 Thank you. Everybody, oh my gosh, listen to me. Yeah, my name is Ali. I'm a lot of things, but for the most part, I'm a digital producer and course creator. This is my dozenth plus time speaking at a WordCamp. But this is my first time in Asia at all. And I'm so honored and humbled to be a part of this first time event. It's been a very long time coming. I'm so happy to have been able to meet so many of the people that I've known through Twitter for many years. And finally, I get to see their faces and hug them and congratulate them. And so before we begin, I would really like to stop and give a huge round of applause to the WordCamp Asia organizing team volunteers who have been working for literal years to make this event possible for us. And it's been so far so fantastic, and I'm so grateful. As we go through, please tweet about what you see and what you think using my Twitter handle, ali underscore nimmons. Let me know what you're thinking and feeling and all of those wonderful things so that I can connect with you afterward as well. So if you are someone who is not particularly a huge fan of code, if you don't like to code, if you're not that passionate about coding, or if you'd simply like to learn to do other things aside from coding, this is the talk for you. So I'll go over here. A little table of contents for you and just an overview of what we're going to cover. We're going to talk about what tech actually is, right? Because we say, we work in tech. What does that actually mean, especially in the context of code and software and all that stuff? I'm going to go backward on myself and talk a little bit about why you should know at least a little bit of code. I'm going to tell you my no code story. We're going to talk about why WordPress in particular is so good for people who would like to work in tech without needing to touch any code. I think most of us kind of know that, but we're going to go over it together. And then we're going to talk about how to actually begin a career, a freelancing career, finding work, finding jobs in tech as a person who doesn't write software. So a quick show of hands. I'm really curious the professions and the passions that we have in the room right now. So if you are a designer, please raise your hand. Website designer, logo designer, UX designer, all of that kind of stuff, cool. If you work in business, marketing, analytics, data, all of those kind of numbery things, raise your hand. Gorgina, love that. If you're a writer, if you're a content writer, SEO writer, technical writer, documentation, that kind of stuff, love that. If you work in community or events, that kind of stuff, raise your hand. Nice. And if you are a developer, you write software and things like that, please raise your hand. We have such a good mix of people here. I'm so excited. OK, so when I started preparing this talk, I asked myself this question, what is tech? What does that mean? And I went to Ye Olde Google to try to figure that out. And the first definition I found is this one, which I don't like. I think it's way too technical. It's like way too dry and specific. And I just kind of feel like it's not very true. There are lots of jobs and lots of passions and responsibilities that don't necessarily fit this definition. So I kept searching. And I found this one, one that deals with computer programs, hardware, software, networking, and maintaining systems. Still a little bit dry. I feel like it omits a lot of the creativity and, again, doesn't include a lot of the things that I think about when I think about what a lot of y'all and myself do. So I came up with my own definition, because why not? I've decided that to work in tech means that you do work that determines how computers and or the internet affects our lives and affects our businesses, which I think way more covers the gambit of what we're all actually here to talk about. How we use WordPress, which is reliant upon the internet and our computers and our phones. How we use WordPress to affect how people run their lives, how people interact with information. And spoiler alert, that doesn't necessarily mean code. So like I said, I'm going to kind of be a little bit of a hypocrite and talk about why it's important, I think, if you're working in tech, to at least know a little bit of code, even if it's not in your job description. And when I'm talking about code here, I'm talking about the basics. HTML and CSS, I think, are important for even people who don't work in tech to know. Knowing code provides a baseline understanding of how these systems work. If you're a content manager and you're working in WordPress to publish things that other people have written, knowing a little bit of HTML, knowing a little bit of CSS, like my friend Laura said earlier, enough to be dangerous, gives you context. It allows you to kind of understand how things are working underneath the hood. I think learning any language, whether it's code or whether it's Spanish, Thai, German, knowing other languages encourages a different way of thinking. And I believe that a lot of people in this room are bilingual. There's a lot of people here who know English and another language. And I'm sure you are aware of the fact that when you switch languages, it changes a little bit of your perception. It changes a little bit of how you see the world. And I think knowing code changes a little bit of how you see the world. Code is great to help with troubleshooting. If you have a website and something's going a little bit funky, maybe you install the theme. It's not doing exactly what you want. Being able to go into that little CSS customizer and add a couple of little things to change how you want things to look is an extremely powerful thing. And it helps you to be a better teammate. It helps you to be able to speak and communicate more efficiently with the people on your team, in your companies that do code. And I think makes you a more valuable team member at the end of the day. So I think that since this is a persuasive essay that I'm writing here, it's good to include a real life example. So this is my story as somebody who works in tech full time and doesn't write any code. So 2013 is about the time that I dropped out of theater school and decided I was going to become a web developer. So I decided to take this 180 turn and go from the performing arts into sitting in front of my laptop for eight hours a day looking at bright lights. And I started learning how to code first out of library books because at the time I didn't have a laptop. Eventually I got enough money to buy my first laptop and I would go to Starbucks and I would use courses like Udemy and Code Academy and Treehouse and Linda and YouTube. And I would write code in my notebook because having learned Spanish in high school I was like, well, to learn semantics and stuff, I need to write it out to remember it, which in retrospect, I feel very silly that I ever did that. But that's how I started to try to learn. And I really didn't enjoy it. It wasn't very fun, but I wanted to build websites. And in my mind, that was the way you started is you learned how to code. And after about a year of that, I got my first job as a junior web developer at an agency in Florida. And that's a picture of me helping my boss to start our very first podcast. So I've been a podcast person from day one. And I did a lot of different things in that job. And that job was actually where I got introduced to WordPress. That was the job I was working at when I met some of the people in this room and I attended my first word camp. And I started to learn that I didn't actually need code because I had WordPress. And so about a year at that agency was not a fun place to work, so eventually I was like, I need to get out of here. I struck out on my own. Because I had WordPress, I could build websites for people and I could sell those services. And at that agency, I learned about SEO and I learned about maintenance and I learned about hosting. And I learned enough about building those systems and processes without any code that I could start turning around and selling those services to other people. So this is, I had to go onto the Way Back Machine and find a screenshot of my old website. And this is kind of the best that I could get. And I was like, oh man, I have this old weird headshot that I took and everything. But I started my own business and I was able to make my own money on my own terms. And it was the confidence of starting this business that allowed me to feel like I could apply to speak at a WordCamp, which I did about a year later. So things were already kind of starting to roll. And again, I wasn't touching any code. So I ran that business for about three years and eventually I was like, I'm getting really burned out, not making a whole lot of money. I miss working with people and being on a team. And I actually met Michelle for Shet, who I'm seeing nods a lot of you know. And through her, I learned about GiveWP. I learned that there was a position for support tech and I applied and I got that job. So this is a picture of me working the booth, the sponsor booth at WordCamp US in 2019 before the world exploded. And I think you can tell from this picture how much fun I was having and how much that I was enjoying myself and I was making friends. And I wasn't alone in my bedroom, fiddling with WordPress all day long. I was out, I was speaking to people, I was doing things, I was impacting things and it was extremely, extremely fun. And that first job was the rocket ship that sent me to all the other opportunities that I've had. So for this 2023 point, I couldn't figure out what to list here. So these are just some of the companies that I've been lucky enough to be able to work with, to be able to create content for, to be able to make money working with. That's a pretty cool list right there if I do say so myself. I'm pretty proud of myself for that list. And again, none of them have asked me to code. None of them want me to code. They want all the other knowledge and all the other experience that I have. And these are some of the things that I've helped create in some ways. I've helped build the Black Press Slack Group, which is a fantastic community initiative. I've helped build underrepresented in tech with Michelle. I started my own podcast production company and now I create content from Astro WP. And it's been an extremely gratifying experience all without needing to learn to code. So I think there's been a theme throughout all of this, right? And it's been WordPress. I think that there is no other software tool community that is as supportive in tech of non-coders as WordPress is. I think most of us can agree that putting up a WordPress site doesn't require you to code. That's normal. That's typical, right? There's this huge community, part of which I'm looking at right now, of non-coders, people who don't focus on that, that you can learn from, that you can find friendship and mentorship from, that create educational resources for you, a lot of times for free, that you can find to begin to learn from. To contribute to WordPress, which is one of the most powerful things that you can do with your knowledge, doesn't require coding knowledge for I would say the majority of teams. There are fantastic teams, important teams that need coders. But I think one of the saddest things to me about our contributing structure is the lack of emphasis on the need for people who do not code. If you know two languages, you can be a contributor to WordPress. The Polyglots team needs you. If you design anything for a living, a contributing team needs you. If you know how to write, if you know how to edit, if you know how to take a picture with your phone, a contributing team needs you. And that is contributing to a tech open source project without needing to know any code. And if you do decide you want to learn how to code, which every year I look at myself and I'm like, man, this is the year you're gonna learn JavaScript. Ali, this is the year you're gonna sit down with a course and you're gonna learn some JavaScript. And then the year's over and I'm like, man, that past version of me was really dumb for thinking that because I don't wanna do it, right? But one day, if I do decide to learn some JavaScript, I know that I have resources and people at my fingertips ready and willing to help me do that. There's people in this room that I can look at right now and know that they will help me do that. So despite me saying you don't need to learn how to code, you don't need to learn how to code, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't learn how to code or that you can't learn how to code. All right, so if you want to start working in tech, you don't know how to code. How do you make that leap? How do you make that step? There we go. The number one thing that I think I did right when I struck out on my own, I made a lot of mistakes. I made way more mistakes than I made good decisions, but I think the number one thing that I did right very early on was I built a portfolio of work for myself. And a lot of it was fake, right? I would create a website for a company that didn't exist. I would like grab a stock photo from Unsplash and I would say, what does this photo represent as a company? Let me make a company around this image and I'm gonna build a homepage around this image and this fake company, right? And then I moved into building things for friends and family at very low cost, but all that beginning stuff, all that beginning practice and trial and error was just for stuff that I made up. If you're not necessarily a designer or a builder, maybe you're a strategist, maybe you're interested in SEO, some things like that. I'm sure we've all had the experience, right? Of going to a website for a company that we're trying to get something from, right? Maybe you're trying to order dinner, you go to a restaurant website and you're like, man, this website sucks, right? Who designed this? I could have done this so much better. Do it, sit down, open up one of my favorite tools ever. If you write down anything from this talk, Local by Flywheel is an amazing tool for just spinning up a WordPress website and getting started, right? Download Local by Flywheel, start a website, it'll open up a blank WordPress install for you and redesign that company's website. You don't ever have to give it to them, they don't ever have to see it, but get that experience, get that practice. And if you put that into a portfolio, you don't have to say, oh, I sold this to this company, you can say this was a personal project. You can be transparent about that, but you wanna have something that you can show as far as what your skills and your experiences. Same thing for plans, strategies, all of these things. You can make it up, no one cares. Just get the experience and make sure that you keep all of that. I wish that I had kept so much more of my early projects and the early things that I worked on. Because especially if you're working on these things and you're thinking, well, maybe I'm not doing a very good job or I'm not really happy with this. Future you, you in five years is gonna love being able to look back and say, I'm so much better now than I was before. Look at all the progress I made. That's a huge, huge, huge confidence booster. And start creating content about the things that you know and about the things that you're learning. One of the things that I always recommend is starting a blog, right? Most of us here know how to do that, thankfully. Start a blog and document the things that you're learning. So if you sat down and said, okay, I wanna learn how to use Figma for my logo designs. Write a blog post about that, about how you learned it, what you learned, what you struggled with and document all of that progress. Start a podcast, start a newsletter, put content out there. And you might think, well, nobody's gonna care what I have to say or maybe I don't have anything interesting to say. Do it for yourself. Do it for yourself. Do it for yourself in five years. There are tons and tons of job boards out there, particularly WordPress ones that are looking for non-coders. Post status, I've heard mentioned a couple of times today as a fantastic place. It's a Slack channel as well as other things, websites. And there's tons of people to connect with there who are hiring and looking for you. WP career pages is basically just a long list of WordPress companies and you click one and it'll send you to their careers page. So you can just tab click, tab click, open up all those career pages and tabs and apply to all the jobs that you can find right there and then. Jobs.wordpress.net is similar but kind of opposite where you can filter by the skill or the profession. So if you're a designer, there's a design tab that you can click on and it'll open up all the WordPress companies that are looking for WordPress designers and so on. And then a little bit of shameless self-promotion here. My friend Michelle and I created a database called Underrepresented in Tech. And pretty much just from looking at faces, almost everyone in here is qualified to be in this database. It is a database of people who are not your, I will say average in the West because I don't wanna make assumptions. Average in the West meaning straight white men. If you are not a straight white male, you can be an underrepresented in tech. You add yourself, you add your profile, so you say what you do, what you're interested in, what kind of opportunities you're looking for and then employers will go through that database and be able to find you. I know that a lot of us identify as introverts, right? I know a lot of us are already getting tired today because we've been interacting too much with people and we're starting to get tired. But networking is an incredibly important part of this experience, especially if you are looking for a creative role where you're gonna have to be communicating, right? And thankfully WordPress makes networking pretty easy to where half the time you don't even know that you're networking, right? You've already done the first step. You're here at a word camp. That is the first step to networking. Go to a word camp, find someone to talk to, congratulations, you just networked. Apply to speak at word camps or your local meetups if you have them. I would not have gotten most of the opportunities that I've gotten if I didn't decide to get up on stage and start speaking. Same for podcasts. I met Michelle who got me my first WordPress job because she had a podcast and I applied to speak on it. Pure and simple. There are tons of podcasts out there and they're always, always, always looking for guests. And a lot of the American or North American ones are desperate for guests from other parts of the world because there are stories that we don't hear on that side of the world. So you are hot commodities. Attend other tech conferences that are not about WordPress. Please, I wish more WordPressers would go to conferences that are not specific to WordPress because there's so much else to learn and there's so many other perspectives to get. For better or for worse, the WordPress community is on Twitter and will be for the foreseeable future until Twitter actually explodes. So if you don't have a Twitter account, set one up today and if you have one that you don't really use, try to be on it a little bit more frequently. That's where a lot of the conversations are and a lot of people are posting about these kinds of jobs and opportunities on Twitter. And find one of these Slack channels to join either a post-status or black press. These are places where people come together and talk about a lot of these opportunities and where you can find mentorship in the kinds of roles that you're looking for. All right, so I wanted to list out some of the types of roles and types of jobs in tech that are very popular, very high in demand that do not require any code. So I've tried to group them into sort of like categories. So we have a design category that's website design, UX, UI, themes, logos, graphic design, animation, video, all that gorgeous stuff. I group these into sort of like a business category and that's consulting, coaching, helping other people to run their businesses, human resources, data, starting your own agency. If you're one of those, the saying is like, if you can't do, then teach, right? If you can't do, then lead. They lead the people who can do and support them, uplift them, or working in things like e-commerce. So these are all great for if you are passionate about leadership, if you're passionate about numbers, data, people, these are all very powerful. And there are tons of certifications, courses, workshops online where you can learn to do things like this. So if you are a communication person, if you are a sales person, if you are a storyteller, marketing is probably a very good area for you. There's a lot to do with strategy. There's a lot to do with advertising. SEO is a huge one, as well as social media. All of these things, you could code as a SEO person. You don't have to. If you are a natural writer, I see some natural writers in this room already. There's tons and tons and tons of jobs within the tech community that need writers and people who communicate well. I can't tell you how much tech documentation I've read that is practically illegible because we don't have enough writers to rewrite these things. Copywriting is incredibly important. SEO and blogging, proofreading, documentation, creating courses, that's one of my favorite things that I've been doing recently is writing educational content. And all of it comes down to the writing skills that I honed in high school, right? And if this is something that interests you, just start, just start doing it. Freelance, find gigs online, write your own content and publish it. You have the power to do that. I remember when I first started out on my own, I would write SEO articles for $5 on Fiverr and it was hard and it was kind of demoralizing but it helped me to hone those skills very, very quickly and it gave me a body of work to show for my skills. If you are a community person, being here with everyone gives you all those warm, fuzzy feelings and you are less of an introvert and you really like talking to people all the time and that jazzes you up. Tech communities are one of the most important parts of how we build these products and these services in this software, right? We all know that WordPress wouldn't be what it is without this community and we need people to run those communities. We have some of them sitting here and I'm so grateful that they are here, right? Community can involve consulting. I do a lot of diversity consulting that has nothing to do with software but it's needed. Podcasting, nothing to do with software but it helps build community around that software. Organizing events, right? Maintaining the open source project. There's so many contributions we need to WordPress around maintenance, keeping things going the way that they need to be going as well as news, reporting on the things that are happening, right? Join in as many conversations as you can. That's where Slack comes in handy. That's where Twitter comes in handy and publish your content about your thoughts. Start these conversations yourselves. Contributing to WordPress is one of the most powerful things that you can do to thrust yourself into these opportunities as a non-coder. Yesterday at Contributor Day we had all of these amazing, beautiful, wonderful people come out and either contribute for the first time or help other people to contribute. I'm right here, right there. Yeah, that's me. I look great, don't I? That's about, I can count, I think, eight pixels. Contributing to WordPress is fantastic and everything I've mentioned, all of those jobs that I just, like roles that I just had in those bullet points, there are corresponding teams for those skills. If any of what I just said appeals to you either as something you would like to do or something you already enjoy doing, there's a team for you. It's right there for you to get started with and to find people to mentor you as well who can help you move even further into those fields. So if you're a marketing person, there is a marketing contribution team. If you're a design person, there's a design team. If you're a writing person, pretty much every team needs writers. If you're a community person, there's a community team. Make.wordpress.org, write that down also. Make.wordpress.org is where you can go to find all of those teams. So that is it for me. I would love to answer any questions that anybody has. While you think of those questions, I would like to take a quick picture of all of you if you don't mind that I can commemorate my experience with. So if you are on this far side, if you are on this far side, I would love it. If you would scooch in as close to the center as you could get, I'd really appreciate. If you don't, it's like five o'clock. If you don't feel like getting up, I totally understand. But if you wouldn't mind being in my picture, I would, it would make me really happy. Yay. Oh, I appreciate all of you. I have so much power. I'm like, rise and everyone gets up. And I will be, I will take a picture of the picture and I'll tweet it for all of you to be able to see and share, okay? So everyone look cute. I got to get this way. There we go. I think I got everyone in here. All right, one, two, three. Yay. All right. Thank you so much.