Episode 49: Russell Aaron

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Introducing Russell Aaron

Russell is a new father, blogger, racing enthusiast, and back-end developer meet support technician. Based out of Las Vegas, Nevada, Russell works at WebDevStudios.

Show Notes

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 49.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re joined by Russell Aaron. Russell is a new father, blogger, racing enthusiast, and back-end developer meet support technician. Based out of Las Vegas, Nevada, Russell works at WebDevStudios. Currently, Russell is one of the co-organizers of the WordPress Vegas Meetup group. Hey, Russell.

Russell: Hi, Tara.

Liam: Hey, Russell, welcome. Thanks for joining us on the show today. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, more than Tara shared?

Russell: A little bit more than Tara shared. Alright, I started out doing affiliate marketing and we needed to build a website in order for people that track their sales so I got involved with PHP and I started learning basic how WordPress sites work and how– it was very brand new, this is 2004, 2005. But I started just learning the fundamentals and then I started building MySpace layouts for bands. I’m very big into music and I love everything about music. I have a guitar tatted on my arm, it’s my grandfather’s Gibson Les Paul. I love music. And I was helping my friends who had bands and I was building cool tricked out MySpace layouts, and I would use the blog feature of the WordPress blog and I would blog about my triumphs or my failures. I’d be like, “Oh, I can’t figure out this thing, or I don’t know how to build this template or whatever.” But I was doing it at the blog and I was using WordPress. One day, somebody told me that I could install WordPress on my own website. Once I did that, I just fell in love. I could do anything I wanted, I could be a blogger, or I could build a corporate website, or I could build my own little app. I was just hooked because the possibilities were endless. Then there is a WordCamp in Vegas, I think it’s 2013. Josh Strebel from Pagely, he did a presentation on the many faces of WordPress and he covered just the random websites that are built on WordPress, there’s an entire video game that you can play that’s all ran on custom post types and a WordPress site. I saw that and I just knew WordPress is where it’s going to be for a long time. That basically got me to the WordPress meetup group. I sought out more information, I wanted to meet more people in this community that I’ve heard so much about. Five months later, I was speaking and I haven’t stopped doing that and it’s really my passion. It’s a conversation that I can never stop having, anything really around WordPress.

Liam: That is great. What are you doing today in WordPress? In our intro, it said you’re a back-end developer but affiliate marketing to back-end developer I imagine had a few steps or at least a learning curve in between somehow. Talk to us a little bit about that, would you?

Russell: You should be able to get a degree from YouTube with all the videos that I have watched in order to setup FTP and to do things, you should be allowed to get a degree. That is my college, that is what I did. I have crazy insomnia so I sat around and just watched YouTube videos all day. So what am I doing currently? You name it, I do it. I do WordPress support with Maintain, it’s a WebDevStudios company. Any question that comes in, it’s my job to answer or help find an answer or say, “You know what? I’ve never heard of this before. Let me get you an answer.” And I spend my day, the hardest thing I have to do is log into WordPress.

Liam: I like that. So let’s go back a little bit to that first WordCamp that you attended in Vegas. Was that something that you said, “I have to go to this.” Or as you were getting into WordPress a little bit more, you said, “Oh, there’s a WordCamp, I wonder what that is. It’s only 20 bucks, I guess I should probably go, I’m probably free that weekend.” How did you eventually decided to go and how quick was it? Was it just that one quick talk from Josh, was it the whole weekend? Was it that talk inspired you to do a little bit more? Walk us through that a little bit more, and I guess where I’m coming from is that we hear about WordCamps a lot in the transformative value that it has in the life and the work of many people who have attended and of those who’ve been on our show. I wonder if you can just share your experience in a bit more detail?

Russell: Of course, my first WordCamp was Las Vegas 2011. It was put on by John Hawkins who is another WebDevStudios and overall pretty popular person in the WordPress community. I’m sure he would hate me saying that but he’s been to so many WordCamps it’s crazy. That was my first WordCamp was Las Vegas 2011 and I saw many different talks from all kinds of people who do WordPress. Not just developers but I was listening to marketers, and bloggers, and people who just ran businesses. At that day, I understood that there’s so many people that do WordPress that you wouldn’t even expect. You could just be standing behind someone at the grocery store and they probably are thinking about a plugin just like you are. So many people now, when you go up to them, it’s like, “Yeah, I do WordPress.” They just start asking you questions and they know a little bit about it. I knew that in 2011 just by going to this WordCamp. I’m going to be able to have a community of people because we’re talking about WordPress and that’s what I fell in love with. I saw a talk by John Hawkins, it was about child theming, it was brand new or the idea of using a child theme and a parent theme system, it was so brand new and I didn’t understand it. But I sat there and I listened, and when I got to that point in my career of child theming, I remembered everything John Hawkins said. That’s the benefit of WordCamp and that’s the benefit of going. Yes, you might not know what this thing called a plugin is but you should go to a talk about building a plugin, and when you get to plugins or when you start installing them, you’ll maybe appreciate them a little bit more. Or we think of a plugin as Jetpack, you think of it like, “Oh, it’s whatever plugin.” If you actually go to a talk by George and he shows you how they built this infrastructure, you kind of start appreciating these things that are just free downloads. To me, it’s not just a free download that makes my website, it’s somebody’s hard work out there that made my website do this cool feature.

Tara: Yeah, I think that’s a good thing to acknowledge and recognize that we do forget about a lot, we have so many things available to us that people have worked hard on and offered for free. I’ve seen some people on Twitter occasionally kind of give a shoutout and say, “Make a thankful Thursday or something and go donate to a developer who’s done something that you used or thank them, at least just send them a nice note or a shoutout on Twitter to say thank you for giving back to the WordPress community with some awesome functionality that some of us can’t imagine working without.” That’s a great thing about the open-source community. I’m going to jump into a question of kind of more general non-WordPress specific question necessarily, which is the idea of success. We ask everybody this question, it’s something that intrigues us and I think people like to talk about, which is, how do you define success, either or both in your personal and professional life, and also where do you find yourself if it’s a journey for you or a path, or if it’s constantly changing but where are you in that definition?

Russell: When I first started working, I was 15 and I worked at a GoKart track in Rino, Nevada. I sat on a rock and when somebody would bump their friend or whatever and spin them around, it was my job to run out and turn that car around. That’s all I did all day for eight hours a day and I did that until I was 25. I became number one on this thing called the leaderboard. I had seniority over all these people that literally, they had worked at this place longer but I was a harder worker and I was never one on this board. I had something to shoot for every week. If I was number two, I was really upset. I started working and stuff like that motivates me. When I can see that there’s a chance for me to be number one, I’m that competitive that I’m going to do it. But success is just winning every single day. I set a small goal every day of make sure every email that’s in your inbox gets checked. If I hit that, then I know that I can move onto my next task. And as long as I’m checking tasks off, I know that my day has been successful or I did at least what needs to be done for our company to stay afloat. That’s how I define success is that I can come to my job tomorrow and know that I’m going to work as hard today as I did yesterday to secure tomorrow.

Tara: So when you do that, when the first thing you’re doing, I like to do this too, is go through all of your email. Sometimes that can take a long time. Is that among the most important things that you do or is it just kind of a test that you need to get out of the way before you move on to more important things? What’s important in that when you say winning every day, what is that, what goes into that?

Russell: We offer 24/7 support, it’s not for everybody. You do have to have a pretty premium enterprise plan. But we do have clients, some of our bigger clients even on the WebDevStudios sides of things, they have 24-hour support with us. It’s all night I’m checking emails and it’s not because we have to, it’s because we offer the support. I pretty much stay ahead of my emails or if I fall asleep for five hours, I only got a couple of emails in that span. I’m constantly staying ahead of that. I also mentioned earlier, I have insomnia where I can sleep for like an hour and I’m up for another 36 hours. I’ve had it since I was really little, it’s a big part of my life, but I do feel like it’s an advantage because I’m working 20 hours of the day and I’m only sleeping four hours. I’ve read a book that said that very smart people who have been recognized as smart people, that’s what they do. Because they’re running their business for 20 hours a day, it’s very successful.

Liam: Russell, I want to jump in and what you said about insomnia as an advantage. I don’t know enough about insomnia to know whether or not that it’s a business advantage. But certainly, I love the approach of, I’ll call it a physiological challenge, I don’t know if insomnia is or isn’t but if you give me that for purposes of this conversation, seeing that as a strength and a way for you to succeed rather than something negative or stigmatizing or negative in your life is really powerful. I wonder if you can share with us did you always feel that way or is this something that you kind of came to. How did you get to that? Because for those who sometimes have challenges in their life and don’t see them as a strength.

Russell: I don’t know if this is the right way to phrase my point but I’m going to tell you the truth because that’s very important. When I went to my very first WordPress meetup, it was in 2009, it was before I went to that WordCamp. It was October and we were at this little bar, and everybody had their computer and we were running around trying to find a plug but we were showing each other our sites. I had the most advanced site there out of everybody. I was selling tickets, I had Jigoshop set up, #Jigoshop. I had that setup and I was selling tickets and I was doing this kind of stuff. And there were people that just had like a blog or they just had this. I’m not saying that because eCommerce is better than blog. I’m saying that I had more functionality built into my site instead of just plain content. When I look at things like that, I thought, “Okay, I’m already this advanced. What am I going to do?” I watched John Hawkins and he started teaching. He would sit there for two hours and run that meetup by himself. He just, “This is what I did today, check this out.” And he was showing them. I started buying him beers, as like, “If I buy you a beer, can I speak?” And he’s since told me that I never had to do that. I’m welcome to speak whenever but I bought him beers and I would speak. I was crazy, I was like, “Oh, there’s this setting and then if you go to this page, there’s this setting.” It was very hard for me to just stay on one topic. And John really focused and just said like, “You should do 20 minutes and all you need to do is what is the problem and what is the answer, and how do you marry those two.” I spent a lot of time thinking about that. With insomnia, I’m up. It’s 3:30 in the morning and I’m acting like I just had a cup of coffee in the morning. It’s 2:00 PM for me when most people are asleep. And it’s constant. For me, especially now in WordPress where we basically have to learn this asynchronous way of like, “Hey, this framework just came out on GitHub 20 minutes ago, did you learn it? Are you up to date?” That’s an advantage for me because I’m up 20 hours, I’ve seen more things and I’m current. My RSS feed only has three or four things where– like Tara just admitted, she comes in and she has 25 emails. I’m ahead of the game. I’m not saying that to brag, I’m saying that that is my advantage. I have always felt that in my life, it is something that has helped me get in. I didn’t want to do my homework at 5:00 PM, I want to go play with my friends so I’m doing my homework at 3:30 AM but I’m up, I’m awake and I still turn in my work. You know what I mean? Because I have so many hours in a day, I can actually move things around in my schedule where most people can’t because they work an eight-hour day.

Tara: I occasionally have insomnia and if I’m gutsy enough to actually get up out of bed and admit that I’m not going to fall back asleep, I do love that feeling of being up when no one else isn’t getting stuff done. What you’re describing reminds me of this movie that I fantasize about sometimes, not just because Bradley Cooper’s in it, but it’s called Limitless. Have you seen that movie? He takes this pill and he can learn everything in like an hour and then he learns all new language and I always think that would just be awesome to be able to absorb all that information so quickly. It sounds like you have more time so you’re absorbing more and you are learning that thing that was just released on GitHub 20 minutes ago. [laughs]

Russell: It’s not only that but I tell anybody, you’re going to have to learn WordPress. At this point, there’s almost a manual that says, “Here’s the core functionality of WordPress and then here’s the developer handbook.” Like, that’s what the codex and all the make blogs and stuff are. But if you read three articles a night, just three, “Here’s how the settings page work, here’s how the reading settings work, and here’s how the discussion settings work.” If you read three pages a night in 30 days, you’ve read 90 articles. You are that much smarter with WordPress and now you know how to do this. You’re going to retain that, right? And then you’re going to set up a site and then you’re going to start doing it and you’re like, “Oh, I know the answer.” It’s just going to start clicking. That is what I tell everybody, that is what I do at night. I’m just up and I read three new articles. Then, “Okay, let me go check GitHub, let me search for WordPress plugins. Do I see anything new? Okay, there’s this thing coming. I didn’t know.” I saw Gutenberg when it got updated before it was fully announced but I didn’t know it was going to be a thing. Still, I’ve seen stuff like that. I’m up, I’m able to just view that.

Tara: Do you have to take a nap?

Russell: No.

Tara: You just have very little sleep that you need?

Russell: Yeah. Tonight, I’ll probably fall asleep around 6:00 PM to eight, and then I’ll just be up for a while.

Tara: You have a baby, right? Is that your child’s nap schedule? Do you just nap when your baby naps?

Russell: No. I do the opposite. What it is is it’s actually helped with our raising our son, because she doesn’t want to get up, she’s tired, she worked all day and I’m like, “Well, I’m up anyways. What else am I going to do at 3:00 AM?” I go get him and we hang out and then again, I bring him out to the living room when he’s up and then I put on YouTube and I watch a WordPress TV talk, and I see another thing. I try to be involved in the community as much as I can without– with the lack of being there, I still feel like I was at WordCamp Minnesota.

Tara: Yeah, you’re very productive, Russell. Very productive, impressive.

Russell: I see the opportunity and people say, like, “When you have time in the day.” I have time in the day and this is what I think about. My heart is in WordPress and my heart is in racing, and my heart is in my family, it’s what I care about. If I get 20 minutes, guess what I’m doing? It’s either my family, racing, or WordPress.

Liam: Russell, let me ask you this. And I’ll let you decide which one you want to talk about but what’s been your biggest challenge to date and how have you addressed it, or if it’s ongoing, how are you dealing with it now?

Russell: My biggest challenge has always been finding the time to come up with content for our meetup group. I love running that meetup group. I’m currently not right now, John Hawkins has the group and that guy is just smart, let me tell you. But first of all, when I inherited the group, there was structure but there wasn’t a WordCamp style to it. It was basically just four people saying, “Look what I did today.” And I really tried to curate content for that. I want the whole night to be about contact forms. You can talk about anything you want but don’t talk about Javascript because we’re doing just contact forms. I rounded up speakers and I got that but the problem is what I’m into and what the audience is into is different because for lack of a better term, they’re still beginners and I’m advanced. I want to talk about Gutenberg and I want to talk about the REST API, and they’re like, “I’m trying to figure out my media settings. Do I click left or swipe right?” I had to go back and I started relearning WordPress as a new beginner again. And I was like, “That would be a fun topic.” I forgot half of these settings existed. I basically did a refresher course and I was able to turn our meetup group into like, “Here’s this style that we’re going to do now.” I was able to address the issue of that gap between, “Here’s what I’m doing daily.” Which is all this advanced stuff, but here’s what we’re doing once a month. How you bridge that gap.” And I started learning again, it definitely helps. A refresher is not a bad thing.

Liam: I totally agree with you. I think that 101 when you’re running at a 200 or 300 or 400 level is really, really helpful because we get to the point where we know which rules to skip and we skip them all the time. Then we come back like, “Whoa, I didn’t know WordPress did it this way now. That’s really cool. I didn’t know I can click that and this would happen. That’s so much easier. Which developer put that into core because that’s wonderful. Thank you, whoever did that. That’s awesome.”

Russell: Whoever did the one where you can just highlight a text and it brings up a link and you just click it, I didn’t know that either.

Liam: Yeah. Or that you could update menus or select menus from the bottom of the menus page. I was TAing at a GDI course in Philly and Tracy Levesque was teaching it and she showed that. I didn’t even know you could do that.

Russell: And that’s why I say, “Go to WordCamps.” Because I wrote a plugin and I went to a beginner talk on design and I heard somebody say like, “It’s not easy to style Gravity Forms.” So I built a plugin that basically inputs a stylesheet and you can just say, “Add this class name to the Gravity Form.” And it styled the whole thing. That way, if styling and designing is not your thing, here’s 10 presets that you can do and it costs you 50 bucks for a year license. But I went tto a beginner talk and somebody said that and I was like, “There’s a plugin idea.” That’s another reason why you should go to a WordCamp.

Liam: Absolutely. Let me change gears on you a little bit if I can. I want to ask you one of our more regular questions and it’s around advice. I wonder if you’ll share with us the single most valuable piece of advice and it can be personal or professional that you have ever received and implemented in your life? Single most valuable piece of advice, or at least one of the more valuable pieces of advice that you’ve implemented?

Russell: I’m thinking. As somebody with a mind who has seen so many things throughout every day. I’m trying to scour my hard drive which is my brain and think of really– I have to do a search query right now, get all the posts from the category and then add this category, get all these posts, I have WordPress going in my head right now. One of the best things I’ve ever heard and it’s so simple is just when you attend a WordCamp or when you attend a meetup or when you’re just talking to somebody about WordPress or anything in life, if you’re talking to somebody about racing, just remember, they’re either five minutes ahead of you or five minutes behind you. But you both are the same people, you don’t have to talk down to somebody because they didn’t know Jimmy Johnson crashed last year and lost the championship. But they’re into NASCAR so just have a NASCAR conversation. You don’t have to put somebody else’s story down to make yours better. You just have to have a conversation, you’re always five minutes ahead of somebody or five minutes behind. But at some point, you’re going to obtain the same information.

Liam: And you’re all on the same journey in your own way, and it’s not a race against others, it’s always just a race against ourselves, isn’t it? Or journey against ourselves maybe more than a race. I really like that kindful respectful mindfulness of we’re all close enough.

Russell: What it is is that I run a blog and you run a blog, and essentially, we output the same thing. We have a new blog article that goes on the homepage, and then when you post a new one, it goes on top and you create a feed. My blog and your blog do the same thing, but the pieces that are put together in the backend are going to be completely different because I want to do social media this way, you want to install Jetpack and go this way. The same things that I’m into are not going to be the same thing you’re into because our sights are different. You shouldn’t just be like, “Oh, you’re using Jetpack, that’s a horrible plugin.” Maybe the theme dictates that and it’s because it’s actually the best option out there. Just remember, just have a conversation, it’s not putting each other down. Maybe you’ll fall in love with Jetpack because Liam says it does this cool thing with Photon. Just accept the information.

Tara: Yeah, it’s easy to forget when you get into some of these meetups and WordCamps and things where people have very strong opinions and it’s easy to feel like you’re not doing something right or somebody’s doing something better or somebody’s doing something worse. I think that’s really good advice, Russell, it also ties into the idea of going back to the beginner level and sort of trying to relate to what someone is seeing when they’ve never seen it before. That’s great advice.

Russell: On top of that, I have friends that work in these companies. You get on Twitter and you’re going to blast this company because they had bad support 10 years ago? It’s not the same. I have friends that have families that have kids that I have held. Don’t go blasting people because of something. Why don’t you help them instead? It doesn’t cost you anything, you can make that same decision, just help people. I have a feature on my blog, it’s called Shared Blogs, and I just share links to all my friends. If the only thing that I can ever offer them is one backlink to help their SEO, I’m going to do it.

Liam: I like that, that’s very generous.

Russell: I encourage everyone to do it.

Liam: Russell, we have a couple of minutes left and I’m going to come at you with a different question and it’s following on from our conversation before we clicked the record button. You mentioned that you read a lot, if not everything, and that you had a funny story that you wanted to share with us about that. I’m wondering if I can put you on the spot to share that story with us.

Russell: I forgot the context of which I said it. I probably had it cute but I don’t– I read everything. Oh, it was about a job, I got it, I understand. So I just did this thing with my hands, for those of you playing the home game. I did this thing with my hands and that triggered my memory, now I know what I was going to tell you. I used to work for a company who was contracted with the national weather service. We worked on some high-profile code, and what you don’t know is that the weather’s the most important thing. If we can save somebody’s life by releasing some code to say, “Hey, there’s a tornado coming.” That is going to trump whatever Kanye West tweets. I’m sorry, that’s how it works. I went to the National Weather Service because I wanted to work on that kind of code. When I applied there, the guy said, “Please just sit down at this computer. Turn it on, fill out the paperwork and then we’ll do the interview.” He goes, “Come with me if you have any question.” I said, “Okay.” I turned the Power key on, I didn’t have my phone. It was in the car, I didn’t have anything, and I just sat there and I stared at the screen. And this thing clicked on the screen and it said, “Go see Tim.” And then it clicked and it loaded the Apple software. It just like it was doing its job. There was a flash screen, there was a quick little message that says, “Go see, Tim.” I got up out of my chair, I knocked on the door and said, “Tim, I just read the computer and it said to come see you. And he goes, “Have a seat, you’re hired.” I said, “What do you mean?” He goes, “When you work for the National Weather Service, your job is to look at the screen, it’s not looking at your phone, it’s not looking here. If we can save or if we can predict weather patterns that we can release an update, it’s going to change and affect how people live. We need somebody concentrated who’s going to look.” Because I read everything, because I watch everything, I sat there and it got me the job.

Liam: That is an awesome story. With that, we are out of time. Russell, it’s been an absolute pleasure to have you on this show. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Russell: Thank you.

Tara: Thanks, Russell. It’s great to have you on the show.

Russell: I had fun, thank you for your time and if you ever have questions, hit me up through Twitter. I’m sure there’s links somewhere.

Tara: I was just going to ask you that. Share with us and everyone else where they can find you?

Russell: I have a blog, RusselleNVy, or you can go to RussellNV, like the state, I think they both go to the same place. If not, my DNS has broke. I’m on Twitter as @enqueue_russ and just through Facebook Russell Aaron, you can find me also there. Or go to Webdevstudios.com, there’s a ping page and all my links are over there, too.

Tara: Great.

Liam: That is awesome. Thank you so much for joining us today, Russell, my pleasure.

Tara: Thank you.

Russell: Thank you so much.

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.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.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.

Introducing Russell Aaron

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