EP319 – WPwatercooler Live at WordCamp OC 2019 #WCOC

(00:00) P water-cooler episode number 319 319 I know I had to go look it up and actually I like update the website and everything to be able to do it so 319 if you’re playing along at home you Gorda order court are calm and you can go take a look at our website and all this stuff that we have going on over there let’s go around the room real quick get everyone introduced I don’t have like a code of conduct typing on yours whatever you know they may or may not be in this room how about that so let’s go around
(00:32) real quick get everyone introduced see read well your head is name is say read and I’m a compressor secretary media all the things that presenting the believe it’s the y-chromosome all right that’s cool it cost for how about you tell us about yourself everybody Jason Casper aka fat mullenweg in the building aka Curt autoloader here with WP water cooler news tomorrow and John Brown are on assignment sitting out in the audience um happy to be here awesome good to have you on as always Leo how about you tell us about yourself
(01:35) hey everyone I am one of the organizers here at WordCamp Orange County that’s where we are yeah and we’re planning something like stuff in Long Beach do you or Long Beach’s I do it’s like my phone’s in Long Beach my father’s actually from Long Beach it is outside the orange curtain yeah yeah we actually have like things you know we we organize things up there too so we’re actually gonna be hosting a work camp coming up soon probably like October or December but yeah that’s that’s me I do
(02:05) that stuff among other things and I do WordPress things and I actually like help organize like WordPress core stuff too which I think we could talk about today be Wong sounds like a wonderful idea whoa hi I’m Steven I’m the founder of Zeke Interactive I run the OC WordPress meetup and I’m one of the organizers for word camp Orange County what do you what are you doing up there on Twitter my website is Jason Tucker top blog I do this show as well as another show called WP blab happens on Thursdays feel free
(02:52) to go take a look at that that’s a it’s a great show we talk about social media marketing and all that fun stuff I’m also the one of the WordPress or one of the word one of the WordPress meetup host right that’s literally your thing over in Whittier so feel free to go take a look at that you can go find us over on on our meetup website party organizer word camp Long Beach and I’m going to be organizing the after party and you should all anyone I can’t see the audience I can only see these four
(03:25) groups but you should all put that on your radar sleep right now just flipping us the bird I mean that’s very accurate so Lee Osama core contributors how should we do core contributors um okay so today at wordcamp arch county I saw Jonathan Desrosiers who’s an awesome core contributor is a core committer actually he has the ability to write code to the WordPress core stuff he gave a great talk on how to contribute and he talked about how he went on his life journey working at Boston University all the way through to now doing a bunch of
(04:12) cool stuff with Bluehost and like helping teach people that you got to build this stuff otherwise the platform doesn’t have it and yeah like there’s definitely a lot there but maybe we can talk a little bit about how maybe we got involved in doing stuff in the WordPress and maybe uh talk about some of the controversy maybe what you said something interesting so he is not just computer he is a committer yes what’s the difference so you can contribute in small ways and hey is your contribution you can just go be a I’m sorry did you
(04:44) just say you can microdose your contributions you can give tiny little bits to the wordpress course but I just I just want to make sure I heard you correctly it’s legal now Steve it’s okay that’s where you put a larger contribution in water and then a little bit at a time you go ahead and just dilute your contribution I’ll use I use what Jonathan called it earlier he called it a drive-by contributor you can just like drop in one patch and be liked by everyone or file bugs you know to stop it small
(05:11) right like you you gotta help out with the project and whatever way that’s appropriate for email that you can give okay and so what’s a commitment add a comma everybody loves it when people add commas an Oxford comma just you know there’s a comma and you need it would be a would be a small like thing cuz people that’s important to the project itself and that’s a microdose that’s a microdisk okay the the other sort of and there’s a bunch of cork core contributors who have done a lot of work over a period of time
(05:41) you will have core commit access can basically write to the wordpress trunk that they see something that’s really important that they know needs to happen they make sure it happens and there’s a whole bunch of them you can see them on the website some of them are really cool people actually Oliver say which of the ones that are my favorite collie like Western Rooter for example had does incredible stuff with PHP Andrew Nason who works with the White House helps the White House org like everybody else gov
(06:09) doing all kinds of really cool stuff like these people are really smart cookies and they’re they’re trying to help the White House I believe what’s up for the record used to help the White House used to help the White House I don’t think you still there I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know that could be an accurate but I don’t believe it Steve Wikipedia make it happen we were late on kinda birthday well it’s really important that the community finds a way to communicate so like there’s a bunch
(06:38) of different ways that we do it there’s what they call the p2 blogs there’s a space we will post stuff but these people kind of go either around that or sort of work with their owns or design decisions to make sure the platform doesn’t fall apart so the committers they are not taking small doses but they’re instead the full whammy there they’re doing it every single day most the time and some people are more active I mean they’re doing really good because that’s your range it’s it’s microdose or full whammy yes
(07:11) well Jonathan Rogers like helped write a ton of stuff in privacy’s he’ll fix a ton of stuff in short codes like stuff that people aren’t caring about but really should and if they didn’t do that work a lot of the stuff that actually the platform needs wouldn’t get done so I’m getting a little quick applause to the people who are doing that core stuff but you know it’s ready for you wherever you’re doing it so how do we get involved in this like SMA who’s not a core contributor but how does someone
(07:39) start navigating those waters sorry start with my so you start you start with like as far as I understand the probably best way is to join with the wordpress.org username join the slack figure out the community you probably fit the best in so if you’re a designer you could do that stuff you’re like Jason and your performance monkey was a whole bunch of really cool stuff there’s always performance things if you’re like Steve and all you want to do is talk about business there’s probably a place for that somewhere all
(08:06) right yeah there’s really not no there’s really not that there’s no place there’s no place I just know there actually is a little bit of a dearth of a place and this is something that’s been a topic of conversation amongst the people in general is that there is less of a place where people who are not contributing technically to contribute so that’s something that I think has been over the past six months or so gotten some more attention in terms of how can you contribute in a way if you’re not
(08:44) necessarily a hard coder or you know feel comfortable enough to do you know polls or whatnot so that struck me needs more similar work so just saying you know you can contribute however you can totally you can but some of those contributions require more effort because there’s not just an easy way to do that yeah so for people who do want to make a technical contribution and something that they do pretty well in track is they have a tag called good first bug and that is great for people who are like okay I know my way around
(09:22) PHP I’m not shy with it I want to start contributing like maybe they have a plug-in or two in the repo but they haven’t taken that first step to to run at the core code a good first bug is a fantastic way to do that I just pulled it up and it looks like there are a hundred and fifty-six bugs tag good first bug in there so if you all have done plug-in work and are ready to take that step and actually you know commit to core and have your name in the release notes so I’m honestly I’m not familiar with this so these bugs are
(10:00) tracked and tagged as good first bug meaning something should go and tackle that as their first project correct okay yeah it’s good evaluating the buzz like for the good person because if it’s like Nathan he’s like this is a great first time it would be like probably a little more complicated could be a hundred hours so there are people like like me and a bunch of others who help maintain each of the components of WordPress so if they usually get tagged or associated with one of those and then we will go
(10:30) through those issues and look for essentially stuff that hopefully is gonna be easy or straightforward or simple hopefully and then we will tag that stuff and we say all right I know this patch only requires like three lines of changes I could totally make that in an hour but I can also give it to someone else and hopefully they can tackle it and then they get their first kind of contribution they get used to submitting a patent it feels normal okay and that is how all of the really simple bugs never get fixed
(10:58) [Laughter] well there are actually people who like like they like literally died at the track looking for old stale tickets they’re like I want to kill those tickets I want them out of here so there are people who like do their best to triage and anything call it gardening is the common one so they clean up the garden the weeds out Scott Taylor is really good at weeding out the super old stuff but low-hanging fruit super old stuff that nobody is really paying attention to the one of the last versions of WordPress that he did the
(11:34) lead on there were a ridiculous number of commits where Scott was just like there are patches for this like why have we not like pulled this thing so he’s he’s closing out tickets that may not even be relevant anymore closing them up that may not be relevant merging patches that it’s like yeah why don’t we have this in here because people like Leo I mean it’s quick and that needs to get done we’ll get it done whatever we need to do and if something sits for too long say hey like this issue is open in fact
(12:06) I think there’s like probably an issue too that’s sitting with me but should probably get addressed because that’s what happens first vote for you going through and you know what happens if the if the the bug is part of something that’s deprecated like is there is there like a way where it’s like this whole section of code is man is now deprecated let’s get a little mildly controversial things like shortcodes xml-rpc even maybe RSS feeds like stuff that people heavily use in WordPress this stuff
(12:36) might consider might be considered legacy or even deprecated eventually by the project and how we tackle this stuff like do we add features to short codes for example really just called legacy is that what you did I did I heard the classic editors we’re living in a post underworld that was that was controversial yeah you heard it here and you know metas is no longer as important we’re trying to build things and blocks and that’s it’s harder it’s better it’s got a lot more flexibility for certain
(13:10) kinds of things but it’s entirely different it’s we have to start answering the questions repeatedly so do they so do they kill those bugs then that are a deprecated code do they say like hello this is gone away anyhow or whatever or somebody else is gonna inherit this because it’s gonna be pulled off into a plug-in or something like that will depends sometimes some of the core committers may say like this is really important we know that this is important they might still make that patch someone
(13:35) might also say that isn’t important just closing it won’t fix it but there’s still you know versions of four nine being released yeah for security patches so it’s still you still have to actually all the way back to three point six I believe yeah there are people for whatever reason who haven’t updated to wordpress 4.
(13:53) 0 let eleven four point five let alone four point nine like it’s clear no do you mean like they’re still um they really are on legacy stuff like people who were in like three you didn’t mistake 5.0 you really meant that yeah so secures people definitely are pushing back all the way through as much as possible so if I find a bug that’s in like the blog role for links I could submit it and then somebody’s gonna have to go and fix that that might get killed as a won’t fix because yeah along with that there I actually do not remember
(14:39) where I read this because I read too many things and I don’t track them enough but there is something if someone was talking recently about the concept of badge collectors so there are these folks who are kind of you know making their way through the community and looking to essentially collect all of which we probably have you all probably have there somewhere all the little badges that have the different icons on them for the different types of contribution and participation that you can do in the community and I read a
(15:09) really great article that was saying hey please don’t just contribute just to contribute just to be a badge collector because we you know it’s not about coming in like I was saying earlier and changing a comma you know and then being like yes I’m a core contributor and now you know having that badge or whatever so that’s something to be aware of oh what’s what’s wrong with that right you’re still coming in you’re fixing something even if it’s small and you’re collecting a badge what’s what’s the
(15:35) problem there couldn’t we just make the badge of kamma probably just annoying are you saying there’s gamification in this accident okay like I talking to Jonathan about his experience at Boston University he was working on multi-site stuff right he was like we got this really big scary thing at our University it’s hard it’s a little broken it doesn’t have this doesn’t have that so we’re making these changes ideally in WordPress core so everyone benefits for this stuff and becomes
(16:08) easier do the things you want to do like he’s trying to do this stuff with that purpose right like you should be doing things with a coming for a good place the badges don’t really mean anything it’s like Foursquare or swarm right like doesn’t really mean anything it means everything they don’t mean anything where’s Hawkins at Pokemon go does not count [Laughter] it’s like whose line is it anyway anybody in the crowd oh yeah everything’s made up and the points I mean the points do matter because it’s a
(16:44) third of the internet running were honest but I mean in the grand scheme of things a little badge on your profile maybe more badges as a solution you know oh yeah more badges there we go yeah catch them all right I think more badges it’s absolutely it’s absolutely the solution because you can even like now in facebook group you know you can get badges for participating in the group you can be like a conversation starter or all these things and honestly even if you don’t want to be gamified you’re
(17:17) like kind of resisting gamified like me you can’t help it you’re like oh I got that I only have to post two more times to get another one so I think I’ll do it so there is definitely a motivation factor you know that’s the reason everything is being game Ithaca game of for card game emphasize that easy for you to say what if we through the badges out and hear me out replace them with oppas so you actually do have to watch them all I know I like this I like it so like a doc block wafu and like absolutely XSS bug blah people
(17:59) who and I mean and also think about the people who make custom whoppin is like how much like business and activity we could give them non-stop unfortunately nobody is listening to the show except the people sitting in this audience though and I’m surprised they haven’t thrown it I have stats to differ but yes well I mean I don’t know I I did like I feel like doing really good PHP really good javascript writing things with purpose thinking about WordPress is a product that’s really hard and if gamification can help people
(18:38) actually get involved more I mean why not lean into it as opposed to lean against it those things all sound [ __ ] who worthy to me they they definitely do so how do we how do we take an idea like this and then pitch it to somebody and then how do we get another part of the organization to hear that pitch how does that work he was saying or whoever asked that is just one part of talking to the other part of WordPress I don’t know I know there’s definitely one of the community people I know kami chaos is
(19:12) back there huh right you got to go find the people who have ideas she’s waving at me yes so so you if you waving at me switch the bad news right now thanks okay cool make it happen so you know if you if you get a solid ideally show up to meetings you meet people and you say hey I have a crazy idea and they say that’s crazy but I love it that’s usually how the community embraces things we’re pretty open to whatever so if if something like Scott shows up to my meet up and says hey I really really want to see more
(19:43) stuff about PHP unit test I would say heck yes do you want to give a talk he’ll say heck yes right it doesn’t matter what you’re doing we have to be a community I I was laughing near you there’s a group that started in in the WordPress slack not too long ago within the past couple years the WordPress hosting group so a bunch of hosts both managed and just standard web hosts have joined together to talk about how to make WordPress a you know like basically here’s best practices here are things that we can be
(20:27) doing even sharing like server config information yeah with each other to make sure that the WordPress experience or anybody that comes to one of like the you know dozens or maybe even hundred hosts that all want to participate can do that and they can actually have like a head start on here is a best practice for your WordPress stack like hosting well and that’s and that and that’s good because it’s it’s it doing those things it’s all good for all of their brands yeah right yeah and technically speaking a lot of
(21:04) the hosts are really similar now and that’s good you should have staging you should have backups and those hosts should really fight to differentiate between customer service compare they think they’re similar there’s that they’re not that similar when you get into it they offer similar things but they act in very differently and the act part is the key part right so like like poster are a lot more similar than more dissimilar and understanding that and finding the differences that really do
(21:33) matter like that’s that happens as a result of people collaborating and trying to make sure that everything on the internet is fast not just one host and that’s absolutely yeah absolutely and cost per once it get a whopper for being a host so this just needs to happen the hosting whomp ooh pasta wobbly he walks around like this like a little yeah he’s a little host server just just imagine a whopper with my crazy hair and beard I literally see a sticker I think we need to get those sashes so that like
(22:08) maybe this is something we could have it we’re in camp Long Beach Leo we can have like sashes so that we can put all of our badges and all of our walk was on it like weird words yeah I’m really really relieved to say because I really because of the way you’re coming through it sounded like you said we needed fascists [Laughter] we can we can wear sashes and then have our badges and be like you know like in the Boy Scouts in the Girl Scouts and welcome to all of our word camp as well like vegan ones I think you have your
(22:55) theme they just got very excited so that never happened do do we want to do we want to talk about our other topic or do we want to scrap that for this water so let’s do it yeah go for it what do you think you know we only got a little bit of time but that might be good cuz it’ll be a cliffhanger and then the huff to listen to it yeah I’m truly paraphrasing this question the way based on the way I heard it is do the internal WordPress development teams actually talk to each other short answer is yes it’s really hard to
(23:39) talk to people all across the world we all async we are all in 15 different locations so it’s hard let’s let’s talk about the the nature of the question right let’s talk about the purpose of the question yeah and why the question was asked in the first place right yeah and why is controversial okay so there’s a lot of complicated nature’s when you’re building software doesn’t matter what kind of software you’re building and there’s a lot of different communities that are sort of micro
(24:06) communities inside the larger thing and so the hard part is there is information there’s so much communication and how do you actually get all of those people to read the things to hear the things everything is like if you go to like the the meta or the core chats there’s hundreds of messages per every ten minutes it’s like really hard to follow so like do people actually read all those things I don’t know if people actually listen I don’t know and then when people say you didn’t hear the
(24:35) thing that I said that was there was all the P to blog about this and this was like we tried literally the reason why I don’t use like maybe the bigger question is maybe the bigger question is is flack the right communication method for all of these disparate developers and community members to be talking to each other all over the world me because I find it difficult okay so we need a like a p4 p5 whatever number were up there nouns are the key to a roundup type post or something that says like hey this is
(25:07) what’s changed in the hosting space or hey this is what’s changing in plugins or hey this is what changing in themes because it’s really hard to like filter through it so unless you are actively doing this as a full-time job which I’m not like I’m as a core contributor like I’m doing it as a part of my life but a very small part 5-10 hours a week at most yeah whereas the people who do it full-time can keep up I can’t remember where this came out because this came up for us a couple of weeks ago but we’re
(25:33) talking about either the WooCommerce team or the the jetpack team or the core team or something something yeah was released and wasn’t working within court wasn’t a plug-in right the jetpack part of it sound maybe it was during that topic that we were discussing that but it’s yeah the I don’t it’s like that the idea of how do you get those two to really communicate really how are they commute how are they communicating with you you know what you know what it was is we were talking about like I think I
(26:04) don’t think I brought up yet I think I brought up the question of like is there essentially like a hallway that these folks are able to like bump into each other on the internet through some slack where they’re like hey so what’s up with this or what’s up with that and and how do those people interact with each other what’s up with that I mean I have to say people try their best to talk but yeah it’s hard you know there’s so many people involved and you really have to be active within it and you also
(26:33) have to be willing to listen to other people and you want to collaborate and you want to work out in the open also the fact that wait the fact that threading in slack is like not good for accessibility make slack almost unusable in my opinion because without threading it’s almost impossible to stay on topic and then at the same time people like don’t thread because it’s not accessible so it causes a lot of problems yeah so that you know how the threading mechanism but they tell people not to use it well it’s not excessively like
(27:09) compliant with the way the screen readers like sit on top of it so slack actually has a problem it’s really hard if you’re using a screen reader to use that with bread doesn’t really work well so the advice is if you’re using slack with an accessible needed community don’t use those threads which means that those conversations become really messy and we’re dealing with this chaos and everything Wow so basically it’s like a giant group text that you don’t you don’t know who half the people are and
(27:38) everyone’s answering a question that someone had two days ago and then responding to someone else’s comments that someone else has already responded to and it’s the giant asynchronous conversation and then all of us somehow expect that to work really seamlessly and to be like I’m getting and get really mad at people if they don’t listen and haven’t heard something and if it’s a little crazy the expectation versus the reality is really out of whack have you have you ever logged into
(28:09) the slack channel saying yeah I’m in fact right now it’s madness it’s a lot it can be very overwhelming also something that we were talking about is like the hallway idea of having a place where people can discuss things with one another really like the core room is four core and the second you start kind of biessing with other folks about something else you get reminded hey this room is for core okay where can I go well we don’t really have a room that y’all can chat in go on Twitter and yell at each other
(28:48) and that’s that is what Twitter is for is just yelling at each other not everybody uses Twitter and a lot of the WordPress development community at least has the slack account and can if yeah maybe we do need a hallway r2 r2 r2 main communication tools within the WordPress community are slack asynchronous non-threaded black and Twitter no no no also the play yeah but but just because you are being a t2 doesn’t mean that every like developers I’m just saying is it useful for this communication that’s
(29:39) all I’m saying I don’t I still don’t think c2 blogs are useful for this kind of communication either they’re very isolated and so if we’re talking about you know how does the whole entire community get access to that it’s you know if this is what we’re talking about right how do people contribute how do people participate look at we add well we need a I need a whopper badge for better communication so like if you communicate better you earn that badge and you can just go back to your old
(30:05) ways and you’re good perfect we solved all the world’s problems here they say thank you all in the audience for hanging out with us we really appreciate it go over to our website at de parkour comm you can look at all the things there on how to subscribe to a parkour doc Pomus / subscribe and Steve and all the folks here that we’re doing you know the the word camp here we really appreciate having the opportunity to have this venue and be able to discuss this was awesome thank you very much all you have a good rest unite why
(30:31) [Applause] [Laughter] I just leave say up there all day we were up there during plugins gonna heckle the crowds a heck of a joke [Laughter]