 Thank you for that introduction. WordPress the early years from a co-founder's view. I'm really just going to talk a little bit about my own backstory and how WordPress got started. We'll see how it goes. So, really right from the beginning, I was born out of wedlock. In May 1962, if you're quick with your maths, you can work out how I'll do. To a mixed race couple, I was put up for adoption at four months old. I kind of wasn't wanted. By white couple who had two children of their own and over the years fostered a lot more, I was adopted by them at age 10, so they kind of decided they wanted to keep me. I want to fast forward to high school where I dropped out at the age of 16 in the middle of my first year of A-levels, if you know the English education system. But just before I dropped out of school, I got a chance to visit the local college and have some computer lessons. There I got to write my very first computer programme, 1978. The computer was a teletype terminal, so that means it didn't even have a screen what you typed on the keyboard came out at a printer on the back of the device. And it probably got sent off to a central processor somewhere, which was probably a washing machine sized mini computer in the back of the college. I programmed in basic and I saved my programme on pink punched tape. Things moved on, so let's fast forward a few more years. And I was working in a record shop, so I was into music very much in the early days. And I got to know a bunch of local bands, so this was 7980, kind of the era of the post punk time in the UK. I was made redundant from the record shop and started working with those local bands. First as a roadie, humping gear about and then quickly moving on to be the techie person. Working the sound desk, programming synths, eventually working in recording studios with video cameras and so on. And at one point, one of the bands decided they wanted to do something sexy with televisions and graphics, not that we perhaps would have used those words. And basically this was the early 80s and so the likes of the human league were kind of top of the post punk pile. So we borrowed a Sinclair Spectrum for UK people, you might remember that computer, home computer, really small. But we borrowed one and I found a couple of programs in a magazine. One that let you type in a word and it drew the word in 3D graphics, which was amazing at the time. And another one that would generate shapes and bounce them around the screen. On a 8 bit 4K computer, that was really exciting. The programs were in basic source code, printed in a magazine I bought from my local news agents and I typed them in by hand. But I combined the two programs so that the 3D words bounced around the screen. Alas, we were never able to figure out how to get the one home computer to project its image onto multiple TVs. So we never solved the hardware problem. But in the process of doing that coding and fixing the issues and even living with the fact that this computer used to reset itself every hour once it got too hot. I was bitten by the programming bug. And thinking about it, this could really be described as my first encounter with open source. The term hadn't been invented at that point. But this was people sharing working code and I was taking that code, combining it and creating something new. I'll fast forward a few more years. I went through a succession of home computers, 8 bit, went to 16 bit. And eventually I got my first PC. It was a green screen, 20 megabyte hard disk, so it was really exciting. 640 kilobytes of memory and a 515 inch floppy drive. I taught myself Pascal on it because when I went to the library to get a computer book the book told me that Pascal was the right language to learn. So 1990 I landed my first professional computing job working for an industrial software company in Stockport. There I learned to program in C because Pascal was not used. On production code for the company's main product which was interesting. And interestingly I got my first position as part of a government back to work scheme after I've been out of work for a short while. Which actually meant that I didn't get paid for the first three months. But I got into open source as it was starting to be termed then although not actually open source. And participated in a number of projects including MySQL. Fast forward 10 more years. I've been through several companies, dozen programming languages at least. The web's been invented and I've gotten into creating websites and writing code for the web. Both as a hobby and professionally. In 2002 I decided I wanted to try this blogging thing that was getting really popular. I thought I'd use a domain that I'd registered in 92 and not use, my Z1.com. And having looked at the options and tried a few of them I installed B2Cafilog and started blogging. I got into blogging really, really, really enjoyed it. I managed to write stuff most days. I also got into hacking on the code. There was a really great community around the support forums and we helped each other and we wrote code and we shared code. I used to spend hours on those support forums. Sometimes four and six hours into the early hours of the morning. And I produced a few things that people liked. Most prominent was probably my B2 links manager at the time. Adding the ability to create and display links on B2. Put about 10 months into my blog B2 seemed to be abandoned. The author Michelle Valdrigi had disappeared off the net. There were known bugs and even the domain it was hosted on was coming up for renewal. One of my fellow B2 bloggers, a chap called Photomat, wrote a blog post entitled The Blogging Software Dilemma in which he bemoaned the problems with B2 and suggested he might take the GPL source of B2 and fork it to fix it and make it better. I commented on that blog post and said, Matt, if you're serious about forking B2, count me in. That comment kicked off what became WordPress. An interesting thing was pointed out to me only a couple of years ago that no one else replied to that blog post. The next comment on that blog post is a year later celebrating the fact that we've been going for a year. We started hacking on B2, fix the issues, add new things into it. Matt worked on the admin screens and we both worked on making the output XHTML compatible or standard. Just like Matt, I was and still am a standards fan. I believe strongly in accessibility and back then bad HTML was a pet hate of mine. I added excerpt functionality and I merged my B2 hack link manager into the code. Somewhere along the line, Matt's friend Christine came up with a name WordPress. We had a new name for our project. A little before we got that first release out, Michelle came back online and declared us the official successor to B2. There was, in fact, more than one fork of B2. We got that first release out in May 25, 2003, version 0.71. For those that remember that release, two of the files were still called B2, something or the other. It wasn't until 1.0 that the rename was fully completed. Immediately after that first WordPress release, Donica O'Queve joined the team. He explicitly came on board to see about merging his own B2 fork, which was B2++, and he created that as a separate project to add what we now call multi-site support to B2. After that first release, we got cracking on more new features. I added the OPML importer, which still exists, to import links into WordPress. Ryan Boren started contributing, as did others. I think he worked on the moveable type importer first, but he went on to become a key figure in WordPress. As 0.71 came out a month later with new features, plenty of bug fixes, and there was also a big speed up, 300% according to Matt. Later that same month, I added WPConfig-sample.php to the project, having experienced that crazy a new release overwrites my setting with many, many projects. So now WordPress does not ever overwrite your settings as they were at the time. There was an 0.711 release with a critical bug fix. Alex King joined the team in August that year. Three years ago, I received a wonderful commendation from Alex during Thanksgiving, where he said, after I started my blog, I started creating custom features for it called Hacks. Mike was active in the B2 community, and he took the time to answer my questions and help improve the code I was creating. Mike's support helped encourage me to create and release more open source code, and also taught me a few things about performance and development techniques. As much as anyone, Mike's support and encouragement helped me get involved in the B2 and the WordPress community. Sadly, Alex died last year, not the only one in the WordPress community to pass on, but he was a big part of the community for a long time, and I'm glad that I got to hear that I'd helped him that much. Dougal got involved, used to be a name in the community, began hacking on the code. We released the next version in October, and my port of the B2 options code removing the need to edit the WP settings file, or even much of WP config got incorporated. I also added in geolocation code that someone had donated. WordPress did actually use to support latitude and longitude directly in the post table, and in fact, I've still got more than one live WordPress site that still has those columns in the post table. WordPress 1.0 came out in January 2004 with some more great features. Permalinks were added, multiple categories, intelligent upgrade code, comment moderation, more input options, lots more things. It's closely followed by 101, fixing those bugs, and later that month we celebrated the first anniversary of the start of WordPress. 1.2 was on its way with some new exciting features, post metadata, the plugin API, internationalisation and more. 1.2 was released in May and with the new plugin system, things really started to take off. Just as 1.2 was in beta, movable type changed their licensing. They were the number one in the blogging world, and they upset a number of prominent bloggers, and some of them very publicly moved over to WordPress. It was a tipping point, there have been others, but it was a real tipping point, and it really increased the visibility of WordPress and its take-up. WordPress hackers mailing list, if people remember that, it's still going. Also started in June 2004. By July 2004, there were a number of popular blogs reporting mostly if not exclusively about WordPress. It really, really had grown. The new theming system was developed, intended for version 1.3, but that eventually became 1.5 many months later. Planet WordPress, a feed aggregator of all the WordPress blogs and sites launched in December 2004. Collecting feeds from many prominent WordPress bloggers and developers. In January 2005, WordPress just two years old from its inception, was awarded web application of the year by the Ars Technica site. The WordPress plugin repository was launched that month. WordPress 2.0 came out in December 2005, and sadly by that time I was no longer able to contribute regularly to WordPress development. I've been made redundant from one job that year and started a new one, but more importantly, my own personal life had me spending much less time at the computer. However, I did manage to complete my sixth chapter contribution to my first and so far only published book that was published by a press later that month. At the time I think it was the only technical book that featured WordPress or at least in the English language. However, I continued to use WordPress on all my sites and those of family and friends. As I moved into my next job I found myself with less time to contribute but I still participated in the mailing list and occasionally in the forums. Eventually over the next few years I saw WordPress go from strength to strength and I began considering giving up my increasingly boring day job. By mid 2008 I decided to try to go freelance with the vague idea that I might somehow be able to contract for three days of the week and find two days to do something with this WordPress thing. And then in July 2008 we had our first word camp in the UK. It was a reasonable size two-day event with between 60 and 70 attendees and one of the speakers on that first morning asked for a show of hands in the room could you raise your hand he said. All those who make all of their income from WordPress and about half the people in the room put their hand up. Not me. And at that point there and then I decided that I would figure out a way to work with WordPress full time. I realised just what WordPress had become. I made some great contacts at that first word camp and it allowed me to do a little contracting work over the weekends in that autumn and then I left my day job in early December that year 2008 and walked straight into my first WordPress work as a one-man company. Through another contact I had made at that first word camp Simon Dixon that first job was the number 10 Downing Street site for the Prime Minister of England. Quite a day view. I maintained that site for the cabinet office for a couple of years before they took it in-house. Interestingly I got a call from the in-house team on a Thursday night in 2010 about two long after the election and the government had changed hands before the new in-house built version was supposed to be launched. It was already several weeks late and they couldn't actually get it live because they'd broken the sophisticated Apache setup that I'd built. I whizzed down to number 10 the following day and we managed to get the thing live before the weekend. I went on to build sites from a number of other UK government departments including the Law Commission, Ministry of Justice and Department of Works and Pensions. I also managed to work with smaller clients building sites for local charities, schools, small companies and so on. I picked up another client through Simon again actually called Gallamanna and we began to build their I'm a scientist get me out of here site which is a science engagement site for high school students in which they learn about real life scientists by asking them questions during science lessons in class over a two week period. They participate in real-time chats with the scientists and more and a quick tip to developers don't ever write real-time chat in WordPress. It's not up to it. The site's won awards, I can't believe it and they even once got mentioned in the British Parliament. It's probably one of my proudest achievements and we continue to develop it to this day. I become very involved in the WordPress community over the years as my contribution code-wise preceded my contribution to the community has grown. I've run a local WordPress meet-up in Manchester since 2009. In fact, we've just had a seven years anniversary since I've been running it anyway and we managed to build up from the lowest point of just three attendees to a regular of 30 to 50 people each month from a pool of over 700. I've been involved in the committee that organized and helped more than 10 UK word camps and other WordPress events throughout many different cities. Three years ago, just after we'd celebrated the 10th anniversary of WordPress, I was presented with an award by the SASCON conference in Manchester in the UK for outstanding contribution to digital when they realized that every single attendee of a search engine and marketing conference used WordPress, every single one of them. This was actually the first and so far only prize that I've been awarded and it was great, I felt really recognized from that and it's a really nice award that sits on my shelf in my office. I've also been running training courses to local non-profit creative community space called Madeleine Manchester's Northern Quarter, which is a really great way to get people involved in the WordPress community. I don't just teach them how to use WordPress and how to get better with WordPress, I also try and invite them into the community. That kind of brings me up to date. The last few months I've been thinking critically about the world we live in and the WordPress community. Petchers already mentioned some of the great things about the community. Those who know me will know that I'm passionate about accessibility, but I'm also equally passionate about things like gender equality, gender diversity and related topics. I was proud that in 2014's word camp we had an equal number of male and female speakers, but events like April's word camp London really helped me understand about inclusiveness, not just accessibility and gender equality being really inclusive. We do better in this community compared to other tech communities, but we're not perfect, but with some of the horrific events happening around the world at the moment with tragedies on Orlando in my own country, other less widely reported issues and increasing divisive hate driven politics that have led to horrendous decision in my own country today. That's spilling over into the street and football terraces. I want to appeal to the WordPress community. WordPress is a tool, it's a tool that we use to make websites, to publicise our bosses to run our businesses and so on, but it's also a tool we use to help others. I'd like to appeal to each of you to in some way try to make the world a better place through WordPress. When you build a website, make sure it's accessible so that everybody can use it. When you build a form, make sure it doesn't make assumptions about gender. When you test a site, don't assume everyone can afford the latest retina screens and fastest broadband. When you or your client chooses stock photography to illustrate a site, stay clear of the gender and race cliches. When you write your marketing message, think about any of those terrible stereotypes. Think about changing the world one WordPress site at a time and in the real world in your day-to-day communications, Petru has mentioned it already, communicate with those around you, stay away from those cliches, those jokes that reinforce the stereotypes and belittle or exclude people. This weekend, think about speaking to new people, make those connections, introduce yourself to someone new, perhaps someone you might not normally consider talking to. We're here for a common cause so it's not too awkward. Hi, I'm Mike, are you enjoying the conference? How did you get into WordPress? You never know, you might make some new friends, some new connections and a friendly face and a few seconds of friendly conversation actually make the world a tiny bit better. Spread a little love to your fellow WordCamp attendee, to a fellow human and continue to do it when you get back home. Thank you.