WPCoffeeTalk: Joost de Valk

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[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to WPCoffeeTalk with your podcast Barista Michelle Frechette, where we interview people in the WordPress community from all over the world. Every guest is asked the same questions and every guest has wonderful and varied answers about their history and their hopes. Special thanks to our espresso level sponsors, Bluehost, WS Form and Beaver Builder.

[00:00:23] Speaker B: And now on with the show.

Welcome to WPCoffeeTalk. I’m your podcast Barista Michelle Frechette, serving up the WordPress stories from around the globe. And today my guest is the one and only Joost deValk, who is the part, is a partner. The partner. One of the partners at Emilia Capital. You might recognize his name from other projects too. In the past, something little, but we can maybe squeeze that in there somewhere. But Joost, thank you for coming today. Welcome.

[00:00:56] Speaker C: Thank you for having me. Great to see you again.

[00:00:58] Speaker B: It’s good to see you, too. I feel like we should have done this years ago, but I was, I.

[00:01:04] Speaker C: Never get invited to this stuff because people think I’ve already done it. And then I’ve never done most of these things.

[00:01:10] Speaker B: I mean, I did, I did have the most important person in your life on my show a few years ago, but. And she was wonderful, by the way. But, you know, you can come in second.

[00:01:18] Speaker C: She is my better, it’s my, she’s my better half. And I.

I won’t respond to the coming second to her.

[00:01:29] Speaker B: No, you guys are wonderful. I love your family. I’ve had the occasion to meet your son, also your oldest, who spoke at Wordcamp Europe. And then we also had him on underrepresented in tech’s webinar series about people under 25. And he is significantly under 25.

[00:01:47] Speaker C: He is 17. Yeah. So that is slightly under 25. Eight years is not much anymore when you’re my age, Michelle.

[00:01:57] Speaker B: Oh, honey, I got you beat.

And my kid’s 31, but that’s a tale for another day. So for those who may not know who you are, why don’t you tell us about yourself and what you do?

[00:02:11] Speaker C: So I’m the founder of a company called Yoast y OAc that builds an SEO plugin that you might or might not have heard of.

I founded out in 2010. My lovely wife joined me quite soon after, and we ran the company together for quite some time, together with a couple of other very nice people. And then we sold it in 2021 to Nufault Digital.

After that, we started investing. Well, we started investing a bit before that already, but we started doing more of it after we sold our company.

We do that through a company called Emilia Capital.

And so, yeah, I’m one of the two partners at Emilia Capital. My wife is also the other partner, and so we are partners in many ways.

[00:03:06] Speaker B: It’s a good thing you get along.

[00:03:07] Speaker C: It’s a good thing we get along. Yeah, absolutely.

And so we invest, but we’re also working on new projects, actually hoping to release the first buyable things soon.

So, yeah, no, it’s good fun.

[00:03:27] Speaker B: Awesome. Yeah, I just. Yeah, nothing but props. Every time I have conversations with you or Marika, I just. I leave with my face hurting because I smile too much. So go easy on me today.

[00:03:39] Speaker C: I’ll try.

[00:03:41] Speaker B: So one of the things I always ask people on the show, as people know, is to bring a mug. Show us your mug. Tell us the story behind it, if there is one, and tell us what you’re drinking.

[00:03:51] Speaker C: So I’m drinking coffee, and I’ll be known as the person with the smallest mug, is what you already told me.

[00:03:58] Speaker B: Yes.

[00:03:59] Speaker C: This is a very simple nespresso mug.

Very nice.

Because we have very nice nespresso machines here in the office, which we used to have. Well, yoast still has too. We are opposite of the street of yoast. So I like to drink coffee. I don’t do these gigantic mugs because I’m european. We have style.

[00:04:24] Speaker B: I’m about to show you my 40 ounce mug.

[00:04:27] Speaker C: Yeah, no, we don’t do that. It’s a thing in the US. And the funny thing is, I like it with my sodas. So every time I come back from. From the US to the Netherlands, I mean, they sell coke in 0.2 liter bottles here. So that’s like.

It’s like, what, an ounce? Something like that.

[00:04:48] Speaker B: Very small.

[00:04:49] Speaker C: It’s very small. It’s less than a can. So. So, yeah. Um, so then I like it. But for my coffee, I wouldn’t want that much. But I also don’t drink milk in it. I like my coffee strong and unspoiled.

[00:05:05] Speaker B: Well, I have a large mug because I’m american, and my mug is the love wins from the givehaveagayday.org swag that we sold a couple years ago to support that organization. And it is like, I think it’s a 20 ounce mug. I don’t know, 16 ounce, something like that. It’s big.

[00:05:27] Speaker C: It’s beautiful.

[00:05:28] Speaker B: Isn’t it lovely?

So I’m 55 years old. I didn’t start drinking coffee till I was 48 years old. Never liked it. And so if you start drinking coffee in your late forties, you better believe you have cream and sugar in there. So mine is always sweet and always creamy. Um, which is probably why I also need it in a gallon size thing, so it’s a little diluted. I need a little more of the caffeine. I don’t know.

[00:05:53] Speaker C: We’re 31, so. And I started, I, I’m 41 and started drinking coffee at twelve and have been addicted probably since 13.

[00:06:03] Speaker B: That’s, that’s because you live over there and I live here. I don’t know. Yeah, maybe it’s because my father always made instant coffee growing up and that stuff is just nasty.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So tell us, how did you get started? I don’t actually know the story, so I’m excited to hear it. How did you get started with WordPress?

[00:06:27] Speaker C: So I was active in an open source project called Webkit, which is the core of safari and Chrome.

I was a committer on that project and I was doing a lot of CSS testing.

Because of that, I started a site called CSS three dot in Fo, which had a lot of previews of what CSS three would be at that point and how you could be using it, et cetera. I built that on WordPress. At the time I was working as an SEO consultant at an agency.

I did some research and looked at like, hey, which CMS is the best for this? And settled on WordPress because I thought it was easiest to SEO relatively well.

And that’s how I started using WordPress. And then I started building some small plugins for myself to scratch my own SEO edges.

And those plugins later became yoast SEOs. There were six or seven small plugins that I merged into one thing, which was at the time called WordPress SEO. And later on WordPress SEO by yoast, and even later on Yoast SEO, a little plug in.

[00:07:43] Speaker B: I love how you do a little plugin, a little SEO plugin which has turned into like the most downloaded. I don’t know, I’m making it up maybe, but it’s got to be at least one of the most downloaded plugins in the repo. If it isn’t.

[00:07:54] Speaker C: I think it was the, at the time that we sold it was the most downloaded and most installed plugin. I think we’ve, it has since been surpassed by some other things, but I don’t know the exact numbers.

[00:08:11] Speaker B: Well, my plugin in the repo, hello beautiful, has 798 downloads, so I’m coming at you. I’m sorry, I don’t know. I have never looked to see how the repo works when it ticks tips over into different things, like a million plus or whatever. But mine still says ten plus active installs.

[00:08:31] Speaker C: Yeah. So the biggest it’ll go is 5 million plus, which is what it says for Yoast SEO. I think the reality is for yoast is probably more like 13 million plus right now.

Let me see the download numbers. I haven’t looked at those in a long time because that number is weird.

[00:08:49] Speaker B: But my ten downloads is actually still on par. You also have ten plus, you just have.

[00:08:58] Speaker C: Yes, absolutely. Now Yoast SEO has been downloaded 622 million times.

[00:09:06] Speaker B: That is a lot.

I don’t think my little forked version of hello Dolly is coming at you that fast. So I think we’re good.

Oh, my goodness. I love that though. And I love that you probably, I don’t know if I’ve told you this before, I know I’ve talked to Marika about this, but I ask people in the rapid fire questions, the first question I ask is what are two or three must have plugins that you would recommend to somebody building their own website? And by far, Yoast is the most mentioned to plug in on this, on this show as well. So it’s doing something right. I love, and I don’t know, this is probably, I don’t know, I’m not going to guess. I don’t know whose decision it was to put the, like the stoplight, you know, the red, green and yellow. But that to me was like, what I was learning was so brilliant. I was like, oh, it’s still yellow. What if I have to do to make this green? And I was. And then there’s a list of things you can do to make it better. And I’m like, this is amazing. How is this free? Like, you give away so much, have given away so much in the free plugin. But we’ll talk about that later. First, the next one I want to ask you is, when you look at websites, whether you built them, don’t look at mine, but other websites, what do you think is something that we as web builders, developers, designers don’t focus enough attention on that would make our sites better for the end user.

[00:10:27] Speaker C: So there’s a lot of answers to that.

[00:10:33] Speaker B: Just pick one.

[00:10:34] Speaker C: And my biggest problem is that I can’t look at a website anymore without thinking, this should be better, this should be better, this should be better, et cetera.

[00:10:42] Speaker B: It’s hard.

[00:10:46] Speaker C: Funnily enough, I think that most of that could be solved with a simple course in HTML.

Actually knowing which element is supposed to be used for what and then actually using them for that.

That would be like so simple things like if something is a search input field, at least make sure that it’s also coded as a search input field.

If I’m on a checkout page and you want me to input my name, then make sure that you use the right HTML to tell me that, so that my browser can actually fill my name in it and I don’t have to type because I’m lazy.

[00:11:25] Speaker B: But also that would help with accessibility, wouldn’t it?

[00:11:29] Speaker C: Yeah, with accessibility and with lots of things. So a lot of this is just knowing a bit better how it all works.

At the same time, I hope that we’ll get to a stage where people don’t have to know how this all works and they can just throw some blocks into a page and have it.

[00:11:50] Speaker B: Work as long as you’re using the right blocks. Right, like you say.

[00:11:53] Speaker C: Yeah, and I hope that we’ll actually have all of those things in core and we’ll help people make good use of them and we’ll make sure that they’re accessible, et cetera, in core as well.

[00:12:05] Speaker B: Yeah, well that makes, that makes really good sense, actually. And you’re the first person to say it that way, so I like that. That works for me. What’s something that you wish you had known earlier in your WordPress journey that would have made life a whole lot easier sooner?

[00:12:20] Speaker C: Oh, I should have started charging for yoast SEO way sooner.

[00:12:24] Speaker B: Believe that.

[00:12:26] Speaker C: And probably also gave away a bit too much functionality for free in the beginning, which is something that we’ve never wanted to step back on because that was frowned upon by the community.

But when, when I began selling yosis your premium, it was still, well, premium plugins were still something that we had debates about and I think that we had those debates a bit too late. Would have been better if we had them a bit sooner.

[00:13:06] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that there’s, there was a lot of conversation early on that open source meant that things should be free for people to use, but you can’t make a living and feed your family of six, or even just one if you’re not making money off the work that you’re doing.

[00:13:20] Speaker C: So, no, no, it doesn’t work. And it’s also like, what people don’t realize is that yoast, the QA team was probably bigger than most other plugins development teams were. I mean, when you run a plugin that big, the amount of testing needed to make sure that stuff keeps on working is ridiculous.

[00:13:40] Speaker B: Yeah.

[00:13:41] Speaker C: So it’s just very costly to do so. Yeah, absolutely. That would have made it, like, made life easier.

[00:13:48] Speaker B: You got to pay people. When I worked at give in the customer success, the number one question I would get was, well, can I have a discount? I’m a nonprofit. I’m like, it’s give WP. You’re all nonprofits. 90% of the customer base is nonprofits. So, yeah, I understand, absolutely.

When you think back over the word camps, WordPress events that you’ve attended, what are some of your favorite experiences or talks that you’ve seen? Maybe it was something that was a pivotal or inspiring moment for you, whether it was in a session or just talking to somebody in the hallway. Track.

[00:14:24] Speaker C: Um, there’s been loads of moments. Um, I.

[00:14:28] Speaker B: It’s hard to pick one, isn’t it?

[00:14:30] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. Because there’s been so many good experiences at Wordcamps, and I’ve met so many of my friends there. Um, I think the one that I still reference almost daily is a talk I gave myself at work, Camp Leiden, about open source and making money with open source.

And, I mean, if I could force everyone in the WordPress community to watch one thing by myself, it would probably be that one.

It’s called the victory of the commons, and it’s very much about, how do we, where do you need to make money? And why is that important even in open source?

Another well, very proud moment for me was when you mentioned already, when my son was up on stage presenting this last word, Camp Europe, I was like, okay, that is a thing.

And there has been so many. I mean, I was lucky enough to be at the state of the work this year in Madrid, and I was just so happy to see where we are as a community right now and how much the software is progressing, but also how the spanish community is, like, amazing. And so.

And, yeah, no, so it’s. There’s a lot of these experiences, and we’ve had so many fun moments there that it’s, yeah, I can’t really pick.

[00:16:13] Speaker B: I would have trouble answering this question for myself as well. And yet I ask it of other people. But it is difficult when you have become so ingrained in the community to say that there’s. Yes, there are some absolute highlights, times when. But then in a half an hour after we hang up this call, you’ll be like, oh, and I forgot. I should have said that one too. Right? Because there’s just so many of them. For sure.

[00:16:36] Speaker C: There absolutely are. And it’s like, it’s also been so long. I mean, I started contributing to WordPress in 2006.

So it’s. It’s been a while.

[00:16:47] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. Absolutely. I would say for me, there’s like, the one that’s like, the day I signed my contract to work for Givewp was really life changing for me, and that happened at awardcamp us. So, like, I’m probably going to throw that one in there for me. But there’s been so many other amazing conversations.

[00:17:06] Speaker C: Yeah, well, you were very lucky to work, Matt and Devin. I mean, they have been great people in the community as well.

[00:17:15] Speaker B: Absolutely. Yeah. And then, but then also, like, what I forget sometimes is I know so many people on screen, right. Especially, like, from 2020 on, when we’ve been as a community so much online.

And then I meet people for the first time in person and I’ve, like, when I met you and Marika in Athens last year, I was like, oh, my gosh, right. I have never met you in person before.

[00:17:39] Speaker C: Like, nope.

[00:17:41] Speaker B: But you almost forget that, right? Because you see people and you talk to them and you’re hanging out in slack and things like that, so.

[00:17:47] Speaker C: Well, it’s a good thing, though, because I can feel close to a large part of the community and not have to fly to orca pos every year, which is sort of a drain if you’re in Europe.

[00:18:01] Speaker B: I’m going to Asia for the second time this year, so I understand long flights. Absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, tell me a little bit about Amelia capital and what you’ve been doing since you really launched. And I know you’ve been doing some competitions, things like that. It’s exciting.

[00:18:20] Speaker C: Yeah.

So we did a competition, more competition is maybe a big word, but we had people pitch to us at work camp Europe in public, which was probably scarier for them than it was for us, but that was fun. We had a couple of companies pitched to us. We picked two that we actually decided to invest in. And we’ve also finalized those investments last year.

And so we invest in mostly WordPress companies, some other stuff, too.

Basically, if a company does something that we feel makes the world a better place and has a plan that will actually allow it to make money, that’s important.

Well, yeah, yeah. Because to be sustainable, you need to make money. I mean, that, that is just the reality of running a business. Otherwise you’re running a charity, and that’s a different thing.

So we’ve invested in quite a few of those.

It’s, it’s been interesting. We’ve learned a lot.

We’ve also learned that where we thought that a whole lot of the things that we did at Yoast and the success we had with Yoast was purely luck.

I now look at it slightly differently.

So we’ve also learned, okay, there’s a couple of things that maybe we are very good at, and we actually need to help our portfolio companies with, which is very fun to do.

We’ve hired a couple of people around us, which we’re very happy with. So we have a finance manager who’s worked with us at Yoast for years and now works with us here and helps us to review the books of all those companies. And that’s fun. And we have Ari, who was leading the WordPress core team at Yoast and is now working with me on core work, but also on helping our portfolio companies and on building our own stuff. So that’s good fun.

[00:20:34] Speaker B: Yeah.

[00:20:34] Speaker C: Yeah. We’re just having fun.

[00:20:36] Speaker B: I love it when you can enjoy the work that you’re doing and have fun with it. That’s absolutely the best.

[00:20:43] Speaker C: It is. Yeah, I agree.

[00:20:45] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. I am. I was thinking back to interviewing you for Postatus last year before.

I can’t remember which one. Was it Europe? Yeah, it was before Europe when you were doing the non shark tank. You guys are not, like, sinking your teeth and it’s not like that, but, but it had a shark tank like, feel to the pitches and things like that and making decisions. Like that day. It wasn’t like, well, we’ll get back to you in a month.

[00:21:13] Speaker C: Like, and, no, but to be fair, we did make them send in something before, so we. So we did know some things, but, um. No, I think that one of the things that Marie and I are pretty good at is, is not waiting too long on things, just. Just making decisions and moving fast.

[00:21:32] Speaker B: Yeah.

[00:21:33] Speaker C: Which is important, because if you’re running a company, you have to run so many decisions. And if you are going to take long and think a lot about all of them, sometimes you have to think longer. That’s fine. But you have to also be capable of making decisions.

[00:21:51] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And it’s interesting, too, to, like, follow along. Everybody was so excited. The people who you invested with were so excited, and the people that you chose not to invest with also were saying what a great opportunity it had been and how much they learned and grew through it. And I think you even were advising some of those people, even if you were.

[00:22:14] Speaker C: I mean, I’m pretty much always happy to help people if I can. I have to admit that that becomes harder over time because more people ask you and you have less time.

[00:22:25] Speaker B: Yeah.

[00:22:25] Speaker C: For sure.

But, yeah, I mean, this whole community is helping each other, right? It is. It’s helping everybody thrive because that makes the community as a whole better, and that helps us all again. So, yeah, very much that, that type of thinking that I think, well, we. We want to be like, what, what.

[00:22:50] Speaker B: Are you hoping over the next year with Amelia? What can we expect to see from what you’re working on?

[00:22:57] Speaker C: So we’re gonna launch our first product in the next few weeks.

I’m actually. We have a bigger product in the works that I.

I’m not sure what or where we’ll be, but I would be very disappointed if I didn’t get the first version of that released before the summer as well.

So we have a couple of our own products, we have a couple of our portfolio companies that are doing really cool stuff. So personalized WP just launched, which was actually pitched to us at Wordcamp Europe.

[00:23:29] Speaker B: Oh, nice.

[00:23:30] Speaker C: So that’s really cool to see. And there’s quite a few companies doing. Doing well and doing fun stuff. So, yeah, just helping them. Maybe making a couple more investments will probably not go as fast as we did last year because that’s a lot of work. Yeah, I like investing. I don’t necessarily like the paperwork involved with investing, and, yeah, so maybe don’t do too much, too much of that.

And I’ve been consulting for automatic a bit, which is also good fun, helping out the Tumblr team with SEO and some other things.

It’s just working on things that I find fun to do. Marika, working on things that she enjoys. That’s what’s most important.

[00:24:24] Speaker B: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. And it’s been fun to watch you guys have fun with the things that you’re doing. So that’s what makes a difference as well.

You’ve got a great reputation out there, not only for helping people, but for enjoying the work that you do.

[00:24:39] Speaker C: Yeah, well, if we didn’t, we’d go nuts.

[00:24:42] Speaker B: Exactly. Exactly. All right, let me move into the rapid fire questions, which, of course, they’re not really rapid. They. They come as quickly as they come, and you can take the time you need to answer them, but it’s fun to call them the rapid fire questions. I don’t know why. Anyway, what are two or three must have plugins that you would recommend to somebody building their own website?

[00:25:04] Speaker C: Well, first of all, yo, socio, which is no surprise.

[00:25:10] Speaker B: I was expecting that.

[00:25:11] Speaker C: Yes, yes.

Second, depends a bit on what you’re doing.

For most sites, you’ll need something to do, forms there’s a lot of good forms plugins out there. I bought my first commercial plugin license was gravity forms, so I use that everywhere.

But there’s basically quite a few good force plugins out there. So pick one and then it really depends on what you’re doing.

To name one that a lot of people might not know. But if you do something with comments on your blog, and I really want to urge everyone to start commenting on each other’s blogs more, again, because that’s so much more fun than Twitter, then my own comment hacks plugin is something that you might enjoy, has a lot of different features to help you clean up the processor and comments, which I think is good fun.

[00:26:09] Speaker B: Absolutely. Well, I’m going to have to look up that one now because I wasn’t aware of that one. So maybe you could send me a link later and I will include it in the show notes for sure so people can find it.

At any point in your WordPress journey, have you had a mentor, whether it was an official mentor or coach or somebody that you either just kind of like tried to emulate, or maybe they took you under their wing, but it wasn’t unofficial, um, official experience or whatever. And who. So who was it? That’s what I want.

[00:26:36] Speaker C: So there, there’s, there are two people that have been incredibly important in my WordPress development in, in different ways. The first is obviously my wife. Uh, I was hoping because, um, oh, she’s just prevented me from doing so many stupid things and, and has off very often also helped me see people, things more from a, nor, I want to say, normal. It’s not that, but from, from the perspective of a non developer, which is, which has been very, very helpful.

The other one is another lady called Juliet, who is a developer from the Netherlands who is probably the best PHP developer I know.

And she’s just been amazing in helping in very many different ways. So she helped on Yoast SEO, she later on built the WordPress coding standards and she did a lot of that work for yoast. And now I use all that still to review every plugin that we look at.

And it always feels a bit like Juliet switching over my shoulder and telling me what I’m doing wrong, which I kind of like.

No, she’s been amazing.

[00:28:00] Speaker B: What would Juliet do?

[00:28:02] Speaker C: Well, yeah, if, when you’re coding, that is probably a good thing to think for yourself.

[00:28:06] Speaker B: Absolutely.

[00:28:07] Speaker C: Yeah. So, no, I think both, both of them have been, have been very important and might not either. Both know it well. I think my wife knows.

[00:28:19] Speaker B: And Juliet if she listens to the show, she’ll know now as well.

[00:28:22] Speaker C: I’ll tell her that I spoke nicely about her.

[00:28:27] Speaker B: We’ll send her a link to the episode.

Okay. Now the next question you cannot answer with either your wife or Juliet. So you need to think of somebody different. But who is somebody that you admire in the WordPress community and why.

[00:28:41] Speaker C: There are so many political answers I could give here.

[00:28:45] Speaker B: Go with your gut.

I don’t ask the easy questions. Yes. I only ask the hard ones.

[00:28:56] Speaker C: No. So I’m gonna go with Matt and not, and not for, not because he founded the project, but because he’s still like doing it and he makes mistakes and he’s human, but he, he does so much still. And sometimes I go like, I disagree entirely with what you’re saying. And then four years later I’m like, maybe he was right, which is annoying, but it is. No, I think to a degree we’re very lucky that we have someone who’s willing to take that position of leading this project because it’s incredibly hard because you get so much shit it as well.

[00:29:46] Speaker B: Yeah.

[00:29:49] Speaker C: So I admire that.

[00:29:50] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that’s a good answer. You’re not the first person to say him, but that’s the first reasoning. First one to have that reasoning. What’s something that you would like to learn in WordPress but that you haven’t tackled yet? Or is there anything that you haven’t tackled yet?

[00:30:06] Speaker C: Well, yes. So I’m a pretty old school WordPress guy and I’m still not very good at blogging. I like working with blocks but I’m not good at building them myself yet. And I want to be, but I’m just not very good at that yet and I really want to be. So it’s, that is one of the things I wish to learn this year.

[00:30:26] Speaker B: There you go. You’ve heard it here first. We’re going to hold you to it. No, I’m just kidding.

There will be no quiz at the end of the year.

What’s one of the biggest mistakes that you’ve made with WordPress or in WordPress and what did you learn from it?

[00:30:45] Speaker C: I’ve made so many mistakes.

[00:30:47] Speaker B: We all have.

[00:30:50] Speaker C: I mean the one I often mention is we did a release at some point in Yoast SEO where we changed how we dealt with attachment URL’s, which we disabled by default and then we didn’t disable by default for a whole bunch of sites and they actually suffered from it a lot.

And that was because, well, basically everything that Google was saying about how they were dealing with those things was wrong. Turned out, and Google was actually, both sites were hurting because they had those pages.

So in the, in the end, I got to fix that by, in the last release of WordPress, actually taking attached materials out of WordPress core, which is, which is something I was very happy to be doing to WordPress.

But, yeah, what you learn from that is probably just testing more and longer and at the same time, you can’t always. I think the lesson is always you’re, it’s also, you’re going to make mistakes, own up to them, fix them and move forward.

[00:32:06] Speaker B: Absolutely.

And that’s the biggest thing, I think, is learning from them. We can make mistakes, but if we just continue to make them without learning how to correct course, correct as we go, that’s the hard part for sure.

And I’ve discovered that a lot with social media, managing social for different accounts and things like that is social is very forgiving. You can put out a meme that’s hysterical and you’re the only one laughing at it. And it’s like, well, that didn’t go over very well. Let’s try something different tomorrow. Right. But we learn and grow. What’s your proudest WordPress moment?

[00:32:39] Speaker C: Oh, there’s quite a few of those.

I think selling yoast, to a large degree, was one of our proudest, my proudest moments because it sort of felt like finishing the game like you’ve beaten the end boss.

But another one is probably seeing my son on stage or my wife on stage, or being on stage together with my wife a couple of times is also amazing to do. So there’s been quite a few.

I’ve always been very happy in this community, so, yeah, that’s wonderful.

[00:33:25] Speaker B: If you weren’t working in tech at all, what’s another career that you might like to try?

[00:33:32] Speaker C: Politics, but probably not, like political enough for that. I say what I think too often.

[00:33:41] Speaker B: That’Ll get you in trouble unless you’re in american politics, in which case, whatever, it’s a problem right here.

[00:33:49] Speaker C: Times are changing and I might get away with that a bit more, but at the same time, I don’t necessarily think that that’s a good thing.

[00:33:58] Speaker B: Maybe not. Maybe that you need your own spin doctor for that.

What’s something on your bucket list?

[00:34:05] Speaker C: I want to travel more, see more of the world. I have this amazing app which, which lists the world heritage sites and you can cross off the ones where you’ve been and then you realize that you’ve seen like a lot and it’s 6% of the entire.

So there’s a lot left to do.

[00:34:29] Speaker B: That’s wonderful. I think experiences like that really do make a difference in our world. Last year was the first year that I traveled to Asia. Last year was the first time I was ever in Europe. And so, like, in one year to have broadened my horizons, that makes a big difference.

[00:34:42] Speaker C: It does. And it, I tell my european friends all the time when they go to the US for the first time is I tell them, you’ll probably realize that Europe and Italy in the Netherlands might seem very different, but at some point you’ll realize that Italians are closer to you than the US, that the cultural difference is actually quite big.

And it’s not bad. It’s just, it’s good to realize that the culture is so different and that really makes a difference in how people deal with a lot of things.

[00:35:16] Speaker B: Makes a lot of sense. Yeah. We all are dealt something different by where we live. I’m under snow today, so.

[00:35:22] Speaker C: Yeah, well, that we can agree on. We are too.

[00:35:29] Speaker B: So show us or tell us about a hidden talent that you have that the WordPress community might not be aware of.

[00:35:38] Speaker C: Well, I don’t know if this is a talent, but I am a football coach or soccer as you’re american with american football.

[00:35:46] Speaker B: Yeah.

[00:35:48] Speaker C: Yeah.

[00:35:48] Speaker B: I don’t know why we call the football one, the one that you’re not allowed to touch with your feet.

[00:35:53] Speaker C: Yeah. And where the ball is actually an egg. So, yeah, what can I say?

Yeah. So I do that, um, two evenings a week, and on Saturday morning we coach a game. And I’m actually, I’m a board member at the football club, so I’m pretty active there. Do a lot of work stuff there. It’s, it’s good fun. That’s cool. It’s, it’s funny because it’s also a volunteer community, and you’d be surprised how many volunteers it takes to run a football club because, well, there’s tons of teams and, and you need a field and you need all these things to, to be able to, to play that game and to teach kids that game every, every week. So. No, I really enjoy that. And it’s, it’s with our youngest son who’s nine now. Eight, sorry. But they’re in the under nine category. And so it’s like eight boys of eight years old that you’re teaching how to and, well, mostly which direction to go.

[00:37:00] Speaker B: That’s our goal today.

[00:37:02] Speaker C: I’m not very good at football myself, so I’m very happy to teach the younger ones, where I’m, where I can still actually say them things, tell them things that are meaningful, at some point it becomes a bit more problematic. But yeah, I don’t think the WordPress community knows me as such and has seen me do that. So, yeah, that’s probably new.

[00:37:23] Speaker B: That was new to me. So. And I’m in the community. So there you go for sure. Is there anything I didn’t ask you about today that you want to share with our audience?

Aha. You didn’t see that question coming, did you?

[00:37:37] Speaker C: There are loads of things. No, I think if you’re in the WordPress community, just be, be happy, keep on working on the stuff that you enjoy and keep on being nice to each other because that’s what makes this community so special.

[00:37:58] Speaker B: I agree. Absolutely. So how do people get in touch with you if they’re interested in following up on Amelia, if they want to talk to you about any of the various things that you’re involved in?

[00:38:09] Speaker C: Well, I’m on post status, which we didn’t talk about, but we have also invested in.

I’m on the WordPress slack. I’m on Twitter as yay. J Deval J d e v I l K.

I’m like that on multiple networks, but I’m honestly not very good at keeping up with all of them. So Twitter and my blog is yoast blog. It has a contact form. Feel free to use it.

[00:38:39] Speaker B: If you are listening to this episode and you want any of those and you didn’t write them down, just go to wpcoffeetalk.com comma find Yoast episode and we will have all of those links along with a transcript of today’s episode in the show. Notes thank you so much for taking time out of your day to answer my questions and whether they were rapid or otherwise.

[00:38:58] Speaker C: I thought they were pretty rapid. I tried to do rapid.

Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

[00:39:06] Speaker B: It’s always fun to talk to you. I appreciate you so much. And for everybody else, we’ll see you on the next episode of WPCoffeeTalk.

[00:39:13] Speaker A: We hope you enjoyed this episode of WPCoffeeTalk. Please share it with others who, who, you know would enjoy hearing from the people who make the WordPress community the wonderful place that it is.

[00:39:24] Speaker B: If you are interested in joining us.

[00:39:25] Speaker A: As a guest or a sponsor, please visit our site wpcoffeetalk.com.