For the last three and a half years, Yoast has offered a “diversity fund”, which funded WordCamp attendance for underrepresented people in tech. The goal was to increase the diversity at WordCamps. It worked very well. According to a recent blog post: During 2018, 2019, and 2020: We were able to sponsor 70 people, To…
A couple of months ago Michelle Frechette approached me about being on a podcast for Sentree.io. I didn’t realize at the time I was going to be their inaugural guest! We had a great time, and things got back to normal. Several weeks later Michelle said they sent me a thanks gift, which was very…
I recently took part in DoSummitGood, an online conference for people and organizations working to Do Good in the WordPress community. The organizers managed to get recordings of all the talks on YouTube the very next day, which is pretty impressive. In this talk I tell a lot more about what was going on in…
Exactly five years ago today I woke up to an email from Dave Rosen telling me my life was about to change. He didn’t know yet what we’d build, but he offered me the chance to build something. From that seed we crafted HeroPress. It was a battle, filled with uncertainty, and at times tears,…
As of today, HeroPress essays will be syndicated on WordPress.org/news once a month, on the first friday of the month. A few weeks ago Josepha The Great approached me and said she’d been tasked with getting Better News at that location, and HeroPress was one of her first thoughts. We discussed how it would work…
You may have noticed there’s no Essay this week. This is for a variety of small reasons, some of which involve going fishing. We’ll resume our regular schedule next week. I think this is only the second time in over 4 years that we’ve missed an essay. Later this week I should have a fun…
On March 25th, 2015, I published Rarst’s HeroPress essay “Finding Your Place“. It’s been four years. As of this post there are 165 essays published. 165 stories of dreams, successes, failures, and courage. 165 people I’ve gotten to know and love. It feels like it’s always been there. For a while this last year I…
A couple years ago I noticed that someone had done a talk at WordCamp Brighton called “The Hero’s Journey“. As you can imagine it immediately caught my eye and I went hunting to find this cool person. As it turns out it was Tamsin Taylor from Brighton and she had a great story. As I…
In the early days of HeroPress there were quite a few Indian contributors, for a variety of reasons. India has long been a technology powerhouse, but the WordPress community was just beginning to get traction. I got to meet many Indians and even traveled there for WordCamp Pune. The stereotype that “India is cheap” is…
About a year ago, Christie Chirinos wrote the essay “What I Do Does Not Define Who I Am“. It felt like a big deal at the time, and it was, but like most big deals, it slowly faded from memory. That’s one of the reasons I do these replays, for the benefit of my own…