Tonya & the WP Developer’s Club, Episode 72

Episode Transcript

Carrie: Howdy! Howdy! Welcome to officehours.fm episode # 72. I’m broadcasting from Texas today all the way up to the Northwoods with my guest Tonya. Tonya, how you doing?

Tonya: I’m good. Thanks for having me on Carrie. Hi everybody.

Carrie: I’m excited to have you on. So today we’re going to be talking about a really interesting topic, which is the lack of certification in the WordPress world. What that means for people trying to hire developers and what Tonya has got going on to help that out. Before we dive in, I just wanted to take you have questions for Tonya you can send them via Twitter using #officefm or if you watching over on Google+ you can use the Q&A app to get one of those in. Thank you to those of you who are tuning in and listening live. It’s always nice to have live viewers. I did want to thank our sponsors for this episode. I’ve got DreamPress2. They are a managed WordPress hosting service brought to by DreamHost. I’m going to tell you more about them later. I’ve also got the WordPress Development Workflow Webinar series. Boy that’s a mouthful. Where myself and Mika Epstein will be teaching folks how to do a proper WordPress Development workflow. More on that later as well. So without further adieu, here we are. So Tonya what are you sipping on over there?

Tonya: I’ve got my hot water and lemon.

Carrie: Cheers!
Tonya: Cheers to you.

Carrie: I’m drinking little hot tea over here in an effort to make me less…or my voice more buttery. I don’t know that it’s working though.

Tonya: It sounds buttery to me. Like it’s oozing all over my screen. (both laughing)

Carrie: Wow. Wow! Well I’m really sorry. I’ll send you some monitor wipes after the show. I’ll get an amazon drone to deliver them.
Tonya: Excellent! I can just see the package arriving now.
Carrie: From the sky no less. Well for folks that haven’t gotten the chance to meet you, will you give a little rundown of who you are and what you do?

Tonya: Oh Sure. Hi. I’m Tonya. What do I do? Well, I started a club called WP Developers Club. You can find us over there. I am a software engineer, an electrical engineer and quite a few other things. But I’ve been in software engineering for 30 years now. I first came to WordPress with my business – oh gosh. I think it was back in 2005. We needed a business website and it switched over from ASP. So I’ve been around a little while.

Carrie: Wow! So you were literally then coming over to WordPress at its very beginning.

Tonya: Yeah. Pretty close.

Carrie: Excellent! Well, I’ve done some classic ASP slinging in my day too. So if we want to nerd out…you know? I don’t know if I’d remember it if I tried. I’ve been in PHP so long.
Tonya: (laughing) Do I have to remember?

Carrie: You know what? I have one client. I built their site literally a decade ago in classic ASP. I should’ve done it in .NET by that time. I thought it was too much of a learning curve, timeline, budget and all that stuff. So I went with Classic ASP. Anyways, they had the same site. Like they never updated their site. They had me like do updates on the back end for them, but they never wanted to rebuild… they’re a nonprofit…so there is never the budget to rebuild. Every time I would have to go in and edit their site, I’d have to re-orient myself with classic ASP and remoting into a SQL Server. Yeah. It was bad news bears. Anyway…
Tonya: Yeah. That’s why I said let’s not go back there.

Carrie: Yes. Then I did. Then I proceeded to go right back there.

Tonya: Did I say I used to do .NET things? How I made robots and stuff move? Nowadays, I don’t do that. I’ve moved away from that and now I’m just in the PHP world and obviously WordPress.
Carrie: Did you find the transition…when you’re in a program for so long… the transition between languages difficult or is it more once you have the…kind of the understanding of how code operates it’s just a matter of learning new syntax?

Tonya: Right. It’s the latter. Basically what you find is once you learn how to think like a software engineer and you’ve been exposed to so much code in so many different applications, you are able to walk and almost anything. That’s actually what my business was before I came into this. We had an engineering company and people would hire us to come into their facilities, not know anything about them and quickly be able to ascertain what some of the issues were. So you could look at any piece of code, any type of robotic system or inspection system and be able to see, because you’ve seen enough of them and you know the principles that you’re able to move from this proprietary system to this type system and so on. So yeah. It’s just learning syntax. Syntax itself…you know. You’ve seen enough things out there too…there’s enough of it that translates over that you can quickly be able to go, ok I’m looking at C. It does this. I’m looking at C# it does that or PHP.

Carrie: When you’re talking about going in and being a diagnostician essentially, I was thinking about you know when you take your car to AutoZone or something and they plug their little machine in. It can read and tell you what’s wrong. That’s like what you are only at a very fancy and more intelligent level.
Tonya: No, at just a different level.

Carrie: Ok. So here’s my burning question before we get any further. Everywhere on the web you are hello Tonya. And your last name… I tried to stalk you and failed. So beyond the hello Tonya. Is the omission of your surname a purposeful thing or for privacy? Can you share on that?

Tonya: It’s both. As I said I was in the automation field for so long that when I decided to leave that field and closed up my company and did something else that people were trying to still come and find me. So whenever I put my name out there, all of a sudden I’d get phone calls. Hey. I’ve got a problem with XYZ. Can you come into my facility? Well I don’t do that anymore. So it was a way of being able to say ok that was Tonya the engineer who did those things and now this is hello Tonya who does just WordPress. So the two worlds don’t collide.

Carrie: Makes total sense. Well, hello Tonya has a nice ring to it. It makes you sound friendly before anyone’s even talked to you. Because you’re saying “Hello!”
Tonya: Well that’s me. As I was telling you privately, that moniker came because I’m the kind of person that anywhere we go I have to say hi to everybody. I’m the gal who opens the door and waves at you and talks to you. Whether you’re in the grocery store or wherever. So, I’m just a happy go lucky gal.

Carrie: Awesome. Well let’s dive in and talk about the WordPress Developers Club. Can you talk a little bit about how that…first what is and then how it came to fruition?

Tonya: Oh sure. Ok. So the club itself is basically here to service and help developers. Whatever skill level you’re at, if you’re coming in and if you have no skills…you just want to learn WordPress development…all the way up to folks who have been in WordPress development for years and really want to know, not only quality code but how to excel to excellence in software development. You know I started a blog on my company so that I could reach out and share information with my customers. That was back in the early days. We were not building WordPress sites for people. We were doing automation work. But when I finally moved over into the community, what I saw was what a wonderful group of people. They are very open. They are very sharing. They support one another for the most part. But I kept seeing the same questions over and over again. How do I do this? What’s that? They seem very elementary to me in a lot of ways that there were gaps in what people understood. A lot of that comes, and I saw that even back in engineering. I brought in a lot of apprentices…people into the apprenticeship program and would train them up. There would be gaps from with they didn’t get computer science training in the past. They haven’t seen a lot of different applications. They may not under fully understand scoping is, how data moves around, what the memory stack is , the process and so on. So there’s gaps in there. They don’t even know OOP. So they are out there and searching so hard to find snippets and how do I make…you know I’ve got a client…I need to get this work done…Oh Crud. I’m spending all my time searching for answers instead of just coding. So that disconnect struck me as ok, well I used to do that with my business. Part of my business was helping to train people up and then I would embed them and put them in the companies where they got hired. It made sense to translate that over into WordPress and see if folks were receptive to learning proper software development, not just putting sites together and so on. But the actual process and craft and discipline of software development.
Carrie: That’s awesome! I love that. There’s one thing I do want to go back and touch on. You mentioned coming into WordPress, that it was a very open community of people who are willing to share and give information and generally be helpful. Is that different from what you’ve experienced in other like closed software systems or maybe even other open source projects?

Tonya: Yeah. Most of the work that I did previously was not open source. A lot of it was proprietary systems.  So if you can imagine, if you headed over the club and you landed on my meet Tonya page you’d see this system there. I put a picture up of a bunch of robots and an automated system. What you would see when you walk into a facility is all this different equipment. You could have a 100 different proprietary languages on there. So trying to get information about those was very difficult. People could be kind of snarky. They could be protective of…and this is just true in engineering…you know trying to look out for themselves and protect their what “this is mine”. So coming into an open source environment was very refreshing. It was nice to see the openness of people to share and help one another.
Carrie: Cool. Well and you clearly have a passion for that training aspect. You mentioned the apprenticeships in your previous roles. So how does one and I’m asking you some questions that I already know the answers to (wink, wink) But if someone wanted to. Wait! Let me ask this. So who is the WP Developer Club for? You mentioned you know that person…I’ve heard them called the label of implementer. Someone who puts together sites, can make a handful of basic customizations. But it is copying and pasting code more than understanding why that code works. Is that your target audience or someone who’s never had any code experience?

Tonya: It’s much more broad based that that. I find even with folks who been doing this for quite a long time still have gaps, unless they come from a computer science background. You could be in this business and you started out by you know…as a lot of folks do…you just start hacking the code. I’ve got a do this, I’ve got to do that. And then it segways into freelancing or a job or something else. Then over the years, you’re doing more and more things but you still feel like you have gaps. I’m not quite understanding why I do these things. Maybe I’m not quite as efficient as I could be. Maybe I’m spending a lot of time…like I said relying on other people’s code and snippets. But then I don’t quite understand what the side effects of those are. So maybe I have some quality issues that occur in my code. If I’m looking at my code and I see that one function has more than six lines in it, then obviously I’m not quite understanding what refractoring is and single responsibility principles. Those are clues. If you’re putting a lot of comments into things, that’s another clue. I call it…some people so far been receptive to this word…I call it cobbling. Only from the premise of you’re not quite there to the point of understanding what goes into quality code. I am very much into quality and excellence. As I said, that can be a beginner all the way up to someone who’s been in it even 10 years or so. If you’ve got gaps in your learning and you really want to excel and understand the principles of what goes into quality code. Then yeah. Come on over because that’s what we do. We are very hard core into code.
Carrie: It’s free to join, right?

Tonya: The club is free to join. We have a weekly podcast where I teach you live 20 or 30 minutes each Wednesday. There’s code challenges that go with that so there’s plenty of learning opportunities there. We do have some premium things that are coming. DevSchool is the other one. The other one…that’s certification stuff we’ll get to. The other one IS DevApprentice where you’re actually working with me and I’m mentoring you. So yeah. There’s plenty of learning opportunities.
Carrie: Love that! I actually just joined this week. I’ve been developing for a very long time but there are no doubt…there are gaps in my knowledge base and we’ve talked about this on the show before with other guests that procedural programming…I’ve got to really feel solid on…there’ probably gaps there too. But that object-oriented is still…I need some puzzle pieces to click together on that one. Attend WP Developer Club school people. Check that out.
Tonya: Like I said, this is not for the faint of heart. We are very hard-core code. So if you want to know code and you really want to know it, come on over. If you just want to learn how to do something that’s not what we’re about. We’re about the why, the when, the what, the where and the how.

Carrie: Jackie has a question that tied in. It’s like Jackie is in there. (pulls out earbud). Are you in my headphone Jackie? I don’t know. She is whispering in my ear. She says it seems that many who code in WordPress are self-taught. How can you help formalize and standardize the approach? So how do you see…well I’ll just let her question stand.
Tonya: Hi Jackie! We yap a lot. Yeah. A lot of people are self-taught and I’m going to say right up front, there’s nothing wrong with that. I will declare right here and now, I’m non-degreed myself. So it’s not about that. I went through formalized computer science training and I have a big degree or Masters in it. No. That’s my brother. He has a PhD in computer science. I went into an apprentice program and learned the right way to think about code first. Which to me is very important. It’s the process of thinking. This is a thinking discipline. It’s not just sitting down and typing things out. There’s a lot of planning that goes into it and so on. So to get back to Jackie’s question. How can I help formalize and standardize the approach? The first process that you need to do is understand your elementaries. What I mean by elementaries for folks, is those are the foundations. It’s understanding computer science, how all functions in PHP work, what’s scoping, what are variables, even OOP. That even falls into elementaries as well. Looking at how things work together. Do you understand how the browser works with the server? A lot of folks don’t. I see that trip people up when they’re not quite understanding how the assets get delivered. When you can do different things on the front end versus the server-side. So to formalize, you need to go through education processes. Honestly. You need to learn the proven time-tested software principles which is what we teach and quality code. I hope that answers your question Jackie?

Carrie: I want to poke on that just a little bit more. In terms of…do you ever see actually offering…this is a two-part question. Do you ever see offering some sort of a certification or if you pass these levels and will deem you the stamp of approval for WP Developers Club. And if you do, what would it take to have other people in the WordPress industry recognize that the certification had any value?

Tonya: Ha! You and I talked about that way back a long time ago. Didn’t we?

Carrie: We did. I’m bringing it out to the public.

Tonya: She just tossed softball and lobbed it to me. Ok. So developer school…that is what developer school is. The dream that I have…come with me on this little progression of Tonya’s dream.

Carrie: Bring it !

Tonya: Other software languages, other disciplines have certification processes to them. Even Zen. You can go into PHP if you’re going to specialize in the Zen framework and you can go and you can get certification that is recognized and employers will hire you. It gives you that pedigree if you will that then gets attached to your name. Microsoft has them. Oracle has them and so on down the pike. It’s not just about going and getting a computer science degree or an electrical engineering degree. That teaches you this much. Now you need to actually translate that into doing. Which is what we do. We do a learn/do process. So developer school is going to go in and teach you like you’re going back to school, going back to college. We’re going to really dig in. But it does more than that in that it’s not just sitting there listening to me blather on about what code is right? It’s about learn/do. So I give you a little bit of training like we do on the Wednesday show. That’s a snippet of what you’d be exposed to. Then you are going to go do it. Ok. I teach you this…now go do it. Why did that happen? There is that process. The dream is…that I’m still working out…there is a process on other languages where you can go pay your money and it’s a proctored exam that you can take that then validates…yes, I went through the training. Then I went and took the test and I passed the test and now I’m certified. Ok. So great. You’re certified from our school. Now what? That’s the part I need to get down.

Carrie: That’s the $60,000 thousand dollar question.

Tonya: That’s the $60,000 thousand dollar question.

Carrie: Maybe that’s the $60 million question.
Tonya: I think as I get the opportunity to talk to more and more employers out there…which will take some time for folks wanting to get know my face. Hi. And for us to then communicate about what their needs are. From that we can start to put together how do we make the certification stick to where it has value to it? Bringing in people in the industry who know like Tom had joined up the club just a couple weeks ago. Yourself joined in. People who are known in the industry coming and joining into the club and participating will help to give some validity out there as well. So it will take time for it to be recognized. That’s our goal.

Carrie: That just made me think of maybe an interesting angle of looking at what a specific job entails or job description entails and almost doing a personalized certification track. So maybe it’s not a broader WordPress certification but it’s for this company and this how they define…this position…here’s the certification track that we require people to have gone through or something like that.

Tonya: Yeah. But what I did initially was I broke it up by skill set. I said when you go through this program whether it’s a Genesis specific one or non-Genesis specific, is first to go through and you’re an associate developer. Then you go through and you’re a developer. Then you go through, and you’re a programmer. Now those are very broad-based. I can see it developing itself into what you just talked about. That’s what I used to do with my engineering company was companies would come to me and say ok. We know you know how to train people for XYZ. We have specific needs for ourselves and they would have me go through and vet their people that they were considering by bringing them into an apprenticeship program. I’d train them and then I vetted them in specific to that company. In over six months or a year they got to test each other out and decide if that was a good fit. So that something I used to do. I can see us morphing into that as well as time goes on.

Carrie: Interesting. I love this discussion because I think that you’ve clearly identifed a gap and a need and have a passion and some plans are unfolding for how to address that. Very cool! So, Leonica brings up…she was asking about the cost of some of the premium add-ons and that leads perfectly into what I want to know. I asked you this quite a while back. Undoubtedly you are altruistic and loving to help others in their learning journey for code. However, you’ve got to pay the bills. What’s the monetization plan for WP developer club?

Tonya: Ok. Well it’s going to depend upon the value that it gives to somebody. And we all know if we’re in the business of making money, it’s not about how much time I put in or how long it took me to put this program together and so on. It’s about value that’s given to somebody. So I have not gone through and modeled yet to price out each of the programs in DevSchool yet to know what type of value it will be. Until I know how much content is going to be there and we’re not talking about you’re going to go through this and it’s 10 hours. No, No, No. It’s like going to school like I said. So you know it could take you a year to get through if you want to go all the way up to software engineer. It could take you a year and a half to get through the entire program. So what kind of value does that give to people? Now if we look at…I did put a price on DevApprentice because we’re rolling that out and taking applications now. DevApprentice has right now it’s priced at an introductory price of $2500. And that is…you’re going to spend…it could be…it’s pretty self-paced. You spend 10 hours minimum a week. You’re going through a learning phase. You’re actually building a business centric website and then you’re going to go and build your own business centric website that you pick. During that whole time you’re going through and I’m mentoring you. We have office hours scheduled each week and so on. That process can take anywhere from 14 weeks on up to get through the entire process. So you can see I’m investing a lot of time into each individual. So that has a value to people that I had to put on. And where I got that from was…if I learn these skills and then I went out and I was able to as a freelancer or get a job and I built this same type of website what could I charge in the marketplace? So could I pay this back in one or two projects? That’s how I valued it. Ok. If I could learn these skills and I could really go off and now I’ve got a template to start with. I know how Tonya thinks and I can start to do it myself, how quick is my return on value?

Carrie: I think you nailed it. That is a fantastic example of pricing based on value. It made me think too of…how do I say this? The value of being able to go from right now I’m freelancing. Maybe I would like to get a gig at 10up, WPengine, any number of WordPress companies out there. Getting some of the core positions from those companies and saying that if you want to be able to apply for this position, here’s the level of knowledge or training that you would need. Then you can place value on…Ok. Well what’s the salary on that? You know if you’re making…I’m not going to bore anybody with the math…but I think it would be a great way to…of course I think it’s great because it’s my idea.

Tonya: Don’t break your arm there.

Carrie: Yeah. I don’t even know why people tune if for me. I’m ridiculous. Yes I think that would be cool. So to answer Leonica’s specific question of the premium parts of the Developers Club, that is that something that is still TBD?

Tonya: Yeah. You know you’ve got a value and a price placed on one program. The other programs aren’t going to come out until next year. There’s a lot of material I have to create. So sometime next year we’ll start rolling those out. Then we’ll be able to put a value on them. I’m hoping in that period of time, I’m also able to talk to some of the major employers out there and get a sense of what they’re looking for. I mean I’ve already been looking at their job descriptions such as natural for me to go and do that. So it is very targeted for their specific that we’re going to hit each one of these points. But I’d still would like to know what their needs are. So if you guys are watching…contact me. I want to talk to you.

Carrie: Absolutely!

Tonya: Our people want to talk to you too once they graduate. So let me help you.

Carrie: Well and just remember that we’re probably 6° of separation here in the WordPress community. We’re still small. It may be that we’re even 2° or 3° of separation. So yeah. I’m thinking if I know anybody. I would be happy to connect. So Davinder has a question. He says I know interest is one thing as far as the coding goes. Can you share about the journey of learning code and resources used during that time?

Tonya: Sure. The journey of learning code. I like that. That’s…let’s put that somewhere.
Carrie: I am going to put it on Twitter right now. Or somebody else can beat me to it.

Tonya: She’s tagged it guys. Yeah. Your journey to learn code needs to start with a firm foundation. I like to give the analogy of trying to build a house. You really don’t want to start building a second floor until first you have the foundation poured. Whether that’s a basement or a nice slab on the ground with its foundation firmly rooted so that then you’re building up from there. So starting with that foundation is absolutely critical. The process itself comes from the learn/do. You need to learn the code. You need to see our lot of applications of code, which means reading a lot of people’s code and some of it’s not going to be good. But that helps you to start sniffing out what some of those code smells are. That process really helps to tune-up what your skill set is going to be. And then you go and you see oh! I don’t quite understand what that’s doing. You flag that and say now I need to go and learn that. So it’s a continuous process of  1) being able to determine what is good code so that you know what you’re looking at. I see that disconnect a lot unfortunately with folks. They’ll come to me and say hey I read this on XYZ and immediately it’s like oh but that’s not right, that’s not right, and that’s not right. So there’s a lot of misinformation out there. So the process starts with first learning what the real proven software principles are, what computer science is and then building up from there.
Carrie: Awesome! Thank you for that. So let’s see. Melanie says Awesome Tonya. What a great way to approach pricing. I concur. Davinder has trademarked Journey of Learning Code on Twitter.
Tonya: Oh Darn! I was going to use that.

Carrie: Leonica’s question. Is it possible that you teach someone who is living not a normal life? I’m not sure…

Tonya: Are any of us are normal?

Carrie: I think none of us are normal, so…

Tonya: I’m not normal. Are you Carrie?
Carrie: I’m 100% not normal. Leonica, if you want to rephrase that or get more specific we’ll be happy to talk about that. So Marjorie brings up…we’re back to the monetization question…but are there any companies interested in sponsoring WP Developers Club?

Tonya: I have a…we don’t have sponsors as of yet…we’re too new. So you know companies need to see value for themselves before they’re going to put any money into you and support you. However, when we first started I did approach some of the people that I like, use and recommend. Some of those folks stepped up and they partnered with us. And by partnering I mean they donated services and products to us to help support our mission. Those are listed on our website. But until we really get enough traction for people to get to know who we are and who I am and what we offer and what we’re trying to do for the community… I don’t…you know at some point those folks will come to us and say Hey! We do want to sponsor you and so on. As long as they fit within the mission we’ll talk to them. But they need to fit the mission of excellence and quality in software.

Carrie: Absolutely! Speaking of sponsors…

Tonya: (laughing) What a Segway. I love it. Go for it!

Carrie: A total softball. I’m very much appreciative of DreamPress2 for hosting today’s show. So they have a WordPress managed hosting plan. Which basically means you’re not on a shared server with a bunch of people running different types of applications. You are on a server that is just WordPress being run. Now it’s technically still a shared server, but it’s optimized specifically for WordPress. They have a 100% uptime guaranty. You get 30 bytes of SSD storage and you can get email addresses with that hosting account if you choose to mix your hosting and your email. You can check them out @dreamhost.com/officehours. They are also sponsoring my next sponsor, which is myself. WP Development Workflows. That is a three-part webinar series that I mentioned earlier. Taught by myself…uh…hosted by myself and taught by Mika Epstein a.k.a. @ipstenu on Twitter. I’m so excited about this! We had a false start this week. So if anybody that is tuning in this part of the part of the webinars sorry for that. We were supposed to start Tuesday and we’ve postponed until next Tuesday. But anyways, we’ll be walking through how to use version control, how to incorporate Grunt into your workflow, how to keep your live site synched with your local site and all of that good stuff. If you would like more information you can head over to wpdevelopmentworkflow.com. All right. You know what? So I’ll tell you a story about sponsorship. I do agree with what you said about you want have sponsors that are in alignment with your mission. I’ve actually turned down a couple of the sponsorship requests for this show because I didn’t feel like it was something that I felt good about putting in front of my listeners. But a lot of really…most of the people that have sponsored the show so far, don’t sponsor it because officehours is netting them this massive return on their investment yet. They sponsor it because they are supporting me and supporting what I’m doing in the in the community. So I would say…our maybe just encourage you…that you you don’t necessarily have to wait until you have this amazing polished product that you can guarantee a ROI. People would want to support what you’re doing. So you might look at some sponsorship levels even early on. Just a thought.

Tonya: Yeah. It’s funny that you said that because I was actually going to start creating some verbiage on the site, since we do have a program up and running now. We are chosen to Know the Code Show, which is the free Wednesday show. So if someone were interested in sponsoring that I’d like to give them a vehicle to then be able to contact me and talk about those situations. It needs to be…and you’re right. Anything that you do, you want to make sure you’re aligning yourself properly so that the message is centric. If you bring in a sponsor that you yourself don’t believe in,  what does that say about you?

Carrie: Yeah, I’ve had…not to keep going down this this a particular trail…I’ve had somebody email me and tell me that they basically go buy anything that say “buy this” because it’s always been a good win. I was like, oh my gosh! Please stop. It made me feel this tremendous pressure. I want to have transparency and integrity in everything that I’m bringing out. Anyways, just this pressure. Oh my gosh! Please vet these products for yourself. Just because…I say a lot of wrong things…ask my husband…I say wrong things everyday. So yeah. It’s important to be in alignment.

Tonya: That’s quite the burden to bear on your shoulders isn’t it?

Carrie: Yeah. That made be nervous. I was like please don’t ever do that again. Feel free to buy stuff but not just because I said so.

Tonya: Yeah. You’ve got to think. We just got done talking about that. You’ve got to think for yourself.

Carrie: There’s actually a passage of Scripture…it’s New Testament Scripture and it talks about Paul who was an early century pastor or preacher. He basically said I said all this stuff to you but don’t take my word for it. Like go investigate, do the homework, go figure it out for yourself.
Tonya: Exactly.

Carrie: I love that. Test things for yourself.
Tonya: Exactly. While I’m saying that, you know people see and they go wow! She’s got a lot of experience. Cool. Look where she came from. Awesome. First of all, I’m extremely approachable so don’t put that out there and think…Oh my God! How am I going to talk to this person? And secondly you need to think for yourself because yeah, this is not the Tonya show. There’s lots of folks that are getting on board and eventually in time as we elevate people it’s not just always going to be the Tonya show. It’s going to be hey! We’re flooding the WordPress markets ecosystem with people who understand quality. They’re software engineers and so on. so I would love when that day comes. Yeah.
Carrie: Well then Jan just asked the perfect question. I love how all these questions just flow in together. So speaking of the Tonya show…that it will won’t always be the Tonya show…Jan says you can’t do the teaching alone. Are you going to involve well known or otherwise people from the community or from a circle of people that you trust?

Tonya: What a great question!

Carrie: I’ve got fantastic listeners.

Tonya: I know! I just love WordPress people. I’ll tell you.

Carrie: If I could push hearts on the screen right now, I would.

Tonya: Me too. Just picture it in your mind. Go to that place. Heck with robots. Those are boring. You guys are great. You know initially it’s me. It is. We do have some folks on Slack. We have a pros group that even Ms. Carrie is a member of.
Carrie: I’m surprised you all let me in. Thanks.

Tonya: Come on. (laughing). I like running things past people so that it’s not just again the Tonya show. It’s something that is hitting home and I’m taking in the perspective of people out there in the industry. Eventually…mostly in DevSchool…let me back up real fast. I just jumped to a thought. When you get into DevSchool, as you elevate up to the next certification level, you enter into a program where you’re now giving back and it’s not just meant for giving back. It’s meant to help cement your understanding of code in that you will help in answering questions for people in the lower programs. Kind of like a TA, where you’re answering support questions…those types of things.
Carrie: I love that. In order to teach something you do have to have a different level of understanding. You think you understand something. Then you try to teach somebody then you’re like uhh. Let me circle back around on this.

Tonya: Right. Yet you can sit there in your little room like I am here in my wall of wood and you can live in your own little world. But until you get out there and start talking and explaining a concept to somebody else, the lights and the bells really just don’t go off until you do that. So having that rolled into the program to where you’re actually translating your own knowledge and answering…because somebody is going to give you a question that’s in a totally different context and make you think about it. Eventually in time as people graduate the programs, I’m hoping that we get more and more folks who want to move into teaching and we can roll them into the program. And yeah. It needs to live on past just me. That’s my goal. I’m not a young lady anymore. So someday when I want retire down the road whether that’s 50 years from now…it needs to move on.

Carrie: I think even though you don’t want to be the Tonya show I really think that Hello Tonya could be a great…like morning…the 5 AM slot. Hello With Tonya!

Tonya: There you go!

Carrie: Yeah! Let’s get up and go and do some code today.

Tonya: Whoo Hoo! Maybe we should change the Know the Code to the Hello Tonya Show.
Carrie: Yes. Melanie came back. Thank you. That reference was 2 Peter 1:12. Whoo! I didn’t lie. We have a question from Nicole. She asked have you ever considered focusing your DevApprentice towards designers entering the world of PHP?

Tonya: Wow designers. Hi designers! (both laughing). I work with a lot of designers and Man! You guys just blow me away with what you can do. Let me tell you. You know we do have some folks who are designers and want to learn code. And yes. When you come into something like a DevApprentice let’s just say, because that’s out there right now. I’m going to try to group people. There’s only 10 slots. I just want to really focus on people. So there’s only 10 slots open per class. Now let’s say we had a class every month or so that opened up. I want to try to group people in there so if I had say 5 or 6 designers…wouldn’t that be awesome to put you guys through so that you have that synergy amongst each other when you’re in your study groups. I can then target and focus and talk about specific coding that fits your context. So I think that kind of answers your question. Same thing with newbies that are out there that are coming in. I want group newbies. If we have some folks that have been in the business a little while, group those folks together. So you’re not just talking…you know. You can talk at the same level.
Carrie: Man. You have thought this through and thought through it well.

Tonya: Well, Iike I said, I’ve been doing it for a lot of years.

Carrie: It’s a great concept and I’m glad that you’re…the rubber is meeting the road in terms of getting it out there. How many members are there presently?

Tonya: How come I knew you were going to ask me that and I didn’t look it up. I’m not sure of the top of my head.

Carrie: You can ballpark.

Tonya: Last I looked we have 350 some members. It might be more than that now. After my Genesis talk…it really shot up after that. Once people got to see who the heck is Tonya? Why do I know that name?

Carrie: She’s Hello Tonya. Awesome. So I’m circling back around. Leonica clarified on her question a little bit. She said if someone is ill, say they’re living by strict rules and not having a job but love to learn all there is to learn about WordPress and Genesis. So maybe for instance in your apprenticeship that something like those office hours would be difficult…those sorts of things. Are there workarounds or do you see it being something that’s pretty accessible to anyone?
Tonya: Within reason. It’s pretty accessible. I’m going to…just see me up late at night, early in the morning. Office hours can’t work. It’s not going to work unless it can meet all the different needs of people. So that means that I need to schedule myself to be available at the different time zones around the world. That’s what we’ll do. Office hours will be opened up for you know…there’s three different time slots. It will be run several times a week so that people can pick and choose. Ok I want to come and talk in a group. If it’s a group which is in the learning phase, you’re in a group. So everyone in your class can come to a session. I may only have one person it it or I could have all 10 of you. Then when you get into the build phase, it’s just you and me. So I work around your schedule and we figure it out. When do we need to get together?

Carrie: All right. Such great questions coming in today. Yael is asking can you share more about the Genesis Developer Course 2016?

Tonya: Well everything I do is in Genesis. I’m a big fan. So it made sense when we started doing this that we put together something. I talked to the Studio Press folks and I said you know I’d really like to put together a program that is centric to Genesis. So if you want to specialize in Genesis it made sense that ok…first you’re going to learn…you’re basically going to learn everything that’s in the WordPress program and then on top of that you’re also going to dive deep into Genesis and know that code like the back your hand. Yeah. Almost everything I do, even in DevApprentice is all Genesis. So when you come in that’s a prerequisite. That you have that framework. You’ve purchased the license even if you’ve never worked with it. I’m going to teach it to you.
Carrie: I like though that you’re laying the foundation of WordPress first.
Tonya: Correct. You’ve got understand core and WordPress too. Genesis is a framework that works on the presentational side for a theme. But without understanding WordPress core, it’s really not going to help you.

Carrie: Well Jackie asked what would you like to see changed in Genesis if you could change something? If you had commit permissions?

Tonya: Oh boy. Oh boy. How’s that one for throwing it up there?
Carrie: Don’t worry. Nobody from Copy Blogger is tuned in right now.
Tonya: Yeah right!
Carrie: I have a red flag that alerts me.

Tonya: Yeah. Gary and I’ve talked about this a little bit too. So are there some things I would do different? Sure. Sure there are. I come from a different perspective of how I would code things up. I like being able to pass in parameters through configuration. So that’s where code changes…for the most part …in my opinion Genesis is very elegant. There are a few things that I would change. But I work with it because it is elegant and it’s easy to extend and understand. So no. I’m not going to specifically answer…look in this one. I would tell you if you asked me about core.

Carrie: Well ok. Well what would you change in core?

Tonya: Oh my gosh See I’m going to get this call now. Did you just call us out?
Carrie: I’m pretty sure Matt Mullenweg is not listening to this episode.

Tonya: I’m pretty sure he’s not either. Matt. Man we need to talk. What we do every week in with Know the Code Show is I have folks go and sniff out all the code smells that is in there. So you’re learning what some of the code smells are. But if you were to flip through core you would see lots of principles being broken and bent. For example, if I were to go to wp_query is one of my biggies. I would look to see that oh my gosh! How many lines of code? It’s also inside of another file and not sitting out on its own. It’s very wet. It’s not dry. It’s not single purposed. There’s a lot of redundancy in it and so on. So those types of things, yeah. There are things I would change. In time, we as a community will because we’re all going to, right?  We’re going to contribute back and help to improve our ecosystem. In time, Yeah. We all will help to elevate even core.

Carrie: Oops. I was still muted. I was going to say  you could be a politician with these answers. Very nice.

Tonya: No! No! I’m way too ethical for that.

Carrie: Yes. Ok. So Marjorie has a question. She says do you consider a newbie as someone who knows HTML and CSS?
Tonya: There’s different levels. So a total knob is someone who knows nothing. You are coming in and you know nothing. That’s a different person and you basically have to build that person from the ground up. They don’t know code at all. A beginner has multiple levels. A beginner can be anything from someone who just knows some HTML and CSS. Maybe just a snippet of PHP, all the way up to someone who still cobbling but still hasn’t moved into maybe understanding some of how to do custom databases. Maybe some rewrites. Understanding how rewrites work and those things. So the beginner level is pretty broad. Then you get into the intermediate level and you do more advanced things. You know how to really extend WordPress but still you may not fully understand. You still have all those gaps in there. And a big chunk of folks fall into that. Then you get your advanced group which a lot of those folks are software engineers who do other languages like Ruby. Maybe they’ve been in C# or C/C++ so they do a lot of different things.
Carrie: All right. And I would just chime in that if you already know some HTML and CSS your ahead of 99.9% of the rest of the world in terms of your developer skills. Let’s see.

Tonya: But do you really understand it you know? I can spell it.

Carrie: True. Davinder asked any major pain points while teaching code to others because a lot people are…people are tagging themselves as experts without having that knowledge.
Tonya: You know. There’s going to be resistance from some folks who have not come to the table to understand their true skill set. Absolutely. In time I hope that they can start to embrace maybe what some of their gaps really are. No. We’re not going to reach everybody out there. Some folks are going to say I’m already an expert. Who the heck does she think she is? Just because she knows robotics and other things. So what? Are there pain points of teaching people? Absolutely! People are people. Right? I’m sure you see this too Carrie. You know?

Carrie: Well I guess. Yeah. People have to come into it wanting or willing to hear that they’ve been doing something incorrectly or not in the best way. So there’s humility for certain.

Tonya: There is humility. But at the same time though it’s also taking a look at… if you’re sitting there, like I said. And I try to reach you on a very personal level by saying I bet you have some of these pain points yourself. I have a whole list of them when you land on the DevApprentice page. How you’re out there and you’re Googling things. You’re not doing unit tests. Oh Crud! A customer wants me to change this but every time I touch it, it breaks. Son of a…those types of pain points are real. And a majority of folks have them. Those come from when you have quality code smells. When you have issues with your code. So once you understand it…you know I don’t want to do that anymore. I really want to master this craft. I really want to excel and stand out. Some folks aren’t going to want to do that. They’re just happy being implementers. Maybe they’ve made a full career of it and they’re perfectly fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’m not saying there is. I’m more targeting people who really want to excel.
Carrie: Once again either a politician or like Seinfeld…not that there’s anything wrong with it! A follow up question from Jan talking about beginners and different levels of folks. Do you think that the beginners will be intimidated by the skills and some of the conversations happening say in Slack for instance. Like Gary and Alain and Robin and these really super stars…people.

Tonya: I think they also will see that we have a huge amount of beginners in there that are asking questions of people…of Gary, Alain, myself and Robin. And Carrie and Jesse and so on. They’re in there and asking these questions because they want to know how to we do it? We have…most people in there are at your level. Whatever level that can be you’re going to find a buddy sitting in there…in the club right now. Because our ecosystem has so many different levels. There are…and I really hate to say this because somebody is going to call me out on it . But really when you get to the level of software engineer and if we looked at our ecosystem I think that a lot of us are in the majority. Uh…minority of the ecosystem. So of course people are going to want to know what we think and they’re going to ask those questions. I will say, to answer little bit better, I did pull our conversations off into a private group so that we could talk about higher level stuff. So that we’re not intimidating people. I’m hoping that conversations like we’re having right now… me and Carrie. You guys can see that you don’t need to be intimidated. Any question is valid. If you don’t understand something that is very valid. That’s what I’m here to do, is to help you understand it. So ask the question. It’s ok. Don’t be intimidated. I’m really not scary.
Carrie: You’re not scary and I know that Gary is not scary.
Tonya: Gary is not scary.
Carrie: Carrie is not scary. Mary is not scary. I don’t know who Mary is but it rhymes with scary.
Tonya: Alain is not scary. A lot of us are just not scary. We are nice people. We want to help you.

Carrie: It’s true. And the only stupid question is the one you didn’t ask.
Tonya: Oh my gosh! That’s true. Absolutely!

Carrie:  Man! This hour has absolutely flown by. I’ve got one last question I’m going to ask you. This is from Jackie. Do you offer code audits?

Tonya: (laughs) I get asked that a lot. I have done some code audits. I’ve done professional development and so on. I do not do that anymore. I’m able to better serve each of you and really be able to help this, I need to focus. So the only thing I’m going to be doing…after I get done with this one institute that I’ve got to finish… as soon as he’s done and out the way… the only thing I want to be doing is teaching. And that’s it. So my total focus is the club. I’m not doing…you can’t hire me for paid work on things. All I’m doing is teaching you guys and that’s it.
Carrie: Kudos for being laser focused. Because even though you could do it you have chosen not to do that because it’s not in alignment with where you are going.
Tonya: And there’s just not enough time in the day to do it right. There’s not enough time in the day.

Carrie: No doubt. Well I’m going to have one more thing a moment. Until that moment….thank you to everybody who tuned in today. Absolutely great turn out. Great questions from you guys and if you want to catch the replay or you didn’t get to hear all of  this episode you could always go to officehours.fm and see all the replays and see transcripts of the episodes and all that good stuff. Also if you want to be reminded of the episodes and you don’t have to remember to put it on your calendar…I don’t want to put anything extra on my calendar. You can go to officehour.fm/subscribe. Once a week I will send you a little loving email reminder.
Tonya: You are very loving.
Carrie: Well thank you. Except those times when I have to you know send out a follow up email. Crap. I’ve got the wrong links. Sorry.

Tonya: I do that too. So yep. It happened this week.

Carrie: Nothing like you hitting the push broadcast button and then you’re like oh crap! I just let that out. So what is the best way for people to find you, follow up with you?

Tonya: Well, you’ve got multiple ways. You can hit me up on Twitter. I’m @hellofromtonya. You can hit me up at…just come on over the club. If you’re not sure you want to be a member yet, you just want to talk to me there’s a contact form there. I will write you back you back. Yep. Just me. I’ll write you back. If you are a member and you want to chat we have a private Stack group. You can either join in any of the channels and talk there or you can DM me privately and we can chat too. So I’m pretty accessible. I try to make myself accessible to people.

Carrie: Awesome. Well Tonya. I’ve enjoyed this immensely. And wishing you best of luck with the WP Developers Club. Maybe you can circle around in six months or so and see how things are going with you.
Tonya: That sounds good to me. Have me on anytime you want.

Carrie: Awesome. Well until next week. Everybody have a fantastic rest of the week and then your weekend. I’ll see you next week. Bye.

Tonya: Bye Everybody!