 All right, we're rockin' and rollin' now. Well, glad to see everyone here. Nice turnout again. So my talk is gonna be about how I transitioned from a mailman, led a carrier, to WordPress and the journey along the way. A little bit about myself, I'm just gonna reiterate what Jason said. I'm an associate software engineer at Penske Media Corporation. I'm a former led a carrier for the United States Postal Service. I'm a husband, proud father of two boys. That's my LinkedIn and GitHub, if anyone wants to connect later. Slides are available if you need, wanna check it out as well. And I'm just gonna go over the roadmap. I'm gonna talk about just the idea of how I wanted to change careers and then a process going to a boot camp and then a long comes WordPress, how I even got involved in WordPress community, going to meetups and WordCamp as well. And then finally, the changing of careers. And if anyone has some questions, I'm sure gladly to be able to take some questions afterwards. So let's get started. So the idea to change careers. So I never was really a technical person. I did have a background in music production. So that was like my first kind of foray into like software cause everything was, is with music, software based, everything kind of transitioned from hardware to software. So that was my first kind of dabble with software and development. And in the era of Myspace, I don't know, I'm dating myself. Anybody remember Myspace? Ooh, that's what I'm talking about. Different time, good times, right? So in the era of Myspace, you could kind of like really trick out your Myspace page instead of having like your generic Myspace page. So one of my friends, another like freelance music producer, he made his so nice, I was like, man, how'd you get it so nice? He's like, oh, you know, little CSS HTML. And I was like, what? What's that? So I go to W3 schools and kind of was messing around with that. And I just was like, man, this is kind of boring. So I was like, I'm ditching this. So fast forward, like years later, years later, I was kind of working on a musical project, helping someone out. And I stumbled upon a Squarespace page, Squarespace. And I used that and I was like, you know, I kind of wanna trick this out. Like the Myspace pages I used to see. And I said, you know what? Let me, let me get back into this. Let me get back into, you know, pursuing this HTML, CSS thing, whatever that is. And so I stumbled upon free code camp. And I kind of, it wasn't as boring anymore. It was like, okay, this is pretty cool. This is, I could, you know, I could vibe with this, but I just felt I needed more structure. And right around that time, I wanna say this is probably like 2016, 17, a term kept coming up. I kept hearing boot camp. I was like, what's a boot camp? So apparently the boot camp was an accelerated, kind of, I don't wanna say a CS degree, because I mean, God forbid, someone who has a CS degree there probably would be like, what, no, a boot camp, what, no, no. It's not the same, it's not the same. So I'm not gonna say that. I wanna get beat up after this. So they just kind of, the key components that are needed in software development, they give you that as opposed to everything else. So to just kind of get you fast tracked. And at the time, a lot of them were like 12 weeks, some were even shorter than that. But it was, it had to be in person. So I just was like, I can't afford to go full time and do that. So I just kept and kind of just kept going with the free code camp and self-teaching. And then the pandemic happened. And everyone was kind of, lives changed. So, and everything became online. So then I've been fine, like I said, okay, here's an opportunity, I think it's time, I think I could re-engage that idea of going to a boot camp. So, I'm going to a boot camp. So, and let me tell you that facial expression, that's how it feels. But so I stumbled upon this aggregator called Career Karma where they help people who do wanna get into tech find a proper boot camp. Because now around this time, this is like 2019, 2020, the boot camp thing is kind of taken, it's taken off. And there's some not so nice people who are offering boot camps in there, it's kind of getting to a place where it's getting a little predatory. So here comes this place, Career Karma, who kind of wants to really help people guide them through the whole process. So I go through them, I find a boot camp that kind of can coincide with me working full time, where I could kind of like, well, I could put in about four to three hours in the morning, three at night. So I was doing all this and my second son was born in the middle of it. So it was intense, it was intense. And plus, you know, the early stages of COVID-19, which was scary for everyone. So, but I just persevered, persevered, spoke to a lot of software engineers and heard about different technology and just I was just kind of soaking it in. I was just like, okay, let me, I want to learn as much as I can. And then I hear like whispers of WordPress, WordPress. Now, now back in that MySpace age, I heard about WordPress then too, but I didn't understand it. I know there was WordPress.com and I kind of fiddled with that. I was like, I don't get it. So, but I just heard whispers of WordPress. And I was intrigued, I was like, okay, let me find out about this WordPress. You know, and along comes WordPress with his hand out, open, ready, ready to embrace. So I was like, you know, WordPress, like what you're about? But then I started asking people, those same like engineers I was meeting. I said, what's up with WordPress? Like, what do you think about it? I said, pump the brakes. What did you say? WordPress? No, no, no, no, no WordPress, no way. No way. You know what WordPress is built with, right? PHP, no way. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. And I heard, oh, I heard it all. And I'm sure everyone has heard them too. But we're gonna, for fun, we're gonna go over them and laugh as we go over them. First one, it's a dying language. It's a dying language. It's been dying for 20 years apparently. So, so that's one, another one. Real devs don't use WordPress. Oh boy. That is, that's offensive. That's offensive, that's offensive. And so untrue. So untrue. There's no money in it as well. That's even more laughable, right? And my favorite, you won't find work. That's, but still I heard all of these comments and I just was, you know, I'm still, WordPress has its hand out. I'm gonna go see what it's about. I wanna find out what's up with WordPress. So I heard about meetups and I heard that was a good way to network and meet other people who are in the same interest of you, same interest that you have. So it's the, you know, it's in a pandemic. Everything's online anyway. So I was like, let me see if there's like some kind of networking for, you know, engineering or anything like that. And then, ooh, I see WordPress Montclair Meetup. I was like, Montclair is not too far from me. It's online anyway, let me just go. Let me, let me check it out. Let me see what's it about, you know? And I wanna talk about the power of meetups, right? My son, by the way, he encouraged me to put this one in his picture. So the power of meetups. So I go and I see Mike, I see Cameron, see Jason, I don't know anybody. I have my camera off and I'm getting my son ready for bed and it was my turn to kind of introduce myself. I let him know like, hey, you know, I'm in a boot camp now. I'm just, you know, really getting into software development and you know, I heard about WordPress. I just kinda wanna find more things out. And Mike, Michael Terry, we have a very similar story. So it was kind of like a kindred spirit. He was like, hey, you know, I used to, used to work for the post office back in the day when I was in college. I, you know, did it, you know, in the summer. And I too transitioned. I don't have that whole CS degree thing. And we kind of bonded over that. And Montclair was so cool to WordPress that because of the pandemic, there was a Slack plugin called Donut that did a random one-on-one meeting. And, you know, as fate will have it, Mike and I, that was my first Donut. So I'm in my mail truck. And I turn my phone on and we talk and he dispels all the rumors of WordPress. He was like, what? No, you know, you could do X, Y, and Z with WordPress. You know, I just, it was like, I heard it was just like a page builder. No, well, you could do that too. You could extend it, it's really flexible. And he was like, you know, what you could do is, why don't you take like this course, look into this and check out WordPress. Like, see how it is. So, you know, I was diving into WordPress. And of course I still had heard those whispers. What WordPress? You, and I just, I just ignored it. I just kind of kept on the side along with the bootcamp. So after that meeting, I just was going through the bootcamp and, you know, kept in touch with Mike and everyone else in the WordPress community, Mike Clear, Meetup. And, you know, we're just going through the motions of the bootcamp. And then finally I was able to finish it. And one thing that I did was, you know, I said, you know, let me be a little bit more active on LinkedIn. So I was on LinkedIn and I kind of was used to strategy learning out loud. So things that I didn't know well, I said, you know, this is a challenge. Let me start doing this online more, more so. And that caught Mike's attention. And so Mike and I continued to be in further communication. And one night he invited me over. He was like, hey, why don't you come over? Cause I was interested in a position at his company. I said, hey, are they hiring? And he was like, well, we want a guy who's kind of like more experienced and has a little bit more knowledge. But why don't you come over and like, well, you know, I'll talk to you, let you know, like how things work. And I, you know, I thought that was awesome. And then around that time, we're getting ready for my clear word camp. So I'm oblivious to everything. So I don't, I don't know what a word camp is. I, you know, I'm like, what's a word camp? I don't know. But you know, I'm going to volunteer for it. I don't know what it is. I'm going to volunteer for it. And I really didn't know that, you know, this was the first word camp at, you know, post pandemic. So it was going to be pretty, pretty huge. So, but that's when, you know, an opportunity came about. So I'm at word camp and we're kind of, you know, just getting things ready. And Laura, who is awesome, Laura always is kind of like, hey, Kayla, why don't you, why don't you try that? Why don't you do this? Try that. And she was like, hey, Kayla, why don't you, you know, present the speakers? I was like, oh, like MC a little bit, all right, you know, I'll do it. And it so happens that Penske was one of the sponsors last year. So Mike's boss and my boss as well, Gabriel comes and he tends to word camp and word camp was awesome last year. It was the first one after post pandemic. It was great. It was my first time, wonderful people. And then Mike comes to me, he was like, hey, listen, I've got an idea, kind of spoke to Gabriel. He goes, you know, why don't we do this? Why don't like we give you some like tickets in the backlog and you, you kind of work, kind of work on them on your, you know, on your spare time, see how it goes. You know, let's just give a shot. So when I heard that my, my ears perk, I said, wow, all right, this is, this is a shot. I'm going to take advantage of it. And I know, I think I could do it. Cause if I could go through that boot camp, getting up at two, three in the morning, cause my newborn, you know, he's a sleep pattern is not there. I was like, you know, I think I could, I think I could do this, I think I could handle this. So here we go. So that's my setup. It's my setup in the mail truck. So I said to myself, you know, you know, I asked him like, I said before, before I say to myself, I said, Hey Mike, what, like, what, what are you guys looking for with these tickets? He was like, Hey, you know, see how it is, you know, get a feel. And then in my mind, I was like, you know what, I'm going to really make the most out of this opportunity. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to do the same schedule that I had with the boot camp. I'm going to do three to four in the morning, two, three at night. And I'm going to, I wanted, I want the team to feel like I'm the, like I'm part of the team. Like that I'm not part-time. Like I'm just like doing these tickets, like an asylum that I'm like really engaged. So I said, you know what? I'll do my lunch breaks. I'll use that for stand up. So stand up, I would use my own or my lunch breaks, or if it was really hectic, if it was like a ticket that needed to really go out, I would just kind of take a quick 10 minute, look it over, but I'll push it out. And then the only challenge was grooming. Grooming is where we kind of vet the tickets and see, you know, the scope them out, see, you know, how long it's going to take, how we should point them. So my trick for that was I would have the laptop to vote. So we got, we have to vote. And then I would do my loop and have, so kind of have like the laptop was had had the Jira and then my phone had the zoom. So I would have the letters in between the phone with the camera turned off, of course, because I was like, I think they can't see this. So, and I would do a loop. So by the time I would get back to the loop, it was time to vote. So I would hustle back in a truck and then do my vote, go back. So to just really be a part of the team. And I learned so much. And I had such gracious teammates. One of them is here. Nayeon is in the audience. She's awesome and really helped me. Mike really mentored me and showed me ropes and showed me how to really work and communicate. So that went on for about six months. And it was great. I enjoyed it. I loved it. And in that time, I grew to love WordPress and was just blown away by what you can do with it. And like, why isn't everybody using it? Well, yeah, well, 40% of the internet uses it, but I was just blown away by PHP and WordPress and everything you could do with it. And just was, just like really taking it back why people didn't embrace it. But you know, who knows, but anywhere. So then I get some news from Mike. So Mike, usually I have my camera off all the time because I was like, I don't want them to see the grittiness of mail delivery. This is gritty. This is pretty gritty stuff. So I had my camera off. And Mike was like, hey, you know. Hey, let me talk to you for a second. And prior to that, Mike invited me to come to our office a few times and meet with Gabriel, meet with Jenny and really getting to see how PMC does things. And it was such a, so PMC was like an extension of WordPress, the community, how the WordPress community is so open and welcoming and wanting to teach, wanting to embrace you wherever you are. You could not know anything. You could know a lot. And WordPress has a place for you. It's the same way when I would go in the PMC. I was like, wow, this WordPress just, community just extends to everything. So that's what a bit to the Mike, you know, I'm in the truck and he goes, hey, I wanna talk to you, you know. He was like, so I talked to Jenny, he talked to Gabriel and we wanna make you an offer. So, you know, I was ecstatic. So I had to turn my camera on for that. I was like, I had to turn it on for this. This is gritty, you know, I turned it on, you saw the mail all over the place, the 100 year old truck, it was all good. It was all good. So fine, so it was able to transition careers. Transition careers and this is all from this beautiful community and beautiful piece of software that has helped everyone kind of live out their dreams in the sense of whatever ideas they have, they could just bring it out. And I was just blown away by the community and just the people and just how WordPress extends itself out into the world and continues to do so. And I was glad that I didn't listen to those voices because that's, you know, sometimes you could hear people say things and it could affect you and you could say, oh, well, you know what? I'm gonna take this person's advice. Or sometimes things could be motivated purely by the money and instead of the joy of doing something. And that's another key to thing that I really enjoy and started to really enjoy using WordPress and really having these ideas and really seeing them out in the world. So it was just all that whole culmination was just mind blowing in me. But I do have some tips for anyone who wants to change careers and kind of has either trepidations or just wants to know how would you do, how would you start? So one of my tips first is if you go in a self-taught route, which I think a lot of people in the room have done. And I think that's an amazing route as well. And I would, two things that I found, and this is particularly, one of them is particularly if you wanna get into WordPress or even if you are a seasoned dev too, I think LaraCast is really great, especially Laravel is like taken off. I think Laravel is kind of has people warmed up to PHP again. 100 Devs is an online free style of work so it is sort of a bootcamp, but it is self-taught. It's done by this guy named Leon Noel, who's like an amazing guy during the pandemic. He figured, hey, let me do a bootcamp for free because he's a part of a bootcamp. I think it's in the Boston area, Massachusetts area. He said, whatever I'm teaching there, I'm gonna just give it for free. He created a great community and some of the strategies he even said I incorporated, which was like learning out loud and things of that nature. So I definitely would check that out. Another advice I would say is learn in public. Show what you're learning. That could be on social media. I use LinkedIn. You could spin up a WordPress blog pretty easy and you could document your journey. And so just people could see what you're doing and then what you're doing is you're reinforcing what you're learning and then you're also teaching someone who doesn't know. And then I would also set up a GitHub account as early as possible and push code every day. So that was one of the things that helped me out. I was in a rhythm of doing like a kata a day and pushing that. So by the time the opportunity with PMC came, I kind of was had that pattern of pushing code every day. Even, I don't know how small it is or how insignificant you may think it is. I think it's just good to push code every day if you're going along this process of transition and just to build up that discipline. If you wanna join a boot camp, although I did join one, now that I look back on it, they're good, they're good, they're good. But I think what's online and especially with chat GBT, although it's a little clunky sometimes, you could really still do self-taught path, which I think I probably would recommend that more so. But if you're gonna do the boot camp, I would say I would check our career karma and they do a really good job at aggregating what boot camps are right for you. So I would definitely, if that's the route you wanna go, I would also read the contract thoroughly. There's a lot of gotchas. That's why career karma kind of came into existence because it started to get predatory and then certain boot camps started changing their names and just to avoid all these kind of lawsuits that we're getting into. So be very careful with that. But it was a great experience for me because I was able to get into habits that software engineers in the field do, which is reading a lot of code. So that was a good experience. And also another thing I would recommend is be open to opportunities. Like for instance, I heard about WordPress. I could have listened to what people said and just was like, I'm not doing that. I'm gonna just do JavaScript, React. React developer, that's the thing now. So, but I didn't, I kind of was like, hey, I'm intrigued. So I would definitely be language agnostic and I would start freelancing as soon as possible just to build your portfolio up. You know, if your mom needs a site, your dad needs a site, cousin needs a site, uncle needs a site, whoever needs a site, I would just do it just to get that experience and I would do it with WordPress. If I knew better, if I knew WordPress was around, I would have done it with WordPress. What, I digress. I wanna say thank you to, I wanna say thank you to the whole WordPress community. I think this last year was my first word camp and I just, everyone was so welcoming and still welcoming and everyone has such different backgrounds and it's amazing. So I just wanna thank the WordPress community. I wanna thank Mike or Terry. You know, Mike is, I don't know, Mike is probably in a lot of people's stories. I wanna thank Lauren, Lauren Byrne as well. She's awesome. She's always encouraging me to do things more to get more involved in WordPress. I wanna thank Jason. I wanna thank the greater Montclair meetup as well. I got to Howard, of course. Sorry, Howard. I should have put your name in there too. Wanna shout out also BlackPress, which was really helpful to me as well. I saw them, actually, it was Michelle who I saw she was a member and I was like, let me check this out. And I checked it out and it was like, it was so, it was awesome. And they were really helpful. Everyone, everybody was there. It's just, it's not just for a few of African-American origin, everyone is in there. So I thought it would, I really benefited from them early on too. I wanna thank Penske Media Corporation as well for giving me the opportunity and really giving me a chance to be a part of their company. So that is, that's my talk. But if anyone has any questions, I'll take them. If not, oh. Hi, that was about, let me see. So that was like 20, about three years. About three years, yeah. Thank you, thank you. Any other questions, if not? Oh, I would say starters early is possible. I would say, so what I did was I started doing custom themes cause I was, once I got my, my head wrapped around like HTML and CSS and JavaScript then I started playing with custom, like doing a custom theme from scratch and like converting an HTML like site I did, vanilla and then doing it as a theme. That really helped cause I was able to like touch PHP and really see how the functions and methods work. So yeah, I would start, I'd start early as possible. I would just, I just, just break stuff. Like I was, I was, just break stuff. I was always scared to break stuff. I was like, oh, I'm not gonna do it. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, just break it. Just break it, break it. Cause then you'll ask questions. So when you break stuff, you'll, you'll go to your meetup and you say, hey, listen, I was working on this and this is broken. Can you, you know how to fix this? And oh, this is what you do. You know, I do the, I break stuff all the time. I'm all like, Mike, Mike, I broke this. You, you know how to, you know, and Mike is, oh, easy. Bop, bop, bop, bop, bop. So yeah, I would, as soon as, I would just, as soon as possible, just break stuff, play with it and just have, and have fun. That's the most important thing. It's like, for me, what I really enjoyed about WordPress was a creative, just coming from a music background. I liked, I liked theme, theme development. So I just was, you know, HTML and CSS and design, I really enjoyed it. So I would just say just as early as possible, break stuff, ask questions, you know, and everyone here is so, WordPress community is so knowledgeable. That's another thing too, like the whole not real depth. I think I'm at the most amazing software engineers in WordPress, like, like hands down, they could do, they could do anything. They're like, MacGyver, I don't know. I'm dating myself with, I'm dating myself. I'm like dating myself the whole time, man, but yeah. So yeah, I, yeah, I would just build stuff and ask, cause there's so, so many like really knowledgeable people in the community. So. Question. Hey there, I got the mic. Nice. So I am Courtney Robertson. I am at GoDaddy Pro. I'm sponsored to contribute to the learn.wordpress.org website. So if you're on WordPress at the top, it says learn, go there, the team that I work with most contributes to that question for you. It sounds like in your journey to finding a bootcamp, you found WordPress after that? Is that right in your timeframe? Okay. Did any of the bootcamps that you were checking out mention WordPress beyond content marketing as part of their programming or their track? I say this because I taught at one and I'm seeing a need. There is a need. No, none of them mentioned it. Everyone was, so their thinking is, okay, like once they have that mind frame, PHP is a dead language, Java is old, C++, all of that, all of the enterprise technologies, they're like, oh, it's old, you know, React, the Merman stack, MongoDB, all that stuff. So that's what they learned. And then what winds up happening is people get out of the bootcamp and no one is really hiring for that from a junior. Right, so as part of that, when I was instructing at a bootcamp and I was teaching the languages, using WordPress, developing with WordPress, and we were using CARES Act Relief Money during COVID to do all of that. So my bootcamp leaders were not providing adequate PHP because PHP is dead, right. But also we were struggling because there were no official guidelines or resources that said, here is what an entry WordPress dev needs to have or to use or to be able to do. Because if you're going in through a bootcamp and you come out as front end or back end, there are some pretty obvious pathways, but with WordPress, you need to be an inch deep full stack and you need to have that PHP, even if you're front end, because if you're going to support a plugin or a theme, you need to know a little PHP just enough to, right, so I don't know if you've got thoughts on this and I would love to connect more a little bit later, but I want to receive some of the feedback from the bootcamp side, as well as the hiring side of what you're seeing or observing to help share that so that WordPress.org can help facilitate here's what we need job pipeline wise and how to help get those jobs. Absolutely, that's a great idea because I definitely see that, like you said, a lot of times you would do a bootcamp and it's full stack, but you're actually not. Whereas if you worked with WordPress, you are actually doing the full stack and you get leveled up really quickly because you're in it, with WordPress you're in it, you have no choice but to be all in. It's not a separation of like a front end, back end, you're like, it's all together. So I would love to talk to you and definitely love that. Any other questions? Did you just do it on your own, oh, thank you. Hi there. You just do it locally on your own laptop or did you go and get, you know, would you buy to? So I use the, that's a great question. So to get started, there was so many great free resources. So for my development, my local environment, I used VS Code and there's like a lot of extensions if you want to kind of see your work live, it's been a preserver for you. But when I got into PHP, I mean WordPress, you know, there's all, you know, there's MAMP and local, I would recommend local because it's so easier, it's much easier if you, especially when you're starting out. And, but initially before I started working with WordPress, there's a couple of tools where you could get some, you could, I forget the name, where you could kind of host your website. It's not even really hosting this. You could, I forget the name of it, gosh. No, it was, it wasn't involved with WordPress. It was, it was something where it was just basic HTML CSS. You could, like if you wanted to do like a little portfolio site, you could just spin it up. I forget the name off hand. Also GitHub has, you could use GitHub to kind of host your website if you wanted to just do something basic HTML CSS. But I would recommend if you, for your developer environment, I'd do VS Code because it's free and it's like a ton of tutorials. And especially if you want to develop a WordPress, which I mean, that's why we're here. I'd go with the local by Flywheel. It was really, I was like blown away by all the tools that, everyone, like WordPress is just so, you can make it as robust as you want or you could make it as simple as you want. So that's what I recommend. I hope I answered that question for you, probably. Anyone else has a question? If not, thank you for your time and enjoy the rest of WordCamp.