Special Episode: Live from WordCamp US 2017

Joe Casabona: Hey, everybody and welcome to a very special episode of How I Built It. This is in between Seasons Three and Four, and this is a special Live Events episode.

I had the opportunity recently to go to WordCamp US. Thanks to a generous sponsorship by Pantheon. So they offered to pay for my trip and sponsor this episode. And in return, we would work together on the theme for a special just about an hour-long episode for them.

And so to pull back the curtain a little bit, we talked with them, we want to focus on their services, do you want to interview somebody from the company, or do you want to talk to attendees, should I find a booth somewhere? And we essentially agreed that what we would do is men on the street, type interviews. So I would have my portable microphone and my portable equipment and I would go up to attendees and I would talk to them about front-end development and so we came up with a few questions. The folks that Pantheon and I did about optimizing your site for front-end development how to level up your skills. And then my favorite question, which is, “If you could go back in time and tell your younger self something, what would it be?” And so I got to talk to 7 great 7,8,9 something like that, great people about those three questions. So I’m really excited to bring this episode to you. It was so much fun to do. I hope to be able to do more live events like this in the future where I go to a WordCamp or some other events and I just talk to the attendees.

So again, I want to thank Pantheon for the opportunity to do this. You can find out about their hosting services and everything they have to offer over a buildpodcast.net/pantheon. And so we’ll get into the interviews at the end of the episode. I also get to talk to one of the folks over at Pantheon, Steve Persch. And we get to go through his answers to the same question so I had a lot of fun doing this episode. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. And without further ado, on with the show!

Jackie D’Elia, we’re here at WordCamp US recording a live man on the street interview for How I Built It. I want to ask you just a few questions about front-end development. Thanks to my friends at Pantheon who I’m working with who sent me here for a very special live episode. Are you cool with that?

Jackie D’Elia: I’m cool with that Joe!

Joe Casabona: Awesome. So the first question is, “Do you have any front-end development optimization tips and tricks for us, things to make your website faster on the front-end?”

Jackie D’Elia: First thing I can say is, use SVG’s where you can…I think that really decreases the file size of your downloads and helps you make your website faster. Start looking at ways to do different things other than giant hero images, or video backgrounds, and come up with some creative ways to maybe do some SVG and even animations, they’re very lightweight, easy to use.

Joe Casabona: Awesome, I love that. And you’re quite an SVG expert, I would say you have some good material on SVG’s, right?

Jackie D’Elia: Yeah, and I’m learning as I go.

Joe Casabona: Very nice, very nice. So my next question is, they’re out of order here on this sheet of paper. But my next question is actually, “How do you level up your Dev game? You know, do you have any learning sites that you recommend or anything like that?”

Jackie D’Elia: Yeah, everybody knows I’m a big fan of LinkedIn Learning, and Lynda, and Treehouse was another one that I’ve spent quite a bit of time on. So I am always dedicating time every week to continuously learning to leveling up my own game. And when I encounter things that I don’t understand, I reach out to learn more about it. And then to figure out what I need to bring into my own development workflow that’s actually going to help me do a better job. Not everything will and you don’t want to get stuck with the shiny object syndrome where you’re chasing all of the new things but get a good system working for yourself. And then stay on target and keep track of what’s out there and what’s going to really help you level up your damn.

Joe Casabona: Awesome, I love that. Have you seen more and he’s headed? I have LinkedIn Learning.

Jackie D’Elia: I haven’t talked to him this morning, yeah!.Joe Casabona: Very nice. And my last question is, “If you could go back in time to your younger self and give her one tip, what would it be?”

Jackie D’Elia: If the book ‘Essentialism’ had been available twenty years ago, thirty years ago, I wish I would have read that then and taking that to heart. I think eliminating all of the excesses that we’ve got that’s distracting from us and helping us focus on what we really will excel at, is something everybody should take to heart.

Joe Casabona: That’s fantastic, Jackie! Thank you so much for your time! I really appreciate it!

Joe Casabona: All right. Hello, hello! I’m here with Scott Deluzio of WP CRM systems, a former sponsor of the show in Season Three. So I want to ask you three questions about development. Sounds good?

Scott Deluzio: That sounds great!

Joe Casabona: Awesome, thank you! So my first question focuses more on front-end development. I know you’re back and guy. Maybe you could just answer generally, “Do you have any tips or tricks for optimizing your website?”

Scott Deluzio: Yeah, it definitely takes a look at your information. Using tools like GTmetrix, and other tools that are out there. Take a look at those reports that come back and do what you can to address some of those high ticket items that will really have an impact on speed, page load times, and things like that. Because especially on e-commerce sites, you want to make sure that the sites loading quickly and you’re not losing customers because they’re impatient. They don’t want to wait around for you know, your site to load or whatever especially when it comes to the checkout page. That’s kind of an important thing you don’t, you definitely don’t want to be losing there. So…

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. So, “Do you have, like a favorite, like a caching system that you use or anything like that?”

Scott Deluzio: So right now, I’m on WP Engine so I’m using that for their internal CDN and things like that. But I’ve used it on many other hosts that I’ve used throughout the years. You know, some of the caching plugins, the super cash. Another other caching plugins that are out there are really great for those quick fixes that give that instant boost in your scores on some of those things. Not that you’re necessarily looking at you know, the overall score because you’re probably not going to get a perfect 100% score on those things. But it helps address some of the low-hanging fruit.

Joe Casabona: Nice, very nice, that’s awesome. So as far as learning this stuff you know, “How do you kind of level up your development game?”

Scott Deluzio: Yeah, so I am pretty much completely self-taught. So I relied a lot on…Initially when I first started out, a lot of books. I would take these books and just kind of consume as much content as I could. Now with more stuff being online, it’s really easy to go out and try to find information. Maybe I’m having a problem with how I do this, or maybe I’m tackling a new situation that I haven’t really dealt with. Before I can, I can kind of go out there and try to see if someone else has done this before. So I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The downside to that is you kind of have to filter out some of the bad information from the good but you tend to start to learn where some of the good sources are. You know, who’s been around the space for a long time and has done things the right way, and you kind of learn to trust those people a little bit more. You know?

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely, that’s awesome. So now with all that in mind let’s go back in time when you’re talking to your former self, your younger self, “What is one thing that you would tell him to learn like I wish I knew this sooner?”

Scott Deluzio: Yeah, absolutely. I would definitely tell that younger me to get out and get involved with the community. Start networking with people because you can’t do it yourself. If you need to have a strong group of people working around you not necessarily working for you, you know. But networking and getting to know people and everything is really a huge thing which I think, five years ago the kind of introverted me was just like, I’m just happy to sit here behind my keyboard and just kind of type away on Twitter and that like, that’s what I’ll do. But that doesn’t work and getting out to events like WordCamps and another other industry events are really a great way to go.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. Well, Scott, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

Scott Deluzio: All right, thanks for calling.

Joe Casabona: All right. Hey everybody, I’m here with Akshat at WordCamp USA. Akshat I’m going to ask you three questions about development. Is that Okay?

Akshat: Yeah, absolutely. Hi, glad to be here. Thank you for having me.

Joe Casabona: Hey, thank you very much for doing this, awesome. So my first question revolves around front-end development or development in general but, “Do you have any tips or tricks on how to optimize your website or our website?”

Akshat: All right. So there are like, there’s no single tip you can give to like you know this is a magic filter optimizer or to optimize your website. I would suggest using a caching plugin for sure if you are there. And from a development perspective, be careful of the MySQL. The database calls you’re making that’s where I think the majority of the load is put on your site. So you want to make sure that the MySQL queries are you wanted them. You find out you optimize them, you go through all the MySQL queries that are being made when your site loads. And that’s the single most important thing you can do for optimal experience as a developer.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. So aside from caching, there are things that you do on the code level, right? Make sure your code is right, and you’re not just doing a bunch of nonsense, right?

Akshat: Absolutely, like even though, even at the code level…Every small function you right has to be, I can be, you can think of it, the data has to be cached in on that front. So how you load the data and how you reuse the data again and again. And especially when it comes to database access and a lot of value loading from the MySQL database, you need to make sure that you are doing it only once and cashing it and reusing it in the right way. Especially if you’re traversing functions then you’re carrying forward that data and not reloading it from the database. And those are easy to these mistakes can be made very easily even by experts and you just need to be very, and you need to analyze your code after programmed it and you put it on.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. I mean that makes sense right? Something and refactoring stuff like that so that’s a great and pretty technical answer, right? So “How do you level up your skills? How do you get better at what you do?”

Akshat: All right. So the way I do it is I listen to a lot of podcasts. That’s my way of doing it like whenever I’m working there’s always a podcast playing in the background. Now, does that mean that I can multitask? No. But some things or the other just keeps percolating into the head and you take like five times longer if you really focus on it. But you’re not spending so much time listening to so many different things that some of it just inculcates. And that’s one of the ways I really learn new things. And then you experiment like if something really catches your eye, you try and try and use that try and experiment and write some code around it.

Joe Casabona: Absolutely. So that’s great! So you have a podcast playing in the background. Maybe they say something that catches your attention that you can, then follow up on later, right?

Akshat: Right, and sometimes, it breaks your momentum of whatever you’re doing. But sometimes, it’s important enough so you actually rewind and then play that segment again and that happens. Again, I think there are people who can multitask. But it works well for me like you just go back to listen to it again, bookmark it and then get back to it in the future.

Joe Casabona: Awesome, that’s fantastic! So that’s great advice, both questions are great advice. And so, I want to know, “If you could go back in time and tell your younger self something I wish I knew X, what would it be?”

Akshat: All right. I’m just wondering like, quite a few things. I would say, I think that one thing would be you know, focusing on the wrong things, right? through school? In the real world, the things that matter are completely different. Meeting people, talking to people, being friends with people, you can’t just sit in front of a computer and solve all problems by yourself. Like as much as you think that’s possible, it does not happen. This community is the best estimate of that. Like I should have gotten involved in it not a lot earlier and that’s just one example. But I’ve seen this happen again and again.

Joe Casabona: Man, that’s fantastic advice. It’s funny you mention that somebody else that I interviewed for this, also said the same thing. So for those listening to the big takeaway, get involved in the community early and get involved often. So thank you so much for your time! I really appreciate it!

Akshat: Thank you so much! Thank you for having me.

Joe Casabona: Absolutely. You have to enjoy the rest of your WordCamp US.

Akshat: You too.

Joe Casabona: Thank you very much! I’m here with Michelle Shao and we’re going to talk about front-end dev stuff. So the first question is, “Michelle, do you have any front-end development optimization tips/forms?”

Michelle Shao: Well, everybody is always trying to make it better, right? But my biggest tip is to try not to be overly redundant in your code in general. So whether that’s you know better CSS it’s not overriding itself. Whether that’s using leaner JavaScript, or maybe using JavaScript to do or add remove classes instead of like a little jQuery fade or something that’s always good. Breaking things apart, being modular, we’re using it to create a better image. I mean, there’s nothing revolutionary there but anywhere you could not repeat yourself is good.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s great advice. And I mean it’s things that people don’t really think about. I have to build this, and I’m building, I’m going to build it four times, right? Or I have a class that could have been reused but I just rewrote that class, right? So I mean code optimizations are important and like. So do you use like any, like mini fires or anything like that either?

Michelle Shao: I mean…So I do write all my CSS and Sass and so I compile that and I do minify my job. I mean I use CodeKit, I’m kind of a visual person, right? Coming from a design background. But so yeah! Minifying stuff.

Joe Casabona: CodeKit is a great tool especially if you don’t feel like banging around the command line or anything like that. So I used CodeKit for a while and then…and I’m a developer you person by trade, so I was like, all right, I’ll do the command line. So my second question is, “How do you level up your Dev game, right? How did you learn all the stuff that you just talked about?”

Michelle Shao: So a lot of what I learned, I usually would hear about it either from somebody sharing a resource at an event like this or on Twitter. Somebody tweet something out or whatever and I’ll go and like, learn more about it. So I’ve also been really lucky that some of my friends have been super, super smart developers. And they’ve sat down and been like, “Hey, Michelle! Want me to teach you, Sass?” And I’ll be like, “Yes friend. That’s great!”. But honestly, just as I’m building projects like taking on projects that are maybe like 10 or 20% harder than something I know and then having to learn that as I go on. Learning how to search for it was great. And now I can pretty much find anything that I need. So…

Joe Casabona: Nice, that’s awesome. So it’s like you know, kind of trial by fire. You know, you’re going to take on something that you’re confident you can learn, that’s the important part you want to get in over your head.

Michelle Shao: Yeah, correct. I mean that’s why I said it’s usually only about 10 or 20% that I don’t know and 80% that I do. And then I can learn that 20% while I’m doing it.

Joe Casabona: Awesome, very nice. And my last question for you is “What’s one thing if you could go back in time to your younger self and say I wish I learned this sooner?”

Michelle Shao: Honestly, I wish I had learned how WordPress templating actually worked sooner. Because it seemed like this magical frustrating black box until I finally sat down and learned it. And now it just makes total sense. So I mean it makes about as much as a WordPress templating can make sense, right? But it made it so much easier and so much less frustrating to be a developer in this program to actually know how the program works.

Joe Casabona: That’s awesome, yeah. I think that’s a wish of a lot of developers. So well, Michelle, thank you so much for your time! I really appreciate it.

Joe Casabona: Hey everybody. I’m here with Leland Fiegel of Demetri. We’re going to be talking about front-end development and advice for leveling up your game. Leland, thank you for joining me today.

Leland Fiegel: You’re very welcome!

Joe Casabona: All right. I gotta say I’m a big fan of the machine they’ve sponsored the show in the past. I love your theme, so I think you’re a great guy to ask these questions too. So the first question has to do with front-end optimization, “How do you optimize your website from a user standpoint on the front-end?”

Leland Fiegel: Sure. So the number one tip that a lot of people overlook is images. Like a lot of people make a big deal about like, you know, shaving like 2 kilobytes or something off of your CSS file, and then they upload these like 2-megabyte images without even realizing how long that’s going to take to download. After the user that’s something you really need to be aware of when you know you can’t assume everyone has a high-speed connection like you do. People might be on mobile devices, people might have unlimited data plans, and you can’t be like forcing people to download gigantic images. So that’s the number one thing that people overlook and don’t realize is wasting so much bandwidth on these images. Other things you know it never hurts to minify your CSS or JavaScript, other static assets like that. Concatenating them you know, it certainly doesn’t hurt to be on a kind of a nice server that doesn’t have like 5000 other sites on it so I’d like to kind of think of it very holistically. Fonts, I think people get a little too crazy on Google fonts. They like to load like 10 different weights of the same font or something when they’re only really even using two of them and that’s just completely wasteful. So just you know, look at your network tab when you’re loading your web, different pages of your website, and just keep an eye out for things that just look unusual.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha, yeah. So you’re really talking about resource management, right? You don’t want to throw a million things that your user, especially if you’re not using them. All right.

Leland Fiegel: Exactly, yeah.

Joe Casabona: Cool, very cool. I love that! So you run a theme shop, I’m sure you try to keep your skills up to date and fresh and things like that. So “How do you, how would you level up your development game?”

Leland Fiegel: Sure. So lately, I’m a big fan of online courses. So, not really that great or I wasn’t really that great at JavaScript. Zak Gordon has this great JavaScript course called JavaScript WordPress. I took that, I bought that as soon as it came out and went through it. And now I feel pretty comfortable with JavaScript and that’s something that you’re going to need to know. Every WordPress developer is going to need to know in the future. Other online courses like Udemy have a lot of great courses. I don’t really know the people who make them but they just look at the ratings and how many other people take it and kind of evaluate how good it is. So I’ll look at stuff like object-oriented PHP, other JavaScript-related courses, and things like that.

Joe Casabona: Cool, very cool. Online courses are…Well, I do them, so I’m a big fan of them. So other definitely important spaces in there like kind of learn at your own pace, right?

Leland Fiegel: Exactly, yeah. And like, I buy a lot of them and sometimes I don’t even like to go through them at first. But I like the ones that are just kind of like a one-time payment thing so you’re just kind of investing in the courses and you can revisit them when you’re ready. Oh! In WP sessions is another one. I just signed up for that just a few days ago, actually and there are a bunch of WordPress-related, WordPress-specific courses on these more general sites like Udemy. Like there’s a whole like, grab bag of different things. But on WP sessions, WP is going to be WordPress specific or mostly.

Joe Casabona: Awesome, yeah. WP sessions are a great resource. We interviewed Brian on the podcast and for this episode actually, so he’s somewhere in here. Spoiler alert If he’s not in here yet. So the last question that I like to ask is, “Let’s say you go back in time and you see your former self. You say I wish I knew this to your former self, what is that?”

Leland Fiegel: Right. So, definitely be more willing to ask for help. I’ve always been the type of person who never asks for help and just tries to figure things out on his own. And you know going back related to the online courses thing like I just tried to just type things out and see what worked and what didn’t work. And you know I realized later on like this sort of huge weight, I mean not a huge waste of time but if you have a real, like instructor teaching you the kind of background behind things and how they work, you can kind of figure out more of a high-level perspective on things. So definitely ask for help, look at online courses, maybe find some sort of mentor or something you know. If you’re a developer try to work with another developer, kind of split the work and you probably have different skills that one of you is good at something and the other is good at the other thing and you can kind of have a synergistic effect on each other. So don’t be afraid to ask for help would be my number one piece of advice and I wish I learned that a lot sooner.

Joe Casabona: That’s fantastic. That goes along with what I say a lot with just asking. So, reporting live here from WordCamp US. Leland, thanks so much for joining me today!

Leland Fiegel: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Appreciate it.

Joe Casabona: Absolutely. Hey everybody. I’m here with Brian Richards at WordCamp US and I’m going to ask you a few questions about front-end development. Sounds good, right?

Brian Richards: Sounds great!

Joe Casabona: All right. Thank you very much! So my first question is what has to do with optimization “Do you have any tips or tricks for optimizing the front-end of a website?”

Brian Richards: Yes, I would recommend taking a good close look at the CSS that you’re building for your sites. There’s a pretty good chance that you’re not actually utilizing the cascade and writing way more CSS than you need to. A great tip that I picked up a while ago. Then probably forgot about and then rediscovered with the release of Tailwind CSS is to create a lot of utility classes that you can just reuse across elements. Things that add standard padding and margin and such. It makes your markup a little messier because you have all these utility classes in the list of class names but it makes your overall volume of CSS much shorter. Now that’s a pretty marginal game. Other options that would get you a much higher rate of success for optimization are optimizing your images beyond just using save for web from Photoshop which makes images still pretty huge. Taking a good hard look at the JavaScript that you’re loading across the pages. Maybe you don’t need it on every single page so maybe you need different payloads of JavaScript. Maybe you could just get away with less JavaScript. And other things like that where you’re adding nice window dressings that I consider it with things like shadows and rounded corners which surprisingly make your front-end load a little slower because it takes more time for the browser to paint all of those elements of all of their special effects.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha, yeah. So you’re doing things like you’re adding things that you think might look better but not necessarily at the cost of the performance that it’s giving you, right?

Brian Richards: Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly the case.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha, cool, very cool. So now I know that you run WP sessions, so you are all about learning, “How do you level up your skills as a developer?”

Brian Richards: I find people who are smarter than me and ask them lots of questions. That’s actually how the WP session started. I started looking for people who knew things that I didn’t and I said can I pay you to take an hour and teach me this thing and a lot of people said yes. Outside of that which is still largely how I find my speakers, I also seek out people who are writing articles and consume those every now and again. I go to events like WordCamp so that I can find more speakers. Basically, I just…I find other people who are talking about smart people and then go and track down the smart people that they’re talking about to try and learn from them.

Joe Casabona: I like that! That is exactly why I started this podcast because I like talking to people who are smarter than me like yourself now. So the last question that I know is that you’re going to give a really good answer for this one so, no pressure. “If you could go back in time to your former self and give him one piece of advice I wish I knew X, what would it be?”

Brian Richards: I would tell former me to make a point of documenting the way that I work and the things that I’m doing much much better than I ever do. Because man, having things written down has saved me so much grief in the current age that I wish I would have written down so many other things at a younger age. And like for code, obviously putting inline comments and documentation of my code but also like ideas that I’m having. I keep a very rich list of notes in Evernote of just things that I need to remember, about what I’m doing for the day, for the week. I started at the beginning of each week, for instance writing down three positive reflections, and three things that I could work on from my observations from the week prior. That’s a pretty big thing. And it’s been pretty awesome to go back and look at even just a few months that have been doing it, seeing all of the good things that have happened over the last twelve weeks or so.

Joe Casabona: Nice, I really love that, create advice for anybody, not just developers, right? Document what you do, it will make your life easier in the future. So, Brian, thanks so much for joining me! I really appreciate it!

Brian Richards: It was my pleasure. Thanks for taking the time to interview me.

Joe Casabona: Absolutely. Already here we go! Hey, everybody. I’m here with Kim and Jason Coleman of Paid Memberships Pro, and I am going to ask them a few questions about front-end development and learning stuff. So the first question guys well first of all, “How are you doing?”

Kim Coleman: Very well.

Jason Coleman: I’m having a good time. Thanks, Joe!

Joe Casabona: Excellent. Thanks for doing this with me. So the first question is about front-end optimization. “Do you have any tips or tricks for optimizing the front-end of your website?

Kim Coleman: So we have a membership plugin and it has to play nice with the theme that off-site is already using. So one thing that we’ve chosen to do is keep our plugins styling very lightweight and try to leave it up to the theme to control. And I think years ago, we were a little bit more heavy-handed and we’re backing away from that so that themes can have that control over the checkout page or other account-level pages more so than the plugin trying to control it.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. So you say heavy-handed in the sense that you were pretty opinionated. You would make a lot of design decisions and now you’re backing away from that.

Kim Coleman: Yes, absolutely.

Joe Casabona: Cool, and that makes sense why you don’t wanna load too many things, right?

Kim Coleman: Right. And that was based on the landscape of themes you know eleven years ago that didn’t necessarily include styling for forms. Nowadays, forms are expected on a website and themes do more to include styles for those types of elements.

Joe Casabona: And Jason, you do primarily the back-end sort of stuff. Do you do anything on the back-end to make front-end loading faster/better or anything like that? I know this is a curveball.

Jason Coleman: Yeah, you’re throwing a curveball. I’d have to think about that. What I was going to say is kind of friend related that my…Like almost #1 tip for any website owner that does a number of things but also improves performance is to make sure your homepage does only one thing. If you talk to a lot of businesses, you usually ask this question of your client. You say, when someone comes to your website if you could have them 100% of the time, do just one thing, what would you have them do. And it’s usually not browsing through my slider or reading through my testimonials or all of this kind of heavy stuff that can slow down a homepage. It’s like calling me, joining my mailing list, buying my product, or submitting this form. And so, if you just put that front and center and take away a lot of the rest of this stuff, you know you can optimize your site. Not through tips and tricks maybe, but just simplifying what you’re doing.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. So you have very focused content, right? So mean you’re not loading a whole bunch of nonsense on there.

Kim Coleman: Another thing related to performance as a plugin author is if your asset isn’t needed on those pages don’t enqueue them, don’t load them and the same was somewhat true with we initiated a PHP session but it was only really required for its the PayPal gateway that was requiring the session.

Jason Coleman: Yeah.

Kim Coleman: So we in our most recent 1.9.4, yeah took it away.

Jason Coleman: Yeah, there are tips. You can do it in the back-end with almost any PHP resource. One of them in this case is like loading data into the PHP session but sometimes it’s loading a class or loading data out of the database. If you’re smart about when you actually need to do those things and avoid doing them when you don’t have to, sometimes it takes some upfront thought about things. But it’s worth it because if every plugin developer did that and you’re running thirty plugins on your site, you know you’re going to, yeah, speed up your website.

Joe Casabona: Cool, very cool. So now you guys have been doing this for a while and I think this is right. You are self-taught since paid memberships came into existence, right? So, I’m especially excited to ask you this question “How do you learn, how do you level up your skills?”.

Kim Coleman: I think the…as a plugin author, you look at other plugins and you say what are they doing the same is true for the skills you look at a website and you pick it apart. You look at their JavaScript, you look at their CSS, how are they doing things, what are they doing. And it’s really just you know, sink or swim a lot for me. So I see an element I like and I realized that I need to learn how to code it so I have to dive deeper into the CSS grid or I have to dive deeper into, you know, variables in a CSS file so that I can make a better product and I can get smarter about things for myself on-going. So yeah! It’s really just when the need arises, you have to learn more. And it’s looking at other people and what they’re doing for inspiration.

Joe Casabona: Nice, kind of learn by example. And so, Jason, I know that you’ve written kind of a book on like a time. I really love it, about you, you know, doing good WordPress plugin development essentially. And so “How do you kind of, how do you learn because you learn and then you learn like, the more advanced heavy deep dive stuff?”

Jason Coleman: Yeah. It is important to keep up your game when you’re developing. And like to be honest, I feel like I’m starting to…I feel like an old-time developer when I talked to the…like the younger crew coming up and they’re doing all this fancy stuff in using all the new frameworks and I’m a little bit, like can’t you just use you know basic JavaScript to do the same thing. And they’re like no. So I’m kind of graduating into a, you know, coding management role versus programmer even though I love the program. But on the programming side, what I found you know in my career and still and with my team is like side projects are a really good way to dive deep into those new platforms and technologies and skills that maybe you feel like would slow down your normal course of development. So yeah! You know, dive into a side project just for fun and like oh, this is an excuse to work with React that we haven’t worked with before. And every once in a while too, maybe if it’s not a side project, if you’re doing consulting work, you quote a build for someone. And like it’s overkill to use react to build this but if it does kind of make sense you know, spend extra time that you’re not building the client to build it using like the newer technology. Like if it makes sense, you don’t want stuff that doesn’t make sense. But sometimes you can kind of choose to use the technology just for learning and so you kind of force yourself to try out and use some new techniques because if you don’t it’s very easy to get stuck in a right and wrong just coding. You know, and you know PHP 5.2 you know, no object-oriented. You know whatever you get you go back to your old habits because it’s easy so you have to force yourself.

Joe Casabona: Cool. So it sounds like the thing taken away from both of you is kind of learn by doing, right? You figure out and you do something. So awesome! Thank you! The last question I have is a really good one. “If you could go back in time and say to your younger self I wish I knew X at this point, what would it be? What would you tell your younger self to learn and know?”

Kim Coleman: To learn and know. Hmm…(laughing background). This is not about WordPress.

Joe Casabona: You are not the first person to give that answer.

Kim Coleman: I think…I did talk about this with Jessalyn also but he always, Jason always jokes with me that I have kind of an impostor syndrome about what I’m good at and what I know how to do. And using the word developer in my job title is something that I feel nervous about because it implies something that I don’t agree with personally. So yeah I mean to be more confident be more, a short of yourself that you are that title and that’s part of your day today. You know.

Joe Casabona: Nice, I love that. And what about you Jason?

Jason Coleman: Yeah, business-wise like one thing that I often come back to about, you know telling my early self is that a mantra that I like fails fast. And so you know I’m saying, “Hey, do these side projects, do all these things to level up your skills” oftentimes like, I find that I get involved in too much stuff at once. And then it becomes you know a time sink to kind of maintain these things or like pursued business goals. And I think sometimes you can have a sense of this isn’t working out, but you feel connected to it for you know kind of emotional reasons. And if I had failed a lot of those earlier projects maybe I would have gotten to the successful ones earlier is that kind of thing.

Joe Casabona: Cool, I love that! Well, thank you both for joining me today. I really appreciate it.

Kim and Jason Coleman: Thank you so much, Joe!

Joe Casabona: All right. That does it for the live in-person interviews that we did at WordCamp US. Thanks so much to all of my guests, Jackie, Scott, Akshat, Michelle, Leland, Brian Richards, and Kim, and Jason Coleman, That was some excellent advice. I’m going to…Before we get to the Pantheon answers, I interviewed Steve from Pantheon with these same exact questions. I don’t often get to do this so I’m going to kind of wax poetic a little bit on my answers and kind of put some of these things up, right?

We heard a lot for the first question about front-end optimization, we heard a lot of being mindful of your resources, right? Jackie talked about using SVG for images instead of massive images. Leland talked specifically about that for a while not uploading these gigantic images that take up a lot of space on your server but also take up a lot of resources for your users, and then the rest of our guests pretty much echoed these same things. Be mindful of the resources you’re uploading. Make sure to write good concise CSS and don’t repeat yourself. Make sure to minify things and use lean JavaScript. All of those things are really important because in today’s world, in the web development world at least, there are so many different frameworks and things that you can add to your website that it’s easy. It’s really easy for a website to get uploaded but on that same token, a lot of the things that you had to use JavaScript for even seven years ago, you can now use CSS for. So, make sure I would say, make sure you’re using the right tool for the job, right? Don’t use JavaScript for site-wide CSS changes for example. And make sure not to use images for things that CSS can do and vice versa. So…or if you are doing heavy animations perhaps JavaScript is the way to go, right? CSS can do animations but depending on the language that you’re using and the animations you’re doing you know, maybe JavaScript is better. So it takes a little bit of learning your craft, honing your craft and it’s definitely not like MVP style learning. But as you learn more, definitely know what the best tool for the job is.

With our second question, we got a lot of online courses or books. It was a common answer, reading Twitter and learning from your friends. That’s how I learn. That’s why I started this podcast to learn from my friends. And of course, I love online courses because I make them myself. And I like to ask a lot of questions and this isn’t even like, just web development related. I will get stuck on a subject and ask a bunch of questions about whatever it is. “Hey where did that saying come from or why do you do things this way?”, so I’ve been very inquisitive. It’s been very helpful to me because then I will when I’m interested in some craft or learning more about JavaScript. Why do we do it this way, why do we need all these things to react, what’s Webpack, and things like that. So definitely ask a lot of questions and talk to people, talk to lots of people. Brian said that he likes to find people who are smarter than him and ask questions. That is maybe my favorite answer because it is an excellent one. Learn from your friends.

And the last question which is my favorite one, we got a pretty wide array of answers here. But one that came up more than once is, get involved sooner, network faster, meet people faster. If you do that, the number 2 won’t be so hard because you will meet the people who are smarter than you, and then you can ask them lots of questions and level up your game, right? As far as what I would tell myself, my younger self, don’t be afraid of the word no. When I was a kid, well I started my business when I was 16 or 15 or something like that. I was pretty afraid to be told “no” and because of that I wouldn’t ask right or I would quote way lower than I should have. And it wasn’t until well into college that I learned, “Hey, there’s nothing wrong with the word, ”no”. Somebody says no, it’s maybe not a good fit or they weren’t ready for the services or I wasn’t ready to do the project and they could tell right that’s absolutely the possibility as well”. So don’t be afraid of the word “no” and just ask. It’s something I say all the time and I’m a big fan of it.

So with that, I’m going to now lead into the interview that I did with Steve Persch over at Pantheon. Pantheon of course sponsored the episode. They sent me to WordCamp US so I could conduct these interviews and bring you such great content. So absolutely, check them out. There is a link in the show notes but if you go to buildpodcast.net/pantheon you will see all the fun things they have to offer. So without further ado, here’s my interview with Steve Persch answering the same questions.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to a very special edition of How I Built It. So I am back in the studio after an excellent time at WordCamp US. Thanks to the sponsor of that episode Pantheon. And today, right now I’m here with Steve Persch who is an agency and community engineer at Pantheon and he’s going to answer the same questions that I was asking people at WordCamp US. Steve, how are you doing today?

Steve Persch: I’m great! Happy to be here, Joe.

Joe Casabona: Thanks for coming on the show. Again, I really appreciate Pantheon giving me the opportunity to go and record a live show at WordCamp US. I had a blast doing it and I’m definitely going to look into doing more of that in the future. So, first and foremost, I really appreciate that.

Steve Persch: Absolutely. It’s a great conference this year. We really enjoyed it.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. Glad to hear it. So I know that we’ve got the questions. Well obviously, we have the questions ahead of time that are the same ones that I ask at the WordCamp US. And so, the first question is “Do you have any tips for front-end optimization for us?”.

Steve Persch: Sure. So I just wrote a blog post, ‘Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs’ front-end performance addition. So it basically takes the idea that there’s a progression to rise up towards making sure your site is actually serving its real purpose. So for an end performance optimizations, I think should be done in the service of whatever the site exists to do be. Add an E-commerce site, a blog site where you’re trying to pass along information for pretty much any site. You don’t want people waiting 10 seconds to load the page. So one of the bits of advice in that blog post was, examine whether or not each element on your page actually belongs there. So I was recently looking at a site that had a lot of JavaScript files loading. One of which was like, share this JavaScript file but as I was looking around the page, I didn’t see any share these widgets. And if I had just jumped straight to let’s optimize this JavaScript, let’s make it smaller, let’s make it faster, let’s concatenate these files together. I probably would have overlooked the fact that there was this whole file, this whole set of logic that didn’t need to be loaded at all. So before trying to make something fast, ask do we need this thing at all?

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. That makes sense, right? Like if you know, if I’m driving let’s say, Chevrolet Cavalier, I’m not going to put like some sort of 10:10 thing on the back of it. That’s going to be hard, really slow and I don’t need it.

Steve Persch: Yeah, exactly, exactly. You don’t need that.

Joe Casabona: Cool, awesome And so you mentioned that you wrote a blog post which is a great way to learn more and level up your skills, but in general you know I’m sure you’re writing the block that blog post. So, you already have those skills. “How do you go about learning new things and leveling up your skill?”

Steve Persch: Sure. Over the course of my career, I think what I’ve relied on most is working on projects that I care about, personally. So side projects, I got into web development, I was a theater major in college and started making websites for theater companies. Like I literally needed to make a better website in order to do my job better. I was managing the website at this theater company. It was all flat HTML that was a pain. I didn’t like managing sidebars across these hundreds of HTML files. I thought I could probably do something like a PHP include. And that’ll make my real job actually easier. So over the course of my career, I’ve learned mainly by figuring out the thing that I need. Either for myself, be at work, or be it for a personal project. So I still think personal projects, side projects often are the way I learn best after over a decade of doing this. Though I don’t have a lot of energy to just rewrite my own blog and react or whatever the new thing is, like, I can only rebuild the same websites so many times. So what I’ve been experimenting with more recently are Internet of things projects. Just because it’s more exciting to me at this point in my career. So, buttons that call off to API’s that trigger Amazon Lambda functions all within a second and then send responses back to the button, like by doing that, I’m learning new things. I’m learning about the latest in JavaScript, learning about Amazon Lambda functions, and I’m doing it to make this button light up which is right now more exciting to me than rebuilding my blog yet again.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s awesome. Because well, first of all, you’re learning by doing which is something that I preach all the time. I absolutely love that but I mean as far as your more recent techniques you’re actually building something in the real space which is not something that programmers get to do a lot of the time, right?

Steve Persch: Yeah, a lot of that Internet of Things stuff, I picked up in preparation for a conference presentation. Earlier this year was called connecting your development workflow to the Internet of Things. And I submitted the head, that talk abstract. Before I had it really altogether so I had to learn a lot just to get ready for the conference talk. That’s another way to learn new things. Submit conference talks about things you don’t really know completely yet and then you’ll have to learn in order to get ready for that presentation. So yeah, I ended up putting together a lot of Internet of Things side projects just to get ready for that presentation.

Joe Casabona: Cool, very cool. A trial by fire if you will jump right into the deep end. Cool. So now we are on to the last question which is “If you could go back in time and give your younger self some advice what would that advice be?”

Steve Persch: Sticking to the technology world, I think the advice I would give to my earlier self would be, you’re gonna have to learn bash at some point. As a web developer, I tried to narrow the scope because there are so many things, technology-related. If you try to learn the mall, you will never get anything done. So I knew that I couldn’t learn everything. And as a web developer, I tried to stay focused on websites and for the team that I was on. I thought yes, there are scripts that need to be written but I feel like that should be someone else managing the server, managing DevOps, see things I’m focused on building out the website. And that’s true and worthwhile to a certain extent just on the web hosting side of things. That’s why I liked Pantheon because I knew I didn’t have to worry about the engine X. Pantheon has got that covered so it does hold for a lot of areas but I’ve found that I would have been better off had I just gotten comfortable with the command line earlier. Had I gotten comfortable with bash scripting earlier, even just the basics of variables in bash and exit codes pass, fail, like there’s so much that can be done with those decades-old fundamental tools. I just wish I had gotten into them years earlier.

Joe Casabona: That is a great piece of advice because especially if you’re starting out in, like front-end, the sort of role. The command line can be very scary right? But I remember when I made the switch full time, I would do some things on the command line like nearly delete my entire, my brother’s entire hard drive because it did like pseudo-RNS.

Steve Persch: Oh yeah.

Joe Casabona: But it was like there was a conflict between something I was using like the version of Git that thing was using and the version of Git I needed. So I just like, uninstalled the graphical user interface I was using for Git and getting up and just used to get from the command line and like I never looked back so it’s a lot of fun. I think now that I’m like, embedded in it.

Steve Persch: Yeah, absolutely. And I’m supposed to give yet another answer, find a great team to work with sooner. I spent a lot of time in my early career working solo and I guess I figured out soon enough that I needed team members to be working with. But forget specifically I feel like I accelerated through a lot of the Git angst that I’ve heard. Simply because I adopted get at a time when I was switching jobs to accompany those all Git. And I just had to learn it, learn it quickly. And I had great coworkers who could help me out when I had to re-base for the first time or had to work with most or multiple remotes for the first time. I could ask someone over the cubicle wall and they would help me. And yeah! There are a lot of times really in my career one of those you know just me working out of my bedroom getting stuck in Googling for hours.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. That is not too great pieces of advice and that’s what will leave you with C. Thanks so much for joining me, for this short version of our interview but a longer version of How I Built It live from WordCamp US.

Steve Persch: Thanks so much, Joe!

Joe Casabona: All right. Thanks again so much to Steve and Pantheon for making this episode possible.

If you want to learn more about Pantheon head over to buildpodcast.net/pantheon to see everything that they have as a hosting company has to offer. I will point out my favorite feature of their hosting service. Aside from they’re really nifty like global CDN stuff, what they’re doing is how easy it is to connect GitHub or Git to my website. It’s the easiest process I’ve experienced across any hosting provider. So if that is a really important feature to you, Pantheon might be worth it. Just for that! So absolutely, check them out again! That’s buildpodcast.net/pantheon.

I really hope you enjoyed this live episode. I hope to do more of them in the future. Again this is like a very special episode. It’s in-between Seasons Three and Four.

Season Four is coming out in just a couple of weeks and man, I am so excited to show you everything I have in store for that season. I’ve got some really great guests. We talk about some really cool subject matters, we even venture outside of just building web products a little bit so there’s a little teaser for you.

If you liked this episode or enjoyed the show please rate us, interview us over at Apple podcasts. It really helps us discover. And I do want to thank you because the ratings are…the reviews, the subscriptions put How I Built It in the top 25 tech podcasts on iTunes recently, which is a great honor. I’m so excited for that!

So again, until Season Four which launches in a couple of weeks.

Thanks so much for listening.

And until next time, get out there and build something.