite reconcile the deep desire that you had to do your own thing with your reality? You know, you&#8217;re turning up to work and getting a paycheck, and all of that. I&#8217;m guessing that&#8217;s more likely. You just evolved out of it and thought, I want that in my life again, I want to be in charge of things, figuring things out again.</p>



<p>[00:30:40] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> I think that in the essence, yes, it was that. Because at one point I started freelancing again in my own spare time. Practically, I moved to a larger city and I didn&#8217;t have friends, I didn&#8217;t have a girlfriend, I had all the time in the world. After a full-time job, I also had a few more hours where I could do something.</p>



<p>So at one point I started freelancing again, but I could do it on a different level. And this is when I started the pet project, which ended up being first PHP data tables, a PHP script for rendering tables. And then I wrapped it as WordPress plugin, and published the WordPress plugin.</p>



<p>It was still a pet project, but then when I started seeing people buying it, liking it, enjoying it, using it in different parts of the world, people started sending me requests for more features. I started receiving support requests.</p>



<p>For me, it was so inspiring, and I realised that maybe $100 earned through selling my own piece of software, are more dear to me than $1000 earned through working at a full-time job.</p>



<p>[00:31:45] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Oh that&#8217;s such an interesting sentence. That&#8217;s really interesting. Okay, alright. Sorry to interrupt. I just thought that was worth calling out.</p>



<p>[00:31:53] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> At one point, I just couldn&#8217;t help but invested more and more time into my own thing, my own baby. When you see it&#8217;s growing, it&#8217;s a feeling you don&#8217;t get from anything else really. At one moment it started selling really well. It wasn&#8217;t still enough to become a substitute for a full-time job. People were using the plugin, and they wanted also to add features X, Y, Z, and they were ready to pay for it. And I started charging higher and higher hourly rates. I figured out, people are still happy to pay those higher hourly rates. And I just decided to take the risk, to quit my full-time job, and to start a company.</p>



<p>I was still relatively young, I was like 27, 28 back then. I decided that, what do I get to lose? Maybe I will lose one or two years. I can always get back to full-time job, some other company. And there is nothing like this experience. Yeah, it was a very interesting moment in my journey. And this is actually the next step.</p>



<p>[00:32:50] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> I was just going to say though, you&#8217;re in a really different place, aren&#8217;t you? Because if you go back to your hiring freelancer moment, there were all the trip wires that you went through, and the things that you did, in air quotes, incorrectly. You are now armed with three years of knowledge of working at an agency. There&#8217;s a whole bunch of things that you will now not get wrong, because you&#8217;ve seen how to grow a business, what kind of processes need to be in place. And so, okay, let&#8217;s go, starting my own company.</p>



<p>[00:33:17] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> Yeah, that was the next step. And this is when I needed, had to become project manager, the office manager, finding an office, changing bulbs, finding furniture, hiring manager, developer, all that. I had to divide my day in small shifts. For two hours I&#8217;m an office manager, for two hours I&#8217;m a product manager.</p>



<p>It was an interesting time, and I think I did it at the right moment, I was still full of energy. I mean, I&#8217;m still full of energy, but I don&#8217;t know if I would have the guts now to enter the same journey once again. I have family now, I need my own time. Back then I did have the luxury of waking up at whatever time I wake up, and then just work for 12, 14 hours, and then just go back to sleep. This was the whole life for the first year or two of my company in the beginning.</p>



<p>[00:34:04] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> You just described it as an interesting time. You know, changing light bulbs, picking out furniture. Interesting is an interesting word. It&#8217;s kind of implies that there&#8217;s a little bit of frustration there maybe. Jobs that you probably don&#8217;t need or don&#8217;t wish to do, but need to be done. Basically, it&#8217;s got to be you, I guess. You know, the light bulb&#8217;s gone, okay, who&#8217;s going to change it? Let&#8217;s look around, oh me. The carpet, somebody spilled the coffee on the carpet, who is going to, oh me. That&#8217;s a big change in life, suddenly. I guess, yeah, interesting sort sums it up. Frustrating, but useful and necessary.</p>



<p>[00:34:38] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> Yes, exactly as you described it. And this is something that happens with bootstrap founders. It&#8217;s not like you become a boss, and everybody starts running around you. For the first year or two, it&#8217;s the other way around. You have to round around everybody and everything, and make sure things don&#8217;t fall apart. Because when you start something new, it has a tendency to die initially, in the first year or two.</p>



<p>I mean, things just fall apart. Servers are falling, light bulbs are going out, the first developer you hire decides to change the job in two months, and you need to rehire, and to onboard, and to go through everything once again. So I think only after it was maybe 10 or 15 people working in the company, I could relax a little bit. Okay, there are people now who take care of different segments of the job.</p>



<p>But initially, especially as we were combining developing our own product, and working as an agency on clients, on software. It was an interesting time. It was frustrating. It was tough. It was a lot of stress, because you practically depend on every client. If one client decides to stop working with you, you immediately don&#8217;t have the funds to keep paying the salaries that you are already committed to.</p>



<p>So there is a lot of stress involved in the first years, but also a lot of inspiration. A lot of great emotions, because you see how things grow, and they grow really fast in the first year or two. Because growing from two people to ten people is X5 growth. These initial steps, it&#8217;s wow, amazing.</p>



<p>Right now we would add seven or eight people. I wouldn&#8217;t even notice much of a difference, but back then it&#8217;s changing things completely. And yeah, so you are growing your baby, and getting to do things you&#8217;ve never done before.</p>



<p>Getting back to the project management side of things, initially I didn&#8217;t even think about hiring project managers, mostly because of the funding restrictions. And also mostly because, initially when we started doing agency work, we were outsourcing developers. We were outsourcing developers on hourly basis, or per seat basis. And I would say there was no chance, back then in 2013, 14 to sell project manager seats to a client.</p>



<p>And I actually, for few years after that, it took maybe five or six years for the market, this kind of market outsourcing market, for clients to figure out the project managers are actually crucial to project success. But back then I had to do it all on my own. And when we had eight or ten developers, I realised that it&#8217;s physically impossible to do it like this anymore.</p>



<p>I had to be project manager on every project, including our own product, plus three or four client ongoing projects. I had to know exactly what happens, what piece of code was released, what we are planning to do. And I just realised, I am losing quality on all fronts.</p>



<p>[00:37:33] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Of all of the bits and the pieces that I read, that bit stuck out to me as a real moment for you. The realisation that, I need to hire people to shepherd the people. I can&#8217;t do everything myself, and I have to allow people to be in charge of bits of my business, and to manage those projects.</p>



<p>And maybe that is a difficult thing to let go of, because in so many ways, project management from a developer point of view probably looks like, well, that&#8217;s a strange role. What are they actually doing? They&#8217;re just going to meetings all day, and they have more meetings after the meetings. And yet it&#8217;s really essential, or at least that&#8217;s the conclusion I think you drew.</p>



<p>[00:38:14] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> Yes, exactly. And I remember my own thoughts, my own perception of project managers, while I was still a full stack developer in a large company. And we would talk, as developers, we would talk between each other like, why do these guys get to evaluate our job? They know nothing about coding, they know nothing about elegance of the code, coding standards, they don&#8217;t contribute to the software, yet they are our bosses, and they rate our work, they try to push us to do more. This is really unfair, that was my own perception.</p>



<p>And to a certain extent, unfortunately, I must say, some less experienced managers can do that. They can push people too much, they can come across as bosses, which I think is unnecessary in the software world. You don&#8217;t need really a boss, like a manager to be a boss and to be above you.</p>



<p>When I started doing all of that myself, I quickly realised that like, there is no way around syncing all the stakeholders, but having meetings. And at some point you get to 10 meetings per day, or something like that, if you have many projects. This is something that&#8217;s unavoidable, and actually it&#8217;s the most efficient way to sync, and to coordinate things.</p>



<p>[00:39:26] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Would it be fair to say, now, that you are, you know, you&#8217;ve really removed yourself from the coding side of things, and you are basically project manager for the entire business. So maybe you are a project manager of project managers, which sounds strange to say. But you are managing, and you&#8217;ve totally moved away, and you&#8217;ve realised that this is now the bit of the business which you are best placed into.</p>



<p>[00:39:49] <strong>Alexander Gilmanov:</strong> Yes. I think the key for scaling is focus. Whenever the revenue allows, whenever project scale allows, I like to identify things that were shared, things that one person combined, maybe two projects or two different roles, and to hire people that would do just one thing with 100% focus.</p>



<p>I am now maybe even on the third level of abstraction, third layer as developer. Developers call this like abstraction layer. So I&#8217;m managers, above managers, above managers. And we do have different role names in the company, like product owners, product managers, team leads. We also try to, when possible, maybe separate people management from processes management, because different mindsets are needed for those.</p>



<p>It&#8217;s great when one person can combine both. Many people are great at that. Sometimes it&#8217;s better to give the processes management to person who really likes the admin stuff, and people management to someone who is an extrovert, and is just great with people naturally, without some tension. Because for me still, I&#8217;m very introverted. Dealing with people still comes with a certain tension for me.</p>



<p>[00:41:03] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> I&#8217;d like to say a big, thanks to Alexander for talking with me on the jukebox podcast today. Don&#8217;t forget that the conversation will continue next week, where we explore some of the practical steps of growing a business.</p>
</div>



<p>On the podcast today we have <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-gilmanov-tms/">Alexander Gilmanov</a>.</p>



<p>Alex comes to us today from Belgrade, Serbia. He’s a full-stack developer with a rich heritage of freelance and agency work. His company officially launched in 2014, and they’ve continued work with clients, as well as creating a range of WordPress plugins, and their own SaaS apps, mainly in the online booking space.</p>



<p>Slightly unusually for this podcast I decided to break the content up into two parts. You’ll hear the first part today and part two will be coming out in the next episode.</p>



<p>If you’re a developer and are in the weeds of writing code, perhaps you’ve thought about a change of direction. This could be changing the place where you work, but it could also mean starting an agency and moving towards a more managerial role. This is what Alexander did, and this next podcast charts his journey. The highs and the lows, the epiphanies and the moments of regret.</p>



<p>We explore Alexander’s transition from hands-on coding to strategic management. He shares insights into his initial roles, where he juggled multiple tasks and managed client expectations as a freelancer. This foundation not only honed his technical skills but also prepared him for the complexities of leading a business.</p>



<p>We talk about how Alexander’s management style has evolved over the years. Starting out, he faced the typical challenges of delegation and supervising a growing team, trying to understand individual personalities and communication styles to create a functional working environment. His approach emphasises the need for breaking down large tasks into smaller, more achievable goals, a method that has proven instrumental in managing both projects and people effectively.</p>



<p>We also discuss the critical role of autonomy in the workplace, particularly how Alexander has learned to trust and empower his employees based on their experience levels, leading to greater productivity and satisfaction for everyone. He reflects on the key lessons learned from the earlier phase of his career, where he underestimated the importance of project managers, and how this realisation led him to restructure his business operations to optimise efficiency and output.</p>



<p>It’s a fascinating conversation, and if you’ve wanted to start an agency but have concerns about what that might bring, this episode is for you.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Useful links</h2>



<p><a href="https://wpdatatables.com/">wpDataTables</a></p>



<p><a href="https://wpamelia.com/">Amelia booking plugin</a></p>



<p><a href="https://trafft.com/">Trafft</a></p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 15 May 2024 15:37:11 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Nathan Wrigley";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:49;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:21:"Matt: Sabbatical Wrap";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:23:"https://ma.tt/?p=114289";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:38:"https://ma.tt/2024/05/sabbatical-wrap/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4436:"<img width="604" height="453" src="https://i0.wp.com/ma.tt/files/2024/05/IMG_6094-1024x768.jpg?resize=604%2C453&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-114293" />



<p>Today is my first day post-<a href="https://automattic.com/benefits/sabbatical/">sabbatical</a>, getting back in the swing of things with <a href="https://automattic.com/">Automattic</a>. <a href="https://wordpress.org/">W.org</a>,  all the <a href="https://audrey.co/">things</a>. What a unique experience! I found the lead up to the sabbatical and planning process to be infinitely valuable, the sabbatical itself to be interesting experentially, and I&#8217;m curious to see what the post-sabbatical effects are. I have that nervous excitement like it&#8217;s the first day of school, which I haven&#8217;t felt in years.<em> What should I wear? Who will sit with me at lunch?</em></p>



<p>I could now <a href="https://ma.tt/2024/02/samattical/">give a much better talk about the value of sabbaticals</a>, having finally done one myself vs observing the hundreds that have taken place at Automattic. Like having a kid, it&#8217;s something you can understand intellectually but the direct experience is profound in ways that are hard to articulate.</p>



<p>There&#8217;s so much to catch up on and it&#8217;s kind of delightful to check in on progress of things after a few months rather than day-to-day like I normally do. If I had one bit of advice it would be to not get a big surgery  (I had a sinus one) or plan for other major health things during a sabbatical, that should be on a different track if you can help it.</p>



<p>At <a href="https://ma.tt/2024/02/samattical/">the beginning</a> I allowed myself two goals around sailing and chess. Sailing I decided to postpone to take advantage of a peak opportunity in July, but chess has been a fun incorporation into my daily habits and also incredibly humbling playing with folks who have been at it longer. The thing I didn&#8217;t plan for that became actually really important to me was getting back to the saxophone, not even trying to perform but the ritual and zen of long tones and practice is incredibly grounding in a way I didn&#8217;t know I was missing.</p>



<p>A few bullet point highlights:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Rowed to Alcatraz.</li>



<li>Got Covid the 4th time.</li>



<li>Went to Super Bowl.</li>



<li>Spent time at my alma mata University of Houston.</li>



<li>Toured the modern cathedrals of datacenters.</li>



<li>Did a ton of health scans, blood tests, doctor meetings.</li>



<li>Got my DEXA body fat down to 17.9%.</li>



<li>Skied Big Sky and Yellowstone Club.</li>



<li>Went to friend&#8217;s 40ths and 50ths.</li>



<li>Got a major sinus surgery.</li>



<li>Hosted an <a href="https://ma.tt/files/2024/05/644-upload.jpeg">epic eclipse party from a plane</a> with 100+ flash talks.</li>



<li>Studied <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qigong">Qigong</a> and yoga.</li>



<li>Spent time in Houston, San Francisco, Big Sky, Austin, Orlando, Tokyo, Taipei, Amsterdam, Paris, and Mallorca.</li>



<li>Cleaned up a ton of personal projects.</li>



<li>Read a ton.</li>



<li>Swam in the ocean.</li>



<li>Played saxophone at 40k feet.</li>



<li>Equine therapy.</li>



<li>A lot of progress on renovation projects in Houston and San Francisco.</li>



<li>Hiked many places, walking in general more than normal.</li>



<li>Tweaked my back. :/</li>



<li>Couple of podcasts and interviews, a few meetings.</li>



<li>Binged <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_Body_Problem_(TV_series)">Three Body Problem</a>.</li>



<li>Did a lot of solo time and introspection.</li>
</ul>



<p>Also, there was actually a lot of Automattic stuff happening most notably the <a href="https://ma.tt/2024/04/beeper-texts/">acquisition of Beeper</a>! I wasn&#8217;t able to unplug as much as I hoped, but I did definitely reverse my normal priorities. One thing I really missed was that I had very high hopes to see a lot of people, but a lot of stuff came up so outside of the events it was probably smaller social circle than I normally have.</p>



<p>It does make me think about apophatic theology or <a href="https://fs.blog/a-wonderfully-simple-heuristic-to-recgonize-charlatans/">how Nassim Taleb talks about <em>via negativa</em></a>. Whatever you&#8217;ve been doing, it&#8217;s nice to try the opposite for a while, just to see what happens.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 15 May 2024 13:35:01 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4:"Matt";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}s:4:"type";i:128;s:7:"headers";O:48:"WpOrg\Requests\Utility\CaseInsensitiveDictionary":1:{s:7:"*data";a:9:{s:6:"server";s:5:"nginx";s:4:"date";s:29:"Sun, 16 Jun 2024 07:17:24 GMT";s:12:"content-type";s:8:"text/xml";s:13:"last-modified";s:29:"Sun, 16 Jun 2024 07:15:29 GMT";s:4:"vary";s:15:"Accept-Encoding";s:15:"x-frame-options";s:10:"SAMEORIGIN";s:16:"content-encoding";s:2:"br";s:7:"alt-svc";s:19:"h3=":443"; ma=86400";s:4:"x-nc";s:9:"HIT ord 1";}}s:5:"build";s:14:"20211221040300";}