Community + Code is taking a break this week for #WCUS26. We'll be back with a new episode in 2 weeks!
Community + Code podcast
@communitycode.dev
A podcast about the people behind the commits. Community + Code is dedicated to the humans that write the code that operate the systems of our lives. https://communitycode.dev
Bud Kraus has been in WordPress about as long as WordPress has been legally able to drink. This week he tells me about the Uber ride that became a 110-episode podcast, why airports should be teleporters, and the one thing AI can't fake.
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Bud Kraus will happily tell you he might be the oldest person in WordPress — he once tried the line on Matt Mullenweg, who told him he’s “getting there.” But the fun of this conversation isn’t the age jokes; it’s how much genuine curiosity he still runs on. We trace the whole arc: teaching HTML and […]
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@toderash.net came to WordPress through open source, not the other way around — and he thinks that changes everything. We talked #FAIR, package management as a Lego set of proven ideas, and why AI might bring back writing code just to give it away.
Brent Toderash on sharing, sunk costs, and the software supply chain
Spend an hour with Brent Toderash and you realize he’s the guy quietly holding a very complicated system together with clear thinking and a lot of diagrams even as he tells you that he’s not a very technical person. Brent came to WordPress through open source first. He started with Linux in the ’90s, free software, […]
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Miriam Goldman calls her job "a website therapist and a website doctor at the same time." We also got into Drupal vs. WordPress, how a church band accidentally started her WordPress career, and why she's a fourth-degree black belt who plays clarinet
Miriam Goldman on WordPress, Drupal and website therapy
Miriam Goldman has filled just about every role a WordCamp has to offer — organizer, speaker, volunteer, attendee — over more than a decade in WordPress. Lately, though, she’s been branching out, showing up at DrupalCon and DrupalCamp Ottawa to see what WordPress and Drupal can actually learn from each other. We talked about the real […]
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WordPress gets blamed for security problems that are almost always the user's fault. Robert Abela has been in security since he was 19 and has a lot of thoughts about that. New Community + Code ep is out now.
Robert Abela on old-school hacking and why WordPress gets blamed for the wrong things
Have you ever talked to a real live hacker? When I was a teenager, I loved reading about the early days of hacking — wardriving, phone phreaking, the wild pioneering days of the early internet. My guest this week, Robert Abela, actually lived through them. He got his start in information security following in the footsteps […]
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New episode of Community + Code with @carriedils.com — WordPress educator, FAIR co-chair, and former Starbucks manager (the last one is not a bit). We talk courses, open source governance, and why you should care where your plugins come from.
Carrie Dils on FAIR and WordPress education
Carrie Dils has been in WordPress long enough to remember version 3, long enough to have built courses on Lynda.com before LinkedIn bought it, and long enough to have left tech entirely for a while to go learn the coffee business at Starbucks. (She came back. Obviously.) In this episode of Community + Code, Carrie and […]
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Miriam Schwab went from content writer → WordPress agency owner → static site startup founder → acquired by Elementor → Head of WordPress at a 21M-install company. She calls herself a "fake developer." New episode is out now.
Miriam Schwab from a folding table to 21 million installs
Miriam Schwab has been all in on WordPress for two decades. She started as a content writer who got distracted by the websites she was writing for, taught herself to build them, and eventually grew that into a thirteen-year agency — illuminea — serving tech companies and nonprofits in Israel. Then she went startup: Strattic was […]
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This week on @communitycode.dev, @courtneyr.dev admitted she had Claude running in another tab during our conversation. To be fair, so did I. We get into DevRel, AI coding, vibe-coding WordPress plugins, and open source licensing ethics. Check it out
Courtney Robertson on being the glue
Courtney Robertson has been in the WordPress community since 2009, when she got her start volunteering to hand out name badges at WordCamp Mid-Atlantic after missing out on getting a ticket. These days she’s a Developer Advocate at GoDaddy — a role she describes as a “dotted line,” connecting the engineering side of hosting infrastructure […]
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7 out of 56 speaker applications were from women. That was Jill Binder's WordCamp. So she built what became a workshop that ran in 50 countries.
Jill Binder and being an expert on your own experience
Jill Binder didn’t plan to become a diversity advocate. She was co-organizing a WordCamp in Vancouver when she noticed that only seven of fifty-six speaker applications came from women — and decided to do something about it. What started as a local fix turned into a five-year journey: a five-hour workshop, run a hundred times, in […]
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Natalie MacLees has been thinking about web accessibility since before most developers had heard the word. She's also been very patient about people mispronouncing her name. (I am one of those people.)
Natalie MacLees on the misinformation holding accessibility back
Natalie MacLees has been thinking about web accessibility since before most developers had heard the word. It started with a phone call — a university’s Office of Disability Services telling her that students couldn’t use the websites she’d been happily building — and it never really stopped. Now she’s the founder of AAArdvark, an accessibility […]
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The guy who built PublishPress reads every single support ticket himself. 10,000 customers. Probably not in any management textbook. It works though.
Steve Burge on iteration, local journalism and the COBOL users of WordPress
Steve Burge came to open source the long way around. He was a schoolteacher in England, then in rural Georgia — the kind of rural where the starting pay for a teacher in 2004 was $27,000 a year. That math didn’t work once he had a family, so he started building websites in the evenings. […]
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Four WordPress nerds walk into a Podcastathon. All of them are on the board of a nonprofit trying to fix how open source contribution works. One of them is me.
The WP Community Collective on feeding humans into the boiler
This is a first for Community + Code: a full board meeting (almost), on the podcast. For this special Podcastathon episode, I sat down with three of my fellow WP Community Collective board members — Courtney Robertson, Sé Reed, and Jono Alderson — to talk about something I care about deeply and probably doesn’t get discussed […]
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The person whose code silently runs in your CI every single day has thoughts on AI PRs, exploitative capitalism, and funding open source. They're spicy. You should hear them.
Juliette Reinders Folmer on being invisible and exploitative capitalism
Open source runs the internet. Most people who use it — including the companies profiting from it — have no idea. That’s the central tension in this conversation with Juliette Reinders Folmer, a Netherlands-based PHP developer who has quietly spent the last decade maintaining tools used by hundreds of thousands of developers worldwide. You might not […]
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Fons Vandamme has a rule: if an LLM responds with "great idea," something is wrong. We talked Drupal, Webhaven, building solo with AI, and why the story might only be starting now. 🎙️
Fons Vandamme on building without excuses
There’s a particular kind of developer story that often shows up on Community + Code. Someone falls sideways into technology, gets obsessed, spends years getting really good at one thing — and then decides to pour all of it into something they’ve been building in their head for years. Fons Vandamme’s version of that story […]
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Carl Alexander on serverless WordPress, the real cost of “cheap” hosting, and why modern devs just want to deploy and go live their lives. Also: candid talk about marketing noise + staying honest when building solo. 🎧💥
Carl Alexander on scaling and being true to yourself
The through-line in Carl Alexander’s career is building things that other developers don’t want to think about and making it easy for them to adopt and use and stop babysitting systems. In this episode of Community + Code, we talk about Carl’s early exposure to programming and robotics and how he fell into a WordPress […]
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John Hawkins (@vegasgeek.com) is with me on the podcast this week to talk about WordCamps, teaching one small thing that changes someone’s path, and the long-tail “return on connection.”
John Hawkins and “return on connection”
John Hawkins (aka VegasGeek) has been around WordPress long enough to understand the part nobody can put into a spreadsheet: that the real value of community is almost never immediate. We talk about the moment a simple plugin-development talk at a WordCamp helped flip my own identity from “designer” to “developer, actually,” and how John […]
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I’ll be joining a @pantheon.io livestream at 1:30pm ET / 11:30am PT / 7:30pm CET to talk about Drupal’s upcoming marketplace and how @dripyard.com fits into the growing commercial ecosystem. Join us 👉 pantheon.io/events/webin... #Drupal
Livestream: Exploring a commercial ecosystem for Drupal | Pantheon.io
A livestream to learn about the Drupal theme marketplace Dripyard
pantheon.io
Season 2 is here! 🎙️ First up in 2026: @tearyne.bsky.social on online identity, DevRel as “therapy,” accessibility getting real, and cozy co-working communities.
Tearyne Almendariz on identity and intentional community spaces
Tearyne Almendariz has one of those internet-origin stories that makes perfect sense: Sailor Moon fandom led to learning Japanese, which led to building websites, which eventually led to Drupal — and to a career shaped as much by community as by code. In this Season 2 kickoff of Community + Code, we talk about the […]
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I sat down with @thewebprincess.bsky.social to talk cultural algorithms, implicit bias, WP Includes, and why our communities thrive when we stop guarding our corner of the pie.
Dee Teal on cultural algorithms, belonging and bias
A common theme in this podcast is the way that open source brings people together and it’s those communities that become far more powerful than the software that we initially got into. In this episode, I sit down with my friend Dee Teal, a Melbourne-based project manager, delivery leader and long time WordPress community member […]
communitycode.dev
This week on C+C, I chatted with @troychaplin.bsky.social about the real work behind higher-ed WordPress, supporting huge groups of editors and why a11y has to start before you hit publish.
Troy Chaplin on Accessibility and WordPress in Higher Ed
Troy Chaplin is a WordPress developer at Carleton University and one of the organizers of WordCamp Canada. He wrote the Block Accessibility Checks plugin out of a need for his work in higher ed WordPress. In this episode, we talk about what makes building WordPress sites for higher education different and the reality of supporting […]
communitycode.dev
For the past 7 months, I've been running @communitycode.dev, a podcast that gives me an excuse to talk to cool people about what inspires them. It's been a great run & I'm looking at doing it all over again in 2026. Join me and be a guest on the show! communitycode.dev/be-a-guest/
Be a Guest - Community + Code
Everyone has a story to tell. If you are doing things on the internet (anything…really), I want to talk to you! Community + Code is a casual conversation that focuses as much (or more) on the who and ...
communitycode.dev
I talked with @mike.herschel.com about Drupal’s big shift toward themes, Drupal CMS, Canvas, and what it’s like to build @dripyard.com as the ecosystem starts changing. Super thoughtful conversation about community, collaboration, and timing.
Mike Herchel on open source and the future of commercial marketplaces for Drupal
Mike Herchel is a fixture in the Drupal community and the lead developer of the Olivero core theme. Now he’s building something new, a Drupal theme marketplace called Dripyard. We talk about the challenges the Drupal has faced over the years, particularly around the user experience, theme development and limitations and the culture of collaboration […]
communitycode.dev
I was on the @communitycode.dev podcast talking about #Drupal theming and my new company, @dripyard.com Details at communitycode.dev/episodes/epi...
Episode 14: Mike Herchel - Community + Code
Mike Herchel talks about the future of Drupal theming, the rise of Drupal CMS and Canvas, and how the community is navigating its first real push toward a commercial theme marketplace. A candid look a...
communitycode.dev
Being number one in WordPress isn’t the point — keeping the web open is. @mikedemo.bsky.social joins Community + Code to talk about bridging open-source communities, from Joomla to WordPress, and why collaboration beats competition.
Mike Demo on Open Source, Community and Vegan Food
If you’ve been to more than one WordCamp, odds are you’ve seen Mike Demo. He’s a Partnerships Lead at Hosting.com and a familiar face in the open-source world—someone who thrives on connecting people, projects, and ideas. Demo describes himself as a “lead handshaker,” a title that pretty much says it all: his work is about […]
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From Chicago to Greece, @paloukas.com talks performance engineering at @pressidium.com, WordCamps and camping with his cat. 😻
Christos Paloukas on Performance Engineering, Community, and Cats
In this week’s episode of Community + Code, we’re joined by Christos Paloukas, a performance engineer at Pressidium who’s as passionate about making websites faster as he is about rescuing cats. We talk about what performance engineering actually means, why “making things fast” depends more on people and process than technology, and how caching can […]
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FusionAuth’s @maida.kim joins @jazzsequence.com and shares her path through DevRel, why identity work matters, and how art helps her stay balanced.
Kim Maida on Identity, DevRel and Finding Balance
When you think of identity and authentication, “fun” might not be the first word that comes to mind. But for Kim Maida, Senior Director of Developer Relations at FusionAuth, it’s a calling. In this episode of Community + Code, Kim talks about her journey through Developer Relations and how she found herself coming back again […]
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In case you missed it last week (and if you did, you should really *hit subscribe* 😉), the newest episode of Community + Code dropped. This time, I chat with @karmatosed.art about building products, the company she co-founded Guildenberg, AI and burnout. communitycode.dev/episodes/epi...
After wearing many hats within the WordPress ecosystem, my guest on this week’s episode of Community + Code, Tammie Lister, has settled on the title of Product Engineer — someone who thrives on guiding ideas from their earliest spark to scaling, while keeping people at the heart of the process. In…
Tammie Lister on Technology, Creativity and Community
After wearing many hats within the WordPress ecosystem, my guest on this week’s episode of Community + Code, Tammie Lister, has settled on the title of Product Engineer — someone who thrives on guiding ideas from their earliest spark to scaling, while keeping people at the heart of the process. In this episode, Tammie shares […]
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