Hey, welcome back to Community & Code.
I'm Chris Reynolds.
My guest today has basically filled every
role a WordCamp has to offer.
Organizer, speaker, volunteer, attendee,
you name it.
Over more than ten years in the WordPress
community.
But lately she's been doing something a
little bit different.
Showing up at DrupalCon and DrupalCamps,
taking notes,
and coming back with some observations
about what Drupal and WordPress could
learn from each other.
Miriam Goldman is a senior solutions
architect at Pantheon, and yes,
we did happen to be showing up to
this recording wearing matching company
hoodies.
That wasn't planned, I promise.
We get into the technical differences
between how Drupal and WordPress handle
dependencies and updates,
why Drupal's module culture tends towards
collaboration while WordPress' plugin
culture trends towards competition,
and why WordCamps might be leaving money
and organizer sustainability on the table.
We also talk about how she stumbled into
WordPress in the first place,
trying to build a website for her friend's
church band.
But the most fun part is talking about
the non WordPress stuff.
Miriam is a fourth degree black belt with
a very specific origin story involving the
Green Power Ranger and a weekly schedule
that has her switching between clarinet
and percussion and two different community
bands.
Let's get into it.
Here's my conversation with Miriam
Goldman.
Welcome to Community & Code,
the podcast where we talk to the humans
behind the commits,
and the human I'm talking to today is
Miriam Goldman.
Miriam is a longtime WordPress developer
and community member, WordCamp organizer,
and senior solutions architect at a
company called Pantheon,
where I also happen to work,
and we also happen to be matching today
with Pantheon Sweatshirts.
So welcome to the show, Miriam.
Tell us about yourself.
Thanks, Chris.
So, yeah,
I've been involved with the WordPress
community for over ten years now,
and I've been a developer,
I've been a WordCamp organizer,
WordCamp speaker, WordCamp volunteer,
WordCamp attendee.
You name it with WordCamps,
I have been involved with them.
And recently,
I've started to branch out more to the
Drupal side as well.
just because I don't feel it's good just
to limit yourself just to one CMS.
So I was at DrupalCon two weeks ago.
I've been to DrupalCamp Ottawa twice,
and I'm just kind of like wetting my
feet into that community.
Just right now,
just attending or supporting Pantheon and
just learning what WordPress can learn
from Drupal and vice versa.
I found when I went to DrupalCon,
I found there's a lot of things that
WordPress can learn.
One of my takeaways from being there was
that more WordPress people need to be
going to DrupalCon and vice versa.
What was your takeaway from going to your
first DrupalCon?
I would say is how vibrant the Drupal
community is.
There were so many conversations I had
with developers and project managers,
agency owners who were just
really passionate about how Drupal is and
just the excitement rather than just
sometimes I've seen in the past couple of
years,
just kind of exhaustion in the WordPress
community with some of the unfortunate
drama over the past couple of years.
I didn't see that in Drupal.
I saw a genuine excitement for the
technology and how they can really make it
grow and make it better for everybody.
what being someone who's been in WordPress
for a long time,
this is a tangent that I'm just personally
interested in.
So like,
we'll get to the other stuff soon,
but like,
I really want to get into this.
Being someone who's been in the WordPress
world for a long time,
what sort of like differences and
similarities did you observe in the Drupal
space from your experience of the
WordPress community?
Well, to be honest,
I was mainly just at the Pantheon booth
most of the time,
but I did get to chat with folks
over lunch and just if they needed help
with something.
The similarities I saw was, again,
just a passionate and really caring about
the technology and just how nice everybody
was.
I did not meet one rude or mean
person when I was there.
People were genuinely excited.
And even when I'm like,
Yeah, well, I'll be honest,
WordPress is my background.
I didn't get, oh no, your WordPress,
get away.
I got people who were genuinely excited
that I was kind of like dipping my
toes into Drupal.
And the main difference, honestly,
really comes down to the technology I
found.
It's just...
a lot of things about composer differences
and just really getting down to the nitty
gritty about how there's certain things
like,
What happens if you pin Composer to this
and you have an issue with one of
your Composer plugins or something's going
on with one of the modules and everything
and versioning wasn't as much of an issue
I found with WordPress plugins because
WordPress plugins,
it's a lot easier just to
set it and forget it.
And especially if you decide not to put
auto updates,
you could just leave it on an old
version for decades.
With Drupal,
as long as you run your composer update,
you're going to get more things and it's
easier to just stay relevant and modern
with Drupal.
One of the things that I took away,
one of the conversations that I was having
when I was at DrupalCon
they had just started talking about maybe,
well, I mean,
it was in the Dries note,
but even before the Dries note,
they were talking about the idea of like
the commercial ecosystem around Drupal as
composed to WordPress,
but also just the module ecosystem as it
was, as it stood,
and as it stands now, I think,
which is that there is this culture of
If I have an SEO plugin and you
have an SEO plugin,
this is something I've talked about on the
show before,
then we're more likely to collaborate and
make a better SEO plugin rather than be
in competition with each other.
in the Drupal ecosystem.
And within WordPress, that is kind of,
I mean,
by and large in the WordPress ecosystem,
if I have an SEO plugin and you
have an SEO plugin,
we're going to hold on to that IP.
That is our intellectual property,
and we might want to sell that at
some point.
So it creates more of this competition in
the WordPress world and less
collaboration,
which is good for commerce and good for
selling your plugin down the road,
but maybe not good for the solution.
like making a better SEO plugin or
whatever.
And that's also, I mean,
that's at the time what was new was
there is the SEO recipe,
there is the AI,
all the recipes are coming out with Drupal
CMS.
And that was kind of how those things
evolved is like,
let's figure out what the best things are
that relates to this thing.
Let's bring them all in from a variety
of different sources.
And then let's also collaborate and make
it better.
Um, and, and that's,
that sort of energy of, of a collectivism,
um, was really sort of refreshing.
Um,
but also it's at odds with making money
on the thing.
It's the joke of, of, you know,
WordPress developers make money.
Um, so now, uh,
We've had a year since Dries first said,
hey,
let's think about how to build a Drupal
marketplace and what that looks like.
I imagine that there is a little bit
more energy,
a little bit more conversation around that
happening in the Drupal ecosystem.
Did you have any conversations around that
when you were there?
Not really.
Most of my conversations were more about
just like, I'm having this issue.
It's more like tech support stuff.
Yeah.
I'm having an issue with upgrading to
D-Eleven from D-Ten on this multi-dev,
or I'm having Git workflow issues and
everything.
So that's what most of my conversations
were, but I'm sure they were out there.
Yeah.
I need to watch this year's Dreece Note.
I haven't yet.
I've been a little busy.
Yeah.
I hear that.
But so long time WordCamp person,
what got you involved in WordCamps?
You've had so much involvement in
WordCamps for so long and so many
different hats in WordCamps.
And you also were one of the organizers,
I believe,
of WordCamp Canada this last year.
So what pulled you into that besides just
WordPress?
So let's go back to twenty thirteen.
That's when WordCamp Ottawa first came to
the city.
We really didn't have too big of a
WordCamp scene back then in Canada.
So at the time,
my manager where I worked was just like,
hey,
there's this thing called WordCamp coming
to Ottawa.
I've been to the one in Toronto.
You should go to it.
And so I went and I really enjoyed
it.
So I attended in twenty thirteen,
twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen.
I had to go to Montreal because we
didn't have one in Ottawa.
And then in twenty sixteen,
my manager is like,
hey you know what you should you know
your stuff you should speak at a word
camp so i did my first talk i
chose doing multilingual plugins in ottawa
in the nation's capital which can be a
very fiery thing so at the time i
was just like i don't know if i
want to do this so then i'm like
but i'll organize
then i also was like hey i can
talk but i'm horrible at slides so i
did a whole bunch of panels about women
in wordpress and i kept organizing and i
just added that and then it just built
up from there and honestly wordcamps have
gotten me
two of my past jobs it got me
my job here at pantheon and it got
me my job at canopy studios where i
worked before coming to pantheon so it's
just kind of like that alone kind of
makes me want to stay involved because i'm
like hey it's gotta be network connections
and it's gotta be employed but it's also
just the amount of things you can learn
and how it can push you
Having been on the organizing side of
WordCamps, and granted,
even WordCamp Canada is a scale or two
smaller than something at DrupalCon scale,
but what
having just come back from DrupalCon,
what do you, like, in terms of, like,
how the event was organized,
did you see any sort of, like,
differences that kind of jumped out at you
in how DrupalCon was organized or built or
collected, you know,
or versus how WordCamps are kind of
handled and organized?
It's hard to say because I was just
there kind of as a sponsor.
Mm-hmm.
And,
but overall it looked like pretty
organized.
Like if I compare it to when I
did Work Camp US as an organizer a
couple of years ago,
I would say it's very similar to that.
However,
I would say that things were just a
lot more organized and
I don't know who the actual organizers are
at DrupalCon,
but I did see some board members come
around.
Like, some are just like, hey,
we have these extra DrupalCon beers.
Do you want one?
I'm like, yeah,
that wouldn't have flown that work out.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
When I went,
I spent a lot of time,
so I went to the community summit and
I spent a lot of time trying to
just have conversations that weren't
necessarily about troubleshooting at the
event and really try to take in as
much as I could.
And part of what I learned and came
away with was, well, A, yes,
they feel very similar.
One of the big takeaways was like, yeah,
this feels,
Like, this doesn't feel any different.
This doesn't feel any different.
I expect it to feel different because
different community, different technology,
but also it's a, what,
one thousand dollar conference versus a,
like, fifty dollar,
hundred dollar conference for WordCamp US.
So, like,
there's a major difference in cost.
But it doesn't feel any different as an
event.
And that was interesting because it kind
of led me to the idea, I mean,
an idea that I've had for a while,
which is WordCamps can probably charge
more.
Especially the flagship ones,
they could probably charge more.
You could probably charge a couple hundred
bucks.
And
Part of the observation that I made,
some of the stuff that was talked about
at the community summit was around like,
well,
the reason why the Drupal Association
exists is in part because when DrupalCamp
started happening and then DrupalCon
started happening,
Dries realized pretty quickly that he
didn't want to organize everything
himself.
And so he formed a body, a board,
and basically made it one of the jobs
of the board to do the organizing for
the DrupalCons.
And then all the money that is generated
from DrupalCon goes to the board to
actually pay
positions and people that are on the board
and to do things,
but also so the board has financial
ability to put that money towards specific
Drupal development.
And I've always thought that because the
two events are so similar,
because they're basically the same scale,
and because we obviously have this thing
over here,
a model for a CMS that powers, what,
two or three percent of the web?
generating a lot of revenue and basically
having the same number of people coming,
twelve, thirteen, fourteen,
fifteen hundred people,
that's almost like a lost opportunity in
the WordPress space to have a similar sort
of model where, again,
we could just bump the price up a
little bit,
pay people to actually event organize,
and then also maybe have some stuff left
over to direct funds towards actual
projects that the community cares about.
Yeah, no, I agree.
Because having been an organizer,
because sometimes, like,
it's all volunteer on the work camp.
And I was the volunteer team lead,
like actually,
both for Work Camp Canada and Work Camp
US.
And just sometimes I just felt thankless,
to be perfectly honest.
And
it's like yeah you've got the volunteers
and you're encouraging them and everything
but and there's that whole thing about
okay i'm giving back to the community this
feels good but beyond that how can you
help it grow because you can give back
to the community but if the community
doesn't want to embrace it then it's just
going to be dead in the water
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
That's, I feel that really hard.
I was involved in WordCamp Salt Lake City
for a really long time.
And I was an organizer,
I was co organizer for two years,
and then I was lead organizer for two
years.
So I did four years of basically lead
organizing.
WordCamp Salt Lake City.
And so after I was done,
after that second year of being solo lead,
I was like, okay,
someone else can do this.
And I think the year after that,
it sort of just stuttered.
We didn't have anybody that was willing to
take up the reins to lead organize.
And then after that was COVID.
And then that was just like,
there hasn't been momentum in the local
community since then.
And
It's that thing of where like, yeah,
like you need,
you need to like figure out like a
chain of command,
like a passing on the torch sort of
thing.
But also like if,
if there aren't people involved that are
like putting a ton of themselves into this
mostly invisible labor, then yeah,
it's just gonna, it's just gonna stall.
Yeah.
And then there's the risk of those people
getting burnt out.
Like,
I have seen like,
we're lucky up here in Canada that we
have this year,
they're having Work Camp Canada out in
Vancouver in November.
I'm actually not an organizer this year.
And as of right now,
I'm not a volunteer.
That might change.
We'll see what happens.
But it's just people burn out so easily
when they put so much of themselves into
this.
And if people are burnt out,
they don't want to train the next
generation, for lack of better words,
to do it.
And it's kind of like this
catch-twenty-two almost.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, or even have,
like the energy even like,
if you're if you're burning out,
or if you've done it long enough that
you're now like sort of feeling cynical
about the whole thing,
you're probably not the best person to be
training the next generation either.
So beyond WordPress, well, let's go back.
What's what was the first thing that like
led you into WordPress to begin with?
um it was the fact that i was
playing with my friend's church band i was
playing clarinet with them and they wanted
to make a website and they knew i
was just starting out in web development i
think i was three four years out of
college at that point
And they're like, Hey,
can you build us a website,
but we want to update it ourselves.
So I looked into WordPress,
I looked into Drupal,
I think I don't even remember what version
Drupal was like a Drupal five or six
back then.
Looked at Joomla, I think back then.
Moodle,
I looked at a whole bunch of different
options and WordPress seemed like it was
the best option because I'd been just
doing some blogging about like when I was
in university, me like, Hey,
I wrote this school paper.
And then I just started falling into it.
And for about three,
four years I was working for the Canadian
government.
So I couldn't use it professionally.
And then I got a job back in
the private sector,
and it was with WordPress.
And I'm like, hey, cool,
this can be my career.
And then almost every single job just kept
doing PHP developer, WordPress developer.
And I'm just like, cool, I like this.
I can really build some cool stuff with
it.
And it was kind of like a happy
accident in a way.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah,
I think one of the things that I
noticed the most and one of the main
things that led me to,
when I was freelancing,
decide that I wanted to just focus on
WordPress was, A,
how easy it was to use and how
easy it was to teach to people who
didn't have a lot of technical experience,
but also that...
whenever I had a question,
there was always an answer somewhere.
If I had a question about Joomla or
if I had a question about some other
smaller thing,
I would do a search and maybe I
would find an answer or maybe I wouldn't.
But if I had a question about anything
that I needed to do in WordPress,
there was always an answer either in the
codex or on a blog or somewhere.
There was always an answer out there.
It was always easy to just find support
for whatever I happened to need to be
doing.
Yeah, exactly.
That was definitely one of the most
helpful things when I was a junior dev
was just...
Okay.
It's either in the codex or stack
overflow.
Those were my two, those were clutch.
Okay.
They still are clutch to this day,
but it's just,
they were so helpful when I was really
active in dev and you're right.
Just like there is an answer or there
are multiple answers and you can do trial
and error instead of just,
so this is before the days of AI
before Google really got good.
It was just like,
You could spend like a week doing trial
and error,
or you could have these things and you
could spend a day trial and error.
And let's be real,
I'd rather do the day than a week.
yeah for sure um you mentioned uh that
you were in your church band i know
you still uh do musical performance still
what uh talk about uh we'll do a
total uh tangent what instruments do you
play and what do you still play and
and and how did that sort of uh
become be a thing i don't meet very
many adults that are still in sort of
like marching band type things yeah
So I play a lot.
Clarinet is my main instrument.
I've played that for about thirty years
now, since grade seven.
That came about, I was a band nerd,
band geek, all that kind of stuff.
Kept that up through high school.
Moved to Ottawa.
Played with my friend's church band.
Did a few local musical theatre pit
orchestras.
And then I found a community band and
they were looking for clarinet players.
So I did that for two and a
half years,
took a pause and then about ten year
pause.
And then I went back to a different
community band.
And so I joined that in twenty eighteen.
And then three years ago,
we lost the percussion player and
percussion section leader was like, hey,
Miriam,
you play timpani on this one piece.
Do you want to move to percussion?
I'm like, sure.
So I've been a percussionist in that band
for three years, everything but drum kits.
So that includes like the xylophone,
the vibraphone, crash cymbals, bongos,
you name it,
everything but an actual drum kit.
And then last year,
I got asked to join another community band
on a different day, back on clarinet.
So it's very interesting.
Every week, even like Tuesday,
it's percussion.
I don't need to worry about breath
control.
I just got to worry about rhythm.
And then Thursday, it's my clarinet one.
And it's just like, looking at the music,
it's like, well,
I'm going to be out of breath by
the end of the night.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I was also,
I picked up the saxophone in sixth grade
because, no, fifth grade,
because I had just,
I went to Catholic school first through
fourth.
And in fifth grade,
we moved and I went to public school.
And then they also like on,
I don't know,
the first week of school or something had
the music teacher come in and say,
this is this instrument,
and this is this instrument,
and you can join,
and you can learn about these things.
And saxophone,
like he played all the instruments and
demoed them for everyone.
And saxophone sounded cool and looked
cool.
So I decided, yeah,
I want to do that.
And I did that until seventh grade when
I moved again.
And then I was too cool to do
saxophone.
And then I was too cool to do
saxophone for most of high school.
But in my senior year,
I decided that, I mean,
I basically my senior year,
I was taking as many just like fun,
whatever classes as I could.
So band sounded cool.
So I joined marching band as a saxophone
player when marching band did both like
competitions as an actual marching band
and also like the band at like the
football games.
So I did that,
so I got back into it and did
marching band,
which is a whole other like way of
like even thinking about things like
skills that I've like kind of even kept
to this day to a degree.
But that was also like a lot of
fun to like be out in with.
It was, I mean,
the whole point was like to hang out
with people and like marching band and the
football band at the football games was
like so much about like just hanging out.
And that was what I, like,
it wasn't jazz band.
Jazz band was super, like,
technical and very, like, specific.
And it wasn't, like, the pit band for,
like,
you know,
concerts and orchestra type stuff.
It was more like, yeah,
we're loud and maybe playing off key and
that's okay.
Yeah.
I wish we'd had marching band in my
high school.
That would have been fun.
But I hear you.
It's about hanging out.
Like when I had spare periods,
when I didn't have a class in grade
eleven and grade twelve,
we would just hang out in our band
room.
We had a ginormous band room at my
high school.
I'm pretty sure it's still the same size
there.
And we had a big, big,
big band program.
So our band teachers were so chill about
it.
They were just like, yeah,
just come hang out.
Do your homework in here.
Let's just hang out.
And because of that, it's like,
unfortunately,
one of the band teachers passed away in
twenty nineteen.
But the other one I'm still friends with.
So I like if I am ever back
in Calgary, I'm like, hey, Mr. Mack,
I'm in town.
You want to go grab a coffee?
And so.
That's kind of cool.
Like over twenty years after graduation,
I can still keep in touch with that.
And it's like seriously,
music got me through high school.
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure.
The thing that I always find really
interesting when you say that you're going
to like band rehearsal or band practice is
that like I haven't thought about band
practice
since high school, which is, like,
more than twenty years ago.
So, like,
how did someone find an outlet for that
type of performance?
Like, did you just, like,
stumble into that?
I just Googled it.
I would just, like,
I missed playing my clarinet,
because I hadn't been,
I had taken a break from doing some
pit orchestras,
because that I got through said friend's
band.
This was...
It was before my first black belt.
So anyways, long story short,
I got asked to play clarinet in a
production of Beauty and the Beast.
And they're just like, you're amazing.
Can you do a few more shows?
So for the next couple of years,
I did a couple of shows.
They didn't need me anymore,
which is fine.
And so I had about four years of
not playing my clarinet.
And I'm like, I missed this.
I need to do this.
wait,
are there community bands for adults?
I've heard of this thing.
And so I just Googled it and I
found one and I found one not too
far from me that's like, yeah,
we're looking for clarinet players.
And then I joined.
If you look for it, it will come,
apparently.
Exactly.
You just got to be persistent.
You got to know the right keywords.
Well,
you mentioned something in there offhand
that I also wanted to talk about,
which is you are a black belt.
Yes.
As you can probably see in my background.
There we go.
Back there,
I have been doing martial arts for
nineteen years,
so almost twenty years now.
So I'm a fourth degree black belt.
And so I got my first degree black
belt in twenty ten.
And the way I got into that was
I used to work at a grocery store
in college and made friends and.
Moved on, started my career,
and one was like, hey,
do you want to come to a cardio
kickboxing class with me?
I'm like, I would love to,
but it's too far for me.
But then I'm like, hey,
I want to get in shape.
So I found a cardio kickboxing place,
like a.
Fifty minute walk from my place at the
time.
I did that.
It was fun.
And then I watched the karate class that
was right before my kickboxing class.
I'm like.
That looks cool.
I want to try that.
And he's going to hate me for this,
but he's never going to watch this.
One of my senses looked,
at the time when he was younger,
looked a lot like Jason David Frank from
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers,
who played the Green Ranger.
And I had a crush on that actor
when I was younger.
So that probably played a decision.
So I started in two thousand and seven
and then I just
fell in love with it and I had,
I guess,
natural skill for it and I just
kept going and honestly it's one of the
best decisions I've made because I did a
talk at WordCamp about seven years ago
about how being a martial artist and
especially an instructor can help your
tech career because there's so much
correlation with the confidence and it's
just like katas it's in a specific order
it's an orchestrated fight against an
imaginary opponent
You might not think that that relates to
tech,
but in a way it does because of
the logic in tech that think of going
back to procedural programming back in the
day.
You need to do it in a certain
order or else things are going to go
belly up.
And if you don't do things properly in
karate, it's injuries,
but still it goes belly up.
I think that's a fascinating story and
that's a really interesting correlation
between karate and tech and sort of just
the programmatic thinking, I guess,
like the sort of developer brain.
I think that makes a lot of sense.
And I don't think you're the first person
to have made that connection specifically
with katas.
I've read that before,
just like katas for like development,
you know, sort of a practice.
I started doing Tai Chi over the summer
last year and I've been doing that once
a week and I've really been enjoying that
in part because there's not a lot of
times
Well,
I started doing aerials like a year ago
and like aerial arts are like on hammocks
and silks and hoops and stuff.
And you've seen videos of this.
And that puts you,
it forces you to think about like what
your body is actually doing,
which is not a thing that my brain
often does.
But Tai Chi really gets you into that
space.
Like you have to like,
because it's the whole point and you're
going very slowly and you're like trying
to make your movements fluid and also
you're trying to pay attention to what the
instructor is doing because nobody's
actually telling you what you're supposed
to be doing.
And I imagine that it's a similar head
space when you're doing karate as well.
It is because not so much when you're
like a lower belt because you're just
learning it and you're just trying to make
your body do it.
But at my level,
it's now a point like listening to your
body and being like adapting,
like looking around.
It's like, oh, no,
there's like thirty five people in class
and I barely have enough room.
I need to just adjust how I do
it or else I'm going to get hit
by somebody who.
may not have the same awareness of their
personal space as you do.
Which is fine.
Everybody does it basically for
themselves, really.
And they train how they train.
But it's just one of those, like,
you have to know how your body feels
and you don't want to get injured.
So especially now that I'm out of my
twenties anymore,
it's kind of like you got to listen
to what your body does and
it has the added layer being an advanced
black belt is that you have to teach
it too.
So I teach basically preteens once a week.
And so it's very interesting.
Like sometimes we have like seven,
eight year olds and you got to,
also think on your feeds like, okay,
how old is this person?
How do they learn?
Do they pick up on things fast?
Are they very shy?
Are they kind of bombastic and everything?
So it's kind of like you have to
know how to adapt.
And again, bringing it back to tech,
I see that as kind of debugging.
So
you're debugging code, like,
that's what I'm going to be doing once
we finish chatting is I'm going back to
debugging some code.
But with people,
it's not so much debugging them.
It's kind of like finding the best
solution for them.
So some people like repetition and doing
it over and over and over again.
And doing like a full cat.
Some people like you to only do four
moves.
And then when they feel comfortable,
you move on.
So it's not like one size fits all,
which I kind of like.
I like that it's not one size fits
all.
I hate one size fits all.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah,
one of my first real jobs out of
college was working in tech support.
And tech support sucks.
And I have a lot of empathy for
folks that do it.
But one of the things that I learned
doing tech support was a similar sort of
lesson, right, where, like,
I,
you need to have a lot of empathy
and you need to have really good listening
skills, um, because, and,
and this like led into how I approached
working at WordPress agencies and how I
approached like product development and
design and building things.
The things that,
that people are saying with their words is
not always the things that they want or
need.
They're just,
they're responding to the thing that they
see in front of them.
And they, you know,
even sometimes they think they want a
thing or they think they want a particular
outcome,
but actually
That's just like the surface level of
something else that's happening.
And the trick,
if you're good at doing the support stuff,
the trick is being able to listen for
those clues that tell you,
that inform like, oh,
actually there's something else going on.
Yeah, exactly.
That's why, like,
I have mad respect for the people at
our company who are in technical support.
And especially for those who sometimes
just have to deal with the chats,
just like mad respect for what they have
to do and just figure it out and
be like, can we help you with this?
Or do we need to escalate it up
the chain?
Mm-hmm .
What sorts of things,
because what you do at Pantheon is a
little bit of support adjacent.
What sorts of things characterize the work
that you do here?
It's a lot now.
So if we go back to my role
purely as a solutions architect is
basically I look to help improve
performance.
And so what I look at is since
I'm a subject matter expert at WordPress,
that's what I specialize in.
I look at the code base.
I look for anti-patterns in custom plugins
and their themes and everything.
I dig into the database.
I look for database indexes,
fragmented tables, loaded tables,
like orphan metadata and everything.
How can we improve their database?
I look at the file system.
I'm like,
do they have way too many files going
on?
Are they...
For some reason,
have they added twenty five image sizes
and that is blowing up their uploads
directory and then they're going to have
trouble with their backups and everything.
So it's like I take my knowledge of
WordPress and my knowledge of the platform
and I kind of marry them together and
then I find out, OK,
I think I mentioned this before to you
in the past, but I'm like,
it's like almost like a website therapist
and a website doctor at the same time.
Therapist in that I listen to what the
customer is having trouble with or the
developer and a doctor in providing like
the prescription, the solution to it.
And now outside of that,
I've started to get involved with a lot
of, I get to work with marketing more.
I get to work with the engineering team
more.
So I'm working on my department,
all the cool stuff that's on a roadmap.
I get to kind of see it in
progress and I share it back.
And then I help guide and being like,
actually, no,
have you considered this from the customer
perspective?
So it's almost like, because...
I can be the voice of the customer
because I'm in the field.
I can kind of like guide and offer
suggestions to our non-customer facing
teams and be like, actually, no, I mean,
that's a great idea that you have,
but that's not going to jive with the
customers.
Yeah.
It's a lot of that side of things
is definitely like,
and we are on a lot of the
same calls because that side of things is
very similar to developer relations.
The inside joke is like,
For a long time,
there's been this idea of shadow
engineering,
where there's engineering work that's
happening outside of the actual
engineering team.
Miriam,
I always like to tease you and say
that you're shadow DevRel because you're
doing the work of DevRel outside of the
developer relations role.
But I mean, I was too.
I was doing that same stuff when I
was in engineering.
I was engaging in the community,
being in community Slack.
And because for a lot of times,
particularly at a product company or maybe
a hosting company,
the people that are building the stuff
that WordPress users are using...
Don't necessarily use the wordpress
themselves or don't use the drupal
themselves they're they're using the
platform they're deep in kubernetes and
they're deep in file systems and like all
these different things and like sometimes
a lot of times.
What what goes into the Kubernetes cluster
can and should be informed by you know
how like what best works for a you
know commodity WordPress site.
Exactly yeah.
What sorts of, you mentioned,
and this is just, again, my own curiosity,
what sorts of anti-patterns do you look
for specifically when you, like,
if you're just opening up a code base,
what's sort of the first thing that you
try to look for?
Um, sometimes it's just really the basics.
It's just like,
are they doing some really crazy nested
loop?
Are they trying to connect to an external
service that is going to do it?
Are they trying to do repeated curls to
something that is going to hammer or SQL
injection?
I always look for and just best practices.
Like sometimes I'm just like,
If it's something that's like really,
like you can't really, it's not obvious.
I sometimes go in and I'm like,
let's look at WordPress coding standards.
So I go against the Pantheon ones we
have.
I go against some of the best known
agency ones.
I think Field and TenUp have one that
they use.
And so I just look for that.
And then I'm just like,
what would I do if I was a
developer here?
So I try and...
turn back on my developer brain and just
look at stuff from that.
And I'm like,
are they using their plugins, right?
Like ACF, for example, great plugin,
but the amount of bloat it could cause,
and especially like,
if you have just one field group and
you have a ton of fields in it,
and then you try and couple that with
GraphQL and you try and go decoupled,
you're not gonna be in for a good
time.
So that's kind of like looking for ways
without having to completely redo a
website.
I look for things that can just be
modulized and broken up a bit more just
to help with the performance so that
you're not slamming it and that you're not
going to have like a five second load
when you load into the dashboard.
Did you ever do sort of site audit,
code audit sort of work when you were
doing agency stuff or did you?
I did actually.
So when I worked for Canopy for a
while, when I left Canopy,
I was on the build side.
So I mainly dealt with new builds for
my last year and a half there.
But my first couple of years,
I did both support and new builds.
So when we had a new client come
in, we would do a site audit.
So again, we would check their plugins.
Is everything up to date?
Are they following code standards?
Are there any security things like
SonarCube, I think is what we used.
and everything.
So we did full site audits before we
even started addressing any of the
client's needs.
And we would have like present depths and
everything.
So similar to what we do on the
migration side here,
if people pay for a premium migration,
I get involved as a solutions architect,
and then we get access to their code
at their previous provider.
And then I do something very similar,
just being like,
Is this good?
But then this comes from like, no,
this won't fly on Pantheon because we have
certain things that just don't work with
the platform.
Not with any provider.
Yeah.
Have you... Probably, I shouldn't ask,
but like I've, in my...
time of doing audits of code and in
particular inheriting code from a
different team for either building on or
for whatever,
there have been times where I have just
been like,
why did you build it like this?
And sometimes it's on occasion been from
teams or agencies that I would have
expected better from.
We don't need to name names,
but have you also had a similar experience
where you got some code,
it was from some agency that you recognize
and you think that you had an opinion
in your mind about them and you see
this code is like, wait a second,
what is going on?
Why is it like this?
Yes,
I've had it from agencies I recognize and
agencies I don't recognize.
I had one customer last year who we
brought on who had a legacy multi-site
experience.
That was built before.
So that was before old school, old school,
old school,
where we had to refactor the database
because they were still using WP
underscore one underscore for their main
blog,
rather than putting it in the main table.
So, and then some of the code.
Some of the UIT I had to do
on that site,
it kept me up at night.
Well, thank you for coming on Miriam.
Where can people find you on the internet
if they were looking for you?
I am one of those interesting folks who
really does not have much social media.
So you could find me on LinkedIn.
and miriam goldman and also
miriamgoldman.ca my website that i haven't
updated much but i will start doing it
more and that's really it i tend to
keep private because i used to be on
facebook instagram but not anymore yeah um
well again thank you for coming on uh
thank everyone uh who might be watching or
listening to this in the future and uh
yeah we'll see you on the internet
Thanks, Chris.