Episode 42: Birgit Pauli Haack

Hallway Chats: Episode 42 - Birgit Pauli Haack

Introducing Birgit Pauli Haack

Birgit Pauli Haack has been a web builder for the last 22 years and is still fascinated by it. Right now, she is learning JavaScript for the third time and evangelizes for the upcoming release of Gutenberg in WordPress core. By day, she runs her own web agency Pauli Systems.

Show Notes

Website | Pauli Systems
Website | Gutenberg Times
Website | WP4Good
Twitter | @bph
LinkedIn | Birgit Pauli Haack
Instagram | IDX
Podcast | NP Tech Projects

Episode Transcript

Liam: This is Hallway Chats, where we talk with some of the unique people in and around WordPress.

Tara: Together, we meet and chat with folks you may not know about in our community.

Liam: With our guests, we’ll explore stories of living – and of making a living with WordPress.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 42.

Liam: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Liam Dempsey.

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re joined by Birgit Pauli-Haack. Birgit has been a web builder for the last 22 years and is still fascinated by it. Right now, she is learning JavaScript for the third time and evangelizes for the upcoming release of Gutenberg in WordPress core. By day, she runs her own web agency Pauli Systems. Hi and welcome, Birgit. Nice to see you.

Birgit: Hi, everybody. Hi, Tara and Liam. Thank you so much for inviting me on your podcast. I listen to it quite often and it’s good to hear the personal side of people. I love it, thank you so much for inviting me.

Liam: Well, thank you for that very flattering welcome. We’re just so happy to have you here today, Birgit. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself that Tara didn’t share with us?

Birgit: Well, I live in Naples, Florida. This time of year, I shared this with a few hundred thousand people and more that come as snow birds to Naples and stayed the winter here. I’m married for 25 years and my husband works in IT but for a big company, we have no kids and we love to travel together. I do a lot of things besides my web business, and I think it will come up throughout the questions and answers here.

Tara: I look forward to it, let’s start by acknowledging your accent and where you come from and where you started, not only physically in terms of where you grew up, but where you started in your path towards WordPress. I’m leaving that really open for you.

Liam: And I’m just going to interject and say, I hear your accent, too, Tara Claeys.

Tara: Thank you.

Liam: Go ahead, Birgit.

Birgit: We immigrated to United States 20 years ago in 1998. That’s where my accent comes from, it comes from Germany. Born and raised in Munich and that’s where I actually joined as a hobby a free internet service called– there was CitizenNet in Munich and that’s where I first learned how to build websites and curate sites. Journey to WordPress was quite a few years later. 2009, I started doing it seriously, researching it for a non-profit internet service provider that had services for non-profits, amongst them content management systems. Back then, it was started in 2009 or something like that. By the time of 2010, it was highly outdated and the developer disappeared or had other things to do as a volunteer, so we had to make a choice on, “Okay, what’s next for those non-profits that we served?” And after I looked for quite a few months for content management systems, back then I probably tested about 10 or 15 to see if it works not only for the non-profits but it was also how a tech team would be able to manage onboarding and supporting things just on a volunteer basis. WordPress was a one-trick install with a ton of information available on the internet that people who would use it could self-study, could actually google stuff and find out how things work, how to operate a PDF or how to create a button, or these kind of things. So we selected that and in summer, we migrated about 40 non-profits to the new system.

Liam: One summer?

Birgit: One summer, yeah. Back then, I did weekly migration workshops where everybody came and it was kind of work-along kind of thing and I helped everybody out. But What I found very helpful and what really astonished me and I knew that we were on the right track with that choice was that the techies would go away in those workshops and communicators, the newspaper editors, the membership chairs, those who actually want to directly talk to their supporters, and members came in and were just empowered to communicate online just with this tool. That was really democratizing publishing, as the mission is with WordPress. And it was real life. You didn’t have to talk about, “Okay, how can I change the font from green to blue? What a designer would do?” They just said, “Well, if I can do that, I can do so much more.” And they would have very creative discussions from the workshop and I felt really happy about that.

Tara: That’s a great example of how WordPress can spread, like you said, beyond the techy people and I think that’s definitely one of the goals. Some people might debate that, that we’re going in the direction, maybe too much for those people but I’m going to ask you about Gutenberg since that was in your intro and what you’re doing with it, what you think about it, how you’re integrating that into your workflow with your clients?

Birgit: I had the same questions, how do I get my clients on Gutenberg. I was in Europe when Matt Mullenweg showed the first video demonstration. It was not a live demo on stage like it was in WordCamp US but it was a video on how Gutenberg works, and I was fascinated by it. I had the feeling that it would be a similar step from the content creators as it was back then in 2010 with non-profit editors. But right after I got back from Europe, I heard all these voices in the community. Of course, the negative voice is always louder than those that are inspired. I felt the need to curate all those community voices and find out what everybody’s saying but also what are tools there, what is information that is really helpful for people. So the question, okay, when will it be released and what will it mean for plugin developers, what will it mean for theme developers, how consulting businesses would work on it? But by the time WordCamp US came about, it really how a whole lot of pushing in the United States, with the finale of the on-stage demonstration by Matias Ventura who’s the lead developer. There wasn’t a whole lot of talk about releasing and about how to integrate it for some work that you do every day. But after that, a few scenarios kind of came about. Gutenberg will not be released in April. [laughs] Just to kind of make that clear. I don’t think that Matt Mullenweg said this. The team is working very hard to make it as painless as possible for a site owner to migrate to Gutenberg. There are few things that need to happen. One is the custom post types need to work. We’ll have a feature to not enable Gutenberg on when it comes to pass. And the plugins that work with the content itself that’s in a post have a way to convert whatever they do into a block. That is in the editor. I curated all this information on Storify, and I did probably about 40 updates since June and December. Where I curated was the tweets that are out there, blog posts that are there. I didn’t do a whole lot of writing myself about it, but then in December, Adobe announced that Storify is going to come to end of life in May 2018. That kind of made me stop a bit and kind of think about, okay, how can I make this a little bit consistent and not all the hard work can go away. In January then, I started a website called Gutenbergtimes.com and a Twitter handle, @gutenbergtimes. That’s where I now curate and I will move all those Storify updates over to a Gutenberg-driven Gutenberg Times website. And this is fascinating what information’s already out there. There was a two-part question, I think, Tara. You also wanted to know how I work with my clients on Gutenberg?

Tara: Yeah, how you see it integrating.

Birgit: I think they will love it. We are right now in the process of creating the staging sites and making copies of the more complex websites that we maintain and that do work with people and make them– on the station site, we test everything out, we test the custom post types, we test the custom fields, we test the editor itself, see that the themes that we built are still displaying the blogs right. And we do a kind of an all-out plan with the clients. Either schedule training and then also, “Okay, is there a solution for the problem that we have?” If not, we connect with the plugin developers, we connect with the theme developers and then see how we take it from there.

Liam: Would it be safe to describe the way that you integrate and interact with clients is really as kind of a– I don’t want to say a project management person because it’s clearly much more about. You’re a technologist, you’re an integrator, you’re a collaborator and coordinator, and you’re bringing together all the different parties and potential stakeholders to ensure that the non-profit has the best web experience that it can. Would that be a fair way to–?

Birgit: Yes, that’s fair. I have been a developer for many, many years. With WordPress, you don’t have to touch so much code anymore because a lot of good smart people that came before me have solved most of the problems. It really is more like, for many, many people that all– all my life is not as easy as the normal life. Translating lead generation, the experience of going from maybe signing up as a volunteer or maybe giving a donation. It’s hard for non-technologists to translate that experience in an easy smooth pathway and what happens afterward. You need to have a thank you email, you need to have a thank you page and all this. Yesterday, I talked–

Liam: So you’re walking them through not just the actual technology in the sense that we’re going to use this plugin and we’re going to use this tool to maintain that functionality? But you’re actually coaching them on the actual processes involved so they can appreciate it in non-technical terms so that they– more importantly, their target audience–?

Birgit: Yeah, I have found that it doesn’t really matter what technology you use, and technology is actually– in implementing something, the technology, most of the time, unless it’s really fairly complex and it’s really integrating with different kind of services. It’s most of the time not a problem, it’s the communication part of it. It is, what happens afterward when the technology happened, how integrated is it into normal processes, yeah.

Liam: it’s a lot like design, I think. Good design, good technology should go unnoticed in the user experience. The user experience should just drive it forward. Speaking of user experience, and of individuals and people, let me steer us towards one of our more prominent, more regular questions, to ask you about success, Birgit. What is your definition of success, be it personal, professional, combination thereof, can you share that with us?

Birgit: Success is when I build something, when I learn something, or discuss something and I’m better than before after that process. Not only that I am better off monetarily, that’s actually just a secondary question or aspect of it. It’s more like, did I get my best and was it helpful to other people or did it reach its goal? And even when I’m not as successful, failure is actually– I learn the most when I have a failed project. I have found in my life, I never get it right the first time, especially with technology. But even processes, you kind of need to go through multiple iterations to get it to a place where it’s good enough. If we make a step forward every day, that’s success for me.

Tara: Does that translate beyond your job, beyond the technical side? Do you translate that into your personal life as well?

Birgit: It does, although I’m not so much stuck between work and personal life because when you’re married to a technologist, yeah, there’s a lot of technology you have to deal at home as well. [laughter] Not only the Amazon Echo or Google Home.

Tara: Do you have it making your coffee for you? When you think about doing something, trying things and failing, and finding success in your daily life, what is the most important thing that you do every day?

Birgit: That’s easy, I get up from bed. [laughter]

Liam: Very direct.

Tara: That’s important.

Birgit: That’s really important. Whatever I do, there’s always a tendency to say or find reasons not to do it. Sometimes they are built up so much that you actually are not starting to do it. And I find starting and taking everything a little bit less serious and kind of find where it takes you, it goes back to the, “I’m not going to get it right the first time.” The work teaches you how it wants to be done and you need to just let it. I don’t know if I can make this a little bit clearer but the journey is actually the goal, pretty much. Also, when I go from A to B, gather the roses, look at the landscape, look out from your mobile phone what’s around you. That’s kind of an approach that I try to do every day.

Tara: You mentioned getting up out of bed and actually, this morning I had a really hard time with that. [laughs] I usually can get out of bed, this morning I could not get out of bed so I realize that I can really relate today to the idea of just getting started and just getting out of bed. What would you say is your biggest challenge in getting started on things?

Birgit: My biggest challenge is– I don’t know, I have so many shortcomings. It’s hard to say that’s the biggest one, it really depends on the project.

Tara: Okay, just name that comes to your mind?

Birgit: I have a challenge to think bigger sometimes. To not get bogged down by the minutia, although I know– and I need a lot of big picture before I actually start. I need to know more about the theory, I need to know more about the purpose. Then I kind of can see the process that can get me to my goal in terms of my work. Sometimes, that’s hard. Especially when it gets to new technology. JavaScript learning, that is not a purpose in itself, it is, “Okay, what do I want to do with it?” And I have a project that would be very fitting. Just to get started, the biggest challenge right now is to clear my schedule for it. To actually sit down and say, “Okay, what do I need?” I can’t shut off the internet but I had a very good– there was a very good talk at the WordCamp Miami last weekend about the zen mode, being on an airplane and still being able to do your work. John Blackbourn had a very good talk about that. I’m going to go back and feed that and make my environment so I can get off the internet which is just the biggest timewaster ever. Right? [laughter]

Tara: Yeah, it certainly can be but I like your insightful answer about thinking bigger and I think it sounds like you’re already doing that with your Gutenberg Times. You do carry things with this open big-picture approach, which makes you successful.

Liam: I’m almost the opposite where I like to just, “Okay, let’s get in the car, let’s go, let’s get going.”, “Wher are we going?”, “Well, first stop is coffee and then we’ll go on.”, “Okay, where we’re going now?”, “Well, let’s get on the turnpike.”, “Okay, where we’re going now?”, “I don’t know, let’s try west.” Every once in a while that comes back to bite me in ways that aren’t always enjoyable, but I get that tension between what is my macrocosm of what’s happening here and how does it relate to the very specific microcosm I need to address. Finding the balance between knowing enough that we feel empowered without getting lost in the, “Oh my gosh, all the information, all the knowledge needs to be here before I can do anything. That’s a challenge. Especially, I think, in technology that changes constantly. It’s difficult to know when do I learn JavaScript, now or– well, is it being used enough, is it being used in ways that interest me? Do I care and do I want vanilla, do I want Vue, do I want React, do I want strawberry, do I want chocolate?

Birgit: It’s like buying The White Album all over again.

Liam: [laughter] Awesome, awesome. You talked about the single most important thing that you can do is getting up and getting started. Your wonderful analogy of just getting out of bed. What’s your favorite or one of your favorite things to do around work on a daily basis around addressing your challenges, around supporting your clients?

Birgit: I think my favorite part is when I can bring information that’s not available online and find the best way to present it, either supporting open information. It really doesn’t matter if it’s a collection of pictures, or is it a series of blog posts, or is it a book, an author that has published her book but it needs to get to the audience and we look through it and say, “Okay, are we able to put it in small tube or chunks so people can get a taste of it. Or is it how do we do the process from working with a learning company that wants to take offline learning online and how to walk them through it and what content needs to be produced, in which form.” It’s the lead generation on the funnel with the commercial part but it’s also an experience for the user. I’m building that step by step and bringing the customer along is my favorite part of that.

Liam: Yeah, that sounds like a really enriching experience in that you’re taking something in one environment and introducing it to another environment in the hopes that it would bring value to others. That’s pretty neat, thanks for sharing that.

Birgit: You’re welcome.

Tara: I’d like to know a little bit about your favorite things that are not work. So you live in a beautiful part of Florida and you said that you and your husband like to travel. You mentioned getting out and smelling the roses somewhere in between all that tech stuff. [laughs] Tell us a little bit about what you like to do when you’re not sitting in front of your computer.

Birgit: My husband, Christian and I, we have a ritual every morning. We make breakfast together and we do it to soca music which is we– three years ago, we went to Trinidad and that was all around there. We’ve been in buses and the bus ride, I had the same music over and over again. It’s very energetic. And if you want to look it up or get a taste of it, we are big fans of Machel Montano. In that part, we have this ritual in the morning and if the weather is fine or not too cold pretty much, it’s fine I’m sure, but not too cold. And we are not too tired, we actually run in the morning before breakfast, together, two miles. We talk about things that we’re going to do. That’s my favorite time of the day, when I try to– sun is already up, it just comes up over the Golden Gate Canal and it kind of shimmers on water. That’s just beautiful, I want to stop and take a picture. Sometimes, I do this. If you go to Instagram on my account, @idx. You see some of the pictures from the Golden Gate Canal in Naples and it’s always pretty much the same thing. We do this once for three years and it’s really beautiful. If you’re not at home and you’re traveling, we love to explore a city on foot. We walk cities and when we go away, we pick cities. We are not going to go for beach vacation because we have 15 minutes to the beach and we can do this any weekend. We are city kids and we love it. I take a lot of pictures.

Tara: Do you have a favorite city or favorite couple of cities that you visited?

Birgit: I like my hometown Munich, there’s always a new aspect to see and just to come back to it. Next one up is Venice, Italy. It’s a beautiful city and we love that you can just walk it. There are no cars in the city and it changes so much but it never changes. It’s like coming home, so to speak. And when we used to live in Europe, we’d spend every 18 months or so, at the latest we would go back to Venice for about three or four days and just walk it and see things.

Tara: That’s lovely. I think you’re the second or third guest we’ve had on here who has a ritual of having breakfast with their spouse, which I think is amazing. I look forward to the days when our life is setup so that my husband’s around to have breakfast because that is a good time of day. Although we tend to read the newspaper and drink coffee even when we are together. [laughs] But music sounds like a good plan, too. It sounds lovely.

Birgit: Don’t get it wrong, we both have our laptops in front of us.

Tara: Okay. [laughter] Thanks for clarifying that! That makes me feel a little bit better, I was envisioning deep conversation over coffee looking out.

Birgit: That’s probably happening while we are breaking eggs and putting– we have eggs and spinach and avocado every morning. We site next to the oven and that’s where we have our little conversations.

Tara: really nice. That sounds like a good ritual to share with everyone. I’d like to also ask if you have some advice that you’ve been given that may be the best advice you could think of that you’ve ever received and implemented in your life that you’d like to share with us, too?

Birgit: One of them is, “Be grateful, count your blessings.” That is something that is not in our general culture. It’s always imperfect and you need to get better, better, better. But rest and be grateful for what you have is the best way to find peace. If you’re always thinking how imperfect your life is compared to others, that doesn’t– be grateful. The other one is, “Stay in the moment in times of sorrow.”

Tara: That’s great advice.

Birgit: I worry, too much.

Tara: Yeah. That’s excellent advice. I really appreciate you sharing these things in combination with a lot of the tech talk that you shared with us today, Birgit, because you know a lot about what’s going on in WordPress and technology but I think what you shared about your approach to life and how you start your day has been really interesting and helpful for me to hear about. So thanks for sharing that.

Birgit: You’re welcome, thanks for asking.

Tara: Sure.

Liam: Our pleasure. I find it interesting, your advice that you’ve implemented as being grateful. I’m just tying that back then to getting out of bed and just the realization when we wake up that, hey, we are awake. That’s a blessing, right? It’s another opportunity to do something right, or to learn something, or to make strides. Or you can just get out and enjoy. I like that holistic approach and it seems to be that you’ve tied together these various pieces of lead systems and practices in a way that is coherent and consistent.

Birgit: I hope so. [laughs]

Liam: Of course, right. It’s easier said than done and I appreciate we all have good days and bad days, and good weeks and bad weeks. Some days we’re not thankful for anything. In other days, we are. But that’s really, really great. Thank you so much for that.

Birgit: Sure. Tomorrow or the next life, you never know what happens first.

Liam: Wow, there you go.

Birgit: It’s a Buddhist thing.

Tara: I think we’re just about out of time here on that inspirational note. Thank you so much for sharing with us today, really appreciate all that you had to say and getting to know you a little bit better. Where can people find you online?

Birgit: Thank you for having me. You can find me on Twitter. My Twitter handle is @bph, which are my initials. My direct messages are opened, just ask me to follow you and then we can connect. Everything else is probably there. My business website is Polysystems.net. My non-profit is WP4Good.org. That’s a WordPress community for non-profits.

Tara: Great, thank you. We will put that in the show notes and we’ll also get a link to your music that you mentioned as well.

Birgit: Thank you.

Liam: Birgit, thanks so much for joining us. It’s been a real pleasure.

Birgit: Thank you, bye-bye.

Tara: Bye.

Liam: Bye-bye.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

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