Profiles

Teaching while learning and the reverse, hiking amongst California’s tall trees and mountains, punishing the ill-humored with puns, media-making in any form, reading mostly fiction, entertaining people and making people laugh even if it’s at my expense.

In the Dark Ages of Internet before WordPress, I was Intranet Production Editor at The Walt Disney Company, helping create a company-wide publishing platform for disseminating New Technology & New Media developments and knowledge. That custom publishing application was a precursor to WordPress in many ways, using a database backend to dynamically feed the intranet front end. That intrigued me. I had prior experience using Filemaker Pro databases to manage movie footage that I was editing (in a prior career in Hollywood post production), and the idea of being able to paste the text of an article into a database record and have it pop up live on the site for Disney’s 120,000 employees (actually mostly just department heads and engineers) was quite supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, if you get me.

SO, when I discovered WordPress some ten years later, I was supercal-jazzed. As a web developer who came from content creation and media creation, I was stoked to be able to create a whole publishing machine for others (clients) and empower them to post their own content with relative ease.

Another five years after that, I discovered the WordPress community in the LA area and was once again blown away. I was, by then, mostly freelance with my own company (Lucky Cat Creative), still doing occasional contract work for Disney and also working at a number of Los Angeles-area creative agencies. But I was essentially working solo. Finding the WordPress Meetups and other events, and meeting the amazing peeps who proudly WordPress really opened up my world — it have me colleagues, resources, knowledge, energy — even clients, and was, like WordPress itself, a great bargain at the price of zero dinero. The rest is very likely to become history (stand by for that) . . .

Thanks, Matt. Thanks, WordPress. Oh yes, I would also like to thank the Academy.