 All right, can you all see my screen? Because I can't see. OK, good. Awesome. Good morning. So I too enjoyed your theme and took advantage of that in my slides, so we'll have a little fun with that. We're a little short on time, I think. So this is going to be a little interesting, but I'm going to make sure that we cover as much as we can before we move you all on to the 10 o'clock sessions. But also, remember how to use this little thing that I brought along with me. Don't you love, like, speaker gifts? This was a speaker gift, and I don't know how to use it. There we go. So make sure it works before I move forward. So all right, so I'm really excited to be here in Asheville. This is my first time, and I have to say, you'll have an amazing town. I've been here since Wednesday, and I really enjoyed it. I've eaten some amazing food. I ate at 12 Bones, I think it was called, which was, oh my gosh, that was really good. That potato salad was, like, life force. Really good potato salad. And there's a coffee shop on every corner here, which is, like, really great for me, because I'm a freelance remote worker. And so there was always, like, 40 options to go sit and work for a couple of hours. I had a really good meal downtown at Kurate, which was, oh my god, that was good, right? And I saw the drum circle last night. So I've had a really great Asheville experience. So who am I? My name is Rachel Cherry. And for those who I have not had the pleasure, I am a freelance software engineer. I do a lot of WordPress work. I get to build websites for companies like Disney, which is a lot of fun. I also do a lot of higher education work. I am also the director and founder of WP Campus, which is this shirt that I'm wearing. We're an organization for people that use WordPress in higher education. And so we do a lot of great work with that. Yesterday, we celebrated our three-year anniversary. And last month, we had our fifth conference. And so if you're anybody working higher ed, if you're not familiar with us, we'd love to have you get involved. Our website is wpcampus.org. I also have tons of swag. So find me later. I love our swag. And I would love to give you said swag. You don't have to be in higher ed to come take the swag. We have a great WAPU that have stickers and pens and buttons galore. So come find me later. So I love video games. This is me being a Super Mario World expert as a young child teaching my uncle how to play and how to beat Bowser. So I wanted to throw that out there. And so, for the internet. So I will say that I'm not old enough to be, I guess the internet, I'm trying to say the internet was invented before I was born. So I'm not quite old enough to know what life was like before the internet. But I am, I guess, getting my description backwards. But I do know what it was like before the World Wide Web was invented. The World Wide Web was invented about five years after I was born. So I grew up, I did grow up a little bit. So to put it in perspective of how young the web is, I don't mind saying this in front of you all, I'm 33 years old and I'm older than the World Wide Web. So I do remember what it was like, back when HTML first got started. And who remembers what websites were like before CSS was invented? Like, I remember what that was like. And people got really creative with HTML tables and to lay things out. I always love, if you don't know what this map is that I'm showing, it's basically the internet. If you don't know how the internet works, it's lots of cables that run under the ocean floor. And I highly recommend finding videos that talk about it because it's really cool to check out. But I remember what it was like to get AOL CDs in the mail. I had a, we got our first computer when I was like nine years old. We had one computer, the whole house shared. We had dial up internet. If anyone picked up the phone line, you got kicked off. I remember what that was like. So I grew up with the web, which is really great to say. This was also the first, this was the first website ever released, by the way. You can go to that link I have in the bottom right if you wanna pull it up on your phone or something. I imagine this responsive because websites were just so basic at that point that it has to be responsive. But I grew up with the web and I like to consider myself and all of us in this room as humans of the web. The web itself and the, it was invented by this one guy, this medium of the web. But over the past, almost three decades, the web has become what people like you and I have put into it. And a lot of us in this room, myself included, we have this privilege that we have the skills needed to be architects of the web. And so we have this advantage that we can truly make the web what it will be, what it has been and what it is now and what it will be in the future. And as cheesy as what I'm about to put on the screen is, that it's very true. We have a power when it comes to the web and WordPress, using systems like WordPress and the whole democratizing the web philosophy is that it's giving us this power to change the web and to change what is on the web, what we consume on the web, what we share, what knowledge is available. If you've been following along this past week, there's been a lot of kind of WordPress drama on the web about free speech. And this is, there are pros and cons to open web, things like that. And so it is what we make of it, it is how we use it, what we put into it. And so today I wanted to talk a little bit about how to level up on the web as humans, as web professionals. I care about everyone here in this room and I care about, we're thinking about our careers and our futures in the web as professionals, A, but we're also just talking about our personal lives. The web has had this influence on our lives and our society more than any other communication method. And so it does, it's extremely important. And so I do think there's a lot of value in how we grow with the web and what we learn from it, what we put into it, and then how we grow in our careers so that we can put what we learn back into the fold. And so I did have a lot of fun with these slides to kind of go on the game. The game theme, which is really great. So I have just like a few really high level, I'm gonna make sure you watch the time. I have a few high level bullet points that I hope as I talk that you'll put these into your day to day and kind of wrap your brain around these and how you can use these and kind of put them back into your life. So number one, never stop learning. And basically what I mean by this is professional development is super important. And it's kind of weird how a lot of people don't really put that much emphasis on it. A lot of my employers never really have, but there's so much value in it. And it kind of depends on what you're doing. I'm a developer, so for my purposes, like maybe an hour is not really enough time for me to maybe really dive into a code base or something, but I could spend an hour in the morning reading articles and studying theoretical type things. And then maybe every other Monday, I spend three hours playing with something and that's professional development. What you're doing here is professional development. You're coming and you're learning. So you're already placing a focus on it already, but I hope that you take that forward and always how important it is to keep learning, trying new skills. This will also only better your career options and open up this world to you. I wear a lot of hats. I am a developer, but I'm also an event organizer and a planner, I lead a community, and that only has all these things enriched in my life. I've made a lot of friends. I've organized camps, word camps on top of WB campus. I've organized several higher education conferences, but it's also given me this new skill that's made me more desirable to an employer because I have all these great project management skills on top of my developer skills. I also have a bachelor's degree in graphic design. So because I play around, I'm always learning, I taught myself how to code when I was in college or going to college, there wasn't programs. And so I had to teach myself. And so if you want to teach yourself a new skill, that would be really, that's really great. Like for me, I would find projects and experiment, play around, and that's how 15 years later or however long it's been. Here I am taking it day by day. Question everything. I encourage everyone on the internet to just question everything that happens. That's kind of like a pro in a con. There are pros and cons of the open web, one being that anyone can put anything on the internet. And we've learned that a lot. And when there are new tools and frameworks that come out, don't just look at new and shiny and think that it's the answer to your problems. Question what it's doing and how it's built. And what people are doing on the back end, things like this. I have a friend that she likes to say, I'm gonna get it wrong. Tools before strategy equals tragedy or something like this. And the point she's trying to make is that a lot of people will go with new and shiny tools and instead of going with what's best for your project, things like this. And so what she's trying to say is that, don't go with new and shiny just because it's new and shiny, but go with things that fit into your strategy. You should have goals before you pick tools. So just being a human on the internet, question everything that's going on. And it's not necessarily, you have to be this super negative thing about what you're questioning, but it's just more also to learn. If you are questioning things, you are learning and you're growing. You're growing as a web professional because you're taking in more about what's going on. If you're a developer, always look at the code. The first, anytime someone comes to me and asks how I can learn WordPress better, I'm like, just look at the core code. Just break it, look at the code, play around with it. Don't hack core code, but break it and learn with it and that's really the best way, get down to it, figure out how it's loading, things like this. They're really important in your growth. All right, we're gonna have to hurry up along here. All right, have a side project. This is, I have another great talk that I love, a talk that I love to give called, Imprase of the side project because I do think they're really valuable, especially like I mentioned earlier, if you're wanting to learn a new skill. So has anyone in here ever heard of the Hiroy Club? I know a few of you have. So I have a fun side project called Hiroy. You can go to the website right now. Holly recommended Hiroy.club, tweet at Roy. That's all you really do on the website is tweet at my friend Roy. And this is a side project that I started and on the surface it's really silly and there's really not much to it. But on the back end, I've built all these things because it's my playground. I've built an Alexa skill and a Google custom action, they call them. And I've built APIs. There's an API you can ping that will play audio files of people saying Hiroy. Like, this is, like, you know. And you know why I built it? Because I wanted to play around my Raspberry Pi and I wanted to, so I wrote this script that I hooked into Twitter's streaming API and anytime someone used the Hiroy hashtag, it would hit my API and it would play the audio file and I hooked that up to speakers. And so I never did this, but my plan was to hide the speakers under Roy's desk. And it was a pretty awesome idea. And so anytime, so I was gonna get a bunch of people to tweet at Roy, you know, tweet the Hiroy every few minutes so Roy would hear the audio files. And so I also built a jQuery plugin. You know, like these, it's just an excuse really for me to test things out and have a little fun at the same time. But maybe you find a project that like actually serves a purpose other than me innocently trolling Roy on the internet. And so find the need, find a project and then that can be your excuse to learn a new skill to try something out you've never done before and then go with it. So contribute to open source, you know, pretty much that's what we're all doing in here right now, right? And open source is really important on the internet because it does drive this collaboration and the sharing of knowledge that's really valuable. And so if you can take the skills and the things that you've learned and you can give it back to a project, it can become, it's just, it can be really enriching for you and it can be really enriching for someone else. Now how many people probably wouldn't be where they are right now if someone else hadn't shared what they'd done online? Like, right? Like I wouldn't be a developer if there weren't websites online where some previous person had come along and shared what they learned because, you know, there wasn't tons of curriculum. And even now, like it's getting better and better but, you know, how many of us like Google 40, you know, 500 times a day to find the answer to something. And, you know, that's, and so that's because someone else contributed, you know, what they learned. And so that's not necessarily always open source but you get my point. Who all contributes to something open source besides WordPress? Yeah, a few people. There's tons of projects online so you doesn't have to be just WordPress. So I also encourage everyone to find your people, when I'm trying to give advice on how to like get involved, a lot of people will come to me and ask how to like become a developer, things like this. And one thing I do encourage is to find your people and we're doing that right now, aren't we? We've found our WordPress people. And there's a lot of value in that if you're trying to get familiar with a piece of software because you've found people that you can network with and you can ask. And when you're having a really bad day or you're stuck on a problem you know where your people are that you can go to and you can talk to them and you can talk it out. So a lot of us can struggle with this whole idea of being on the internet and being home alone. And I work for myself, I'm remote. So if I don't have my people I'm sitting by myself in my bedroom on my computer all the time. And so I need my people even if it's just to get out of the house and to not go crazy. So find your people whether they're in person at a meetup. So if you find a local meetup and there's obviously like there's a WordPress meetup here there's other meetups. You don't have to be WordPress and maybe you're like a huge React fan or something like some other kind of framework or I'm a big accessibility advocate so I like to find accessibility meetups things like this. Maybe you're a UX person, a designer, maybe you're a writer. And so you can find these other meetups that will also allow you to find a network of people to talk with and to share your ideas. All right, so let your voice be heard. And what I mean by this is kind of going back to what I mentioned earlier about sharing what you learn. It's really important to share everything. Maybe you've gotten up and speaking at a word camp. Maybe you're in a situation like I am right now sharing these experiences. But also if you really believe in something, talking about it and sharing, we have, there are a lot of things like imposter syndrome are really real and stuff like that, that it can be a struggle, but I really encourage you to do what you can to share. Maybe blog about something. Maybe if you've learned a new technology or a skill, you write the blog about it. Share it with somebody else. That person is gonna come along behind you and now they need to learn too. And you may not think that you have something to teach but I promise you you do. You have insight and experience that is very unique to you. And you have no idea what that will mean to someone else. Even if it's just one person who will, it turned on a light bulb, I promise you it's worth it. A lot, you know, I talked to a lot of people that do struggle with imposter syndrome and that's really what they come down to. They don't feel like what they have to say matters and it does because you'd never know what life you might inspire. Like I said, what light bulb you might turn on. And so these things are really important to share your experiences, what you're learning and share it with everyone else, especially lovely people in this room. So as we all are hardworking people on the internet, it is really important to balance your time. And so what I wanna talk about this for, you know, phrases like work-life balance that people use. I'm not a super fan of this word but I am a fan of the ideology, I guess, behind it in the sense that we need to focus on our priorities. And we don't need to spend all of our time like doing one thing. And because I struggle with this too, I struggle with it a lot. I like what I do for a living, I like coding, I like organizing my events, I do all these things. And so, but you know, sleep is important. And apparently we need sleep. And so I struggle sometimes with getting enough sleep. And so for me, my work on balancing my time is having these priorities that are not work and making sure that I am spending the time that I need for those things. So for me, my priorities are like my health. So I just kind of include sleep in that. And exercise, I like to move and be around. So for me, it's like making sure that I move my body a few times a day. I do actually, I'm not kidding, I have a reminder on my phone that reminds me like once an hour to get up and move. Because otherwise I will get so in the zone of my work that I will forget. And then like six hours later, I stand up and you know, you have that feeling or you've been sitting there for a long, that happens way too much to me. So I need to be reminded to get up and move. You know, and for me also, you know, what's important is relationships, which you could include like your family and your friends. You know, these two are also very important. So, you know, maybe on a Friday night, like I really want to sit there and code for a few more hours, but I need to go hang out with my friends because that's very important. So this is kind of like what we mean by work-life balance and managing our time. It's really easy to get sucked into the web and our jobs on the web, especially if you like your job like I do. And so kind of keep these priorities in mind. Consider the consequences of what we do on the web. To go back to earlier, we do have this power as architects on the web that you know, what we do matters and what we put on the web matters. The products that we create and the effect they have on people's lives, they matter. And so it's really important to ask yourself these questions when you're, you know, building something that you're going to put out there, when you're sharing something that you're going to put out there. And, you know, in a sense, we are making decisions, you know, for people that we never really interact with, not face to face. And so, you know, ask yourself, you know, when you're putting something out there, like, why am I doing this? And, you know, why is it important and what effect could this have on the world? This is, you know, check your stereotypes. This is, if you follow me on Twitter, you know, I talk a lot about stuff like we have, we have a lot of, you know, diversity issues in our industry. And so, you know, I have gone to conferences where, you know, people come up to me and immediately think, you know, I'm a social media manager or I am the designer or whatever. And I had someone come up to me and start explaining to me how websites work. And, you know, I was trying to be nice for a minute or two, but then it was just like, you know, dude. And, you know, did you even plan to ask me what I do for a living? And, you know, and so then when I told him, I work at Disney and I build Disney websites, you know, that was, you know, stuff like this happens, though. It happens at our camps. And so I just encourage you, we all have them. We all have bias, whether it's conscious or unconscious. And so I just encourage you, if you're sitting there and you're about to, you know, interact with someone in our industry, just to kind of think for yourself for a second and check what you're thinking. You know, I do it too. I have to check myself because I have stereotype and bias. And so it's just really important as we move forward, if we want, you know, if we want the dinner diversities and all the other diversity issues in our industry to change, then we have to start with ourselves and we have to, you know, we have to do something about it. And last but not least, doing pretty good on time, challenge yourself. And, you know, that's how we grow. And sometimes it's uncomfortable and sometimes it's really hard. Sometimes you fail, sometimes you succeed. And there's nothing wrong with failure as long as you learn from your mistakes. And, you know, it's okay. And so I just encourage you to, you know, think outside the box and whatever other cliches we can throw in in the next couple of minutes. But it's super important as we, you know, to grow as even just humans in general, but also as web professionals, you know, I challenge myself to, you know, learn new pieces of technology. You know, as I embarked on WP campus, it was always a challenge to learn, you know, I had, I started a nonprofit, you know, never done that before. You know, things like this, they were a challenge to me, but they made me better and they made me smarter. And so I encourage you to do this in your own day to day. I wanted to list out the game credits that I used, you know, give them some heads up. I got kind of bummed because I ordered a t-shirt that was my favorite game and I was gonna wear while I gave my talk. And I was gonna give like Kudos to anyone who actually knew what the game was from my shirt, but has anyone ever played the game missed? Yes! Come talk to me later, I'm a big fan. A huge missed nerd. When Sian, like, did their kickstart a couple years ago for the abduction game, like I was the person that gave enough money to like sit in their hangouts and like talk to them. Like that was me. And so, but thank you very much. I hope you have a wonderful camp. I'll be around today and tomorrow and I'll be at the party the night. I hope you'll come and say hi and we can talk about missed and we can talk about WordPress stuff all you want. So thank you.