#196 – Topher DeRosia on How Public Contributions Shape Careers in WordPress

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how public contributions can shape careers in WordPress.

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So on the podcast today we have Topher DeRosia. Topher is a web developer with over 30 years of experience, and he’s been deeply involved in the WordPress community for the past 15 years. He’s attended nearly 80 WordCamps around the world, contributed to projects like HeroPress, and has made it his mission to highlight the power and value of open source and remote work, especially in the WordPress ecosystem.

In this episode, Topher joins me to talk about the value of working in public, and how sharing your work openly can create unexpected and lasting opportunities. Whether that’s boosting your career, finding a sense of purpose, or building connections across the globe.

We start with Topher’s personal journey, discovering the WordPress community and the profound impact it has had on his life and family. The conversation explores what makes open source communities, like WordPress, so unique, and while working transparently can lead to moments of serendipity and even job offers from people who have seen your contributions many years before.

Topher shares stories about giving back, the motivation that comes from helping others, and the long-term satisfaction that comes from being generous with your time and expertise.

We also discussed the tension between the philanthropic and commercial aspects of WordPress, and how individuals and companies navigate that balance.

Towards the end, Topher reflects on building a body of work over time, trusting in the slow and organic process instead of seeking instant influencer success. He explains why he still chooses to create and share resources for free, motivated by the hope of helping the next person just starting out.

If you’ve ever wondered about the power of sharing your work, finding meaning in open communities, or how to make a difference over the long term, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Topher DeRosia.

I am joined on the podcast by Topher DeRosia. Hello.

[00:03:19] Topher DeRosia: Hello there.

[00:03:20] Nathan Wrigley: It’s very nice to chat to Topher. We’ve done this before. We’ve had many chats online, but I just want to pay a special thanks to Topher for reasons I won’t bore the audience with, Topher has sort of joined me at extremely late notice, like minutes of notice.

We had a bit of back and forth yesterday about topics that we may cover, and the one that’s going to be covered today is the one that we decided. But he wasn’t expecting this, and so he’s arrived and I’m extremely grateful. So firstly, my deepest thanks for carving out a bit of your day unexpectedly.

[00:03:50] Topher DeRosia: You’re very welcome. This is always fun, and fit my day perfectly.

[00:03:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. Thank you. So what we decided to talk about was, and I’ll encapsulate it in a sentence that Topher wrote to me, and then we’ll just sort of get into it and see where we go. Topher said, he’d like to talk about the value of doing things in public, and how this can come back to you later as a way of potentially, I don’t know, boosting your career or just offering some guiding light to the community and what have you.

So first of all, in order to give us some idea, I’m sure that there are people who know you, having listened to the things that you’ve done or consumed the HeroPress website or what have you. Will you just give us a little potted bio of yourself related to, I guess the WordPress community, makes most sense in this context?

[00:04:30] Topher DeRosia: Sure. I have been a web developer for 30 years, which is old, but I got into WordPress about 15 years ago and I did not know there was a community for several years. And Brian Richards said to me, hey, we should do a WordCamp. And I said, what’s a WordCamp? And then of course, my life changed forever after.

Oh, you know what? We started with a meetup, but like 2 weeks later he said we should do a WordCamp. And he said, we should do it this summer. And we were talking, like we were talking in June. So we went from never hearing of it before, to having a WordCamp suddenly. And I’ve been in, all in on the community ever since. I’ve been to nearly 80 WordCamps, all over the world. I’ve been making stuff, building stuff, meeting people ever since.

[00:05:12] Nathan Wrigley: Wow.

[00:05:13] Topher DeRosia: It’s pretty great.

[00:05:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, 80. Gosh, that’s profound. I mean, I don’t consider myself to have a high attendee account, but 80, that really is remarkable.

So I think it’s fair to say that the profundity of the effect of discovering that community is pretty important in your life. You know, it’s had a material impact in every way.

[00:05:31] Topher DeRosia: Hugely. My wife got into the community. My children, both my kids have spoken at WordCamp US. My wife has spoken. My kids have friends in other countries that I don’t know because of the WordPress community. Every parent has that fear of, what if something happened to us? What would happen to the kids? And we have family that would take care of them, you know? It’s nice to know we also have that backup where there are people all over the world who would say, hey, we got room, come on.

[00:05:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s pretty amazing. I joined the WordPress community, so I’d been involved in lots of open source projects, things like Magento and Drupal and things like that. And I know that Drupal has, there’s definitely stuff in the Drupal space that you can attend. But I never did.

And to be honest with you, I didn’t know that that stuff existed until after the fact. And then in about 2014, something like that, I discovered WordPress. And just like you, I had no conception that it was more than some downloadable bit of software. Honestly didn’t even know that it was done by volunteers. I just had probably some assumption that there was an organization or a company behind it that in some way monetised it and made it free and what have you.

And then just got this intuition, I guess, with social networks, the way that they were at that time, you could find groups and discover that there were all these ancillary groups of people doing things with WordPress, you know, groups focusing around page builders and groups focusing around plugins.

And then for me to discover that there were actual events that you could attend was, just like you, really remarkable. And I attended the first one and I kind of thought, oh, we’ll just see how this goes. I’m a bit of an awkward character in person, so I sort of stood around at the back. But it didn’t take me long to sort of be welcomed in. And just like you, completely changed my life. And ever since then, a sizable proportion of my free time has been devoted to curious WordPress things. It’s amazing.

I can’t quite work out what it is about a project like WordPress that inculcates that, fosters that, makes that possible. Because I imagine if you attended, I don’t know, a Cisco networking conference or something like that, it’s not going to have the same feel. So I don’t know if you want to speak to that for a little bit, why you think the community works.

[00:07:36] Topher DeRosia: Yeah. I have two thoughts about it. One is that I think it’s absolutely because of the people. And it may be chance that the right people found WordPress and got together at the same time. But to that point, that it’s the people, I recently went to two non WordPress conferences in one week.

I went to one for higher education in technology. The people who attended were from universities and colleges, and they were looking for ways to manage web stuff on their entire campus. So do you offer a blog to all 24,000 students, you know? That kind of thing. It was my first time there, but I saw a number of people who were greeting each other and not having seen each other since last year, and the year before, and the year before. And it was very much like a WordCamp. And people talked about how this group is so wonderful and they wait all year long to come back here. And I thought, oh, okay, so this is WordCamp.

And then while I was there, I met somebody who worked at Umbraco, which is an open source .net based CMS. And they’ve been around for 20, more than 20 years, but it’s a very small community, like 0.01% of the market share. And I told her, you know, who I am, what I do, and she’s like, oh, we would love to have you come to our conference this weekend in Chicago. Can I pay you to come? I was like, oh wow, sure.

So I went and it was about a hundred people and it was WordCamp. Everybody there loved the software, loved the community, everybody was friends. It was the same. And expanding just a little more, HeroPress says it’s about people leveraging WordPress to make their lives better. But in actuality, what it is, is open source and remote work combined. It allows people in Malaysia to pick up software and compete on a relatively equal basis with somebody in New York. And in our world, that’s WordPress. But it’s exactly the same with every open source remote work option, Drupal, Umbraco, anything.

[00:09:45] Nathan Wrigley: Maybe open source then is, forgive me, the secret sauce. Maybe that’s the component, the bit that binds those communities together in a way that perhaps, I don’t know, something where a proprietary thing or something was locked down, or profit was the whole point, maybe that is the bit. The fact that there’s a bunch of people gathering together in a kind of philanthropic way. You know, there’s no expectation that my attendance will definitely lead to finance, let’s put it that way.

Like I said, I don’t really have much experience outside the WordPress world, and so my assumption was that there was something a little bit unique. But from what you’ve said, this same exact thing is happening probably a thousand times over throughout the globe, but your expectation there is that the open source component is the bit, the bit that unlocks it.

[00:10:32] Topher DeRosia: Yeah, I agree. WordPress has the advantage of a very large user base, which is good and bad. There are certainly more wonderful people in it than if there were fewer. But at that scale, you are just as likely to have really terrible people. I know people that have left the WordPress community because they’ve been treated horrendously, abused, and it breaks my heart. And I want to say, oh, WordPress is different, you won’t find that here, but you will. It’s too big a community to not have that.

[00:11:01] Nathan Wrigley: I wonder what it is then about that sort of spirit of giving back that creates some kind of, I don’t know, hive mind, for want of a better word. You know, there’s just this ethic that you’re all combined on this slightly higher purpose. So in the case of WordPress, and you mentioned Drupal and you mentioned the other CMS with the small market share, the principle there is that you’re working on something, and I guess publishing is the point. You are enabling people who may or may not have a voice to get on the internet and do something, publish something, write something, put images, videos or what have you.

There is some kind of higher calling there. It’s very hard to sort of grasp that, and to really understand it. But do you know what I mean? You’re doing something which, at the end of your days, you can look back and say, there was something there. There was something meaningful, there was something significant and important. And that feeling, that thing, whatever that thing is, is important, and enough to propel people to give up hours and weeks of their lives to do this.

[00:12:04] Topher DeRosia: I think most people enjoy making other people, I don’t know, so many things, more successful, happier, more stable. And there are open source projects that will shrivel up and die because no one ever says thank you. People work on a project for years and years and they think, you know what? Nobody cares. I’m going to go play Frisbee.

But I think the WordPress community is large enough, and we have these events that everybody goes to, that you run into people who have been impacted by the work you do.

There’s a, boy, can’t remember his first name. Heisel. He’s Dutch but lived in England and now he lives in Malta or something. Anyway, I met him for the first time at WordCamp London and he walked up to me and said, hey, I need to shake your hand. I said, okay. He said, a few years ago I lost my job and I didn’t know what I was going to do and I needed to support my family, and I got on OS Training and learned WordPress from your videos, and now I support my family with WordPress. I about broke down in tears right there.

And that kind of thing happens to lots and lots of people. People who say, you know what? This plugin you wrote, it changed my life. I make a living with this now. I support my family.

[00:13:19] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know what’s kind of interesting there is that, I guess you did none of it with the expectation of that person wandering up. You know, it’s not like, Topher, you sat down and thought, the more thanks I get, the more I’m going to do. There isn’t that kind of expectation. But it certainly helps, doesn’t it? When somebody does come up and express those thoughts to you. I bet you that carried you through the next days, weeks, or months. You know, the capacity to drag that out of your brain.

[00:13:42] Topher DeRosia: It still is. That was years ago.

[00:13:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah. Isn’t that interesting?

[00:13:45] Topher DeRosia: I do think though that you don’t do it for the thanks, but it’s a lot easier to do if you think it matters. When people say thank you, it feels good, but it lets you know that what I’m doing matters. It’s making a difference. It’s making somebody’s life better. It’s making the world better. That’s a huge motivator.

[00:14:04] Nathan Wrigley: That’s the big thing. So this is a curious question, right? And it’s not really related to WordPress. Did you have those same intuitions at an early age? Was there some part of you can remember even as, I don’t know, let’s say a 15-year-old or 17-year-old or something like that. Where you had already made the leap that life is better when you are being helpful? Or did you learn that later?

Because I kind of have the intuition that quite a few people in our community probably figured that out at some point fairly early on. And it enables them, I’m obviously not suggesting that people who didn’t make that intuition early on can’t join the community or what have you. But I’m surrounded by people who seem to have this almost bottomless capacity to give. And I’m always struck by how did that begin for them? Where did that start for them? So because I’ve got you on the line, I’m asking you directly.

[00:14:58] Topher DeRosia: When I was in college, I just randomly became interested in motivations. What makes people do things? What makes somebody mean all the time? What makes somebody happy all the time? What makes somebody be kind?

And I thought through the process of how gratitude is an influencer. If you say to somebody, thank you for what you’re doing, it makes them feel good. It makes them want to do it more. If they’re, you know, working at a food pantry and you say, hey, thank you for what you’re doing, it’s changing lives, just feeding children. It makes them want to do that more. If that person at a food pantry were faced every day with angry people who abused them verbally and stuff like that, they’d be a lot less inclined to do that.

[00:15:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I listened to a podcast not that long ago, and I actually can’t remember which one it was because I listened to several in this line. But essentially it was trying to peel back the latest studies in what causes some people to be happy. And I am not going to explain this and have the expectation that everything I say is true, nor that this is the limit of that. But a fairly reliable indicator of happiness, whatever that means, but on a fairly profound level, happiness can be boiled down to these two things, apparently.

One of them is that you are giving of your time. So it may be that you are, as you say, working in a soup kitchen. Or that you are doing something in the community. Or you are just putting into your children or what have you. There is a real connection apparently between the capacity to give something from which you expect nothing in return. Humans apparently find great, deep satisfaction from that.

And the other one is friendship. If you have people that you regard as friends, on a deep level. So obviously acquaintances, we can all have many, many thousands of those, especially online nowadays. But it’s that core little group of really impactful, meaningful people who in the time of crisis, you know are going to have your back.

Those two things apparently are a real predictor of one’s happiness. And both of them seem to stray into our community, you know? Although it’s an online thing, you’re still giving your time, and you know that in a fairly ephemeral way that you maybe can never grasp, people will be benefiting from that. And also you make friends. So there you go, it’s the root to happiness.

[00:17:19] Topher DeRosia: It is.

[00:17:20] Nathan Wrigley: So all of that, having said all of that, you have this wealth of experience in the community. You’ve done so many projects in the community. And as I said at the top of the show, the thing that you wanted to talk about was, not just the mere fact of doing things in the community, but about the fact that you are doing things in the community in a sort of public way, and how that can sort of impact in the future. So just tell us a little bit about why you wanted to get into that, or maybe some anecdotal evidence of how that’s helped you.

[00:17:50] Topher DeRosia: Very little of it in my life has been deliberate. I’ve done some things and then later thought, oh, wow, I didn’t realise that this would be the consequence. I made videos for OS Training for a lot of years, they’re behind a paywall, they paid me by the video. I wasn’t thinking, oh, I’m going to go teach the world. It was a client, I made videos.

And years later, Brin Wilson from WinningWP got a hold of me on Post Status and said, hey, I want to start a YouTube channel. Would you make videos for me? I said, sure, but why me? He said, well, I’ve seen your work. You’ve done this, you have given evidence to the world that you know what you’re doing. And that was a good contract. And I got it because I had previously done something else.

With HeroPress, I didn’t set out to become a relatively known person. I was just doing it. But I remember the first time I talked to a stranger from India and introduced myself and they said, oh, of course we know you. I said, what do you mean of course? You live 5,000 miles away from me. How on earth would you know me? And, boy, it is just stuff like that.

I have some plugins on wordpress.org. I think cumulatively they have 12 installs. They’re not big plugins, but they’re there. And people look and say, oh, Topher knows how to make plugins.

I contribute to the photos project. And people who aren’t necessarily contributors don’t necessarily understand the different kinds of contribution. They just see my name on the contributor list like, oh, Topher builds WordPress because I take a lot of photos or something. But just the fact that I’m out there doing that makes a difference.

I’ve been blogging for years. I did blogs in the GoDaddy Garage back in the day, I wrote on OS Training, I wrote all over the place. And recently I thought, boy, I wish I had had all that on my own site.

And then it occurred to me that WordPress does a lot of RSS, and so does YouTube. And so I built a site called topher.how. Found everything I’ve ever done and just used WP All Import and pulled it all into one place. So now at topher.how you can see stuff I’ve done decades ago, and it’s nice. It’s a place to say, look, here’s stuff I did. But I have gotten, no, you know, I’m not going to say I’ve gotten jobs, I’ve gotten consideration, interviews, interest because people who know who I am, because I did something once long ago.

[00:20:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess the interview phase, to get yourself over the line, you’ve still got to sort of show your metal, haven’t you? But that whole thing of just being represented by your past, it’s really curious. We live in a world which is so dominated by, I don’t know, the financial motivation for this, that, and the other.

It is curious when nowadays you can have a legacy which is not the CV, it’s not the line items on the CV. It can be much more ephemeral stuff. Things that you did, videos that you made, blogs that you contributed to.

The people out there making the decisions about who’s going to get those jobs, well, you have proved that that kind of history of being online definitely works, and in unexpected ways. It’s not like there’s always a through line between, okay, I’m going to make these YouTube videos so that in a few years time I’ll have this credible body of evidence that will make it so that anybody can employ me. It’s much more ephemeral than that. It’s more, I’m doing this video because I think itll be helpful, and then serendipitously that then leads to something in the future.

[00:21:14] Topher DeRosia: Yeah, very much so. Before we started recording, you mentioned my background here. It’s a piece of fabric on a photo stand. And I bought it just the other day because, you know, I’ve been making videos for years, I’ve never appeared on camera. Always been a screencast. And I recently got a client that said, well, we want you on camera. And so I got this thing.

But the interesting part is that the client is a company in Bangladesh. And I know them quite well, they know me quite well because of stuff we’ve done together in the past in the WordPress community. And when they needed videos, they came to me, because they know me and they know that’s what I do. That wouldn’t happen if I hadn’t been out doing stuff years ago. What are the chances I would know somebody, me in Michigan, I would know somebody in Bangladesh?

[00:22:01] Nathan Wrigley: Right. Right, I mean, the world of 50 years ago, it’s tending to zero basically, you know, unless you’d been on plane or somebody had been on a plane in the opposite direction and you’d met where you are. The opportunities afforded are amazing, and it’s that kind of long tail that you’ve got as well. That I suppose is going to be hard for somebody that’s younger to listen to because, you know, they kind of see this mountain that they’ve got to climb and this great body of work that they’ve got to build up over decades. I guess that’s, it’s not all about that either, it’s about sort of just chipping away at it and doing things piecemeal.

[00:22:31] Topher DeRosia: I have a funny story about that. Early in my WordPress career, I got to know Pippen Williamson. You may remember him.

[00:22:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I do.

[00:22:39] Topher DeRosia: And he was very well known in the WordPress community. I got to know a few people who were very well known. I was like, man, that’s cool, everybody knows these people. Wonder if people will ever know me? We were talking about it, he and I, and he quickly urged me, do not seek to be known because that will only lead to tears. If you’re doing it for the wrong reason, then it will just turn out badly.

And so I thought, well, you know, maybe in 10 years. Well, here we are. And I didn’t set out to be known. I’ve never bought a banner ad saying, look at Topher. I just went to WordCamp and spoke. I wrote blog posts, I made videos. I shook a lot of hands. I listened to a lot of stories.

[00:23:18] Nathan Wrigley: It’s about sort of spreading the network organically really, isn’t it? Which I suppose in a sense leads to, okay, rather than the word fame, I’m going to use the word notoriety because I think they’ve got two very different endpoints. But the idea of seeking fame is tied up with, you know, you just want random people to know you because they know you, and that’s the kind of end game, you know? Oh, you are famous because you’re famous, that sort of flavor to it.

Whereas notoriety for me has much more, there’s a body, a corpus of work behind you that leads to that understanding that, okay, that’s Topher. I know Topher because he did this, this, this, and this. It’s not famous because they’re famous. It’s more, there’s the guy who made those videos that I watched. Or there’s the guy that wrote that blog that I read all the time. That kind of thing. And so it’s not fame for fame sake, it’s accidental fame more, if you know what I mean?

[00:24:10] Topher DeRosia: Yeah. I heard the term not too long ago that I like called community known.

[00:24:14] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That’s nice.

[00:24:15] Topher DeRosia: Within a community, you you could say famous, very well known. Outside that community, people do not care and have no idea who you are.

[00:24:22] Nathan Wrigley: That’s right. Yeah, it’s curious, inside of our community, there’s this one person whose name kind of precedes all others, and it would be Matt Mullenweg. But I’m willing to bet that if Matt was walking down the street, more or less anywhere, that his life is just the same as yours and mine. Nobody’s going to know who he is unless randomly they happen to be a WordPresser. But he’s fairly thin on the ground. You know, it’s not like he’s Scarlett Johansson or George Clooney or something like that, where that fame is probably quite an oppressive thing in their life. You know, the capacity to just walk down the street.

So yeah, anyway, the point being that you’ve done stuff over time without the intention of it being this fame for being famous. It’s more about being community known, as you said. But that has had amazing consequences.

And that kind of leads me to this next thing. I wonder, this question comes up all the time, but I do wonder if it’s more material now than it ever has been. I wonder if the community can always cope with the commercial pressure that is being born by the community?

So for example, you know, you up to events and there’s a lot of people trying to sell you things. And maybe WordCamps from 15 years ago would’ve felt very much more a room full of like-minded individuals. Whereas now if you go to WordCamps, maybe there’s more of a feeling of, okay, that bit over there is more commercial, that bit over there is less commercial. But there’s always that kind of commercial angle.

I don’t really know where I’m going with that, but the commercial side of things, I don’t know if you’ve got a feeling on, or a intuition on that?

[00:25:54] Topher DeRosia: Sort of. Something I’ve noticed over the years is that it’s entirely possible to write a plugin, start selling it, have it be successful, build a business, hire people, maybe get a relatively large business, maybe hundreds of employees. And it feels good, it looks good, it’s great, it’s wonderful until it starts going, or getting hard. And then people who never thought this would happen start having to make difficult decisions that hurt people.

If things aren’t going well, we need to let some people go. Maybe we need to let a lot of people go. Maybe we need to reorganise, whatever. And people look at this golden company, the pinnacle of WordPress, open source, love, family, peace, blah, blah, blah, and they’re letting people go. And you think, what? They’re just another business. They were just in it for the money. And they’re not, but it can feel that way when you’ve been let go.

And at some point it has to be about the money. If you’re building a plugin because you love it and you’re selling it because people need it, that’s cool. If you’re running a business and people are depending on you for their livelihoods, you have to make the decisions. You have to do some hard things sometimes. And it’s never going to be comfortable. And at some point it’s going to look like you’re just another company. I’ve never been in this position, but I think it can be incredibly difficult to maintain a culture that we associate with the stereotype of WordPress community, in a full on company.

[00:27:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I do know exactly what you mean. I think we, let’s say for example, let’s go back to Cisco. I used that example a minute ago. Let’s say that I work for Cisco. It’s pretty obvious what the goal there is. The goal is to ship loads of units of networking hardware all over the world, and then next year ship more than we ship this year and innovate more and.

[00:27:45] Topher DeRosia: And you have investors that are going to hold your feet to the fire.

[00:27:47] Nathan Wrigley: Right. Okay, so make money, make the investors happy, make the shareholders happy, and so on. That is so straightforward a bargain. But we in our community have this extra layer underpinning it of this philanthropic bit, which forms the basis of it. It’s literally the bedrock of it.

And so that whole thing is propping everything else up on top of it, which I genuinely don’t know how the shifting sands of that all work. We’ve managed to get through 22 years plus, of that building up slowly over time, there being arguments here, there and everywhere. Minor arguments, some bigger arguments. We’ve somehow worked it through.

But I don’t suppose that will ever get perfectly resolved. It’s going to be just part of the understanding that if you’re in open source, there’s a commercial bit. And if you can’t cope with that, well, that’s something you’re going to have to think about and look at. But also there’s going to be this whole philanthropic side, and that has to carry on and has to be funded, and figured out, and made important and advertised and all of that. I don’t have the brain to figure all that out, but it’s part of the jigsaw puzzle.

[00:28:52] Topher DeRosia: Yeah. It’s truly something I’ve never had to deal with, and I hope I don’t, the scales of money. I had a job once when I was very young. We’re at home, we were newly married and money was tight, and we were talking about where to get $20 for groceries and things like that.

And at work I was allocating hardware for new employees and, oh, let’s pick up two or three extra computers at $4,000 each because we might need them. That scale of money is, it’s something I’ve tried to be aware of.

I look at a WordPress plugin company that has employees and I think, oh man, you have so much more money than I do, so much more. And maybe they do, but they also have so many more bills than I do. Just because they have several employees, and they’re doing well and things look great on Black Friday, doesn’t mean that they’re super wealthy or anything.

[00:29:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I genuinely struggle with this component. I don’t think I’ll ever resolve it. I’m just aware that it exists. I’m aware that there’s people who are very polemic about it. There are people on the far this side, and there’s people on the opposite side who maybe are kind of struggling to shout across the gap. But then there’s people sitting in the middle who are somehow managing to figure it all out, or at least be sanguine about it, and not worrying too much about it. Time will tell. In the year 2026, I’m sure that it won’t get figured out, but it will probably carry on.

I’ve got every hope that WordPress is exciting enough to carry on and that people will continue to use it. So I don’t worry too much about that. It’s just more whether or not the two sides of the argument, in an increasingly polemic world, whether the commercial side of WordPress and the non-commercial side of WordPress can figure out some way to walk upon the same path.

[00:30:28] Topher DeRosia: There’s an element to WordPress that I think will carry on, even if it looks like WordPress is starting to fail. And that’s going to be the earliest people, the smallest contributors. Things have been really shaken up in WordPress in the last year or two, and I have friends who’ve left the community. And business is getting bigger and WordPress itself is changing. Gutenberg is a big thing now and AI is moving in and all that. So much is changing.

And I have people say, why do you stay? Why do you keep doing WordPress? Specifically, why do I keep doing HeroPress? And I think my experience tells me that there will always be a 17-year-old picking up a computer at the library for the first time and discovering WordPress and starting a new life. And I want to be there for that person.

[00:31:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So it’s going back to the 17-year-old you as well. You know, that bit that we had earlier where you figured out you had this intuition that there were some things in life which mattered more.

One of the things that I think is really, like it’s so difficult to square this argument though, the whole thing where you see incredible wealth being generated by WordPress and you see incredible endeavors being put into WordPress by people who are really struggling to make ends meet. And I simply don’t have the capacity to figure out the solution to that. I cannot square that circle. But that is such a bit of cognitive dissonance that so much wealth is generated, on the one hand, and yet so much of the foundational work is created by people who may be struggling to put food on the table and what have you. And that is really challenging.

[00:32:12] Topher DeRosia: Yeah, it is challenging. I don’t think it’ll ever be solved. I think it’s a universal problem of humanity. But similar to other areas, I think WordPress does better than other communities. There have been a bunch of discussions in the past about inclusivity, diversity in the WordPress community. And even people who point out the problems and say, look, we messed up here, this is bad, we need to change it, will say WordPress is probably the best of the IT world. There are problems. It’s bad. There are things we need to change, but we’re way ahead.

[00:32:47] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so that’s a really, sorry to interrupt. I got really caught up in what you just said then. I wasn’t expecting that to hit me quite as hard as it did. That was really interesting. That sort of sanguine approach to it. It’s never going to be perfect. We’re probably going to have division and factional fighting, I’m going to do air quotes around the word fighting, but you know what I mean, like infighting and what have you. But we do all right. Given how it could be, it’s okay. These things are just a part of the evolution of it. It’s a journey, not a destination. Yeah, that was interesting.

[00:33:18] Topher DeRosia: We do have to take care though to not rest on our laurels, as it were. To say, oh, you know what? It’s okay, we’re better than everybody else, and so we don’t need to work on it. As soon as we do that, then we will not be better than everybody else.

[00:33:30] Nathan Wrigley: And it’s curious because I think the people that I end up talking to when I attend things like WordCamps have that intuition. I think some, on some innate level, they get the bit that you just said. They know that it’s not perfect. And they know that work needs to be done. And they’re there for that thing. They want to fight the good fight, and make it so that this platform is available to the 17-year-old that you just described, so that they can pick this stuff up and publish their own stuff online, and have their own voice, and create their own identity and all of that. And it’s, yeah, really interesting.

I think I have one more question. So we were talking about the impact of you doing stuff in the open. You obviously did all of that stuff in the open. You did everything, you put everything online, you got HeroPress and all of that kind of stuff. Would you still advocate that in the year 2025, 2026? Do you still think that’s probably the best way forward?

The reason I’m asking that is because we see so much out there in the world, beguiling stuff. TikTok, YouTube, all these people getting YouTube famous, making giant amounts of money and all of that kind stuff. They’re doing it kind of purposefully in order to gain wealth. So it’s less that philanthropic side.

If you could replay your life, would you do that? Is there any part of you which thinks you’d go down that route of being the kind of influencer, or are you happy that your life would replay in, if you were the youngster that you were many, many years ago and you were now that youngster, would you still do it the same way, do you think?

[00:35:00] Topher DeRosia: I think I would. A couple years ago I did a video tip of the week on HeroPress. It was a video on YouTube. And people would say to me, you know what? It’s good that you offer this free stuff. You should put something behind a paywall and make money off it. And I think, oh, you know, that’d be cool. I could make money and pay the bills. But then I think, anything I put behind a paywall is not going to be able to help a 17-year-old who’s making a dollar a week. And that’s where my heart is. And I struggle.

I’m doing a project right now that I would love to tell you about. Over the years, I’ve done support a lot. And I, early on, made a rule, if I get asked a question more than three times, I’m making documentation. And so I can just say, oh, here, go check this out. And over the years I’ve had many clients come back to me three months after I built a site and say, you know, you taught me how to use the WordPress admin and I don’t remember, can you show me again?

So, I don’t know, a year ago I thought, I’m going to make a course for beginners, and it’s going to have videos that are one minute long about how to make a link, how to put in a picture, how to edit your form. Stuff that we all take for granted every day. But somebody who just got a website three months ago and used it once, they don’t remember.

So I started down that road. I got MemberPress, I set up a site, and I made a list of videos to make. I was going to sell it to my clients as part of, you know, you bought a website, for an extra X dollars, here’s all this documentation you can have. A WordPresser at that educational conference said to me, I want to sponsor you to make those videos. You pick the topic, but do it on our hosting platform, just so that our name is there.

And she gave me some money to do it. And she said, I want you to put them on your own YouTube channel. I didn’t have one. All these years, I didn’t have my own YouTube channel for my own videos. I want you to put them on your own YouTube channel, and once you get 2000 subscribers, I will pay you for every video you make. Just to put them on my own YouTube channel. I get to pick the topics. It’s just to get their name out. And I thought, wow, okay.

So I pivoted, rather than make a course behind a paywall, I am doing this thing, but they’re all going on YouTube. And I started three weeks ago, and I’m putting up a video Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and I have 57 subscribers.

[00:37:19] Nathan Wrigley: There’s a little road to go. That’s so nice.

[00:37:23] Topher DeRosia: But this goes back to doing stuff in public so that it’s more significant later. Maybe in a year or two or five, I’ll have thousands of subscribers. And life experience has shown me that I need to not assume that I’m going to have thousands of subscribers within a month. That’s not how this works. You do stuff now, you build your foundation and you grow it. And eventually it gets big.

HeroPress happened that way. You know, I did a few essays, and I did a few more and I did a few more. And then one day I thought, oh, I have 200 essays, and now I have 300. I never set a goal of how many or anything like that. I just did one at a time, and then suddenly there’s this big site full of stuff.

And so that’s my current project is to make these videos, helping people figure out how to use WordPress. It’s not going to be just the beginners, it’s going to be, well, have a heart for beginners in any area, so I’m going to do some beginning programming stuff. I’ve built some cool stuff like WP Podcasts, aggregates podcasts. It wasn’t hard. It’s WP All Import, pulling them into the posts type. It’s not that big a deal. But I can make a 10 minute video on how I did that, and some developer’s going to go, wow, I never realised you can do this kind of stuff. So I’m pretty excited about it.

[00:38:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, your life seems to represent that kind of long term approach, and I can completely empathise with that. Obviously my thing is podcasting, and I have the same sort of story that I just began it and kept doing it and kept doing it, and people obviously, you know, found that there was something there for them, or they didn’t.

But there was something that kept that propelled. And now I look back and there’s a few episodes that I can look back to and, it’s pretty amazing what that brought in its train. Most of it completely unexpected, most of it never intended, and now podcasting in the WordPress space is kind of what I do.

And it just goes to show, if you do things with the right intention, and you do things for the long game, there is a way to make it work. You know, obviously you’ve got to keep the wolf from the door, and if you live in a part of the world where it’s incredibly important that you earn lots of money in order to just meet the bare essentials, then you’ve obviously got to take care of that at the beginning. But then after that, there’s these opportunities on top of that to sort of grow who you are, grow the community that we’re in. And maybe in the long term, over 2, 3, 5, 10, in your case, probably approaching 20 years in the WordPress space, it has an impact. It’s slowly but surely. Slow and steady wins the game, as they say.

[00:39:57] Topher DeRosia: It does, yep.

[00:39:58] Nathan Wrigley: In which case, I will say thank you for that conversation. It was very unexpected and really, really powerful in some regard there. You really made me think on a couple of occasions as we were chatting there, and I really appreciate that.

So, Topher, where can we find you if somebody wants to see some of the stuff? You’ve already mentioned one. It’s probably topher.how. I don’t know if that’s the one you want to drop again.

[00:40:17] Topher DeRosia: Yeah, let’s say topher.how. But if you search Google for Topher1Kenobi, you’ll find me pretty much everywhere.

[00:40:24] Nathan Wrigley: Love that.

[00:40:25] Topher DeRosia: I’ve never found anyone else use that name.

[00:40:26] Nathan Wrigley: And it’s the number one, like the numeral one.

[00:40:29] Topher DeRosia: Yeah.

[00:40:30] Nathan Wrigley: Not the wan.

[00:40:31] Topher DeRosia: My personal blog is at topher1kenobi.com. There’s HeroPress. I did an episode the other day with Christos Paloukas, and he said, hey, send me your links.

[00:40:40] Nathan Wrigley: An essay.

[00:40:40] Topher DeRosia: I sent him 15 links.

[00:40:44] Nathan Wrigley: Do that to me as well. Whatever you do send me, then I will put them into the show notes. wptavern.com, search for the episode with Topher. It’s T-O-P-H-E-R. If you just look for that, you’ll probably find it. And thank you so much for chatting to me today. It was very pleasurable. Thank you.

[00:40:59] Topher DeRosia: Yeah, I had a really good time too. Thanks.

On the podcast today we have Topher DeRosia.

Topher is a web developer with over 30 years of experience, and he’s been deeply involved in the WordPress community for the past 15 years. He’s attended nearly 80 WordCamps around the world, contributed to projects like HeroPress, and has made it his mission to highlight the power and value of open source and remote work, especially in the WordPress ecosystem.

In this episode, Topher joins me to talk about the value of working in public, and how sharing your work openly can create unexpected and lasting opportunities, whether that’s boosting your career, finding a sense of purpose, or building connections across the globe.

We start with Topher’s personal journey, discovering the WordPress community and the profound impact it had on his life and family. The conversation explores what makes open source communities, like WordPress, so unique, and why working transparently can lead to moments of serendipity, and even job offers from people who have seen your contributions many years before.

Topher shares stories about giving back, the motivation that comes from helping others, and the long-term satisfaction that comes from being generous with your time and expertise.

We also discuss the tension between the philanthropic and commercial aspects of WordPress, and how individuals and companies navigate that balance.

Towards the end, Topher reflects on building a body of work over time, trusting in the slow and organic process instead of seeking instant ‘influencer’ success. He explains why he still chooses to create and share resources for free, motivated by the hope of helping the next person just starting out.

If you’ve ever wondered about the power of sharing your work, finding meaning in open communities, or how to make a difference over the long term, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Topher.How

Media Forge Productions

HeroPress

Hallway Chats

WP Photos Info

WP Wallpaper

topher1kenobe.com

YouTube

LinkedIn

Mastodon

Bluesky

Facebook

Last.fm