 Sylvain Hagen? Thank you. And thanks for organizing this event. He comes from Zurich, he's very active. He's seen and also in the working team. Sort of. He's going to be very active next year. Hopefully. He knew his story, so he basically was part of the event he required. Exactly. And one of the founding partners. Founding partner and took a different route. Yeah. And looking forward to hearing it. Thank you. So good afternoon and welcome to work at Loza. I hope you have a good time so far at the talks you already saw this morning. There was a bit of a mix up with the talks. I think, but luckily it seemed to be turning out well. So everyone, every empty slot was filled after all. Is that correct? That's correct. As Florian said, hopefully I'll be part of the team. Whoever wants to join me, Andrew already did. We will try and organize another work camp in Zurich next year. I will not be the lead organizer. This position I guess is still open. Nobody wants to? No? Oh, Nick will do it. So yeah, welcome to my talk. This is a different talk than I usually give. It's a very personal talk. So yeah, let's get started. If this thing will work, it doesn't. No, I turned it off. Obviously, but it still doesn't work. Do it by hand, which doesn't work either. Maybe it's for the best turn of the lead organizer next year. I can't even organize my slides somehow. That doesn't work. Is it just a screenshot? It's just a screenshot. Don't even have a talk. What's one of the co-founders had required? Three of them are here today. Also going to their sponsors booth for fresh chops and play the games. It's difficult. It's more difficult than it was last time at the FrommingCon. What am I doing now after leaving an agency that I co-found? At the moment I'm working part-time for Switch Plus, the hosting company everyone hates, especially around here, because I know it's many episodes here, but I'm not part of the hosting. I'm the team lead for a product they're building. We built a tool kit, a marketing tool kit for small, medium-sized businesses, of course with the WordPress website at its core. But besides that, I started doing something completely different. I started working with my hands again and not just typing on a keyboard, like building products, touching stuff. I started gardening with a couple of friends and we're building some weird gardening products, but I'm going to talk about that later. So what's in it today? What am I going to talk about? Like I said, it's a personal WordPress story. I'll touch on a few or all of these issues during this talk. So let's get started. A bit of a backstory. I started quite early with creating websites even way before 2005. I was lucky enough to have a teacher at school who was very interested in the web early on. So around 2001, he already gave us courses in Adobe Go Live. Who here remembers Adobe Go Live? Who remembers Microsoft from page or something? We're all glad they don't exist anymore. But yeah, that's how I got started and how I got hooked into building websites. Shortly thereafter, a friend of my parents who had a computer teaching business asked me to build his website. And this was the first time I touched PHP code because after building the site, I was like, it's quite a bit boring and I don't like to repeat all the navigation and further info on every fucking HTML page. So yeah, I wrote a bit of PHP code, which was embarrassing, obviously, but it worked. Also, this was my first experience with a really shitty client. I wanted to do the site for free because it was like my first project. But he was like, no, no, no, I'm going to pay. I'm going to pay until the site was live and then he didn't have any money anymore. So it was like, oh, come on. Yeah. But nevertheless, I still hooked with this internet thing. So after that, I was looking for an apprenticeship that had something to do with online stuff, media, online, whatever. This stuff was still sort of new, not super, super new. But yeah, I decided to do an apprenticeship called Media Martica. I think it still exists. It's a weird mix of all kinds of office jobs and then on top of that, a little bit of electronics. So it was like accounting, marketing, a bit of coding, but not much. So after four years, you basically knew a little bit about everything, but not enough to start a career, I would say. Well, I was lucky enough that I had a cool boss during my apprenticeship. I worked at a large corporation in IT support and it was so boring. Like, yes, I'm going to reconnect your keyboard now, but you're back from your travels. Yes, oh, someone unlocked your computer. That's why it won't start. Oh, there's the paper jam and the printer. Yes, I'm going to fix that. So basically, I didn't have too much to do. But I had a cool boss. He realized that I wanted to do more and then I was really interested in building stuff. And of course, large corporation behind a huge, huge crazy firewall, very weird computers where you could not install anything, basically. So he gave me a custom internet connection in our office and the computers. So during my off time, which was like six hours a day, I had the chance to learn JavaScript, a bit of PHP, and also I designed sites in Photoshop not great looking sites, because I'm not a designer, but I tried to find my way around Photoshop. Back in those days, you were still doing slices for sort of things. Weird times. So before I finished my apprenticeship in 2006, in 2005, a friend of mine asked me to join a competition. And together with Felty, who would later become one of the co-founders of Required, we decided, let's go and be part of this competition, let's build a website. And so what we did, we created a website that was very accessible and taught you how to build accessible websites. We were young, unexperienced, and I was like, yeah, there's no CMS around to do this. So I'll write my own. I can do it better. So within a month, while Felty designed it and my friend wrote all the content, I wrote a CMS, a content management system, a WordPress one, so you can manage your website. So yeah, within a month, I built a PHP-based CMS where you could create pages, add your content, upload images, and add some navigation items. On an old, old backup, I found the code very embarrassing. But of course. And it worked. So I created a hot little mess. And we actually won some primes, not like the main main prize, but our site was super accessible. And we did win some money, which of course, what do you do when you're young? We spent on beer the same night. All the money we won. But it was fun. And it was fun. So please, if you're young, very young, or inexperienced in this field, and you're thinking about writing your own CMS please don't. There's tons of great CMSs out there. Many of them open-sourced. They work well. And most of them have a huge community around it. Because that's the thing. Technology is just a tool. The code is just a tool. What actually sets things apart is the community around it. Like people gathering here for a work camp. And that's what makes a huge difference in an open-sourced project. So basically, yeah. But I know a bunch of people in my time wrote their own CMSs. And for some people, maybe it makes sense for me. It never did, even though I did it. But shortly after that, it was like, oh, no, that wasn't a good idea. So after we won a bit of money, we decided, oh, maybe there's a business inside. We could build websites for clients in our spare time. So we were looking for a proper open-sourced CMS. And in 2006, a bunch of options were already out there. Our idea was it had to be a CMS where we were in total control of the market. Because many CMSs back in the day, still to this day, the code for the front might be a bit bloated, unnecessarily bloated. So yeah. We were looking for one that was easy to use. We tried Joomla. Not happy with that. We tried Type-O3. Sorry, also not happy with that. Very difficult to install. Too many options, too many conflicts for us, for what we needed. So we didn't decide on WordPress. We decided on CMS Make Simple. Anyone ever heard of? Oh, three or four people. Have you ever used it? No. No? Yes? You do? Okay. One site? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a simple CMS. It was easy to use. It was to have full control of the markup it created. It already offered CSS styling. And it was an easy to stay still on the development. I checked yesterday. So it wasn't too bad, but it wasn't too good either. The releases were very slow. Like the community wasn't big enough. So there were many, many bugs in their extensions. And it took it sometimes months to get stuff fixed. Which was a bit of a downside. If you wanted to use that in a client project. So, then we decided to build a website for our own small site business. We were looking for a CMS again. And then, Glory Phone WordPress. It was, at that time, it was a two point something. What took me initially was like regular updates. Already many, many, many plugins out there. A pretty easy theming system. But then I tried to set a static front page. Didn't exist at the time. Like it was not an option baked into WordPress. So there was a plugin out that promised to do this. We got it working after a few days. And things were great. So we had our site with WordPress. And I fell in love. I started building themes. I started learning more things about how the API WordPress works. And for the first time, I was really happy with a simple and easy to use CMS. But first, before I really, really got into WordPress, things took a different direction. After an internship in the U.S., I landed my first full-time gig as a web engineer at a small, small HSE. They had their own proprietary CMS, built in .NET, and it was surprisingly good for the time. It had some sort of a block editor. Not like Gutenberg, but more like a page builder where you could define, this is like an area for this, this, this, that. There's the table, there's that, there's that. And I learned a lot about building larger sites for bigger clients. But I also learned how to not do business. Like, the way we were treated as a team was sometimes not so cool. And it took me a while to figure out why this was. One of the reasons I think is that the founders of that company, when they started out, they wanted to sell ERP systems. So basically resource planning and management software for your resources in a company. But back in 2001, clients asked for websites, not ERP systems, or they wanted a website on top of an ERP system or vice versa. So they quickly switched their business model completely, didn't offer ERP systems anymore and followed trends, which in my opinion wasn't a good decision for them. But nevertheless, it was an interesting company and I learned a lot, but there was no trust to the team. There was micromanagement everywhere. And I left after we figured out that one of the co-founders started to alter our locked hours so he didn't have to pay overtime. Fun fact, it was very stupid of him to do this in a system we coded for another client with his login. Very smart or not. So yeah, I learned quite a few things at this company on how not to do it in my opinion. In 2008, I had the opportunity to join the largest Swiss web agency and I was still a front-end engineer and still part of their .NET team. And here I also met Perrin, the now CEO of Required. Hello! And back in those days, IE6 was still huge in banks and insurance companies. It was a nightmare. We spent hours and hours and hours fixing small, tiny bucks, things that just suddenly broke. I don't know. It was very weird. So we had to use jQuery to enhance, for example, SharePoint front-ends. Pure horror. It was actually a really bad time. We had to write jQuery code that added class names to the front-end code so that we could actually style the shit. Like it was really difficult to actually do anything with it. But yeah, one point that I learned there is that if you're a technical consultant in a large corporation, please take a technical person with you to the meetings with the client before you promise anything. Just a small tip on the side. Things got better for me at the agency after I switched teams. I then built front-ends for Sitecore CMS, which is another .NET CMS, Magnolia, and even WordPress. To this day, nowhere on their website except for their blog will they say they use WordPress because they only build super-large sites. But some clients asked specifically for WordPress. So I got to work with my favorite CMS at a paid job on an enterprise level. That was really, really interesting. During that time, I learned a lot from very, very smart people and that helped me a lot on how to build stuff quicker, how to test stuff more, and so on and so on. But nevertheless, I still had this dream of running my own company or having a company together with friends. So in 2009, Karen and I had the chance to visit App Media, a big conference at the time in London, and that's where Require was born. We discussed with a few of the speakers there how they set up their company, how they work as a collective or distribute the teams, and we thought to ourselves, hey, that's cool, we want to do that, too. So I still remember sitting next to a coffee, no, not a coffee, that was a closed restaurant that offered free Wi-Fi, registering the domain on our phones. First iPhone was out, I think. Yeah, that was fun. So after that, we switched to part-time to 80% work, and I remember my grandpa called me. My grandpa was this business guy, like he was an architect and when he drove me through CERN every now and then, he was like, and I built this, and I built this, and I built this, and he called me and was like, you're 20-something, are you already retiring? So it took me about an hour to explain to him, no, I'm just using this one day to build something else. But he had a hard time understanding how he could do this, why would he do that, that was a really interesting thing. But what we set out to do was explore how we could work in a different way as a distributed team. So what would later become required? And at first we were a collective of about 15 like-minded people, and the idea was that we helped each other out during projects and got to work with bigger clients. What happened was we started working on projects, but basically the same four people always worked on the projects. So we got rid of the rest, and the gang of four future founders, yeah, that was us. So a few years later, still at the agency, while the agency, the big agency grew very fast, sadly their culture faded, but that gave me the option to leave. So I decided to leave and go freelance full-time as the first of us. I was still young, thought I knew it all, and I knew everything better, but I already had this list compiled with things I learned at the agency jobs that I will never do when I have my own company. So I started out working from home, coffee shops, from home, pens were optional, coffee shops not so much, and there were already a few co-working spaces popping out, and I really enjoyed this new freedom. I was working hard, sometimes seven days a week, but I didn't mind it. I had amazing clients that supported me early on when I started this, and whenever I needed help with code or with design, I could ask one of my colleagues that required they were still working their jobs, but they had some time in their spare time to help me out. Simply put, it was a very liberating feeling to be your own boss, even if that meant working a lot. And it worked well, working with others. So in 2013, we decided it was time for the next phase. We had this idea by now, required turning to this idea of building a remote company, so Karen, Felty, Stefan and I found it required. We initially set out to make this a lifestyle business, not that you think that we didn't want to work hard or didn't want to take things seriously, but the idea was to support our individual lifestyles. Because we believe that this gives you the best results, like, for example, some people like to go out in the morning and work from their home office. Other people want to be flexible with the way they spend their time so they could spend as much time as possible with family and kids or traveling the world, going surfing and biking. And remote works allows you to do that, which is great. So for me, it was traveling and also working from new places that gave me a lot of freedom. And at around the same time, I started to get interested in gardening. Some of my friends infected me with the gardening buck, growing your own food. So the business grew. We traveled a lot. We worked a lot. Things were great. Here you see the first hire on the right, Pascal. And we got to work with bigger and bigger clients. So after one very difficult project for me, I should have taken time off. I only took two weeks off and my batteries didn't recharge. That was a weird feeling for me. For the first time I felt like it's weird I'm having issues sleeping. I had anxiety attacks, something that never happened to me before. So, yeah, I thought I was slowly burning out. But I never took the time to recover because every once in a while we like to think for ourselves as machines or robots, we're not. So after a while, my business partners took me aside and we had a chat about it and I promised to get help. At this point I still thought, yeah, yeah, I will recover. It's just a phase. Everything will get better. It did not. So in 2017, my business partners pulled the emergency break and asked me to see a professional. It hit me very hard at first because when you're in this weird mood where you think, yeah, you can still do it, but you never can recharge your batteries, you sort of lose yourself in a way. So, yeah, I was really grateful for their support, especially in retrospective. And I went to see my doctor and he immediately put me on sick leave. So I started seeing a therapist and went to my doctors every few weeks and I had some time off. So I decided that this time I really wanted to spend much less time in front of a screen. And I did. I started biking with my brother, growing even more food in gardens and that helped me keep going, at least for a while. But in summer 2017, I was still in a very bad place. I had mood swings all the time. Sometimes I wouldn't want to get up for days. I just didn't like life very much at this point. Then my girlfriend gently kicked my butt. Thank you. For the gentle or for kicking? Both. Both. And that sent me out on a search. What is it that I actually want to do? What is it that makes me happy and keeps me going? And I started searching. I started thinking about it, writing stuff down, going out more, going more into the gardening thing as well. And it helped me a lot. And I, sooner after I realized I was not completely burned out and my therapist later confirmed this. I was just very, very tired of the way I worked before because it didn't suit me anymore. Like I was tired of this agency grind. Just thinking about it was like for me, meetings and pitching and even coding lost its appeal. It's hard to explain, but things that you love so much before and then all of a sudden it's like, ah, it feels gross. I don't want to do it. It's very hard. I was not happy anymore with that kind of stuff. For me, that's one of the things that I remember very vividly when I was thinking about projects with clients. Not that it is that way, but for me it felt that way. It was like, ah, we're just building the same marketing bullshit over and over again. Of course it wasn't, but it felt like this. On the other hand, I was not happy with clients not taking risks or trying to be bold, looking at the competition for inspiration instead of trying something new. Of course this is overstated, but this is how this type of work felt to me at the time. After I started the search and started gardening even more and going out and not spending time in front of a computer, I started to trust my inner voice again and my gut feeling for the first time in months. So me and my friend Dave, we started visiting food gardens in and around Switzerland, taking notes, pictures, videos and at the same time we started putting some effort into building gardening products. So we spent days at the workshop refining parts, building prototypes, testing different types of soil and other weird shit and it was a lot of fun. So I was happy again. I didn't mind the hard work and I could finally fall asleep again at night and it was like, ah, this was a great day. We accomplished nothing, we broke thousands of parts but let's do it again tomorrow. So it looks like I found my new passion. So before 2008 it became clear to me that reaching tech and gardening is a thing that I wanted to focus on next. So by the end of 2017 I informed my partners that I will be leaving required. That was a really tough time and a tough decision for me especially if you're leaving a business that you helped build and I still miss the team from time to time and I see them from time to time but I have no regrets over this decision. It was like really liberating for me to actually do this. Luckily Switch Plus offered me a part-time job, a former client of required and I had the opportunity to start a product business in gardening. Product takes a men's amount of time. So unlike the website where you can build, ship and then refine if something breaks, a product if you ship it to your client, it's there and it has to be perfect. So it's a completely different mindset but also very interesting. So we're on a good path for that now. This year we started to sell the first few products and next March we will start to sell and market some more. Is that one of your products? Exactly. So what kind of products am I building? This here is called a geodome. It's a weird looking greenhouse. Basically it has better shape so the sun can go in from a different angle and some other weird stuff. It's a super robust structure and you can grow tons of food in there and you can stretch the seasons by the bit. Like you can start earlier and you can end the season later in the year. So as a driven personality I'm super happy that I found something that not only interests me personally very much but also on an intellectual level. It's very interesting to work with some stuff that's completely different than what I did before. And gardening gives you the opportunity to move fast and slow and it made me more patient because food takes a lot of time to grow. You cannot just sit there and look at it. I mean you can but you will stay there for days and days and days. So this is one of the early prototypes of raised beds we built. They now look much, much more polished and what we did is a special type of inlay that allows you to store water for 10 to 20 days. So you don't need to water them for quite a while even during this hot summer we had. This was the first of those geodysic domes. The specialty here is that we have a fish tank. The fish grew in the water. It's called an aquaponics system. You pump that water into the plants and they take the nutrients out as a fertilizer and enrich the water with oxygen and give it back. And we're going to build a web app for that because we are collecting data from 12 sensors. It's very interesting to see temperature, pH level and oxygen levels change during the day. Tomatoes! This is the largest one we built so far. This is going to be a combination inside of with soil and then also with an aquaponics system. So to wrap things up, it was very difficult to leave a company but sometimes change is very necessary. So please, especially in remote teams, watch out for each other and talk to each other more. Also about personal stuff. How you're feeling, how you're doing. Every once in a while someone has a bad day. That's normal. But if this prolongs over a long period of time, maybe some change is necessary. And it's absolutely no shame to get help. I know robots are cool, but we are humans, not robots. It's hard, but not listening to yourself will finish you in the long run. Thank you. However, it's a break now. So if you have questions, feel free to ask. Yes. We are new products on the website. Yes. But we'd love to see that. It's F-O-E-E-S dot C-H. Please dot C-H. Well, I think for me it's pretty awesome. The WordPress changes you to love the life and make your living an awesome lifestyle and even become a biologist. Now, really? Yes, but I really want to say congratulations on this. Thank you very much. I think it's difficult for people to make changes, but yeah, it wasn't easy. It's cool. Thank you. It's already three minutes late for your break. Sorry, let's thank Sivan again.