Hey, welcome back to Community in Code.
My name is Chris Reynolds,
and my guest today will tell you in
the most Canadian way possible that he's
not really that technical.
But if you let him show you the
complex architecture diagrams that he's
built to illustrate the fair project that
he sits on the technical steering
committee for,
you'll probably have a hard time actually
believing him.
Brent Todorash is a Winnipeg-based
developer, consultant,
and self-described thinker of things who's
been in the WordPress community since it
was BII.
through
the Federated and Independent Repositories
project and in person last year at
WordCamp Canada in Ottawa.
He co-runs a WordPress-focused agency with
his brother Scott and came up through the
nineties Linux and free software scene
long before he ever touched WordPress,
which he says is exactly backwards of most
of the community.
He thinks money is a lousy motivator and
that AI might actually bring back one of
the oldest open source instincts,
building a thing and giving it away.
We talk about FAIR's evolution and
adoption by TYPO-III,
and how it was never really about
WordPress,
it was about the software supply chain
itself.
I'm thrilled to introduce you to Brent
Todorash.
Welcome to Community & Code,
the podcast where we talk to the human
beings behind the commits.
Today, I am with Brent Todorash,
a longtime WordPress user, developer,
thinker of things, and currently,
basically,
you're kind of project managing the FAIR
project, I think is safe to say.
Welcome to the show, Brent.
Tell us about yourself.
Oh, well,
it's a big subject because I'm not a
young guy anymore.
But yeah,
I've been in the WordPress space for many
years.
Low profile bloggers.
for most of that time.
But, um, you know,
it more recently I've kind of stepped up
to,
to work with Aspire Press and then with
FAIR, uh,
and kind of become associated there as
well.
So, um, yeah.
And I, you know,
I don't have a formal designation or title
as the project manager of FAIR, but it's,
you know,
I just kind of step in with that
kind of, um,
you know,
sort of thinking and thought process
rather than pure code.
And it's kind of help out, you know,
which is cool because open source is
always, you know,
bring the skills you have.
And if coding is not at the top
of your list, that's okay.
There's still...
things you can do.
I feel like you're being very humble
because I've seen some of the architecture
diagrams that you have drawn up and they
are highly technical and things that
require like me to squint my eyes a
little bit to like follow the logic.
So like there's a lot of thinking that
goes in there and there's a lot of
like pulling pieces together and like FAIR
as a project is not
is is a complex beast let's say yes
yeah um so i yeah okay humble whatever
i i'm canadian we're generally
self-deprecating uh as a as a rule so
uh if i downplay myself that's it's
cultural so i yeah i've created some very
complicated diagrams and
you know as the saying goes any fool
can make something complicated but the
real so that's what i do i make
things complicated but um but really um
fair has a lot of moving pieces and
a lot of
you know, very, you know,
very intricate bits.
And most people don't look at it as
a whole,
because it's very hard to do that.
So we kind of look at it in
little pieces.
So you've probably seen the diagram with
everything on it.
But in practice,
you really look at that in just chunks
because it's easier to conceptualize what
each system does that way.
And the big diagram is how the systems
interrelate and talk to each other.
So, yeah.
But that's kind of one of the things
that I've sort of done over the years
is it's what I do.
I pull out threads and either I've
discovered they're disconnected and should
be thrown away or
you know i find out you know how
it really does connect things and um and
how things need to talk to each other
if they if they aren't or what that
sort of thing so that's that's sort of
the big picture or systems thinking that i
i kind of really excites me um and
this is one of the reasons um
you know, going back to open source,
this is one of the classic reasons why
people do it at all is because,
you know,
offer someone an interesting problem and
they'll show up.
Uh, and, uh,
and that was my introduction to open
source is, um, the, uh, you know,
late nineties, uh, I started reading and,
um,
I started playing with Linux and stuff
like that.
And, uh, uh,
you know,
learning more about the open source
development model and about free software.
And that is a big question because you
typically think of, or it's changing,
thankfully,
but for a long time you thought about
software as something that, you know,
how can I make money from this?
It's, you know, I'm going to,
I'm going to write some code,
and then I need to cash in.
But historically, that wasn't the view.
Historically, it was, you know,
I'm writing code.
This is interesting.
Maybe somebody else can use it.
I'll just share it,
and they'll share stuff with me.
And that's how computer science generally
works.
you know, uh,
is standing on the shoulders of giants,
which is a whole scientific model of
sharing because, uh,
because everyone benefits.
So, um, yeah,
I forget where I was going, but well,
let's, I mean, that tangents, uh,
into sort of where I wanted to go
anyway, which is, uh,
like sort of what brought you to what
got you interested in tech to begin with
what sort of led you into the realm
of, of open source software.
Um, let's see what,
what caught me into tech, um, in, um,
high school for me was the early eighties.
So when I got to high school,
we had computer science courses,
signed up for all of them,
all the computer science,
all of the data processing,
everything we could do and found that I
just really liked it.
And it turned out I was,
I was reasonably good at it.
So at that time we were,
we were using punch cards um and feeding
them into the card reader and it was
a whole there's a whole production um so
my first programs i ever wrote would have
worked like pencil and paper which you
then copy onto the cards so it was
um but i i just you know i
just took to it i really liked it
um and then uh
the school had these Commodore PET,
which is,
looks like a larger Commodore-sixty-four
that people would be familiar with,
but these started out with thirty-two K of
memory.
I used all of it.
I wrote a program one time where I
actually had to go and change the wording
of some of the display sentences to make
them shorter,
because I'd run out of memory and just
had to squeeze it in.
But that was my introduction to tech.
But I didn't follow it up.
So after high school,
I just did other things.
So I didn't...
and regretted it later.
I should have stuck with it,
gone to university and learned to do it
properly.
But I was in the general insurance
industry for about a dozen years and got
a professional designation as an insurance
broker and analyzing risk and all that
stuff, which came in handy later.
Um, but as of, uh,
it was spring of two thousand.
Um, I'd been, you know,
I'd gotten online by then and was,
you know, back into the computers and, um,
uh,
was learning more about open source and
all that stuff.
Um, as the,
as the internet was becoming popular.
So, uh, spring of two thousand,
I went into business with my brother.
So, um,
We were partners and built an ISP,
wireless ISP.
We did hosting.
We did software development.
So he came from a client server
development in the in the nineties.
They were doing a lot of some very
large software work.
So I
He actually did get an education in
writing software,
and I just picked up the web stuff
as I got into it.
So we started doing that in early two
thousand, and we survived Y-two-K.
A lot of people who listen to your
podcast, this is before their time anyway.
I don't know.
Yeah.
At least they may not remember it.
Maybe too young to remember.
But yeah, that's...
And it's interesting to think that now
it's like it's over twenty five years
where open source has been maturing and,
you know, and, you know,
I would say winning the day because,
you know, what's the stat?
It's like someone
It's a huge percentage of even commercial
packages that have open source somewhere
embedded in them that are relying on it.
And even Microsoft,
who called Linux an existential threat,
is on the Linux bandwagon now.
And yeah, it's been a wild ride.
Yeah, no,
I was actually going to say because,
you know,
talking about Linux in the nineties and
open source in the nineties,
that was really sort of like, you know,
the enemy of the state sort of thing.
Like, you know, Microsoft was huge.
Apple was slightly less so actually
considerably less so in the nineties.
And
Yeah,
it was very much like seen as a
threat to the whole operational model of
these large tech companies to even
consider giving something away for free.
What, uh, what, what attracted you?
Like what, what about that model was,
was made it attractive to you to play
with, uh,
Linux as opposed to like the sort of
dogma of the time from, uh,
from Microsoft is saying like, no,
don't do this.
This is very bad.
Use our stuff instead.
Yeah.
Um, yeah, that's a good question.
Uh, I, um,
I've always been one of these root for
the underdog kind of guys.
So, uh, so that kind of helps.
Uh, so, um, you know,
voting for not Microsoft is what a bit
of thing.
Um, uh,
and I like Bill Gates a lot more
since he left Microsoft.
Um, but, uh, the, um,
I kind of,
I objected to the way that Microsoft used
their monopoly in Explorer,
Internet Explorer,
and then in even the Office Suite,
like all of that stuff, that embrace,
extend, extinguish,
and fight everything with FUD.
So I just,
I kind of reacted to that and
wanted to find another way and I like
the sort of mutual sharing and we don't
have to be in this for the money
as long as everybody has enough to you
know to get on with their life that's
you know we don't have to you know
see who's got the biggest stack of coins
it's that's that's never been the biggest
motivator for me what and I don't think
it is
People might criticize the viewpoint,
but I don't think money is a good
long-term motivator.
I think it's a fair short-term motivator.
You'll show up and get paid all week,
but...
whatever they offer you as a you know
staggering salary three years in it
doesn't matter anymore it's if the job is
drudgery you're you'll still hate it right
so um so there's things that that money
just doesn't overcome in in motivation but
um in uh
in software, in open source,
it's interesting problems.
It's scratching that personal itch is
always the classic metaphor that,
you know, I need to do this.
And so you write the thing and you
do it and then you just give it
away.
And this is actually something that I
think AI can help us regain that mindset
because when
when it becomes easy to write that kind
of stuff you can write what you need
as you need it and then give it
away because somebody else could write it
just as easily and it the software doesn't
have a value so there's a lot of
a lot of concern and rightly so about
devaluation of software or of the time
that software developers put in.
And I share that concern,
but if there's a silver lining,
it would be the recovery of this ideal
that it's okay to share.
so yeah i just uh i just wrote
a blog post today because i was thinking
about the fact that um i don't miss
not writing code and that realization
comes along with the realization that like
it wasn't the it wasn't the writing code
part that i liked uh as much as
the building things part and if claude can
write code faster and probably better than
I can, which I think it can now.
I am less concerned,
I feel less loss by not writing the
actual functions into my IDE,
as much as I would feel loss about
not actually being able to build a thing
that I that like, yeah,
scratches my own itch or solves a problem.
Yeah.
Yeah,
and you've built some interesting things
like very recently because I was looking
at Invert, is that what you called it?
And I thought,
I like this because it sort of crossed
my path about three days after I had
been
spending time with my buddy claude and we
were we were chatting as we do uh
designing a system where i because i
thought i mean everybody's going to astro
plus fill in the blank for you know
i've moved my wordpress site from
know to astro plus something yeah um and
i thought well this is kind of fun
i um i could write uh i could
write blog posts uh using vi uh on
the command line and that then talk about
distraction free there's nothing to click
you just type right um so uh
if you can recover that,
but also have the ability to sort of
edit any way you want.
Um, so I started thinking, well, okay,
so I'm using obsidian.
Maybe I've got something in obsidian that
I just want to push to my website,
or, uh,
I just want to quickly log in and,
you know, do something.
And I, you know,
I just have a command line or maybe
I'm in my browser and I want to
do something in the browser.
Um,
what if I wanted to update my,
my blog using any one or all of
those methods?
And so this is what I,
this is the conversation I was having with
Claude is, okay, how do we build that?
And sort of stitching it together so that,
okay, well,
we'll store everything is marked down.
And then even if you're,
even if you're using headless WordPress or
doesn't matter, we're, you know,
we have a way of just kind of
merging all the content together,
store it all in get,
and then build a site with it.
Like,
And then, you know,
Invert came up and I was like,
wait a minute.
So I said,
so I pointed Claude at it and said,
take a look at this and take a
look at what we designed and tell me,
you know, were they the same?
Were they different?
And he just went through it and said,
this is very, you know,
very much on the same page as Invert.
what you were doing.
So, you know, we had a similar itch,
and independently,
we could sit down and use Claude,
and yeah, so I think that's,
I think you're right.
It's something you don't have to write all
of the lines of code anymore,
but it's still important to understand the
task.
And this is what I've been telling people
recently about AI is, yes, it's great.
AI is something you leverage.
It's not something you just delegate to.
Because you can't just say, oh,
go do everything.
You have to leverage it to do tasks.
And if you don't understand the task,
you can't create a prompt.
So...
In building software,
if I can build the prompt and if
I can understand the use case and
understand the architecture and the
approach,
I don't have to remember the wording of
every individual function.
Because, yeah,
so I don't have to look it up
as to, you know.
So that saves a lot of time.
But I was...
I was doing a proposal for a client
this week, and I said, okay, well,
I haven't done this yet,
but let's try it.
So I gave all the information to Claude
and said, create an estimate.
This is what we want to build.
Create an estimate.
And it came back,
and it estimated way higher than I did.
But that aside...
I said, okay, now,
because it's estimating as if you just put
a couple of developers on the task.
I said, now,
what if we have you do all the
parts that you can do better and more
efficiently?
I forget how I worded it,
but you know what I asked.
It's, all right, great,
but what if we have you do a
bunch of it?
And the saving was was forty percent.
which is a lot less than the hype
would have you believe sure sure and and
I think that's the that's the lesson is
that you still have to understand what
you're doing you can't just you know feed
in and yeah
Yeah,
it makes me think about sort of a
fundamental rule of software development,
or even just of using computers,
which is that the computer is only as
good as you made it,
or it only knows what you told it
to do.
It can't do things that you didn't tell
it to do specifically.
And as smart, in quotations, as AI is,
It still follows that same rule.
Think about things like OpenClaw and the
weird stuff and the weird problems that
come about from OpenClaw agents doing
their own stuff and managing their own
sole files and whatever.
like that largely comes down to the
original instructions given to that agent
being not clear or specific enough for it
to that,
which then allows it to sort of go
off the rails because you never told me
not to do this.
And so I'm going to like, you know,
develop a weird personality or like,
you know, go off and, uh, start writing,
uh, take down articles about, uh,
open source maintainers, or I'm going to,
you know, like, yeah.
like all sorts of things because like it
was just left so open-ended and and and
that's like you said like you you use
the tool if you don't use the tool
then i mean in those cases the tool
ends up using you or it goes off
like goes rogue and does like weird stuff
yeah you've got to give it the guidelines
uh and if you don't it's just going
to wander aimlessly um so and i was
this i was listening to a couple of
podcasts on ai recently because i um
Last week I went and picked up a
refurbished PC,
which is a fresh Linux install,
and I just have to configure OpenClaw on
it.
We're going to start playing with that.
So I've been listening to some of these
podcasts,
and I'm kind of losing my train of
thought, but...
I forget where I was going.
That's why I need an AI assistant.
There you go.
But yes,
you have to give it guidelines and you
have to kind of tell it what's expected
and tell it what to do and what
not to do and all of that.
And this is sort of what I'm getting
out of some of these podcasts is people
are saying that or they're learning that
in different ways, you know,
how to configure it to get the most
out of it.
And so that's kind of what I'm about
with AI.
I'm still getting the hang of it.
It took me a long time to actually
pull up my credit card for cloud because
I was doing the...
and so it's like okay well you will
get twenty minutes of the cloud every day
or something and but you know then I
got into more complex stuff and pull out
the credit card and just did the very
minimum which thirty bucks a month or
whatever it is and world the difference
just being able to access different models
and
you know,
spend a couple of hours coming up with
something with all of the back and forth
that helps you dial in a design.
And that's one thing that I found Claude
is really good at, is, you know,
designing the system.
So we're able to, you know,
go back and forth.
And we come up with a really good
project plan at the end.
then building it is a separate thing but
it's it becomes well defined uh and uh
and turns out who knew it helps when
you define your software ahead of time
really yeah what um you know nobody's been
saying that since the eighties nineties
whatever uh but
But yeah,
it turns out that this is true for
AI as much as it was for humans.
Oh,
that's what I was going to say about
these podcasts is they're talking about
treating the AI agent like you would an
employee.
And it feels a little weird,
but it sounds weird.
If you're just talking to it or whatever,
it
they respond like a person.
So it feels a little more natural,
but conceptually,
it seems weird that you would,
you would do that.
But, um, but with an employee,
if you don't give them good instructions,
they can't succeed in what they're doing.
Right.
And it's exactly the same.
So if you suck at that,
you're going to suck at this.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
You talked about going into business with
your brother,
and your brother went to school and got
a degree, presumably,
in software engineering or computer
science, and you did not,
and I know a lot of people have
found their way into open source,
myself included,
in a more choose-your-own-adventure path,
and with no sort of formalized education.
Talk about some of the things, I guess,
that you noticed or that were...
like both sort of the pros and cons
i think of like like you're directly
interfacing with somebody who has this
computer science background and you don't
but i think there's there's i think
there's benefits on both sides right yeah
um yeah so um and it was very
different because i started building for
the web so late nineties um my brother
said um someday all software is going to
be delivered on the internet
So it makes sense to get into the
internet space.
So it was pretty early on the curve
because we were still doing dial-up at
that time.
But it's true.
That's how we expect software to work now.
It's not the exception anymore.
I mean,
I still have desktop applications that I
use.
I like, but you can do,
you can run your whole world in a
browser now.
So that is what's happened.
But so he had a he had a
disciplined the view of building software
and had worked on some very large
projects.
And it was all, like I said,
it was client server.
It was object oriented.
stuff so when i started uh messing around
with html it that's much much more basic
um but uh but he looked at what
i was i was building and said well
you know that's really good attention to
detail and so we were able to kind
of work together on building website stuff
and um sort of scoping um things that
we would do for a client uh
That's a lot of sort of business analysis
and all that traditional stuff that we
used to be, you know,
software projects used to involve.
And we're actually coming back around to
that because when we
we talk about a website project with with
um with a lot of our clients now
it's not a uh like a brochure where
kind of a thing that's just here's some
static blurbs about whatever come see us
pick up the phone um it because people
now expect to be able to interact with
you on the website expect to to either
buy something or book something or order
something or
You know, if you're, if you're looking,
if you're in the market for a new
car,
you expect to go to the website and
build it piece by piece and get a
price at the end.
And then you go to the dealer and
you do all the things.
But, you know, at that point,
by the time you get to the dealer,
you probably know more about the vehicle
than they do.
So, or, you know,
other products are the same because people
are,
they're expecting that level of
engagement.
So, you know,
if you pay your water bill or your
electric bill,
That's all online.
What did I pay three months ago?
It's there, right?
You know,
what did I buy from Amazon last year?
I want to buy it again.
That was good.
So it's all there.
And that's what people expect.
So we're doing those sorts of sort of
analysis bits with clients now.
the way that you it used to be
done when you're writing custom software
for them to run their business and we
have clients that run their business
online that have some very specific needs
we have one client that we're doing
geospatial mapping using you know gis
mapping data and it's
it's an agricultural app.
So they,
they tell farmers what to put on,
what fertilizer to put on the crop and
in what part of the field.
And then it's all GPS so that when,
when the,
when the farmer drives his equipment over
a certain part of the field,
it knows adjust.
And, but we, we have it,
set up,
they can do all of this online in
a, in a portal because, um,
so they can do it in the field.
They can do it from home.
They can,
cause that's how we do software now.
Um, so yeah, that's, um,
so that's kind of where, uh,
where we came to from.
you know, me learning HTML and CSS,
and my brother Scott having had sort of
the education in, well,
first you do the business analysis,
then you write the thing,
and then you do the software.
And so, I remember in the,
must have been in the year of two
thousand and one-ish,
two thousand and two, maybe,
We were writing an RFP response and it
said, describe your methodology.
And this was,
everybody was using waterfall and all this
stuff.
And we didn't like it.
Well, he didn't like it.
I didn't, I never tried to use it.
So, because I was just building websites,
you know.
But we, so we wrote our own methodology.
There's four points.
It's, this is what you do.
This is how you build software.
And, and it was, it was practical.
It was, you could iterate on it.
You could, and it worked very well.
And you could even adapt it to use
with other frameworks.
And then later on,
um everybody started talking about agile
and we look i looked at it and
said wait a minute this is that so
uh and within a few months of when
the agile manifesto was literally created
in a ski chalet or whatever uh we're
writing this thing and it was all value
based this is values
you know this is how you approach the
thing rather than these are the exact
perfect steps to do it's no this is
the approach these are the fundamental
principles stick with this and you'll
it'll work so so he had the my
brother had the experience of working in
large companies and
red tape and all of that.
And I'd spent my whole career working with
small business.
So it was another thing that we were
very different, uh, in our experience,
but it worked very well together because,
uh, we were able to say, okay,
what can, how can we make a enterprise,
um,
an enterprise approach work for small
business?
And that's one of the reasons we got
into open source.
We built a business that we couldn't have
built without open source because, well,
just the software licensing costs alone,
but the ability to just install things,
run them, say, no,
that's not the right thing.
You'll switch to a different one or
whatever it was.
So we were able to build our business
and also be able to share those approaches
with clients.
So we didn't need a custom-built
proprietary CMS.
We had one.
So back then I started using a
little-known blogging software called
Bitu.
And I went to install it one day
and went back and said,
this hasn't been updated for a while.
And I was kind of reading and I
was doing a new install and reading it.
Oh, there's a couple of forks.
And so I installed all three of them
and played around.
And yeah, that's how I got to WordPress.
And I got to B two because open
source was a requirement.
So I came to WordPress from open source
rather than learning open source from
WordPress involvement.
And I noticed a little bit of a
difference in a lot of the WordPress
community who did not have an open source
background before coming to it.
And Matt's been very vocal about,
you know, GPL support and all that.
And that's been great.
And it's been good to help spread that
word.
So it's been a good introduction.
I think people need to look farther than
just WordPress to really understand open
source.
So that's my appeal to the WordPress
communities.
You know, look around more.
So I've been running a Linux desktop for
over two decades because it's open source.
And if you have an Android phone,
it may not be totally at peace with
the Google, but at least it's open source.
And that becomes sort of a default choice
is if it's available,
pick that first unless there's a
compelling reason you know for a different
solution I know everybody loves the
MacBooks but but in its core you know
it's you know it's got the the BSD
yep you know roots so yep yeah
yeah i that actually is a is a
the open source uh thing and and being
able to take something and then try it
out and then choose something else like i
also see the overlap with that and the
ai conversation and some stuff that i've
been reading uh lately has been you know
to the extent of like well it it
like
I've heard the question asked,
how does open source exist in the world
of AI?
And I think that is one of those
ways where it becomes easier to build the
thing,
it becomes easier to have your little pet
project or side project thing
And that also means that it's easier to
take something that somebody else built
and then tweak it,
like you were saying about invert,
to be the thing that works for you.
I didn't build a connector yet for
Obsidian,
but you could then take the code that
I wrote or that Claude wrote,
that I directed Claude to write,
and be like, hey,
how do we make a connector for Obsidian
for this thing so that I can publish
from Obsidian?
And then that becomes part of the...
become part of the source code that could
just be part of what you're using it
for.
Um, and I think that that's, uh, like,
I think there is a future.
I think that is a really interesting
future because like it,
it lowers the barrier to entry to building
new and interesting stuff.
Yeah.
So, uh,
when I read the cathedral and the bizarre,
um, the, the book, like late nineties,
early two thousands, whatever it was, um,
One of the rules is write one to
throw away.
You will anyhow.
And it feels like it's going to be
really expensive to get deep into a
project and then abandon it and start
over.
But with AI,
that equation has just changed
drastically.
In a sense,
you see this with MDash recently,
where you take twenty years of software
development in WordPress and say, well,
what if we did that today and two
months later?
Sure, it's rough around the edges,
of course.
It's that new.
But this is what happens when you say,
okay,
let's take everything we've learned and
do a redesign.
Um,
and we've had to do that with some
clients, um, where, um, you know,
in some cases they've been using software
for years and we've just say, okay,
it's time to rewrite this thing.
Cause, uh,
we don't want to support PHP four point
three or whatever, like, uh, you know,
something, something crazy.
Um, we, um, um,
In, in, in, in, in, in, in, in,
in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in,
in,
So we inherited like ninety six or
something ninety some cold fusion sites
and it was like I Don't want we
don't want to do with cold fusion anymore
so
It's the great that's,
that's almost a hundred projects we get
to.
Uh,
and so we started working through those
conversions and some of them were custom
apps.
Some of them were just very,
very simple websites,
but some were custom apps that we said,
okay, it's, it's time.
This is,
this is really technical debt that you're
paying.
Um, and we're going to rebuild it.
So, um,
we just got the last of them done,
um,
last summer.
And it's live now and we're building on
top of it.
But yeah, that makes it feel like, okay,
you did this prototype and you've got all
of this effort into it.
With AI, you can actually...
You don't have that same...
opportunity caught, no, sunk cost fallacy.
That's it.
Because people commit to the wrong path,
because they're very invested in it by
now,
and they don't see how advantageous it
could be to get off it,
even if it means kind of going back
to the beginning.
It's always faster to do something a
second time,
but AI can help us sort of break
out of that sunk cost fallacy for
software.
And actually just thinking of this now,
it can help you find and address technical
debt in existing code bases.
If the hackers and crackers are using AI
to find security vulnerabilities,
we can do the same, patch those,
but also, you know,
what could be more efficient?
And I was writing some stuff for FAIR
recently.
It was shell scripts for some stuff that
we're doing, and I was able to,
after a certain number of iterations,
was able to say, okay, well,
going to run these three things in
parallel rather than sequentially and
we're able to optimize kind of how how
the thing all works together um and that's
just that back and forth that you kind
of um
That's not how, that's not the,
how you initially approach AI is you think
you're just going to say,
I need this and it'll produce it.
But that AI and that, uh, uh,
that the back and forth with the AI
and, um,
the ability to look at what you've got
and,
and figure where you're going and say,
well,
how can we do this better and keep
iterating on it?
You can do those iterations so much faster
now.
Yeah.
So.
Talk about how you did get into FAIR.
Obviously, it's been almost, I think,
a year and a half now since it
was sort of officially made into a
project.
Aspire Press launched maybe a little bit
earlier than FAIR was announced as a named
thing.
What attracted you to that project?
like obviously you're i can see that
you're like it's the interesting problem
solving stuff about this thing that is
interesting to you what what interesting
problems did you uh see about the project
that you wanted to help try to solve
risk management so as of you know uh
late september twenty twenty four um
we noticed a brisk in the supply chain
for WordPress software.
And it was very concerning because we've
got a lot of clients that we've done
work for, and a lot of them,
It's just a basic, it's a just,
just a basic website or whatever.
It's even if it's e-commerce,
it's not a huge, you know, uh,
Amazon's not banging down our door for
work.
It's they're small shops.
Right.
Um, but, um,
So rebuilding those are, you know,
if worst case, if you,
if we had to not a big deal,
but we'd built applications on it for
clients.
So we're using WordPress as an application
framework, um,
for a number of these things that have
some fairly complex, uh, and,
and in my mind, I'm thinking, well,
If things go really south for WordPress
and for this distribution and because the
future at that point was really uncertain,
the
What happens if a client comes back and
says,
you gave me bad advice and I trusted
you as a professional?
You're a professional consultant.
You've got all the experience and you've
told me to do this thing.
And now I'm subject to this kind of
thing just happening.
And so I kind of...
It's the point I thought I had to
get involved and do something.
So if you...
recall around that time there was a lot
of a lot of um blog posts and
uh you know social media posts you know
here's here it is on github this is
how you host your own version of the
wordpress repository and i thought well
see that's great but it doesn't help
anybody because that's you know was
everybody gonna do that no that doesn't um
So I started looking around and I found
Aspire Press,
which Sarah Savage had started like
October, so it was like right after.
And it was a vision for distributed
federated software repositories.
So I hopped into the community there and
I found it was a community,
not
a guy with a GitHub thing.
It was a community of people,
and they were asking the right questions,
which I always thought asking the right
questions is more important than giving
the right answers.
Because if you're asking the right
questions, you will get there.
And that's kind of what I found with
this group.
And so I started working with them,
ended up managing the project.
And then as FAIR was forming,
right around christmas twenty twenty four
and january twenty five uh um there were
a few of us that were working with
uh uh with aspire press um you know
andy fragan and uh and others that are
um that would be no well known in
the wordpress community um
kind of drifted into the fair conversation
and drifted.
It was a little more,
it was not so much drifting.
It was pretty direct.
So, um, uh, and,
and I got involved at that point as
well with fair because Aspire Press had,
uh,
had a working piece that fair was going
to need, uh, and,
You know,
that comes about a little bit later.
But by the time FAIR was forming,
Aspire Cloud was already in beta and we
were testing.
So Aspire Cloud is the...
It's basically the server piece that is an
API server that tells you, okay,
if you need to update this piece of
WordPress software, this plugin,
here's where you get the downloads.
And the download comes from a mirror,
which was the other difference about
AspirePress is
rather than just saying here's the code go
set up your own thing it was we're
going to make a public mirror that
everybody can can access and then we're
going to you know federate it so that
there would be not just one mirror they
can be all kinds of so um so
that was that was the piece that we
had in uh in beta so we'd replicated
enough of the wordpress api to
serve packages and rewrite the download
url um to to the mirror so uh
so as pharaoh is coming together um
And this was like spring,
twenty twenty five.
So officially announced June six.
And so it was just a few months
of writing the protocol and figuring out
what the fair governance model would be
and
shipping the plugin.
So we had a SpirePress version of what
became the FAIR plugin, but it was...
uh, it was a little more rudimentary.
It didn't do all of the, um, uh,
all of the functions that the fair plugin
or what we're now calling fair connect,
um, uh, what it does, uh,
because it stops, um,
all of the phoning home if you want.
So it's,
it's not always pinging.org for everything
like browser, uh, yeah,
all of that stuff that, um, uh,
a principle level i i don't want to
do that for performance reasons but also
privacy and like you know all all the
reasons right um so uh
Anyway,
so FAIR was able to ship that plugin.
And we had already arranged to do an
announcement of a demo of Aspire Cloud at
the event in Basel, the old control org.
And FAIR was ready for the same.
So we tag teamed.
through the summer then we brought all of
the AspirePress pieces that were,
you know, that were FAIR related,
we brought them all into FAIR.
So in addition to Aspire Cloud,
there was Aspire Explorer,
which is the browser part that you just
browse the repo on FAIR.pm.
And that it's a WordPress plugin that
adds those pages and then uses the API
to get the listings of all the things
from Aspire Cloud.
And then most of those got renamed,
but the Aspire Cloud decided to keep the
name just as an homage to what Sarah
had found and started.
So yeah,
so we had a good six month head
start on building Aspire Cloud.
so that it was ready when FAIR officially
announced.
So yeah.
Yeah,
I think one of the things that I
think is interesting about,
especially coming from sort of full circle
from the conversation of Linux and open
source software,
that is maybe not discussed a lot in
connection with FAIR specifically,
because a lot of people just perceive FAIR
to be a WordPress specific thing.
But what's interesting about FAIR is that
it is really about package management and
package distribution.
In open source broadly,
and this is sort of to your point
about people inside the WordPress
community looking outside of WordPress,
that's not a new concept.
The concept of package management and
distribution and even maybe federated
distribution is not unique in open source.
There are models for this that you could
use and base the underpinnings of FAIR on
top of and build on top of, again,
standing on the shoulders of giants.
Yeah.
Yeah, um, absolutely.
Uh, um, I just, you know, thinking the,
um, um, it's, it's a web three model,
uh, but I'll come to that so that,
uh, um, I talked about, um,
the supply chain, uh,
at a WordCamp Canada in November and, uh,
um,
And the WordPress supply chain is very
different from what you would design today
from the traditional or...
Supply chains are getting a lot of
attention right now as they need because
they're vulnerable.
And I think that FAIR actually has the
potential to become the gold standard for
software supply chains because its
architecture is for now.
something that we've inherited,
it's not something that we've tried to
piece together and just sort of iterate on
to make it almost acceptable.
It's something that was designed from the
ground up.
And the interesting thing about it is
that,
and this is my pulling threads thing,
is when you look at all of the
pieces on their own,
All of it has been done before.
Everything's been done before.
So it's all proven.
Just nobody's put it together this way.
So it's, you know,
it's all the Lego bricks that you can
imagine and they're all proven.
But nobody's seen this thing before that
we pieced together with it.
And I think that's part of the real
genius in it.
So Ryan McHugh did a great job on
the drafting the first version of the FAIR
protocol.
And we've been extending it as needed
because
it was designed to um to just address
basically digital goods so it's it's not a
wordpress thing and there's a lot of
misconception here because oh you know if
if yoast isn't involved anymore it's no
longer wordpress it's dead it's whatever
well none of it none of that's true
it's it's ongoing and just a couple of
weeks ago in germany we added typo three
support
So now the typo three as of the
version fourteen that's coming out next
week, it will support fair in in core.
So you'll be able to do your software
updates using fair rather than using their
legacy.
They call it TER, T-E-R,
Type-O-Three Extension Repository.
And they also have composer support.
But you'll be able to use FAIR.
So they saw the value in it.
And they...
I worked with some of their security
people and they said, what about this?
And I'm going, that's the right question.
And we talked through how it worked and
I get a genuine feel of
of moving from skepticism to enthusiastic
support as he sort of basically vetted the
model which was also actually vetted by
some of the web hosts who didn't want
to be named but they did security reviews
and audits on it and they gave us
feedback and we made
Thankfully, nothing had to be huge,
but we made some changes that said, okay,
well, this could be better.
Let's make it better.
And that's what we need to get into
the future.
But yeah, FAIR can be, you know,
I keep saying if you've got a group
of science fiction writers that just want
to share all of their EPUBs,
you know what, FAIR will do that.
it'll do that because it's at the protocol
level.
It's, it's nothing to do with WordPress.
It's about the supply chain.
And then in fact,
the very original design of it,
all of the WordPress specific pieces are
extensions to the protocol.
They're not baked into the core of it.
And there,
and it's designed that way so that so
now that we have type of three,
the type of three comes in as a,
protocol extensions that are sort of
designed exactly the same way.
And it's a good model.
Well, thank you very much, Brent,
for coming on.
Thank you everyone for watching or
listening to this in the future.
Brent, before we go, is there,
if somebody wanted to find you on the
internet, where would they find you?
Todorash.net.
It'll link you to wherever I am on
socials and all of that.
Awesome.
Well, thanks again, Brent.
And again, thank you everyone.
And we'll see you on the internet.
Yeah.