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What’s that you say? You didn’t know I was leaving? Well, it wasn’t an easy decision.

Pros of working at Event Espresso

Some of the things I loved about working with Event Espresso was being part of a great team, being able to contribute to development, and being able to help shape the direction of the plugin and the business. These are all good things.

When I first started working with Event Espresso, it was that or going back to work at Whole Foods. Business was slow, Museum Themes hadn’t taken off, and things were getting rough. Event Espresso was one of the few opportunities that allowed me to work at home and get a regular paycheck, and for that it was great and I jumped at the opportunity. Over the course of 2 years, I learned the business as well as the plugin, and was able to help steer the direction (or at least offer my suggestions) for both.

Cons of working at Event Espresso

Here’s the dilemma: my freelance web development business was still slow and Museum Themes still hadn’t taken off. I’d been with Event Espresso for 2 years and I always said that I’d be able to work on that stuff on the side, but it never happened. I was always working at Event Espresso, working long hours, constantly in front of the computer, and I was watching my life pass me by. On the one hand, I was a valued member of the team, on the other I was cranky all the time from the stress of doing support and of having half a dozen different things that needed to get done RTFN on any given day and I was passing up potential clients because I just didn’t have enough time.

I tried a number of things. I tried having one day a week where I did client work or work on Museum Themes. That sort of worked — in that I could do one or the other — but if I had both, Museum Themes got pushed (once again) to the bottom of the pile. I started cutting my hours back so I was only working about 20 hours a week. That helped me get through my most recent course for Pluralsight, but, again, everything else got pushed to the bottom of the pile and I was still cranky and stressed.

Work smarter

In short, I’ve been working really freaking hard for the last couple years and I feel like I don’t have a lot to show for it. Certainly my sanity and my availability to my family has been worse for the wear. When Megan from Pluralsight approached me last fall at WordCamp SLC, I was skeptical. I wasn’t sure if this was a one-off deal or if it would be something I could do as a steady gig. And I knew nothing about the company, their background, where they came from, how legit they were. I didn’t know if doing Pluralsight courses would pay off, if it would be worth it, if I would just be working really hard and nothing would really come of it.

But when I finished that first course, we celebrated with a bottle of champagne. And when that first royalty check came I could see that, yeah, this is something that could be a real thing.

It’s not that doing a course isn’t hard work — it is. It’s really hard, actually. It involves creativity and creativity doesn’t grow on trees. But one of the differences is that I need to know the stuff I’m teaching and that means I need to be constantly learning and experimenting — things I want to be doing anyway but previously didn’t have enough time. Sure enough, as I was finishing off my last course, I started getting ideas of what my next course would be (my next two courses, actually). Doing a course for Pluralsight means I actually need to take time away to do other things, which helps me stay fresh and motivated and then inspires creativity when I start working on something that I can then turn into a course (or a part of a course).

Even if I run out of WordPress-related ideas (which I don’t see happening for a while), the WordPress development cycle is about one major release every six months, so at the very least, I could do a course every six months covering what’s new.

I’ll still be involved with Event Espresso for the foreseeable future. Right now I’m working on doing use case articles for them and I expect to still be a part of the Espresso Bar hangouts once a month. I’ve had a week away and I feel like it will be an adjustment, but I’ve gotten a lot of stuff done, lined up some possible client work, and I’ve started working on my next Pluralsight course. Best of all, though, I feel like I’ve been much less cranky. All in all, I think it’s been a good week.

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overheard on Twitter…

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But wait, you’re still unconvinced that Pluralsight is worth the monthly investment? Seriously, you shouldn’t be. This stuff is by devs for devs (of all shapes and sizes, from beginner to advanced) and the material is awesome. But you don’t need to take my word for it. I’ve got a stack of 1 month trial codes that give you access to the whole library sitting right here. I’ll give you one (well, I’ll give you the code and the URL to activate your trial) if you tweet a link to the announcement post on the Pluralsight blog and post a link to your tweet in the comments. Ready? Go.

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Progress Bar 1.1 | Progress Bar.

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Every Noise at Once.

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CISPA is back..

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At WordCamp SLC in September, he had been working on Skematik and we talked a bit about it then. I was anxious to take a peek but I hadn’t had a chance to ask him about it again until the meetup. So I did. And what you see before you is it.

Okay, you’re right, it doesn’t look like much at the outset. In fact, it probably looks almost identical to what this site looked like before I started using Skematik. (To be fair, I modified some of the templates and am running a child theme of Skematik — one that supports post formats for one thing, and allows my notifications plugin to work.) But the proof, as they say, is in the pudding. Or something. All the goods are under the hood. It’s based off Twitter Bootstrap — something I’ve been developing with lately anyway, and it’s incredibly flexible in terms of how you can customize it out of the box. Obviously, considering it only took a few minutes for me to get it to look almost exactly the same as the site did before I installed it.

What I like about the theme, besides the bootstrappy-ness, is how quickly you can get it up to speed with whatever you’re working on and get a nice looking site that’s immediately responsive (thanks to Bootstrap). Also, he makes full use of the WordPress theme customizer — which I haven’t played with enough, myself, and the only thing that shows up on the Theme Options page as far as settings is a custom CSS editor. It’s pretty cool to be able to tweak your theme before you even deploy it. And then there’s a bunch of shortcodes, but we won’t get into that…

Go check out skematiktheme.com and give Matt some business if you’re interested in an easy-to-use theme/theme framework that already supports some popular plugins (bbpress, buddypress, wp e-commerce, etc) out of the box.

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‘The Single Most Valuable Document In The History Of The World Wide Web’ : Planet Money : NPR.

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Get used to failure

When I was in high school, I was active in theatre. I was in all the school plays from my Freshman year on and I was good. My Drama teacher was impressed and encouraged me to continue. She even got me a book of Shakespeare quotes as a graduation present because of the several Shakespeare competitions I participated in. She also left me with a gift of another sort. As a form of parting advice in pursuing theatre in the future she told me to “get used to failure”.

I know this was a matter of just preparing me for the inevitable. But when I went on to the City College of San Francisco right after high school, and I auditioned for a musical, I was intimidated by all the other performers bringing a piece of music with them as compared with my really nervous rendition of “Happy Birthday”. That’s it, then, I decided. It didn’t matter how good I was in high school, this was another level that I just couldn’t compete on. And it wasn’t until a friend wrote an adaptation of William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell my senior year at college and invited me to act in it that I set foot on a stage again.

Similarly, in high school, I wanted to be a writer. And I was pretty good at that, too. Enough so that something I wrote so disturbed my AP English teacher that he had a talk with me afterward about what was in it to make sure I wasn’t, you know, crazy or anything. “This is really good,” he told me, “I just wanted to make sure it’s all fiction.”

My dad had had dreams once, too. He wrote, and he wanted to be on the radio. His plan was to study broadcasting in southern California. Then I came along and he went to night school, worked graveyard shifts at the grocery store, and is now in Human Resources — not exactly the original plan. Like my Drama teacher, he was skeptical of “making it” as a writer, and encouraged me to think and plan realistically about my future, telling me that almost no one ever actually makes it as a writer.

And so it goes. It’s similar to the “scale it down a bit” joke Eddie Izzard does in Dress to Kill.

And, you know, unfortunately for me, all the things I wanted to do didn’t involve sitting in an office in front of a computer or working in a store or becoming a doctor or a lawyer, and I wanted to do all of them — writer, musician, actor, designer. When I was in high school, “entrepreneur” was not a job title — certainly not a realistic one.

Faking it

Several times this last year, I’ve come across variations on this advice: “Fake it until you make it”. Except it’s not really “fake it until you make it”, it’s (in the words of Amy Cuddy) “fake it until you become it”. This is illustrated in Amy’s TED talk and the story of Biz Stone (co-founder of Twitter) which was published in the 20th anniversary issue of Wired.

In both cases, they “faked it” until they started to believe their own hype and it became a part of them, and through that, became successful.

But why is faking it necessary? We’re so screwed up that we squash our dreams before we have an opportunity to pursue them. And it’s the people who continue to dream that we put on a pedestal and call visionaries. Because no one told them “get used to failure”.

Growing up shouldn’t mean forgetting to dream

I’m tired of being jaded.

I’m never going to fit into a cubicle. If I can’t believe in what I’m doing, certainly no one else will. I call for radical optimism. I call for a return to the enthusiasm that was so ingrained before we had to deal with “the real world”.

More than anything else, though, I call for an immediate halt on telling our kids ridiculous things like “get used to failure”. Maybe that wouldn’t have made a difference for me, but maybe it would have. I’ll never know. But that it wasn’t one person who said it, and instead was the overall, prevailing theme of what it means to “grow up” and go out into the “real world” that makes it so harmful. Instead, I say fuck failure.

Do it anyway.

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