203 - The WordPress journey of Wendie Huis in t Veld

Interview with Wendie Huis in t Veld and Nathan Wrigley

This is one of those warm and fuzzy episodes! It's all about Wendie and her journey with WordPress.

There's no product here, no tutorial, just a good, old fashioned chat about WordPress with a thoroughly lovely person!

Wendie and I have been chatting on and off for years. It all started back in the day that both of us were going through the WP Elevation program and we decided to be accountability partners.

We chatted from time to time during that and drifted in and our of conversations online for many years. We met in person at WordCamp London in 2018 as well as WordCamp Europe in 2019.

She's been working in the WordPress space for years and has a really interesting story to tell.

We speak about:

• Wendie's 'Website Club' project. This was a philanthropic project that she started to meet with other WordPressers who wanted to learn from one another. It all started off well, but then the club started to be used by some people in a way which means that Wendie decided to stop participating and move on.
• We also talk about the beguiling nature of web technologies and how it's easy to dabble in other platforms, such as Webflow. Although WordPress is an amazing project, it need not be at the root of all our online endevours. Wendie has some interesting opinions about this area and although it's constantly under change, it's certainly something that I've thought about a few times in the past.
• Can we trust the WordPress Project for all of our work. The concern that some people have is that the governance model for WordPress means that we have a benevolent dictator (not our words) who oversees the ultimate direction of the project; what gets commited and what stay out of core. Is this the best model for a platform which is now seeing such a large proportion of the internet running WordPress code?

Since the discussion was recorded Wendie has had some great news. She's been taken on as an employee of Automattic, working as one of the WordPress happiness engineers.

Maybe some of the conversation would have gone differently had we recorded it last week, but I commend it to you anyway as it's a lovely story of a Wendie's journey which I'm sure will resonate with many of you.