Transcript ↓

In this podcast episode, host Michelle Frechette welcomes Felix Arntz, a senior software engineer at Google, about his decade of contributions to the WordPress community. Felix shares insights on effective communication, persistence, and attention to detail in open-source collaboration. He highlights the importance of building relationships, learning from others, and embracing the welcoming nature of the WordPress community. The episode also introduces Felix’s new “View Transitions” plugin, designed to enhance user experience. Listeners are encouraged to engage, contribute, and build connections within the WordPress ecosystem.

Top Takeaways:

• Attention to Detail Is a Key Marker of Professionalism: Felix and Michelle emphasized that small details—like capitalizing the “P” in WordPress—may seem trivial but are taken seriously by seasoned professionals. This attention to detail reflects pride in one’s work and often becomes a litmus test for developers and marketers alike when assessing quality and seriousness.

• Thinking at Scale and Growing Gradually Are Crucial in Open Source Contribution: Felix discussed the importance of thinking at scale, especially when contributing to WordPress core. A feature might work well for a blog with 80 posts but break down on a site with tens of thousands. Additionally, contributors are encouraged to increase scope gradually, starting with bug fixes, so they can build trust, demonstrate commitment, and avoid burnout or disappointment when larger proposals stall.

• Personal Motivation Can Guide Your Niche in Open Source Work: Felix shared how his contributions to WordPress core initially grew out of real-world problems he encountered during freelance work. This insight reinforces the idea that contributors should follow their authentic interests and pain points when selecting where to focus their energy, making their efforts more sustainable and impactful.
  
• Relationships and Community Are the Heart of the WordPress Project: Michelle and Felix agreed that building personal relationships—whether at WordCamps, online, or through collaborative work—is not just rewarding personally, but also essential for project momentum. Felix shared how meeting someone briefly in person changes how online collaboration feels. Michelle told a moving story about how her community connections helped her navigate an inaccessible travel situation, underscoring the tangible power of WordPress friendships

Mentioned In The Show:

• This Week in WordPress
• Felix-Arntz.me

🐦 You can follow Post Status and our guests on Social Media:

• Felix Arntz (Senior Software Engineer, Google)
• Michelle Frechette (Director of Community Relations, Post Status)
• Olivia Bisset (Intern, Post Status)

The Post Status podcast is geared toward WordPress professionals, with interviews, news, and deep analysis. 📝

Browse our archives, and don’t forget to subscribe via iTunes, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Stitcher, Simplecast, or RSS. 🎧

Transcript

Michelle Frechette 00:00:02  Welcome to the Post Status Cache Up. I almost said Cache Up plugin, Cache Up Podcast where I’m catching up with Felix Arntz today. Felix, I don’t know when our paths first crossed. I feel like I’ve always known you as part of the community. As long as I’ve been part of the community. But it’s delightful to have formed a friendship over the years. And I’m very glad that you’re here with me today. So thank you for joining me.

Felix Arntz 00:00:26  Thank you. Yeah. Happy to be here.

Michelle Frechette 00:00:28  So you have multiple roles. Tell us first what is your full time job and what do you do there?

Felix Arntz 00:00:35  Yeah, I’m a, Yeah, I’m a Senior Software engineer at Google. I’ve been at Google for six and a half years now, so it’s getting a long time. And yeah, historically, we’ve been, we’ve been mostly focused on the from the beginning on, WordPress in various different shapes and forms. When I started, I think for maybe a good three years or so, I was the lead engineer for the Sidekick plugin from Google for WordPress. So that was my first primary project. But we were always also spending some time through, through work time to contribute to WordPress Core. That really, expanded, late. I don’t I think it was late 2021 that we started, dedicating our team efforts to performance. So we co-founded the WordPress Performance Team together with a few contributors from other companies. And, yeah. So I’ve been working on that for well over three years now. And then most recently, though, we’re shifting more towards working on AI. And so I’ve personally been more involved in working with AI in WordPress and now with the new WordPress AI team, which I’m sure almost everybody has heard of now. So that’s yeah, that’s kind of what I’ve been focusing on as part of my job for the last. Yeah, six and a half years.

Michelle Frechette 00:02:09 Yes. I love it and I love that Google is not just I mean, obviously for powering WordPress is powering 43% of the known internet, right, that we know of. Google definitely is paying attention to what we’re doing. Not only that, but sponsoring many of the flagship WordCamps and having a presence there to help people understand how to use Google right. And how that we can be leaning into all the things. I will say, if you go to the Google, Google booth at any one of these word camps, they will not hand you a list of how the algorithm works. So don’t get your hopes up. That is still secret, and we’re not going to drop that in today’s episode either. But if you do your research, you will understand how SEO really works well for you. And we’re not here to talk about SEO. Mostly. I’m interested in.

Felix Arntz 00:02:55  That’s also a lot of the questions I get, especially when I started at Google, people would ask me like, I don’t know, how can I get to number one or page one? And I’m like, hey, like if ,I if I knew I probably weren’t allowed to say it, but I don’t even know, like I have zero idea. Like that’s not my responsibility at Google.

Michelle Frechette 00:03:13  But that’s what that’s what our customers ask us if we’re freelancing or our agencies. You build the website, you send them the link, and they’re like, how come I’m not on first page of Google when I search it? Because it’s only three hours old. Your website has not existed for a very long time and so these things take time. Probably your distant cousins don’t know when you’ve had your baby either for a few days. So like, let’s make sure that we give things time to to grow. But yeah, no, that’s true. I think that people often want to like, what’s the secret sauce, Felix, tell me, what’s the? There’s it just like it’s just like any recipe online. You know, it’s proprietary. We’re not going to tell you how those things work, for sure.

Felix Arntz 00:03:53  But, but and it doesn’t. And of course, the company is so big, right? Like like. That’s right. That’s the other thing. Like in a company that I don’t know. I don’t know when it changes, but like, maybe in a company with 500 employees, you can still find somebody somewhere. But if you were in a company with 100,000, more than 100,000 employees, I feel like it starts getting like, I don’t even know who. I don’t even know who I would ask. And I also don’t know, sometimes I don’t even know where to search, like internally or it’s so many people.

Michelle Frechette 00:04:20  Maybe that’s a good thing, because then you can honestly say to people, even I don’t know, and you’re not telling them and that truth. But for somebody who’s contributed, I’ve been part of the community for, since 2011, I have not been a contributor since 2011. Of course, that was when I built my first website and started learning what WordPress was. I didn’t even know there was a community back then. I just knew it was software that existed. But as somebody who’s been contributing for ten years, you’ve recently put out an article on your website about your ten years, Ten Lessons From Ten Years of Contributing to WordPress core. And I think that’s wonderful. And I think, like I’m looking at the cover photo, which, by the way, worked really well with your new plugin, that transitions plugin you have. So we can talk about that a little bit at the end too, if you’d like people to know about that. I was like, we demoed that this morning on This Week in WordPress. And I was like, that is a really slick plugin. But the cover photo, the hero image there is WordCamp Europe 2015, in Sevilla, Spain. So that was exciting. So tell us a little bit like the overview. Let’s look. We’ll go into the lessons in a minute. But what’s your overview of ten years in WordPress? If you had to sum up in just a sentence or a few words what that has been like, what would you say?

Felix Arntz: I don’t know. 

Michelle Frechette: In not your native language.

Felix Arntz 00:05:43  The first the first word that comes to mind is transformative.

Michelle Frechette 00:05:48  Yeah. I can see that.

Felix Arntz 00:05:51  Yeah. I mean, this. So when I went to this, when I went to WordCamp Europe 2015, that was, that was my very first WordCamp I ever went to.

Michelle Frechette 00:06:01  Oh, wow.

Felix Arntz 00:06:02  A I like I was a freelancer at the time and kind of could work from wherever I wanted. And, that I started, I think I had started working with WordPress in 2012, and I don’t even remember how I found out about the community. I feel like at this point, I had seen names of some of the more, I don’t know, more active, more known contributors to WordPress core online. And somehow I, I guess I must have found out that that there were WordCamps and, I and I, I know, I think I didn’t I think a lot, a lot of people actually, at the WordCamp would tell me, hey, like, you’re brave to go to this massive WordCamp as a first WordCamp, because, like, there’s all this much, many smaller, much smaller WordCamp right all over the world. And I chose to go to WordCamp Europe, but I think that was purely because that’s what I found that was coming up, which probably has probably WordCamp Europe and WordCamp US and WordCamp Asia are just more promoted like right, more globally.

Michelle Frechette 00:07:07  Absolutely.

Felix Arntz 00:07:08  So, so that’s maybe that’s why I found out about it. And then I went to Seville. And a side note, I love Seville is one of my favorite cities in the world. I might be biased because I went there for this for the first time and it was such an amazing experience. But I also just really started felling a lot, falling in love with the city. I’ve been there a couple times since and yeah, that WordCamp was just, I don’t know, it was great to see people, that I yeah, that I had only followed around online a little bit and, yeah. Also meet a lot of new people or even just, even if, even some people I didn’t meet, but some people I hear talks and I was like, oh, this is a great session. Like, I should also follow this person and see what they’re doing. And yeah, the and then the last day back then, I think, I think back then, it was more common to have the contributor day as the last day of the event. I think today.

Michelle Frechette 00:08:09  Yeah, I think so too.

Felix Arntz 00:08:11  Yeah. That mostly is the other way around today. but, yeah, it was the last day of the WordCamp. June 28th, 2015. That was June 30th. So it was two days ago. Ten years ago.

Michelle Frechette 00:08:23  Yeah.

Felix Arntz 00:08:23  That, what I was because I guess I was because I’m a developer, I thought, I want to contribute to WordPress core. And, one thing I want to call out, I also mentioned this in my post. I really thought that that contributor day a like, I was lucky that that contributor day a was an excellent setup for the core team. I want to say, because. It was shortly before WordPress core release. So there were, there were some new features that were like almost ready to commit to WordPress core, but they still wanted to do some testing. And up to this day, I think that that’s like an excellent way to run a contributor day for WordPress core, because it’s it’s it’s I think it’s very hard to start with something like, hey, search, search for tickets that you can work on, and there’s thousands of tickets, but some of them, many of them are really complicated.

Michelle Frechette: Where do I start?

Felix Arntz: Yeah, yeah. And that’s it’s hard to find the right thing. But then also many of them are really complicated, have years of discussions and weren’t committed yet. So that already shows that they’re not easy. And I think a great starting point is to do testing. I feel like generally like I, I have that experience there, where basically it was Constantine Oberland who was the release leader at the time, was asking us, hey, like, here’s this new site icon feature. I don’t know if you remember that when I was added like this. The feature that you can choose the icon on your WordPress site like that was it for. WordPress 4.3. So that feature was there. It wasn’t committed yet. And he used to say here. Test this, test it out. Test the functionality. back then it was also tested in all the edge cases. You can think about disable JavaScript in your browser, which I don’t know today. I don’t know how much that is a priority anymore, but that.

Michelle Frechette 00:10:13  But back then it was.

Felix Arntz 00:10:14  But back then it was exactly. And I did found one bug, where JavaScript was disabled and then I fixed it. I was probably five lines of code or something, but and then other contributors did the same thing, found some little problems, fix them. And that was a great way to contribute to something that, in the end, was kind of like almost a flagship feature of that release. And obviously we didn’t do the flagship feature of the release, but we did our little contributions to it, and that felt great. And and it was just a very practical approach to starting to contribute in a way that like like I think anybody can start helping tests, right? Like.

Michelle Frechette 00:10:54  Absolutely. 

Felix Arntz 00:10:54  That’s why it’s such a great, it’s such a great starting point. And then you can try to fix the bug yourself, or at least you can discuss how it should be fixed. And that’s, that’s a good first contribution.

Michelle Frechette 00:11:03  So I do a talk called Personal Branding why you should do personal branding and how personal branding helps you, with your career, whether you’re employed or, you know, freelance. And one of the things I talk about is people should have their own website and they should put a favicon on the top of their page. So I did not know that was, you know, those are working things to people like you who had done that back in the day. I do remember now you can upload any image and it will do its best to create a favicon for you. Back in the day, you had to do 16 pixels by 16 pixels and you. There was websites where you could go and upload your photo and you could change pixel by pixel. And so it looked like something that you’d want to have represented at the top of your website.  Luckily, we don’t have to do that anymore, but I remember spending an hour on a client’s logo to try to make it look like its logo in 16 pixels, so.

Felix Arntz 00:12:00  Oh, that’s that’s painfully.

Michelle Frechette 00:12:03  It was. And I was like, maybe we just don’t do it. No, we had to do it. But, but that was. Yeah, that’s pretty cool as a non developer because I am not a coder. I mean I’ve done a few things I’ve learned a little bit over the years, but I don’t contribute to code. I’m somebody who early on thought why would I go to a contributor day if I can’t code? And when you finally go to one, you realize coding is only a small part of how you can contribute. At a contributor day. And so I’ve been part of marketing and I’ve been part of photos and I’ve been part of, different, different tables over the years. I only really speak one language. So I’ve never joined polyglots, but somebody who is multilingual.  A polyglot stable is also somebody, somewhere they can help out a contributor day. But yeah, it’s I think it’s interesting that once you learn that, you know, we say code is poetry. We talk about the code, we talk about the software. The community is so much bigger than the software because it takes so many more people to make things work than just the code itself, which of course has to be good. So it’s it’s it really is. All these contributor days really are part of helping the entire community help the open source project grow. So thank you for all your years. And if you’re listening to this podcast and you’re not looking at this podcast on YouTube, I can see four record albums that are the thank you gifts that you get when you have been not just a contributor, because there’s hundreds and hundreds of people who contribute to each release, you know, a primary release. But the people whose name are, as I say, above the fold, right? The people who have some pretty specific jobs on a release. Get these record albums like what you have behind You that are the the album of the artist for whom that release is named. Well, I did not come up.

Felix Arntz 00:13:55  Yeah.

Michelle Frechette 00:13:57  And they’re jazz. It’s always jazz. So it’s really neat to see how they’re displayed behind you there. Someday, maybe I’ll have some behind me instead of my guitars in photography, but, but those are pretty cool.

Felix Arntz 00:14:07  Yeah, I really like the. I really like it as memorabilia. Yeah, they they look cool.

Michelle Frechette 00:14:12  They do look cool. When you got your first one in the mail where you like, oh, this is sweet. Where am I going to do this?

Speaker 3 00:14:18  Yeah. For sure, for sure. I think I got it for WordPress 5.1, I believe. Yeah, that was where we worked on, the fatal error protection that was so basically there we, we added this feature there that, when your website would throw a 500 error and nothing works anymore that you get it sends WordPress, sends out an email to the administrator and you can kind of recover. There’s like a recovery mode.

Michelle Frechette00:14:48  yeah.

Felix Arntz 00:14:48  To to fix that. That was I think that was primarily what my bigger involvement in that release was.

Michelle Frechette 00:14:54  That’s when we stopped fearing the white screen of death quite so much, Correct?

Felix Arntz 00:14:59  I don’t know if I don’t know if stop fearing is, I still fear, but.

Speaker 3 00:15:03  Maybe not quite so much. 

Felix Arntz 00:15:06  Yeah, yeah. Fear it less. Yeah.

Michelle Frechette 00:15:08  I don’t see it as often anymore. So I think we’re creating a more and more stable product with each release for sure. But sometimes it’s those plugins. You got to watch those plugins, man, because it’s not always the software. Sometimes it’s the plugins that will just throw everything out of whack, and then you’ve got to figure out how to, how to fix that. But there are people in the community that you can absolutely hire to fix those things for you, and that’s an entire industry of its own. But let’s talk about the lessons that you’ve put on your blog post, and I will include all the links that we’re going to talk about today.  I’ll include the blog and the show notes here as well. So if you’re listening, all you have to do is go back to the PostStatus.com and find this episode in our news feed. And all of those links will be there for sure. But it is Felix-Arntz.me and you can find Felix’s blog there. So the first thing, the first lesson that you put here, for the ten lessons in ten years is communicate and communicate well. So I’m going to let you tell us a little bit about what you mean of each of these things. And the people can go back and read more.

Felix Arntz 00:16:13  Yeah. I think it’s a that, I think communication, even as a coder, it’s, it’s, it’s not just about writing code. Especially I feel like, I feel like when you, when you work, maybe when you work for yourself or when you work by yourself, that’s kind of like you just need to write the code, right? Like you need to come up with it and write it. But as soon as you start working with a team, let alone if you work with a global community of contributors, you will need to communicate and you need to. I think it’s important that you are able to reason about code you write. But also even before you write code, propose a technical solution without necessarily having to write all the code and just giving it like, here’s what we should do. And I think that’s, I think that’s crucial. Probably not just in WordPress, but like any, any software project where you work with a team, I would say. And, so I think that’s one of the, I think that’s one of the biggest lessons for me to that, that, that that’s important. And, the more you do it, I think the more proactively you do it, the better. Like like, because sometimes, if, both when you, both when you start, when you want to propose a new enhancement or a bug fix. it might be fine to write a pull request immediately, but even then, if you even then, ideally you should write something in the pull request description like why did you do it this way? Or if you, if maybe if you’re raising a ticket, why is this even a problem? Like make sure to put enough steps to verify the issue. And and then later when other people review your code, I mean, basically, like, you should be able to explain to someone who asks potentially critical questions like why you did it this way and why you don’t do it, didn’t do it the other way. Or you should be able to engage with that other contributor to discuss, like, should we do it the other way? Is this way better or that way?

Michelle Frechette 00:18:28  I am fortunate to live in a place and have been raised and lived my life in a place where English is my primary language, but for a great number of people in our global community, English is a secondary, tertiary or beyond language. And, but it is the language of communication within the WordPress community because there’s just so many languages. Even somebody said to me, like in, in, if we had WordCamp Asia, why are we presenting in English? And I said, well, in India alone, do you know how many languages there are? Like, which would we choose? Right? So I am very blessed that way. But what do you say? Communicate. Communicate well. Especially you. As you said in a global community, you really have to take into account that a lot of people are reading, or listening in a language that is not their first language and they’re translating in their head. If it hasn’t, if it doesn’t come as naturally for them. And so I think that that comes into play a lot as well. So that communication isn’t just be very clear what you want to say, but also take into account that not everybody is reading it and hearing it. They have to translate it as well for themselves.

Felix Arntz 00:19:36  Right, right. That perfectly leads to my. My second point was is.

Michelle Frechette 00:19:39  It does

Felix Arntz 00:19:40  Assuming good intent.

Michelle Frechette 00:19:43  I set that up for you so well!

Felix Arntz  00:19:45  Yeah. Yeah. Perfect.Yeah. Like, my second point is assume good intent. And, yeah. When people you work, you have to always remember that you work with a global community and other people, like, may not be as, I don’t know how you say as, strong in the English language, but. Or, but there’s also other things like, there may be different communication norms in different, there will there are different communication norms in different parts of the world. And like, like something may come over, may come across as harsh. Which maybe in another country is just the way to speak. And me, as a German, I can make that joke. That German, Germans. I think. I think you know what I’m going to say. Like German people don’t have the most welcoming reputation, even though. They may still be.

Michelle Frechette 00:20:45  There’s a joke in English that you may have heard that says if you love somebody, tell them. If you want to terrify them, tell them in German.

Felix Arntz00:20:52  Oh, yeah. Yeah. 

Michelle Frechette 00:20:57  It is not a flowery like I mean, maybe flower. It’s not presented in a very flowery way, like a Latin language would be.

Felix Arntz00:21:03  Right. Right. But yeah. So like people, people speak in different ways and I think, yeah. Like, I’m, I, I mean, for what it’s worth, like, I’m sure I’ve come across to someone as harsh and I. But I try not to write like I try my best to, Yeah. To speak more, how you say, positively and and, like, I’m. I guess I’m trying to be aware that maybe my natural language is in a certain way, and I try to be more welcoming than than German. Otherwise might be. But like. Maybe that sounds wrong but. 

Michelle Frechette 00:21:43  The people who know you know your intent. But if you don’t know you, maybe they don’t.

Felix Arntz 00:21:46  Exactly.

Michelle Frechette 00:21:47  But I will say there’s a lot of neuro divergence in, in tech and in WordPress also. And so I find myself I’ll reach out to somebody and I will start with my thought of what I want to communicate with them, and I don’t. And I forget that other people start by saying, hi, how are you? How is your day going? And instead I’m like, hey, do you want to be on my podcast? When are you available? I’m like, oh, and I meant to say hello.

Felix Arntz 00:22:11  Right, right.

Michelle Frechette 00:22:14  Because it’s just right to the straight to the point. But yeah, there’s definitely social norms that we can, we don’t always have to include, but always assume the good intent with people for sure. And like you said, we don’t always communicate in the same way. And so making sure that we understand that it’s it’s I would say 99.999% of it is not ill intent. There’s always an outlier.

Felix Arntz 00:22:39 Exactly. Yep. And I think the other part, the other part I mentioned in the post is that, people like probably all of us, we don’t have enough time, right? Like I wouldn’t we all wish that the day was longer. So there’s I think oftentimes communication is short. Like how you say short winded. Is that a thing? Like, it’s too short sometimes because.

Michelle Frechette: Winded

Felix Arntz: Short winded. Winded. Yeah. That, that and that’s maybe just because the other contributor that replies to you has a million things on their mind. And that’s not necessarily an excuse, but it happens like you, you could have provided more detail. You probably should have provided more detail, but sometimes you don’t. And that’s not out of ill intent. It’s just a mistake and an honest mistake. Right? 

Michelle Frechette 00:23:27  Yes or the rush to get that information across without the niceties around it. Absolutely. 

Felix Arntz 00:23:31  Right.

Michelle Frechette 00:23:33  I like your next point as well, which is be persistent as long as it’s appropriate. Like there is a point where persistence is like, all right, you are the squeaky wheel, and we’re still going to keep ignoring you because it’s not the right time. Right? Like the kind of thing. But there is a time when persistence is absolutely called for, and I like how you put that as your third point. So.

Felix Arntz 00:23:56  Yeah. Like, I if I had this, I had this experience early on, where I would open an issue or ticket that I thought, well, I mean, it goes also in other points, but like, I thought it was totally reasonable and I was like, why is this? yeah. Like, I was proposing this. I was giving a lot of context, but then the ticket was very quickly closed and, with maybe like a sentence. And then I was like, why is it that? Okay. You didn’t give a reason, so I reopened the ticket. I was like, can you please follow up and stuff like that. And, when that happened, I was in the moment, really frustrated. And, I don’t remember the exact moment, but I know, I know, I was frustrated, maybe I took a moment to step back, and then I came back and reopened the ticket and asked for more context, like, why did you close this? And what is the problem here? And, but yeah, eventually, eventually other other contributors chimed in and eventually it turned out like it was not really aligned with the, yeah, something with what should go into WordPress core. And I think that’s, I think that was like it was just a very short example of, being like, it’s important that you are persistent if you feel like you’re missing context or if if you feel. And even if you if you if you step back and you still feel you were being treated unfairly, whether probably not intentional, but, then you should follow up and ask like, can you provide more information? Like, why is this, why was my ticket closed? Or why was my proposal rejected?

Michelle Frechette 00:25:46  And persistence doesn’t doesn’t have to mean rude. You can be persistent without being rude. And the way you’ve described it is, could you please explain to me why as opposed to how come you didn’t? Yeah.

Felix Arntz 00:25:56  Right, right.

Michelle Frechette 00:25:57  There’s different ways to approach.

Felix Arntz 00:25:59  Right. And that goes also again to like being. Yeah, being respectful communicate well and so I mentioned this elsewhere in the post also. But, but I’ve been there, I’ve been there several times. Like if something can feel frustrated, just step back and come back later and you will collect yourself and be able to reply in a, in a not so, yeah. How do you say,

Michelle Frechette 00:26:24  Yeah. Knee Knee jerk reaction.

Felix Arntz 00:26:26  Exactly, exactly.

Michelle Frechette 00:26:28  I learned that as a parent. Right? So my daughter is 33 now, but when I was, she would frustrate me as when she was a child, it wasn’t her fault. She didn’t understand the way the world worked. It wasn’t my fault that I’d had a bad day, but I could step back for a few minutes, regauge myself and approach her with love and kindness, and answer her questions in a way that we were both satisfied at the end. It’s not always easy to learn, though, because our emotions are always with us.

Felix Arntz 00:26:54  Yep, yep.

Michelle Frechette 00:26:57  Number four says pay attention to detail. And, you know, we joke about the I can’t find the missing comma in 40 pages of code. So paying attention to detail can sometimes help with those things. But tell us a little bit more about why that’s important.

Felix Arntz 00:27:15  Yeah, I think that’s at this point is probably one of the ones that are most focused about actual code. Which I want to call out, like you mentioned earlier, like when you go to contribute today, you don’t need to. You don’t need to be a coder. There’s so many other things you can contribute to. But I, that’s like almost all of my points I’m making here are not about code either, even though it’s about contributing to core and writing code, like, because a lot of it is interpersonal skills that you need. And also some of this you can definitely develop and get better at while you’re contributing to WordPress core. Yeah. But paying attention to detail is, is mostly about, being, maybe being proactive in, well, how much attention you pay to getting writing the, the code that you write that you do it, comprehensively, like, make sure to document it well, for example. Make sure to add unit tests or, or if you’re new to contributing to WordPress core and you don’t know how to write unit tests in the WordPress core test suite. You could also acknowledge that again, like when you open the poll, say, I haven’t had a test yet. I would love to get some pointers on how to do that, that kind of messaging that that way you acknowledge that this is missing and you ask for help.

Michelle Frechette 00:28:37  And that’s the perfect. The perfect way to learn is there, too, because everybody sitting at the table has various levels of ability and knowledge of how it all works. So it’s a perfect opportunity to say, teach me how to do this.

Felix Arntz 00:28:50  Right, right. And at the end of the day, I mentioned here, get it done. The mindset should be to get it done right, not get it done quickly. And I think I think that’s important. Like, I, I still notice myself, like, every time that I work on a core ticket, I end up working on it for so much more time than I thought I would. And I think that’s partially, that’s partially, I think that’s partially just how, how we are as developers often underestimating the work that it takes. But also. But especially with WordPress, there’s so much, so much things. So many things to cover. Like, like, testing, testing, all the edge cases and stuff like that. It takes much longer than when you initially think, oh, I have a I think I have a solution. I can put this down in like one hour and later you’re like four hours on it. And with all this, with all the additional, with all the additional testing, writing, writing unit tests and documentation and, and then even writing the pull request description to explain what you, what you’re doing. So I think it’s important to take that time because that way it prioritizes and prioritize quality over quantity. Right? Because you can also I also sometimes see that, people try to implement like many, many pull requests. And that can sometimes not be, I mean, sometimes there’s easy, really easy things that you can work on, but many times they’re not that simple. And, and I think then it’s I would recommend people to take more time to work on one thing than try to get as many things as possible done.

Michelle Frechette 00:30:27  Yeah. And they attention to detail part actually extends beyond code as well. I was at a WordCamp this weekend here in the US, and I was asked to come up and this one of the, organizers was talking to one of the vendors and giving them a hard time jovially. And he said, Michelle, look at this poster. You know, the the pull up behind him. What do you see that’s wrong with it? And I started reading, like trying to find things. And all of a sudden I was like, oh, lowercase ‘p’ in WordPress on a poster? Like, does the world stop revolving? No. Does it make his product worse? No. But do, it’s like really, you know, people who’ve been around a long time noticed that right away. Of course we do. So like in marketing, those things matter as well. Because we say people say, does it matter if you apply for a job, if somebody is applying for a job with you and they don’t capitalize the P. And a lot of developers will say yes because the attention to detail is so important. And a lot of marketers will say yes because you have to have attention to detail. So important. And HR says I don’t see why that’s important. Right? So it depends on the audience for sure. And the use case.

Felix Arntz  00:31:33  Right, right. Yeah. I mean I totally like I think you can you maybe you can maybe reason about how that it’s a bit silly that we’re, that we’re like this and want the P to always be capitalized. But at the same time, that’s I guess that’s kind of how things are. So then I, I agree with you. Like, I think that’s kind of the paying attention to another aspect of paying attention to detail.

Michelle Frechette 00:31:53  Yeah, it’s all in the context for sure. Thinking at scale is your next one. And I think that’s really important because I can come up with a recipe for me and my family. But to think of the same recipe to feed an entire church or an entire WordCamp, just to put it in colloquial terms like that, it’s very different to think at scale that way. So why is that important from a developer standpoint?

Felix Arntz 00:32:20  Yeah. When you, when you, usually when you work on a WordPress project, I don’t know whether you’re a plugin developer or you’re, you’re working with clients. You like your plugins, like, I mean, unless you’re an extremely popular, maintaining an extremely popular plugin, you’re usually talking about, thousands of users, maybe ten thousands of users. That’s already a large number. And on the, on the client side spectrum, when you when you’re an agency, you’re working with a client, you work on a single site, like it might be a big site. So it may still have it may still have the scale aspect in that sense. But you, if you control the for example, if you work on a specific site, you always control the entire hosting stack and you typically control the entire hosting stack. And that’s that’s a major difference, even if you work on a plugin because your plugin could run anywhere. But then if you take this to WordPress core, it’s even much larger. It’s the same same idea, but much larger. And so you need to keep in mind that WordPress is used anywhere from I mentioned here thousand dollar premium hosting, but also could be used on a raspberry pie. So you need to be mindful of not assuming that, certain, technical capacities are there on the specific hoster that the WordPress site is running. but then also the other aspect is the, is the scale of the individual site that could run WordPress. Like let’s say, let’s say, you propose something where which involves migration. Migration is always a great topic for that. Like if you propose, if you think about a feature that needs to update the content of all the posts on a website, it’s like, okay, if you have a small business portfolio, maybe you have seven pages, that’s fine. Maybe you’re an individual person’s blog. Maybe that means maybe you have. Even if you have 80 posts, that’s still fine. But then if you’re like a newspaper or an online magazine and you have ten thousands of posts, it doesn’t work so good anymore. Like, like and then then you need to think with a completely different mindset, like, how can you approach it in a way that even for those sites, it will work? That’s kind of the aspect. That’s one that’s another aspect of thinking at scale.

Michelle Frechette 00:34:42  And the next point also has to do with thinking about the size of things, which is increase your scope gradually. So you can’t do everything all at once, everywhere, and expect everything to work well, right. So, tell us a little bit about what that would look like within the WordPress project.

Felix Arntz 00:35:02  I think, I think this you have to me, this is mostly about the, we all have, I think we all, as developers, we all have strong ideas about something that should change in WordPress core. But if you’re a new contributor, starting with that complex thing right away is is probably unfortunately, I’m going to say like, unfortunately, it’s probably bound to for, to fail because you need to, people first need to get to know you like it’s kind of a natural in an open source ecosystem that, if you’re new, the other more seasoned contributors need to understand kind of like what. Like kind of like assess your skill set, your motivations. And and also basically your availability. That’s always a thing, right? Like, you don’t know, like, many times, you have it that some, some somebody comes in and proposes something and then disappears. So you don’t know if that, if a person you need to you kind of you need to get a better idea whether a person will be able to see their proposal through. Because it’s always even the way I say it’s unfortunate, is that the proposal might be great. but at the, at the end of the day there’s only unfortunately a very small number of contributors for all the things that need to get done. And unless, unless your proposals really strikes a nerve with another contributor, you probably it will be more likely to succeed if you can lead it, if you can spearhead it yourself, and if you just ask for someone else, hey, someone else should do that. That’s usually not going to work out, because everybody else already has a gazillion things on their, on their mind to work on.  And that’s that’s, I think that’s where it’s great. But better to start with helping or working on little bug fixes. Kind of seeing what other teams are working on and try to help out there. And later as you get more experience and, and you become a more experienced contributor yourself, I think you can still push forward those larger initiatives.

Michelle Frechette 00:37:15  Every major release has so many things that every team wants to include in it, and it has to be triaged on, and you cannot include everything in a major release. And sometimes even the things that you think you can include have to get dropped and pushed forward to the next one, because of time limitations and human resources and things like that. So it makes perfect sense. Scope is always something that should be approached very carefully.

Felix Arntz 00:37:41  I think there’s I think there’s also another important lesson there is that really the resource and constraint is often times why something doesn’t move forward. And I think this is also something that I had to learn at first like that, that, sometimes if something doesn’t move forward, it’s not necessarily a rejection of your idea. Especially because, I mean, there are thousands of tickets on track on core track that are open.

Michelle Frechette 00:38:08  Yeah.

Felix Arntz 00:38:09  Probably hundreds of them haven’t moved in the last four years or something. So like it’s it’s just it’s and so, those the fact that they’re still open shows that they’re not rejected.

Michelle Frechette 00:38:19  Right.

Felix Arntz 00:38:20  There’s so much to do and people haven’t gotten to it yet. And many of those tickets are, are the kind of like I mean some of them are very complicated and need a lot of discussion, but others are really just like, if you want to work on it, go ahead. That would be great. Like, we can move this forward, but.

Michelle Frechette 00:38:37  We’re not saying no, we’re saying not now.

Felix Arntz 00:38:40  Exactly.

Michelle Frechette 00:38:42  So your next point is find your niche. And I mean, I know that it took me a while to figure out what my niche was. How do you, how do you advise people to figure out what that is?

Felix Arntz 00:38:54  yeah, I mean, I can I can, share my, my own story with there a little bit. I was when I started contributing for the first maybe six months or so after I started, I was just working on random tickets here and there, sometimes opening my own, sometimes them getting closed and me being frustrated and but but over. But on my in my freelancing time there I was working with a client that had a large multi-site network. And, I was encountering a bunch of annoyances here and there that I think, oh, this would be great. And to fix and this should not be fixed on my site here. This should be fixed in WordPress core. I was thinking, and, I remember at, yeah, at WordCamp US 2015, I met, John James Jacoby, Jay Tripp. Who was very active on multi-site or has been very active on multi-site and I, I told him about like I told him about these problems I was facing and he said, well, just go contribute there. And I was like okay. At that point, I was I don’t know.  At that point, I felt, well, I definitely felt like an imposter. I had definitely felt some imposter syndrome. And I was like, I don’t know if I should can go into this area and really, like, make the mark. But like, maybe a month later, I joined one of the Slack chats of the multi-site component and, which, which is, which is very much an issue, like if, you know, multi-site, it’s not used by tons of people. It’s it’s when you talk about scale. But then again, the sites that do use it, they’re usually, they’re often big. So scale is actually still a very important aspect in that sense. And yeah, when I started, so I started contributing there. And my biggest, that’s what I, that’s what really I was focusing mostly on for the next almost a year or so. And it was based on my real like personal needs or work needs in my in my freelancing work. To like I was building a lot of experience through working with multi-site on on my in my during my work that then I could bring over to contributing and have basically practical experience to say that this is a problem.

Felix Arntz 00:41:24  And I think that’s, that’s kind of, that’s I think that’s one way I would recommend you to approach something if, if you work specifically with one, with one portion of WordPress core that you, yeah, that you just have a more, I don’t know that you personally care about more because of you, because of you working with it, or you have a stake in it for some reason like that. I think that’s a great point, place to start contributing to because that way you’re not just contributing to something random, you’re not random. You’re not just contributing to contribute. You’re contributing to address real pain points for yourself.

Michelle Frechette 00:42:06  Oh for sure. 

Felix Arntz 00:42:07  And your club.

Michelle Frechette 00:42:09  Yeah, your last three points actually work very well. To what. To with what you’re just talking about now. But also, with, with each other. So the next one is to be helpful and I think it should be obvious, but maybe it isn’t always obvious.

Felix Arntz 00:42:30  Yeah. I think, one, going back to my point earlier, I think we often, many of us have certain ideas that core is doing things wrong in certain places. But, it’s not only important to. It’s not important. Like, you shouldn’t only push forward your own ideas. You should especially also, I think also that especially in the beginning, it goes to show that you are interested in the project’s long term health. And if you, if you look beyond what you care about yourself. right?

Michelle Frechette 00:43:05  Right, it’s not just your own agenda.

Felix Arntz 00:43:07  Exactly. You shouldn’t just push forward your own agenda. You should help other people, move forward theirs and and support the project also, maybe in ways that, I’m going to say for many coders, for, for example, for many of us coders, we don’t love writing blog posts or summary posts or something like this. But that’s something that is important for the project, and it’s important for other contributors to know what’s up, what’s going on. And this is this is a great way that you can help.

Michelle Frechette 00:43:37  Absolutely.

Felix Arntz 00:43:38  It’s also a great way that you can help because we all should do it more. And some people, many people don’t like to do it. So if you can take that burden away from someone, it’s a great way to show that you care. I think it’s really like it’s a great way to show that you care and you can. It’s also a great way to take a more, take a little bit more of a leadership role, even if you’re still new to the project, it helps you a lot understand how things work behind the scenes and. And that way you can then still also build expertise to. Yeah, again, push forward your own agendas at some point.

Michelle Frechette 00:44:15  I think, I think when you mentioned like, the, the smaller bug, solutions and things actually lends itself to this as well. You’re helpful when you’re, you know, killing the smaller bugs that we’re finding. And not only that, but you’re learning and you’re becoming more a part of the team as you do that. So it makes a lot of sense.

Felix Arntz 00:44:32  Yeah. And then also reviewing other people’s tickets and pull requests. And I think that’s I want to say there it, also may happen that you feel imposter syndrome.  Like like why, why, why can I review this person’s ticket? Like I’m just a new contributor myself. But I would say, like everybody, all we all are developers with different, with different strengths, with different expertise in different areas. And I think it doesn’t matter if you’re new or experienced, you have your own expertise, and it might be different in other ways in complementary to someone else’s. So I think it’s always great to review another person’s pull request for a ticket, even if you’re new yourself.

Michelle Frechette 00:45:15  Absolutely. You say adapt well. And the one thing that you put a common descriptor for the ideal mindset of a WordPress core contributor is strong opinions loosely held. Can you explain that a little bit?

Felix Arntz 00:45:30  yeah, I think it means that, well, if you, if I maybe it maybe it goes a little bit back to this point of being persistent, but not, but as only as long as appropriate in a way that if you believe that the idea or the approach that you have in mind is, is right and someone else disagree with you, feel free to. You should. I think you should continue, arguing for it. But you should also obviously engage with the other person and see what if the arguments they make, if you if how valid you think they are, can you should you counter argue them, or do they actually raise a point that you haven’t considered yet? And but basically the strong opinion is, is a bit going towards being persistent. Don’t just give up if someone else disagrees, but at the same time loosely help means sometimes you, sometimes you. You have to. Sometimes in a discussion they will. Something will come up that you actually haven’t considered, and then you should be able to change your mind about, about maybe your approach needing to be adjusted in a certain way that this other person is suggesting. And that’s kind of the loosely held point. And, yeah. And it goes, like I said, it goes back a little bit to also knowing when you should maybe stop. Stop pushing for your own point when you see that so many people, especially if a couple people disagree, you should really question like am I missing something here?  And then you should be able to, yeah, she should be able to change, change your mind and adapt, to to work together with the other contributors and find a solution together.

Michelle Frechette 00:47:21  Your 10th point is my favorite, because it’s actually, like, my biggest wheelhouse is building personal relationships. And I know it’s not always easy for everybody because, as I said, we have a lot of introverted and neurodivergent people in our community. But I think that WordPress, when somebody allows themselves to step outside of that comfort zone a little bit, you’ll find that such a welcoming community and it is easier to build some of those personal relationships. And I like that this is perhaps one of the longest sections that you have in here is to really talk about why that’s important.

Felix Arntz 00:47:55  Yeah. I mean. I mean, I. I’m just thinking back to my, my first WordCamp. the WordCamp in Seville. I well, I actually I met the first two WordPress people. Like I, I’m, I’m an introverted person and I met the first two WordPress people on the plane and just seeing that they had a WordPress backpack or something. So I was like, okay, these people must be going to that WordCamp. And I yeah, the the community truly is so welcoming. And I think. I’m sometimes thinking like it could have gone completely differently if I just don’t I don’t know if I try to engage with people and nobody’s like letting me in and things like that. Like I would have never gotten to where I am today and I’ve never probably I wouldn’t have gone again and wouldn’t have contributed and things like that. So I really want to emphasize the WordPress community is extremely welcoming and, so, so, yeah, even if you’re even if you’re introverted or even if these things can be overwhelming, they still are to me to this day. Like after WordCamp, I always need to lock myself in for a little while.

Michelle Frechette 00:49:04  And asleep, do all the things.

Felix Arntz 00:49:07  Right, right. It’s but it’s also it’s also such a so such an amazing opportunity to meet people sometimes meet people that you have worked with online for for a while. To meet them in person and, I don’t know, share a meal or whatever you want to do together. And it also it also really, like, I feel like whenever you meet someone in person, you have a different relationship with them afterwards. Even if you meet for like 30 minutes, I think it already changes the dynamic. And you, I don’t know why that is how that exactly works in the human brain. But like even afterwards when you then chat to them online, you have you see that person in front of you, maybe rather than just this avatar, that you. Don’t have much of an association with that yet. And I think that makes, I think that also makes a little difference in this. What we’ve started with the whole communication aspect. I think it also, I think I don’t know, I think it’s sometimes I feel like it starts being easier to understand that the person wasn’t, didn’t have ill intent, for example, if you met them before. Like, it’s just like, okay, I know, I know, I know this is a nice person, so why would they do this to me? Right?

Michelle Frechette  00:50:19  Yeah. And I will tell you. In Basel this year, the being in the city itself was perfectly accessible. I had no problems with my wheelchair and everything. But when I arrived at the airport and I tried to get a ride from the airport to my hotel, none of the taxis or Ubers would take me because they didn’t want to deal with my wheelchair. And I was like, I’m looking at like, how long would it take to pull my suitcase behind me on the road as I just kind of go by myself. That was not going to be a good thing. And so I sat at the Starbucks and I was like, okay, don’t cry. You can figure this out. And I looked up and Domantas and Emma from Hostinger saw me and they’re like, Michelle, it’s so good to see you. What’s wrong? I said, I don’t know how to get to the hotel. They said, we got you. And because I had built relationships with people in the community, I wasn’t stuck at the airport. They found a taxi. They took care of it for me. They took me to my hotel, got everything out for me, and then went on to their hotel. And those are the kinds of people that I think are in WordPress. I have no doubt. Have you seen me there. You would have been like, how can I help? I think any of the people that would have seen me there would have said, how can I help? And that is because we build these relationships within the community. And I think that that’s just the beauty of it all. And it does help the project move forward, not just because Michelle found her way to this, to the hotel, but because of the things that we do as contributors within the community. Having built those relationships helps move all of those things forward. it.

Felix Arntz 00:51:51  Right. And at the end of the day, at the end of the day, it also helps you. Like you said, we build, we build friendships. Some people you continue connecting with, after the WordCamps. Maybe someone who doesn’t live that far away from you. Like maybe you can. yeah. Outside. Outside of just WordPress. Outside of just WordCamps.

Michelle Frechette 00:52:11  Exactly.

Felix Arntz 00:52:12  You. You’ll find friends. You make new friends in the WordPress community, and. Yeah. Or even, or even if you are far away, you can start having, like, a monthly or weekly hangout or whatever. Online.

Michelle Frechette 00:52:22  The first time that that a WordPresser. Like a celebrity in my eyes. Right. Somebody that I knew and had seen a lot gave me their phone number, their personal phone number to follow up afterwards. I was like, this happens? Like, we can actually connect outside. And I still have Adam Warner’s phone number in my phone, and I never talked to him. I mean, I see him at places and once in a while I’ll message him about something, but it’s like just knowing that we’ve made that connection beyond the project into the friendship levels and having people’s phone numbers and messaging on WhatsApp and things like that that we do. It does. It really does feel like it draws you closer to people, which is pretty cool.

Felix Arntz 00:53:02  For sure.

Michelle Frechette 00:53:03  So ten years in, what do you predict for yourself for the next ten years Felix? 

Felix Arntz 00:53:08  Oh, that’s a. I don’t know. I think well, I’m going to say that I don’t know, because ten years ago, I would have never guessed that I am where I am today. Like, even after this first contribution, I thought, oh, this was really cool. I want to contribute, continue contributing. But, yeah, I would have never imagined where this would get me and how much I would have learned from it. And I also, I don’t know, I probably also wouldn’t have known that in ten years from now, from then, I would still be contributing.

Michelle Frechette 00:53:40  For sure. Yeah.

Felix Arntz 00:53:42  So I don’t want to make a judgment call, but what I think is going to happen in ten years. But I definitely plan to continue, continue to be involved. And for the next, probably for the next couple of months at least. Or so I will. My biggest focus will be on the. 

Michelle Frechette 00:53:59  From a couple months or a few years. We’ll see how it goes.

Felix Arntz 00:54:01  Yeah. Yeah.

Michelle Frechette 00:54:03  That was such a developer answer. The only thing you didn’t say was it depends. That’s wonderful. We are running out of time, but I do want you to tell us about your new plugin really quickly so that people can understand what it does. I will include a link to it in the show notes as well. It’s it’s just really slick, and it makes things pretty.

Felix Arntz 00:54:26  Thank you. Yeah. So, earlier this month, we released the a View Transitions plugin. As part of the work from the WordPress performance team. View Transitions is basically it’s a browser API. So it’s something that’s not just a WordPress thing. It’s it’s something that browsers, several of the major browsers support it. It’s a it’s it allows you to have smooth transitions when you go from one URL to the other. So instead of seeing that hard page transition that we all use to on the web, you can have the pages fade into each other or, and keep certain elements of the page in place without them disappearing for a second while the pages loading. Very common ideas. For example, if you have a navigation bar, it should stay in place or.

Michelle Frechette 00:55:12  Like your hero image. I like how your hero image went from the thumbnail to just like transition over the entire post. 

Felix Arntz 00:55:20  It’s also a common example, especially in WordPress. Like if you have a blog, you have a blog archive of posts. If you click on a post, kind of it should morph into the new location on the single post, like the, and that’s also something that you can do with that, with that plugin. It basically makes it, it brings some sensible defaults to your WordPress site that you then can, customize further and, but it’s built on top of this web API, so it’s very light, lightweight, not a lot of JavaScript and CSS involved. And, it basically allows you to build this kind of slick interface, which in the past you would have needed to build a single page application, which is extremely complex and easily can lead to a tons of technical problems. And WordPress is not meant to be used that way, really. So now you can do all that with in a much simpler way, and this plugin makes it particularly easy for to use in WordPress.

Michelle Frechette 00:56:19  It made me think of using PowerPoint or Google Slides when you can transition from slide to slide in a much nicer way than just boom, boom, boom. Yeah.

Felix Arntz 00:56:29  Right. And you can also you can definitely have a lot of fun with that plugin, because there are certain ways that you probably should, shouldn’t be using this in. But you can still try and have fun, like do some kind of spinning web page transition or something. Some nonsense like this. 

Michelle Frechette 00:56:42  Make people feel really dizzy.

Felix Arntz 00:56:46  Yeah, yeah.  So that’s. Definitely not something that you should do, but I still sometimes have fun with it, and I don’t know, I started asking AI to generate new CSS animations for this and. Not to put in the plugin. It’s just, it’s just hilarious.

Michelle Frechette 00:56:59  I bet it is.I bet it is. But we’ll definitely include that in the show notes. If you’re interested in seeing the transitions plugin, you’ll be able to find that on the show notes as well. Felix, thank you so much for being here today. Is there anything I didn’t ask you that you’d like to remind us about or tell us about?

Felix Arntz 00:57:15  No. Yeah, it was great.

Michelle Frechette 00:57:16  I’m so thorough. Right. I’m just so thorough.

Felix Arntz 00:57:17  Yeah.

Michelle Frechette 00:57:19  It’s awesome. Well, I, for one, am very glad that you and I have built a relationship over the years. Have friendship within WordPress. So thank you personally. Thank you for Post Status this as well, for coming here today to share a retrospective of the things you’ve learned over the last ten years. And, and one of the things that’s brand new. So I appreciate everything that you do. Thank you.

It’s just it’s just hilarious. 00:57:38  Thank you.

Michelle Frechette 00:57:39  We’ll see everybody on the next episode of Cache Up.