 So this presentation is called wordpress as a catalyst for any passion my story your story I Was talking with a friend last week About unrelated to wordpress subjects and he used a word that doesn't often come up in day-to-day conversation And that word was atonement So I'm not a particularly religious guy more of a spiritual person But my mind immediately goes to religion when I see this word, but he didn't use it in the religious context So I was curious and I wanted to dig a little deeper into what that word actually meant And and and what the origin was so I found three contexts in which it could be used but it was the origin of the word that I discovered that interested me and Inspired me to include mention of it today So the first context of this word is to atone for something or a Reparation for a wrong or an injury right we probably know that The second is a religious context an annual ceremony or atonement of sin or something And then the third context is it can be used as a noun in theology as in the atonement The origin of this word was traced back to the 16th century It was influenced by a medieval Latin word, and I'm gonna take a moment. So I pronounce it right or close to right a Dune a mentum and a dune a mentum means unity and That is part of a part of that is from an earlier word One mint taken from an obsolete verb of one meaning to unite So we have unity and unite mildly interesting maybe Maybe not Related to why we're all here today. I'd say definitely So before I get into that I'd like to share a story about a series of events And moments in my life that led me to standing on the stage and doing what I do today and It all starts with this story It was 1972 Yes, I'm older I was 10 months old and I was doing what 10 month old babies do I was crawling over everything and I crawled on to the back of the couch and I was looking out of the picture window and The Sun was shining in and my grandmother noticed that there were three yellow dots on my eye Because she worked in a pediatrician's office. She knew that that was abnormal Or not normal So she took me in to see her boss He diagnosed me right away the next day we went to the University of Michigan Medical Center They confirmed the diagnosis and that was of retinoblastoma, which is cancer of the retina so in 1972 there there was There were no other options other than to remove an eye so they did so I have an artificial eye So thanks grandma Now the reason I tell you that is because this Kind of facilitated an over-attention on me when I was a kid So I've come to expect that in my adult life It really bothers me when people don't like me Because I'm used to that but I'm working through it So I had a typical childhood. I grew up in a small town in Michigan In fact, it was so small that the slogan is where nature smiles for seven miles Because that was the extent of it My parents were divorced like many of us when I was four and they were remarried and All through childhood I kind of considered that I had the best of both worlds because one side one set of parents were kind of the blue-collar Disciplinarians make sure that everything was taken care of in the other side completely opposite total hippies Lived on a farm drove tractors Did other things that hippies do not hippies, but you know what I mean? It's a little bit of an outdated term so The best part was that because of that remarriage. I then gained a brother. I was four He was six. So it was like we had always grown up together I watched the Brady Bunch. So all that seemed very natural. No problems there. I was a typical 70s 80s kid. I Went rode my bike through that seven-mile town all by myself To my friend's house who lived in the downtown Where the arcade was and we would bring our bag of quarters And we would be at the arcade from morning until night until his mom literally would yell down the street And then someone outside of the arcade would come in and tell us it's time to go home. I Was skateboarding I was dirt biking. I was drinking lots of Pepsi And dukes of hazard and all the other things there Does anybody know what movie this is from? Yes, better off dead. It's good movie if you haven't seen it So I lived with the blue-collar a Disciplinary and work ethic focused set of parents and I was taught a really really good work ethic my first job is when I was 12 I was a paper boy and then I was a bus boy and then I was a dishwasher and I even did a short stint as a hot dog guy pushing we willies weenie wagon It's a true story It was the only job I've ever been fired from incidentally Because I used to go in the back alley and give all my skateboard friends free hot dogs and sodas and stuff Or pop as we say up here, right? And then I worked on a blueberry farm as a farm hand Fast-forward to college Throughout my childhood. I was always considered the artist of the family because I was always drawing or painting or doing Something that leaned toward the creative. So I went to school for advertising design I was a pizza delivery boy during college and When I was in school, it was one of the pivotal moments in my life When I look back and that was when I had my first interaction with the internet and this was in 1991 or two I think and it was a Boyfriend of a girl that worked at the pizza place. We went to their house and he showed me what a bulletin board system was Does anybody remember the bulletin board system? So it's basically if you're not familiar It was a connection and it was a monochrome screen and you had usernames and then messages And it was basically like a big chat window, right? and I remember being Amazed that I was talking to someone in Belgium and I was talking to someone in Madagascar Maybe not Madagascar then but you get the idea all over the world this little this guy from a small town, right? So after graduation from this Advertising design program. I thought for sure that I was headed straight to New York to work in and high-end ad Agency and then live the life of the show again an old reference 30-something anybody Okay, a group of friends that worked in an ad agency But what what happened? Is that I went back to my small town and I went straight to work on the factory floor And that's not a bad thing But it wasn't what I had envisioned for myself. Does anybody know what kind of machine that is? It's a panel saw I got to be very careful with those So I was raised to believe with this work ethic and this blue-collar life That if I got a job with a nice company that the company would take care of me if I just put in my 30 years in that stark metal building and I had my 20-minute lunches every day and I could power through that in two weeks vacation in the summer That at the end of it all I would have this glorious Retirement where I would put my feet up in Florida because that's what you do and you're from Michigan you find a way to get to Florida so What ended up happening with this during this job? I was married. I had gotten married Because I had this tendency to be creative and I like to draw still I started a side business of a pen and ink portrait Service so I would take a photograph and I would draw a black and white pen and ink portrait of it and I would sell it to you and that is that was Toward the beginning of this entrepreneurial trend that I've had since then But the problem was I tapped out my entire Customer base because I was going around the factory and then no one wanted anymore And I didn't know what the next step was because I was working So my work ethic kicked in then With that job I moved my way up from cleaning parts up to programming C and C machines, which are the X Y and Z accesses Not very visually stimulating but interesting nonetheless So when I started learning that We're fast-forwarded now to the late 90s and the services like geo cities were coming up Angel fire And because I had had that programming Exposure, but I needed the visual part. That was Amazing to me. I could get on these sites learn to little HTML and then have a sweet marquee you rolling across my website, right? The first website I ever built was for that pen and ink portrait business And it was basically a series of tables with some pictures in in the middle It was also the days of ICQ the chat messenger Napster Kazaa all of that. I would download 10 songs and it would take a full day to do it So that was all well and good. I'm living life, but I'm in this this grind of this factory work And I had this recurring feeling of dissatisfaction. I knew that I wasn't being fulfilled by just Performing well at my job and doing these little website things at night And my life wasn't changing. I knew I needed something else and that's when things started to go a little bit south This sorry for the text there. So I'm working on a Tuesday Listening to the radio working with my partner on this factory floor There's lots of machines going but the radio is blasting and we were listening to Howard Stern and That was Tuesday September 11th So when I say it's the day that changed the world I I in no way want to lessen the grief and the horror of people that Experienced that or are close to people who have but it changed everything for all of us and in the furniture industry What it changed was the ability for the company to continue to pay people Because in the furniture industry a lot of the contracts are government contracts and they would Re-up their contracts every year and get new office furniture in order to keep their budgets after this date All that money got diverted. So we went through a series of layoffs. I made it to the third round of layoffs I actually asked to be laid off before a few other people I thought at the time that I was some chivalrous Person, but what it really was was me Giving someone else responsibility for making that life-changing decision for me and they made it So I had this realization That the company as I've been taught is not going to take care of me. They're not going to Make sure that I'm happy and healthy and have a good retirement The company and I weren't united in our goals And I also learned obviously that nothing is guaranteed So at this point I'm now separated in my marriage. I have no job and I'm collecting unemployment And as you may imagine that was the beginning of a low point. I Was I literally was lost. I had no idea what to do The only thing I knew was the school that I went to for this advertising program It just so happens that the Wi-Fi was separated from was about 45 minutes away from that school Which was about three hours away from my home So I moved away. I went back to school and because of this experience with building websites I took a web design class and a video production class. I Focused solely on those classes and what I was learning and Then I would drive back to where I had rented and it was I wish I had a picture of this It was a the smallest mobile home trailer you can imagine and it was literally in the middle of a field In the middle of winter in Michigan There was nothing no TV Barely any electricity barely any heat because I would go home and the pilot light would be out on the on the furnace That was a little scary so My only contact with people at that time was when I was at the school in class online I Had found or I was starting to find this community of people that I could then communicate with and rely on To a degree So after about six months and about four months of that I Learned of a school in Florida. I had no idea how it was going to pay for it But I found some roommates online. I sold everything that I had left that I owned I grabbed my chocolate lab and grabbed the car and we went down to Florida And I literally had no idea who these people were that I was moving in with Four days after I arrived I Secured a job at a place called discovery Cove which is a sister park to SeaWorld where you have dolphin interactions and swim tropical Rivers and that sort of thing At this point. I had a very long beard. I was wearing my hat down. I was hiding quite a bit But I wasn't allowed to have facial hair So I had to shave it because I needed money and that was what brought me out of My depression out of my isolation because my responsibility there was to welcome people to the park and give them a tour Talk about terrifying when you come from Not communicating with anybody other than online to having to do that. But you know what happened. I Found a community. I found a community of people that I worked with But then I also moved in with a bunch of co-workers And we had a house with four people in it So again, we were unified by our jobs where we lived together and life was getting better and better every minute and Then I received a phone call one morning that my mom had had a heart attack She's okay. She pulled through Two months later while I'm off wearing my sandals and flowered shirts. I get another phone call My dad had a heart attack Remember these are the the the two sets of parents, right? So it's coming at me from both sides. He's okay He's actually skydiving for the first time today at 71 years old I'm a little nervous about that. I'll tell you the truth and Then a couple months after that I got a call that my brother had passed away So there was this series of events Which made me feel like I need to get back home and that's exactly what I did When I got home I gave the eulogy at his funeral. I created a photo montage Memorial DVD for him to show at the funeral and That worked out pretty well Everybody got that It's important So remember that DVD I made for him. Well the funeral director liked it He thought that was a great addition to the grieving families So he asked if I could do another one and another one and another one and then that turned into a business called moving moments So at this point I stayed in Michigan. I had gotten a job with an audiobook publisher as the Website sales Processing person and phone sales and then I was doing this memorial business on the side That was going really well except for the fact that I was only sleeping two and three hours a night because this is this is 2000 in late 2003 through 2004 When you would burn a DVD and then you had to check it afterwards to make sure it was actually going to work So I would need to do that because I needed to take that to the funeral home on my way to my day job and Hope nothing went wrong So it was going very well But looking back again. I had found another community We were united in grief It was my job to make sure that I was serving them And and making sure that they had you know had a good experience So I've made this website for this business. I started updating it quite a bit. It was an HTML website If you've ever built an HTML website and you're not a developer level person You know that sometimes you have to update 20 or 30 pages individually To get things right back in those days I didn't know any better So I was looking for a faster way to update that site to build the business because we were now starting to talk about Other partnering with other funeral homes and really building it So I was looking for software. I was looking for open source Blogging software because I didn't know there was anything called a content management system And in fact WordPress wasn't a content content management system back then So similar once I started working with WordPress similar to that bulletin board system I was amazed at what I could create and the people that I could interact with Online this was the version of WordPress. I started with it's a little pixelated. It's version one dot zero dot one Incidentally, this is before plugins were a thing if you wanted to add functionality you had to edit your hacks file And copy and paste code and then add some additional files and man was I good at copying and pasting? Only experienced the white screen of death about several dozen times But where was I finding this code? From others using and building WordPress the community This new community united by the software So all of a sudden this guy from a small town in Michigan Was being it was it was talking to and being helped by men and women all over the world So the more I learned the more I started sharing via blogging and I was writing tutorials about what I was learning And that went pretty well There were a lot of ups and downs a lot of opportunities and failures I had a dream blog Where I would write about dreams and then I invited other authors to write about theirs and submit them and my monetize that with some Advertising it was okay 100 bucks in a month extra that'll work. I Made a pet supply store. I started selling pet supplies with a drop ship supplier. That was not with WordPress That was with OS commerce another open-source platform and Then I discovered WordPress multi site and if you're not familiar with multi site multi site is a Well, it's now a feature of WordPress that you can turn on that allows other people to sign up for other WordPress sites under your single installation When I started using it WordPress and WordPress multi site were two separate things So there was two separate forums and I made this site for artists because I was trying to feed that Creative part of me and provide others with solutions and I started monetizing that by by adding special features For $5 a month $10 a month and it went so well that I was literally a couple of weeks away from putting in my two weeks notice at My day job and then I woke up one morning and the whole thing was hacked the whole thing Emails you wouldn't believe it. So I tried to do What I could it didn't work. I went to the multi site forums got some help That worked for a while and then it would get reinfected. I ended up closing that business refunding everybody's money and then feeling again like I had failed but Fast-forward to that day job which then led me into the IT department because I couldn't stop talking about WordPress to the IT Manager who shared my cubicle with me He finally acquiesced and gave me a position there blogging And then that company was acquired by Amazon So now I was an Amazon employee that had WordPress experience that led me back to Florida For a ventilation systems company where I could use WordPress and WordPress multi site every single day That job then led me to being aware and knowing about the plug-in ecosystem the free and the premium plugins I found a guy on the gravity forums forum that helped me with something else We decided to partner up and we started a company called foo plugins that is now six years old and it's still going today So one thing leads to another But you know what none of that matters none of what I've told you today really matters Without your story All of us here today have a story. I'm not unique So all things considered Our individual histories are short, but our future together with open-source software and the people Within it and surrounding it is long term What we do today at WordCamp Pittsburgh The people we meet the conversations we have will shape not only the future of the web Which is vitally important, but the interconnectedness that we all feel Being part of a larger community So I welcome you today to meet people to be open to meet people that you to talk to people that you Might be nervous about Because everybody has a story and you never know where one interaction is going to lead you Thank you