Bold Life – Episode 5 – Rachel Cherry

BoldLife

March 30, 2018 by Nicole P

Show Notes / Transcription: MikeDemo: Hello and welcome to the fifth episode of Bold Life. I am your host Mike Demo and I am pleased to welcome our special guest from California, Rachel. Rachel Cherry: Hi. MikeDemo: How is it going today? Rachel Cherry: It’s going pretty good. It’s a pretty day here. A little foggy, but another lovely Wednesday in California. How are you? MikeDemo: Good. It is not a pretty day up here in Minnesota. It’s wonderful snow. Rachel Cherry: We don’t get that out here. MikeDemo: Yeah not so much. So, introduce yourself. How did you get out to California? How did you get involved with WordPress and what do you do? Rachel Cherry: So, I am a senior software engineer at the Walt Disney company which is a lot of fun and I’ve been out here about two years. I moved out here from Alabama. Beforehand, I worked in higher education and that’s where I got started with WordPress. I started using WordPress in January of 2011. So, it’s been a fun seven years. So, yeah. Here at Disney I get to work on some cool stuff. I worked on a team that built shopdisney.com which was pretty cool and we have a couple WordPress sites so we do have a lot of fun playing around with that here at Disney. MikeDemo: Awesome. So, you’re the reason why my wife says we have no money because I spend too much at shop Disney. Rachel Cherry: You’re welcome. MikeDemo: I’m also a shareholder of the company so I feel like I’m paying back my investment, right? Talk about Disney a little bit. I’m a huge Disney geek. Did the Disney mouse planet podcast for six years, used to work for the company. Rachel Cherry: That’s pretty cool. MikeDemo: Yeah. So, were you a Disney fan before you moved out to California or do you just like it a little bit? Rachel Cherry: I don’t consider myself a fan. I don’t crazy nerd out about it. I’m a big Minnie Mouse fan. I do have lots of Minnie Mouse swag and things like that. I do enjoy going to the parks but not a crazy amount. We get to go to the parks for free which is cool, but it’s still an hour to drive there and it’s still a big thing to go, but it’s still pretty cool. Definitely not complaining about that. We get to go for team outings which is neat. We’re going next Friday. So, I get paid to go to Disneyland which is pretty cool, but I grew up on the other side of the country, so I grew up actually going to Disneyworld. So, I have to say, I like Disneyworld better than Disneyland. I’ll just go ahead and put that out there. My colleague Roy is sitting in front of me shaking his head. MikeDemo: I find that comparison so interesting. Everyone is like, “What do you like better?” I was the same way. I grew up going to Disneyworld, went every year my parents would take me. We used to live in Atlanta. I think checked out Disneyland for the first time and once you get over the initial shock of the baby castle. Rachel Cherry: Oh, that was a shock. The first time you go down main street. The baby castle. It’s so tiny, but- MikeDemo: It’s the park that Walt built. Rachel Cherry: Yeah. That’s true. You can’t really beat that Walt built it, Walt walks through this place and it’s hard to top that, but I enjoy Disneyworld better. It’s bigger so it’s not as crowded. There’s more to do and there’s just more options. I think the food’s better there and probably because there’s more options where here it’s limited. So, here it’s small and so there’s a lot of crowd issues and things like that. So, someone like me that’s kind of introverted can go and there’s a little anxiety involved in that. So, I enjoy Disneyworld better. I feel like you can breathe a little bit more there at that property. Yes, I am a Disney fan and I do enjoy it. It’s just a one … MikeDemo: Hello? Rachel Cherry: Subway rides and the stories and all that stuff so it’s a neat thing to be a part of. MikeDemo: Yeah. Excellent. I make it out quite often with all my evangelism travels. If I’m within striking distance of a Disney park, I usually make a point to go out there. Be it Paris, Orlando, California. Whatever the case is. Rachel Cherry: I haven’t been to any parks outside the country. That would still be pretty cool. Especially Shanghai that just opened. That park looks insane. I would love to go to Shanghai and I haven’t been to Paris. I have some friends that are gone and reported back so to speak, so that one’s still on my bucket list a little bit to check out a park outside the country. MikeDemo: Excellent. So, how long have you been in California then for? Rachel Cherry: So, I pretty much on the dot two years. I think that I left Alabama on April the 3rd 2016. So, pretty much exactly two years. MikeDemo: Cool. You moved out for work, then right? Rachel Cherry: Yeah. I moved out for this job. I got this job and it all happened really fast. I think between applying and I think pulling out of town was a month or maybe five weeks or something. It was all pretty fast and exciting and I get to now hang out with Willy here everyday. MikeDemo: Excellent. So, let’s switch over and talk a little bit about WordPress a little bit. You started with WordPress in education is that correct? Rachel Cherry: Yeah. I did. So, when I started using WordPress, I was at the University of Alabama. Roll tide. I pretty much when I got the job, that was part of the job description is that I had to learn WordPress because I had never used it and before that, I had used a CMS called [Ektron 00:06:16] if anyone’s ever heard of that lovely [inaudible 00:06:17] and I think it’s now called [Episerver 00:06:22]. It got bought and so now it has a different name but it was an asp.net platform. So, switching to WordPress. I kind of joke, I just got thrown in the deep end because I was responsible for migrating an entire college’s network of websites on to WordPress from Cold Fusion. No, sorry. The Cold Fusion project came later. I forget what it was on before. Rachel Cherry: Maybe it was Cold Fusion. It doesn’t matter, but I was migrating this entire network of eight sites to WordPress. So, I’d never touched it. So, what I was doing was I was making a multisite. I was a designer, the developer, I was the QA I was everything. So, I was one [inaudible 00:07:09] to rule them all so to speak. So, I had to design a theme so I designed a parent theme which was the main engineering website and then all the academic departments had child themes. I did all of this in six months all by myself. So, that was crazy wild ride. I always joke that it wasn’t pretty but it worked. Pretty came later because I know that I didn’t do everything the WordPress way, but it worked. Rachel Cherry: So, I had to figure out all the WordPress ways as I went. That’s a lot of fun. I think that that first year I went to WordCamp Birmingham and that was my first WordCamp. I didn’t speak, I just went. I think I spoke the next year and that was the first time that I spoke at a camp so that was a lot of fun and did that for a few years before I started branching out to other camps because Birmingham was only an hour down the road. Yeah. So, here I am seven years later. About two years ago, not too too long before I left higher education and came to Disney, I started WPCampus. So, the backstory to that and describe what it is a little bit more first, WPCampus is a community that I organize and it’s conferences and events for people that use WP in higher education. The reason that it all kind of came to be is that I was going to these camps. Rachel Cherry: While I had lots of fun and you meet lots of great people, you kind of leave with this feeling like I didn’t really talk about the stuff that I do and the stuff that I work on and the nuances that we deal with in higher education and things like that. So, there’s that feeling of I wish I could have talked about that. So, the idea came to me one day, the story goes there was a big WordCamp US announcement and so I think that was the first WordCamp US year I think. The reason the hashtag WordCamp US, which, when it’s written out … [inaudible 00:09:29] so that’s when the light bulb came on for me that that’s what we were missing. Wouldn’t that be great if we had a WordCamp that focused on higher ed? Rachel Cherry: So, I tweeted that out and got lots of interest and threw up a web landing page really quick in opened a Slack account and then everyone just came. We started planning a conference. So, that was August I think of 2015. So, by the next summer in July 2016, we had our first conference in Sarasota, Florida. It was a lot of fun and we’re still going and so 2017 we had one in Buffalo, New York and basically what we do is we move every year and we have it on a different campus every year. So, first year was University of Southern Florida Sarasota, Manatee. Then last year was Canisius College and so this summer we are going to Washington University in St. Louis July 12th through the 14th. Rachel Cherry: So, it’s still going great. It’s been a lot of fun. We also started an online conference because we know that traveling can be hard. It can cost money that maybe you don’t have the budget for. It’s time consuming because you do have to travel and all this stuff. There’s a lot into it. So, we wanted to make sure everyone had the chance to not only attend but to present. Even if they couldn’t travel. So, we started a virtual conference that we had in January so we’ve had two now which that’s really great. We just call it WPCampus online. So, we’re still going and we still have lots of other things that we want to try to do and things that we want to achieve. If you are interested in coming to the event this summer, we also have our call for speakers is still open and we’d love to have you come and talk and just share about what you do. You don’t have to be in higher ed, but we do give priority to talks that are a little more focused on our field, but with that said, you don’t have to be in higher ed to participate in our community. Rachel Cherry: You can go to our website and click the get involved button. You can join our Slack and you can chit chat with us. It’s a really great group. So, the conference speaker is open until Friday and we’d love to have you join. Then registration opens April 30th. So, tickets are $125 early bird and it’s a lot of fun. We really love karaoke and we’re going to try to go to a St. Louis Cardinals game. So, if you want to come, we’re organizing some group discount tickets to try to go on Sunday and that would be a lot of fun to hang out. We have some really cool swag. We have a really great [inaudible 00:12:06] that I love. So, we have lots of edgy [inaudible 00:12:10] swag that we give out. It’s a lot of fun. It’s a great event. Rachel Cherry: We do livestream it and every year we’ve been able to livestream it for free which is really great with some help from some really great sponsors. So, if you can’t make it, we do livestream and we have workshops. We’re adding an extra day this year so that our workshops can have more time because we used to kind of squeeze them into the schedule, but now our workshops can have three hours and they can take their time, really dive in to topics. So, yeah. It’s kind of like a huge spiel of all the stuff but I could go on talking about it all day. We have a lot of fun and it’s a really cool group and we just talk about all kinds of stuff. We even have a Drupal channel. People come in and talk about Drupal. So, feel free to join us and hang out. MikeDemo: Cool. You go to WPCampus.com? Rachel Cherry: Org, yeah. MikeDemo: Org, okay. Rachel Cherry: .org. Wpcampus.org. So, if you click the get involved and you fill that out, you can auto-invite into our Slack. Then you can create a user account which kind of helps with some information for us and help you apply to speak and things like that. MikeDemo: Excellent. I’ve had the pleasure to be able to speak at the last virtual conference and in Buffalo as well I believe. I can’t remember. Rachel Cherry: I think you were there. MikeDemo: Yeah. I was speaking at Buffalo as well. I almost didn’t make it, but weird flight information that day and the road was closed outside the airport and all that fun stuff. Rachel Cherry: Oh no. But you made it. MikeDemo: Yeah. I did. It was a lot of fun. I remember a big group of us went up to Niagara Falls and watched the fireworks at Niagara Falls one night. Rachel Cherry: Oh yeah. That was a lot of fun. MikeDemo: Definitely. Cool. So, talk a little bit about the online version of WPCampus. I’ve been on teams in the Joomla community, I’ve been to the Joomla World Conference. Things like that. You guys have a very successful digital conference which I think’s a little unique to have so much participation on both the speakers and the attendees side. What’s your secret formula for your digital conference to be so well attended? Rachel Cherry: [inaudible 00:14:37] but what’s the secret? I think the secret is just organization. Can you hear me? MikeDemo: Yes. Rachel Cherry: Okay good. Just wanted to double check before I went on rambling. I think the secret is organization. We have a really great team that are just really excited about what we’re doing and they’re really involved and so everything is planned out really well. One of our main priorities is communication. So, we’re trying to communicate as much as possible and make sure everyone knows exactly what to expect and what’s going to happen. If problem A happens, here’s how to address it and problem B happens and we map all that out a lot in advance. So, when the day comes, there’s no surprises. There’s no problems. Also, we try to keep a dose of reality. If the worst thing that happens is this, then there are worse problems to have and things like that. So, also just having really great community that’s excited about the event and speakers that are excited also helps. Rachel Cherry: It was funny this year. Not really funny, but funny to me. You know your event is so well organized when the lead organizer oversleeps and the event starts without you. Because that totally happened this year. My alarm didn’t go off and the event starts at 9:00 central which is 7:00 AM my time in Pacific. So, my alarm didn’t go off and I literally woke up at 7:05. I jump out of the bed and I scramble to the computer and the event has just started and I pop in the playing channel and I’m like, “Why didn’t anyone call me?” They were like, “Why would we need to call you? Everything is fine.” I’m just sitting there like, “Oh my God. I love you so much.” Rachel Cherry: So, just stuff like that. Organization really plays a big part and just making sure it’s all in the details. So, that helps a lot clearly. MikeDemo: Yeah. I remember that early start. I was sitting in Vegas at another conference at the time and had that after party the night before until 2:00 AM local time. So, got to bed about 2:30 in the morning, set my alarm for 5:30 AM Vegas time. Woke up, took a shower, Rick had breakfast at the Starbucks and was ready to go. Thankfully because there was something that was going wrong with the other room, Tessa’s computer, so I happened to be the only slot that time, but she was able to speak later I believe. Rachel Cherry: Yeah. So, the things that happen during an event. As well we always have backup plans and things like that. Tessa had computer problems and so we encouraged everyone to come join your talk. Meanwhile in the background, about maybe 30 minutes later we had another speaker that had an afternoon slot that was sick and wouldn’t be able to present. So, we just asked Tessa, “Hey, do you think it’s reasonable you could fix the computer stuff and then you’d have a chance to present this afternoon?” She was able to and it all worked out. So, there’s lots of things going on in the background, but if you’re well prepared and you have everything laid out and like I said you kind of keep cool with reality and that perspective about what’s really a problem and what’s not. Rachel Cherry: Things work out and thankfully we were sad to miss, I think it was Catherine. We were sad to miss her talk, but there’s going to be other events for her to share. So, it all worked out. So, yeah. You were first up that day. So, we were grateful to you for kicking things off. MikeDemo: Yeah. It was my first time giving a virtual talk in a conference setting. I’ve done webinars and things for demos. So, that was a good, cool, unique experience for me as well. Rachel Cherry: How would you compare it to speaking in person? How do you think it went? MikeDemo: I thought it was really good. The interaction was top notch. Obviously it’s better to have meet space, conversations face to face is always gives you something you can’t get online, but I was so impressed that I literally recommended it to one of the open source organizations for some of their conferences. Hey, look at what WPCampus is doing. This might work if you can’t do a physical event this year as an example. So, I’ve suggested it to a couple of open source foundations as a model to mimic. So, I was really impressed. Rachel Cherry: I apologize. The audio kind of cut out, but I think I heard the gist of what you said and thank you for saying that. Hopefully people do pick up on it because it still involves some work and some planning, but it’s a lot less intensive also than an in person conference. So, that’s a benefit too. I do think it just breeds life to more inclusivity because people don’t have to travel and traveling is a big part of it. It’s not just money but if you have family and things like that that you can’t lead from, there’s a lot of variables that go into travel. So, we have the technology. Why not have this be an option? Rachel Cherry: It’d be great if more and more communities started looking into these options. We enjoy Crowd Cast. The tool that we use. It’s not that expensive. I think we paid about $90 to use it. $90 to $100 something like that. It’s really affordable. What’s really great is that we’ve been talking with them to try to make it more accessible because it does have some accessibility issues right now, but we’ve been talking with them and getting some feedback and they’ve been really responsive to it so hopefully that will improve and then it will be something that more people can use and more actually users can interact with. MikeDemo: Excellent. We got about 10 minutes left. Normally we ask every guest to share their favorite WordCamp story. Rachel Cherry: Favorite WordCamp story. Oh, you should have given me some heads up. Let’s see if I can think of something on the spot. I will just say this past fall I enjoyed taking a little bit of a West Coast WordCamp tour. So, I’m glad. I went to Portland and Sacramento and Seattle. I went to Phoenix. It was really great to see those cities. I’ve been to Portland before but none of the other cities and just kind of get to know some various communities. I will say that I really enjoyed my trip to Portland. Their community was just really … Lots of people came up and just talked to me at random. We had all these great conversations. I gave my side projects talk. Rachel Cherry: I think that was the first time I gave the talk and I just felt it went really well and I had lots of people talk to me afterwards and share stories about their side projects. I also did a lightening talk about higher ed. So, that was really fun. I don’t think I’ve ever done a lightening talk before that. So, that was interesting experience trying to cram in all this stuff in seven minutes. I think all of us went over by a minute. So, that was a really great experience. In Seattle, I got to give this really great Women and WordPress panel that we had this really great discussion and lots of great feedback on that. So, that whole tour was just a really great. I’m really glad I did it. I’ve been to San Diego which is next weekend which I’m excited to go to. Rachel Cherry: Obviously we have one here in LA that I’ve gone to both times since I’ve been here. So, there’s lots of camps out here which is really great to get around and meet everyone. So, off the top of my head, I’m glad to share that story just in the sense that there’s lots of action on this side of the country because I’m originally from the other side and there’s obviously lots of camps over there. So, it’s just kind of neat to see all the action over here and what everyone’s doing. Phoenix, bless their hearts. They had their double camp scenario and how well they did with that. I’m glad that that was successful for them. They can move that around. I got to go to the one in the fall. I didn’t go to the one in February. So, it’s just neat to see how excited everyone is to try to make these things happen and work on that kind of stuff. So, I’m glad to be part of the west coast communities and have really fun visiting their camps. MikeDemo: Excellent. So, you did mention WordCamp San Diego which is coming up next weekend that you’re going to be at. Obviously WordCamp LA. Are you going to WordCamp Orange County? You there? Rachel Cherry: I can hear you now. Okay. MikeDemo: Okay. I want to apologize to everyone about the technical issues that we’ve been having with Skype, so we’ll do our best to do the recap in the show notes so apologize for the little bit of cutouts that have happened. So, you mentioned WordCamp San Diego and WordCamp LA. Are you going to WordCamp Orange County as well? Rachel Cherry: I won’t go this year. I won’t be in town. I’ll be in San Diego. Are you going to be in San Diego? MikeDemo: I will. I will be speaking in San Diego so I will see you there. Rachel Cherry: Nice. I’ll see you in a week, two days. MikeDemo: Yeah. A week and two days. Then I’m going up to LA for a couple days in the office and coming back for WordCamp LA and Orange County at those respective dates. Rachel Cherry: You gonna go to Disneyland? MikeDemo: Probably. My travel day home I pushed out to a red eye so that I could take a PTO day. Rachel Cherry: That’s going to be a long day. MikeDemo: It will be, but [crosstalk 00:26:14] Rachel Cherry: It’ll be worth it. MikeDemo: Cool. Well, we’re kind of wrapping up. How can people find you online? What are your social accounts? GitHub, how can people find you? Rachel Cherry: So, my website is bamadesigner.com. That’s pretty much my handle on most social media. So, on Twitter I am bamadesigner and Instagram I’m bamadesigner, but you can find all that information at bamadesigner.com. MikeDemo: Cool. Also on your screen you see her Twitter handle and in the show notes on [inaudible 00:26:47] there are quick links to your volunteer portal, GitHub account and Twitter account as well if people are looking to connect with you that way. Rachel Cherry: Awesome. Just to repush it again or whatever, the call for speakers is open until Friday and we’d love to have you come and share with us. We love case studies. We love accessibility. There’s going to be lots of talk about Gutenberg and things like that. So, if you want to ping me and brainstorm ideas or get some feedback on stuff you have, feel free. I’m always available. MikeDemo: Excellent. People go to wpcampus.org for that, correct? Rachel Cherry: Correct. MikeDemo: Excellent. Well, I want to thank you for your time and thank everyone on the interwebs for watching this fifth episode of Bold Grid Bold Life Facebook live show. Please visit boldgrid.com for our blog and recent product updates and again, thank you so much for your time today I really appreciate it. Rachel Cherry: Oh you’re welcome. I’m glad to be here. Thanks for having me. MikeDemo: Awesome. [inaudible 00:28:06].