WordPress is great, but what makes it so special is the people working behind the scenes. You may know them by the collective description, WordPress contributors. These people volunteer to make WordPress better year after year.
Today, we have Sjoerd Blom with us who is a WordPress contributor and has worked tirelessly over the years organizing WordCamps all over Europe. He has also translated a number of WordPress plugins, core, and themes into his native language.
Let’s hear it from the man himself.
Moeez: Hi Sjoerd, it’s great to have you with us today. We would love it if you introduce yourself to our audience. Tell us a little bit about your background and what you are working on nowadays?
Sjoerd: I live in the Netherlands, in the beautiful city of Leeuwarden. I was born here, but have moved around the country quite frequently. Originally, I’m a teacher but my passion is where the bits and bytes come and go.
I taught myself programming, first on a C64, later on, a PC, but that was after I discovered Yggdrasil, an early Linux distro. Actually, Linux became the basis of my current knowledge: I learned to program in Shell, Perl, C, and later PHP. Linux taught me all about configuring mail servers, networking, security, web servers, and so on.
Nowadays, I’m a developer. I like to write new code but also operate and extend servers and applications. I take securing servers very seriously and prefer to do that at the OS-level instead of the less secure application-level (through the security plugins).
Moeez: How did you start working with WordPress? What led you to think that WordPress should be a part of your career?
Sjoerd: I’m an early adaptor of WordPress. I started blogging in 1999 and tried different blogging tools. I was disappointed in how the last tool before WordPress removed my credits for code improvement, as a result, decided to try WordPress as a last resort. The slogan “Code is Poetry” converted me to the cause. That was in 2003.
At that time, I was still a project manager at Telecom Utrecht, developing new concepts for FttH (Fibre to the Home). So a professional career with WordPress didn’t come to my mind yet. It was actually the last financial crisis that cost me my job and I decided to become self-employed: back to what I was good at – building and developing digital stuff.
Moeez: As a WordPress contributor, what is your basic source of income? What projects do you work on regularly?
Sjoerd: My strength is creating custom solutions for small and medium-sized enterprises. I’m very keen on the personal touch and prefer to help prospects and customers on the creative development path. I try to keep WordPress the number 1 solution as much as possible but if there are better alternatives, I do not hesitate to suggest them.
Furthermore, I make a living by installing and managing large-high-quality WiFi networks of Unifi, especially in areas where there’s a high density of other radios on the WiFi frequencies.
Moeez: Speaking of WordPress as a career, how did you get involved in the WordPress community? And how long have you been a part of it?
Sjoerd: Like many of us, it all started with attending a WordCamp. Somehow I once ended up at the website of a WordCamp and I thought to myself: “Those tickets are not that expensive. The schedule looks promising, why not just buy a ticket and go there?” Well, that WordCamp changed my life. I was so much surprised to see the warmth of the WordPress community.
People from all over Europe and beyond just came to this WordCamp to attend the event, but also to meet each other. All the hugging and greetings. It was just so amazing. I wanted to be part of it, too. Anyway, that was WordCamp Netherlands in 2015.
I joined the polyglots team and started to translate into Dutch. I was happy doing that for a couple of years but when I started organizing events, I could not find enough time for translating anymore. It’s a pity, but you cannot have it all.
Moeez: Could you please tell us about Vertizio? How did you get the idea to start your own agency? What inspired you to take this decision?
Sjoerd: Currently, Vertizio is an agency run by one person: myself. It might change in the future though. At the moment, I outsource some tasks, especially the areas that customers request but that I don’t have the full knowledge of. We’re customer-oriented but we don’t succumb to customers.
The idea for Vertizio started at the kitchen table of a friend: he had an online community for runners and needed some assistance with his website and hosting provider. I got his issues fixed and later he sent me some friends who needed help with their websites, and that is how Vertizio came to life.
Moeez: What were some of the challenges you faced while setting up Vertizio? How did you overcome them?
Sjoerd: Like most startups finding new customers was challenging. When a friend told me of a nearby small flex-worker venue, I discovered the concept of working with other freelancers, but it didn’t get me new assignments. Then, I found out that there was a larger flex-worker venue downtown and decided to try that one instead. Well, that turned out to be a goldmine!
Pretty soon, I quickly enlarged my network, and all of a sudden, I had new customers. Some of them are still with me. Besides that, I joined a Facebook support group, I started to answer user questions and not much later, I became one of the moderators. Being a moderator somehow gives people a trustworthy image of my service and they started to approach me for more specific requests and assignments.
Moeez: I see that you have organized a number of WordCamps. What is the important thing that you learned after organizing all these events?
Sjoerd: Quite a lot actually, and I learned new personal skills. For instance, I learned how challenging it is to organize an event with people from all around the world. I also learned that is a great way to meet people and expand your network. And that brings me to the most important aspect: the community around WordPress. There’s so much to do to get involved: translating, coding, organizing events, writing manuals, support. Just pick the one you feel happy with, and join in the community!
Moeez: Coming back to WordPress, why do you think WordPress is so popular considering it now powers around 40 percent of the web? What edge does WordPress have over other platforms?
Sjoerd: WordPress is one of the few platforms that can be run on any platform, although Unix-based operating systems are still better for WordPress than a Windows platform. What WordPress stand out is the large number of people around the globe who support WordPress. If you’re not happy with your current developer or hosting agency, just pick up your entire WordPress package and move it to a better place.
However, to me, the most important reason is probably that there is no vendor lock-in with WordPress. Once you have chosen WordPress, there is no need to stay with WordPress all your life. Migrating to a different platform is easier than proprietary solutions.
Moeez: What do you think is the future of WordPress? Is it going to gain the same success as it has over the years or is there a slump around the corner?
Sjoerd: I expect WordPress to be around for another decade, however, I do expect new internet developments might nibble on WordPress pretty soon. Of course, Gutenberg is a good idea to keep people on board but will it create new users? When I look at my daughters, I see them spending more time in interactive areas (such as games and social media) than in browsing static websites. To them, a website is boring. And my children are not alone in this opinion. I think the youngest generation will be a game-changer to WordPress and websites.
Meanwhile, in my opinion, WordPress should move from a personal blogging platform to a real user-friendly CMS. Looking at the dashboard WordPress still looks like a blogging platform from the 00s: Posts? Pages? Seriously: we need to explain to new users (but also existing ones) over and over again the difference between a post and a page! And still, they don’t get it: why the difference? Just give the users the option to write some text and publish it, maybe add an option to change the characteristics of that text so that you can differentiate.
Moeez: If you could instantly change one thing in WordPress, what would it be?
Sjoerd: The administrator notifications. Plugin and theme developers need to earn their living with their software but seriously: pushing all kinds of advertisements onto the dashboard? It’s just highjacking a site owner’s dashboard!
Last year, somewhere in November, a client called me. He was worried because his dashboard had undergone a full makeover. It turned out that with the Black Friday deals a lot of developers had updated their software just to show funky, flashy banners and deals. Seriously, he had to scroll down more than a screen length to get to the first row of his WooCommerce product list.
Moeez: Keeping WordPress aside for a little bit, what do you think about remote working? Since almost everyone is working from home, what are some of the challenges you face with remote work?
Sjoerd: Remote working has never been an issue for me. I’m used to working at my home office, but I do miss working at flex-worker venues. Before the pandemic, I had a nice balance between working at my home office and working at flex-worker venues. It changes your own mindset, you meet new people, you get new inspiration. At the moment, we’re trying to arrange all kinds of virtual gatherings and events but it still is not the real thing.
Moeez: Online or virtual events are replacing offline events and it seems like this year the story won’t change much. How has your experience been organizing and attending online events? Are they a good substitute for offline events?
Sjoerd: I love both types of events. Offline events are great for attendees: all your senses get triggered by the event and of course a lot of after-event activities among the attendees. Online events fill one important gap that offline events have: everyone can attend, especially attendees who are limited by customer regulations, visas, and other traveling restrictions.
I expect to see fewer offline events in the next few years. Maybe, there will be a shift into more online events or meetings for the local and regional community and a few larger, continental events like WordCamp Asia and WordCamp Europe for the international community.
However, I do notice a certain “online event fatigue”: that’s something we have to face as well while preparing for WordCamp Europe 2021 Online. Not only attendees but sponsors and speakers may be less interested in making the event a success. Anyway, we’ll see what will happen. We’re trying to make WordCamp Europe 2021 Online into another great event.
Moeez: Lastly Sjoerd, what advice would you like to give to people choosing WordPress as their career? What are some of the things they need to look out for?
Sjoerd: Get involved with WordPress! It helps you to build a network that you might need in the future when working with WordPress, either to solve technical issues or find the right people working at specific companies like hosting companies. Chances are high that one of your future customers might have issues at a hosting company in which you have friends, or you’re friends with a developer of a popular plugin that your customer uses.
Mohammed Moeez
Moeez is a WordPress community manager at Cloudways. He loves to work closely with customers to understand their problems and come up with solutions that are not only beneficial but are long lasting as well. He also actively participates in the community to share his knowledge regarding Cloudways and hosting in general. In his free time he likes to watch football, workout and spend time on his PlayStation. Get in touch with him at [email protected]
