Jonathan Wold read encyclopedias for fun as a kid. Not because he was precocious — because his mom wouldn’t let them watch much TV and he got bored, and there they were on the shelf.
That’s roughly the shape of his whole career, it turns out. Homeschooled through high school, first computer an Apple IIGS, learned BASIC because he liked changing a line and watching what happened. Found WordPress twenty years ago because a client wanted a blog. Stayed because the people on the .org forums were nice to him.
The thing I keep coming back to is that Jonathan thinks never being sorted into a school social hierarchy is why it doesn’t occur to him to ask permission. Nobody was there to quash the weird questions. So when he got curious about the idea of WordPress as the operating system of the web — originally suggested by Matt Mullenweg at a WordCamp, he went straight to the source and asked him about it. When he noticed Matt was busy with other things — like actually running the WordPress project, he decided he’d just go run with the idea himself. “It didn’t occur to me to not. That gets me into trouble occasionally.”
We also get into ecosystems, going back to college at almost 40, and how to survive WordCamp US this year when the sun in Phoenix is actively trying to kill us.
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