Fall has always been the season I’m most conflicted about. It gets darker and colder, and in Colorado, things start to freeze. Especially in October. Since it’s October 22nd, I thought I’d pause to reflect on the past and look toward the future.
I’ve been assigned to think back on 2025 and look forward to 2026, and honestly, I’m a little stuck. It’s been a while since I’ve done real reflection and forward planning in a concrete way. Sure, I worry about things I’ve done or things to come, but that kind of worrying isn’t productive. Putting thoughts like these on the screen takes presence, and that’s something I’m learning to prioritize.
Personal Reflections on 2025
This year, I’ve continued to focus on taking care of myself, physically and mentally. I stopped drinking alcohol in 2020 and haven’t looked back. It’s simply not good for me, and I feel better without it. I still enjoy spending time with friends and family who do drink, but the biggest gift of quitting has been regaining my mornings. I wake up early now, feeling clear and creative. I’ve developed a morning writing habit that I plan to keep nurturing, as this very post demonstrates.
I’ve also been plant-based since 2012, and that lifestyle has become second nature. It keeps me healthy and helps me avoid overindulging in my favorite activity: eating. Lately, I’ve been using ChatGPT to plan meals and create recipes, which has expanded my culinary horizons and made learning generative AI feel tangible and practical.
Exercise and physical activity continue to be a work in progress. I use Apple Fitness+ most mornings. Their on-demand classes make it easy to stay consistent. Since I spend so much of my day at a desk (or couch), staying mobile is non-negotiable. I’ve gotten better about walking the dogs, taking breaks, and even getting out on my bike more often. I still haven’t conquered pull-ups yet, 2026 might be the year for that.
As I get older, my risk tolerance has shifted. I descend a bit slower on my mountain bike and snowboard. The thrill has evolved: it’s less about adrenaline now and more about being outdoors with friends. The joy is in the experience, not the edge.
Professional Reflections on 2025
Travel and Events
This year brought more work travel than any other in my career, and I’ve loved it. I’ve visited new cities and returned to familiar ones, but the highlight was Basel, Switzerland. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I found it charming: kind people, beautiful old town, and a grounded energy. Presenting at WordCamp Europe there for the first time was a milestone. Altogether, I’ve attended 11 events so far in 2025, with three more to go. I’m genuinely enjoying the travel: meeting new people, reconnecting with colleagues, and deepening friendships.
Public Speaking
Public speaking has become one of the most rewarding shifts in my professional life. I went from just one talk in 2024 to seven so far this year, with one more in December, eight total. That’s a huge leap for someone who used to dread the stage. Joining my local Toastmasters club has helped immensely. It’s a space to refine my skills and encourage others to find their voice too.
Work Projects
Two big projects stand out: our open-source sponsorship program and our agency partner program relaunch.
The sponsorship project has distributed tens of thousands of dollars to contributors and projects worldwide. I still sometimes feel like an intermediary, but it’s deeply satisfying to see our company supporting something bigger than ourselves.
The agency partner program has been years in the making, and this year it finally relaunched. The goal is to help agencies grow their businesses using our infrastructure and services. It’s just the beginning. Now comes the real work of building relationships, understanding needs, and connecting partners with customers. WordPress may be free to download, but creating a consistent, professional experience takes collaboration. Helping agencies deliver that feels meaningful.
Generative AI
AI has found a permanent seat in my workflow. It saves time, helps me organize thoughts, and frees me to write more. Still, I sometimes question whether it’s making me sharper or lazier. Maybe both. The irony is that I’m writing more on my own now than I have since college.
The best part, though, is the conversations: hearing how others use AI and helping people integrate it into their work. It’s exciting to see curiosity turn into confidence.
Community
The Durango WordPress Meetup turned one year old this month since I relaunched it. It had gone dormant during COVID, and reviving it has been a rewarding challenge. Attendance fluctuates, you’d think free lunch would help, but I’m learning the importance of consistency and better outreach. The goal is simple: keep showing up and building community, one month at a time.
Personal Goals for 2026
I turn 50 at the end of next year, a milestone that somehow feels both heavy and light. My memory isn’t as sharp, my joints aren’t as forgiving, but overall, I feel strong and optimistic.
Goals for the year:
Finally master the pull-up.
Have a fun and injury-free snowboarding season.
Plan an anniversary trip, location TBD.
Deepen friendships, even if that means making more effort in a small town where few people work in tech.
Decide how to use my upcoming month-long sabbatical. Last time, I took it in July, which opens up endless summer options. Or maybe I’ll chase snow to South America, learn Spanish, and keep winter going.
Professional Goals for 2026
Public Speaking
Toastmasters remains a cornerstone of my growth. I’m working through the Presentation Mastery pathway, starting with my Ice Breaker speech this year. More importantly, I’ve realized how much I need in-person connection. Remote work is efficient, but it can also be isolating. Toastmasters offers that rare combination of practice, feedback, and human contact.
Next year, I want to double my 2025 speaking engagements, aiming for 16 talks. That means applying to at least 32 events, knowing I’ll be accepted to some fraction of them. I’ll start that outreach soon. My focus areas include:
The critical role of websites in an increasingly gated digital world.
Automating plugin updates as the foundation of website security.
Personal growth in a digital age: how to stay human amid constant change.
Agency Partnerships
My goal is to deepen relationships with agency partners and cut through the noise around AI. There’s still too much fear, confusion, and short-term thinking in digital marketing. Agencies that thrive will be the ones building fast, functional, mobile-friendly websites. Ones that make it easy for customers to take action. It’s surprising how many sites still make paying or contacting someone difficult.
I’ll keep focusing on co-marketing, lead sharing, and helping partners connect with clients who truly value quality.
Open Source and Community
Our open-source sponsorship program is off to a strong start, but I’d like to expand our impact, both as a company and as a community. Locally, I want to grow the Durango WordPress Meetup, build a simple website for it, and start publishing useful content for attendees. A little “dogfooding” wouldn’t hurt either.
Leadership and Mentorship
At this stage in my career, leadership feels less about titles and more about teaching. I want to help others see what’s possible on the web; to share what I’ve learned about creativity, communication, and connection. I might even reboot a blogging challenge like the one I ran years ago, this time with more focus and structure (and maybe some Toastmasters influence).
Do I want to move into management again? Maybe. There’s potential to grow our partnerships team in North America. The question is how to scale relationships while keeping them genuine.
AI Tools
AI continues to be the frontier. The tools are powerful, sometimes magical, but they still depend on thoughtful input and careful execution. I plan to take a few structured courses next year to deepen my understanding and consistency. The more I master these tools, the more effectively I can apply them to everything else I do.
Conclusion
That turned out longer than I expected, but worth it. Writing this helped me process a lot of what’s been swirling in my head. If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading. I hope it inspires you to pause and take stock of your own year too.
When I first met Matt Suffoletto, I knew this conversation would hit home for a lot of agency owners.
He’s been a Kinsta customer for years, and he’s built an entire business around helping teams pass Core Web Vitals without wrecking relationships.
From College Startup to Performance Specialist
Matt started building websites in college under the name WordPress Guys, until a legal notice forced him to rebrand. What began as a maintenance service turned into PageSpeed Matters, an agency specializing in performance audits and Core Web Vitals optimization.
His approach is deeply collaborative. Instead of pointing fingers at developers, he builds 76-point audit sheets and lets the internal team take the credit. As he put it:
“We’re not trying to talk developers out of a job. We just want the job done.”
Core Web Vitals: Beyond the Score
Matt’s philosophy is simple: a 100/100 score doesn’t matter if your site feels slow. He focuses on passing real-world metrics, the ones based on actual user data, not lab results.
It’s a refreshing reminder that optimization isn’t about ego; it’s about empathy, for users and for the people maintaining the site.
AI: A Tool, Not a Thinker
When asked about AI, Matt said something that stuck with me:
“We use it for formatting, not thinking.”
He sees it as a helper, not a replacement for problem-solving. That balance, between automation and understanding, is exactly what sets his work apart.
Takeaway
Working with Matt reminded me that great performance isn’t just about fast servers or clever caching, it’s about collaboration.
When agencies, developers, and hosting partners like Kinsta work together, everyone wins.
Imagine standing in Tomorrowland, missing three rides with your kids while you frantically reboot a client’s website from your phone.
That’s exactly what happened to Paul Letourneau, founder of YEG Digital.
It was the moment he realized something had to change.
🎥 Watch the full interview on YouTube:
From French Teacher to Agency Owner
Paul didn’t start out in tech. He studied to be a French kindergarten teacher, taught English in Taiwan, and learned to build websites in Dreamweaver, long before Facebook existed. His curiosity carried him from education to digital media, to big-agency life, and finally to founding his own agency in Edmonton.
“I’m not big on smoke and mirrors. I like transparency.”
Burnout, Panic, and a Reset
After climbing the corporate ladder, Paul found himself leading marketing for a major automotive group. Then came the panic attack, the kind that sends you to the hospital and makes you question everything.
Within months, he left his executive job to work from home and build a small, remote team. He designed the life he actually wanted.
“We just designed the life that we wanted.”
Back to Kinsta and Back to Balance
The Disneyland server meltdown made him rethink his tech stack too.
He moved 110 sites to Kinsta because he needed reliability, responsive chat support, and a mobile dashboard that actually worked.
“The best part is, I don’t even have to do it anymore.
My project manager reaches out to Kinsta before I do.”
That kind of trust lets him focus on people, not panic.
AI as Enhancement, Not Replacement
Today, Paul’s team uses AI for copy, research, and content audits, always transparently. They paste entire websites into ChatGPT or Perplexity to spot messaging gaps and new opportunities.
“AI isn’t here to replace you. It’s here to enhance you.”
The Takeaway
Paul’s story reminds me that success isn’t just measured in uptime or revenue; it’s in the freedom to be present for the moments that matter.
Reliable systems, supportive teams, and a bit of automation can help us get there.
Full Transcript
Paul Letourneau (00:00) I was right in Tomorrowland and I was on another platform and one of our major sites went down and I was standing there on my phone trying to reset the server, trying to figure it out. Like I missed like three rides with my kids and I was just choked. Like I was just like I’ve had enough of this and honestly the thing that ticks me off the most was not so much like the server was great like we fixed the server everything was fine. I mean stuff happened.
Roger Williams (00:19) Yeah.
Paul Letourneau (00:26) right? It happens with everybody. But I had no support. I was doing it on my own. the thing that frustrated me the most was the platform I was on, their mobile experience was just terrible. And so when I moved to Kinsta,
Roger Williams (00:27) Sure. Sure.
Paul Letourneau (00:38) the chat support Kinsta has is amazing. And you know what the best part is? I don’t have to do it. So our project manager gets in there. If she has an issue, she actually reaches out to Kinsta first before I have to, which like as a business owner, that frees me up, right? So it’s been really nice, but their mobile experience, like the site on mobile is just sick. It’s amazing.
Roger Williams (00:50) Yeah.
Hey everybody, it’s Roger with Kinsta. I’m joined today by a good friend, Paul. Hey Paul, how you doing?
Paul Letourneau (01:04) Good, how’s everybody doing?
Roger Williams (01:06) doing really well. It’s been a while since we’ve talked. We ran into each other at WordCamp US last year. And, you know, I know you’re a great partner with Kinsta. We love working with you. But, you know, before we get into anything like that, I’m really curious to learn more about how you got into digital marketing. Like, where did this come from? Did you have like a computer as a kid? Did you go to school for this? How did this happen?
Paul Letourneau (01:30) Oh man, that’s a loaded question. So, I mean no, I did not start out knowing what I wanted to do. I actually came out of high school, this is a long time ago, 20 years ago now, and wanted to be a French kindergarten teacher, believe it or not. Yeah, I know. mean, Canadian to the core, right? I went to school for it, went to university in French afterwards. Figured it out really quick, yeah, exactly.
Roger Williams (01:37) Okay.
Yeah.
Whoa. Yeah.
Oui, oui.
Paul Letourneau (01:56) Figured out really quick that it was just not for me. I just enjoyed more of the lifestyle part of university so I had a hard time getting to class right and then ⁓ You know went through went through your first year and then you know what honestly I jumped around a lot I went to a couple different universities I did a little bit of digital media. I did like a certificate course in that was like that’s kind of cool But I actually I specialize in video
Roger Williams (02:06) Yeah, buddy. Yeah, buddy.
Paul Letourneau (02:21) And back then it was like, we were like over the shoulder video cameras with tapes. Like they had just come out with the mini tapes at that point. So, and we were still using flash for web design. So like, that was like the extent I hated flash. So I was just like, couldn’t, I couldn’t do it. And then, you know, I graduated. I had absolutely no job opportunities coming out of that. It just wasn’t the right time in the early 2000s.
Roger Williams (02:26) Yeah. Yes, yes.
Yep.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Paul Letourneau (02:48) So I
actually went and taught English overseas. I went to Taiwan and spent six months out there. And that’s where I think I actually, you know, just in, you know, nature and everything like that and being disconnected from my family. I just started trying to figure out how to use Dreamweaver again. And I built my own blog and just started sharing some photos and sharing some things so that I could share it with my friends and family back home. And this is pre-Facebook.
Roger Williams (03:06) Okay.
Paul Letourneau (03:16) And then that just kind of took off and everything else was self-taught. YouTube, a lot of that. And then I just came back and started taking jobs where I could get more and more into web until eventually about nine years ago now I left and started this.
Roger Williams (03:21) Okay?
Beautiful. I’d love this story. So all right kindergarten teacher teaching French Why why how did that like how was that something that was in there?
Paul Letourneau (03:40) I don’t know, my whole family is teachers. So I just, it was easy, right? And we were like, okay. I love French. My last name’s Le Tonneau, we’re Canadian. It’s just part of our culture. I was like, man, I love teaching. Maybe this will work and I like kids.
Roger Williams (03:42) Okay.
Yeah. Yeah.
Paul Letourneau (03:56) did not work out. actually married a teacher though, that’s the funny part. So she teaches anywhere from kindergarten to grade five. And we have three kids as well from kindergarten to grade four. it’s, yeah, it’s all kind of worked its way out.
Roger Williams (03:58) Yeah, there you go.
Okay.
Beautiful.
Absolutely, Alright, so fast forward a little bit. went and taught English in Taiwan. I have to say there was a moment in my life where I was really close to doing just that. Any quick tip of advice for people who are considering like, hey, I want to go and teach English in another country because I’ve heard some horror stories. What was your take? What was your experience? Okay.
Paul Letourneau (04:30) it was pretty cool. I mean, I
was 21. I was not prepared. I knew nothing. Like the internet wasn’t the same back in 2002, right? Not like the same as it is now. I I remember we had to get like those plug-in headsets and we used Skype to talk to each other. ⁓ So it wasn’t the same. But nowadays, man, just make sure you do your research on your country. I have some good friends who are in Abu Dhabi and they’re loving it. ⁓
Roger Williams (04:40) Sure.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
Paul Letourneau (04:57) Friends that went to South Korea loved it. So I say just do it. I mean, it’s an amazing experience.
Roger Williams (05:01) Okay.
Sweet, sweet. right. So anything from that experience that you still kind of pull from today when you’re working with clients?
Paul Letourneau (05:11) Yeah, I think just being open and easy to talk to, when you travel you have to meet random people, right? You just strike up conversations. So I think anytime I jump on a call, it’s just about being a normal human, I guess. I don’t know, it’s, right? Just like you’re traveling and you meet people. You’re traveling, I I go through three four calls a day with potential new clients. You’re meeting them every day, you meet new people. So just treating everybody with respect and being kind and, you know.
Roger Williams (05:27) Yeah.
Paul Letourneau (05:39) Moving through it.
Roger Williams (05:40) Man, I love it. The golden rule, right? ⁓ All right, so Dreamweaver, you built a website, but obviously WordPress is in here. How did WordPress come into your life?
Paul Letourneau (05:42) Yeah!
So I got back from traveling and I went and I actually worked for our local school board and they managed about 200 Joomla sites and that was hard to do. There was a lot going on. So my job was to figure out if there was another way. so knowing my little bit of digital.
Roger Williams (06:08) Okay.
Paul Letourneau (06:16) background and then I had a bit of background in communications and public relations I kind of merged the two together and started just looking into WordPress and Not knowing kind of the levels of how you can do things I just called WordPress VIP right away and I met somebody there that that was super kind was like hey just go to dot org like start there and You know just kind of tailored my expectations a little bit, but and then YouTube
Roger Williams (06:30) Okay.
Sure.
Paul Letourneau (06:42) I just started learning. I started playing and learning and eventually we rebuilt our first site, our first school website with WordPress and I trained the IT guys at the school board on how to do it and then we just iterated and went one after the other after the other and then eventually I had a friend who had a blog who I still manage to site to this day who asked me to build him on a blog and I did and I was like, hey, I can maybe do this for other people.
Roger Williams (06:49) Yep.
What’s the blog?
Paul Letourneau (07:11) It’s wildsaud.ca, so w-i-l-d-s-a-u.ca. He’s the only Canadian blogger who has journalism status for automotive in Canada. Yeah, so he’s been all over the world. I mean, I haven’t touched the site in a long time, but he does amazing work and he reviews vehicles. yeah.
Roger Williams (07:23) Whoa, okay, awesome.
Beautiful beautiful. All right.
Well, so so all right, so you start your agency you get that you get the reps in with this school project What was what made you take the final leap to like okay, I’m gonna do this is on my own as an agency ⁓ How did that happen?
Paul Letourneau (07:47) Yeah.
It wasn’t quite yet. I probably had another six or eight years of learning in there. So I went to a large local agency. I was their lead digital strategist for two or three years where we were doing million dollar projects. It was huge. It’s like, you know, the fancy, you know, mad men type stuff. ⁓ That was an interesting learning experience. I learned that I’m not one.
Roger Williams (07:53) Okay.
Mm-hmm.
Paul Letourneau (08:13) that’s big on smoke and mirrors. love transparency. I don’t like the song and dance that come with a lot of agencies. So that was a really big thing that I still use today in our day to day. And then I went to an online university and worked with them. So started learning a little bit more about conversion optimization, still bringing my WordPress along with me.
Roger Williams (08:16) Okay.
Yeah.
Paul Letourneau (08:35) And then we actually went to automotive. so I was the head of marketing for the largest automotive group, one of the largest in Canada. So we had 75 dealers and my job was to just oversee all of their sites and make sure that their sites were converting. We had a team of 25, know, digital marketers, basically, graph designers that all supported those sites. And so I just started getting into the data things and how we can make things better.
Roger Williams (08:55) Yeah.
Paul Letourneau (09:01) And then honestly, our second daughter came along and I had my first ever and only ever panic attack. And it was tough and a lot of people struggled with it. I knew nothing about it. And it put me in the hospital and about three months later, I was just like, I’m done being an executive. I couldn’t do it anymore. I was like, I’m done. I want to be at home and started this and it’s been amazing. So now I get to work from home. My team of 10 is remote.
Roger Williams (09:09) wow.
Paul Letourneau (09:31) And yeah, I mean, we just designed the life that we wanted.
Roger Williams (09:35) man, that’s beautiful. I love hearing happy, happy outcomes to really hard situations. And thank you so much for sharing that. know, you know, I find myself getting burnt out on occasion and, you know, making sure to take a deep breath and take care of yourself and make sure that you’re okay is so important. Right. ⁓ But this is a beautiful story. Like, I love the story behind the beginnings of this and how your daughter plays a role and
Paul Letourneau (09:55) yeah.
Roger Williams (10:02) So it sounds, you know, the passion has got to be there. Who are the clients that you’re working with now?
Paul Letourneau (10:09) man, they range everything from small business, home-based, service-based business, know, lot of those local. mean, Y-E-G digital is, yeah, is our airport code. Like I know that’s, when we started the business, it was like, man, that’s awesome. Cause Edmonton’s big on Twitter and I guess X now and you know, we hashtag everything, but it was big for our local. So it just.
Yeah, I mean, we just went with that and everything is focused on companies mostly in Edmonton, Alberta, but we’ve reached out like now we’re down in the States, around the world, like we work with some like multi-country companies. But so everything from small business to, you know, we’ve really gotten into medium sized enterprise lately, ⁓ which has been really cool because, you know, with WordPress, you gotta keep it really simple when you get to that point. And it’s like, gotta, it’s more about the user experience and paring it down.
Roger Williams (10:35) Okay.
Okay.
Paul Letourneau (10:56) So yeah, we’re all over the place.
Roger Williams (10:58) Beautiful. Walk me through some engagements. With a small independent company, one person, maybe 10 or something, when you’re engaged with them, are you going soup to nuts? Are you figuring out marketing message all the way up to launching the website?
Paul Letourneau (11:14) Yeah, yeah, I mean, we can’t just, I have a hard time, I don’t know, it’s me. My project manager Janelle would agree, I would hope, but she just says like, I get in my own way sometimes. Like I wanna help so much. So it’s my own fault, but I can’t just take on a website that’s just like, hey, we just need a brochure website. If this is what it’s gotta say, like it’s just not in my nature to not be helpful and not to add in that extra value of.
hey, have you thought of this? Because we’ve done this on a hundred other website builds. This could help you, right? Like, I don’t know, we get very involved and you know, that’s why we price where we price and that’s why we like to do the soup to nuts. I don’t like to just get involved and say, yeah, we can just build that rinse and repeat. It’s it’s not as fun.
Roger Williams (12:03) Sure, no, absolutely. love it. So really bringing your passion again, bringing that passion in and all the experience that you’ve got and also tying into really relating to people and the golden rule that you talked about. At what point did Kinsta become part of your world?
Paul Letourneau (12:18) So, it’s actually funny. So I moved to Kinsta actually quite a few years ago and then left because I thought the grass was greener. then came back because I was standing in, I mean, so we have three girls, three little girls, and my wife is obsessed with Disneyland. So we go to Disneyland a lot. And I was standing in Disneyland in California.
Roger Williams (12:23) Yeah.
Okay.
Paul Letourneau (12:41) and I was right in Tomorrowland and I was on another platform and one of our major sites went down and I was standing there on my phone trying to reset the server, trying to figure it out. Like I missed like three rides with my kids and I was just choked. Like I was just like I’ve had enough of this and honestly the thing that ticks me off the most was not so much like the server was great like we fixed the server everything was fine. I mean stuff happened.
Roger Williams (13:01) Yeah.
Paul Letourneau (13:08) right? It happens with everybody. But I had no support. I was doing it on my own. So I had to reach out to a buddy who was local, who knew the platform. And so he’s working on it. And I think it was even a Saturday. Like it just was a mess. But the thing that frustrated me the most was the platform I was on, their mobile experience was just terrible. And so when I moved to Kinsta, and then we just moved like 110 sites to Kinsta.
Roger Williams (13:09) Sure. Sure.
Ugh.
Paul Letourneau (13:34) Like we were just like, we’re done, that’s it, we’re done. Like I want the support because of the chat support. Like the chat support Kinsta has is amazing. And it really is. And you know what the best part is? I don’t have to do it. So our project manager gets in there. If she has an issue, she actually reaches out to Kinsta first before I have to, which like as a business owner, that frees me up, right? So it’s been really nice, but their mobile experience, like the site on mobile is just sick. It’s amazing.
Roger Williams (13:55) Yeah.
Paul Letourneau (14:03) So I can do anything on it and I know that’s like a little thing but it’s really helpful for me.
Roger Williams (14:10) awesome. Awesome. That’s great to hear. Yeah. And I use I find myself more often. Like I’m using I’m using WordPress on my phone, right? I’m logging in through the browser because the block editor experience is fantastic on mobile. And so then occasionally, I’ll need to log into my kinsta and I’m on my phone and I’m like, it all works. This is this is amazing. ⁓
Paul Letourneau (14:23) Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Roger Williams (14:31) Big shout out to the support team I have all of my respect goes out to them they do an amazing job so I’m really glad to hear that you guys are getting the same experience as well that we want everybody to have. Are there any features of the Kinsta dashboard or the product that you really are just like wow this is a game changer?
Paul Letourneau (14:52) There’s been a couple of new ones lately that have been a game changer. So the automatic updates has been really nice Adding into that just because like as an agency you’re plugging in all these different pieces of software to try and automate your life, So that’s really a nice one The changing of PHP actually per site has been a game changer because we have some ecommerce sites that just need more resources So being able to just go in quickly change that one site. That’s been huge
Roger Williams (14:57) Yeah.
Yep.
Yeah.
Paul Letourneau (15:17) And then just, I mean, the team in general has just been incredibly open to other feedback, which has been really fun and just sending in like, hey, it’d be really nice if we could have auto login, right? Click on the WordPress icon, automatically logs us in. Man, I could probably save myself a lot of other pieces of software and money every month if I just had that one piece. So it’s cool to, you know, I’m still a user of it, but to at least be able to have a bit of an ear to send that in as a user.
Roger Williams (15:37) Yeah, yeah.
Paul Letourneau (15:46) and improve the platform.
Roger Williams (15:47) awesome. Awesome. And just to kind of recap, you’re talking about the automatic plugin update feature that has visual regression testing. So people are aware of that. PHP memory, we have the ability now for adjusting the threads and the memory amount on a per site basis, which yeah, when we came out with that tool, was like, this is like people are going to eat this up. This is amazing. And then yeah, the feedback, right? We’re very open to receiving feedback, hearing how we can do better. I know that the one click
login thing is definitely on the roadmap, we’re getting there for you. So like, and that’s what’s really fun about building our own dashboard, right? We have that capability because it’s our dashboard. And and we can do kind of whatever we want with it. So man, that’s beautiful. I love hearing all that feedback. And thank you for sharing it. As we’re moving forward, it’s 2025 AI is everywhere. It’s what we’re all talking about. There’s a lot of hype.
But there’s also a lot of practical use. I use it every single day, but it doesn’t do my job for me. How are you guys approaching AI internally and also when you’re talking with your customers?
Paul Letourneau (16:58) Yeah, I we’re very transparent that we’re using it. First off, mean, it’s in, you know, every client that we talk to knows that we’re using it, knows how we’re using it. You know, we set limits on what we upload, what we don’t upload with them at the very beginning. So, but it’s a tool. I mean, it’s incredibly helpful. I was down at South by Southwest with a good friend of mine from MultiDots and ⁓ he was…
Roger Williams (17:10) Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Paul Letourneau (17:21) We were in this presentation and they were talking about how AI is not meant to replace you, it’s meant to enhance you. And that’s really what we’ve done with our team. And so, you know, our team shares all the new AI stuff that they’re diving into, that they’re using, we fully encourage it. We do use it for everything from copywriting. I mean, you need to really work with it to make sure it doesn’t have a dash in every single sentence. You know, like little stuff that everybody knows about, right?
Roger Williams (17:39) Sure.
Sure, yeah.
Paul Letourneau (17:45) But it helps with design and layout and a good practice that we often do is we’re just gonna copy and paste the entire website into a chat, into like perplexity or chat GPT, whatever you want, and just have it give us a really good understanding of what the client is, who the client is, what they’re all about, what’s on their website. We’ll pair that with the notes from our meeting and it’ll actually show us gaps in what the client has on their website and what they don’t. Or you can do that with competitors.
We’ll use it for a ton of different ways.
Roger Williams (18:15) Sure, sure. No, I love it. And I think, you know, there’s this, this hype cycle, right, that happens with all these technologies. And it, you know, AI is definitely victim of this, but there’s so many practical uses, but you still have to work with it. It’s not just an easy button, click and boom, everything takes off.
Paul, this has been a fantastic discussion. really appreciate your time. I try and keep things short here. What, if people want to get in touch with you, if they want to work with you or just talk with you, what are the best ways for them to reach out?
Paul Letourneau (18:47) Yeah, best way is just our website, yegdigital.com. I’m also on X, trying to get more active on it, so it’s just Paul Letourneau. But yeah, or LinkedIn, whatever the case is, just look me up.
Roger Williams (18:59) Wonderful, Paul. I appreciate the time. I look forward to speaking with you again soon, man. Have a great day.
Paul Letourneau (19:05) Yeah, you too, Roger. Thanks.
In this episode of Kinsta Talks, I had the pleasure of speaking with Laurent, co-founder of Holycode, a dev agency that’s grown from a side hustle into a 400+ person operation.
But it didn’t start in a boardroom.
Laurent’s first step? Starbucks. Then telesales. Then a detour through banking. Only after the 2008 crisis did he fully dive into the startup world, and never looked back. He shared how chaos, speed, and experimentation pulled him into the ecosystem and how that led to Holycode’s “tech tunnel” of services, spanning from no-code to ERP systems to AI development.
Speaking of AI… Laurent pulls no punches.
“80% of what clients call AI is just decision trees with lipstick.”
That line stuck with me. Because it’s true. We’ve all seen the buzzword bingo. But Laurent isn’t anti-AI, he’s just realistic. He talks openly about what’s working (agent AI for efficiency) and what’s already outdated (overly-hyped chatbots that link to docs nobody wants).
We also nerded out on ERP and open source. Holycode prefers Odoo and Business Central, depending on client needs; and his insights into plugin quality and software choices definitely resonated with my WordPress brain.
This one’s packed with wisdom, laughs, and a few caffeine-related scars.
What’s your take on “real” AI vs. AI-hype? Ever built something that was obsolete six months later?
Full Transcript
Laurent (00:00) When it comes to AI, I mean, everybody, every client you’re talking to is coming up and saying, okay, can we do this? But can we do it with AI?
I’d say 80 % of the cases, it’s actually not AI that they need. It’s just decision trees or logic that they want to have implemented and then you slap the AI logo on it, they go to corporate and they say, yeah, we did AI and they’re fine. So in 80 % of the cases, that’s still the case, but I think that’s going to shift fairly quickly.
A year back it was all about implementing chat bots and helping us be more efficient with that. Now it’s all about agent AI. You also know it’s the buzzword everyone’s talking about, So they all want certain AI agents that do a job for you that make things more effective or efficient. And there’s awesome things you can build with it.
The main problem we see is you build it six months later, it’s out of date. That’s really the crazy part about it in this current trend or AI wave where everything is getting better at a massive rate.
Roger Williams (00:53) Hey everybody, it’s Roger with Kinsta. I’m joined today by a new friend, Laurent. Hey Laurent, how are you?
Laurent (00:58) Awesome, thank you very much for having me.
Roger Williams (01:00) Yeah, absolutely. It’s exciting to talk with you and kind of get more of your perspective on open source and kind of the business around everything. But before we dive too deep into stuff, I’d love to learn more about your story and kind of how you got into digital marketing. You know, did you go to school for this? What, what, how did Lauren happen?
Laurent (01:22) That’s a good question. I did, I would say the classical way. started business in economics, then started working as a barista at Starbucks, worked my way up as a telesales, selling health insurances over the phone for three years, then joined UBS, Swiss bank, a global bank in the interbank marketing. And that’s sort of where the marketing area came into play. But then financial crisis hit 08, 09, I got fired.
And that was basically the start of my startup career. So I then joined a Groupon clone in Europe that was growing massively fast. I was responsible for the e-commerce strategy, the whole internet shebang basically back then. So learning how to do that. The company was sold. I had a burnout. Then after the burnout decided to try it again, founded another company called Movil, which was a digital moving platform for relocations. Sold that to an insurance company in 2007.
at 17, then became the CEO of an ERP company for a couple of years and since 2022 I’m the co-founder of Holycode, software agency developing for startups and scale-ups across the globe, 400 employees by now, really deep into the tech tunnel.
Roger Williams (02:37) Wow, okay, all right, lots to unpack here. you know, going back just for a quick second, what was the most annoying order at Starbucks?
Laurent (02:44) Well that’s a very good question. I never liked Frappuccinos because they take a lot of ingredients, you mix it, if you don’t put the lid on properly the stuff just explodes and goes everywhere and then everyone has this know this special but please put this in and not that so Frappuccinos were really the thing I hated the most. Everything else is cool.
Roger Williams (03:01) I love it, yeah. I’m always shocked at some people’s orders. I’m like, wait, are you getting a coffee or a milkshake? Like, what’s happening here? So that’s great. ⁓
Laurent (03:10) The more sugar the better.
Roger Williams (03:11) I love it. All right, so fast forwarding a little bit, you had some fun trying out different businesses, telesales, hey, been there, done that. And then you had a little bit of a financial crisis and then you come through and you got into the startup culture. How did you get into startup culture? How did that happen?
Laurent (03:29) Well, my girlfriend at the time was working for a startup and when I got laid off at UBS, I was thinking what to do next. My goal was always to be in a big corporate career and kind of getting fired after my first year in my sort of dream banking job made me rethink what I’m doing, right? And she just told me, look,
You’re this naive, positive, energetic guy. think you’re much better off in a startup environment. So come join it and test it out. So I went there, I had a test day at the company. They liked me. liked them. And that’s sort of how it sucked me into it. There’s just, you know, this everything is chaotic, has to grow quickly. This vibe of getting things done, even if it’s really difficult, you don’t know what you’re doing. It just sucked me in and I never came back out of it.
Roger Williams (04:13) That’s great. I love it. have the same experience. And I think maybe some of my ADHD brain, it just fits better with that. Like I love having new projects and just trying new stuff. It sounds like now though, you’re quite established and you’ve kind of become the corporate that you left behind. Can you walk me through kind of how you built this into what it is?
Laurent (04:38) I mean, yeah, sure, Holy Code now with more than 400 employees is quite big, I’d say. I don’t think we’re corporate yet at this point for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s six different entities that work within Holy Code. So we’re trying to keep the groups relatively small so that they’re more agile and they’re more like…
Roger Williams (04:46) Okay.
Laurent (05:00) I don’t like to say family, but let’s say like a sports team. Everyone knows still who they’re working with and what the strengths and weaknesses are of everybody else. So that’s one of the ways that we try to keep it nimble and agile.
And then, mean, how did we get here? We started it 10 years ago as a side hustle. We founded another startup in between that we sold successfully. Then I did a CEO job for a couple of years until we saw that the company that we worked over lunch and that night and on the weekends became big enough that it could actually absorb us joining the company and really starting to push for it. So it was more of a very slow cooking meal on the side, basically.
Roger Williams (05:38) Okay, all right. So when you got started and you were taking on these projects, what was kind of your ideal customer profile and how did that evolve over time to really become something more sustainable?
Laurent (05:49) In the beginning it was really the…
The ICP, the ideal customer profile was basically startup friends that also wanted to build a tech team in Eastern Europe, right? That’s how it started. That’s how it grew to hundred something people. And then after five years, we said, let’s do more. So we set the vision to say from the idea to the IPO, we want to cover all technological services in one company, whether you need it or not, that’s up to you, but we’re going to offer everything in one place. And that’s really where we took the next step and started saying, okay, what does that I mean, so we then started an ERP company implementing ERP systems because investors after series AP, they’re like, you’re excellent reporting. It just doesn’t work. Come on, give us something more meaningful and more reliable. So that’s one thing we started. Then we started a software agency to build faster MVPs. We started the no-code team to build proof of concepts very early on. started an AI team, obviously like everybody in the world right now. Yeah, so we kept building all the teams.
to just make sure we can cover all the areas around that, also CRM, DevOps, all these areas. So yeah, we’re inching towards our mission and our vision, but we’re not there yet.
Roger Williams (06:57) Okay, all right, I dig it. So kind of backing into the ERP side of the discussion, I have very little experience at the large corporate level where ERP systems are just rampant. How do you get a foothold into that? When I think ERP, think like SAP and these massive software projects, are those kind of the projects that you’re interfacing with or is this like a smaller, more independent ERP systems?
Laurent (07:20) Honestly, that’s usually too big for us because as you say, those are massive, right? So if you want to do an Oracle SAP kind of ERP project, you need to be huge to absorb that. So what we do is smaller integration system, integration topics into SAP, for example. Yes, that’s what we do. But we focus on Microsoft Business Central and Odoo. Microsoft Business Central is obviously for Microsoft, is more for the SMEs kind of size of companies and Odoo as well, but Odoo is open source,
has its own benefits. So those are the two things that we’re trying to really focus on currently.
Roger Williams (07:53) OK, excellent. So that’s a perfect kind of lead in to talking about open source. Do you have a preference for working with open source, or you’re pretty agnostic when it comes to the type of software you’re working with?
Laurent (08:04) I’m very agnostic.
doesn’t really matter to me in the end what matters to me is the quality of software that you’re getting and that you can use towards the client. What I love about the open source Odoo part is there’s just a solution for everything around it. For everything that someone builds something, the difficult part is knowing whether qualitatively it’s good enough. That’s where I think in certain areas, it’s not in the core, but as further out you go with such a solution, the more you have to watch out that if you were going to use that for yourself or a client and then it
to do with the ERP system which is your financial area as well, you’ve got to be really careful what you’re using and what you’re not using. Where if you use Microsoft BC for example, everything that’s there is tested, approved and fine. So it’s much more rigid, it has less topics around it, but the quality is definitely there. So both of them have advantages and disadvantages and I think it really comes down to what the customer is looking for.
Roger Williams (08:58) Absolutely. this so that this parallels perfectly with the WordPress world, right? So in WordPress, we’ve got WordPress core, which is very solid. You know, the security is there, the performance is there. But with WordPress, anybody can come in and build a plugin. And so you have to evaluate, hey, is this plugin going to be effective? Is it secure? So everything you’re talking about there, and a lot of times, you know, lot of the agencies that we work with just build their own plugin for their client.
and then they know for certain that it’s going to be quality and good. You mentioned AI. I have to jump onto the AI at least a little bit, right? I mean, I use AI almost constantly throughout the day. How are you approaching AI with your clients at this point?
Laurent (09:41) Sure, so let me just quickly jump back to what you said before because just lately we had a client that came to us and said our WordPress page is really messed up. They built it with, not going to say the country because I don’t want to blame anyone, with an agency from a different place. And then we looked at it and they had 150 plugins implemented into their page. We’re like…
What is this? mean, how are you going to run this? Who is checking the security on this thing? Like you can thrash it and start over, right? So that was the craziest experience I’ve had when looking at a WordPress page so far, just as a short anecdote. When it comes to AI, I mean, everybody, every client you’re talking to is coming up and saying, okay, can we do this? But can we do it with AI?
I’d say 80 % of the cases, it’s actually not AI that they need. It’s just decision trees or logic that they want to have implemented and then you slap the AI logo on it, they go to corporate and they say, yeah, we did AI and they’re fine. So in 80 % of the cases, that’s still the case, but I think that’s going to shift fairly quickly.
A year back it was all about implementing chat bots and helping us be more efficient with that. Now it’s all about agent AI. You also know it’s the buzzword everyone’s talking about, So they all want certain AI agents that do a job for you that make things more effective or efficient. And there’s awesome things you can build with it.
The main problem we see is you build it six months later, it’s out of date. That’s really the crazy part about it in this current trend or AI wave where everything is getting better at a massive rate.
Roger Williams (11:17) Yeah, no, absolutely. And so it’s interesting kind of backing up there about the chat bots. So we just did a survey recently, just asking regular consumers about their experience with AI chat bots. And it’s like over 90 % of people are like, no, I can’t stand these things. And because it’s very obvious, right? I mean, it’s almost immediate that they’re reflecting to documentation and the responses are obviously, you know,
They’re not creating something new. They’re just regurgitating what’s already been written. Have you had any clients kind of roll back from implementing chat bots?
Laurent (11:52) I think so, but I would have to check with the team because usually once it’s implemented it’s with the success team and not with me. But I think we’ve had a couple of them that afterwards said it didn’t bring the gains that they expected. I know for one that implemented it on the website and I think it was just a conversion killer. So they rolled it back, but for the rest of them I actually don’t know, but I think so.
Roger Williams (12:14) Sure, sure,
yeah, no, it’s really interesting.
Laurent (12:15) Because as you say, think
you can feel it. You can feel if you’re talking to human or not. It’s not that hard to figure out usually.
Roger Williams (12:23) Absolutely. And you know, and the point that I always make to people asking, Hey, should I use AI chat is, you know, when when people are coming into support, they’ve already exhausted all of their options, right? They’ve probably checked the documentation, they might not have read it, but they’ve checked. And so they’re trying to get like a unique response for their problem. And so I think it’s important to balance those things as a good
Laurent (12:48) I mean, of the easy
things that we learned very early on is…
Do not let the chatbot go back to documentation. That pisses off people. So if you just take this out and say no links, not linking them back to any documentation or tutorials or whatever, but really just copying the response into the response that you’re giving them, already a massive improvement for the people. So that was a relatively easy one that we learned on early on, but it doesn’t really solve the whole case.
Roger Williams (13:12) Okay.
like that. And I think that that that, you know, as people are asking, hey, how should we implement this stuff, I think that that is a really interesting thing to put in there is, you know, don’t link to documentation, you know, be, be proactive, be, you know, the words are failing me right now. But you know, think through these things a lot better, like talk, think through how your customers working.
Lauren, I really enjoyed this. We’re coming close to our time, but before we jump off, is there anything in the next six to 12 months that has you really excited about the software business?
Laurent (13:50) Absolutely, and all the buzzwords.
I really want to see what happens with the whole vibe coding topic. There’s so much heat and energy in this area. know people that are vibe coding all the time. And for us as a software agency, this can be a curse or a blessing both at once. we don’t know. Ask me tomorrow morning, it might be terrifying. Ask me the day after, I might be fantastically excited. But I think there’s a lot going to happen in the software coding industry with AI in the next six to 12 months.
Roger Williams (13:56) Okay.
Laurent (14:18) this talk again in 12 months I might be crying I might be I might be partying I don’t know we’ll have to wait and see what happens
Roger Williams (14:26) Awesome, awesome. Laura, this has been really great. I’ve really enjoyed our time. I hope that we speak together within the next 12 months. If people want to reach out to you or to Holy Code, what is the best way for them to get in touch?
Laurent (14:39) The best way is to go to holycode.com and just post as a message or find my LinkedIn profile and write to me a direct message. Those are the two ways.
Roger Williams (14:48) Awesome, Lauren, I really appreciate your time and I look forward to speaking with you again soon.
There’s something deeply reassuring about hearing a seasoned contributor say, “I had no idea what I was doing.”
That’s how my conversation with Olga Gleckler began. What followed was an honest, funny, and moving conversation about her path from hardware student to software developer—and eventually, to an outspoken advocate for contributor mentorship in WordPress.
“I started writing my own CMS… because I didn’t know better. WordPress was like a revelation.”
Olga shared how a frustrating job, a broken website, and a bit of curiosity led her down the WordPress path. From her early days reverse-engineering PHP to the moment she discovered the WordPress community through WordCamp Nordic, her journey is anything but linear.
We talked about what drew her to WordPress (spoiler: it’s hooks and flexibility), her love-hate relationship with Gutenberg (she’s now fully onboard), and the future of WordPress contribution. Her biggest mission now? Making contribution more accessible for newcomers:
“You don’t want to do work that no one needs. You need support. But you also need to ask. That’s why mentorship matters.”
Olga believes mentorship shouldn’t be a limited-run program, but a permanent and accessible part of the contributor ecosystem. And I couldn’t agree more.
If you care about the future of WordPress, this is an interview you shouldn’t miss.
👉 Want to connect with Olga? You’ll find her in Make WordPress Slack or on Twitter: @olgagleckler
Full Transcript
Roger Williams (00:00) When did you start getting involved with that and start contributing back to the project?
Olga Gleckler (00:04) Firstly, I had no idea about any community that exists, but when my boss started to switch to this system, I was sure that it’s like a mistake. I started to look around for support group. I needed some people who understand me and found out my local community, my local meetup. I am very grateful that people was doing this thing. And then I started to look for more events and
I was lucky again because it was WordCamp Nordic. In 2019, in February, I went there. It was quick, cheap for me and I was so excited. This event opened a whole new world for me. So first thing I did when I went back from Helsinki to St. Petersburg, I bought a ticket to Berlin. And from Berlin, I started to contribute to marketing. I was so excited and I…
Roger Williams (00:33) Okay.
Olga Gleckler (00:55) had a great time in marketing team and big thank you to Abatako who mentored me and pushed me forward and convinced me that I actually can do things.
Roger Williams (01:05) Hey y’all, it’s Roger with Kinsta. I’m joined today by a new friend, Olga. Hey, Olga, how are you?
Olga Gleckler (01:11) Nice, thank you. Great to see you.
Roger Williams (01:13) Yeah, it’s great to see you too. We ran into each other for the first time at WordCamp EU earlier this year and had a lovely conversation about all things WordPress. And so I’m really excited to get you on this show because I want to learn more about not only what you’re working on currently and in the future, but also learn like more about how you got into development and how you got into WordPress code. So take us back a little bit. How did you get into becoming a developer?
Olga Gleckler (01:39) You know, when I finished my education at school, I was thinking logically. I had no idea what I want to do, but future is sure is with computers, right? So you have to do something with computers. And I decided to be a programmer, but I messed up a bit and turned out that I was studying hardware instead of software.
Anyway, I landed a job in a software company just updating system at clients. It’s like closest thing to software I was able to land the job on. And then I think I wanted to become a programmer, but I was like, I had no idea how to start. And then I had some lousy job, but…
Roger Williams (02:11) Okay.
Olga Gleckler (02:25) My boss had a site that needs to be maintained and he had a row with the developer actually. So I took it to maintaining and I started to decipher how it’s working. I understood this and since this I started like, like normally it turns out that I can do these things. And, but I, I was not like very bold to apply for a job.
as a developer. So it was a couple of more years before I actually started a job as a developer. So you need to take a carriage.
Roger Williams (03:00) Yeah, no, absolutely. So with that first website, how was that being built? Was that just raw HTML or was there a system to
Olga Gleckler (03:08) It was custom made system by this developer, but I read the code on PHP. I understood this. I started to write my own content management systems. Yeah. So I took a way to these things because I had no idea how things should be done. So I had only one working example, but I was lucky to have this. And actually I started to write my own things.
Roger Williams (03:18) Ha ha ha.
No,
Okay. At what point did WordPress kind of enter the scene for you?
Olga Gleckler (03:39) Of course, when I started to develop sites, people started asking me to help with something that already exists. And I started to came across WordPress. Sometimes, for example, a developer made a mistake in infinite loop in its theme. And I had no idea what is the whole thing is about. It took me like two whole days, the whole weekend to find this loop.
But I solved the problem and it was the key.
Roger Williams (04:08) Okay, absolutely. When did it kind of click like, wow, this WordPress is much easier than just rolling my own content management system?
Olga Gleckler (04:18) I think it clicked very quickly, but I didn’t, was able to, like figure out which system is the best one. I was working with another one and with a couple more systems, but then I, of course, I landed a job in fashion company and I had a site to maintain and develop further. But then my boss decided to, that he needs a like cool new look.
Roger Williams (04:26) Okay.
Olga Gleckler (04:44) And I was unable to produce cool look. I can produce like normal functional look, not cool one. So, and he found an agency and they’ve sold him another system I’ve already working with and had no great experience with this one. But they sold this system to my boss and I was like in shock because I was feeling that we are making a mistake, but I had like no voice. No…
nothing against this decision. It was like right feelings because it took like two years, a lot of money, a lot of stress for everyone and both blaming me as a result that I didn’t tell him that it is a mistake. Yeah, so…
Roger Williams (05:30) Yeah.
Olga Gleckler (05:33) At this point I’ve already understood that WordPress is the best choice and decided to stood with WordPress. So we built this horrible thing and I went then they asked me to return back and I supported them One year and a half more Yeah, and finally finally when I landed full-time cool job. I Told them no, I cannot support you anymore for years
Roger Williams (05:55) Oof. ⁓
Olga Gleckler (05:58) and
it took them four years more to rebuild it with another system. Yeah, people stumble on the same rake again.
Roger Williams (06:03) jeez.
Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, so you started, now you’re like, okay, WordPress is kind of what I want to work with. Was there any like specific features about WordPress that made you initially go, yeah, this is the one to work
Olga Gleckler (06:20) I think hooks because I can figure out how to do things on my way. Like if I need to change some things, I can do this and I’m sure that I can do this and all plugins like reliable plugins offer hooks as well. So you know that some things can be done. You just need to figure out how to find right hooks, et cetera. And for example, REST API as well.
you can easily extend it by your own endpoint and do whatever you want. It’s easy. And if things are looking hard with WordPress, most likely you are doing them the wrong way. So it is easy. Everything is easy. Apart possibly from good at work. Let’s take a bit.
Roger Williams (07:06) Okay. Okay.
All right. So are you sold on Gutenberg or is it kind of still iffy for you?
Olga Gleckler (07:14) No, I’m doing blogs, I’m working with blogs right now all the time, but it took me like a month to figure out how things are working. It was like next big challenge. Right now I’m quite comfortable and quite happy because yet again I can do whatever I want. editors are happy when I’m presenting you like new feature. Of course, my manager is presenting new feature.
Roger Williams (07:26) Gotcha, gotcha.
Olga Gleckler (07:40) getting all the excitement from editors and I’m just getting a response that it’s working great.
Roger Williams (07:49) Alright, alright. Okay, so at what point, so you’re working, you’re designing, you’re building with WordPress, at what point did you realize, hey, there’s this whole other side of WordPress, the open source project. When did you start getting involved with that and start contributing back to the project?
Olga Gleckler (08:07) Firstly, I had no idea about any community that exists, but when my boss started to switch to this system, I was sure that it’s like a mistake. I started to look around for support group. I needed some people who understand me and found out my local community, my local meetup. I am very grateful that people was doing this thing. And then I started to look for more events and
I was lucky again because it was WordCamp Nordic. In 2019, in February, I went there. It was quick, cheap for me and I was so excited. This event opened a whole new world for me. So first thing I did when I went back from Helsinki to St. Petersburg, I bought a ticket to Berlin. And from Berlin, I started to contribute to marketing. I was so excited and I…
Roger Williams (08:38) Okay.
Olga Gleckler (09:02) had a great time in marketing team and big thank you to Abatako who mentored me and pushed me forward and convinced me that I actually can do things.
Roger Williams (09:12) Excellent. So, would you say that the in-person events for WordPress are really what pushed you even more into the community?
Olga Gleckler (09:21) Yeah, to feel you like part of a community. But of course we had great time online in the marketing team and right now we still have this great time, but WordCamps is the things you should not miss.
Roger Williams (09:35) Absolutely. Okay, so today you’re involved with testing and some different things. What are you currently working on and what are you looking forward to work on when it comes to the open source project?
Olga Gleckler (09:49) Right now I am a representative of the test team, but my term is going to the end. We will have new people. And right now I’m looking forward to support new contributors in WordCamp Asia as part of the organizing team. And I’m thinking about things I can do in community, investigate a bit more. But of course I’m very interested in continue to support new contributors because…
This is the future and helping people is what motivates me. think this is very important. Providing an ability for people to learn to help them grow.
Roger Williams (10:26) Absolutely, the mentor side of the WordPress project to me is always the most impressive part of it. Because with open source, right, the whole idea is this community and getting people in and working on the project. It seems like right now one of the issues that I keep seeing is that the contributors to WordPress are aging out a little bit. Like I’ve got gray hairs in my beard here if you can see, but…
Olga Gleckler (10:51) you
Roger Williams (10:52) What is your take on how do we get younger people more interested in WordPress?
Olga Gleckler (10:58) You know, think Gutenberg is one thing because we need new cool look inside and outside. And of course, we have a new initiative to bring aboard more students like Campus Connect, but we need a system because right now what we have like an issue is that people are contributing like, for example, a patch. And then this patch…
Roger Williams (11:04) Okay.
Yes.
Olga Gleckler (11:23) No one is bothering about this patch. We need establish a flow. Some people to review this, some people to push this forward and make it consistent and provide help to new contributors for them to stay and get comfortable. So I think this is like a big work needs to be done. So it’s not about making patches, it’s about the system itself.
Roger Williams (11:46) Okay, all right, so maybe digging into that a little bit more, and I’m not a developer here, so many things will go over my head quickly, but my understanding is the easiest way for people to get involved is doing like a bug scrub type of thing, right? And start looking at tickets and seeing how they can fix things. But what you’re really talking about is actually adding code and contributing patches and contributing improvements to it.
What about the current program do you feel makes it more difficult for new people to get involved?
Olga Gleckler (12:18) everything and you’re not sure how to start and there is like even if you are looking for like good first bucks it not exactly
It’s not exactly 100 % guarantee that they are actually easy things. Someone decided that they are easy, but it’s someone else’s opinion as well. And we have a lot of tickets to look forward. So right now what we are offering people in test team is to specialize on one component. Take small thing.
look through the whole tickets, find some patterns, find some connections, understand the whole system before you actually will be doing something. And of course, you should ask if you have doubts, people with more experience, because you don’t want to do some job that no one needs actually. So
You need help, but sometimes you need to ask for this help and be open to communication and to interaction with people. Because if you are staying calm and just get lost, you are stuck. So you need to collaborate with people, ask questions.
And this is what we need to offer to people, make more easier for them because some people are shy. No one wants to look stupid or something. Like, I don’t know, things. Yeah, because we have like complicated things. We have a lot of tickets, more than 8,000 only in core and we have Gutenberg as well. So a lot of things to do. So we need some people who will be guiding new contributors, who helping, who reviewing and make it consistent. Yeah, it’s…
for me it’s like a dream I want this to be happening
Roger Williams (14:00) Okay, all right, so there is already a mentorship program for people to get involved with. Do you think that that’s going on the right track?
Olga Gleckler (14:09) We had several contributor manager programs, but right now we don’t have active program. So it was like three times we did this. So I think we need this on consistent base. So if I want to be taught, if I need a mentor, I’m raising hand and waiting until I will get a or something.
Roger Williams (14:16) Okay
Olga Gleckler (14:33) make some kind of group of people and mentors with them, like working in a group, something like this. So I think we should have this more consistent and like all the time.
Roger Williams (14:47) Okay, you think, you know, one of the things that came across to me when I was looking at the mentorship program is it seemed very organized, but at the same time, maybe too organized. And what I mean by that is it was very regiment. You had a certain number of people that could apply and be a part of it. And from talking with you right now, it seems like maybe we just have a channel.
in make slack that’s for mentoring, you for people that are looking for mentors and they just they go in there and they say, hey, I could use some help with this. Does somebody want to help me understand something like this? Is that kind of what you’re proposing here?
Olga Gleckler (15:26) I think we need some kind of things in between because people are asking questions about it’s like one time and sometimes they got an answer, sometimes don’t because it’s just lost in the process of a lot of questions and everything in the channels. So I think we need people who will raise their hands to be mentors like all the time or part-time. For example, I can mentor people like two hours a week.
Roger Williams (15:52) Okay.
Olga Gleckler (15:53) And
I’m available on certain hours and I’m like taking, making session and everyone can come and ask questions or something like this. And people are really value life interaction. Somehow it’s working better than writing things down. I don’t know why, but yeah, it’s like it is.
Roger Williams (16:11) Yeah, absolutely. And I wonder if there’s an opportunity, maybe with the contributor days at different word camps to have a whole section of it of like the mentorship part of the contributor day. Do you see that potentially as being helpful or is there already kind of an aspect of this in contributor days?
Olga Gleckler (16:30) We have to think about this. Right now with WordCamp Asia, we are thinking about raising more table leads inside the community to have a lot of support for new contributors. So possibly we can combine this initiative with Contributor Mentorship Program and make some kind of consistent income of…
people with experience. Something to grow people from new contributors to experienced contributors to table leads to team representatives, etc. So we need to grow them in more, more, more, bunches. And I have no idea what is the right word about two bunches. Anyway.
Roger Williams (16:55) Okay.
No, absolutely. I
think what you’re saying is we really need to establish a more consistent mentorship program so that people can sign up as mentors easily and then people can be mentees easily. And maybe the existing program is maybe just a little too regiment, but we need to have some sort of organization to really make it work. So.
It’s fascinating. I love seeing your passion and excitement for the project and your enthusiasm. WordCamp Asia, sounds like, is going to be the next big WordCamp event for you. Is there anything else coming up that you want to mention?
Olga Gleckler (17:46) I have two PHP conferences.
this autumn, so I am preparing in Russia, so I am preparing for them. I am campaigning for WordPress inside Russia because you know, you need to go outside of WordPress bubble, our safe zone. So you need to go to PHP community to show them how WordPress is working, to make them understand. At one conference, I am a backup speaker. On the second conference, I am like normal speaker and I will be talking about.
Roger Williams (18:01) Hmm. Yes.
Olga Gleckler (18:16) So I think it’s quite important for people to understand these things.
Roger Williams (18:20) Excellent, excellent. We’ll share the link, we’ll get the link shared with all of those so that people know where to go. And I like the idea of getting outside of the WordPress bubble. You mentioned PHP. Do you think it’s also beneficial to get into like the JavaScript groups because of all of the React and stuff in Gutenberg now?
Olga Gleckler (18:37) I applied to a conference that called Frontend and they decided that Gutenberg is not so much of a frontend. I was trying to explain that this is still a frontend, but I’ll try again.
Roger Williams (18:48) Okay, all right. So maybe that’s where the rest of the community can also start working is really reaching out to the JavaScript community more and see if we can get something there. Olga, it’s great to talk to you. Thank you so much for the insights into how you got into WordPress and your thoughts about contributing and mentorship. If people want to get in touch with you, what is the best way for them to reach out?
Olga Gleckler (19:08) I think in Slack, it makes WordPress Slack. But of course, if you don’t have WordPress Slack or if you have some issues with it, I am on Twitter as well. So you can easily find me.
Roger Williams (19:17) Okay?
Fantastic, fantastic. Olga, it’s great to talk to you. I look forward to seeing you again soon in person and hopefully have you back on here to talk more about WordPress in the future.
Olga Gleckler (19:30) Thank you very much, it’s so exciting. My pleasure.
If you’d told me a few years ago that one of the most successful figures in the WordPress LMS space would be a former sled dog guide from Alaska… I’d believe you. Because that’s the beauty of the internet—and the power of owning your knowledge.
In this Kinsta Talk, I sat down with Chris Badgett, CEO of LifterLMS, to unpack how a background in anthropology and a deep love for people turned into a thriving tech business.
Chris shared the 3 + 1 traits he’s observed in the most successful online course creators:
They’re already monetizing their niche.
They genuinely care about helping others succeed.
They’ve built some technical fluency over time.
(Bonus) They take forward imperfect action—no perfection paralysis allowed.
We also talked about ethical sales, dogfooding your own platform, and how anthropology informs great marketing.
Want to launch your own course? Start with LifterLMS and host it with Kinsta.
Full Transcript
Roger Williams (00:00) who are the people that you see that have the most success setting up an online course
Chris Badgett (00:06) Well, first, I believe there’s a course inside all of us. Like part of my job is just to, you know, help unlock, remove bottlenecks and help people do it. Like I’m sure you, Roger, could teach on a lot of different topics, but the people that are the most successful pattern recognition is something that happens when you spend a lot of time in a niche. I’ve been in this niche for 20 years and
I’ve seen a lot of success. I’ve seen a lot of failure. I’ve seen some modest wins, some decent wins, and the people that really do well. I actually identified three factors that the most successful people always have in common.
Roger Williams (00:42) Hey everybody, it’s Roger with Kinsta. I’m joined today by a new friend, Chris. Hey Chris, how are you doing?
Chris Badgett (00:48) Good, thanks for having me, Roger.
Roger Williams (00:50) Yeah, man, it’s great to have you here. We met at PressConf this year. I think you were coming back from a hike. I was going out or something anyway. And we hit it off really well, I thought. I didn’t hear really your background story and what got you into WordPress and then Lifter LMS. So can you kind of start us off there? How did you get into doing websites and the web in general?
Chris Badgett (01:14) Well, I’m an unlikely person to end up here. And what I mean by that is I studied anthropology and philosophy in college. I moved into the back of my car and traveled around the country in Canada and did a bunch of rock climbing and mountaineering and long distance hiking. I’m a big outdoor guy. It’s no surprise to me that I met you on a hike. that’s what keeps me sane. But to condense the story,
Roger Williams (01:21) Yeah.
Chris Badgett (01:39) I moved to Alaska, spent a decade up there running sled dogs. And then after the birth of my first daughter, I decided to, you know, try to figure out this location independent work online thing. And while I was in Alaska, I started my first website. I learned how to use WordPress following YouTube videos.
And I created a blog about outdoor leadership. So I managed a sled dog tour business on a glacier that you can only get to by helicopter. We had a couple hundred dogs up there and I ended up, I started as a guide, but I ended up becoming a manager for the operation, which is, and I just discovered that I liked management. liked leadership and I was passionate about it and I wanted to write about it. that’s, that got me into WordPress.
And then as I left that world in Alaska, I started building sites for clients and I started teaching how to build sites on with WordPress and YouTube. And my clients just came from watching my videos like, Hey, tutorial is awesome. Can I just hire you to build a website? I also started side hustling and
I fell in love with information products and coaching and stuff. This is way back in like 2008, early days, 2010 period. So I made my first courses in the organic gardening and permaculture niche. My wife’s more expert in that area and we ended up partnering with the top permaculture book writing authors around the world. I would drive, fly.
Roger Williams (03:04) Peace.
Chris Badgett (03:14) or hire somebody to go film these in-person workshops. And I was like digitizing it, doing these business partnerships with these experts. And that launched my course creation journey. You know, one of those took me all the way to Costa Rica. I was in the jungle and just filming a permaculture design workshop with one of the top guys in the world. And it just kind of snowballed. And again, I started writing about it on my web design blog. And then people started hitting me up.
Like, how’d you build an online course with WordPress? And I just did it with a theme off of ThemeFar’s that had some basic course functionality. So long story short, I started getting a lot of clients in the online course, LMS space. There wasn’t a good tool to, you know, combine everything we needed to do without stringing together a bunch of different plugins and stuff. And that was the birth of Lifter LMS.
Roger Williams (04:10) Okay, awesome. All right, so much to unpack here. We’re gonna dive deep into this. Anthropology, that is not a major that you hear often, except where I live in Four Corners, Colorado, we have Mesa Verde, and it is like a magnet for anthropology people. What took you into that as a course option?
Chris Badgett (04:33) Um, so I’m a big picture thinker and I like looking at macro. So I’m a cultural anthropologist, you know, and I like, you know, I went to the Himalaya. I lived in Nepal when I was in college and got deep into, you know, some of the different cultures over there. I did. I went on a archaeology field trip to Mesa Verde, Four Corners area, Chaco Canyon, Canyon de Chey and all this stuff.
Roger Williams (04:52) Sure.
Yeah.
Chris Badgett (05:03) So cultures of the past, cultures of the present, where are we going in the future? What is technology’s place? Tools have always been a part of humanity. These are questions that I get excited about. And I’ve always been that kind of guy and a pro tip out there and kind of an interesting character thing. I kind of became a natural at marketing and sales.
Roger Williams (05:15) Yeah.
Chris Badgett (05:27) But I’m not like an aggressive guy that all the stuff, all my marketing and sales ability and even product design comes from my fascination with people and culture, social psychology. And that’s what allowed me to be like, hey, how does this climbing bum anthropologist get involved in tech and online business with no formal training? Well, it’s because I’ve been studying people. love people.
And that’s my skills kind of come from that background.
Roger Williams (05:56) Yeah, no, I mean, I really dig it. All right, so now we’re segueing into let’s talk about sales and marketing a little bit. I feel a kinship with you here. I’ve had sales positions where it’s been a requirement to be very aggressive. They’ve taught you all of these techniques for tricking people. And there are times where persuasion is needed. You need to close the deal. But I’ve always taken the approach of, hey, you know,
what do you need? Let me offer you something that you can actually benefit from. I’d love to hear more your philosophy about how you approach sales and marketing, whether it’s for Lyft or LMS or life in general.
Chris Badgett (06:35) Well, I mean, I see marketing and sales as two very different things. There is an overlap, but at a high level, you know, starting with marketing, I made a conscious decision when I started getting into the whole online business world to just be a human on the Internet and, you know, kind of inject my personal brand with just being me. I’m not manufacturing a character. You see me in a conference. I talk the same. I have the same shirt on, same hat.
I’m still fascinated about the same stuff, but, you know, putting the human into marketing, I think is really important. Like we always put like lots of faces on our website of real people, not stock photography. I’m constantly interviewing my customers on our podcast. I do, you know, just regular customer interviews. I’m like an in the trenches kind of guy. So like when it comes to like, Hey, what feature in the product do we build next? I know.
because I’ve been talking to these people for almost two decades and I’m one of them. you know, as a culture and as a subculture, one of the things that happens is we kind of quote, find the others. And that’s what happens at WordPress. It what happens in the course creator space or the coaching space. We’re in all these little subcultures, right? So if you want to get good at marketing, these are anthropology concepts. You got to learn the language, the lingo.
You have to know how tools are used here. What are the cultural artifacts in this community? Like you and I are podcasters, so I have fancy audio equipment. You got your headphones on. You know, we go to a conference, we wear our tech t-shirts and stuff. Like this is all part of the culture. And what I found when from a marketing angle, if I ask them, like, why’d you buy a Lyft or LMS? People will say, oh, well, I just felt like I could trust you guys.
I always want to hear, it’s the product, it’s amazing. But no, they always say, I just kind of want to do business with you folks. I like your style, which means your vibe attracts your tribe. So that’s marketing. And I can go into sales too, but do you want to jump in there?
Roger Williams (08:37) ⁓ nice.
Yeah,
no, think that’s great. I love the tribe and vibe. man, that’s that you got to be using that with all this vibe coding thing that’s going on. I think you’ve got a little meme you can jump in on there. I love it. Yeah, please expand on your approach to sales then.
Chris Badgett (08:55) So I’m a big learner. Like learning is really important to me. So I’ve read all the sales books. I mean, not all of them, but I’ve probably read hundreds of sales and marketing books and took courses. I understand the classic objection handling and future pacing and all the, you know, kind of techniques. But at the end of the day, what I found
And I also advise my customers all the time on sales and marketing, because it’s one thing to build a site, it’s another to sell your courses. And so they’re constantly asking questions. We’re big on community and stuff. But the biggest sales advice I have is really that sales gets really easy when you have an almost moral obligation to help people. So if you come from a place of service and you believe in your product,
Roger Williams (09:27) Yeah.
Chris Badgett (09:43) or your service, the first sales you make to yourself. So if you really truly believe in that, you’ve qualified the lead and this is the right person for this. Selling is just a conversation and a lot of it is actually education. And it’s a lot of listening and helping somebody achieve what they want to achieve. And if they’re a good fit, it’s all about just removing friction, greasing the skids, know, making an offer, being sensitive to
sensitive things like budget or, you know, concern or, you know, perceived risk and just stepping through all that in a non-aggressive way and the sales just come from that and then they tell their friends and word of mouth takes off.
Roger Williams (10:27) Absolutely. No, I love it. And I think you’re hitting on a key thing there was listen, right? It shocks me how often salespeople are not listening. The customer is going to tell you exactly how to close them, right? They’re going to give you everything you need. And if they’re not, right, if they’re not talking to you, then that’s not a good customer. That’s not a good prospect. Like you need to, you know, come back to them later or something or just move on. But
you know, listening and then responding to what they’re telling you and giving them what they’re looking for. I think you nailed it on the head. I absolutely dig it. Switching course again. Dog sledding. How did you get into dog sledding, man? That’s so awesome.
Chris Badgett (11:10) well, I was just being my travel around climbing bum living in the back of my Suzu trooper. And it’s really random. Actually, I ran into somebody who I who was on the same international studies program. I was in Nepal on the streets of Boulder, Colorado, and I was just camping up in the hills behind Boulder and I came down the town and I ran into my old friend and she asked if.
Roger Williams (11:28) Yeah.
Chris Badgett (11:36) You know, I wanted to come up to the mountains in Leadville and maybe live there. I was like, sure. And that’s the way I rolled back then. And so I moved in with them and I was trying to get a job as a snowmobile guide. And I never guided before. I mean, I’ve done a lot of stuff, but I’ve never been a guide. And then randomly some dude rolled up and was like, hey, I just bought a sled dog team from Idaho. Idaho. I have no idea what I’m doing. Do you want to be?
Roger Williams (11:43) you
Yeah.
Chris Badgett (12:04) one of our guides. I was like, sure. And that’s how it started. Long story short, I learned the basics of sled dogs in the mountains of Colorado, gave tours. And then at the end of that, I was actually trying to get into graduate school for a ethnographic filmmaking degree, which is like a specialty in anthropology, cultural anthropology. And they shut down the program. So I had to pivot.
Roger Williams (12:23) Whoa.
Okay.
Chris Badgett (12:31) So I just opened up a dog mushing magazine and there was a job ad for guiding in Alaska applied. And then I was on a plane in a couple of months. And then I fell in love with it up there and I stayed for a decade. And I did the guiding and managing that tour business. But my boss was the Iditarod sled dog racer. So in the winter, I would help him train for the Iditarod. And then, you know, I did some races myself and
I really learned from the best in the world, how to run sled dogs and understand dogs and do that. And I met my wife up there. That’s how I met my wife. There’s a saying in Alaska for women, the odds are good because it’s a more male population. The saying is the odds are good, but the goods are odd. And luckily,
Roger Williams (13:10) Yeah.
Yep.
Chris Badgett (13:24) You know, we hit it off and went on our own adventure and, you know, to this day, so.
Roger Williams (13:30) Yeah, man. That’s beautiful. That’s amazing. And I think, you know, maybe this is also tying in with maybe an ethos of like just showing up, right? And like being present and being ready for whatever life kind of throws at you. And you just don’t know where exactly it’s going to take you. You know, as we kind of get wrapping up here, because I like to keep these pretty short and sweet. Let’s talk about today, present day stuff, Lifter LMS. You know, it seems like
This is a great opportunity for people to be able to find alternate forms of income, find ways to really dive into something they know really, really well. In your experience, who are the people that you see that have the most success setting up an online course and really turning it into something that sustains itself?
Chris Badgett (14:18) We’re asking a guy who studies people. So I have this answer fully ready for you. Well, first, I believe there’s a course inside all of us. Like part of my job is just to, you know, help unlock, remove bottlenecks and help people do it. Like I’m sure you, Roger, could teach on a lot of different topics, but the people that are the most successful pattern recognition is something that happens when you spend a lot of time in a niche. I’ve been in this niche for 20 years and
Roger Williams (14:23) Yeah.
Chris Badgett (14:47) I’ve seen a lot of success. I’ve seen a lot of failure. I’ve seen some modest wins, some decent wins, and the people that really do well. I actually identified three factors that the most successful people always have in common. So the first one is that you’re already in some way making money with your expertise and like a full-time income level. So for example, I have a customer named Angela Brown.
She currently has a huge business teaching house cleaners and maids all around the world how to, you know, start, grow and scale their companies. She’s been in the house cleaning niche for a lot of her adult life. She was a house cleaner. She became like a leader in the space, was paid to speak at house cleaning entrepreneur conferences. So she’s like, check the box. Like she’s already, she really knows the niche. makes it. The second thing.
is what I call, it’s more of an internal motivation. So there’s two sides. One side is I want to make money online. I want location freedom and personal freedom in my life. That’s fine. The other side is the people that get really focused on serving and helping other people. It’s like that old Jim Rohn quote.
If you help enough people get what they want, you’ll get what you want. So if you come from a place of service and really care about your, you know, your community and getting them results as quickly and easily and painlessly as possible, those people with that passion and that care do the best. And it’s okay to also want to make money and stuff. But if, if that other piece isn’t there, then it’s the odds are way less. And then the final third piece is
The people that are most successful have at least a couple of years in technology. Like they’ve been playing around with, you know, CRM’s marketing automation, WordPress. You know, they’re not brand new to tech. So the tech doesn’t become this huge roadblock. And then the fourth bonus thing that I’ve seen over and over and over again is forward and perfect action. Cause we get a lot of imposter syndrome, failure to launch.
you know, the course creator cave, I call it, where people disappear for like two years working on this project and never launch. The people that make it like it’s not perfect. They’re not happy with the sales page. They’re like, my God, my video is terrible, but they just do it. And then they do it again. And over time, they just keep refining. So those are the factors that give you the highest odds of success.
Roger Williams (17:25) Okay, excellent. That’s fantastic in a nice nutshell there. When people start using Lifter LMS, do you have tutorials or courses to help them figure things out along these lines, I would imagine?
Chris Badgett (17:41) Yeah, mean, fu bu for us, by us. Like we, use our own product, you know, like our internal training for our team is we have like ways to turn Lifter into an intranet for like a company to do internal training. So all that’s powered by Lifter. We have a public facing Academy. Well, my biggest pro tip there, and I think every software company should do this no matter what they do is we have.
the Lifter LMS Quickstart course, which is about 15 lessons. It shows the 5 % essential parts of how to get set up and use the product that everybody needs to know. That one course, you know, has had somewhere around 50,000 people sign up and it is doubles as both a marketing asset for people who like, hey, let me see if this is right tool for me.
They take a course as a student. They also learn how to use the tool to answer the fundamental sales question, which is, will it work for me? And they get it, and then they buy it, or they get the free plugin. But it also doubles as an onboarding customer success tool. So someone just bought, take the course, and our support volume is much, much lower, because we have a resource that’ll show you how to do it on your own time with no wait time.
So yeah, we use Lifter ourselves constantly.
Roger Williams (19:01) Awesome, awesome, that’s great. Dog fooding is the only way to go. Chris, I really appreciate this conversation. I’m gonna have you back on board at some point, talk more about learning management and all this fun stuff. In the meantime though, if people wanna get in touch with you, if they wanna use Lifter LMS, if they wanna just talk with you about dog sledding or ultra-marathoning, what’s the best ways for them to contact you?
Chris Badgett (19:24) I will just go head on over to lifterlms.com if you’re curious about learning management systems and WordPress. And then I’ve been podcasting for over 10 years. So I have over 500 episodes on LMS cast. So if you want to kind of nerd out on this course creation and WordPress LMS website building thing, we have a ton of stuff over there. And if you want to connect one-on-one, I’m the most active on Twitter, which is just at Chris Badgett.
Roger Williams (19:53) Excellent, awesome. Chris, great talking with you. This was a lot of fun. I look forward to speaking with you again soon.
So this week was Chapter 2 of Producing Open Source Software and, true to form, I stayed up late the night before to get the reading done. Not my proudest habit, but hey, it got me reading, and that’s the whole point of joining a book club, right? And honestly, once I sat down with it, I found myself really interested. This stuff is about open source, about community, and even though I’m not a developer, it feels like exactly the kind of work I should be learning about. My day job is partnerships and community in the WordPress ecosystem, so yeah, this is community work.
I’ve got to give credit where it’s due; Aaron Jobin did a great job leading the group this week. He gave us some structure and nudges to participate, and that made it easier for everyone to jump in. I had a few highlights saved from the chapter (side note: discovered a neat Safari trick, if you highlight text in Safari, you can send it straight to the “Quick Notes” folder in Apple Notes, which is kind of hidden but really useful). That made it easier to come into the discussion with actual notes instead of half-remembered scribbles.
One section that stuck out to me was about naming a project. The advice was basically “look around first.” Maybe what you’re trying to build already exists, or maybe it fits better as an addition to an existing project. In WordPress, that often means a plugin or a contribution to core instead of spinning up something brand new. I thought that was timely. With AI changing things so fast, and with the reality that WordPress needs younger people coming into the community, there’s something powerful about channeling energy into existing projects instead of scattering it into the wind.
Another highlight: Fogel points out that even in projects designed for non-technical users, some percentage of those users are future developers. That clicked for me. You’ve basically got two audiences at all times: the everyday end user and the people who might roll up their sleeves and become contributors. My marketing brain went off here: that’s segmentation, right? Different messages, different documentation, different entry points. In business, we’d call it marketing, but in open source it sometimes gets treated as a dirty word. I’m not saying “sell out,” just that maybe we can borrow ideas from the business world, test them, adapt them, see what sticks.
There was also this part about how no project starts perfectly. In a dream world you’d launch with perfect docs, a user manual, cross-platform support, all of it. But in reality? That’s impossible. People hope others will fill in the gaps later. And that’s where I laughed to myself because I usually hate the phrase “hope is not a strategy.” It’s one of those eye-roll business clichés. But here, it kind of fits. Hope is at least a half-plan. The question for me is whether AI could step in here. Could we use it to accelerate documentation, compatibility notes, or early roadmaps? Not as a magic fix, but as a tool. The trick, of course, is being specific about what AI can actually do and setting up some kind of system that multiple projects could use.
Then there was the section about flaws. Fogel says: In open source, you list your shortcomings openly. No need to exaggerate, just be scrupulous and matter-of-fact. That’s a little brutal, honestly. It’s tough to admit what’s broken in something you care about. But it makes sense. Everyone sees the issues anyway. Pretending they’re not there just makes you look less trustworthy. The caveat is security; some things really do need to stay private, but outside of that, transparency wins.
We got a laugh out of the part about “naïve newcomers.” Every project has them. Sometimes they’re the next star contributor, sometimes they stay naïve forever. The tension is in how much time and grace to give people. And this is where it gets tricky, because open source doesn’t hire and fire. Anyone can show up, anyone can participate, which is both amazing and, let’s be real, chaotic. WordPress plugins are a perfect analogy: it’s great that anyone can build one, and it’s also… not so great that anyone can build one. That’s where codes of conduct come in. They’re a way to set boundaries in a space where there aren’t bosses and paychecks to manage behavior. It’s not easy, but it’s necessary.
That led us into one of the most fascinating parts of the chapter: codes of conduct for organizations. I hadn’t thought about this before. We all know about individual CoCs, but what about commercial actors in open source? The Arches Project has a really thoughtful example, guidelines for companies that participate. Stuff like: don’t replace community infrastructure, make sure your offerings are clearly labeled, contribute to shared documentation, don’t siphon conversations into private spaces. Reading that, I couldn’t help but think about WordPress. We’ve got sponsors, agencies, hosting companies, product makers, all of them commercial entities shaping the project. Instead of pretending they’re not there, why not have a set of guidelines? Something that says: yes, you can bring your commercial interests, but here’s how to do it in a way that strengthens the community.
We also circled around the point that open source depends on public conversations. Decisions made behind closed doors erode trust. Security discussions are one of the few exceptions. But otherwise, transparency is oxygen. And of course, we had to bring up Gutenberg. When it was introduced, the decision felt very top-down, very closed-door, and we’re still living with the ripples of that moment. Gutenberg, aka the block editor, is in a good place now, but the way it was introduced left scars. It’s a reminder of how fragile trust can be when discussions happen in private.
By the end of the conversation, I was struck by how much of open source is about people, not code. Grace, forgiveness, patience, transparency, all of those values are hard to live up to, especially when conflicts arise. But that’s the point. Open source isn’t just a job. It’s not just code. It’s community. It’s messy, it’s human, and it requires a different mindset than a paycheck-driven project.
So that’s week two. I’m still very much learning, still feeling like a bit of an outsider, but I’m glad to be part of this. The group is great. The book is better than I expected. And even if I only get the reading done at the last minute, I’m getting a lot out of it.
One of the best parts of working in the WordPress ecosystem is seeing just how global and connected it really is. In this conversation, I had the pleasure of chatting with Felix Kipyego, a Kenyan developer who went from tinkering with Arduino boards to building high-impact WooCommerce plugins used by large international organizations.
A Tech-Savvy Start
Felix didn’t grow up with a computer. In fact, he didn’t get one until university, where he studied Telecommunication and Information Engineering. But his interest in electronics and systems led him to programming, and eventually to WordPress, where he saw an opportunity to learn, earn, and build.
Why Clients Choose Custom
Today, Felix builds bespoke WooCommerce plugins for clients with unique business processes. One example: a plugin that supports organizations using purchase orders rather than credit cards. It automates the PO approval process, ensures correct documentation, and only processes the order once everything checks out.
“It’s not about how complex a plugin is, it’s about how usable it is,” Felix says.
The Power of Showing Up
Despite being active in Kenya’s local WordPress scene (where there are monthly meetups and lively WhatsApp groups), WordCamp EU 2025 was Felix’s first international WordCamp. Contributor Day gave him a huge unlock: realizing that contributing isn’t about being a genius. It’s about showing up.
“When I met the people behind the plugins, I realized we were more or less on the same level. That helped me see I could contribute too.”
AI, but Make it Real
Felix uses AI tools for debugging and QA but is clear-eyed about their limits. “AI is good in theory,” he says. “But it doesn’t always understand the real-world consequences of the code it suggests.”
He’s not dismissing AI, he’s just waiting to see where it matures before diving deeper.
Looking Ahead
Felix is currently accepting new client work (within reason, he’s busy!). You can reach him through LinkedIn.
Aaron Jorbin has been nice enough to organize a book club for WordPress people, especially core contributors. I love a book club and have tried to create and join a few over the years. This one is interesting to me because WordPress and also I like Aaron.
Preface
The first book we are tackling is Producing Open Source Software by Karl Fogel. Its a book that has been around for over 20 years and had an update in 2023. I have not read this book before, and the Preface hooked me immediately:
Everyone has infinite power; everyone has no power.
This week we are covering the Preface and the Intro. The Preface is a call to arms for us all to get involved with Open Source Software. We all use it everyday yet the vast majority of people have no idea. We have no idea that we can participate even just as users giving feedback. Karl talks about “competence at cooperation” as a key skill for participating in open source software. Cooperation is something I can always be better at.
Introduction to Free then Open Source Software
In the Introduction Karl gives us a history of software development. Starting in the early days of the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s software was seen as a secondary feature that the hardware allowed to happen. Back then software was given freely by the manufacturers and exchanged between users, mainly academics. It was similar to what we now call open source software.
Naturally this changed as hardware became standardized and suddenly software was the differentiator. Laws were updated to allow copyright of software and the modern close source software movement was cemented. Developers could now copyright their work and license it to users.
Then Richard Stallman had a thought to give software away for free and created GNU (GNU is Not Unix) and the GNU GPL(General Public License). The GPL should be familiar to WordPress people. This license “says that the code may be copied and modified without restriction, and that both copies and derivative works (i.e., modified versions) must, if they are distributed at all, be distributed under the same license as the original, with no additional restrictions.”
This was a big event in the free software movement as it created a legal framework for it to exist. For many this was more than just software and was seen as an ideological movement. Software is words the same as speech and deserves to be freely distributed just like thoughts. For others this was a convenient method for sharing their work and getting others to review it and improve it. They didn’t necessarily see a movement just a practical way to operate.
In the late 1990’s the free software movement was doing well. Linux had been created along with the X Windowing system and many other parts and pieces allowing people to fully own their computer hardware and software.
The problem at this point was marketing. For businesses the word ‘free’ is anathema to just about everything they exist for. An adjustment needed to be made to bring commercial interests into the movement. It was also confusing to think of ‘free’ software that was given away at no cost to the user versus software which you had access to the source code.
The change was made to ‘Open Source’ to alleviate these concerns and today rough estimates put to total economic value at over $9 Trillion.
Today we need to work to create community around our projects to ensure they keep going and improving. We should be aware of each others motivations to be a part of the projects that we work on. We should also work to make everyone feel welcome.
I keep hearing the same questions pop up lately, in Slack, at events, in casual convos with agency folks:
“Do we even need WordPress anymore?”
“Can’t AI just build the whole site?”
So I asked someone who would know, Adam Silverstein, a longtime WordPress core contributor. He’s also one of the people Kinsta proudly sponsors for his work on open source.
In the run-up to WordCamp US 2025, Adam joined me for a chat about his upcoming talk:
What followed was one of the most grounded, insightful takes on AI in development that I’ve heard in a while.
Here are a few takeaways:
AI is (still) just glorified autocomplete
That’s how Adam described it, a reminder that under all the hype, it’s still a tool that completes what we start. Helpful? Absolutely. But magical? Not quite.
WordPress isn’t going anywhere
Sure, AI can spin up a brochure site. But what about maintaining that site? Editing content? Handling forms and workflows? That’s what CMSs (WordPress) were built for.
Developers still matter
One of the best parts of the conversation was Adam’s take on junior devs. He sees AI as a way to accelerate their growth, not replace them. That said, he’s quick to point out the risk of over-relying on AI without understanding the code it generates.
“If you don’t have any discernment to tell what a good result is, you’re going to wind up with not-great code.”
Adam’s talk is coming up at WordCamp US, and I’m excited to see the full version. Until then, I highly recommend watching our full interview. Especially if you’re a developer, agency owner, or just trying to figure out where this whole AI-in-web-dev thing is headed.
