Over the last 16 or so months that I’ve worked in the WordPress ecosystem full-time I’ve reached a lot of important milestones. Getting hired by Pods, selling my first paid blog post, becoming a core contributor, releasing my first plugin, becoming a regular contributor to Torque, and Tuts+, learning to say no to most job offers that come my way, speaking at a WordCamp for the first time and more.
In the last few weeks, I’ve achieved important milestones on the project that actually brought me here: HoloTree. Today, HoloTree is a team decision making system, and is in private beta, with its first few users. Overtime our goal is to be a “GitHub for sustainable design.” In other words, it’s the physical manifestation of what happens when a tech-savvy hippie gets into free software while doing a transdisciplinary masters degree in environmental studies.
Over time, we hope to apply the most important lesson I’ve learned from working in WordPress –the power of aligning idealism and pragmatism. It’s been an awesome experience, to work for Pods, which sells no products and to write articles for sites that don’t charge for their content. It’s all part of a wonderful system where creating something free, makes so many people a living, while gaining all sorts of freedoms.
The service isn’t perfect yet. But I’m trying to keep in mind what I learned from Cory Miller at WordCamp DFW this year–that my good is everyone else’s awesome, and that perfectionism robs the world of my gifts. So we’ll be going public in January–and releasing the code that powers the service as a WordPress plugin soon after. I’m not sure yet if it will be a no cost or a commercial plugin–but it will be freely license of course.
Today, I’m headed to WordCamp Orlando, and reminding myself how lucky I am to have fallen into this wonderful world of WordPress. I’m thinking of all the accomplishments I’ve made since my first WordCamp–WordCamp Birmingham 2013–and all the goals I haven’t reached yet, like daily blogging.
So look for more here, and at HoloTree.com, about what we’re creating, and lessons learned both in terms of development and business-wise along the way.
Most importantly, thank you to all the people that make up the WordPress ecosystem. Keep being awesome and I look forward to being a part of this world for years to come.