Miriam Goldman has filled just about every role a WordCamp has to offer — organizer, speaker, volunteer, attendee — over more than a decade in WordPress. Lately, though, she’s been branching out, showing up at DrupalCon and DrupalCamp Ottawa to see what WordPress and Drupal can actually learn from each other.
We talked about the real differences she found: Drupal’s Composer-driven updates force sites to stay current, while WordPress plugins can be “set and forget” for years. We also got into why Drupal’s module ecosystem tends toward collaboration while WordPress’s leans competitive — and discussed the idea that WordCamps could charge more and use the money the way the Drupal Association does with DrupalCon revenue.
We talked about her start in WordPress and how WordCamps landed her both of her last two jobs. She also opened up about the succession problem she’s watching play out in community organizing: burned-out volunteers don’t have the energy left to train whoever comes next.
Then there’s her day job at Pantheon, which she describes as being “a website therapist and a website doctor at the same time” — part code audit, part database triage, part talking someone off a ledge.
She’s also a fourth-degree black belt and a member of two community bands she splits her week between. Listen to the full episode and subscribe so you don’t miss out.
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