something.
Okay.
Hey, welcome back to Community & Code.
I'm your host, Chris Reynolds.
My guest today is Carrie Dills,
who started building websites back in the
mid-nineties before a lot of us were doing
it.
She took a hard left turn somewhere in
the middle to go work for Starbucks for
a decade.
And when she came back around two thousand
twelve,
she discovered WordPress and has been one
of its most dedicated educators ever
since.
We talk about what it's actually like to
build a LinkedIn learning course from
scratch,
about the teaching as learning philosophy,
which is something I could talk about for
hours,
and what building your own website looked
like when stuff like Hot Scripts existed
and SourceForge and GitHub did not.
But a big chunk of our conversation is
about FAIR,
Federated and Independent Repositories,
the Linux Foundation-backed project that
she co-chairs that's trying to solve the
supply chain security problem for
WordPress plugins, themes,
and the broader open source ecosystem.
We get into what that actually means,
practically,
where FAIR is right now after a year
that had some real ups and downs,
and why the Type-O-Three hackathon in
March was a genuinely exciting
development.
Kerry is thoughtful and honest about where
things stand,
including where fare still has ground to
cover.
Let's dive in with Kerry Dills.
Welcome to Community & Code,
the podcast where we talk to the human
beings behind the commits.
And my human being today is Kerry Dills,
who is a longtime WordPress developer,
freelancer, consultant, and educator.
You've been doing like training stuff for
quite a while.
And also one of the co-chairs, I think,
is your official title of the FAIR
project.
which is Federated and Independent
Repositories.
We've had a couple, I think,
we've talked to people from FAIR before.
We've talked about FAIR, certainly.
But anyway, welcome to the show, Carrie.
Tell us about yourself.
Cool, Chris.
Thanks for having me.
Well,
you did a pretty solid job on the
professional intro there.
Other things to note, I don't know.
I don't know.
I went to the movies this past weekend
for the first time, and I don't know,
a very long time,
because I usually don't go to theaters
these days.
I don't know, post-COVID era,
I just don't find myself going.
So that was my big excitement.
I went to a movie.
I've been to the movies...
I want to say like four times since
COVID and, and like really,
it wasn't like zero times before,
like last year or something like there is
definitely like five years before I had,
we actually went to a movie in,
in person.
And then it was like weird, right?
Like you're in the theater, like, oh,
this is a thing that I used to
do.
Except I'm kind of like, wow.
I can't pause it if I need to
go take a bio break.
I've got to get up and miss a
movie if I want to go refill a
beverage or anything.
So I've kind of gotten spoiled, honestly,
to just being on my couch watching movies.
I mean, like...
After our kids were born,
the amount of time that it took to
watch a movie from start to finish between
my partner and I went from like, yeah,
we could binge,
we could do back-to-back movie nights,
we could watch two movies and have a
doubleheader, went from that to like,
yeah,
we'll maybe get through this movie by the
end of the week.
The struggle is real.
Well,
so one of the things I like to
talk about on the podcast is sort of
like what got you into,
like what's your sort of origin story?
What's your origin story for WordPress?
What's your origin story for tech?
Like what sort of led to the decisions
that lead you to the person that you
end up being here as a co-chair of
this weird independent federated
repository project thing?
It's a slightly windy road,
which is probably true of many people's
careers.
I was studying something completely
unrelated in college,
and I went to college literally the last
century.
And I took an HTML class just as
an elective and was very intrigued and
started.
That was kind of my first taste of
the web, and this was mid-nineties.
And when I got out,
that was the only actual skill that I
had was building web pages.
And so I got some,
I found freelance work for that,
started doing it.
And that just kind of snowballed into a
small career in web development and
consultancy.
And at that point in time, it was...
you know, ancient technology now,
but I've had a sideways step in my
career.
I've got tired of tech and thought I
want to go open a coffee shop and
I'll go, well,
I don't know anything about how to
I know how to make coffee and that's
about it.
I don't know anything about the business
aspect of it.
Uh,
so I decided I needed some help and
went to learn from Starbucks corporation,
um,
learned on their dime and ended up staying
for about a decade, a little under that.
And then I actually, it was, uh,
somebody that I was working with, um,
that told me about WordPress.
So I started, uh,
dabbling in that and i was sort of
amazed at just how advanced that seemed
compared to like rolling your own cms back
in the day i was like oh my
gosh all this stuff just exists out of
the box uh so i started working with
it and then at one point determined hey
I can make more money doing this than
I can slinging coffee.
So I made the switch back to WordPress
and or back to tech.
And that was probably around twenty twelve
or so.
And then here I am.
I've just kind of hung around so much.
So what version of WordPress was that sort
of like or or like era like what
where where was WordPress at when you
first sort of tacked on,
like jumped on and saw that it was
like groundbreaking compared to what you
knew?
I think we were somewhere in the early
version three.
I can't remember what point release it
was.
But, I mean,
you go back and look at it now,
and it looks like a dinosaur,
but it looked pretty cool then.
Yeah.
Yeah, well,
I asked because my first WordPress version
was two something.
I want to say like two point five
or thereabouts.
And for me,
like it wasn't it wasn't compared to roll.
I mean,
I had rolled my own a little bit.
Mostly I like found like a script that
that like there used to be a website.
I've mentioned this a couple of times.
There used to be a website called Hot
Scripts, which sounds super bad now.
It had a little chili pepper.
And it was just like free open source
PHP scripts.
And it's probably like asp.net and like,
I don't know,
Perl scripts probably on there.
But really,
it was like you could download something
that somebody made and then put it on
your website and use it.
And one of the things that I found,
a couple things I found there,
one of the things was like some sort
of JavaScript-y thing where,
there would be a block in your HTML
on the web page that you're building that
becomes editable.
And so there's another sort of like
backend page thing that you can access
through a password or whatever.
And then somebody could just log in and
edit the text on the page.
But what they're actually doing is
actually editing the HTML in that section.
So it's kind of like a CMS lite
sort of thing.
So I did that for a couple projects
that I built freelance.
But then the other thing that I had
done for myself was I was web blogging
when it was called a weblog.
Web log.
It's a log of the things you did
on your website.
And when I started doing that,
it was all HTML and I was like
FTPing it up to my server and whatever.
And then at some point I was like,
okay, well, there's stuff for this now.
So I found on Hot Scripts a blogging
platform called Sblog,
which was really like, it was like, yeah,
somebody rolled their own CMS sort of
thing.
And similar to the origin story of
WordPress,
where like the maintainer kind of goes off
and disappears for a while.
I mean, that's a thing that like,
we've seen it all across open source for
forever.
It's just a thing that happens because
people get busy and they stop having time
for their side projects.
So he disappeared and there was a bunch
of problems or bugs or weird things.
I'm like, okay, this isn't sustainable.
And at that point,
I think a friend of mine from college
had mentioned, had talked about WordPress.
So I'm like, okay,
I wonder if I can move my stuff
over there.
And then, yeah,
so that was about the two point something
era.
Yeah, old internet is weird.
And I'm sure we'll look back at what's
currently so cool and be like, Oh yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I,
I've been thinking a lot about like,
Like recently, well,
especially with like a lot of people
talking about like moving there.
Well, okay.
So a conversation that has come up, uh,
I've seen a bunch of times, um, recently,
like in literally in the last couple of
weeks is this idea that not every site
needs a CMS,
like Yoast blogged about that when he
transferred his blog over to Astro.
I'm seeing it on like LinkedIn posts and
whatever.
But like, I don't know,
you and me have been around for a
while.
That's not a new conversation.
Right.
There was a point in time when we've
been talking for twenty years.
Like that's that's like old.
That's an interesting way to look at it.
We're sort of maybe going back to a
simpler web approach.
Yeah, I mean,
it's interesting to me because this is a
conversation that's been ongoing for
twenty years,
but now it's got the AI spin.
Like now, oh,
you don't need a CMS for your website.
Well,
you never needed a CMS for your website.
It helps with some things,
but obviously that was always an option.
Obviously, there are always other things.
But now the thing is, well,
you can have AI build it for you
and then you don't need your CMS.
Okay.
Ooh, to the AI having it built,
not ooh, to the not needing a CMS.
They're not every, you know, not,
not everything needs the same tool.
Yes.
Yeah.
But yeah, so somewhere along the way,
you started,
you started teaching WordPress-y things.
How did that happen?
That was back in the early days of
my entry to WordPress.
I was learning WordPress off of what was
then called lynda.com from an instructor
named Morton Wren Hendrickson.
And he was very involved in the WordPress
space very on and a
I kind of hate the term thought leader,
but he very much is that still.
And a lot of respect for him.
And anyhow,
was learning WordPress from him on that
platform.
And then had a conversation with him at
a WordCamp one time.
And he was like, have you ever considered?
And I was like, no,
but that's interesting.
Uh,
so I went out and did my first
course, um,
and kind of fell in love with it,
fell in love with the process and,
and determined that that had,
I think there's always been an inner
instructor in me or I,
I love teaching others and empowering
others through helping them understand the
why, um, behind things,
not just copy pasting and, um,
Um, and that led to, uh, you know,
now at this point,
a decade long with LinkedIn learning.
Yeah, so I also kind of a,
it wasn't Morton.
Morton never talked to me,
but I had started doing presentations at
WordCamps and it was after one of the
presentations I did,
I think it was just a presentation that
I did on like intro to theme development
or something and
someone from Pluralsight,
which is an online developer training
platform or was,
I think it still exists now.
Pluralsight is actually based or was based
in Utah, a little north of me.
And someone from Pluralsight happened to
be at the WordCamp.
I don't know if they were scouting or
what, but they asked me after my talk,
would you be interested in doing this
thing?
And I'm like,
sure and the way they posed it was
oh it'll basically be the same as what
you're doing this is when the narrator
comes over and does the voiceovers it was
it was not the same it was similar
but building a like a four to eight
hour like course is very different than
designing a like a thirty minute talk on
a subject sure
It'll be easy, they said.
Oh, yeah, it'll be easy.
It'll be fun, yeah.
And that was very early days in
Pluralsight's history, too.
So their history was that they originally
were on-site training for really deep
Microsoft-specific stuff.
And then they realized at some point that
they could...
do this online and not have to send
people to offices.
And then they started expanding their
course catalog.
And it was when they were expanding their
course catalog that I came in.
So really like Greenfield,
they had nothing.
They had very little content that wasn't
about Microsoft something.
Um, so it was like,
we don't really know what we want you
to do.
And also like you're doing all of this
stuff.
So we're going to give you like,
you will reimburse you for like Camtasia
and we'll reimburse you for a mic.
And, uh, and you know,
we'll have a couple of people that'll like
help you through, uh,
like a little bit and we can guide,
but like you're doing all the editing and
all the preparation, all the everything.
Uh,
and we're just going to review it at
the end.
Um, yeah, that was, that was, it's not,
that's not how it is anymore.
I don't think.
OK, because that's a big ask,
because not only do you have to be
a subject matter expert and whatever it is
that you're teaching, but that's oh,
by the way,
you also have to understand production.
You have to understand editing and this
particular software suite and a whole
audio engineer.
Yep.
Right.
All the things.
Yep.
Yeah.
It's very, very bootstrappy back then.
Very bootstrappy.
Yeah.
Yeah, so I mean,
a friend of the show,
a friend of mine, Gary Kovar,
I don't actually think I've had him on
here yet, but he's also,
he started doing LinkedIn learning classes
a couple years ago,
so I know a little bit about his
process from that.
What was the process like for you when
you first started doing Lynda, right?
It was Lynda before his LinkedIn purchase,
yeah, yeah.
It's, I'm trying to remember how the,
like,
those first few courses went.
They've evolved a lot over the years.
It sounds a lot more structured than what
you're describing at Pluralsight back in
the day.
But it would start with just a pitch
for the course.
What's the course?
Who's the target audience?
What's the learning objective?
That sort of thing.
And then a table of contents that would
support that course.
that learning outcome.
Um, and over the years, it's,
it's kind of stuck to that core format,
but with a few more,
they want you to, um,
it's more platform specific, I think.
So like,
what are other classes that might be a
prerequisite to this?
What are other classes that you might
recommend to your learning paths?
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Um, so it's,
you're kind of left to your own when
it comes to actually writing the content,
creating the content, all of that,
but they give you a good structure around
it to help you think about, um,
how a learner might progress through
pieces of information to get to, you know,
from point A to point B.
So I've appreciated that.
It's taught me a lot about how to
deliver,
even in like giving WordCamp talks,
like how to deliver information in a
coherent way.
Um, and then they have, uh,
full post-production support.
So it's literally drop the mic and,
and fly home and it's,
it's in their hands.
And I don't know, like Pluralsight,
did they do any marketing for you or
for your course or was it?
there uh there was a period of time
when you could have been featured in an
email a newsletter okay um and and then
and then after that uh i think they
had so much content that that that the
chances of you being featured in the
newsletter went down um no there was never
really any any marketing um officially and
one of the things like so there were
um uh
they had author summits,
so they call them authors,
BrailleSite authors.
I don't know what LinkedIn calls you.
instructors instructors okay that's good
yeah uh yeah plural site authors uh so
there's author summits um that they had
for a number of years and that was
i went to one of the early ones
i might have been the first one maybe
the second one um because it was actually
in their office and then they got big
enough that they couldn't hold it in the
office anymore um but uh that was really
good because you got to talk to other
people and figure out what other people
were doing um which there really wasn't
any way to like
to get that sort of a feedback from
other people that are doing the same
thing, right?
Yeah.
And one of the things that I learned
pretty quickly is, like,
there are a couple of people that were
doing Pluralsight courses that were, like,
well-known,
particularly in the Microsoft educational
whatever space.
And so, like,
their names specifically would just carry
weight.
And obviously the ones that had names that
had an established following, whatever,
they obviously did really, really well.
and those are obviously also the courses
that tended to get more viewers and
whatever and so like there is there is
like a natural gravity that kind of came
and so like if you came in with
your own sort of like personal brand or
whatever then maybe you could use that and
that could sort of and then for everyone
else it was like okay how do i
build that personal brand um so that
becomes a whole thing that i had to
think about in like the
Yeah,
so you were free to market your own
stuff, but yeah,
there was not really a whole lot of
official push from them, which was, yeah,
everything is hard.
Everything is hard.
That part sounds about the same.
Yeah.
yeah so what about um i'm interested
because so you're talking about um how you
were you were learning from morton uh then
he comes in and kind of asks you
or have you thought about doing this
yourself so there's at least one other
person even just within the platform who's
doing the thing that you're doing um
Were you specifically thinking about or
looking at topics that you could do that
would be sort of like, I don't know,
like,
how are you distinguishing the things that
you are working on that would make it
distinct and different from what he was
teaching and talking about?
Yeah, that makes sense.
And I think it's not that you won't
find overlapping content in the LinkedIn
Learning Library.
You certainly will.
But I think they're very intentional about
course topics and trying to not have...
things that are competing.
Yeah.
For example.
So when,
at the time I started the Genesis
framework was my jam.
And so I kicked it off just by
doing a couple of Genesis courses.
And then from there it sort of rolled
off into other things.
Morton was stepping,
doing less WordPress content and starting
in on other types of content and
Uh, and so it,
it left kind of a,
a nice hole that I could fill, um,
for teaching WordPress related things.
And then I eventually spun off and started
doing not just WordPress specific,
but more front endy things.
Um,
I don't know if that totally answers your
question.
No, it, it, it, I mean, I, I,
I always think about that because like
when I started, uh, at Pluralsight, like.
I could say anything about WordPress.
Literally, there was zero.
I was competing with no one.
That space was totally open.
Then I had to figure out and narrow
down, okay,
how do I figure out what I want
to talk about?
Obviously, the first thing that I did was
essentially an extension of the talk that
I gave that got me in the door
which is like theme development and so I
okay so now I have that now uh
so now what's what's next and so what
I ended up doing um which ended up
being pretty uh pretty helpful is like I
like okay well I can buy Brad Williams's
books
And I can read those books and I
could be like, okay, this chapter,
I'm going to turn into a class.
And then, and then I kind of,
I kind of, so I was,
I was learning as I was going,
which is actually a really good way to
learn stuff.
Absolutely.
Because,
and just learning things from like a video
course that you find on Pluralsight or
LinkedIn learning or wherever,
isn't always the best way of learning
things.
Like it's like, there's,
there's all sorts of like,
I don't know, studies, discussions,
conversations around like the best way of
learning.
But like it's like you hear the thing
and then you read the thing and then
you do the thing and then it's like
locked in your body.
Right.
Yeah.
So like for me, it was like, OK,
I was reading the thing in the book
and then and then also like teaching it
to someone else is also a way to
like lock in the learning.
Right.
So like for me doing like doing an
internationalization course,
like I read a bunch of autos posts
and I I read some other stuff and
then I, you know,
did the course.
And now it's like,
that's burned into my brain.
Like I'm never going to forget that stuff.
Yeah.
I think you're so right because it's one
thing to conceptually understand something
in your head or even be able to
sit down,
write the code and understand what you're
doing,
but to explain it to someone else is,
it just forces your brain to work in
a different way.
And I think that just,
like that reinforces the knowledge.
And to be able to teach it,
you have to understand it
So I kind of learned that even before
doing the courses,
I was blogging and my blog started or
my WordPress blog started with tutorials.
It was basically, hey,
I learned how to do something.
Let me tell you how.
And going through and step by step
explaining what you do,
where you're putting something,
why you're putting it there and things to
think about as you go.
you know, do X, Y,
or Z and kind of logicking through it
and explaining just cemented the knowledge
for me.
So yeah, I think that,
and everybody does have different
learning, you know,
styles or ways that are best for them,
but I've found that that's teaching the
teacher.
Wait, where, how did, I don't know.
Yeah, that works for me.
In all of your years of doing WordPress-y
stuff,
have you ever ventured into foreign
territories of trying out other open
source CMSs or other sort of projects just
to kind of get a sense?
Or were you always kind of, no,
I feel good here.
I have primarily and largely stayed in
WordPress,
which
In retrospect,
I wish I had have been broader.
And we can talk about FAIR later,
but coming into FAIR has opened my eyes
considerably to the larger open source
ecosystem.
And there's so much out there and so
many things,
like there's just people do different
things differently.
And there's the opportunity to learn from
how different open source projects
work, how they govern,
how they do all the things.
And I've been a little bit like tunnel
visioned because WordPress has been my
experience.
So I wish I'd made an effort earlier
to at least dip my toes,
not necessarily to the extent of my
involvement with WordPress,
but just to understand how some of these
other CMSs worked.
Yeah.
Well, let's, we can,
we can segue off and off into fair.
I'm, I'm interested in like how,
how you first sort of got involved in,
in the project.
Um, well not to,
I'm sure you've talked about it on the
show and I don't need to rehash any,
any drama, but after, um, you know,
happenings in the, in the community and,
um, uh,
September of a couple of years ago,
I was appalled and frustrated and the
issues or the concerns that were raised
around governance and ownership,
these were not new concerns.
I realized I had just been ignoring them
and living in my happy la-la land.
and thinking it would not impact me.
And then that was just sort of a
wake up call of, oh,
this is not okay.
And something, we need something better.
And so just through conversations with
like-minded folks,
I started involving myself in what would
eventually become the joining of several
groups to become FAIR.
And the whole purpose behind that was
let's fix the supply chain problem of what
if somebody turns WordPress.org off
because we can't control that.
If somebody turns it off,
how are we still powering our sites and
receiving updates?
So that was where it started was a
technical problem,
but that was also very much a business
problem too.
Yeah.
Well, and that's not even a hypothetical,
uh,
a hypothetical thought experiment about
what, what happens if somebody turns,
you're right.
It happened.
It very literally happened for just for a
very specific, uh, audience.
Um, and that is,
that is sort of part of the, yeah,
that's why we're doing this, uh, I think,
uh, message of, of what fair is.
So what is your role, uh,
officially unofficially within fair now?
um i am a co-chair as you mentioned
and as we started so just to back
up in context like
This was all new territory for me,
like in terms of how to set up
governance and how open source body of
contributors works.
And I'm very grateful to the Linux
Foundation who came in early on and
supported FAIR and still supports FAIR for
their guidance because they've seen it all
and of course know what best practices
look like.
And so when we formed,
we formed a technical steering committee,
which is a common, a TSC,
which is a common term across open source
communities.
And that was just a body of people
that were contributing to the project.
And then within that,
you have people that have different levels
of access, right?
So you have people that maybe they submit
a PR or whatever, they're a contributor,
or they show up to a meeting,
they participate in a conversation,
they're contributing.
And then you have a next step up,
which is organizers.
And those are sort of your core team,
your voting members.
And then somebody sits,
somebody leads the helm of that,
herding cats, if you will.
And that is a chair.
And in the case of FAIR,
we opted to have three co-chairs instead
of a single.
And
I'm really glad of that because it brings
a diversity in terms of just personalities
and perspectives that I think has been
beneficial for the project so far.
But anyhow,
I was elected to serve as a co-chair,
and that was actually a little over a
year ago at this point.
So by the time that this airs,
there will probably have been a new round
of elections for co-chairs.
Wow.
I haven't even thought about that.
Wow.
Yeah.
Talk about like... So...
Obviously,
there was a lot of tension in the
WordPress community following that one
fateful WordCamp US.
There's obviously been a lot of drama,
and that's not particularly new,
although a longstanding lawsuit and legal
case has probably not happened,
I don't think.
not to the degree that it is right
now, happened in WordPress's history.
So that's all part of it,
but what about FAIR and the operational
goal of the project do you feel is
worth volunteering your time and your
energy towards?
Oh, well, in all honesty,
a lot of my time and energy was
with the hope that we would find
widespread adoption in the WordPress
community.
And at the moment, that hasn't happened.
And
Maybe it could still materialize.
I don't know.
I'm glad that FAIR was built in a
way to be agnostic and usable by other
CMS communities or really anybody
ultimately that needs package management.
But zooming, so that's specific,
but zooming outside of that a little bit,
I love the idea of
Okay,
I'm going to go back and give an
example.
You're in your WordPress admin.
You inherit a site and it's running.
Fifty plugins and thirty four of them are
out of date and.
Short of just yellowing it and hitting the
update button or the update all or even
going through, you know,
some sort of a mechanism where you're,
you know,
testing for regressions and all that,
it's
you're a little bit blind.
All you know is there's an update
available from a source.
And so back to your question and fair,
the whole idea of getting trust signals
for a package
And verifying that a package is who it's
supposed to be from,
coming from the destination it's supposed
to be from,
is verified in terms of there are no
security,
active security vulnerabilities that are
known.
Just the level of confidence I feel like
that brings as someone managing a site is
huge.
And, you know,
FAIR gives the ability to do something
that currently just doesn't exist for
comparing it to WordPress plugins.
Yeah, well,
what's interesting about that point in
particular is that as we are recording
this,
Cloudflare just announced their MDash,
which is their reimagining but actually
sort of quasi-fork of WordPress that runs
on Astro and lives in the cloud using
service workers and things.
But one of their fundamental arguments of,
of how and why they built the architecture
the way that they did was this idea
of the plugin ecosystem in WordPress.
I think broken is probably maybe too
strong of a word,
but is
impaired is potentially problematic when
you can have thirty four plugins that are
out of date.
Many of those maybe have security
vulnerabilities.
Maybe of those many of those might already
be exposed or have already been infected
by these vulnerabilities.
and having files written to your file
system.
And the whole premise with the way that
they built the plugin architecture in
M-Dash was these things are going to live
in isolation away from your code base or
away from the rest of it.
So you can't do that thing because they're
identifying all of those vulnerabilities.
They're identifying all the CVEs that
every year that WordPress mostly comes out
of plugins and outdated plugins.
And you can, you know,
Use patch stack you can use word fence,
you can use things that like inform and
tell you to update your stuff and you
can have automatic updates and whatever,
but like that doesn't solve the problem
across the board there's always going to
be.
that sort of potential for security.
And then also like going back to the
original premise,
like if a bad actor was working from
within the system,
which is not an impossible thing,
from inside wordpress.org or somehow
managed a way to circumvent something to
get their code out there.
Supply chain security is known outside of
WordPress.
Right.
It's already, like,
there's supply chain security issues in
NPM all the time.
So, like,
having something where you can track and
trace, you know,
verify where a package is coming from
makes a lot of sense.
Yeah,
I briefly read about the MDash this
morning,
and I'm very curious to take that for
a spin.
Yeah.
I'm interested to see how that works and
where that goes.
It's interesting that it's coming from
someone like Cloudflare,
which I know lots of us in the
WordPress ecosystem know Cloudflare.
Lots of us probably use Cloudflare,
but it's not like they're an established
player in our community
I think the first time I met anyone
from Cloudflare is I went to Badcamp,
which is Bay Area Drupal camp,
this last year in October, I think.
And they had a little table.
They had two guys from Cloudflare.
And that was the first time I'd ever
seen them anywhere.
Like, ever.
Which is really cool.
I got to talk to the two guys
from Cloudflare for a minute.
Well, I'm curious what their role was.
uh it was like a sales guy and
i think there was a developer guy but
he wasn't there when i was at the
table um but yeah so it was very
like high level and not very technical um
but um but i mean like that's also
when like the thing that i was thinking
about at the time back is you know
again back in september october whatever
um is like
the bot protection stuff,
which I think was something they had
recently done.
And that was something that since March of
last year,
we at Pantheon just saw an explosion of
AI bot crawlers just sending tons and tons
of traffic to sites and really ramping.
like exponentially more traffic to these
sites just from these scrapers.
And then Cloudflare just like decided to
build something for free that they're
going to give to everyone.
And so like, of course,
everybody is going to sign up for them,
right?
Right.
Yeah.
So that was that was the sort of
thing that I was thinking about at the
time.
And I was like, hey,
what else you got cooking?
Well, now you know.
Yeah, right?
Well,
I was already curious to try out Astro
and just kind of understand the guts of
that.
I've also recently installed Type-O-Three
locally and I'm starting to play around
with that.
So I'm trying to learn from my previous
single focus and branch out a little bit
and be curious about other things out
there.
Yeah.
Well, and on the typo three thing,
you know, obviously,
like a few months ago, Kareem, Miruchi,
and Joost de Valk said that they were
taking a few steps back from FAIR because
they tried to get funding and they weren't
able to get funding.
They weren't able to get buy-in from the
folks that they were trying to do.
And so a lot of... There's been...
I don't know, discussion,
there's been maybe some wind out of the
sails,
but like FAIR is still going on and
there is interest from Type-O-Three
leadership.
And so talk about like what that looks
like and what sort of like the present
and or future of FAIR might be,
especially in that it was built to be
like intended to be agnostic, right?
Right, yeah.
Well,
so they had their hackathon in late March.
And Type-O-Three and FAIR did a project
together.
And they came out of that with a
working implementation of FAIR running on
Type-O-Three to serve extensions,
which is kind of akin to plug-ins.
And so that's pretty cool to see.
It's actually being added into
Type-O-Three core
like for baked in support.
So I think that's a very real
collaboration that's happening.
I don't know how that will,
I wasn't at the hackathon and there might
be others like Brent or some other folks
from the TSC that are better qualified to
answer kind of what they think their
future plans are there.
But I think there's definitely opportunity
for collaboration and we'll see more
coming out of that.
Yeah, I mean,
I'm trying to get Brent on here too.
But yeah,
I think that even from a WordPress
perspective,
I feel like it's the sort of thing
where competition is good, right?
And when you have a platform that is
built to be generic,
And it's built to be generic, but yes,
obviously,
because we're all WordPress people,
we're doing it in a WordPress context.
But we built it so that anybody could
use it.
When somebody else is using it,
that forces you to think about things that
maybe you didn't,
you weren't thinking about before, right?
Yeah.
The thing that I've been talking about
for, you know,
a year almost in FAIR is, like,
composer support.
But broadly, composer...
There's some agencies that use Composer
for WordPress,
and there's the Roots project that has
been built around Composer.
But in the Drupal ecosystem,
Composer is built into the platform,
is built into how Drupal just functions.
And WordPress has never operated with that
mode of functioning.
So we, as a WordPress community,
have never been forced
to think about Composer in any sort of
real supporting sort of sense.
But here we are with this project,
and we've made this project open,
and my understanding is Type-O-Three does
use Composer,
so that is forcing us to have to
figure out what does that actually mean.
And the answer ultimately benefits
everyone, right?
For sure.
Yeah, as I understand it,
they have a composer version and a
non-composer version for people that don't
want to go the composer route.
I think your comment about WordPress,
it's not in core,
at least not at the time that we're
recording this.
And
WordPress has been such a wide open door
for anybody that wanted to come on board
and use it that I think it has
attracted over time a huge swath of people
that are not developers.
So the user base is,
I'm making a guess,
but I'm going to say that it's a
largely non-technical user base.
So they don't, like,
they're never going to open up a terminal
and...
Or, you know,
do a composer.json file or understand how
or care how any of that works.
But I think it is exciting,
like you said,
that seeing things that other projects use
and how...
We can adapt FAIR.
And I think you will find that Composer
support is coming to FAIR.
Thank you for beating that drum along with
some others.
And that's exciting.
It's just exciting.
In my local development workflow,
I use composerized versions of WordPress.
And so it would be great to see
that support extended.
yeah for sure yeah it's it's funny um
you're talking about um the the user base
of wordpress tends to lean less technical
um and it's it's funny because it's the
inverse i feel like it's the inverse in
the drupal community i've had i have had
a several now uh drupal developers and
folks from the drupal community on on this
podcast uh and i've
been to a couple of Drupal events and
the path of where Drupal core development
is going and where a lot of energy
is going is actually in trying to pick
up more of those non-technical users
because they have,
I
identified, self-identified,
that they're in the opposite problem,
where it's very technical.
In the Drupal ecosystem,
there is the concept of not just
developers,
but also site builders that are just the
people that do the middleware,
the configuration and making sure the
The admin works in the way that you're
supposed to do because everything is like
config based.
Whereas in WordPress,
we've never really needed that so much
because the WordPress UI and everything
that you can do is pretty easy to
use and accessible to kind of everyone.
And what's not built there,
there are like hooks and tools for
developers to add there.
But like for a normal person,
they're just going to find a plugin to
do that thing, right?
Right.
So it's funny because like
With WordPress, we have the one problem,
and in Drupal,
we have literally the polar opposite.
The barrier to entry is too high.
Yes.
And that's been an argument even within
discussions within the fair crowd of
should there be that barrier to entry of
knowing how to use Composer.
And some people say, no,
keep it a low barrier to entry.
And other people say, well,
if it's something for developers,
make it developer friendly.
So yeah.
Yeah,
I've always found the question of Composer
and WordPress really interesting because
on the one hand, like,
so as a developer,
I want to use Composer and everything
because I know, and my argument,
and I've said this in talks and things,
is that by using Composer for WordPress,
It means that the person that is in
control of your updates for your
dependencies, your packages,
your plugins and themes and whatever,
and maybe WordPress core itself,
is the person that knows how to deal
with the problem of, oh,
I updated something and now I have a
white screen.
So, like,
a user who is clicking update on a
WordPress plugin and then it white screens
as a result of that has no idea
what to do and nowhere to go from
there.
Whereas if I'm a developer and I'm
tagging, you know,
tipping one of those version points to the
next version and it white screens, well,
I know that I can fix that because
I can just roll it back or I
can, you know, find a patch or whatever.
But then if you,
so then you think about, like,
I had this conversation with a project
manager, product manager at Pantheon.
He's like, well,
could you do something that was, like,
Composer-based but inside the admin
somehow?
And, like,
a plug-in that was also managing Composer
files.
And, like, there's so many, like,
it's weird.
It's a weird headspace.
Yeah.
Yeah,
I'm trying to wrap my head around that
my initial thought is,
I don't think that would kind of defeat
the purpose.
And it's in the context of WP admin,
but I maybe there is something out there.
Yeah, I mean, I think there actually is,
like, I think there's, like,
a WP Composer plug-in or something that
kind of sort of does that.
And obviously there's also, like,
there's a Composer project called Satis,
which is you can host your own
repositories.
And so there's SatisPress,
which kind of turns a WordPress site into
a Satis server.
So you could host your own repository.
sort of package manager inside of a
WordPress site,
which is also a weird thing.
But like there's that fundamental tension
of like, you know,
a site owner versus a developer.
And in WordPress,
In WordPress, I don't know.
Those are two different personas.
And I don't know that a site owner
should be a developer.
But a developer could be a site owner.
But you shouldn't force a site owner to
become a developer,
I think is what I'm trying to say.
Right.
No, I would agree with you there.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, thanks for coming on, Carrie.
This has been awesome.
I loved chatting about LinkedIn learning
and learning about all of that process.
Where can people find you on the internet
if they were to so go looking for
you?
Come say hello.
I'm kerrydills.com is my website.
And then my blue sky handle is also
kerrydills.com.
Find me on LinkedIn or I'm not super
active.
I'm more of a lurker and post status
chat,
but you can find me at C Dills,
D I L S over there.
And yeah, love to say hello.
Awesome.
Well, thanks again, Carrie, for coming on.
And thank you,
everyone who might be watching or
listening in the future.
And we'll see you on the internet.
Thank you, Chris.