[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast. From WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how to learn to use WordPress and help with events.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox.

So on the podcast today, we have a Vagelis Papaioannou. Vagelis is a software engineer from Greece. His journey with coding began during his elementary school years. In an experimental coding class. This sparked a lifelong passion within him.

His love for WordPress dates back to the early versions. For the last eight to nine years, he has actively participated in the Greek WordPress community, engaging in various roles, such as organizing WordCamps and meetups. Vagelis also contributes to multiple teams, cherishing the small contributions that allow everyone to make a difference. He also serves as the project translation lead for the Greek language.

Vagelis, although a self-confessed introvert, shares his initial struggles with being a part of the community and attending local meetups. He encourages people to step outside their comfort zones, and attend events like WordCamps and meetups, where they’re likely to discover a welcoming and friendly atmosphere. Vagelis recounts his own experience of attending such events, initially feeling scared, but eventually having an enjoyable time, making many lasting friendships along the way.

He talks about how local meetups are more casual gatherings than WordCamps. People come together to talk about WordPress, learn, and spend time with like-minded individuals. From meetups by the sea to forest walks, these events offer opportunities for both education and social engagement.

On the subject of WordCamps, Vagelis unravels the magic behind these larger multi-day events, with presentations and a contributor day. He emphasizes that contribution to the community doesn’t necessarily require coding skills, and encourages more people to get involved. WordCamps are not only platforms for learning and exchanging ideas, but they also provide a space for attendees to have fun, network, and explore all manner of other opportunities.

We talk about the importance of the code of conduct at WordCamps. This code ensures that participants know that they’re going to have a safe and inclusive experience. With attendees joining from all corners of the globe, these events attract a diverse range of individuals who are passionate about the software and the community.

We then talk about the effort required to organize these events. Vagelis explains why he’s willing to dedicate his time and energy to be a part of such complex projects. He talks about the benefits participants gain from taking an active role, whether as an organizer, speaker or volunteer.

As Vagelis shares his personal experiences in organizing and participating in events like WordCamp, Athens, he strongly advocates for more community involvement, and highlights the need for new organizers to get involved, to allow the community to meet up once again.

We then get into a discussion of other ways that you can be involved. This time in the Learn project, which is making freely available materials so that people can learn about WordPress at a time that suits them. Vagelis talks about what the Learn team does, and how you can join them. He discusses how the team works using GitHub for collaboration and accommodating individuals with various skills and abilities.

From the educational content available on the learn.wordpress.org website., To the valuable connections made through hallway chats, Vagelis emphasizes the power and importance of the WordPress community.

If you’re a seasoned WordPress enthusiast, or just starting your journey in contributions, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast. Where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Vagelis Papaioannou.

I am joined on the podcast today by Vagelis Papaioannou. Hello Vagelis!

[00:05:27] Vagelis Papaioannou: Hello Nathan. Hello.

[00:05:28] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you on the podcast today. Just to give you a little bit of orientation, right at the outset we’re going to be talking about WordPress events. We might well dip our toes into WordCamp Europe. We might talk about local meetups and WordCamps in general. And then we might also pivot to talk about something which Vagelis is interested in, the training team.

But before that, just to paint a picture of who you are and what your experience is with WordPress. I wonder Vagelis if you wouldn’t mind just giving us your bio. You can start as early as you like. Anything you want to say about you and WordPress.

[00:06:04] Vagelis Papaioannou: Yeah of course. My name is Vagelis, I’m from Greece. I was raised and born in Athens and I live in Thessaloniki for the last 21 years. I’m a software engineer and my journey with coding started at elementary school where we had this experimental class of coding and I got really into it. And then that just made my passion.

So regarding WordPress, I’ve been using WordPress since the version one point something, I can’t really remember. I was using b2 and then I jumped over to WordPress. The last eight, nine years I’ve been part of the Greek community of WordPress. I’m trying to go to build as much as possible I can.

And I’m a WordCamp organiser. I’m a meetup organiser. I do contribute across multiple teams like training, testing or photos and all that small bits that everyone can do. I’m also the P.T. for the Greek language translation. Yeah that’s pretty much it I guess.

[00:07:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah that’s a lot. That really is a lot. It’s an absolute pleasure to have you on. We didn’t discuss this in our pre recording chat, but I’m just wondering if you could paint the picture for us of what the state of the WordPress community in Greece is like. Just judging by my accent you can probably tell that I’m from the UK, and we might have a very different complexion here.

We’ve obviously just this year had a huge WordPress event in Greece. WordCamp Europe was held in Athens earlier this year. If I’m looking at it from the outside I get the impression that the Greek community is thriving because they put on events like WordCamp Europe, but I don’t know if that’s the case.

How is it being a Greek WordPress user? Are there plenty of events? Is the community thriving or is it in a different state?

[00:07:59] Vagelis Papaioannou: Well the community is pretty big. We have a huge Facebook group with almost 20,000 people. We do two major events, two WordCamps, one in Athens and one in Thessaloniki. Sadly COVID 19 hit us really hard, so we had to stop for a while. We also stopped the meetups but we’re getting back to it. We’ve done like 10, 11 meetups the last year in Thessaloniki, and I know there are plans to do more meetups in other areas of Greece.

We also in planning of a special WordCamp. We try to figure out where to do that and how to plan it so we can apply for it on WordCamp Central. And yeah we have a lot of users, lots of people trying to translate, we have a lot of coders.

We also have a lot of people actually working in key companies regarding to WordPress, like Automattic and stuff like that. So yeah, we’re doing good I guess. But because I’m that kind of person, I know we could do better in some fields, but that’s a whole different story.

[00:09:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah I guess there’s always room for improvement. I can completely sympathise though with the whole COVID thing. I think it’s fair to say that it put the brakes on in the UK and I don’t think the community has quite got back to where it was. Things are beginning again. There are various different WordCamps and meetups and things like that which are coming back from being online.

Broadly speaking I think a lot of them carried on in an online way, but I’m not sure that the interest was maintained. And so a lot of them are now coming back and hoping to be in the real world once more. But the flagship event, one of the bigger events that we had in the UK was WordCamp London and, as yet, it has not re emerged. So fingers crossed.

[00:09:52] Vagelis Papaioannou: Yeah. I’ve been on the last WordCamp London and I had a blast. It was a great event. We had great fun and I really hope that it’s coming back.

[00:10:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah fingers crossed for that as well. We’re going to talk a little bit about local meetups and what have you, and WordCamp Europe in particular. Let’s begin there. Let’s begin with WordCamp Europe and paint a picture.

Prior to that though I wouldn’t mind having a conversation around the fact that it’s very obvious to somebody like you and somebody like me, who probably obsess more than is healthy for us about WordPress, but we know that there’s a community. We’re well aware that these events take place. There was a time though when I was a user of WordPress, I was using nothing else, it was probably about two years into my journey with WordPress that I actually noticed that there was a community at all.

Prior to that I was simply going to the .org websites, downloading the software, using that software, and then you know rinse and repeat, building websites and so on. And then I can’t remember where, it was possibly on social media or something, I remember seeing a picture. The collection of people with WordPress T-shirts on standing in a hallway or something. And I was thinking well that’s curious, what are they doing?

And then obviously as time went on, it occurred to me oh there are these events. So given that the listenership to this podcast could be anybody, do you want to just talk a little bit about what WordPress events are? What they endeavor to do? How they are organised? Whether that be big events, little events, meetups and so on.

[00:11:21] Vagelis Papaioannou: Definitely. Well first of all I need to reassure everyone that’s listening to this that I’m an introvert. So it wasn’t easy for me to be a part of a community, any community. Or just go in a random place in a local meetup, open the door and just stay there with a bunch of random folks.

So if you feel like that, just come to any event even if it’s a WordCamp, a meetup, gathering, whatever. Just come, say hi and we’re all really welcoming and friendly. And you’re going to find someone who can really make you feel comfortable.

I was aware of the community for a long time before I even managed to go on a local meetup here in Thessaloniki. And I remember me being there, just sitting on a chair, and I didn’t feel like talking to anyone. I was kind of scared. Scared grown up man, just in a strange place with other folks talking about software, which I love.

So the next time was better and I actually had fun. I made a few contacts which I can now call friends. And that’s pretty much what a local meetup is. It’s just a gathering. We just get a soda, we talk about WordPress. We may have a presentation, we may have snacks. It’s a cool two hours spending with friends around WordPress. That’s pretty much it.

I remember our last meetup, it was a month ago and we did it on Thessaloniki seaside. So we had like this beautiful sea view and we were just 20 people talking about random stuff. And then the idea struck, and someone said, shall we do another one? But like in Naousa, which is a different place, a different town. There’s a forest there. We can walk through the forest and go eat and do some stuff. And we agreed to do that. So that’s our next meetup. It’s on September the 2nd. So it’s pretty informal.

And the same goes for WorldCamps, but WorldCamp is a bigger event. It’s usually like a couple of days event. There’s the presentation day and then there’s a contributor day where we gather and contribute.

Just a side note, you don’t have to code to be a contributor. You can contribute in so many ways and we do need more contributors to help in so many teams.

So yeah WordCamps, like I said, WordCamps are informal. You can come to learn something but if you feel that you can’t learn anything you can just come and have fun with us. Have a nice lunch, meet new people, exchange ideas. And maybe at the end of the day you learn something new. I don’t want to digress so that’s pretty much it.

[00:14:11] Nathan Wrigley: No I think that’s great. That was a really nice summary. And I think a really important point that you made there, especially for people who’ve never been to these events before, is the no code piece. That is to say, you really genuinely don’t need to know a line of code, you don’t need to know any of that whatsoever to enjoy the event.

Because usually, especially at the larger events, there’s a whole broad range of things that are being presented, workshops that are being given. Yeah, some of it will be about the code but a lot of it will be about other aspects of life on the internet. So it may be SEO, or marketing, or design, or something like that. So there’s definitely something for everybody.

And also, I’ll throw into the mix, the somewhat undermentioned but very important hallway track. And this is simply when you’re not at a presentation. This is just hanging out, being in the corridor, chatting to people. And my understanding from chatting to people over the years is that quite a lot of serendipitous things happen during those hallway chats. You know friendships are created, businesses are formed, partnerships are made during those kinds of hallway random meetups. And it’s those things in particular are really nice.

[00:15:24] Vagelis Papaioannou: And you also get the vibe of the market. So if you’re into that market, you get the vibe of where are we heading to? And that’s a good thing to always stay up to date.

[00:15:36] Nathan Wrigley: I think also it might be worth mentioning that there is an enforced code of conduct. So there really are kind of rules and guidelines around what is acceptable. So if you have any fears or worries around that, what your participation would look like? How you would feel? How comfortable you would be or what have you, there are definite guidelines to make sure that your experience is as friendly as possible. Let’s put it that way.

So WordCamps are the big ones. Then we’ve got these more ad hoc local meetups where really you’re probably just capturing people from the local area. Maybe a few miles around, as opposed to people getting on aeroplanes. They typically happen more like once a month or something like that.

Why have you been so keen to contribute to these things though? Because my understanding is, especially an event like WordCamp Europe, you only have to attend to realise how breathtakingly large that undertaking is. The enterprise of putting on an event for several thousand people, coming from all over the globe.

The fact that it’s, the catering is done, the internet is provided, there’s AV, there’s translations, there’s people standing around with the correct T-shirt on, helpfully guiding people all over. What I’m trying to paint a picture of is just how breathtakingly large these things are, and complex are. So I’m just wondering, why do you give up your time in this way? What do you gain from it?

[00:16:57] Vagelis Papaioannou: It is indeed a massive event especially the Europe, US and Asia. I mean it’s about giving back I guess, to the community because we all get something out of it. I’m that kind of person that I believe we should always try to give back, even if we don’t get enough. We should give more than we get. This is how I work.

However, about WordCamp Europe, yes it was a massive thing. It required so many hours of work. Oh and I forgot to say that most of the times it is fun to get involved in these kind of stuff. And WordCamp Europe was fun for most of the time.

At the end of the day it is a massive event. It’s our country and we’re a bunch of people that we had to help to organise a good event, if you know what I mean. It’s always about giving back. I don’t have something specific in my mind. I never go out to try to find contacts. I never try to go out and do business or whatever. I just want to give back.

[00:18:01] Nathan Wrigley: Certain sense of pleasure from being there, helping, making sure that it all runs smoothly. I can totally empathise with that.

Okay so again, thinking about the listeners who have never been to such an event as that. I described the kind of things that might be on offer. You talked about the fact that volunteers, community members, helping out at these events are a crucial part of that puzzle.

Are you able to just tell us some of the different roles? Now you might just cherry pick some that you know top of your mind. But just to give a flavor of the kind of things that you could be doing should you dip your toes into the water and offer your time at one of these events. What are the kind of things that you might find yourself involved with?

[00:18:45] Vagelis Papaioannou: Well it’s easy to find something to do on these kinds of events. I mean if you can use Gutenberg you can join the website team. If you can design you can go with the design team. That’s pretty straightforward.

But if you just want to volunteer and that means that you will be there at the three days of the event, and you will all be spending time for the event while being there. Which is a different thing than being an organiser, because we had to work like months, several months before the event. So if you just want to be a volunteer you can do so many things from registration, or from helping the sponsors, from making sure everything is okay. From sitting on a corner and waiting for someone to ask you something.

There are so many roles, and I believe that volunteers are a huge part of any event, even if it’s WordCamp Europe or a local WordCamp. Without the volunteers we can do nothing. And also we need to make clear that the organisers are also volunteers. I had a chat with multiple people, and it looks like some folks believe that we’re getting paid or we get something like a benefit or I don’t know, whatever. But we don’t, we’re just volunteers just like the rest of the volunteers and we are all equal during this event.

[00:20:08] Nathan Wrigley: As one of the lead organisers, given that you probably have months and months of work involved in it, well probably years is more the correct way of describing it. But given that you’ve probably got to make trips to the event, now you mentioned that you don’t get paid, but is there a system whereby, if you’re at that level and you’re organising things and you have to, I don’t know, let’s say for example you don’t live in Greece so you needed to make a journey to Athens. Are there any scenarios in which those things are paid for? Or are you always dipping into your own reserves for the WordCamp organising endeavor?

[00:20:42] Vagelis Papaioannou: I guess you can just look for a sponsor for a company that would like to sponsor you to do that. But in my case I covered everything. I’m in Greece, I’m just 500 kilometers away from Athens, so that wasn’t a big thing. But for other people coming from other countries, and if you consider that this is during summertime, and summertime in Greece the prices are going high, because of the tourism and all that stuff. They have to book hotels just like did, so it’s a big expense to be fair. I mean, it’s a few thousand euros to be able to go to venue visits and then go to the event, and stay for a week.

[00:21:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah that’s interesting. I certainly have met people who have been sponsored to attend these events. Yeah thank you for that.

We should probably also talk about the affordable nature of these events, because typically if you were to go to a three day conference, well in WordCamp’s case it’s often two days, and then there’s something called a contributor day which we’ll get onto in a minute.

The cost of these tickets is really low. If you were to attend an event of similar size and scope elsewhere, I feel that you might have a very high ticket price. But WordCamps don’t have this ticket price. Now I understand that some of the money is offset from the sponsors, but typically they’re very affordable to attend in the region of, I don’t know 40, 50, 60 euros, something along those lines.

So I just wanted to raise that as a point. You don’t need to have deep pockets if you want to attend. And if you’ve got local WordCamps it’s very likely that the cost will be low as well. In fact, in many cases, I think it would be true to say that the cost of your ticket probably wouldn’t even cover the food.

[00:22:27] Vagelis Papaioannou: You always get your money back. And I mean our local WordCamps cost 25 euros. And you get lunch, you get swag, which swag is really, really important. And when someone goes to WordCamp Europe for the first time and you travel abroad, just bring an extra bag with you. You’re going to need it. I’m always bringing an extra bag when I go to WordCamp abroad.

So yeah you always get your money back. You get coffees, you get refreshments, lunch. WordCamp Europe was 50 euros. It’s really cheap because if you consider other events of that scale, the ticket could be like 600 euros easily. So yeah these are really cheap events.

[00:23:09] Nathan Wrigley: I’ll also point out the fact that there are, there’s quite a few initiatives. Many of them actually I believe begun by a previous WordCamp Europe over many years. So for example, if you have children that you need to be taking with you, that is also something which at WordCamp Europe at least, I can’t speak about the other ones, there are facilities provided for that.

And also great lengths have been gone to, to make sure that the events are accessible as possible. So by that I might mean that for example, if you need the use of a wheelchair or something like that, great lengths have gone to to make sure that you can access all of the different parts of the event.

But also that things like live translations are done, and not by an AI robot sitting in the corner but by a bank of real human beings, and all of those things really, they’re amazing. I’m quite proud in a sense that the WordPress community sees those things as important enough to spend the money on, to spend the time on, to get right.

[00:24:13] Vagelis Papaioannou: Yeah that’s really great. And this is again done by volunteers, so we should just sit back and realise how much work we need to do in order to get these done. This year in Europe we had childcare and we also had workshops for children, which was really great. Every event should be inclusive, and accessibility should be our first concern.

However this is something that brings a lot of drama into the community for numerous reasons. But yeah we should all help everybody, everyone, every single one to come to WordCamp and have fun.

[00:24:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah nice. So I think we’ve painted a picture there hopefully of an event which is not only affordable, if you can make it there. The cost of the ticket is affordable, but also inclusive. There’s a whole variety of different things, you don’t need to be into one particular thing aka code.

If you want to attend, it’s very likely that you’ll meet some people, make some friendships. And in my case I think it’s fair to say that quite a lot of real, proper, genuine friendships have been built up from chatting to people who were stood next to me that I never knew just five minutes before.

So they’re the big events. Now I can’t remember whether you mentioned whether you’re a part of a more local meetup, but I think if we could just get into that quickly.

[00:25:42] Vagelis Papaioannou: I’m organising me and a few friends, I’m going to call them friends because after all these years I consider them to be my friends. We’re organising the Thessaloniki meetups, which is a monthly meetup. We try to do presentations. We also have a workshop going on about creating what we called the first community block theme, but we didn’t do it fast enough. Someone else did that, but that’s fine. And we also tried to do a few outdoors meetups. The next one is in a month or so in the city near Thessaloniki.

Local meetups are great. We just have a beautiful small place, sponsored by a local business here in Thessaloniki. We gather once a month, we have some snacks, we have some refreshments, we exchange ideas, we have a laugh, we do the presentation and then everyone goes home. And then we just wait for the next one.

It’s really hard to organise these kind of events. It really needs some time to get them done correctly, and it’s always done by our personal time, so it’s not that easy. But it’s fun, and people really like these kind of events.

Oh, I forgot to mention, these events are free, so anyone can just come and join us. There’s no ticket or whatever. We do have a sponsor which helps a lot for snacks and refreshments, and we do have another sponsor for the venue, so we’re pretty much covered and yeah, it’s fun.

[00:27:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah so much more frequent. The cadence is typically I think once a month, something like that. Much more local, so there’s no accommodation requirements. You just make your way there. Often in the evening when the work day is over. A couple of hours of presentation, like you said a few snacks and that’s the way it goes.

So a real nice way to keep up to date with your local WordPressers. And I think these things, once they kickstart themselves after the pandemic, I think really just events like that really do underpin the whole community. Without them I don’t know where we’d be in all honesty.

[00:27:55] Vagelis Papaioannou: It’s an important part of the community, the meetups, I believe.

[00:27:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah I think so too. Let’s move on. Let’s pivot because we’ve got something else to talk about. So this is something called the training team. Obviously it’s connected with WordPress but I wouldn’t really say that I know too much about this. During the process of this interview hopefully I will be learning a lot about it as well.

Let’s just lay the bedrock. What is the training team? What’s its purpose? How long has it been around? Any place you want to begin there really.

[00:28:23] Vagelis Papaioannou: Well the training team is brilliant. There’s so much content for anyone and everyone in there. And how I met the training team. A year ago I wanted some resources about our local meetup, and I was talking with someone from the marketing team, and they told me just go to the training team and get some content.

What’s a training team? I’ve never heard of it. And then I joined the training team and I’ve seen that there are so much good content in there. There are courses, there are lesson plans, there is so much content for all different levels of WordPress users or developers. For the last year it grew so much.

There are two main things in training team, tutorials and lesson plans. You can follow a tutorial and then something new, or you can get a lesson plan and use it on a local meetup, or on your class and teach the others something new. And in order to do that there are a bunch of volunteers working day and night creating content.

But most importantly keeping the content up to date, because that’s the most important thing. Whenever a new version of WordPress comes out and there are changes, we have to go back, review the content and do the appropriate edits. And also because we’re trying to be inclusive, we want to translate that content, and this is where I fit in. I try to translate as much content as possible in Greek. And I also have on the website in order to do some patterns, to do that translation easier for the translators.

And now we’re in the state where we’re trying to find more people to contribute in translations because if we manage to translate all that content then there is no excuse for someone to say, I don’t know how to do that because everything is in there. So you can really learn something new every day from the training team. Which, by the way, can be found, this is confusing, at learn.wordpress.org. So training team is a team, but the website is learn, and this is where you go to learn WordPress. That’s the idea.

[00:30:41] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know if there was a reason if you like, why the team was given a lot more focus and attention more recently? What I’m wondering is, we spoke a little while ago about the effect of things like the pandemic, and effect that that had on the community. I don’t know if it’s coincidental or if it’s intentional that more effort seems to be being put recently into things like providing training materials.

There seems to be a lot more of that being created, but I see a lot more of it being mentioned in different parts of the WordPress ecosystem. So I didn’t know if it was an endeavor just to bolster what we’ve already got, or if it was trying to react to, I don’t know, community dwindling, something like that.

[00:31:21] Vagelis Papaioannou: It’s probably both. I also think that training team has more resources now. By saying resources I mean more people, and more people join every day, and the more people we get the more content we have. And it looks like it’s getting a lot of support from the community and also the team leads.

The previous ones,, and the ones we currently have did a really great job. I’m not going to get into names because I’m going to forget someone and it’s not fair. But they’re all great, and they all did so much about the training team. And I think this is part of the success of the team. It’s going to get better, I’m pretty sure about it.

[00:32:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah so obviously it’s putting out content, it’s keeping that content up to date. WordPress is going through, well certainly in the last several years has gone through some real transformational changes. And it does feel like we’re with the advent of WordPress 6.2 and 6.3 and probably 6.4, there’s going to be a lot of changes, made and so communicating those changes is going to be really important.

You mentioned that the team leads have been great. You also mentioned that there seems to be a steady trickle of people heading in your direction, wanting to help out with the team. How does that team organise itself? How do you come to decisions about, okay, we’ll make this piece of content, but we won’t make that piece of content just yet? Where do you meet? How often do you meet? What platforms are you using? And so on.

[00:32:47] Vagelis Papaioannou: Well there’s a weekly meeting happening in the Make Slack of the training team. If anyone listening to this and doesn’t use Slack, just download Slack and join. How do we even call that? It’s always confusing. Well the Make Slack which is where all the WordPress folks are gathering around, and all the teams and all the info. And you can get really mad really quickly because of the massive amount of the information. But don’t worry about it just join training team. There’s a weekly meeting there.

And then we do use GitHub, but don’t be scared if you hear of GitHub. We don’t really use it only for coding, we also use it to raise issues. And by raising an issue it can be a lesson plan idea, or a content idea. And this is where all the review is going on, and all of the conversation. And then all of a sudden the content is getting published into the website. It’s really easy. Everyone can contribute.

I forgot to mention that I’m dyslexic. So it’s really hard for me to do many things related to languages and stuff, but I do manage to contribute successfully on those teams without any problem. And whenever I need a hand, a helping hand, there’s always someone to help you.

You can also facilitate an online meetup in training team. That’s another great thing training team does. We do online meetups, and you can learn how to code custom Gutenberg block using React or JSX. Or you can just learn how to use a block, like the very first steps and one to do using Gutenberg.

[00:34:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah I think it’s really remarkable the rate at which I’m seeing content being produced. And also a shame in a sense that it doesn’t get mentioned quite as much as I wish it did. I have to sometimes go looking for these things or subscribe to an RSS feed. But if everybody in the WordPress community was just familiar with that URL, learn.wordpress.org, I think you’d be hard pressed to find nothing there which should be of interest to you.

Whether you’re kind of an expert in building blocks, or whether you just want some primer, some kind of 101 of how to begin using WordPress. It is increasingly an amazing resource. And so bravo for all of the things that are being done there.

I’m just curious about the kind of jobs that might be needed, because I’ve seen video content. So obviously at some point somebody needed to sit down with a screen and record that stuff. But presumably there was some kind of script that was created for that. I’ve seen lots of written tutorials. I’ve seen things which you could describe as courses, where you know one thing leads onto another thing, there is isolated bits of content. What kind of tasks are in need of being done to keep that initiative going?

[00:35:43] Vagelis Papaioannou: That’s a really hard one. I mean everyone can find something to do. You can do the meeting notes, which I can’t because I’m dyslexic, but you can. You can do a translation. You can get a lesson plan and translate it. You can create a lesson plan if you have an expertise, or you can create a tutorial. Or if you can create a video tutorial you can get the video and do the transcript.

You can review the content and test what the lesson plan guides you to do and see if it’s correct or not. And then provide feedback for the author to correct it, or say, yeah it’s great just publish it. There’s so many things from the smallest to the biggest one. And it’s really easy, even with an hour per week you can really make the difference.

[00:36:33] Nathan Wrigley: I guess the whole imposter syndrome thing may be something that people are concerned about. You know they’re listening to this and think, do you know what I think I’ve got something that I want to share, but there’s probably somebody out there who’s better at it than me. You know they’re a better writer or they’ve got skills for putting videos out there.

I guess we should address that. Are there any barriers to entry here in terms of the quality of what you’ve got to produce, or the level of expertise? You know if you are going to be writing or producing materials around, let’s say, something in WordPress Core, you probably do need to have some decent understanding of how that all works so that the content is actually useful.

[00:37:09] Vagelis Papaioannou: Yeah definitely. Well if you get into coding, I mean if you do a coding tutorial I guess you should just follow the coding standards and all that stuff. But again, if you do a mistake it’s not the end of the world. Someone will point you out to the right direction and you’re going to figure it out.

And as you may already know, and I’m sure you do, the best way to learn something really deeply is by writing or teaching it. This is the best way if you want to master a craft. If you try to teach it to somewhere else, you get really deep into it. And at the end of the day you will realise your weaknesses and you get better. Or you will realise that you shouldn’t have that imposter syndrome, which I have really bad.

[00:37:55] Nathan Wrigley: Amazing. You’ve come on this podcast. Thank you for that. Takes a lot of effort.

[00:37:59] Vagelis Papaioannou: I have to say it’s not an easy thing, but I mean I’m dyslexic it’s not something terrible. It’s just, okay I may read half your email and I may respond to half of it, or I may mess a few characters. But other people may get these as a weakness and step back because they have something like that. We have people in WordPress community that they can’t even see and they code daily, which is a massive thing.

If you consider that there’s a person without sight who can create some kind of code which is what they do for a living. Why should I stay back because I have that minor thing? And people shouldn’t just stay back. Just join the community. If you know one thing to do just say, yeah I’m good at it, and you’ll find someone to pair with and create something really good and helpful for others.

[00:38:56] Nathan Wrigley: What a cheery episode this has been. I really enjoyed this. And we talked about these fabulous events which you can get yourself involved in. Potentially make some real meaningful friendships and learn lots of things. But also pivoted to talk about the learn.wordpress.org, the training team if you like, and all of the free resources that are over there. A sort of sub community, if you like, of people there that you can also make friends with, and become part of the training team setup.

If somebody has been listening to this today and has thought to themselves, do you know what, maybe that’s for me, I’m going to give it a go. Whether that’s organising an event or becoming interested in training and all of that kind of thing. Let’s tackle the training team bit first. Where would you advise people to go? You mentioned obviously Slack but I wondered if there was somewhere else that you wanted to mention as well.

[00:39:44] Vagelis Papaioannou: If you don’t want to join Slack yet, just go to learn.wordpress.org, and this is the main website. And at the very bottom of your screen you’ll find the CTA. Have an idea for your content? Let us know. Apply to present a tutorial. Submit the topic idea. Just click any of those buttons. And on top of that there’s another block which says get involved, learn how to contribute. And you get all the info from there. It’s really easy. And there’s nothing scary into the process of being part of the team. There are all really welcoming and we’re really all good people. Well most of us.

[00:40:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah thank you. And then pivot that to events, meetups and WordCamps. Where would you point people if they want to begin that journey?

[00:40:32] Vagelis Papaioannou: Well I guess from their local community. Also be aware that you may see that there are a few faces that are again and again on the same event. An example, I’ve done a presentation at WordCamp Athens 2022. I’ve done one in 2021 I guess. I can’t remember. And then I did one in 19.

This is not because I’m special or something. This is because you didn’t apply. If you apply. You may get up there. We need help. We need more people. We need more organisers. We need more people to do presentations, more speakers if you want to. Don’t block yourself, just find your local community, get in touch with them, apply to facilitate an event, apply as a speaker.

It’s really easy. And even if you don’t get approved at the first time you apply as a speaker just do it again. Try again. It’s not the end of the world and it’s not personal. It’s probably because that specific event had too many applications, or maybe your presentation was too specific to something.

I mean I’m a coder but I’m not going to do a really deep, deep coding presentation because I know most folks are not coming for that on a local WordCamp, and they kind of get bored and we need to sell these tickets. So we had to do some funny presentations coding wise, but not just open your terminal people, type npm install and do that stuff. Yeah you know what I mean?

[00:42:09] Nathan Wrigley: If somebody has been listening to this podcast, this is more particular to you, where, if you wish to share that is, where would people be able to contact you? Perhaps you’ve got a website that you want to mention or a, I don’t know, a social media handle that you feel is a good way for people to get in touch.

[00:42:25] Vagelis Papaioannou: I do have a website which I made at WordCamp Athens some year. I can’t remember. It was a presentation about headless WordPress, which was really good back then when people started to freak out about Gutenberg. And I don’t use it at all, so there’s no content in there, so don’t use that.

Find me on GitHub. My username is vagelisp. Or on Twitter, and my handle on Twitter, it’s VagPapDev. Yeah that’s hard. V A G P A P D E V. That’s my Twitter handle. You can find me there. And of course on any of the Make Slack channels as Vagelis. And on Greek community Facebook and Slack channels as Vagelis as well.

Some may spot it that my name is spelled wrong and you may seen this with an n, Vangelis. I just don’t like it with a name. It’s my name. I’ll write it however I want.

[00:43:20] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. I do hope that you get some people reaching out. That would be really great. I appreciate it. Thank you so much.

[00:43:27] Vagelis Papaioannou: Thanks for having me. It was really fun. And I really hope someone got something out of it, and someone got the boost, they may wanted to join their local community.

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how you can assist the WordPress project by contributing.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you, and hopefully get you all your idea featured on the show. Head to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Olga Gleckler. Olga is a self-taught developer with many years of experience. After initially pursuing a career in marketing, she turned back to her passion for programming and became a full-time developer. She has been contributing to WordPress for four years, and is currently serving as the Core triaged lead for version 6.4.

In addition, Olga is a maintainer for two components in Core, and actively participates in various teams within the WordPress community.

Outside of work, she’s also writing a fantasy book, which has a significant personal project for her.

Olga has tried her hand in various teams within the WordPress community, ranging from Polyglots to Training, Support and more. She challenges the commonly held misconception that only coders can contribute to the WordPress project, highlighting the many different ways individuals can contribute without coding skills.

During our conversation, Olga shares some examples of non-coding contributions that can be made to the WordPress project. We talk about the process of submitting patches and contributions to WordPress, discussing the schedule for releases, and the importance of understanding the processes and deadlines.

Olga also emphasizes the essential steps of testing, reviewing for coding standards and ensuring correct documentation in order to make impactful contributions.

Olga’s journey and the WordPress community has been very varied. She discusses how being part of this ecosystem has improved her career prospects, and gained her trust from others. However she acknowledges that not everyone finds their place immediately and may struggle to get started.

She explores how to contribute without becoming discouraged, and shares her experiences in the mentorship program that paired mentors with mentees in navigating the WordPress community.

Throughout the conversation Olga shows a deep passion for the WordPress project and the collaborative nature of the community. She reminds us that contributing to open source projects requires patience and persistence and shares her insights on learning methods, seeking guidance and asking questions in order to make progress.

If you’ve thought about contributing to WordPress, but are not sure where to begin, this episode is for you. If you’re interested

in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Olga Gleckler.

I am joined on the podcast today by Olga Gleckler. Hello, Olga!

[00:04:08] Olga Gleckler: Hi.

[00:04:09] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you with us. Olga is going to be chatting to us today about contributing to WordPress, probably specifically around WordPress Core, but we will no doubt in the introduction discover that Olga’s done a lot more in the WordPress space.

Olga, just before we begin, let’s orientate our listeners a little bit about you. This is a chance to give us your biography. Tell us who you are, how long you’ve been working with code and computers and in the WordPress space more specifically. You can go as far back as you like.

[00:04:43] Olga Gleckler: Sounds great. I wanted to be a programmer at school, but I messed up with my education and turned out to be a marketer. Then I was a bit disappointed in marketing because you cannot promise to deliver something and actually deliver it. And I switched back to my previous passion to development, and become a developer like a self taught.

And already nine years I’m working full time as a developer. And four years I’m contributing to WordPress. To find the WordPress community, it was a big discovery for me, and actually turning point for the whole experience, because WordPress is good, is great, and I liked it.

When I discovered the community, I started to love it. And since Berlin in 2019, I joined marketing team and several other teams. I contributed to polyglots team, to training team, to support, I love support. And some other teams. And right now I am Core triage lead for 6.4. I was Core triage co-lead for 6.3 as well.

I’m a maintainer for two components in Core, so I think I know a bit about how you can actually contribute to Core, and I still enjoying all the process.

Apart from full time job and contribution, I also want to mention that I’m writing a fantasy book. It’s like a big deal for me. It’s a draft, but it’s another passion I carry on with myself all around the world.

[00:06:25] Nathan Wrigley: That’s really interesting. So you’ve been involved in all sorts of different sides of WordPress. You mentioned there specifically that you joined the marketing team, obviously based upon your past history with studying marketing and things like that. But you found that that maybe wasn’t the best fit for you. And I guess that’s going to be part of the conversation today, is that there’s a lot of different places that you can contribute. And if you join a team and it doesn’t seem to be the right fit first time, that’s not a reason to give up, because there are just multiple different ways that you can contribute to WordPress, right?

[00:07:02] Olga Gleckler: I love marketing. I cannot kick it out of me, and I still deeply involved in marketing team activities and most of my efforts I am making are between teams. For example, between marketing and mobile team, between marketing and Core team. It’s something inside me and I cannot kick it out, and I’m looking at Core tickets from the marketing point of view, and trying to find something significant, something to change, something to improve user experience, to deliver improvement and make a difference and impact.

So, yes. I joined marketing team first and I’m still there, part of the marketing team, but I tried different things like in support, in polyglots. They are all very different and very important as well. So I poke around a lot, and finally I pluck up the courage, with help, and starting to contribute to Core team.

[00:08:06] Nathan Wrigley: It sounds like on your journey you have dabbled in, you said, poking around, you’ve had a go at various different teams and you’ve obviously enjoyed that. In some of the show notes that you shared with me, you list out some of the different things. So you’ve been involved in several different teams, for example, polyglots, training, and you mentioned support and TV actually, which is kind of an interesting one.

That gives us an idea of the different things that you can be involved in. There’s a whole range there, but I want to drive this message home. The idea that if you’re in the WordPress community, I think there is a perception that if you don’t code, you’re probably not going to be able to contribute. And I think it’s fair to say that you really don’t believe that. That’s just not true. You don’t have to have any coding skills at all.

Now, clearly, if you’re tackling contributions where code is required, that’s probably different, but there’s loads of different ways that you can contribute. And I wonder if you wouldn’t mind just telling us about some of those different things. Some of the things that teach us that you don’t need to be a coder to contribute to the project.

[00:09:17] Olga Gleckler: For example, Community team. Community team is handling all the organization processes for meetups, WordCamps, other events and supporting people. It’s a great and a big job for managers. People who are taking care about things. You don’t need to be a developer at all. You just need to manage things.

And this is only one team, and we have more than 22 teams. We have security team. It’s a bit obscure because obvious reasons, but you can contribute to all other teams. For example, if you are teacher, you can contribute to training team. If you are purely WordPress user, you can contribute to a lot of teams.

For example documentation and checking if things are clear, and documentation is actually following the actual result or not, or something needs to be changed.

And users, just users without any experience in development can bring a huge value because developers are, we have such flaw because everything is working for us. We know how it should go, and it’s going in the right direction. And if you don’t know how it’s supposed to work, you can poke around a bit and discover some flaws, some doubts, some things which are unclear, and bring a huge value for the code itself.

And apart from it translation. Polyglot team is your goal if you like to translate. And this is the way to improve your own understanding of English and your own language. Because if you are starting to translate, it’s become apparent, obvious that it isn’t easy to do. And you need to put your brain, your heart to this task at hand.

And support also a good point for people who want to learn. Because if you, for example, can answer like one question from ten, you can make someone else’s day better.

And in the process, you can learn more and more, and answer more questions, and improve your own skills this way. Just helping other people. And. This is only few teams you can contribute.

And also TV. You can edit videos for other people. You can translate and make subtitles for these videos. You can of course review them.

And the team everyone is just love right now is photo team. You can contribute your photos to photo directory and contribute this way. If you are a photographer you can contribute to WordPress your ideas in pictures. And of course, if you like looking at pictures, you can go and review these contributions. Because there are some rules, for example, people not, should not be present on these images, et cetera. So there are some rules about quality, et cetera.

So we have a lot more abilities. It’s just top of things and we have a lot more.

[00:12:37] Nathan Wrigley: There are, from everything you’ve just said, so many different avenues that you could go down. And I know, even though you gave us quite a list there, you’ve still probably only scratched the surface, and if you were to get into the weeds of those teams, I’m sure there’d be something for everybody.

I have a question. It’s a bit of a personal question. And I’m really wondering why you do this. And the reason I’m asking that is because a couple of times in what you just said, you mentioned how it was good for your, your heart. If you like, it made you feel better. But also you said that it was helping other people.

And so let’s, for example, say that you answer a support ticket, you’ve helped somebody out. You’ve taken them from a place of not knowing, to a place of knowing. So, why do you give up your time? What is it that you get out of it? That may be simply that it makes you feel good, you want the project to be better, so that you can be employed from working with WordPress.

It may be that you just enjoy it, that you get to meet new people, attend events, go in any direction you like. I’m really curious.

[00:13:37] Olga Gleckler: I think I love everything. I put my trust in WordPress. This is best choice there is. I believe in it, and of course I’m going to improve, to put back this Five For The Future of myself. To be able to work and use WordPress continuously, and improve it like it’s obvious choice for people who are working on it. And this is only one way.

The second, I love all this gathering, all these people with passion. Open minded people and everyone is curious and want to learn and want to do something. And everyone is open and this is a safe environment. We’re all following code of conduct. So, it’s completely different space. Open source project. It’s blow minded. I think how it can change your mind and your perspective.

And of course I got job proposal, previous one, because people know me in the community. And this one is also partly because what I’m doing, because I’m well known, a developer. So I was wondering, where is the technical interview? And I was told that there is no need for you, because we know that you are up to scratch already. So it was a good point.

So people are amazing. You are improving your skills. You are getting understanding of your level in comparison to other people’s level. You can learn on their efforts and, for example, patches, examples, documentation, etc. So you are continuously improving yourself. A lot of reasons.

[00:15:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there are a lot of reasons. Really interesting though. There’s obviously a lot of desire from you. You obviously enjoy the whole ecosystem and all of the different tendrils and spokes on the wheel. But also interesting to note that you’ve also done your career prospects no harm by contributing, because you get to the point where you’ve contributed enough that people are going to start looking for you as somebody that they can trust and rely on. So you kind of jumped over the hurdle of job interviews a little bit there as well. So that’s really interesting.

Okay. Let’s move on to the, another part of the conversation, which is beginning contributing, how you might do that. Because I’m guessing that for some people, it may be that you hit the ground running and you decide, okay, I’d like to be part of the contribution community and you find the right project and you find the right thing to do immediately. But I’m also fairly sure that other people will get discouraged. They’ll perhaps jump in to the wrong part of the project, or maybe tackle something which is a little bit difficult. They can’t find the people to help them and so on. So I wonder if you’ve got any advice about that? Trying to contribute without getting discouraged.

[00:16:40] Olga Gleckler: Firstly, you need to know what is your learning curve, what is best for you. Sometimes it takes some time to figure it out. For example, some people are purely reading documentation and they are fine with it. But some people need video recording, or they need like a leg up from mentor or just little help for like facilitators.

And we are trying to provide all this to make it really easy. Right now, there is a barrier, yeah. But if you want to start to contribute to Core, for example, you need to go to new contributor chat. This is like bi-weekly meeting before the main dev chat. And it’s better to ask questions. For example, we are like going through the usual script, we are highlighting several documents and links you’re supposed to browse, but you can be stuck at any moment and actually these meetings are for providing help and we are there.

I’m mostly present there to help if people are stuck. And you need to understand that asking questions, it’s normal state for everyone. We all are continuously asking questions, and there is no stupid questions, because everyone knows that sometimes it’s hard to begin. Or even you can miss something obvious, even if you are the smartest person in the world, you can miss something obvious, because it’s obvious for someone else.

So, this is how you can start. But in addition to this, we started a contribute mentorship channel in the Slack. This is dedicated channel for contributor mentorship program. We just finished first pilot program when we took 13 people and they got their own mentors. But everyone else was hanging around, and facilitators like me was providing help for people and answering questions. Specific questions, like how to start, how to pick up ticket, what I should do etc. And if I am like with such background, what is better fit for me, etc.

But as well, apart from this, you can just poke around and be present in usual developers chats, but it can take time. So to make things quickly, you need some help from people. And we are actually ready for help. And in the documentation, there is a list of people whom you can ask if you have questions and difficulties. I’m listed there as well. So people are actually writing for me in DM if they don’t like comfortable enough to write openly, and asking such questions.

But if you want your question answered sooner, you can just go to Core channel in the Slack and ask this question openly for everyone to see. And this way you can contribute to other people’s success as well, because some people not ready to answer this, the same question, and they can see your question and pick up what was written to you. But you don’t need to jump in the middle of usual, regular chats. You need to wait until open floor if there is like a dev chat going on. So your question can be like, just be flooded with everything else which is happening. Or this is a release going on, no one will be able to answer your questions properly.

[00:20:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s a good point. Timing is crucial. I’m just going to circle back to the mentorship program because I think that’s really interesting. So this is a new initiative, and it may be of interest to people who perhaps have thought about contributing, but have been a little bit unwilling or discouraged, or they had some bumps in the road and decided not to continue.

Can you just tell us what that is, how that process works? And I know it’s new and I know you’re trying to figure it all out, but what is it? How does it work? My understanding is that you will be partnered, in certain teams, at least anyway, with people who have done the role that you’re hoping to do and can therefore sort of shepherd you for a period of weeks. Set the expectations for you, give you some advice about where to go for help and all of that kind of stuff. Have I more or less got that right?

[00:21:17] Olga Gleckler: Yeah, it was a pilot, so we were just trying things. The plan for people was decided, how they can proceed. And we received 50 applications, but was able to take 13 people to partner them with mentors. Mentors were people with wide knowledge inside the community and contribution, but not exactly the match on person’s interests. This person was providing like general support. And actually it’s works great.

They make contribution plans and providing feedback, what’s working, what is not working. And first two weeks mentees was doing learn courses. And I think 11 of them finished all courses. And then we started sessions, introductory sessions, for many WordPress teams. I had one introduction session for Core. It was also training team, polyglot team, support team, community team, and several other teams.

So we put a lot of efforts and most of these sessions are recorded, so you can rewatch them. And this was only the first pilot try. So I think the next time we will do better. And we actually scheduled this to be finished next day after release. So our mentees was able to see the whole process of the release alongside with us, and take part in this.

And several people actually contribute to Core. They made patches, they tested things. From our point of view, it’s a real success and we provided people ability to start quickly, and when there are dedicated people, it’s much easier to ask questions and get answers, and be oriented in this huge area. And because this mentees got an overview of the whole project, like general.

They was easy to understand what will fit them better. If they like Core, or if they want to translate things, or if they are going to support. Actually, I think one guy answered 200 questions on the support, on the spot, yeah. I have much difference in answering questions. It’s actually takes time, but he went passionate about this, and it’s great.

[00:23:43] Nathan Wrigley: You mentioned in the shared show notes that we’ve got together for this podcast episode well, I just think this is a lovely phrase, so I’m going to read it out. You wanted to talk about setting the right expectations and understanding of processes, and the fact that these are the key points to, this is the bit that I really like, joyful contribution. So I wonder if you could outline some of those things, some of the wrinkles, some of the expectations that you need to, not only have set for you, but need to set yourself. Because it may be that there are going to be bumps in the road, things that don’t quite work out.

You may tackle something which ultimately never gets used, or you may think that you’ve created a solution, I’m thinking about coding in Core in this particular case, which then has an impact on something else. And so it needs to be iterated on over and over again. So I guess what we’re trying to say is, it’s not always going to be plain sailing. Not every contribution that you make might be used or suitable. But there are things that you think you can do to make sure that the process is more likely to work in your favour.

[00:24:46] Olga Gleckler: Yeah, because it’s open source. We have a huge community and we are working together. And if you did something like your part, it’s a bit naive to expect that someone else will pick immediately, like next day. And everything will be done until Friday. It’s not happening. So if you know that things are taking time and can be more complicated than they look like in the first place, you can adjust your expectations and don’t expect your shiny new Core Contributor badge next morning on your profile.

You will get this badge, but only when you’re patch, or testing involvement, or other contribution will be going to release. So you will get this batch after the release, right after. But still it takes time. So if you are like in a hurry, you need to adjust.

And of course, sometimes people are creating a patch, like I’ve done everything and it’s not going anywhere. And they are becoming disappointing and interest is going away for contribution. So, what you should do if you did something and no one is paying attention, at least it looks like it. You need to understand that we have more than 8,000 open tickets. So, it’s a huge thing and we are continuously triaging these tickets. This is why we need continuously triage and component maintainers in the first place.

So if you did something and no one is bothering about it, you should look if this ticket has an owner. Owner is not a person who is doing the patch. This is person who should care, who supposed to care, about this ticket and push it forward. If this ticket has an owner, ping this owner right in the ticket. I did this, please take a look and how we can proceed.

And this ticket has no owner, you can’t ping component maintainer. Some components don’t have maintainers because we have a lot of components and a bit short in maintainers. What should you do? You can turn up on regular dev chat, wait until open floor, and ask about your ticket and what you want to do about this. There will be a lot of seasoned Core contributors around at this point, and your ticket will be noticed. If it will be like good to go further or you need to rework, it will be seen. But at least you will be starting in the right direction forward. So, you need to be a bit pushy about things to make them happen.

[00:27:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess that’s a really interesting lesson, isn’t it? If you contribute something and it doesn’t either immediately get noticed, or you feel that it’s not being noticed, I think that’s interesting advice. There are different ways that you can make your voice heard, shall we say, and you’ve mentioned some of those there.

You also wanted to point out that there are roadblocks in the timeline of WordPress, where if you submit, let’s say a patch to something, there are periods in the calendar where things are frozen. And so there are periods, for example, just prior to a release, when we get to release candidate one or beta one, where really, you’re probably best doing something else because there are freezes. You say that the polyglots team needs to be able to translate strings and things like that. So don’t know if you want to talk about that.

[00:28:19] Olga Gleckler: Yes, sometimes people made something and turn it up, right before the release. And they are disappointed because their patch will not go to this release. Because we have schedule and schedule for the next release, you can easily look on the make wordpress dot org slash core slash 6 hyphen four, for example, right now for this release, and understand the process.

So if, for example, you are working on enhancement or a feature, they need to be in the trunk before better one. Because it’s like a significant changes, and they need good testing coverage, et cetera. Big things needs to be, go first. If ticket has a keyword early, it should be even before beta one, like right after the previous release. It should be done quickly, because these things can impact a lot.

And then there’s a release candidate one. If you are working on a bug or if you are anything have content change, it should be in the trunk for release candidate one. Because with release candidate one, we have strings freeze. This is time before release candidate one and actual release for Polyglot’s team to be able to translate this new, or changed strings, to their own languages and make WordPress great in their own language.

People need time for this, and we have a huge amount of strings. If you will be starting to contribute to Polyglot’s team, you will start to understand that it’s also a big deal and a big job. So if you’re working on something, you need to fit your patch in this right moment and not after.

And of course, your patch needs to be tested, your patch needs to be reviewed from coding standards, for possible regressions. Possibly you will need to rework some things, or make changes in supporting documentation. For example, each function has this description, yeah, documentation for this function.

This is why WordPress is so great. It’s clear, good written documentation inside code. So everything should be fine before it will go to trunk, even if the thing is working itself. Sometimes you need to cover this code with unit tests and you need to take into account these things as well. Sometimes, most of the time, people are surprised about unit tests.

And we have a huge coverage of the code and it’s actually great. It makes things robust. So if you fix some bug, you are covering this part of the code with unit test to be sure that this will not be happening again. And it’s actually great.

[00:31:09] Nathan Wrigley: There are some places, probably it’s fair to say, which are better places to start. And again, in the show notes that you’ve shared, you’ve alerted me to the fact that it may be that you think something is going to be relatively straightforward. So again, we’re talking about bug fixes here. So we are talking about the code.

But it may be that you submit something and it turns out to be more difficult. So what you suggest then is that there are some recommendations for where a new contributor might start. So perhaps not the best idea to find the most difficult and challenging thing first time around. And there is some guidance that you can give in terms of where to look and tickets that are marked in a certain way. So yeah, I wonder if you could get into that.

[00:31:53] Olga Gleckler: Yes, sometimes ticket can be, look very simple, but can turn into a rabbit hole. For example, my best example so far is changing double equal to triple equal. It can bring a lot of regressions, and you will be browsing, trying to fix other things. And most likely this change will not be worth it. And it will be very difficult to convince everyone else that it’s actually worth doing. And, we will not have ten more bugs because of this one.

So sometimes good new patch, like a feature or enhancement, works better. And robust piece of code, when you have like head or tail, it’s great. And we have tickets which are marked as good first bugs. So if you are browsing tickets in Core track, you can see these tickets by this keyword, by search, custom search. And you can even subscribe to this good first bug hashtag on Twitter and following these tickets.

For example, if some ticket is not good for you. If you don’t like it or you don’t want to work on UI, for example, or you prefer some other stuff, you can be subscribed to this hashtag, and following along and see what is actually working for you. And start when there will be like right ticket for you.

But this can be like a bit shock, because a lot of people are subscribed to this good first bugs, they can be taken and already someone else can make a patch. But another thing is that if there is a patch, it does not mean that you cannot contribute because you can review this patch, you can make improvement to this patch.

You can collaborate with other people on this ticket and make it work, and be great and quick. So, don’t abandon some ticket if there is a patch. Work is not done with the patch, it’s just the beginning.

[00:34:01] Nathan Wrigley: You also make a recommendation to look out for, I guess, if you’re beginning at least anyway, to look out for tickets where the scope is really clear. And you’ve also got channels for feedback.

[00:34:13] Olga Gleckler: Yes, definitely. Because sometimes scope isn’t clear and it also can turn rabbit hole. So if you have any doubts about tickets, just any, like a tickling feeling inside your head that something is not actually right, you can turn up into the Core channel on Slack, and ask about this ticket.

Seasoned contributors will look through and clarify things for you. It’s actually better than put up a lot of work and then turn out that something was wrong in the beginning with the ticket and approach is not working. So don’t waste your time, and be ready to collaborate on the ticket from the beginning with other people. And it’s what actually is working.

If you are like staying alone and doing something, you can feel lonely and a bit abandoned, and then disappointed. But if you are open to conversation to other people and can receive help, you can provide this help as well. And we are all working on the final result, on WordPress, and it’s great.

[00:35:23] Nathan Wrigley: I like the way that you’ve rounded off the show notes, because you make the point that whole process of improving WordPress is a continuous learning process. And you may feel that you’ve just provided lots of your time. Maybe your patch wasn’t used, or you ran up against something which you couldn’t work out for yourself, and you needed additional help.

But you make the point that it’s okay, you know. It wouldn’t be wise to view that as a waste of time because even negative experiences, when you view them from a distance can often be helpful. You may learn something along the way. So negative results, negative experiences may also turn out with time to be positive experiences. And so I guess that’s kind of a nice way to frame it.

[00:36:05] Olga Gleckler: Yeah, you can like cut out things that are not working and to make clear paths to things which are working. And then the result, everyone’s contributions count. No matter if you make patch and it wasn’t working, and someone else went and improved your patch and make some additional things. And another iteration, another approach discovered some other possibilities. Upon your negative result, they will be going forward.

[00:36:37] Nathan Wrigley: Just before we round it off, I do wonder what your thoughts are. It’s very clear from everything that you’ve said that you’re very committed, you’re very keen. You love all this stuff. I wonder what the state of contributions is? I’m particularly thinking about things like the pandemic, for example. And whether or not that had an impact in the amount of time that people were able to give.

My understanding is that contributions may have taken a little bit of a dip. I don’t know where we’re at right now. Obviously the program that you mentioned for mentoring earlier is a great way to encourage people, to get people back in. But I don’t know what the situation is. Are people contributing this year in the same way that they were, let’s say, five years ago? I don’t know if you have any data on that at all.

[00:37:24] Olga Gleckler: I don’t think any data, but yeah, we had a drop in contribution when pandemic started, because everyone was distressed and we need to take care about our family, our health. So we went through this and not once, but several times having this thing.

But right now I think we are on the right track. It comes down and we used to new things, and it’s actually turned to be better for everyone. Because, for example, employers understand that people are able to work remotely. And many people right now are working remotely. They got more time. They are saving time on this road to work and back at home.

So they are keeping this time and they can contribute more easily. I’m an example for this because I’m working remotely all these nine years. This is why I was able to contribute at the beginning, because otherwise I wouldn’t have time. So I think pandemic, it was horrible, yeah, but it’s turned for the better. And right now we can do more. We can contribute more and we can be more flexible in what we are doing.

[00:38:45] Nathan Wrigley: Olga, I think we’ll wrap it up there. But before we do, obviously, you’re very keen, and if your passion for contributing has rubbed off on somebody else, and perhaps they would like to talk to you before they jump in with both feet. I wonder if you wouldn’t mind telling us a little bit about where we can find you. That might be a website or a Twitter handle, whatever you like.

[00:39:07] Olga Gleckler: I think best place to find me is on Slack. Why my name? Because there are several channels, I can put people in the right direction straight away. And because I’m almost always there. I just want everyone to join. But, yes, if you have problems with Slack, and it can happen, then you can reach me on Twitter, and I will be able to help you join WordPress org, create an account, etc. But, probably you can try it yourself.

[00:39:42] Nathan Wrigley: Olga Gleckler, thank you very much for joining us on the podcast today. I really appreciate it.