Gary Kovar (Modern Tribe)
Today on the podcast we chat with Gary Kovar. Gary is a backend dev at Modern Tribe.
Micah: [00:10] And this is Micah, and you’re listening to the WP SquareOne podcast. Today, we have Gary Kovar with us. He is a backend dev at Modern Tribe. He’s located in Florida, he’s a podcast host himself and happens to be the most influential developer on Pinterest at this moment.
Gary: [00:32] Good one. Awesome. Thanks. I’m excited to be here, happy that you all decided to have me. And you’re right, I am super stoked about Pinterest. I’m going to google Pinterest and during the course of this podcast to figure out what exactly it is.
Aaron: [00:47] Nice. Nice. We’ll start off, Modern Tribe. I know what that is, but I don’t know if everybody knows who or what that is. Gary, you want to give us a little information about that?
Gary: [01:00] Yeah, I think in the WordPress world, if you’re familiar with Modern Tribe, you’re probably familiar because of the Events Calendar. Pretty popular plugin. I have no idea, like usage stats or anything. That’s about half the company. The other half of the company is a traditional agency. We got five teams rolling and building sites all the time for clients and just building neat, cool, fun things.
Micah: [01:26] Cool. So do you spend most of your time working on client projects or do you get to work on the products as well?
Gary: [01:31] I’m 100% on agency site working on client products. We do a lot with higher ed. Recently we’ve been doing quite a bit with big network type sites, multisite (unclear 01:47), just large installs of WordPress for whatever reason.
Aaron: [01:52] Cool. I got some statistics for you. I don’t know how accurate your pro version or Tribe’s pro version is but looks like the Events Calendar by Modern Tribe has six hundred thousand active installs. I would assume the pro version is I would say, what, 10, 20%, something to that effect. I don’t know. I know we’ve purchased the license a lot for different clients. There’s your statistic for you.
Gary: [02:19] Awesome. I feel like maybe I should have looked up that number before hopping on here. I’m an agency guy; I don’t think about things like that.
Aaron: [02:27] It’s okay, Gary, we’ll make fun of you. We’re just going to make fun of you now.
Gary: [02:29] I feel trapped. If I work with you, skip this part, okay?
Aaron: [02:36] Nice.
Gary: [02:37] Just ignore that.
Aaron: [02:39] Nice. You guys work with a lot of agencies and I know… Micah, you and I, I remember, was it Reid, I think from Modern Tribe that was the speaker in WordCamp Atlanta and he talked about the plugin and stuff and he kind of explained… Did you guys start off as an agency and you needed the plugin and so the plugin was a morph or just something that kind of came I guess organically?
Gary: [03:08] Yeah, that’s how I understand it. I’m actually fairly new at Tribe. I’ve been there for about a year and my exposure to the plugin, it was a pretty mature product at the time I dug into any work with it. I actually years ago was also a user of the plugin and purchased a license along with their ticketing system. One of our devs at Modern Tribe on the agency site is a local here in Jacksonville to me and at a meetup I was having some issues with the events calendar, chased him down and said, “Hey, why isn’t this working like I expect it to?” He politely said, “Maybe you should check the support forums. I don’t know.” They were great at the time. I would assume they’re still great. (unclear 03:49).
Aaron: [03:52] Nice. What all do you do with the WordCamp Community in Jacksonville? I know Micah and I both were at WordCamp Jacksonville. Was that 2016, Micah?
Micah: [04:06] I believe that was the first one I think. Yeah.
Gary: [04:09] Yeah. That was the inaugural one. 2016, two years ago, we’ve had three in Jacksonville. The first year I was late to the party. The organizing team was already in place, and I chased down the lead organizer at WordCamp US. I’d never met him before, chased him down said, “Hey, I’m in Jacksonville, I’d love to help. I’ve been to one meetup, anything I can do?” They had some odds and ends that they needed some volunteers to work on. The last couple of years I’ve been involved with feeding folks at WordCamp Jacks and that’s the thing I sort of started out with WordPress. (unclear 04:40) my brother in law, we built the site spotlighting locally-owned restaurants. As a result, got to know quite a few folks in Jacksonville. I’m also pretty involved in the local meetup. Three or four times a year I’ll speak at it. Generally pretty tech-heavy. But I’ve also done, “Here’s what a widget is and here’s how it works,” and if you have a theme that has widgets, it’s surprising sometimes these days.
Aaron: [05:01] Understood. What’s important here is, do you get free food from restaurants?
Gary: [05:06] Sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a fun story. My brother in law, he and I, years ago, long before I was doing anything with WordPress, he was a professional poker player and we started website doing online poker training and worked in and built a site and had a few hundred subscribers out there. It was a good little business for us. We sold that business and kind of parted ways (unclear 05:31) family events and that was about it. He called me on a Monday and said, hey, I’m taking my family out to dinner on Friday night and I was going to this Greek restaurant in town. When I showed up with my family, the chef was locking the door and I said, what’s going on man? It’s dinnertime. He was shutting his business down for the last time because he couldn’t pay the electric bill and the electric company had shut him off. So Jerry was talking to this restaurant owner, watching his dream die and said, we got to do something to support small businesses and I think we can do something for restaurants in Jacksonville. We spent a few years doing that. These days I’m more involved with just the very technical side. We host events a couple times a month and turn out a hundred people or so at restaurants for tasting menus and spotlight what they do best and get people excited about food in Jacks. So yeah, sometimes I get fed for free.
Aaron: [06:20] Actually, I had no idea that you were involved in that. I was not expecting that much of a response. I know I did a website for one restaurant and I get free food anytime I stop by. But you’re actually pretty active in the restaurant scene.
Gary: [06:39] Yeah, for sure. Meeting restaurant owners is really interesting. One of them gave me this statistic and I haven’t looked it up, I just trust him. The failure rate for restaurants in ten years is 99%.
Aaron: [06:49] I believe it.
Gary: [06:50] If you look at that number and go, “Oh yeah, I still want to do it,” it’s got to be a passion. It kind of parallels the WordPress community a bit. People get an idea and go, I can make something out of this, whether it’s a plugin or a service, they can build their own little cottage industry within WordPress. It’s neat and it’s fun and it’s inspiring to see people chasing something they’re passionate about.
Micah: [07:16] Cool. You also mentioned that you are a podcast host. Tell us a little bit about how that ties in.
Gary: [07:20] That’s a great question. I don’t know how it ties in anything. I have a podcast with a couple of developers, Chris Reynolds and Allison Tarr, developers I worked with at a previous agency. They’re both elsewhere now. We sort of kept in touch and for a while, after Chris left the agency I was at, I would bump into his code in certain situations and on occasion I would be frustrated with a decision he made and so I would grab the gif of Fry from Futurama, mooning, and drop that on Twitter. I would moon him on Twitter. At some point we got into an argument about music all very professionally of course, on Twitter and Allison suggested that we should have a podcast where someone brings a topic to the table and we spend the podcast debating opposite sides. (unclear 08:05) really because we don’t debate each other very well. Allison still brings topic, Chris and I have no idea and topic is until she announces it and then we spend about forty minutes discussing the topic and trying to figure out what it is until the big reveal at the end that we realize how silly we actually were. It’s called Binary Jazz. You can find it at binaryjazz.us or on Twitter @BinaryJazz.
Micah: [08:28] Absolutely not related I guess to anything.
Gary: [08:32] It’s hosted at WordPress. We’ve done a lot of silly things with it. We have what we call the genre-rator. You can generate musical genres and we kind of (unclear 08:44) that with a lot of different prefixes, suffixes, instruments, noise sounds, that sort of thing. You hit the endpoint getting music genre for darn near any occasion. We put a counter, I think we generated something like five hundred sixty thousand unique genres at this point.
Aaron: [09:00] Wow, that’s a lot. Yeah.
Gary: [09:02] You can install it in your Slack team if you need like genres on the fly in Slack. I don’t know why you would, but if you did. That sort of spawned off this, I live a hundred some odd miles north of Kennedy Space Center so I’m really into what’s happening with rocket launches. I was having a hard time keeping track of when things were launching so that after I built the Slack integration for the genre (unclear 09:25), I have this Slack code, I should do something else with it, which turned into a site called Ground Control. It’s a Slack integration that lets you know upcoming orbital launches of rockets also using REST API. Just silly stuff.
Aaron: [09:43] That’s cool though. That’s a good use. Makes me laugh, my kid’s soccer team and total off topic here, it’s called Houston. That’s the name of the team and I make horrible jokes of Houston, we have a problem, anytime they’re playing soccer. I know it doesn’t really tie in very well except for the fact that rockets are cool.
Gary: [10:14] Well, totally. I am speaking at WordCamp Orlando and their theme is space. I only submitted one talk figuring it kind of fits the theme and it’s how I built groundcontrolbot.space is the URL. I don’t know any other dot space domains but that one (unclear 10:33) make the exception.
Aaron: [10:34] I’m trying to think of any and I can’t think of any application where you would need a dot space, but hey, that fits.
Gary: [10:41] I think if you were doing closet organization.
Micah: [10:43] Clean your dot space.
Aaron: [10:46] That’s fair.
Gary: [10:46] I need someone to empty my garage dot space.
Micah: [10:48] If Office Space had come out later, you could have had the office dot space.
Gary: [10:52] I wonder what Office Space would look like if it came out now. There’s a lot of stuff in Office Space now that would seem really outlandish at the time and I think that’s just normal corporate America.
Micah: [11:00] Rather than a parody people saw it as a blueprint in some cases.
Aaron: [11:03] Which is not normally a good idea.
Gary: [11:07] Working remotely it’s easy to go, oh, corporate America.
Aaron: [11:10] Mentioning your code, you waste time on some cool stuff, like Slack integrations, which I love. Who doesn’t use Slack and who doesn’t use some type of integration? What exactly do you like to work on when it comes to code? I guess it’s twofold. What do you do at work specifically and then what’s like your hobby type project?
Gary: [11:38] My hobby projects are always like, here’s a weird API, let’s see how this works. I love the things that aren’t really well documented which I feel kind of parallels a lot sometimes what I do at work. Most enterprise clients when they show up, they have their data that they need to use stored somewhere, whether that’s a faculty or that’s things they’re selling in some kind of data structure elsewhere that you can (unclear 12:07) locations. Ultimately, all that stuff needs to be exposed to a user at some point. One of the great things too about specializing as a backend dev is that I can dive really deep in PHP and not have to worry so much about the actual interaction in frontend (unclear 12:23). I work with some amazing frontend devs who are super thoughtful and brilliant people. It makes it easy for me, I can just present a ray of data and they can make it look really nice and I don’t have to worry about that. It’s not a part I enjoy at all. I really like the deep data, esoteric, boring stuff. I want to (unclear 12:45).
Aaron: [12:47] What do you do at work day to day stuff at Tribe. Are you working on the plugin or projects?
Gary: [12:56] I’m on the project side. Most days I’m working two or three projects that I’m assigned to at a time, sometimes more. It’s that balancing act of where are we in this sprint, what will take us (unclear 13:12) to before the sprint’s over. (unclear 13:14) do a really good job there of prioritizing. Sometimes Mondays are great because you can dig in and go, okay, I can see my priority for the week, but this is the one I really want to dig into. This ticket’s going to be great. These other ones, I’ll get them this week but they’re not as exciting.
Micah: [13:30] Fair enough. Cool. I’m always curious as far as what people’s average day looks like from a productivity standpoint. And I know we’ve talked to some business people, not too many, like more hardcore type devs. I’m always interested in what things you do to stay productive and get the most out of your day.
Gary: [13:55] I love that question. My wife works and we have a six-month old. Most mornings, she takes the other two kids to school and works in the morning and I spend the first half of my day hanging out with six month old and I’m a stay at home dad. On occasion I’ll show up to an internal meeting, but generally I’m just hanging out in the mornings and my day starts at noon. Before that was the case, I’m very much a morning person so when the kids left for school, I would be at the computer at 6:00 AM to 10:00 AM, knock out four good hours of real good focus. (unclear 14:33) the baby has changed that quite a bit. I was a little worried about that, how’s this going to impact what I’m able to (unclear 14:41). I’m happy that I work with so many folks who are just super family oriented, super gracious, letting me figure out my schedule. I usually hit the ground running right around noon. Noon is sort of like that kickoff time where I say, what are the four tickets I want to solve or make major headway on today. Four kind of is the number for me that I can juggle in my head what needs to happen as well as like enough pressure. If I find myself spending my entire time on one ticket, I can go, okay, I need to table this because there’s three (unclear 15:19) tickets (unclear 15:20). I pick out the top four that are important and are interesting and from there it’s forty-five minutes or so at a throw, noise-canceling headphones on, head down. I don’t have an office at home, I’m on a laptop, outside on the porch or sitting in the couch or in the hammock or standing at the counter. I move a lot and it’s usually about once an hour I find myself needing to relocate positions. A little less than hour chunks of code, (unclear 15:49) around the house all day and some days that get me working in a park next to a lake.
Aaron: [15:54] I don’t see how you would work outside in Jacksonville in the summer. Please tell me you don’t do that.
Gary: [15:59] Actually, on this call right now, I’m sitting outside on the porch and my thermometer says it’s ninety-fiveish.
Aaron: [16:08] I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it. Oh, goodness, I guess you get used to it. I just thought, man, that’s brutal.
Gary: [16:18] Here’s a fun story. I had a team call with the agency. I was outside and I had gotten used to being on audio calls with this team and it was warm out and we’re on the call talking and I’d take my shirt off and about a minute later the lead dev goes, did you just take your shirt off? I had forgotten that I was on camera. And I have the physique of a backend developer. It’s a sight to behold, obviously. It kind of became the thing for a little while on that team.
Aaron: [16:48] Always taking your clothes off during the calls, that’s …
Gary: [16:51] A call to arms. If it gets tough, take your shirt off and dig in. Lesson learned, I’m much more careful now about when I’m wearing a shirt.
Micah: [16:59] I remember, I think it must have been Meredith tweeting about how the little screen that comes up before you hop on a Google video chat that says joint call and it shows you the video. He’s like, yeah, that’s kept me from hopping on a call shirtless several times.
Gary: [17:18] That’s where I decided, (unclear 17:19) pops up, I go, oh yeah, I need (unclear 17:23) that.
Aaron: [17:24] My company, we started doing three days out of the week where we have to do video calls because when you’re 100% remote, it’s difficult to build a team, some kind of comradery, so we started doing video stuff and normally I would jump on with a t-shirt on and stuff but the first one we went to, I got a suit and tie on and had the video on. I’m like, this is how I always dress guys, what are you talking about?
Gary: [17:59] Trying to foster a professional environment.
Aaron: [18:00] Yeah, exactly. Then, I was tempted, I have a tux, which is kind of weird, I was tempted to the next call to wear the tux, but I couldn’t do it. That was enough for me for the week. Wearing a tie for about 30 minutes is brutal.
Gary: [18:17] That does sound awful. I have a hotdog costume that I hop on calls in.
Aaron: [18:21] Wow, why do you have that?
Gary: [18:25] (inaudible 18:25)
Aaron: [18:26] That’s bad. You’re supposed to have what?
Gary: [18:29] I guess it was Halloween. I don’t know, it was a Halloween costume with the kids but it’s definitely been used more outside of Halloween.
Aaron: [18:36] All right. You need to start that off next time with definitely Halloween, it’s the only reason I would ever have one of those. Micah, got any other questions?
Micah: [18:48] As far as tools or things that you’ve discovered that help you with productivity, what are some surprising things that you didn’t think would be helpful but ended up being helpful?
Gary: [19:01] I will step back to and say one of the things that I really enforce is right at five o’clock I’m done working. That gives me five hours in the day, obviously it’s not a full day, but that family time I think with remote workers, it’s super important to highlight that there needs to be that time where you flip the off switch. For me, that’s 5:00 PM regardless whether I started at eight or ten or eleven or noon, five o’clock I flip it off. Once the kids go to bed, if there’s still more on my plate, I’ll jump back on. On the tooling side, I don’t know, my terminal is really (unclear 19:36). I am always adding silly heads-up displays, so I have in my prompt. At the moment, I have a countdown for the next launch in Kennedy. I have the weather, both high and low for the day and current including like a little emoji. I guess it would support snow emoji, but not sure how (unclear 19:56). It did snow, like flurries, December 24th, a few years ago, I was going to a (unclear 20:10) and I was trying to determine how I was going to dress and I went out on the back porch and there were flurries and I put on a lot more layers.
Aaron: [20:16] You had to go buy a jacket, didn’t you?
Gary: [20:19] I had to blow the dust off of the single jacket (unclear 20:21). Then, I have news headlines, I have a stock ticker. I do have a lot of emoji in my prompt. My prompt is like, a third of it is data before you can (unclear 20:35). I feel like, the heads-up stuff is always having it at hand. I don’t need to go look for it. I guess the other thing I include is hours that I’ve clocked today and hours I clock in a week. That’s another bit of information that’s in my prompt so I kind of get an idea of where I am. That’s using the toggle API. Toggling and Harvest are the two main clocking services that I’ve used and there’s a few others out there, both of those have great APIs to keep track of where you are. The other thing that I tend to do a lot is if I’m using, I learned the keyboard commands on sites I’m using Gmail and GitHub and we have an internal tracking tool for tasks that I wrote a (unclear 21:17) script for to keep an (unclear 21:20) toggle tool. Learning the key commands on the sites that I’m using most frequently which obviously (unclear 21:27) to that as well.
Micah: [21:28] What you’re saying is that you’ve developed the ultimate tool and we just need to take all the stuff you’ve built and use it, right?
Gary: [21:37] No, not at all, because I would hate to have to support it. I hate supporting myself let alone (unclear 21:40). Why is this not— It’s not a hundred and forty-five degrees outside. What did I do wrong?
Micah: [21:49] I added the Fahrenheit and Celsius together. Cool. Aaron, you got any particular questions?
Aaron: [21:57] Well, speaking of productivity and whatnot, it’s one of the things that I fought Micah for probably a couple of years, is using PhpStorm as my editor because I was like, why would I ever need that? What type of tools do you use daily basis for dev?
Gary: [22:20] Working outside of PhpStorm, I can’t imagine. It’s my left arm. That’s where learning the key commands in your tool are insanely useful. So PhpStorm, Xdebug. Every project I work on Xdebug is the first thing that I configure. There’s not a lot of configuration that takes place unless it’s a weird project but PhpStorm and Xdebug, that’s like the bare minimum starting point. Slack, obviously. Sequel Pro in the visibility in the database. I like to work in projects where we’re doing migrations, so being able to see directly what did I import, is it what I thought, how do we eventually reconcile the status (unclear 23:05)? WP-CLI. In PhpStorm, I don’t use the built in terminal because if I did I wouldn’t be able to see anything; all my information takes up too much of the screen. But WP-CLI is where I go for most things.
Micah: [23:32] What do you use for local development?
Gary: [23:36] Docker. Here’s a fun thing. At Modern Tribe we have our framework for new projects, it’s called Square One. If you’re thinking, “Well, that sounds familiar,” it’s because it is the name of this podcast as well.
Micah: [23:50] Coincidence.
Aaron: [23:51] Interesting.
Gary: [23:51] Yeah totally, so much so that when you were like, “Hey, do you want to come on this podcast?” I was like, “Yeah.” I ran it by my manager. I was like, “Hey, I’m going to do this podcast called SquareOne; it’s just a weird coincidence, right?”
Aaron: [24:03] We’re not going to get sued, are we? Because we’re just two guys here.
Gary: [24:10] I can’t imagine so, no. Square one, I think a lot of agencies have something similar like a jumping off point for “here’s our boilerplate” stuff and stuff is kind of a broad term. What do we generally see on projects and (unclear 24:25)? For Square One, I’ve written quite a few CLI commands to do the standard stuff you need to spin up in almost all custom WordPress sites, right? I (unclear 24:40) CPT so you can hit a CLI command and it’ll generate the class to our register, CPT user taxonomy, user meta fields and whatnot. I like writing stuff like that because when you look at the code, there’s the code that the CLI command executes and then there’s the template and the template is PHP, but it’s not being used as PHP. It’s populating with the CLI, it generates code. There’s actually a CLI command that will generate a CLI command and out of the box when you generate the CLI command it doesn’t do anything but it’s functional and you (unclear 25:19). I don’t know how utilized it is, I know a few devs who use it. I definitely (unclear 25:24) that first step of the project. All the low-hanging fruit is done with a couple commands.
Aaron: [25:32] I’m not in it that much so I’m following the words that are coming out of your mouth, but I’m just in a more theming type stuff, not that, CLI doesn’t. Interesting to hear different devs doing different stuff, but I’m sure Micah probably uses very similar tools as you.
Gary: [25:58] Docker I kind of moved to reluctantly. I was a huge fan of Valet for local. The cool thing is, on a Mac, you’re just running directly on the (unclear 26:05), so super quick to jump in and spin up a local site and start working on it. Docker isn’t quite as quick on the spin up. On the flip side though, it’s nice to be able to have local environments that match production and staging. So, definite benefit in Docker even though it’s not quite as successful as Valet, although it seems to be getting there. It seems like every day there’s still (unclear 26:35) Docker images available.
Micah: [26:40] Given where you’re at in your career so far, if you had to start over at square one, what would you do differently?
Gary: [26:44] I love this question and I wish I could say that I had a great answer to it and I don’t, so, great show. I’m fairly new to WordPress community. I’ve only been a professional dev for a couple years and I spent a decade prior doing E commerce. I wish that I had started sooner working in WordPress. I was always sort of using, not always but I’ve been using WordPress for quite a few years on the boundaries. 2015 WordCamp Tampa was my first WordCamp and I was kind of blown away by what folks were doing with WordPress. At that point, I was using it very much as a general CMS with a couple plugins and some real rudimentary stuff that I’d written. To see where people in the community had taken it and how far they’d extended really sparked my imagination. My regret is I didn’t start sooner. I’m super thrilled with the community in Jacksonville and the southeast in general. There’s quite a few cities with awesome WordCamps, awesome meetups.
Aaron: [27:56] Thanks for throwing us in there, being in the southeast. I would agree that starting earlier is always the thing because I installed WordPress in 2005. I think it was like version one point five or something and I just blogged for about a year and never did anything. And then, it sat for four years, I never really dug in. If I had started sooner, obviously, I’d be further along in my career.
Gary: [28:27] I do enjoy the camaraderie at WordCamps and it sort of doesn’t matter at WordCamp what your day job is. If the presenter is doing something cool, everyone’s interested. If someone has a unique idea there’s that dialogue and refining of ideas and that’s super important I think to keep the momentum that WordPress has. You don’t have any questions about Gutenberg? I thought this was like a WordPress podcast.
Aaron: [28:59] I’m over it really. I’m just kidding. I just wanted to answer the question real quick. I don’t have any Gutenberg questions. I’m actually forking WordPress because of it. No, just kidding. Micah will have Gutenberg questions probably.
Micah: [29:19] Yeah, do you use it?
Gary: [29:21] I do. Actually, we use it exclusively on the podcast site and we have since day one. When we started the podcast, Gutenberg was not quite as polished, but it was just like a drink, the Kool-Aid kind of thing. Since we’re all on that podcast, (unclear 29:36), we’re all WordPress devs, we may as well figure it out. I don’t know, I’m more impressed with the amount of conversation that’s gone into it then Gutenberg. It’s going to change the way we do a few things, but I don’t think it’s going to be disastrous.
Aaron: [29:51] That’s my thinking. In the Atlanta area, there’s eight to ten meetups, WordPress meetups and we had talks about it, what is it going to do, what does everybody think. Ever since the beginning, I’ve always thought, it’s not going to break anything. And if it does, it probably should have been broken because it probably wasn’t done right at the beginning anyway. When WordPress exists and it’s millions and millions of websites using WordPress, they can’t break it, not so badly where you can’t recover easily. The hype to me is kind of over. I’m not stressed, I’ve installed it on a couple of my sites, I don’t have any issues. To me it just natural progression that probably should have happened a lot sooner.
Gary: [30:51] I think that’s fair. It’s a big change and I think the folks that are concerned from the user perspective are concerned that it’s going to be a major change, but ultimately, it’s going to be what it’s going to be. Micah, what are your thoughts on it?
Micah: [31:02] I’m a fan of it. I actually wrote two page builders before Gutenberg came about and just kind of the direction and the vision that I was thinking our page builders would go is I can see Gutenberg starting to at least head down that path. I think it’s a good direction. I think there’s a lot of potential in the future. I think the key now is just stabilizing and getting décor, then see what awesome things people will do with it. Unfortunately, because of all of the deadlines that have come and gone, people don’t believe it when they say that it’s coming soon at this point. I think ultimately when it does come out is when most people are going to get onboard and actually do something with it. But I think too many people at the moment are thinking it’s not stable enough to start learning and so they’re just delaying the inevitable.
Gary: [32:04] Yeah, that’s probably fair. I think too that there are some real concerns from agencies. We built this crazy custom editing experience and in its current form when we install it, it breaks that and it may break into a non-recoverable way. And I get that concern; that’s valid. On the same token, it’s not like it’s sneaking up. We’ve known it’s coming. It’s not like it’s hiding in the bush, it’s going to be here tomorrow. It’s come with some fanfare. I don’t know that any surprise is a valid reaction to it.
Aaron: [32:40] They’re not forcing you to use it either. It’s not like there is no way to get around it. I don’t think it’s going to be that big a deal. Does WordPress ever deprecate any functions? I know they do, but I think the old way will be there for a long time and after a few years I would think that your interface that you built, your custom interface is going to be antiquated anyway. Give it a few years and I think all of the headaches won’t really be a problem anymore. But that’s just me.
Gary: [33:24] I also think, like I say, as a plugin dev, if you’re in a situation where you go— I have to plan for this thing, if I have a successful plugin business. It works in the editor anyway as most do. I think planning for it probably has to be a bit frustrating. On the same token, it’s a huge opportunity. You could be the first guy at the table that has these great solutions and these beautiful solutions. I think it’s a good shakeup, I don’t know.
Aaron: [33:55] I just think it needs to be released before 2019 because then we will never get the 2018 theme.
Gary: [34:04] Do you find yourself using the default theme very often?
Aaron: [34:08] Never. I keep it there just as, “Oh, I broke this, so let me go see if it’s my theme or my code or actual WordPress or whatever.” So no, I never use it.
Micah: [34:20] I use it on every WordPress site that I install right up until I install another thing.
Gary: [34:27] I was really excited about your answer there from Micah until… I’m pretty sure it’s what we’re using on Binary Jazz and it’s the theme I’m using on Ground Control Bot. Bunch of personal sites, 2017’s great. Change up the header image, change a few settings and get a decent looking site. Obviously, it’s really WordPress and I don’t really care that folks know that. I feel like that solves a lot of problems for (unclear 34:51).
Aaron: [34:51] As I say, you’re super dev, so you’re not that worried as long as it’s functional, right?
Gary: [34:59] I would be fine with just black and white text and blue underlined links; that’d be sufficient for me.
Aaron: [35:05] I agree. I always make the joke that I’m fine with Arial. I don’t need seven hundred Google fonts to choose from, but that’s just me. All right. Thank you for your time, Gary, I appreciate it. I like your advice, where you are, stuff like that. I’m glad you’re at Tribe because they seem to be like a great company to work with and great plugins.
Gary: [35:30] Awesome, thank you all for having me. It’s been fun and I’m glad we got to talk about Gutenberg. I haven’t talked to anybody about Gutenberg.
Aaron: [35:38] All right, well, thank you man. I appreciate it.
Gary: [35:40] All right, bye.