Episode 68: Kevin Cristiano

Hallway Chats: Episode 68 - Kevin Cristiano

Introducing Kevin Cristiano

Kevin Cristiano is a partner with Tadpole Collective where he works on business development, database configuration, and web development. He’s active in civiCRM, an open-source community. He’s also deeply involved with organizing WordCamps through the WordPress global community team.

Show Notes

Website | Tadpole Collective
Twitter | @kcristiano
WordPress | Community Team

Episode Transcript

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions, and our guests share their stories, ideas and perspectives. And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 68.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re joined by Kevin Cristiano. Kevin is a partner with Tadpole Collective where he works on business development, database configuration, and web development. He’s active in the civiCRM, an open-source community. He’s also deeply involved with organizing WordCamps through the WordPress global community team. Hi, Kevin. Welcome to Hallway Chats.

Kevin: Hi, Tara. Hi, Liam.

Liam: Hey, Kevin. Thanks for joining us here today out in the hallway. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself please?

Kevin: I live in Philadelphia now. Before that, we lived in New York City. I live with my wife. My son is now grown and living in another state. We moved to Philly about a year and a half ago.

Tara: My first time that I met you, I remember, Kevin, I’m going to completely confess my sweet tooth, was at WordCamp New York and it was in Brooklyn. It was my favorite WordCamp because the afternoon snack was cupcakes and bowls full of candy, and I just thought you are the best WordCamp organizer. I loved that. So you’re from New York originally and you’re really involved in WordPress there as well, right?

Kevin: Yeah, I got involved in WordPress back in 2006, I think. And by 2008, I had found the New York community, and got involved volunteering, organizing, and when we did go to the Brooklyn Marriott, the first year we had box lunches and the feedback was less than stellar and they couldn’t hit the dietary restrictions. So we, in 2015, spent our food minimum on pastry and coffee, and the feedback was incredible. The cakes, the cookies, the cupcakes, the cannoli, it really worked out well.

Liam: Sugar bribes?

Kevin: [laughs] New York City is a tough town to find a venue in that’s affordable and when we did the hotels, the space was ‘free’, but you had to spend a fortune on catering. It wasn’t even good catering, they couldn’t even hit the dietary restrictions. It was tough but that did work out pretty well.

Tara: Yeah, I have a lot of other WordCamps adopted that I haven’t seen it anywhere else.

Kevin: No. As some of the stuff that I have done, it’s one of the last WordCamps where we got away with not having a lunch because part of our contract that we tell our attendees is that your 20$ per day fee gets you coffee, lunch, and a piece of swag. We took away that lunch piece. It does happen occasionally but from a global perspective, we try to ask that we feed lunch to all the attendees. It’s just kind of the nice thing to do, to feed the people, and not just junk food.

Tara: With or without lunch, it’s quite a bargain really. I know there’s some conversation I saw about raising the price but still, I think that’s an amazing price.

Kevin: I have to chime in on that, but even if the price does get raised, it’s still going to be affordable. I don’t predict anything will happen but a very token increase. We haven’t raised a price ever. This is the price when it started. We all inherited that from WordCamp San Francisco and that’s just been where it’s at. It has no relation to anything other than someone decided that back in, I don’t know, 2000 and– early days.

Liam: Yeah, that’s a very interesting conversation. And I want to talk more about WordPress community and your work with the global community team, but before we get into that, tell us a little bit about Tadpole Collective and what is the civiCRM open-source community project?

Kevin: Sure. Tadpole Collective was born out of WordCamp New York City. We all met working, volunteering, organizing on WordCamp New York City in 2010-2012. We came together because there were five of us at the time all doing freelance work and all good at different things. So we decided to partner up and leverage each other skills in order to be able to do more. I hate CSS which means I’m bad at it and it takes me far too long, so getting together with someone who can front-end work was awesome. That’s how we started. Early on, one of our members was involved in May First, and May First was working on the Occupy Wall Street at the time. They adopted civiCRM which is a constituent relationship management system that– It was a Drupal module and also a WordPress plugin. So civiCRM is perfect for non-profits, activist organizations, political organizations where we need to keep track of your constituents. You can actually track your constituent data, donation data, event data, memberships, grants, something called case which is really a workflow module built for social workers but has many more options. We got involved in the WordPress integration. When it started, it was okay. [laughter]

Liam: That was very diplomatic of you.

Kevin: Okay. I had different words for it at the time but as with anything else open-source, since I wanted to change, I showed up, participated, and have been working on it ever since. We’ve helped them build a ton of improvements into civiCRM with the WordPress integration, and it’s now a really solid product on WordPress where you can kind of– the CRM does the same features across Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, and Backdrop. I think I said them all. It’s kind of neat to be working on an open-source project that embraces multiple CMSs. As you learn a little bit about each community and how they work, and it gives you a lot more perspective on how different people do things, and you learn from that.

Liam: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I suppose the CRM aspect of it is independent, right? And the plugin and the module and whatever Joomla and Backdrop call that kind of functionality are just a connectivity between the respective CMS and CRM.

Kevin: Yeah, basically, the core module is the meat and the potatoes, as I think of it. And then there’s the WordPress repo, and Drupal repo, or Joomla repo, et cetera. And that actually provides the CMS-specific functions that links so that when you login, the user is connected to a contact. This way, we can display content on the front-end. You can use civiCRM just in the back-end. We have a couple of clients who don’t ever publish a single form on the front-end. It’s all for internal staff. It’s all how they manage their data. I embrace that because owning your own data and not being reliant on some paid service that one day will send you an email that explains that the price is up 423% is something that I’m not in favor of. I want the organizations to have their data, have a backup of their data and be able to take it and go wherever they want, it’s their data.

Tara: Yeah, that’s often an issue when you’re working with non-profits who use these third-party services to do all of those things, is that then it’s not in their hands, so it’s a great option. I’ve looked into it a number of times. What’s your background, Kevin? How did you even get started in all this development and WordPress stuff? Let’s go back in time further.

Kevin: I guess my background, I guess if you go back to education, accounting, and economics or what my degree might say. But, oh god, I guess it’s now about 12 years ago or so, my wife built a website and it became popular and needed help. I learned about WordPress through her. I had, at that time, kind of switched gears. I was doing enterprise accounting solutions. I think that was the marketing phrase. Basically, I was working in New York City and going to large enterprises and installing, and maintaining, and building their back-end accounting system. I was doing very heavy sequel work, which was very close and felt like a good match. That got me involved in WordPress but I had to learn. That’s how I found the community and that’s just how I got involved, it’s because she needed help.

Tara: And I know she’s also involved in the WordPress community as well. Did you pull her in after you started getting involved or did you both jump in together? How did that work out?

Kevin: I got involved because I needed help. I was doing it wrong, as they say. But I got involved early on in volunteering and got to meet people that I had access and got to learn the right ways, and got to benefit from that. And I saw these WordCamps were a great place. I encouraged Laura to come and join me and she finally did in 2015. 2015 was the first WordCamp that she went to, and it was Scranton. It was unique because that was one of the only WordCamps I’ve seen in recent years where Matt Mullenweg showed up and did a Q&A. Her first WordCamp she got to see Matt Mullenweg, we had a great time, and from there, that was the ‘aha!’ moment for her as she’s like, “I can do this. I can speak. I know this stuff.” I’m like, “Yeah, you do.” And that’s how she got involved.

Tara: That great. It’s neat to see a couple together at WordCamps there. A few couples you see at a number of WordCamps and you guys, it’s fun to see you together. So that’s neat to share that. My husband has no idea or interest in WordPress. Do you talk about it in the evenings? Do you put WordPress aside or how do you manage that with your balance and your relationship?

Kevin: It becomes a bit of a challenge because we do talk about it at night, we do talk about it at times. And I tend to start my day at around somewhere between 6:30 and 7:30 eastern, and I’m done by 7:00 PM local time. Whereas Laura’s a night owl and she keeps going. So at a certain point, we have to shut it down. We’ve both been on the organizing teams for WordCamp US for two years, so that’s a constant topic that we can converse on. I don’t know if we’ve got a good balance yet but we do speak about WordCamps and WordPress quite often.

Tara: Yeah, I imagine your social circle, you must have a big social circle that you share that way, too?

Kevin: For me, definitely, over the years, most of my contacts and people that I see all revolve around a WordPress or civiCRM communities, it really has.

Liam: That’s interesting. Tara, my better half has little interest in WordPress, aside from kind of make the institute that she founded a website and we help keep it running. But like, “Hey, let’s go to WordCamp.”, “No.” [laughter] Fair enough. To each her own, to each his own, I guess. Kevin, let me swing us around to one of our signature questions here and ask you about your definition of success. How would you define success in a personal and/or professional way? How do you define success?

Kevin: I don’t know that I have a single definition. I define it more transactional. Success on a project is that it launches on the simple level. I try to keep things simple. Professionally, I guess success is keeping your clients satisfied, building good products and giving back to the community. If I can do all of that in a project, that’s a professional success. One of the things that we like to do is when we’re building a project for a client, we’re actually looking at giving them what they need but also improving the underlying product. I’m really speaking about civiCRM, not WordPress here. We don’t work on the code on that. That’s how I look at professional success. On a personal level, it’s really– personal success for me would be balancing the work and the life and having time to do the things I want to do. So I do kind of feel as if I’m failing on a personal level because I seem to run out of time but that would be how I define personal success, getting that balance going.

Tara: What do you do toward that definition, I would say, toward that goal? But what are some important things that you do every day to–?

Kevin: Sorry to cut you off there. So, I saw this talk at WordCamp DC that talked about productivity tools and things to use. Yes. [laughter]

Liam: We know where this is going.

Tara: Thanks for the plug or perhaps maybe not. I don’t know. [laughter]

Liam: Wait for it, wait for it. Go ahead, Kevin.

Kevin: So what I do every day now is I’ve always had to track time– well, maybe not always but maybe the past 15 years. So I’d always use a time tracker and I try to– how did I do. But then I installed the tools that actually monitored how many hours a day I was on the computer. A digital to-do list where I’d see how many things I did per day, how many days in a row. So I look at all of those because I love data and metrics, and I’m sure part of it is gamesmanship that I’d like to see the numbers go up. But I look at this, I look at the time management, those are what’s very important because my scheduling and how I balance all the different projects and all the different communities that I volunteer time for need that. Those are some of the most important things that I have to do every day when I start the day, and how could that help with the personal success goals is, yeah, if I can start balancing and not be on the computer as many hours per day as I can clearly see I am now.

Tara: Do you enjoy it? Does the time go by fast when you’re in front of the computer for hours? You log in at 7:30 and then, all of a sudden, it’s 7:00 PM and you’re like, “Wow, where did the day go?” How does that happen?

Kevin: most of the time, because one of the improvements that I did make years ago was when– I guess 2012 is when I fully went out on my own. That was it. I’ve always done a bit of that and that one’s two different things. Because I also do work in accounting and finance and I still do some consulting work there, as opposed to just web development. And being able to keep my own schedule, I’m able to choose what I do and do what I want to do mostly. I think all of us know we don’t get to do that all the time. So for me, yeah, most of the time, I do enjoy what I’m doing. We all have those situations and those days that we want to reset but yeah, I do enjoy it most of the time.

Tara: Yeah, I think that’s an important aspect of it. I know it’s easy to beat yourself over how much time you spend in front of the computer. I do that a lot and I’m trying to spend less time. But then on the other hand, sometimes I say, “You know what? It’s very satisfying.” And you are getting things done, you’re volunteering, you’re doing lots of good things, so that is the balance. What else do you like to do when you’re not in front of the computer, Kevin?

Kevin: Well, since we moved to Philly, I think that the think I really enjoy doing the most is exploring the restaurants and the bars in town. And we’re not done with that yet.

Liam: I hope not. You’ve only been here, what did you say, for about a year or so. If you are almost done, you’ve been out and about a lot.

Kevin: [laughs] We have been out a lot but no, we’re still exploring different areas. We do that. As far as other things that I do, not very often anymore, but the one thing that I want to bring back as a goal is I used to do a lot of hiking and I want to get back into that. I’m kind of excited because next week, I’m at a civiCRM event and it’s a week-long event, and it’s in area next to some really good hiking trails that I used for years before I moved down to Philly. I’m going to organize a couple of hikes during that and try to not work 20 hours a day as you can at the kind of event that that is.

Liam: There’s some great hiking in and around Philly, that’s for sure. Have you been to Ringing Rocks Park yet?

Kevin: I don’t know. I ‘ve done the AT from Wind Gap through to New York. I went for a good swath of Pennsylvania but when I did it, I really wasn’t aware of the area.

Liam: So there’s a place called Ringing Rocks Park. It’s about an hour north of Philly up in Bucks County and it’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s about three or four football fields of rocks, that if you strike them with a hammer, they ring. So you just bring out hammers and pound on rocks for a while. It’s a little simple but it’s a lot of fun. I’ve been there a lot.

Tara: That’s interesting.

Kevin: And they don’t break and shatter?

Liam: Well, sometimes some specks hit your face but no, these are boulders, these are massive rocks. When you get there, you’ll see that a number of them show signs of having been hit with a hammer repeatedly. I mean, they call it Ringing Rocks Park for a reason. As you’re walking in, you see all these families walk in with little ham tools and hammers and things like that. There’s some hiking too, there’s a little waterfall that you’d want to see.

Tara: You wonder how someone discovered that. Was he going around banging on rocks to find one that rings? That’s an unusual thing. I’ve never heard of it. Cool.

Liam: Well, it’s a whole boulder field. It’s pushed by the glaciers, so the glaciers were pushing us this the front end of it. And I think, somebody historically got up there and just pounded. Because it’s like three or four football fields of boulders. Young boys and girls being young boys and girls would inevitably bang something. Kevin, let me leave hiking behind for just a moment and swing towards advice. One of our questions that we like to dig into is advice that we have received. What is the single most or one of the most valuable pieces of advice, either personal or professional, that you have ever received and successfully implemented in your life?

Tara: It could be hiking-related actually. We don’t have to leave hiking. Maybe it’s something like, “Watch where you’re walking.” [laughs]

Liam: Good point, Tara.

Kevin: I remember that you asked this before to others and I thought about how I would answer that. I don’t know who gave me the advice because it’s something that you hear variations on, and it does apply both professionally and personally, and it comes down to, perfect is the enemy of good. Or, ship early and iterate. Variations on don’t hold back until it’s picture-perfect. Make it good, make it work, but don’t be afraid. Ship it, just do it. They’re all variations on the theme. It was one of the things that when I joined the WordPress community that I realized– and I like to tell people, “Don’t be afraid of version one.” I love when I see plugins at 0.9.9.9. It’s like, “Come on. Don’t be afraid. It’s okay to say version 1.0. There’s always a 1.0.” I know one plugin that’s been at 0.9.something now since 2010. It’s really a version 16 at this point. But what do version numbers mean? But that’s the best advice is that you can’t make it perfect, you have to know when to stop. It really helps when you’re dealing with clients with scope creep, as they keep asking for things. It’s really variations on that of, you’re right, we can always make it better but time and money are the enemy there and we have to find a point where this is working, this is good, this is going to be what we ship. Personally, yeah, we can’t have perfect. If I wouldn’t cook until I could make the perfect meal, I would starve or I’d be out to dinner every night, and neither with work.

Tara: I’m a fan of that advice. I follow that advice as well. I think it’s a personality type that can adopt that advice more easily than others. There’s a personality, working style analysis called a DISC Survey. Have either of you heard of that before? It analyzes your working style and you fall into either D, I, S, or C. And D is that style of get it done, cross it off, move on. C is the person who is just that .99999 personality type who just wants everything to be perfect and it’s hard. If your client is a C and you’re a D, that’s a really hard thing to manage, I find. And to communicate patiently and kindly when you’re feeling like, “Okay, I know, but really, I have to move on to something else now.” I think that’s good advice that’s hard to follow for a lot of people.

Liam: Yeah, I think it can definitely be a challenge. And it’s one of those things that if we take the time in dealing with clients or ourselves and kind of rationalize through the argument, we always say, “Yeah, that’s good enough. We should probably go live. So should we publish it tomorrow?”, “Oh, no. Let me have another couple of days to think about it.” Right? It’s that there’s one more, there’s one more, there’s one more. That’s a challenge. I said this before on this show but my wife’s grandmother who I was never able to meet. She passed away before I met my wife. She had a variation of this same theme that was, “If it’s worth doing well, it’s worth doing poorly. Just get it done.” I kind of like the blunt approach of that. And what you were saying, Kevin, you can always fix it, you can always do it better. That’s the beauty of the web, it’s not print.

Kevin: And that’s one of the things that I really like about WordPress and the community and the WordCamps, because they’re a safe place to fail because we’re all in this together. When you sit in your cubicle, office, coffee shop, and you’re working on this, you start to believe that you’re the only one messing this up. That everybody else is better than you and you are the worst in the world. Then you go to these WordCamps. And one of the things that I learned early on was, “Oh, my God. There are people that are so much better than me. But wait a minute. I know some stuff that others don’t. I’ve got something to give and boy, do I have something to get.” And then with the WordPress community, people are willing to share and help you gain the skills. It’s not cutthroat, “I’m not going to help Kevin because then he’s going to steal my clients.” It’s something that I really enjoy because, at least from the perspective I take ongoing for business, as long as open-source wins, then that’s a win for me. Yeah, I want the business, I want the client. But if we keep them on WordPress, or Drupal, or Joomla and on a solution that fits them, that’s really the most important factor.

Tara: Yeah, it’s a great thing about the open-source community. Another great thing about the open-source community as it applies to WordPress are the different teams. And we’ve mentioned at the beginning that you’re really involved in the global community team. So I know we’re coming up to the end of our time but I’d love to have you share with us a little bit about what you do with the global community team and what that team is for people who might not know?

Kevin: The global community team is the team that facilitates WordPress events worldwide. We are the team that helps meetups get started locally that are chapter meetups. A chapter meetup just means a WordPress meetup that’s listed under the WordPress.org account and follows the five rules. Many meetups that are not chapter still follow these. And WordCamps, we help fund. Well, obviously. We help organizers run WordCamps and we do a lot of funding, planning, advising, mentoring. What I do specifically, I got involved basically because in the early days, I was in New York, which was so expensive, and I needed to change the way we handled money and sponsorships in order to have enough money to have those wonderful desserts. And I got involved directly in the sponsorship program and I was one of the people that started the global sponsorships and got that done. So I still focus mainly on WordCamps, budget review, global grants, finance, and that type of things, if that’s not too vague and weird answer.

Tara: That’s helpful, I think. It’s not always clear to people how meetups and WordCamps especially, how they come to be. Especially as we talked about, for 20$ a day. It takes a lot of effort on the back-end to make those things happen. We’re grateful to you and your team for helping us have great experiences at WordCamps. They are life-changing for people.

Kevin: Thanks. Well, I think so.

Liam: Certainly, as WordPress community has grown to the size that it is and the structure around WordCamps and practically every community that wants one and WordPress meetups almost every few miles, if you will, in a good way, it’s really amazing to see the infrastructure behind it that makes that happen and the team that works so hard. It’s not a small amount of work and certainly, through my involvement on organizing WordCamp Philly for a number of years now and being involved in WordCamp US as an organized for a couple of years, it’s a massive amount of work and energy that goes in, so thank you to you and your colleagues for the work that you’re doing on that. We really, really appreciate it all. Alas, we’re out of time. But before we say goodbye to you, Kevin, I invite you to share with us where people can find you online, please?

Kevin: Tadpole.cc is the website for Tadpole Collective where you can find me online, kcristiano in most places, Twitter. I do a lot of social media reading, not publishing, but that is where to find me.

Liam: Awesome. Thank you very, very much for joining us today, it’s been an absolute pleasure.

Tara: Thanks, Kevin.

Kevin: Thank you both.

Liam: Bye for now.

Tara: 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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