Welcome to Community & Code, the podcast where we... Let me try that again. Welcome to Community in Code, a podcast about the humans behind the commits. I'm here today with Roger Williams. I'm your host, Chris Reynolds. And Roger Williams comes to us from Kinsta. He's a community manager. And we met at PressConf where we kind of invented hashtag VegPress. And yeah, but basically I just involved going to the same place the whole week. Absolutely. Hey, Chris, how are you? Good. I'm good. I'm good. How are you? I'm doing really well. I'm excited to be on the show. Thanks for having me. This is a slightly different format for me. I've got a little show that I do with Kinsta called Kinsta Talks, and I don't even really know what the format is for that show. So I'm excited to be on this one and kind of experiment and play around and see where we go with this. Yeah. What do you do at Kinsta? What is a community manager? Oh man, it's a great question. So we kind of created the position for me last year because I was doing outbound sales and my boss at the time realized that You know if I if I kind of maybe went up stream or up level a little bit in terms of the conversations and made them less salesy and more community or more just like meeting people and like collecting feedback that there was a whole lot for us to gain from that because we you know it can still we. we've never been like the most forward facing company in terms of like having lots of people at events and things like that. And so we kind of really kickstarted that. And so it's, man, there's so many things. And the problem I have is I like to boil the ocean. which is not something you can actually do, but I try. And so it started off with, I was going to a lot of WordCamps, meeting people at WordCamps. I was actually able to meet some prospects and things like that and hand that off to the sales team as were, but also just like getting feedback about the product, what people liked, what they didn't like, passing that on to the product teams. And and then last year around WordCamp US, I started interviewing the people who were going to be presenting and just really short, like five minute, ten minute little interviews. Hey, what are you talking about? Who should go to your talk? Should they have anything prepared before they go? And I did a whole bunch of those. And then when I went to WordCamp US, the whole time people kept approaching me going, hey man, I love your show. I'd love to be on it, all this stuff. And I was like, whoa, okay, I guess maybe there's something here. um and so I started doing like this regular kind of interview thing where I'm just talking to all types of people across the wordpress ecosystem sometimes people outside of wordpress um trying to be like definitely open source focused and and then um you know and then there's just a whole bunch of little things that I do inside of kinsta as well to like just help Help us understand that there's a wordpress community and we need to be a part of it, and you know just all that kind of stuff so it's just it's a really fun job. And I'm pinching myself every day. Yeah, that sounds awesome. It sounds very much like what I feel like I've been doing in developer relations at Pantheon for the last few months since I moved over to the DevRel team. They pay me to do this thing that I've kind of wanted to and been doing for a really long time. Yeah, your LinkedIn tells me that you were at University of East Anglia for a bit for a study abroad program. I too was at University of East Anglia for a semester. The story I tell about my experience in Norwich was the voice that Monty Python does, the old lady voice that they do, I was in the city center in Norwich and I heard that voice and I thought for sure somebody was just quoting Monty Python and I turned around and no, it was actually a little old lady making that voice. What brought you to Norwich? What was your experience like in that study abroad? This is total segue, but I happened to notice this on your LinkedIn and I had to bring it up. Yeah, this is awesome. All right, UEA, wow. Talk about a trip down memory lane. My junior year of university, I did the exchange program. Was it a full year or just a semester? I did a full year. Nice. Yeah. So CU Boulder is where I did my undergrad. And they have a program, an exchange program with UEA. And so the difference between study abroad and exchange is that with exchange, you actually qualify into the program. And now you just pay your regular tuition. Yep. And somebody from England basically lives on my tuition. And then I go and live on, you know, back then they had just implemented a thousand dollars a year for university. And everybody lost their mind. And I'm just sitting there laughing like, wow, okay. So yeah, so like crazy story, like, you know, the whole impetus of going there, I was doing like a humanities degree at Boulder. I really wasn't sure what I wanted to be doing. I knew I wanted to go study abroad. Um, and then, uh, and, and, but the problem is I don't speak any other languages. Right. And I'm very lazy. And so, so yeah, I was like, ah, I think I can do English. I think I can pull that off. Um, so that was kind of the qualifier on my end. Also, uh, as a humanities major at Boulder, you have like a primary and a secondary focus, basically a major and a minor within the major. So I had philosophy and economics and, or actually I had philosophy. I didn't. uh, determined what I wanted to do for a secondary yet. And when I was looking at UEA, the, it was a little bit slimmer options, right? CU is a huge university. UEA is a good size university, still nowhere near the same size, but, uh, so they had philosophy and then they had economics as an option. And traditionally the humanities program at Boulder did not have, uh, economics as an option. Sure. for primary or secondary focuses. And so I actually went to the dean of the economics school and convinced her to allow me for the first time in the school's history to have economics as a secondary so that when I went and studied abroad, I was, or studied exchange, I was able to get full credit. Wow, so that's like the really boring aspect of having gone to UEA. The exciting part of going to the UEA was when I went there, it was in I think I was there probably the year after or maybe a year or two after you, yeah. Okay, okay, awesome. So they had just built some new dorms. I feel like it was to the north, right? I know exactly what you're talking about. Okay, those are the computer science dorms and they all had like T-one connections in the rooms. And so this is where it actually got fun is that I was in a dorm room or dorm building with all computer science people And nineteen ninety seven was the year that unreal the first unreal. OK. Yep. I want to say Quake two came out that year. Makes sense. Yeah. And like a whole bunch of other like groundbreaking three D games. So we played a ton of and you were able to connect to the Internet right with the TV. Yeah, dorm-wide LAN parties. Yep, got it. And also, like, you know, playing, you know, across the seas and, like, dealing with horrible lag times. But, so I got a really, that was, like, my first, I was kind of a gamer before that, but, like, I really got into gaming that year a bit. A bit, but I also really like the club scene in the UK was really the reason that I went to school there. I had gotten into the rave scene when I first went to university in Boulder. And then the attraction was, hey, in England, they don't you don't have to go to these fields, although they have that. But you can just go down to a regular club and they have amazing DJs and amazing music. I saw chemistry and storm play like an empty nightclub one time. uh that was amazing I saw ronnie size play the end in london and um really had a great time that my one rule that I put onto myself that year was I was not going to hang out with any americans And so, and it was great. Like I hung out with all, uh, English and Europeans and, um, really like dove into the culture and, oh man. Yeah. UEA, uh, you know, there's a connection that we have with UEA Norwich is John Blackburn. Okay. Yeah. The, um, security, uh, core. Yeah. Okay. So he lives in Norwich. Why did I not know that? I've known John for a while. I worked with him at Human Made and I didn't know that he lives in Norwich. Yeah, yeah. So what took you to UEA? um basically the same uh my my girlfriend at the time and also my current partner uh both went on the same study abroad program to india and I looked at a couple things and I was like no england is good I want to go to england anyway the thing was like I I had gone to italy uh in high school for like a two-week exchange program thing um and I was kind of thinking of that but I was like because I know a little bit of italian I figured I could probably you know pick it up again But I was like, but I've already been there. So like... Looking at the different programs, and it was a very similar thing to your university. It was an exchange program. It was a study abroad program, but it was the same thing. You pay your normal tuition and you just go there. I wanted to go to England. I thought maybe I could use that as an excuse to go other places in the UK or whatever. That never really happened. I went to London a few times, but my ambitions were a bit more... more ambitious than reality. I was in a dorm that did not have internet. I was in a big old, one of their old buildings, Probably you even maybe would recognize, it kind of like looked like a weird kind of Aztec pyramid, kind of slanted. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure you have that image. There's actually an apartment complex that's in Salt Lake City that looks like it. We were driving by yesterday. I was like, my dorm in England looked almost exactly like that. When I got there, I was super homesick and had a little bit of culture shock. I hung out at a... There was a dorm that was all American exchange students or American study abroad students. And I hung out at a party with them once. And there's a bunch of people from my school that went there. And so I was hanging out with them. And then after that night, I was like, okay, I need to not do this. I need to... figure out how to not because this is just going to be comfort and this is going to be like the same thing that I would do at home. I need if I'm going to be here, I need to be here. So what I did is is early on in the semester, they had like I don't know, they've got all sorts of clubs and stuff. And there's like a like like a demo kind of thing where you like talk to the different things and figure out what's going on. So there's a deviant society that I joined, which is basically like the goth kids as a club, which was amazing. And the goth kids as a club actually had a goth night at a local pub, Fat Polly's. So I was going to Fat Polly's probably every week. And then there was another one where there was a radio station on campus, super tiny signal. You could barely get it across campus. But I was really interested in DJing and I thought, well, this is my only chance, right, to get on a college radio. So I did that. And what was cool about that is the guy that DJed right before me played a lot of like white label UK Garage. And so I would just go early and listen to like the tail end of his set and then hang out with him for a little bit. um, and got exposed to all sorts of like underground stuff that I wouldn't have really, uh, heard otherwise and, and developed a love for, uh, for UK Garage and, and the sort of like two-step kind of, uh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. So we're going to stay on this for a while. Okay. So UEA is where I learned about drum and bass, and really learned about it. And it's funny, the origin story actually goes to Wipeout, I don't know if you ever played that on PlayStation two? I don't think so. Okay, it's an amazing racing game. It's probably not as good as I remember it, but the amazing part of it was it had a really great soundtrack. It had Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, a whole bunch of songs, and then it had a Photex song. Okay. And I remember being like, Ooh, I really like this. And, uh, and, and somebody was like, Oh yeah, well that's drum and bass. And I was like, okay, well this is what I like. And so I really, like I started DJing. I was walking around campus with records and had friends with turntables in all the dorms. Um, I was no good, but I really enjoyed it. And, uh, yeah oh man that's awesome yeah yeah yeah so I I watched a movie on the plane called gmt and it was about a band that played drum and bass uh and as soon as I landed I'm like where do I get more of this So I immediately went to the Castle Mall, which, for people that don't know, who weren't in Norwich ever, is a mall that is literally underneath the castle. Like, there's the castle, and then, like, underneath it is a shopping mall. And I went to the music store, and I found the soundtrack, and it was... one of the the guy from so Fru Fru is Imogen Heap and Guy Sigsworth and Guy Sigsworth has done a bunch of other work with other people but he was basically the producer and the main sound engineer for most of the that soundtrack so I kind of like I and then I and then I got that and then I got a bunch of like you know compilation things it's like yeah that was that was my so it's very similar like I got there I landed I'm like okay where do I get more of this thing uh and and yeah yeah Awesome, awesome. Yeah, no, a very formative experience for me. You know, I had traveled abroad a lot before then. I was super fortunate growing up playing ice hockey. I got to go on a traveling team that went to the Soviet Union right before it fell, went to China in the nineties. And then when I was in England, actually the team that I had played for needed an assistant coach because they were doing a tour to Eastern Europe. and so I got to travel with them I went to poland and prague and um oh that was amazing um yeah super great experience I cannot recommend that people travel enough yeah yeah well and and um yeah my my family and I we went to we took the kids to out of out of the country for the first time I went to japan over the summer last year um and that was the first time they had left we've gone you know done road trips we've gone to you know different places in the states but that was the first time that we We went outside the country and I think that, I mean, my, my daughter still talks about it. My son still talks about it. Um, and yeah, I mean, more, more of that, like it's, it's really is, especially at a certain age where like, um, well for me and as a teenager, you think, you know, everything and you think you've seen everything and being able to just go someplace else and, and understand that like, no, actually you don't know anything. Like there's so much more to human experience than just what you see like even on TV or like in your daily life. Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely. Yeah. No. Imagine for a moment that you don't know everything. There was a really good – oh gosh, I think it's called Lights On is an audio book that was just produced by Sam Harris's wife. And anyway, it's about consciousness being a fundamental aspect of the universe. And at one point she's interviewing this physicist and they're like, well, but you know, other people are saying this and they're saying that that can't really happen. And he's like, well, imagine just for a moment that you don't know everything. And I think that's what travel gives you, right? Is like the insight of like, wow, I had no idea that first of all, you could even eat food like this, or that even a culture could like operate a way a different culture does. So yeah, no, definitely travel. Absolutely. And that's awesome. That's such a small world. Yeah, I know, right? Like, I was, I was, it was just hilarious. It was like, you both studied at the University of East Anglia. Really? What did you study while you were there? um I did uh some english classes I did a writing class and I did a theater class I did comedy and the absurd in theater which was um which was awesome um they had a pretty good theater program um so I was I was kind of leaning into into that stuff and and then like yeah english and writing um stuff I I read like I one of the the other memories I have of of being at uea was um that I was studying and working harder than I think I had previously in college and also partying harder than I think I ever had. And that just seemed like that was the norm. Like that was kind of what everybody did is that like you study hard and then you party hard. And like they had a much more flexible, like you weren't in classes every day, you know, it was like two or three days a week or something. So that meant that I could actually do the work and like read all like read an entire book in two weeks or whatever, which is not a thing for me. Like I'm not I'm not a fast reader. Um, so like the, like there's a literature class, a modernist literature class that I took then, and we basically reading a book a week or a book every two weeks. And, and I, yeah, I was, it was, it was a lot of fun. It was pretty hard. And I would definitely recommend like it, you know, it, it was a lot of, there's a lot of people at our, like our, our university, my university, um, really pushed people to do a semester abroad. And, um, like, so almost everybody did it. Um, and there was a lot of different options and a lot of people, and, you know, I can't speak for anyone else's sort of experience, but like for me, like it wasn't any less for it being in, you know, an English speaking country. Um, because I really felt like I tried to immerse myself in the culture and figure out what it is, like what that culture was even. Um, uh, but, um, But yeah, it's a very, very good experience. That's awesome. That's awesome. So my first impression of the UEA campus was, did they build this as a set for a Doctor Who episode? Because the concrete, like the absurdist Bauhaus, like concrete... just everywhere and like the library was like on stilts and it was yeah it was it was a pretty it was a pretty gloomy campus yeah yeah yes yeah well and that that whole getting there um was a whole uh thing for me too because uh I left I left my dorm and I think I maybe even got to the airport and then realized that my ticket was still in my room. So I missed my flight and I was supposed to fly over with someone else that was in the program with me. So she ended up getting on the flight and going over. And so I went later. So by the time I got there, And like, you know, you probably did this too. You land in Heathrow, you get on a bus and then you get on a train and then you're on the train and then you take another bus and then like you're walking. And I've got like tons of stuff with me. And I'm like, I get to the campus. I'm like, it's night. It's like, I don't know, ten o'clock at night or something. There's the night watchman. And I'm like, I don't know anything. Like, I don't know where to go. I don't have any people. I like barely know what I'm doing. Yeah, so, yeah, that first just finding my way to the dorm and then figuring out where I'm going to stay for the next few months was its own sort of... It began a long tradition for me of sort of airline horror stories. Oh, no. Oh, no. Like, I have a history. Like, people who I know who have followed me on the internet, like... I've had bad luck with flights in various different ways, and this was the first time that I sort of screwed things up. But this was probably my own fault more than bad luck in the airport. Generally, generally. Well, that sounds like an issue. But one interesting thing that kind of ties into maybe – What we wanna talk about here is I met, like I was obviously around a bunch of computer science people and they had a variety of different interests, but there was a strong interest about the internet and the web. And that really, even though I wasn't doing a computer science degree, I was fascinated with the web. Obviously I was using it as a resource tool and goofing off tool and all that stuff. But I was also starting to kind of see how this is going to start shaping the world moving forward. And I totally, you know, looking back on it, I missed so many opportunities. Like there were multiple people that were like, hey, I want to start building websites for companies. Do you want to do this with me? And, you know, and I just I wasn't I just wasn't in the right frame of mind to go. Yes, absolutely. But I have You know, those experiences have taught me now to say yes more often and to be, you know, more excited about trying things out. But, you know, you just think back to then and, you know, we didn't even have Google back then. Yeah, yeah. I don't even think AltaVista was really even a thing at that point. It was still directories and Yahoo, DMOZ, and then, you know, and then everything's just exploded since then. What a wild... One of the – so my first internet exposure pre-this trip was through like BBSs. I was on BBSs before I was on the internet. I was paying for BBSs before I was on the internet. Okay. When I was in UEA, I mean, a friend had like a chat room that we hung out in, but he he added a chat bot and it was one of the one of these chat bots that was supposed to be. And this is like, again, ninety nine, maybe two thousand. It was supposed to be like an AI chat bot where in which you could talk to it and it would remember conversations and then it would talk back to you. and try to form coherent sentences. And we fed it so much garbage that we said that the bot just went insane. Like, it just started spewing out the same sort of, like, if you've been on the internet for long enough, there's, like, the Horse Ebooks Twitter account where it just, like, It's just a Twitter account that just spews, like, random, like, just internet garbage, basically. It's like old-school, like, AI, right? Before, like, large language models. Um... And so when ChatGPT and things came out, and when I learned that the way that they trained these large language models is from internet data, it's like, okay, well, I have personal experience with what happens when you feed something like this too much garbage, you get garbage out. So obviously, just from the baseline set, my expectation's pretty low. I know that if you feed it garbage, you're going to get garbage. And so like, like you have to go into it with like a base level of sort of distrust. And obviously now like AI is ruling the world and everybody is scared for their jobs and whatever. But like it, the fundamental truth is you still kind of feed it like an internet worth of, of, of reddit posts and and uh shit posts and like you know like sure just and and maybe maybe out of it it's got enough filtering stuff and it is a valuable tool but you but it's not always right like it's still gonna be basing it off of off of the whatever garbage it was sent at some point that somebody said somewhere maybe like it's it's a predictive model it's not a it's not a fact checking thing Absolutely. No, I think, you know, and we're jumping all over the place here, but talking about AI, you know, it's the, it's something I talk about and think about every single day. Um, I do, I do believe that there's overhype happening, uh, as with all technologies, everything gets overhyped and the people selling it are the one that's going to benefit the most from it. Um, I think that this idea, though, that it's going to take all of our jobs, I have not nothing about it yet has convinced me of that. Yeah. Right. I can see where it helps me maybe do my job a little faster. It helps me be more creative. It helps me think of things that I haven't necessarily contemplated just because there's only so much time in the day. And so I see it as kind of like a supercharging type of thing. I think the analysis that I always go back to is, It's a really fancy spell check grammar checker. Yeah. Right. And so whatever you give it, as you're saying, with this garbage in, garbage out. Right. It's the same thing. Right. You've got to give it something good to work with. And then you also need to know about its limitations. Yeah. And, you know, at certain points, it's OK, I've used this tool enough. Now it's time for me to just. be me or whatever. Oh, man. Thanks for the trip down memory lane. That was crazy. I think about UEA often, but I don't meet many people that have gone there. yeah I same I mean I every once in a while I come across somebody on linkedin that has it in their in their profile um but but I don't know that I've actually ever been able to sort of like reminisce on on our our early formative uea days yeah um yeah switching gears a little bit uh we talked a little bit before about um uh working remotely um I've been working remotely for geez uh probably close to twenty-ish years, I guess. After graduation, I came out to Salt Lake. I did some retail stuff. I ended up doing tech support for a few years. I deliberately avoided getting into the business of making websites because I really liked making websites. I had friends I had friends who went to art school and then went on into the world to be artists and they hated everything because the design work for them was boring and it took all the creativity and all of the joy out of making art out of their daily lives. And I didn't want that to be the case for me in making websites. And then one day, sometime after my son was born, I was like, you know, I don't want to be... My dad was always sort of working and not very available. And so I was like, I don't want to do that. I want to be more available for my kids than my dad was. So how can I do that? Well, I do know how to make websites, so maybe we can try to figure out a way to make this work. And that ultimately led to a long path that ended up at WordPress, ended up in agencies, ended up at Pantheon, and here we are. So I've been working remotely before it was called remote work because I was just working at home making websites. And now it's a whole thing. And I have a lot of very... I've worked in good remote environments where there's a lot of asynchronous and like... um room for people being at different sort of time zones you know and I've worked at other remote environments where um you're expected to still clock in at nine o'clock business time in east coast or whatever um and because that's just nine to five is operating hours um what is what is your path to remote work and and what are what are sort of the the takeaways that you've had in your journey Yeah, no, absolutely. So I haven't I'm not quite twenty years. I'm probably like fifteen. My last office job was in two thousand nine. I was selling content delivery network system solutions for level three communications, which is a very large but mostly unknown telecommunications company that built most of the fiber backbone across the US. I worked in internet. The tech support I was doing was for MSN for a while. And then I worked at Quest, which then became CenturyLink. It was before it was CenturyLink, but the phone system. So I'm very familiar. Well, now Quest became CenturyLink, then it became Lutron. Okay. Something like that. And I think it just bought level three. And then I just saw that AT&T has now purchased their fiber system. So it's going to be AT&T again. But, you know, before before we're dead, it'll all be AT&T. So that was my last office job. And that was a very good I think that was a very good last office job because that was a super corporate job. They were using some crazy ERP management system. It took two weeks to create a quote to sell CDN just to give you an indicator of like how little I was selling because like, you know, by then, you know, people were able to get CDN much faster anyway. I left that I got fired from that job and then I tried to figure out what I wanted to do. I started building websites. Finally, I finally took, you know, I was like, I like doing websites. I don't want to build them. I started building on because I had worked at an agency that specialized in backlinks. And so the whole job was just, you know, going out and finding backlinks and all this stuff. And I'm sitting there the whole time and I'm looking at the client's websites and I'm like, yeah, we're getting all these backlinks for them, but their onsite SEO is garbage. Like there's not even an H one tag, you know, like just basics. And so that's when I realized I was like, oh, I should just, I should just do this. Like, well, I'll just keep all the money, you know? Like, why am I working for people doing this? And so I did that for like eight years or so and managed to burn myself out, tried to do too many things. I was doing social media, I was doing paid ads. And I also was not delegating. So like I was not a good agency person. And then, and I was like, you know what? And that was fully remote. And the kind of the interesting side note to that whole part in My wife and I hit the road full time and we traveled in an RV across the US for six years. And so we were working remote doing that. And she actually walked away from her full-time career in the aerospace industry. We were just burnt out of Phoenix. She was burnt out of that job. We hit the road. She was like, she started doing like some freelancing and then she found her dream job finally. And so that's fully remote. And so I was just working, doing client work And then in like, I was like, you know, I'm, I'm kind of, I think I'm ready to go back and work for somebody again. Um, you know, there's something about when you run your own company, you've got it, you've got to do it all. And yep. I, you know, I'm not saying I won't do that necessarily again at some point in the future, but it just I was like, man, you know what? I really like doing like certain tasks and like really just doing the job. And so I went back in and I went on the tech support side. I had done some support work when I was at GoDaddy way, way back, two thousand three. But that's really more of a sales job. And so this time I went back in like pure tech support. I went and worked at Pressable. I was there for like a year and a half. learned a whole bunch, learned WPCLI, SSH, like started to figure things out and started running across this company Kinsta because every time I would do a Google search for like a database error that was coming up, they would have a blog post that would fix the problem. It wasn't just like, oh yeah, here's the issue. They would actually have the solution. And I was like, who is this company? They're just willing to give away all this information. And so I went and talked with them and started doing migrations for them. And yeah, I've been there for over five years now, fully remote position. We've since built a house. So now I've got like a dedicated office space. One of the things I learned about being on the road is that I really need a dedicated workspace. Yeah. for a few reasons. The first one is I need to be focused. I'm already good enough at distracting myself. I need to limit as many distractions as possible. And then the other thing is, and this is like a bigger topic, I think, about remote work that maybe doesn't get discussed enough, is when I'm done working, I walk out the door and I close the door and work stays in that room. Yeah. And I think that's really important, making sure you're delineating when you're working, when you're not working and like, because otherwise you go crazy, right? And your family goes crazy too, because they're like, are you working right now or are you with us? Like what's happening here? So remote work is great. I love it. I really don't know how I could work in an office again for future employers. I'm saying that tentatively because, you know, the right offer or whatever, but I think just from a productivity perspective, Like I can, I get up in the morning, I do my routine. I, I'm able to come into my office, do work. I can take a break, I can leave, I can do chores, I can come right back, I can do work. It's just so much more productive, so much more efficient. All the people I work with, right, they're all over the world. Like at Kinsta, we're a fully remote company. It just doesn't make sense to have an office unless you really need that much of a... permanent workspace, right to go to or whatever. And I understand like, not everybody has the luxury of having a room that they can dedicate as their office. So like going to a co working space, I think that makes a ton of sense for if that's what works for you. But yeah, man, happy to talk about remote work. I read these headlines from companies that are doing the return to office thing. I worked in an office in a cubicle for a number of years at a couple of different jobs. Um, and then, and then obviously, and then I, I also, uh, my first setup at home was like the computers were just in the main open living room, um, with the kids, uh, you know, newborns and, and, you know, up until like they're two or three or something. And then, and at a certain point I was like, okay, I need, I need to not be in this space because I'm not good for them and I'm not good for, for me. Um, and so I moved my office in, into the bedroom and that was kind of, janky, but it was better because I could close the door and having that space was a big improvement. But I think about going into the office and working in a cubicle job and the amount of just playing flash games on office time. Among other things, there was a role-playing one that I was really into and I wish that I remember the name of it. It was a flash game where you had a hero and you could get equipment and just go through and fight monsters and stuff and you level up and get better stuff and go to different areas. It was amazing. And I played so much of that. And I think about like, yeah, you're saying that I'm more productive in the office because I guess you can look over my shoulder. I literally don't understand that because I know that when I'm at the computer at home, this is the only thing that I'm thinking about. And especially like starting off doing freelancing, every minute that I'm not spending doing my job, I am not making money. like I am a lot more incentivized to get stuff done. And then, like you said, like having a dedicated space that you can just walk away from and like, OK, I'm done with this whole thing now, like is is a really is a really powerful thing for for remote employees. But yeah, I just I don't understand the return to office thing because I like I will say There's the water cooler thing, whatever, and I will say, I worked for Albertsons for a number of years doing tech support for their stores. They had Windows servers and Unix servers. and I supported the Windows servers, and in our umbrella, we also did support for photo kiosks, which they were putting out into all, and it was kind of early-ish days of photo kiosks. Now you see them, they're pretty common, and I think they're pretty much all like Canon now, but we had our own system that we had built and hired these Romanian developers to build out the software. And so we had in-house engineers literally across the hall. And this is actually where I sort of learned that one of my superpowers is being able to translate programmer speak into normal English and why I like doing developer relations because it's a lot of that stuff. Because I would be on the phone with somebody who's very, very tech phobic, right? who has customers in a line at this photo kiosk and it's not working. And I would go across the hall to the developers and say, this is what's happening. And they would say, okay, this is where you get into the MS SQL database and you can see what's going on, whatever, and this is the problem. And then I would take that and I'd go over there and then I would translate that into English and say, this is what you need to do. And that was definitely like nice to be able to walk across the room, but like, I don't need to walk across the room if I can just send them a Slack message, right? Yeah. And I think that's really interesting, right? To talk about the dynamic, right? Because there is kind of this nostalgia, I think, of what office work was or is, right? And there's this nostalgia of like, oh, yeah, no, it's where we all come together and it's kumaya and we're able to be synergistic. And I'll tell you my experience when I was in the office, right? When I was at GoDaddy, you had a key card. And the key card, depending on who you were, opened certain doors. And so since I was sales support, it meant most of the doors did not open. And so there was no chance I could go and talk to a developer. And in fact, actively, they did not want you talking to the developers. and so I think back on my experience working in offices and all the time that these people are like oh but you know this is where the mentorship happened and I'm like yeah I worked in offices for years and there was no mentorship happening like you know the only mentorship that was happening were these like toxic uh relationships where like I was being intimidated and whatnot and so you I hear the words, I understand what they're saying and the benefits of that. I think we can have all of that in a remote situation. And I think they're also, there's a lot of delusion over how much of this mentorship and all of these synergistic things were happening. Um, you know, maybe for a few people, yes. Right. Like a few people were able to get the CEO to take interest in them, but the majority of us are not getting that attention. And so, you know, I can now on Slack, I can DM my CEO whenever I want. He doesn't always respond, but I'm kidding. He totally does. I try to understand that he's got a lot of people messaging him, right? Yeah, for sure. So with remote work, we do lose this thing with the in-person contact, though. you know and so that is one of the things we're doing better about is having like remote meetups of course I started right during the pandemic right and right you know everything got wiped out for a couple of years we've we've been coming back with the in-person meetups I try and make whenever I go to like word camps I try and get other people who are nearby to join in and meet so like we can't be used coming up we'll have a whole bunch of people there And so we'll get that ability to meet people face to face for at least a little bit. And I think now with it in a remote situation, I think I appreciate those situations so much more now, right? Because I'm like, oh yeah, I know you really well from Slack, but obviously I don't know your sense of humor. I don't know like what tone you're actually talking to me in. And so it's weird. There's a lot of balance going on, but I think kind of segueing or jumping all over again, my sister works for a very large corporation and they went fully remote from the pandemic. and then now they've slowly started coming back I think she's doing two days a month back at the office and it's absurd right she goes into this office she sits down at her computer she gets on a zoom call with somebody in a different state yeah yeah yeah I it's I don't I don't I mean I guess you need to justify paying for the office space or something I don't I don't really I don't really get it. I do, I do know, like, you know, again, from sort of from personal experience, um, like there are significant challenges, particularly when you're in a distributed team across time zones, across continents. What have you found that helps negotiate that sort of challenge of like, we just literally have difficulties being in the same Slack rooms at the same time? How do you or how does Kinsta sort of handle that? yeah so um I'm very fortunate uh before I even got to kinsta the async culture was something that was being talked about and promoted heavily right and so this is where you as an individual need to make sure you have an understanding that other people at the company have other things that they're working on right like this is all this is stuff that we should have anyway right but I think yeah in a remote situation you really have to like make sure that you're embodying this mentality of, when I reach out to Sam or Nicole, right, for something, they might not be ready to like work on that or read that message at that moment, right? And I have to make sure I make the call of how important, how soon do I need them to respond to this, right? If it's a server outage, right? Like that's obviously a all hands on deck, we need to get this thing resolved. If it's a, I need you to review my vacation request time, or I need you to like review my strategy planning for the next six months, like there's wiggle room and we need to have more understanding of that. And so Kinsta does a really great job. This is why I really enjoy, many reasons I enjoy working at Kinsta, but like this async culture first, we've really adopted it, right? We didn't invent it, like lots of companies do this, but we've really adopted it at our core from the top down, right? So leadership down understands that async first And especially since we're a distributed company around the globe, it's really important that we understand that because if I'm messaging somebody who's in Asia, they're asleep usually when I'm working. And so I need to know that there's going to be a delay to that response. And so, you know, how can I package the question, right? Am I doing a good job of like, can I just go ahead and create like a Google doc with a whole plan in there for them to review so that, You know, we're not necessarily doing a death by a thousand cuts back and forth. We're just kind of looking at everything at once. And then based on how that's all working now, you need to decide, OK, does it make sense for us to have an in-person or not an in-person, but an actual meeting? so that we can talk we can get the you know get our tones like hey can I figure out like hey chris are you really excited about this project or is this like really tooth pulling for you like I think it's helpful sometimes to get that um but you've got to work async first you've got to try to work through whether it's slack or whatever communication program you're using You've got to be good, trying to be really good at communicating through that first. And then when there's holdups or roadblocks or whatever, switching to other forms of communication. I love video communication. I know a lot of people get very... uncomfortable with video. And I understand completely why. Not everybody is necessarily comfortable on a camera. What I would urge everybody to do is get over that, first of all. If you had an office job, you would have to go and see people in the office. Yeah. When you're remote working, you don't necessarily need to get all dressed up and, you know, crazy. But like, you know, try and take care of yourself, make yourself presentable. I think having a good video setup, right? I don't think you have to spend a ton of money on microphones. You need to spend some money on lighting, like just the number of people that have their window behind them. Face is just black. Like, we've got to stop this. This is, you know, this is what kills remote work, like jokingly, but also somewhat seriously. It's like, I need to see your face because most of human communication is nonverbal. Yeah. And that gets lost in Slack. Don't even try. I mean, that's the other thing. People try and be sarcastic in text, the internet. Don't try and use sarcasm on the internet unless you want to cause an argument. You need to be as tone neutral as possible in text. And then if there's an actual issue, that's what a video calls for. It's like, hey, I need you to understand you're really annoying me right now. without saying that. Right. And so and then the other person needs to be really good at picking up on those cues. Right. Like if the person's not turning on their camera, that's a that's a personal option. I get it. Not everybody wants to be on camera. So that's already telling me something maybe a little bit that they're not necessarily comfortable for whatever reason. Yeah. And just like. So I think, you know, to get back to your original question, like, how do we handle human communication as a remote company? It's complicated, right? But you've got to be proactive about it. And I don't know, how do you handle it? How does Pantheon handle this? Pantheon originally was a in-the-office sort of thing with a couple people that would work remotely. But most people were in one of a couple different offices in different places. And then went fully remote for COVID. I joined after that. And it's still... So like I said, I've worked at a couple of different things. I, you know, human made I was human made for a little more than four years. And we actually did a while I was there, a virtual conference about remote work and invited people from like base camp and like other places that were doing remote work to talk about what like the best practices were. And I feel like because human made was remote first, like they they were in an office for a minute, but Once it was larger than Joe and Tom and they started hiring people, I think they pretty much went remote from day ten or something. They really dug into what does it mean to be remote. I feel like they did a lot of things right. One of the things that they did... was have followed the automatic example of using P twos for everything. P two is a blogging. It's a theme really for WordPress. But the main thing is that it has a front end editor and comments and threaded comments. And none of this stuff is unique or special now. But at the time it was really like live updating and the idea was you could kind of do a twittery kind of thing on on your blog and then it kind of got adapted for for this sort of thing now all the make blogs use use a variation of this thing and so whenever there was a project whenever you know each of the sort of departments had a p-two projects had p-twos all communication happened in p-two so that that was the place that you went to look for stuff so that you weren't doing all of your communication over Slack. I like to think of Slack as not asynchronous because there is just so much mental overhead in trying to catch up with the back scroll that it's not asynchronous. People like to think that it is because there is a log But it's just impossible to keep up with all the things that are happening, especially when a company gets above a certain size. I think Pantheon, honestly, there's still struggles. There's things that I think Human Made was doing right that Pantheon still kind of needs to learn. One of the things, too, that you mentioned as well is getting together in person, and that's a thing that we're still trying to figure out. We kind of do it a little bit in team-size meetups, but Human Made did a whole company-wide thing. It's hard to oversell the value of getting everyone together in person so that you are rubbing up against people that you would not interact with normally, whether that's because of a time zone difference or departmental difference or whatever, because that then carries over into your Slack conversations, like you said. I'm not going to understand what a person's humor is like, what their tone is like. But if I see them in person, then I then I have that context. And when I see them online next, then I have I come into that interaction with that context. And like I said, it's hard to oversell the value of that. I think that's a thing that every remote team needs to figure out how to make happen and make happen in different ways than just, we're going to get this team together, we're going to get that team together. It needs to really be cross-functional because you're working with more than just the people on your team. You're working with people across. And it's usually, in my experience, and particularly a thing that, again, I see a lot of Pantheon, the difficulties in communication are often between departments, between teams that are already embedded in the way that they do things. And that is why it's even more important to have all of those people in a space, a physical space together so that they can figure out just how to communicate with people. And that's huge. It's a very human thing and we try to pretend like we can do this online-only thing and use things like Zoom or video calls and whatever to make up for the in-person stuff. But really, there is a necessary part of working with other humans that needs to happen in person. It doesn't have to be all the time, but there does need to be something. So, yeah, jumping on the bandwagon here, I think we're both in agreement that in-person meetups like we just need to have them, whether it's whether it's once a year, I think at least once a year. Right. At least. Yeah. Just get everybody together and then get the teams to to mix together. Right. Like mix things up because the siloing. Right. But what I'm hearing from you and what I experience as well as the siloing of departments and, you know, everybody's got their own missions, they've got their own OKRs, KPIs, whatever you're using. And the problem becomes that they don't necessarily those things don't interact. And and but we still need people to interact. We still need the people to work together. And so I wonder if there's like, you know, do we have a new acronym we need to come up with for either not an OKR, not a KPI, but like some sort of a. a measurement system that figures out how well departments are talking to each other and working with each other. And maybe that's just something that gets incorporated into our OKRs and KPIs, but it is shocking how much one team is working on something that just obviously makes sense. Like this work could be doing some work with another team, but we're just not using it. We're not even aware that each other's got these systems going, these tools in place. Like I'm using software that other teams aren't even, like they're just discovering. And I'm like, oh, I would have told you about that a year ago. You just had to ask. Um, and maybe I need to do a better job of broadcasting internally. Um, you know, we don't, we don't do a P two, uh, type system. We have confluence, which is not a good confluence is a mess. I love the idea of confluence. I love the ideas of these knowledge platforms, but then the actual use of them, it just like, why can't we figure out things? You know, I love Slack and I hate Slack. I love email and I hate email. I love social media and I hate social media, but these are all tools that I use for managing all of this. And I want to jump back real quick to your comment about Slack not being async. And I'll agree with you that The human instinct is as soon as you see that notification, you see the bubble. And I've even changed all my colors. I hate the bubble. I've even changed all my colors. I don't use the traditional colors. The notification bubble is not red because... red makes me super intense. I think it's green or something benign. But human instinct is, oh, I need to answer this right now, as soon as you see it. And so I get really good, and I think this is where the mobile app for Slack is better than the desktop app. Because in the mobile app, you can go through your threads, and you can choose mark as red or reply, or you can just leave it. And I love just leaving it because I'll check things first thing in the morning. I'll just kind of skim, hey, is the CEO reaching out? Is a customer reaching out? These are really important messages I need to respond to. Whereas like almost everything else can wait. And so I have to like, so I've got all these weird systems, right? Like I've got Slack reminders, but then I keep ignoring those. You know, there's so many bad habits that get built out of trying to like manage all of this. And then I'm part of too many channels for sure. um and then we're creating new channels all the time it's it's a challenge um I don't have any concrete answers for you but I can tell you I've got kind of a system that works um nobody's nobody seems to be upset with me for how I I handle my slack stuff um but I think again it's kind of like how I have to compartmentalize all of work into an office we need to get better at com I know I need to get better at compartmentalizing like email okay I'm gonna check email only a couple of times a day slack I'm only gonna check slack a couple of times a day um you know if somebody really needs me they can dm me but if they start dming me too much then like I'll just let them know I'm like man you dm me too much or something um I'm not always that comfortable. Like with my bosses, obviously, I can't say that. But there is a challenge here. But I think these are good challenges to have, right? I think getting back to the original premise of remote work, this is still so much more productive than any office work that I've ever done. And I think it's just, it's definitely on us. It's on the workers to be more interactive in a remote work situation. Cause it is really easy for me to just sit here and goof off because nobody's watching. But eventually people are gonna figure this out. Eventually they're gonna realize like, hey, you're not doing stuff. you know, and then changes will happen. So man, I tell you what, it's a pinch yourself moment. I'm pinching myself to have the position I'm at. I'm pinching myself that I get to work remote. You know, I remember being a kid and being like, oh man, what a dream. You could just sit at home and work. And like that was like in the nineties, eighties and nineties, like that was such a fantasy. And now it's just such a, it's just such just a fact of life for so many people. But we need to work on it, right? We need to not just like rest on our laurels and be like, oh yeah, remote works here. We've got it all figured out. Like, no, there there's constant improvement. Cause I remember being at Pressable, right? That was a part of automatic and that we had our P twos and, But you know, the problem then is participation, right? If nobody's writing in the P twos, they're not, they're not really effective. Um, and, and so we kinda, there was some of that issue, um, that I ran into when I was there. Um, so I don't know, an interesting thing, and I'm going to keep sucking up all the air here for just a little longer. One interesting thing we did at Kinsta early on when I got there is we had these Kinsta culture projects. And so this is something where anybody that works at the company can come up with an idea, run it by HR, of course, make sure it's not going to violate any thing or anything like that. But so like the first one I did a hundred days of blogging right in the middle of the pandemic, I was like, hey, first of all, we work at a company that we host blogs like we should all be blogging more. Um, and, and so we did a hundred day blogging challenge and, you know, we had a few people participate. It wasn't a huge number. Um, but with, you know, we had somebody set up a book club and, uh, like I created a computer club, a place just to talk about general computer stuff. And I think, and that was one thing I remembered from being automatic with the P twos, right. There would be these like sub cultures within the company. Mm-hmm. and I think that that's really a fascinating way because you also get that cross-functional cross-departmental connections that can occur um so just trying to figure out a way to facilitate all of that um it's a full-time job in itself though yeah yeah for real well thank you roger for coming on uh I feel like we could we could be chatting for a million years so I'll I'll have to get the the hook uh for now but yeah I'd love to have you on again uh in the future uh Do you have links or anything that you're promoting? What does your calendar look like over the summer and into the fall this year? Yeah. No, absolutely. So from a Kinsta side of things, we've got WordCamp Europe coming up. We've got all the WordCamps. We've got WordCamp US. So I'd love to see people there. Always stop by and say hi to me. Interrupt any conversation I'm having. It's all surface level. So kinsta.com, great. Yeah, go there. But then personally, so I've got my own blog is rogerwilliamsmedia.com. I've kind of just restarted that recently. And so I'm just having fun there, just kind of riffing on different subjects and topics and seeing how much AI can make me sound maybe a little bit more intelligent. So it's definitely AI-assisted work there. uh veg press you mentioned veg press at the beginning of the conversation so we're working on getting veg press kind of organized for work camp europe if this comes out by then otherwise uh it's too late but uh then for word camp us I'm working on I think the idea is going to be we'll just have like a big party and all of the food that is catered for it just happens to be vegan which also would make it kosher. And then we'll have some gluten-free. So to me, the idea with VegPress is it's just people that have got dietary kind of restrictions or choices, and they just need a group that can kind of help empathize with them. Yeah. That's what we're here for. Um, and we're not, and you know, and it's not like, uh, uh, necessarily trying to indoctrinate people, but I mean, we are, but you know, but we are, but anyway, um, but yeah. And then on LinkedIn, I'm on LinkedIn all the time. So feel free to find me on LinkedIn and say hi and chat and yeah. Awesome. Well, thanks again for for coming on. This is the first recording. I don't think it's gonna be the first episode. But yeah, early early adopter for for the community and code podcast. And yeah, lovely chatting with you. Yeah, absolutely. Chris, thank you for having on. I'm really excited to see where this goes. And yeah, me too. I'll see you again soon. All right. And take care.