Welcome to Community & Code,
the podcast about the human beings behind
the commits.
I'm here today with Christos Paloukas,
who is in the WordPress community,
works at Procedium.
Tell me, actually, why don't you,
I'll let you introduce yourself.
What do you do and who are you
and where in the world are you?
I'm in Greece.
I'm Christos, and I do work at Presidium.
It's so much easier when the host does
the introductions,
but I love as a host myself for
podcasts I do passing it off to the
guest.
So I've been in the IT space since,
I don't know, since school, I guess,
but like formally since twenty ten or
twenty twelve.
Twenty twelve.
Twenty ten was an iconic year for me
when I moved to Greece from Chicago,
Illinois.
Born and raised in Chicago, Burbank,
Illinois, to be specific,
a suburb just outside of Chicago.
Born in Evergreen Park.
This is the part where I talk about
long walks on the beach and how I
like them, right?
Yeah.
I'm a cat person.
There's not very many beaches in Chicago,
though, right?
Well, there are.
Are there?
Yeah, well, very many.
Does it count as one?
Like, you know, like Lake Shore?
There's a lake.
There's not an ocean.
It kind of smells funny.
I don't know.
Yeah, I wasn't a fan of the lake.
We have a smelly lake here, too.
Yeah, lakes are weird.
Especially Chicago.
Could you imagine how many corpses are in
there from, like, the mafia days?
Like, rolled up rugs getting tossed.
Actually, go ahead.
I was going to say,
I'm in Salt Lake City,
so we have obviously the Great Salt Lake,
and that smells weird for completely
different reasons.
Not so much the mafia, though.
Yeah, good point.
Actually, when I was in school,
fun random tangent,
there was kind of a thing to... Okay,
so, you know,
people get shot in Chicago all the time.
You kind of get desensitized to it for
all the forced reasons.
But it was a thing to,
I don't know, have a shooting of sorts,
burn the car,
and have the car disposed of in the
lake.
Okay.
I mean,
there's so many layers of messed up with
that.
Yep, yeah.
Indeed.
Greece is much more peaceful.
Greece has nice weather.
Greece is nice.
Got the islands.
What took you to Greece?
Oh,
I just ended up coming to Greece so
I can get some Cisco certifications to,
like, I don't know,
expand my knowledge in IT.
And whether I did it in the States
or whether I did it in Greece,
it would have been the same kind of
story.
Everything would be in English,
so it would have kind of worked for
me.
I do speak Greek.
My Greek writing, it's not there.
The military helped.
There's conscription in Greece.
So if you want citizenship,
you have to go to the military as
if you were born a male.
And for nine months, it was for me,
twelve months.
Now, for some reason, it's even longer.
And we keep spending money on,
I don't know,
like F-sixteens and our military as if
we're ever going to actually go to war.
But I was talking about the Greek and
the English and the speaking.
yes and going to greece uh to do
cisco certification yeah i ended up doing
all that i but i ended up finding
her myself in a relationship that i was
kind of committed to at the time and
then i found work and work turned into
the military and i don't know time passed
and i'm still here and it's been over
a decade it's been fifteen years that's
impressive twenty five now yeah it's been
fifteen years um how's that cisco
certification working for you
I was just talking about this today with
one of my coworkers.
He was talking about getting the CCNA and
I told him that the best thing I
ever did in my Cisco career was to
stop taking those exams.
It was the most relieving thing.
It was, I think,
two or three years ago when I had
to take the CCNP security or something
greater to continue having my Cisco
certifications.
And I never used them ever in my
professional career.
Sure, it's great.
That's what I told them, too.
You get good knowledge.
You learn about how networks work.
We were talking about the OSI model in
comparison to the TCP IP model.
I hate that like we still use terms
like volumetric and OS and like layer four
and layer three attacks for Presidium
Edge.
We were talking about this, how like,
you know,
L-three and L-four attacks are cut off at
the edge.
But I hate it.
I can't stand it because the whole world
works off the TCP IP stack, right?
OSI is great for troubleshooting.
You have to know it as an IT
guy.
But I mean,
why do we still have to refer to
things formally using the OSI stack?
Hmm.
There was a point in time when I
was doing tech support where,
and I was doing, well,
so the long newer story is I used
to do tech support for MSN when MSN
was a thing.
And when MSN was actually rivaling AOL to
some extent, you know,
as the thing that you click on to
get internet, you know,
like when that was a thing.
Now everybody just has internet all the
time.
So I did that.
And then I moved from MSN to basically
the phone company that did DSL support.
And a bunch of people that I knew
had or were taking Cisco certification.
And I considered it.
for a minute um but like at the
time uh we had so there was a
point in time where before i joined uh
the phone company um they had given people
cisco modems and so our cisco routers
actually and so it would have been
marginally helpful like you actually would
be working with some of the things that
maybe you would be talking about because
no one really cares about the networking
stuff in like what are you doing dsl
tech support like you're not you're you're
not doing networking you're doing like the
networking hitting the the router and but
you're not doing any internal networking
right yeah um so it would have been
like kind of tangentially okay uh but we
were also phasing that out um and rolling
out this is when like sort of at
the beginning of when phone companies were
like
like rebranding,
like getting some vendor and rebranding
the modem and putting their logo on it.
And like, so it was,
and there's a crappy robot modem that
didn't let you do anything at all.
And the Cisco let you do everything in
the world.
Yeah.
Um, so I never did it.
Um,
And I never actually thought that anyone
who did take it used any of that
information.
So you just confirmed that suspicion.
I mean, it looks good, right?
It looks good to have a little like
CCNA, whatever badge.
Well, I mean, maybe not so much anymore.
It was more impressive like ten years ago.
I thought it was too, right?
So I had that cute little CCNA thing
with a little,
but then you learn at the end of
the day that like, I don't know,
there was this scandal,
I guess it wasn't a scandal,
but more of a realization where large
companies like that,
like Cisco specifically,
I don't want to talk trash about Cisco
podcast,
but
Uh, you,
you figure out eventually that they get,
make more of their,
most of their money off their huge
partnerships that they have like,
you know, gold partner, silver partner,
whatever of Cisco.
And through training,
I don't remember the percentage,
but it was huge, like thirty, forty,
fifty.
Yeah.
Fifty was probably too much,
but they make it off training and training
centers and certifications,
which makes sense.
Cuz one of my problems then was I
paid for the CCNP security exam.
And it was like three hundred and fifty,
if I remember correctly, three hundred,
three hundred and fifty euro.
It's a lump sum to get certified in
something you don't use.
Plus, the other thing that bugged me is,
I don't know,
let's go back to the CCNA thing where
I was talking to the coworker.
Back then we would learn, you know,
basic routing protocols and then EIGRP.
No one uses EIGRP.
But it's good to theoretically know that
things exist, right?
Yeah, not EIGRP,
but it's good to know how to work.
They should really focus on what they
should have focused on.
It's been so long now, like, you know,
routing protocols or maybe even expand to
things like BGP that's widely used.
But no,
you have to be a CCMP level or
maybe even higher than for BGP to actually
get into the curriculum.
And for anyone who's listening who is not
following the rapid-fire abbreviations,
we will definitely move on from this part
of the podcast.
What do you do exactly at Proceedium?
Your LinkedIn says you're a performance
engineer.
What does a performance engineer do?
My LinkedIn is right.
So performance engineers,
we make shit faster.
Okay, cool.
How do you engineer speed?
You start from the ground up, I guess,
by using high speed technologies or using
like, if you want to go really technical,
you'd start at the probably operating
system level.
If not, even if we have like any,
I don't know,
machine geeks or like actual hardware
geeks in the house,
they would probably argue it starts at the
machine level, which does make sense too.
NVMEs do play a role.
They're significantly faster than the
older SSDs,
the solid state disks and spinning disks.
They do die out much faster.
But anyway,
the role of a performance engineer,
I guess,
is relative to what they're focusing on.
So at Presidium,
we do managed WordPress hosting.
So I focus on WordPress.
So I focus on web technologies.
It could be database.
It could be the server itself,
the web server,
whether it's Nginx or Apache,
optimizing the actual web server for the
specific site in question,
because WordPress is a beast with many
faces.
you can do pretty much everything on the
WordPress and people do do pretty much
everything on the WordPress,
meaning that every time I get a
performance audit,
which is one of my responsibilities, it's,
it's usually like everything from the
beginning, uh,
writing something like a SOP for audits,
it would be very vague because then you
have to find something and then rabbit
hole.
Sure.
They're all like low hanging fruit.
I don't know, slow queries, for example,
that you kind of knock out really quick,
but yeah,
As a whole,
without changing or potentially ruining
the website,
performance work is kind of hard.
If you asked me,
what are the most common things you or
no, the most common I can answer.
But if you ask me what are the
best practices,
I would tell you there's no such thing.
I mean, it really depends on your website.
Sure, there are again, like, I don't know,
be careful with your images,
be careful with how things load,
be aware of what the critical
or the critical rendering path is be
careful with your CSS.
But if you don't actually get your hands
dirty,
you're not going to be able to identify
anything.
Yeah,
I think that's a really interesting take
on performance.
I think that's really grounded in reality.
I think we both work at hosts.
And obviously,
hosts want to say that ours is the
fastest.
But how you define fast depends largely on
what you're emphasizing.
One of the things that Pantheon emphasizes
is that everything should be in the
caching layer, in the CDN,
and we give everybody a CDN from the
get-go,
and that's a thing that we've done for
a really long time.
And so to really benefit from
you know,
the speed that Pantheon can give you,
like, yes, obviously we have, like,
containerization and we use Google Cloud
and whatever and those things are, like,
help things be fast, but, like,
ideally you're never hitting the
application server at all to make those
database queries or whatever.
You're just hitting a cached page in a
CDN somewhere that stays there for,
you know, an extended period of time.
And then you don't need to worry how
fast the machine is because the machine
can be slow and it's only hopefully going
to be serving, you know,
a request to a single visitor who just,
you know,
gets the short straw.
Yeah.
Well,
offloading things to see what's funny is
that like in performance,
lots of the solutions end up being the
problem in some way, shape or form.
You mentioned caching CDN,
which basically is caching for,
I don't know,
static assets that can help you alleviate
like what's going on on the actual server
itself.
But then other sorts of caching,
maybe like full page caching on the edge,
something like Presidium Edge does.
It's relatively new.
It's pretty cool with the static and
dynamic caching on the edge.
Only tells me that, okay, yeah,
you can really,
really benefit your site if you don't have
like logged in user traffic or it's not
an LMS kind of deal or it's a
WooCommerce shop that's not necessarily
built.
Yep.
Those are all the things that fall down.
Yep.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, with WooCommerce,
you can always do that.
I always forget what it's called.
The adaptive caching.
Not adaptive.
What's the word for when you cache only
certain parts of the page?
Like caching fragments?
No.
Yeah, fragment caching.
Exactly.
You can do that.
But you have to be in sync completely
with the developer.
You have to know that a certain banner
or a certain part of the page is
going to be served from the cache.
And you have to identify those parts of
the page.
Yeah.
And you can't change those either.
But like caching is one of the best
and worst things ever because it's like
the easiest way to hide all your
performance issues.
On the other side of things,
it's the easy,
maybe the easiest way to make your site
significantly, significantly faster,
you know, closer to the user.
Yeah.
That's why we always do our
troubleshooting without caching.
Like if you want
Yeah, fix the root cause,
and then you don't need to worry so
much.
You don't need to rely so much on
your caching.
Exactly.
What's a good term?
I've used this in a WordPress meetup in
Athens.
Caching is a smart way to do less
steps.
for certain things.
But I don't know, I make pizzas.
And I've been doing it like religiously
lately,
because it's becoming an obsession.
If I do less steps in my pizza
making process,
my dough isn't going to come out right.
So I don't know,
it doesn't apply to every situation.
The cat thing.
Yep.
What took you what what took you into
the WordPress world?
Honest to God, it was just an ad.
There's no fun or cool story here.
I'm not an old WordPress contributor.
Sure, okay.
I was taught to use WordPress as a
go-to in high school,
but that's just because I think
It wasn't part of the formal curriculum
back then.
I graduated high school in two thousand
nine.
But I think it was because our electronics
slash computer science teacher used
WordPress at some point in his life.
So, Mr. Nichols, Richard Nichols,
great guy.
Awesome guy.
Loved him.
Shout out to Mr. Nichols.
Hi, Mr. Nichols.
I think I can call him Richard now,
can't I?
It's always weird with teachers.
Yeah, you get over it.
But yeah,
I think it was because it was his
go to at the time.
And you were telling me earlier that
you're now involved in the WordCamp Athens
organization.
Tell me about how that happened.
Yeah, I'm a co-organizer.
I was asked if I wanted to be
part of it.
I gave one of those really sure yes,
I definitely want to be part of it.
And now, towards the end,
there's a lot of work.
Yeah, yeah.
So for someone who doesn't know what's
involved in organizing a camp,
or even a local meetup,
but we'll talk about camps.
I've done this,
so I already sort of know this story,
but what does that look like for you,
especially maybe if this is like your
first WordCamp that you've been involved
in?
It's the first WordCamp.
I was a volunteer for WordCamp Europe,
yeah.
Twice, once in Athens and once in Torino.
That was good because it was all very
structured and I just had to pick a
role and do my role.
You just had to show up, yeah.
Yeah, pretty much.
And you wear your different colored shirt
or whatever.
Now, we did do that.
We did something similar like that.
We did spread out roles.
But you have to fill in blanks all
over the place.
You just have to keep helping each other.
And sure,
there's always going to be an imbalance.
We've got twelve different organizers.
All twelve are either running their own
business or working somewhere else.
They're all busy half the time.
The other half the time, they're,
I don't know, living their lives.
Let's not forget that.
And then they have WordCamp organizing
going on too.
And I'll be straight with everyone.
In the beginning,
I was one of the most inactive out
of the twelve.
And now these past two weeks,
I'm the guy responding to emails,
which responding to emails like for the
sponsors team doesn't really mean like,
you know, you write a five minute email.
You have to look all over the place
to gather the information that you need
for that particular person so you can be,
again, aware of their situation.
before you can formulate a reply.
And if something is taking long with this
confirmation process that is going on with
WordCamp Central now,
it's our fault that it's taking too long.
It's not.
We're the direct point of contact.
It's like you go to a restaurant and
you have a problem.
I worked in service for a long time
and I use service based analogies very
often.
But you go to a restaurant and you're
not happy with something or you find like
a huge hair,
multiple pieces of hair or even something
that's moving that shouldn't be moving on
your plate.
The waiter's going to take the shit.
And then it kind of goes up the...
Yeah,
and then you have a Karen that asks
to talk to the manager,
and then the manager pulls out the head
chef.
Yeah,
and it just makes everyone's day really
bad.
There has to be a lot of patience.
There has to be a lot of,
from what I'm seeing,
there has to be a lot of understanding.
Things do magically seem to work.
Because we have to do it.
We're at the point that we have to
do it.
I think there's a certain demarcation
point where if you really can't handle,
which I think I was there at that
demarcation point.
I think I was the weak link until
I had to not be the weak link.
And now I'm quite tired.
But there's still some pushing to go.
There's a lot of last minute things to
go.
And we're actually getting a lot of
engagement from people, mostly positive.
People asking to sponsor, obviously.
People asking to volunteer.
Volunteering seems to be a lot easier.
Finding volunteers seems to be a lot
easier than it is to find sponsors.
Yes.
WordCamp Central has been very good about
the portion that they've given us for the
event.
I'm not going to lie there.
Yeah.
When is WordCamp Athens?
When is?
Yeah, when?
November eighth.
Oh, yeah.
My birthday.
Happy birthday, WordCamp Athens.
Yeah.
Unfortunately,
I won't be going to Athens for my
birthday this year.
keyword this year.
I'd like to go to Athens for my
birthday.
Um, but yeah, so no, I, I,
I did, um, I was organized,
I was involved in WordCamp Salt Lake City
for, for a long, long, long, long, long,
long time.
I started out as a volunteer, um,
and then I was, um,
and then I get more involved and then
eventually I was doing like just, uh,
working with like speakers and stuff and
sponsors.
And then I was co-organizing and I
co-organized for two years and then I solo
organized for two years and then I was
pretty done.
And that also like that last year,
that last year that I that I organized
was also probably twenty eighteen.
So like just before covid.
So like, yeah,
then then then covid happened.
Well,
a we didn't have one in twenty nineteen
because nobody,
nobody in the community was like able or
willing to pick up the reins after I
basically
carried it for I mean at that point
close to four years like I mean it
was it was me and one other person
were lead organizing and uh the two years
before I was just fully organizing but or
lead organizing but um but yeah nobody
else was was willing to to to pick
up the the the reins and then and
then COVID hit and that kind of decimated
our like local meetup group like
We still haven't really picked up.
Somebody posted in our Utah WordCamp Slack
last week and it was the first time.
It had gotten to the point where Slack
cuts off after the first message in the
general channel after the last cutoff.
It had been that long that it had
been quiet.
And it's sad.
I would like to have a community,
but it's a lot of work and I
don't want to do the work involved in
lifting the community on my own shoulders.
has it like kind of fixed you guys
do meetups because i know the athens oh
this was before i was like really involved
in wordpress aside from making a website
using wordpress uh the athens community
had the same issue like after covid we're
probably still not back up to speed since
the before christo stays yeah
Yeah, no, we haven't.
I mean, if there are meetups,
they're not happening through our Slack.
There used to be like a Salt Lake
Valley meetup and there used to be like
a couple of people that would meet up
in like Park City.
And I mean, a lot of those people,
to be fair, moved out of Utah.
So like that also,
it's not just the COVID that killed
everything.
It was also like,
I think there's almost like a COVID exodus
that happened too.
Like people,
like when everybody was remote working,
then everybody decided that they could
like move other places and live other
places.
And so that, I think, affected things too.
But yeah,
most of the people that were leading the
charge for making sure that the meetups
were happening and the WordCamps and stuff
were happening kind of got burned out.
No, that makes sense.
But what surprises me, like I pulled up,
that's why I'm looking around.
I'm on the laptop.
I pulled up the results of last year's
WordCamp Larissa.
I'm sure you've never heard of Larissa,
right?
Yeah, it's I think the third.
Oh man,
the Larissa people are going to get upset
with me.
It's either the third or I think it's
the third or fourth largest city in
Greece.
It's up near Mount Olympus.
And they had two hundred and forty two
attendees.
And it's got some other fun stuff from
twelve different cities in Greece,
fifty percent newcomers,
thirteen speakers, fourteen volunteers,
two hundred and forty two for a very
local, I'd say,
not even in the first or second largest
city.
And everything went really well.
We were all very surprised.
Well,
I don't know if they were because I
wasn't expecting it.
But I was very surprised to see that
smaller part of Greece that geographically
kind of works for everyone because it's
kind of in the middle.
If you don't count the Philippines.
It went very well,
which was very inspirational,
especially for WordCamp Athens this year.
Yeah, location matters a lot.
It's like...
And it's interesting,
the WordPress events versus and how they
have or have not come back after COVID
versus Drupal events I'm learning.
Because I think that for the most part,
Like,
Drupal events are still smaller than
WordPress events or than they used to be
before COVID.
But they are happening.
And, like, the local, like,
sort of regional or city-based sort of
meetup groups are, like,
making Drupal camps.
I...
I just came back from Bay Area Drupal
camp, bad camp last month.
And it was a pretty nice, I mean,
it was a cool turnout.
It felt like a small word camp and
that was cool.
And there's been a couple others that I've
seen
For the most part,
there are very few of those things
happening in the WordPress space in the
States outside of the flagships,
which I find interesting and
disheartening.
And there's...
Possibly drama involved in that.
I know at least in a couple cases,
some folks have chosen to make their own
event as opposed to doing a WordPress
community support WordPress WordCamp
event.
Like, you know,
instead of like the organizers of WordCamp
Minneapolis St.
Paul decided to make some conf instead,
which I'll be speaking on in a couple
months.
Which, I mean, I think that's great,
but also, like, there's stuff there.
There's, I think,
Brad Williams announced a while ago
Wordadelphia to do, like,
a small WordPress event in Philly.
Wordadelphia, yeah.
Because Philadelphia, Wordadelphia,
I don't know.
It's a weird name.
And I think there's another one that was
done by the WordCamp Buffalo organizers
that's I think it's color code or
something to that effect,
which is actually going to be like in
different places,
but it started in Buffalo.
And so like there's these other things and
obviously pressconf
But that's not really like, I mean,
that was descended from Pressnomics.
So it's sort of, but like,
it's nice to see that there are other
things happening outside of just the
WordCamp ecosystem.
Plus,
I like things like PressConf specifically
that you mentioned.
Or, okay,
so there's the WordPress community and
there's WordPress community events where
we're supposed to be,
from my understanding,
and maybe the point of view of a
relative newcomer is like, you know,
For my understanding,
it's supposed to be a little bit more
community-based than it is business-based,
kind of like WordPress or Slack, right?
It's definitely community-based.
But then you have people turning these
kinds of events that are geared towards
community into more commercial events.
Whereas PressConf,
they're there to make money.
You're there to make connections.
You're there to make money.
And it's clear, right?
So kind of like post status and the
WordPress org.
Yeah.
I really like when it's clear,
when it's clear cut,
like you know you're there to make
connections, to make money,
to progress your business.
Whereas with WordCamps,
I'm kind of confused.
I think it's a bit of a mix
and I don't know where the balance should
be, would be,
or people even want the balance to be.
That's a really fair point.
I know when I was wrangling speakers for
WordCamp Salt Lake City,
the Salt Lake City meetups often had a
very strong small business sort of focus.
And part of that or a large part
of that is
Salt Lake City in particular,
Utah broadly,
and even more broad than that,
I would say like the dominant culture in
the state is very big on sort of
small business and kind of do it yourself
kind of things.
So obviously that filters down into a lot
of people that go to the meetups,
a lot of people that are interested in
the camps.
are small business oriented or small
business owners or whatever.
And so obviously as an organizer trying to
come up with a schedule,
you want to cater to that,
but also balance with like,
also we should have some dev tracks too.
Also,
we should have some other things that
aren't businessy that are like,
And how to like balance that so that
you have like, I mean,
it's almost like an art to really get
the right sketch.
It's like making the perfect playlist.
I'm really big on making play.
Like I used to be a DJ.
If you've ever seen the movie High
Fidelity, he like, you know,
there's this like.
I haven't.
all through the movie uh john cusack's
character like talks about like um how he
like like making the perfect playlist is
like a common sort of thread and like
he would sit down and like just like
spend hours listening to records and like
organizing things in the right way um to
get the perfect flow it has to start
this way it has to like you have
to come down a little bit then you
go up a little bit you know like
like just like making,
making it into an experience,
which I think, uh, you know, obviously,
uh, that is a, maybe a relic of,
of, of records and cassettes and CDs and,
and not streaming services.
Um,
but like the same thing is true for
like crafting a, a, a schedule for,
for an event like that,
like where you have to like,
understand who your audience is uh and
figure out like and also like timing makes
a difference end of the day talks
everybody's tired everybody's sleepy
especially at like post lunch like you
need to like have something that's going
to bring a lot of energy otherwise
everybody's going to fall asleep like you
know there's all sorts of stuff like that
Yeah, there's definitely like risk too.
So like we got a bunch of newcomers
for speakers and we wanted newcomers for
speakers under the idea.
But then you have the thought in the
back of your head,
if that X well-known person isn't giving a
talk, are people going to, I don't know,
actually sit in the auditorium?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah, you have to, like, you can maybe,
like, if you, like,
sandwich them with other talks that people
do know or something, like, you can, like,
kind of find ways to cheat.
But, yeah.
Or, like, yeah,
it's a really interesting... Like,
that was actually one of the things that
I thought was really fun about, like,
the speaker stuff is always something I
really enjoyed working with, like,
both from, like...
because this is also like how you're
presenting in some ways your local
community right and like um it's not just
we're not just here independent of of time
and place and just talking about wordpress
we're also putting on a show for for
buy-in for the people of our city in
our community yeah and so you you want
that to to you know
look good.
You want your community to be cool.
People will walk away and be like,
you want people to come from out of
state even or out of the city.
It gets difficult.
I don't know.
I don't even know if I should be
talking about this,
but I'm going to do it anyway.
Sorry, WordPress, if you don't like it.
One of the issues that we face is
not having enough submissions from
females.
So at the end of the day,
the speaker's list is going to be,
you know,
there's not going to be the diversity that
we'd want.
Yeah.
But it's not necessarily our fault.
So we want to what we talked about
was that we want to take some time
during the event to encourage more female
people to, you know,
submit submissions for talks.
I found, I had that same problem.
And the solution to that problem is
asking.
Oh,
like going straight to people and being
like... Yes,
going to people and just inviting them,
say, hey, I'm the organizer for WordCamp,
blah, blah, blah, blah.
Do you want to come and speak?
And oftentimes...
The answer is yes.
And that's cool.
And then you can kind of curate that
speaker list because for a long time,
our WordCamp was in a hundred percent
reliant on the submissions that we got.
And yeah,
there's only so much that you can sort
of coerce the submissions and, you know,
because
the dominant culture is largely white
males then the speakers that you end up
getting are predominantly white males i
presented actually at a um at uh open
west back in like i don't know twenty
eighteen twenty nineteen or something
before covet again
And I was presenting on being an ally.
And the way that their speaker submission
worked,
and I think it's actually similar to the
way WordCamp Europe does it now, maybe.
Maybe there's just other things that they
add to that that I don't know about
behind the scenes.
But the way that Open West did submissions
is it was sort of like you entered
into a system and then names and stuff
are removed from all of the submissions so
that it's judged purely on
the content of the submission,
so you don't know who submitted it.
And the idea is that that's more
egalitarian, right?
Because you're just basing your acceptance
or rejection based on the subject matter.
The problem with that that I observed was
that
Eighty to ninety percent of the speakers
that were selected for that conference
were male and most of them were white
male.
And here I am giving a talk on
allyship.
And like, I'm like,
I told I told the organizer, like, look,
like,
I'm giving this talk and I'm going to
blast you because.
like all of the keynotes were men except
for one um like most of the talks
were by men and i was like you
know i i think that there are better
ways of doing this and i i see
what you're doing but also i have a
counterpoint and i'm going to talk about
that is that okay and it was like
he said yes um and uh but yeah
i mean like i think i think if
you just rely on
on the submissions and you don't do sort
of your own outreach,
then you're going to get,
you're going to just get it naturally
because that's kind of how the tech
industry just works.
And it's upsetting too,
like all the other teams volunteer wise,
organizing wise,
where we have a great mix and,
you know, without great mix,
everyone knows this already,
but without diversity,
you don't have innovation.
Without innovation, you don't do anything.
I mean,
it's been proven over and over and over.
Yeah.
Yeah, I feel strongly about like,
you know,
like I don't I don't I don't even
think it's like it's not about like it's
not equal or giving some people like
special, special access.
It's like, no,
we need to just make the table bigger.
And if that means we need to invite
people to the table,
like the white guys are going to come
to the table like they are.
They're just gonna because they're like
that's that's their their
perspective that's their their privilege
that they've lived with their whole lives
they just know that they can go out
and do things and it's harder when there's
not an actual invitation like no you can
you can come to the table too and
we like you are welcome at this table
like we don't want it to just be
a bunch of white dudes at a conference
at a event like anything yeah
I know.
I don't want to fall under any like
stereotype stuff.
But no, I totally agree.
And I mean,
that's how inclusivity like starts, right?
Inclusivity doesn't mean like doors open,
you can enter because no one's gonna come
in.
Yeah, right.
It's more of a we have to go
to them.
That makes sense.
Yeah.
Yeah,
I think one of my first posts that
I, when I moved,
when I went to Blue Sky,
I have it as a pinned post.
One of the first things that I,
I don't know if you bloot or bleat,
or I don't know what the right word
for posting on Blue Sky is.
Bleeding.
Yeah, sure.
Definitely bleeding.
Um, um,
one of the first things that I,
that I posted was, um, was about like,
you know, things that were happening and,
and, and the discourse in, uh,
the United States.
And I was just saying like, you know,
inclusivity is not about people taking
your piece of the pie.
It's about saying, Hey everyone,
there's pie here.
Do you want some?
Yeah.
Share the pie.
Yeah, exactly.
I share and actually invite people into
eating the pie with you.
It's not just about saying, you know,
putting a sign up there that says,
and if you need more pie,
you can make more pie.
It's not like there's people that are
going to take your pie.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't know.
Fear.
Fear is a big topic.
I think we could talk about fear for
like ten different podcasts,
but fear really gets everyone back on
everything at the end of the day.
Yeah.
Fear and comfort.
I guess they go hand in hand.
Yeah.
Well,
I did save some time because I definitely
want to talk about cats.
Yes.
So you go first.
Tell me about your cats.
Um, well, I, I wanted to,
I wanted to, cause I, I still,
I still like, uh, so we talked, uh,
previously about, um,
like you take your cat camping, uh,
and I think that's awesome.
I would like a camping cat.
Um,
I also think that you're a little bit
spoiled because you can just like take,
uh,
you can just go to a beach in
Greece on an Island and,
and then kind of be remote.
But talk about the story of how you
first took your cat on a camping trip.
and how that's worked since.
I see videos every once in a while
of people who have taken their cats
camping or taken their cats to the beach
even,
but most people assume that cats and
beaches and camping are not a thing that
you do.
Dogs and camping seem fine,
but cats and camping always seems weird.
don't know okay i'll give you the story
before that david abella one of our most
recent partners uh him and his wife were
totally shocked when they went out to the
rockies and they saw more cats than dogs
sure they were leashed which i don't know
how i feel about like a leashed cat
but my cat was like a crazy cat
that was i don't know some family that
couldn't handle him uh they ended up
finding some vet that was going to
euthanize him for being uh
too aggressive.
The cat wasn't aggressive.
And I picked up on it through the
animal welfare volunteering that I do.
And I said, no, I'm taking this cat.
So I basically stole the cat.
Yeah, I basically stole the cat.
And there were some legal implications for
the veterinary in question,
which that's how it should have been.
But anyway,
it all came down to necessity at the
end of the day.
I couldn't find someone to take care of
my cat.
uh he had gotten much better like behavior
wise the first year or two actually were
very difficult but uh we ended up going
to camping and i figured it'd be okay
i don't know there's always risk
Because he's not a leash cat.
You can't put a leash on him.
I tried during like the first days or
the first weeks maybe of COVID when they
said we can go out if we're taking
our pet out.
That didn't go well for the leash or
for the cat.
But I just got to the island.
I let the cat out and I was
dumb.
It took a long time to get there.
And I felt bad for the cat.
So I was like, okay, cool.
Now that we took this tiny little boat
to get to Kato Kufonisi,
it's down Kufonisi.
I thought it'd be a good idea to
take him out as soon as, you know,
I could.
Rather than finding a spot to, you know,
make cap.
and then be like, here, this is home.
Dumbest idea ever.
The cat freaked out.
He saw the water.
There was like a whoosh of the wave,
and he just ran up this side of
this really steep hill.
And I tried getting him down,
but eventually I was going to either
maybe get the cat down and have like
hurt myself severely.
And I don't know,
I had to abandon it.
So I kind of slept close there.
I made camp somewhere further back and I
slept close to that area.
And I went for it in the morning
and I was basically just, you know,
climbing the side of this really steep
hill.
with a can of tuna in my hand
to get the cat down.
And fortunately,
I did get the cat down and everything
went well.
Since then,
the second time was kind of difficult.
We went to Donusa,
which is an island that's conquered by
cats.
There are countless cats there.
And my cat's kind of fighter slash killer.
So he didn't have a great time there.
Anafi was the island that he kind of
loved.
And even if he's been three times to
Anafi,
When I take him out on that one
particular beach that I camp on,
he's like, all right, cool.
I know where I am.
I hate you.
I don't know why you do this to
me.
I don't belong here.
Why are you taking me here?
Fine.
Screw yourself.
But he's like, okay, cool.
I'm good.
And since then, like this year,
we went to Ravavos,
which is the most southern point in
Europe.
It's this island,
maybe two and a half hours from Crete.
uh everything was fine actually he's kind
of getting older too and he's got fiv
uh he's got the feline leukemia and he's
got the uh it's another autoimmune disease
the gingivostomatitis is that how you say
it i don't know it's another feline one
that really messes with him uh so he's
a lot calmer because of all that i
guess too and the drug but uh he
would just stick around the tent and
basically be a guard dog
So,
so basically what I'm hearing is immersion
therapy, like kind of just did it.
And then,
and then he eventually figured it out.
No, totally organic.
Totally.
I did see some other cats.
Like there was this girl on the,
on the,
on the boat on our way back to
Athens and she had her cat,
she was sleeping and she had her cat
out of the crate on her chest while
she was sleeping.
And I was thinking, wow,
like on the boat,
not even on a beach or anything on
the boat.
And I did meet another person.
I just remember this too.
I did meet another person that had a
cat that brought the cat with them.
It wasn't a cat that was at the
island of Gavdos for camping.
So it kind of works sometimes, I guess.
There's something that you mentioned in
there that I wanted to pull out a
little bit is like you did some animal
sort of rescue kind of stuff or animal
advocacy kind of thing.
Like, tell me about that.
I haven't stopped.
I did distance myself at some point.
I haven't stopped since I got my first
dog.
And that's like, fuck.
Since twenty twelve,
I think when I started working at Codex
and some office down in Athens,
my first dog was a rescue and my
all my cats are rescues.
I don't know.
Okay, so rescuing and everything.
Some weird stuff happens in the world of
animals and humans.
Some really messed up shit, though.
I mean, even down to rape.
And at some point,
I had to distance myself.
Like humans raping animals.
Sometimes I had to distance myself at some
point because Greek law at that point was
not sufficient enough to punish cases like
that.
And we had a case like that.
And unfortunately,
the case got into the hands of the...
Boys and girls in the animal welfare
group, which because, you know,
the courts didn't do much at all other
than a three grand fine.
The law has been changed since not so
long ago, maybe two years ago.
Now, at least fines,
they stack and there is potential prison
time.
Back then it was kind of whatever you
did.
Oh, fine.
You get a three grand fine and you're
off the hook.
That didn't work for the people of the
animal society,
the animal rescue society or whatever you
want.
And it turned into violence like
individual violence.
And I had to distance myself at that
point.
But sooner or later,
I would find a cat and I would
keep it.
That's Duke.
That's my biggest one.
There was another one, Maisie.
She's a total ditz.
She's my partner's cat.
My partner,
she found her outside of my house,
which was totally my fault because I
removed her from the bakery.
It was across the street from my house
because they had issues with the cat twice
in the same day and put it in
near my apartment.
you know before we can contact people to
see if someone can take the cat and
take care of it uh i ended up
not being at home the time my partner
she returned home and she just called me
and she's like i found this wonderful cat
downstairs and i brought it upstairs and
i'm thinking oh hang on what color is
the cat and she says white and orange
and i was like i know the cat
And she would ask, too,
could we keep it?
Could we keep it?
And I said, well,
it's already in the house.
Once it's in the house,
you can't kick it out.
I know.
It's a law of nature.
The cat distribution system itself never
fails.
I don't know if she understood the concept
when I said it's in the house.
I think she thought that maybe we can
put it back outside.
And I said, it's not a thing now.
Now it's our cat.
And now I've got two other blind ones.
One has one eye.
It's kind of a pirate.
Her name is Lala.
And her brother Mimi has no eyes.
He's blind.
And he's the first blind animal I've ever
had, actually.
But they do everything.
He literally goes around.
So one of the bathrooms is relatively old
in the house.
And it's got like those external pipes for
water plumbing going around.
He goes and climbs on those tiny little
pipes that are like nailed to the wall.
And I'm thinking, how can you do this?
You don't have eyes.
How did you get involved in animal rescue,
though?
I got a dog.
You just got a dog.
You just rescued a dog.
Yeah, it just kind of happened.
I'm a total softie for these things.
I can't handle it.
If I ever killed a human,
it would probably be over something like
animal abuse.
I'm a total softie for that.
I can't help myself.
They're so perfect.
Literally, that's how I started.
No fun story or anything.
No family.
We didn't have pets.
I was raised with strictly birds.
and nothing more I didn't have pets until
I was early teens and then we my
stepmom's sister was breeding Yorkshire
Terriers and so we got one of her
Yorkie pups and then I had a dog
from zero to from zero pets basically to
dog and
yeah that was that was good he was
cool uh his name is pirate um and
uh because that was the name of the
game that we played it was sort of
like a white elephant like everybody
brings a present and then you can steal
the present but like we called it pirate
um and he was a pirate gift that
nobody else wanted to steal from me
So he was named Tiger.
And then nothing until after I graduated
and my partner got a job at the
Humane Society of Utah.
And she was in receiving,
which is where all of the surrendered
animals go.
And then there's a whole,
in a shelter like that,
there's a whole evaluation process that
kind of boils down to,
do we think this animal will be adoptable?
Because...
they get more animals surrendered than the
number of animals they're able to adopt
out.
And there are no kill shelters in Utah.
The Humane Society would like to be one,
but they just don't have the capacity.
So they do need to, like,
make EARNA calls,
and that was always kind of awful.
She eventually moved into adoptions,
and then she moved into the vet clinic,
and those were much better.
But obviously, through this process,
we're, like, taking animals home,
learning about, like,
how the difference between, like,
you know,
an animal that doesn't do well in the
shelter, that doesn't necessarily mean,
like, your experience, like...
it doesn't necessarily mean that they are
aggressive.
It just means that they aren't doing well
in the shelter.
Like this is a really stressful
environment.
And maybe this,
this animal is a little bit more sensitive
to that.
And for humans,
humans would act the same way.
Exactly.
Um, so yeah, um, that's always been a,
and so all of our cats have been
either, um,
quasi rescued like rescued from the
shelter um or uh or they came from
like an actual uh animal rescue uh and
we currently have three um and our oldest
has cancer but she's had cancer for like
two or three years that's the thing about
cats man they could be they could have
like five three different uh autoimmune
diseases duke and he's still a fighter and
a camper literally yeah yeah yeah
yeah and she's the sweetest thing she's my
daughter's cat um she's she's like the
most empathetic animal like she like in in
the world um and so cute too cute
but we can talk about cats all day
we probably would talk about cats all day
this isn't necessarily a cat podcast i
mean it could be a cat podcast it'll
be a different podcast but you have a
podcast too don't you
I do.
I started Uncashed with Presidium.
We only have one episode with Kareem
talking about FAIR,
but the context is kind of hard to
find people.
So you have to identify a problem in
and around the WordPress ecosystem,
and you have to be relative to the
solution of the problem to be on the
show.
I hope it doesn't get stuck at Kareem.
Good show, Kareem.
And then there's an interviewee one,
kind of like this one.
Get another person behind the tech.
I call it a three-queue interview.
I probably have to change the title
because it was supposed to be three
questions,
and now it's about thirty to forty-five
minutes long.
It just kind of evolved.
That's how it works.
That's why I don't make rules for myself.
Yeah, I'm learning.
I'm learning.
Well,
where can people find you on the internet?
I guess I can Google Christos Palookas,
but I mean,
something would be I'm on Twitter,
LinkedIn, kind of.
I did a couple of posts recently.
Not a huge fan, but Twitter for sure.
Slash Palookas.
I don't know where else.
YouTube, I guess.
There was like podcast there.
I have an old podcast.
version of myself that used to write
classical music so if you find uh i
kind of do it sometimes too secretly if
you find some you i don't even talk
about this man i don't even know why
i mentioned this that's a whole other
podcast we need to get you back and
we can talk about your classical music
yeah i abandoned that kind of but if
you do search christopher lucas you might
find some songs that's
Well, thank you so much, Christos,
for coming on and check out Christos'
podcast or the one episode.
And go find him at WordCamp Athens if
you happen to be in Greece on November
eighth.
Thanks again for coming.
And yeah, we'll see you on the internet.
Thanks for having me.
It was a pleasure.
Hope to host you too.
Absolutely.
Take care.