Fostering Healthy Conversations around Contribution ft. Nik McLaughlin

Brian Coords (00:00)
All right, Nick, welcome to Webmasters FM.

Nik McLaughlin (00:02)
Yeah, thanks Brian.

Brian Coords (00:04)
You’ve been on before, but maybe just do like a one, you know, 30 second kind of like bio of who are just so people have like the context.

Nik McLaughlin (00:10)
Sure,

sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. So my name’s Nick McLaughlin. I’m on the Skyverge team at GoDaddy. So we have a suite of WooCommerce extensions. I’ve been with Skyverge for a little over five years, like five and a half years now, and then around doing WordPress and WooCommerce stuff for a good five or so years before that.

But yeah, yeah. So mostly focused on Woo stuff within GoDaddy today and also being more involved in community and brand presence stuff. Being more publicly visible, I guess, has been a big focus of mine for this year.

Brian Coords (00:47)
Nice. And I should say I work at WooCommerce, which is owned by Automatic, but this podcast is not affiliated. Opinions are my own. that’s not a sponsored type of thing that I do through the company.

Nik McLaughlin (00:58)
Yeah,

yeah, yeah, likewise. Not here as an official representative. I did tell my boss I was going on, but not representing a company view or anything. think especially for today’s topic, the interesting thing is for us to be able to just share our perspectives more than prescribe a company line or something.

Brian Coords (01:18)
Yeah, definitely. And I guess what really kicked it all off is you had a tweet thread in response to some community discussions about a new feature coming into WordPress. People had opinions about it. One of my coworkers who I actually just spent the last week at a meetup with, and we talked about this topic and the related topic of community feedback and how do you get feedback from the community?

Nik McLaughlin (01:38)
Alright.

Brian Coords (01:44)
How do you filter it so you’re not getting that vocal minority, but you’re getting feedback that’s meaningful and actually impacts people who maybe aren’t in the Twitter bubble like most of us are? And then how do you get it to influence the products? We were actually talking all about this sort of stuff just last week, but maybe you can kind of summarize the viewpoint you put forward in the tweet and what triggered that for you.

Nik McLaughlin (01:58)
Wow. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, right. I mean, I think you make a good point too that like this whole conversation happening on Twitter is like maybe like part of the problem or at least like indicative of the audience, you know, of like, but that was also intentional on my part. was like, I feel like this is where like XYZ new thing is happening and I’m gonna have a quick, you know, 140 character take about it or whatever.

Brian Coords (02:14)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (02:27)
I they’re not limited now for people paying. But anyways, you know, I’m gonna have a short take on it that somebody can just read while they scroll or whatever, right? So like that’s like where that happens a lot. And yeah, so my thread was mostly, it was about PHP only, like we’ll kind of cement this in a period of time for all history, but like PHP only block registration and WordPress coming out and…

Brian Coords (02:29)
Yeah, you can go on and on now.

Nik McLaughlin (02:51)
some of the responses to that being, you know, like, why wasn’t it this way at first? This is how it always should have been about time that they finally got this done. Like took way too long to get this or whatever. Right. And and then like also the response back to that being like, all these people are just complaining and don’t know what they need or don’t know what they want or don’t want to do the work.

Brian Coords (03:01)
You

Nik McLaughlin (03:10)
or whatever, right? And like, so it’s just like very dismissive both ways, right? Of like, people really worked very hard on this and really needed it a long time ago. And like, so just like that, that whole dismissiveness was sort of the smell for me in the room of like, yeah, something’s off here and we need like a vibe shift to reorient ourselves. And so my Twitter thread was kind of unpacking a little bit of like what I think

the patterns that we’re all kind of falling into in those conversations. And I hope I did a good job there. My drive in all of this is not like to call out people for being bad or organizations or groups or whatever, or even to draw a line between groups. It’s kind of the opposite. Like I’m trying to say these are mentalities, perspectives, I think I said personas in the thread that we can all kind of like get inside of or act out from.

or whatever that like, it’s just important to be able to see that and know when you’re doing it and then find ways to move from there, right? Like, so I sort of outlined like the, there’s like this core versus community divide ⁓ that sort of comes up and there’s other ways you can frame it, but that’s sort of the idea is like you have like, there’s them over there doing the work and they’re the.

Brian Coords (04:16)
Mm-hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (04:24)
that are, you know, making all the decisions that we all just have to, you know, live with or whatever. And then there’s them over there, you know, depending on which perspective you look at it, everybody’s always they, ⁓ which is something that…

Brian Coords (04:34)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (04:36)
Coworker of mine Courtney Robertson actually like she got on the thread as well like she had a talk about this that like I Forget how she put it like they is we or we are they or something right? is no other group which is a big part of this but ⁓ but ⁓ but yeah, yeah so those were kind of the two parties that I sort of the two like patterns that I see us like living into is this like either

Brian Coords (04:46)
Mm-hmm. I remember that. Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (04:59)
On the community side then, guess I didn’t say like complaining about the work being done and being subjected to it or something. And then on the other side is, you know, like not going to listen to anybody. They don’t know what they need. They don’t know what they want. They don’t. They’re not willing to do the work. And

Just having to overcome those dismissive boundaries and how we can actually work on this whole thing together. It’s illuminating of a very different dynamic that we exist in, right? Like our ecosystem is particular in that. It’s not like people are paying for a service ⁓ or paying for a product and just receiving that product. And if it doesn’t match what they

Brian Coords (05:33)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (05:40)
wanted, then they go buy a different one, right? Like in both and on multiple ways, that’s not the reality, right? Like we like A, it’s free and B, like you don’t get to vote with your wallet in the same way, right? Like, so there is this like vote with your voice dynamic kind of built into open source. There’s that. Yeah, that kind of requires some of this conversation to happen. Just hopefully in more like, you know, constructive ways.

Brian Coords (05:54)
Mm-hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (06:06)
Yes.

Brian Coords (06:07)
Yeah. And there’s, there’s like so many dimensions to it. Cause like I started before I ever worked at a company that was contributing, was at, worked in agency and I would write posts when I was annoyed with some direction or something like that. And then I would get the typical feedback, which is like, well, if you don’t like it, you should just contribute. And people do not like to hear that. That is not, if nobody enjoys getting that response. and it’s, kind of goes, it’s really hard because

Nik McLaughlin (06:28)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (06:33)
It goes both ways where it’s like, in one hand, that is true. Like if you don’t like something, you can just build it yourself. And you know, that’s getting easier and easier every day. ⁓ but on the other hand, it’s not everybody knows how and WordPress has gotten really complicated. And I think a lot of people who maybe could have contributed 10 years ago, really struggle. I mean, I’ve opened up like Gutenberg. like, I don’t understand any of this stuff. Like I’ve watched my coworkers contribute. It is a lot harder. It’s not just like, go and contribute. And then at the end of the day,

Nik McLaughlin (06:41)
Right?

Yeah.

Brian Coords (07:01)
the thing you wanted just may not make it. Like it just may not be the priority. You don’t, you maybe don’t convince the people. You haven’t built up like the personal trust with people to give you that space to push something in. And so there’s so many layers to it. And a lot of times it does get simplified down to this like, well, I’m not going to share anything because nobody’s going to listen to me. They’re not going to contribute. I don’t know how to do it. I don’t want to do it. It should just be done. They should just be meeting the users, what the users want.

Nik McLaughlin (07:04)
Great.

Brian Coords (07:29)
And WordPress, you know, if they’ve learned anything, it’s that whatever you think is like people are using WordPress for it’s a million times bigger. It’s a million times broader. And most open source software is not so user like non-technical user focused as WordPress, like almost every other thing, whether it’s like Laravel or Ruby or these other like open source, like frameworks or platforms or languages or whatever. It’s like.

Nik McLaughlin (07:37)
Yeah, yeah.

Brian Coords (07:55)
they’re, they’re really in a developer centric bubble. So there there’s an expectation that if you use it, you should be able to contribute to it because you’re in that layer. But WordPress is not like that. And most of the people that use WordPress, myself included, couldn’t tell you how most of it works or understand it. And so it’s just, it’s really, it’s really hard to say contribute. And it kind of opens the question to people like, what does that even mean? What is contributing? What is.

Nik McLaughlin (08:11)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (08:21)
what is being helpful, you know?

Nik McLaughlin (08:22)
Right, right, yeah, yeah, because in that sense, like, and this was sort of what I was getting at with like, you know, we can’t vote with our wallets, in that, from the, if you frame the community side or the user side as like the consumer, like they’re, you know, a thing is being created that they’re using or whatever, right, which I think is part of the problem. But at least in this case, it’s helpful to at least look at it that way, like.

They can’t vote with their wallets. The feedback is contribution, I think. It’s what they can do. They can say, hey, I’m having this problem. And they can share that in a place where it can reach people who could do something about it.

There’s so many layers in between there of how to do that well and how to that right. It sounds like, you know, that’s a lot of what you guys were talking about when at this meetup, right? Was like, how do we actually shape that experience? ⁓ But at least, you know, that starting point is something like I, come from a support background and this is something that I would always like make sure to thank people for reaching out to us, even if they were livid in there and like calling us out and like just like behaving terribly in the email to us, like we’re posting about it publicly.

Brian Coords (09:11)
Mm-hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (09:31)
or something, you know, like I would still like thank them for raising it because they could have not they could have just, you know, and we have like paid products. It’s a little bit different, but like they could have just, you know, canceled and moved on and we would have no idea that we weren’t meeting this need or that that need even existed, you know, even if it’s something that we absolutely will never do with one of our products, it still benefits us to know that there’s people looking for that because we can maybe meet that some other way or we can find ways to point

Brian Coords (09:46)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (09:59)
those folks to a solution that works for them that doesn’t, you know, like drain our reputation because we’re not meeting it. So there’s just like so much value in having that information that whether it counts as like, you know, committing or contributing or like it depends on what you’re trying to measure, I guess, but like I think…

Brian Coords (10:08)
Hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (10:21)
There’s value there. It’s making the project better. It’s making the ecosystem better to have people who care enough and are willing to say, like, hey, this thing doesn’t work for me. Hopefully, we go further than that, you know? And it doesn’t just die there on the complaint. But I think that’s still a valuable place to start. And literally, if that’s all somebody brings in, then that’s still, you know?

at least like grounds for the project to improve if maybe not improving it directly right away.

Brian Coords (10:48)
Yeah. I used to get annoyed when people would file bug reports, say on like WooCommerce. And then you would ask them for like, you know, there’s follow-up stuff like give us your status report. And so we’ll know what plugins you have active and tell us what worked and what didn’t. And then you’d never get that information. And I’d get really mad and I’d be like, well, why’d you file the bug report? But you’re not giving us any helpful information. But then somebody framed it to me and was like, yeah, maybe they didn’t provide all the information we need. But like if 10 people provide a bug report with the zero information, but they’re all 10 related, like

Now we know we have a problem. like, even if it’s the bare minimum amount of information that they gave us, it could become a signal that something is wrong and it’s better than getting no information at all. And I had to reshape my thinking around what’s helpful and what’s not helpful is, you know, especially around bugs, like bugs are easier. It’s like any information is just going to help. But there, I think there is…

Nik McLaughlin (11:18)
Right.

Yeah.

Brian Coords (11:41)
There is feedback around this thing isn’t working or it’s not solving the need and this is how I’m trying to use it and all that sort of stuff. But then there is that other thing which is just like, I don’t like this thing. Why is this priority? Why are we working on this? And there’s that kind of, and so do you see those two things as differently or do you think even that is helpful? Even though it’s a little bit, I don’t know, it’s not, I mean, I guess it is negative. It’s negative saying, I don’t like this thing that you built or I don’t like this or.

Nik McLaughlin (11:53)
Mm.

Huh.

Yeah.

Brian Coords (12:08)
I didn’t, you should have done this sooner or whatever, but I mean, is that, do you put that as kind of helpful information either way just because it’s better than nothing?

Nik McLaughlin (12:17)
I mean,

yeah, I think there’s still a data point there, right? Like my either, I don’t know if this is like support hat or product hat that I’m putting on there that I’m just like, there’s a data point there that like somebody’s unsatisfied with something. And like you said, maybe there’s nothing to be done in this case to.

get more information from them or to fix the problem for them. But like, there’s still a data point there that we can like learn from and, and, or coalesce or whatever into something that we do learn from eventually, right? Even if it’s not singular. I think like, I,

That versus like a, here’s how I would like this to be, you know, this feature to work differently or something, right? Like contrasting those, I think of it as like a more well-defined request basically. Like, so you just get the raw, sometimes negative, sometimes positive, by the way. Like you can also just get like overwhelmingly positive reactions to things that don’t help at all. Like people are just like, finally, or, I’m so glad they did this, but like why?

Brian Coords (13:06)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (13:19)
How are you going to use it? What are you planning to do with it? Is it because of the things that we thought or are you, is it confirming something else for you? And now we’re still building in the wrong direction, right? Like, so there’s this like neutral, like framing of just like we have the data, right? That’s not, you know, good or bad or whatever. And so in that sense, yeah, it’s all data to that end, but like you can shape it more, right? Like you can, you can develop that kind of raw,

Brian Coords (13:22)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (13:47)
response

or reaction into something that’s more constructive. And I think that that takes like buy-in on both sides for sure. Like, and this is maybe the real, like if I had a call to action in any of this, it’s like to be willing to engage in that, in this process of like shaping your reaction into a request. Like that’s, that’s just, that’s a process that requires trust.

Brian Coords (13:57)
Mm-hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (14:16)
that creates so much value, right? That like, on both sides, right? That the person who may be like the owner of the feature or whatever, know, like put the work out there, like has to trust that there is something deeper than just that reaction, you know, that there’s, or at least that that reaction is like reflective of something deeper going on, right? That there’s more to this to understand.

Brian Coords (14:19)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (14:39)
And then also obviously on the other side, know, trusting that like somebody actually cares when they ask why I’m reacting a certain way, right? That they’re not, you know, just trying to make me look bad or, you know, just being upset because I didn’t respond in the way they wanted or what.

Brian Coords (14:47)
Mm-hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (14:55)
And that’s hard to do. It’s hard to be the person responding to those reactions. Um, but I think that’s part of like working, especially on like an open source project on a free software project, like that’s, that’s public facing. That’s like you said, like non-technical user facing. I think that’s a big part of the job is to be the one who processes those with people, you know, like it, and, hopefully like are able to not carry it.

Brian Coords (15:01)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (15:24)
I’m

not trying to put a bunch of burden on especially folks like yourself who are like explicitly outward-facing in their roles ⁓ Like there’s so much pressure there and so much to to tackle there that you also have to be able to like not carry it you know like to wash it off a little bit at the end of the day, but But ⁓ and yeah, yeah, I don’t know. I just I think being able to engage in that process can create

Brian Coords (15:31)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (15:47)
a lot more value than just the initial data might give us.

Brian Coords (15:53)
Yeah. And we have

like a range of different data sources around this. Like we have like, you know, surveys after people go through WooCommerce support. So they go through some support and we get their feedback and we hear what were their pain points. And some of it’s about the support process itself, but some of it’s about the product. And so you get that and that’s pretty like surface level issues. And then we do these, like customer profiles, where if a customer

is having an issue, we will get a group of people on a call with them and let them just screen share for an hour and explain all the stuff. And they do that, there’s constantly new ones, like to where I can’t even keep up, but they just, people are running huge stores and they walk through and they’re like, explain this screen doesn’t do what I wanted and this doesn’t, and we’re struggling with these extensions or whatever. And you get both sides of it, kind of a lot of surface level data and then these really deep dives that might be unique to that person, but might not.

Nik McLaughlin (16:45)
Right.

Brian Coords (16:45)
And

you kind of need all of it, but then there is like the broader community data, which is like the kind of stuff I used to do all the time, which is like just write a blog post about the thing that’s bugging you that day, which I mean, I still do that. I’m not saying I don’t do that anymore. I still do that. Sometimes I don’t publish them, which we should talk about that because that was the Jonathan’s post, but like that there’s that kind of, you know, general feedback and stuff.

Nik McLaughlin (16:57)
Hahaha

Yeah.

Brian Coords (17:09)
At the end of the day, feel like even, especially now with AI, which is really good at taking a lot of data and like helping you triage and pattern recognition through it and stuff. Like it’s probably more useful than it ever was. And I versus the alternative, which is to get really mad at a thing and then just walk away because you’ve given up on the project. And that’s, that’s probably the worst place we could be is that people just don’t care anymore. know,

Nik McLaughlin (17:28)
Right.

Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, that’s why I said that’s why I’m always like, like, try to root yourself in gratitude. It’s like the biggest challenge whenever you get any of this sort of feedback is like, how do you start from a place of like, I’m glad that they said this because a lot of times you’re just not like, you’re you’re you’re working your your day job and trying to get through it and or maybe like you feel really excited about this thing that you did. And and that’s not the response that you’re getting from people or whatever. Right. Like, yeah. So it’s like, it’s I don’t I don’t

Brian Coords (17:48)
Yeah, you’re defensive, you know? Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (18:01)
I don’t want to say that like flippantly like like oh you should just always be grateful for everybody I don’t know like there’s that there’s like rose-colored glasses or like naive view of it I guess though. I’m like, no, I don’t think that that’s easy or where we start as a default but It’s always a good reminder like a thing to carry around in your pocket to just like alright I got to remember to to be you know working toward that or to try to be framing things that way because it it’s again, it’s it’s like I don’t know like if I was

If I was right, I am, guess I was like if I was running a business that like depended on this sort of stuff But it’s like but yeah, I think it’s like it’s good for business, know, it’s my point like it’s it’s not just like this like Community kumbaya ideal like if you wanted to get brass tacks, which it also is by the way But if you wanted to get brass tacks about it, it’s like it’s like a better way to do business it’s like it’s a it’s it’s gonna be better for your company for your product for whatever because this data is valuable, you know, I try to frame it in that language a lot because

I think that’s maybe ground for folks to understand this in a way that’s not just like be a good person or something but like also this is Capturing value that’s being created, you know, like that’s in like very producty business terms Like that’s that’s it’s out there and if we can do that, there’s like clear incentive I would hope you know

Brian Coords (19:20)
Yeah, I have an alternate viewpoint that I sometimes agree with and sometimes disagree with. And this is from DHH. He’s the guy that made like Ruby on Rails and like from the Basecamp world. And he’s also the maintainer of a very popular open source framework, Ruby on Rails. And he blogs about this kind of stuff, but he takes this opposite. I’ll link it in the post with this episode, but he has a couple posts and one is all about like…

Nik McLaughlin (19:28)
Yeah, yeah, okay.

Brian Coords (19:45)
how open source users are super entitled and they just come to you and they’re all their complaints and that’s not your job as the open source person. And I think the main one is he has one that’s like open source is not a democracy. Like it’s not you get to vote on things and we make them. That’s not the way it works. And the other one is that open source is just a gift and somebody made something. They open sourced it. They gave it to you. You can use it or not, but like that’s, that’s what it is. It’s not their job to make you happy. And that open source is not like a business where

Nik McLaughlin (20:11)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (20:14)
They’re trying to, we’re trying to keep our paying customers and it’s just, Hey, we made this thing. it’s useful for you, use it. If it’s not go use something else, like whatever, you know, we already made it for ourselves. And I think that, like I said, like I’m, go between both viewpoints depending on my mood that day, but I do think there is something in that view. And it’s kind of like, what is the responsibility for like a project like WordPress? Like, you know, I think, I think if you’re using it, you really should be using companies that contribute back.

Nik McLaughlin (20:16)
Right.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Brian Coords (20:42)
And a lot of the big ones do like go to daddy sponsors, contributors, automatic sponsors, contributors, Elementor sponsors, contributors, like a lot of the main players that you think of really do sponsor contributors back. so, you know, in a way you could vote with your dollars and use those companies for your products because you know that you’re helping at least feed the thing. But does WordPress like the core committers that make all the decisions and stuff like at what level.

Nik McLaughlin (20:44)
Hmm.

Yeah, yeah.

Brian Coords (21:05)
should they be thinking about what people want and at what level should they be like, well, we’re just building what we want and you can use it or you can’t like what’s their responsibility, you know.

Nik McLaughlin (21:11)
Yeah, right.

That’s what I was thinking. was like, I think there’s a difference like using the DHH example, like his work on Ruby on Rails, like, and this is sort of what you brought up. Like it’s a developer platform. It’s a developer framework. And so it’s, it’s a tool that other tool users or tool builders even, you know, might be using. But it’s not a product in the same sense. I mean, whatever, everything’s a product, something, something, but like, but, but

Brian Coords (21:39)
Hehe.

Nik McLaughlin (21:41)
You know, it’s not in the same sense that like WordPress is where it’s like this is an end-user thing that we’re handing to somebody to to make a site I still you know, they’re still using it as a tool or whatever, right? But

I guess it’s like the audience that’s different. I’m trying to figure this out as I talk through it. what, what, cause I feel like there is a different level of responsibility taken on by a tool like WordPress. where yes, it’s a gift to the other developers who might take WordPress and build something on top of it or whatever, right? Like, or build something with it or something, but, but it is also trying to be more of ⁓ a consumer or consumable.

product and I think that’s where you get more into the territory of like you know it’s not just business sense but it’s really like the responsibility of the platform that we’re building that we’re offering that that carries that that

Brian Coords (22:20)
Mm-hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (22:33)
we should be taking folks feedback into account, guess. Like, you know, we’re building it for people and knowing who you’re building it for, I guess, is really what that comes down to. ⁓ If you’re building it for somebody who is just looking for a…

Brian Coords (22:38)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (22:47)
code base that’ll get them started on the code base that they were going to create anyways, then cool. That’s, you know, you have a pretty limited window of responsibility as far as like what sort of feedback you need. You’ll probably still hear from them though that like, Hey, it’d be nice if it did this. It’d be nice if it did that. And yeah, it’s up to you what you do with that. I, you know, I think that’s the responsibility in terms of like the, you know, open source is not a democracy. Like, yeah, it’s the responsibility of the people working on the thing to,

decide what it should be. And that’s not that involves listening to feedback. That doesn’t mean making it what everybody else says it should be. And it takes this is where like I hesitate a little bit with like, you know, oh, I can fix this for us or something is like, well, it can help with the data aggregation. It can help with like sussing out themes usually. Right. Like it’s pretty good at like sentiment analysis and stuff like that. But like, I think there’s still I don’t know, I haven’t tested it out.

Brian Coords (23:37)
Hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (23:43)
but like I think there’s a pretty essentially human bit of like empathy here that’s required to really understand the actual problem that somebody’s trying to solve and not just the words that they said and what that might be pointing to or something but like really get at what they actually want here whether they’ve said it clearly or not or whether

Brian Coords (23:54)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (24:03)
aligns with what you think the product should be or not, but really getting into that, what’s the real request here or what’s the real solution, it takes a level of thinking that I haven’t seen from Claude yet, but who knows? I don’t wanna rule it out. just wanna put pause there that just because it can process text doesn’t mean you can understand the real need.

Brian Coords (24:15)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

Yeah, you need those personal interviews.

You need to do that real work. And I think like you were saying, like everything’s kind of a product. I think that’s also a key difference where like in Ruby on Rails, like I don’t think it really affects them if more people use it or not. Like I don’t, like they have their software company, you know, they make a lot of money selling whatever Basecamp or whatever. So like more people or less people using the open source kind of doesn’t really matter to them. I think Laravel is a little different where.

Nik McLaughlin (24:28)
Yeah.

Mm.

Brian Coords (24:49)
They make their money off of like hosting and like deployment stuff. So they kind of want more people using it. So it’s a little bit more closer. And then in WordPress, like we all make more money if more people use WordPress. Like if less people use WordPress, the companies that we work for will be in trouble. Like in a sense, we are all selling WordPress and hoping more people use it. And it, it’s not a gift. is the cornerstone of like a transaction that, you know, pays our mortgage or whatever. that, that is, it’s a, it’s a big difference in like.

Nik McLaughlin (25:00)
Right.

Yeah, yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

Brian Coords (25:17)
WordPress and even with commerce are like platforms with like ecosystems and stuff and like more than say a page builder or something like we’re really reliant on people showing up and adding the missing functionality and extending it and bringing in those people and solving the connections that we don’t have the bandwidth to solve and stuff. it’s much more of a.

transactional relationship, then, ⁓ we just made this thing and you could use it or not. It’s like, no, no, we need you to use it. We need you to be happy using it because it’s what our companies are built on, you know?

Nik McLaughlin (25:44)
Yeah, right, right.

Yeah, it’s a weird space, especially I think in like Woo specifically, like even I’ve had to explain a little bit of this or I’ve seen like some of the disconnect for folks in WordPress more broadly that like Woo is just generally more like.

monetized, right? we’re doing, know, businesses are running here. We’re selling things. and I, it’s, yeah. So like those, the transactional piece of that is at, at once like more real and still like community pointed or something, you know, like it’s still like, therefore we all need to do this together or something, you know, like it’s like, it’s a different sort of transactional than just, ⁓ you know, building a SaaS company or something, right?

Brian Coords (26:08)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (26:31)
Or it’s like, then we’ll get your data and then we’ll get, you know, it’s like, it doesn’t work under the same rules and it requires kind of a different level of response or a different level of effort maybe, like across a broader ecosystem. It’s like ecosystem transactional or something. Yeah, that’s a new thought for me, but I see what you’re saying and I’m also like, yeah, and then there’s also this weird flavor of it that’s different than just like your typical business transaction.

Brian Coords (26:31)
Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah.

Yeah,

and like the post that kicked it off was this PHP only blocks, which a lot of people felt like was kind of like too little too late. Like this, we’ve wanted this for years. Why is it finally happening? It’s a pretty limited MVP, but I think that’s kind of the point. Like I think if you, if you want to write a block in PHP, then you’re not going to get very far, but that’s fine. It’s, it’s useful for this thing, but

Even I did a video on it and somebody’s comment on my video was like, when I read the announcement post from WordPress explaining the new feature, they were like, I can tell the person who wrote this doesn’t even want me to use this. It was like hostility from just the feature description. I was like, okay, I don’t know if that’s projection. I need to reread it and see if I sense that too. then this week another dated reference, but.

Nik McLaughlin (27:36)
Wow

Yeah.

Brian Coords (27:46)
There was, you know, the new feature coming in 7.0 is this ability to connect AI and all this stuff. And you had sent me the, that Marcus Burnett, ⁓ wrote a blog post about that. And it was sort of the opposite instead of too little to it was like, this is too powerful and too fast and we’re not ready for this kind of, that’s constantly. I hear people complain about WordPress and it’s like core moves way too slow. takes forever to get things you want. And then suddenly it’s like, it’s moving too fast. I can’t keep up with the changes. I don’t know.

Nik McLaughlin (28:01)
Right, right, yeah.

Brian Coords (28:14)
what tools I’m even supposed to use anymore. And it’s kind of like you can’t win, but like, what was your reaction to that post and that concept, either the actual thing he was playing about or just the idea of how he presented it.

Nik McLaughlin (28:17)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean a little bit of both like so I’ll like I don’t know this is disclosure or bias or something but like Marcus and I are friends and like he was my onboarding buddy at sky verge, you know, like we go back like so like so like I Yeah, yeah, and that and that helped me a lot ⁓ that helped me a lot in the understanding of like where he was coming from and you know, like so I

Brian Coords (28:37)
yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Marcus is a really good guy. I know Marcus. Yeah. Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (28:49)
That said, I think I’m on the opposite side from him on the actual where things are at. I don’t know. I think we’re actually on the same… I’m maybe coming at it from the other perspective or something. One of the threads that I was in with him and other folks talking about this, I very much felt like I was the one representing, well, this is why it’s this way in core or something, while everybody else was like, they need to do this. Why don’t they do that? It has to be this. ⁓

Brian Coords (29:09)
Hmm.

I guess I should

quickly just explain his argument, which I think is very valid. Like it’s a very good argument is that we’ve added this ability to connect AI to your WordPress site, but what happens if 10 plugins start using it and they’re racking up bills and you have no idea where it’s coming from and now you gotta put limits on your API keys and you can’t control it. Like a very valid point. And I do think there was some original ideas of like having logs and having places where you’d be able to

Nik McLaughlin (29:19)
Yeah. Yes. 100%.

Mmm.

Yeah.

Brian Coords (29:43)
calculate this stuff I just don’t think it made it in to core in this version. that is his main complaint, just so in case people haven’t read it. It’s a perfectly valid good thing to be brought up for sure. Even if I’m not worried about it, it is a very valid important thing to discuss.

Nik McLaughlin (29:46)
Right. Yeah, yeah.

Sure, that’s it, yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, and I-

100%.

Yeah, yeah. And I think the, and this gets at like really like the core of what we’re talking about here of like, you know, like developing these reactions in public, right? Like the fact that he started, you know, like a Twitter thread and then that carried out in other places, right? And like turned into this like.

Community conversation point around like wait, how is this gonna work? And a lot of folks they learned about like what was actually being built in the first place through all that so that’s like again like, know, it’s a Even if you want it I don’t think it was originally like just just a complaint But even if it was just a complaint in the first place the fact that it Created this sort of gathering point like actually taught a lot of people about what was going on I was doing my best to like, you know hand out not misinformation as much as I could in that

Brian Coords (30:40)
Mm-hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (30:45)
But it also, you know, like those conversations helped develop the understanding of what was missing. And the thread I was in, like, we really got to this point of like, ⁓ a lot of folks would really benefit from specifically, like, plugin level permissions to use a connected AI provider. Because the thing that what the core of the core of what is coming into core is that like those

Brian Coords (31:01)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (31:12)
connectors, those AI providers in this context, it could be other things, but in this context, AI providers can be used. What Core is doing is making that accessible to the whole site. So it’s not just I have a chat GPT plugin that connects to chat GPT, it’s my site is connected to this and now anything on my site can do that. So then what we got to was like, having permission sets and controls over, wait, which plugin

can access which provider and can I control how much and which users can use that functionality and stuff. And then obviously, observability and visibility into how much is that costing me? How often are those requests being sent? How much data is that using? All that stuff, right? But really having those controls. And that wasn’t something that…

Brian Coords (31:41)
Mm-hmm and which users yeah

Nik McLaughlin (32:03)
was in the public sphere that people were just asking for everywhere before this. But it came out of engaging in the conversational process of like, okay, yeah, there is something off here and these concerns are super well founded. that doesn’t mean burn it all down, throw up our hands and walk away and dismiss the work that everybody’s been doing. It means how can we figure that out together? Is there a specific

Brian Coords (32:08)
Mm-hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (32:29)
Request that we can shape this into to say okay. Here’s and maybe it’s a bunch of things You know, maybe a bunch of things are missing. I’m not trying to I think a lot of times like that

That response of like, what’s the specific thing that you’re complaining about can dismiss all the other things, right? And say, nope, I’m only going to allow you to complain about one thing at a time. And that’s not helpful. we’re, because then we get too pigeonholed on, well, we’re solving all their problems. Like, why isn’t everybody happy? And it’s like, no, we’ve missed the breadth of it for that. Getting too focused on the tree for the forest or whatever, right? Like,

Brian Coords (32:46)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (33:04)
Yeah, so it was helpful to work through that process together.

And I, I, he had a, like a follow-up blog post then that, sort of encapsulated a lot of that. And he had like, I think it was like five or six bullet points of like, these are the things I would want to see. And I was just like cheering. I was like, yes, this is so good. This list is so valuable for everybody who’s working on this to now have like, Hey, there was a big conversation about this. A lot of people talked about it and here’s, feedback in a way that you couldn’t possibly get even doing customer interviews, you know, because like.

you said you’d get their specific pigeonhole like or their specific use case their specific edge case but this is like hey everybody kind of talked about this and it came down to like a handful of things great let’s focus on that that’s really clear direction that that like wouldn’t have happened if people hadn’t engaged in the conversation publicly like

Brian Coords (33:42)
Yeah.

Yeah. And I think now the next step, which might’ve already had been looked into, but is like, now that he wrote this post where he’s like really outlined specific, like these sorts of things would help would be, I guess, going to like ⁓ track, you know, WordPress track where they, where you file issues. And then it’s like, now you can actually just like create an issue or something where it’s like, if you gave this five things, this feature would be better for everybody because of this. And, and you could turn it into like an actual request to the software.

Nik McLaughlin (34:12)
Yeah.

Right.

Brian Coords (34:24)
or at least something that gets tracked and handled. And that’s that next step, which is like, okay, here’s a really good outline, something people need. It’s been really hashed over by some community people that know what they’re talking about. Now we have to turn it into like a responsible issue to track, which already is a barrier for a lot of people that don’t come from like software world. Just opening an issue on a repo is, and we see that all the time with WooCommerce, people are like, this isn’t working. And we’re kind of like,

Nik McLaughlin (34:43)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (34:49)
Can you do a support request? Can you do a GitHub issue? Like depending on what your expert level is, either one is helpful, but like, can you do one or the other WordPress doesn’t, I mean, I guess we have support forums, but it’s not quite the same thing, but like turning it into like, how do you make it an actionable thing? Cause I, when I, before I ever worked in, in automatic, I worked at NHC and I got really into a project that was like a, a core project where they were trying to build a feature in.

Nik McLaughlin (34:53)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Brian Coords (35:14)
as part of core and in the core slack and in everything and I was learning, okay, well, you have to go to issues. You have to like test all this stuff. You have to join these meetings every other week because that’s where the people who are discussing it are doing it because they have 20 other things they’re doing and they don’t maybe have time to read every blog post. They don’t have time to answer every tag. So you got to go to their meeting. You got to like show the stuff. And it was really hard. Like it was like, it was like, it was like a job, you know, it was not a light thing to do. So I just wonder like for people who don’t know, like

Nik McLaughlin (35:21)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Brian Coords (35:42)
The next step from like I wrote a post and I did the read and I really explained a thing is actually a pretty big leap. And you have to be really used to dealing with a massive scale, technical bureaucracy to get to that next level where there’s 900 people contributing to this release and you have to find the right ones and get it over there. And that’s hard.

Nik McLaughlin (35:49)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah,

yeah, yeah, absolutely. It’s like both like massive scale and like just very few people at the end of the day that it’s like who are the you have to know the right ones though, like who are the right people to hear this? Who are the ones that both can like understand the problem and

either like help me get it to the people who can solve it or are the ones who could solve it ideally, right? Like, yeah, yeah. So I mean, to get like specific about it, like for the using this ⁓ AI connectors.

post as an example, I think a couple folks had shared bits of the conversation and eventually the blog post made it into the Make WordPress Core AI Slack channel. So like these are, you know, the people that are working on AI and Core. That’s the team. That’s where the conversations are happening. And somebody shared the post in there and it like got around a conversation going for folks of like, you know, what are the things of this that we’ve explored already? What are we?

missing, what is this highlighting that we haven’t really talked about? A lot of it was stuff that they were aware of, you know, as the people who work on this stuff day in, day out, they may have had a thought that like, yeah, we need to tackle this eventually or something, but it’s not, you know, they have, like you said, they have their other, you know, 20 things that they’re working on for right now and have to fit all that onto a timeline to actually make sure it ships with the other hundreds of people who are trying to ship things on the same time. It’s a, it’s a beast of a project. But that was sort

Brian Coords (37:10)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (37:27)
the next step, the very next step of like making sure that the people that are building this are you know aware of the conversation and getting some feedback from them on like again like what things they sort of already know about what is maybe missing from their radar.

actually have a GitHub issue tab open, like two tabs down from this one, ⁓ to sort of do exactly that, to formalize that into a GitHub issue. And I don’t know, we’ll see when this recording comes out, if that goes anywhere, or if somebody else creates it or whatever, but somebody needed to, and I’ve been spending enough time in core AI Slack that I knew who to ask about it. So I just asked, hey, I’d be happy to create an issue to help move this forward, where can that go?

Brian Coords (37:49)
Mm-hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (38:12)
Where does this report need to go? And so was asking the people, know, and offering to do the work upfront a little bit, like to carry a little bit of the load and not…

Brian Coords (38:13)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (38:21)
just throw it at them. But also I don’t think I’ll be the one fixing it. I don’t know. I don’t plan on doing that. So it is a little bit of like I’m handing this off. But if I can play a part in getting the message to the right folks to get it to turn it into action. You’re right though, that’s sort of the next step there is like, even if we do have this well-defined request, if all of that happens,

Brian Coords (38:23)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (38:48)
internally at a company, then you have your like product and engineering team that are are kind of constantly in that conversation anyways, right. But for a big project like WordPress, it’s a lot there’s a lot more to figure out. And especially for something that’s open like this, with like open participation, knowing how to and finding your way to those engagement points is is a big challenge. I’m not here with an answer to that. I’ve found

Brian Coords (38:53)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (39:16)
Slack to be generally the place where the people who do the work are present enough and also willing to interface a little bit more. And it’s like a lower barrier to entry versus creating a PR or a track ticket or something that might be a little more.

technical. yeah, finding the places that you can if you’re the one in the position to do it, right? And I just sort of found myself there. Like I said, I was in these public threads talking about what’s going on in core and I was like, well, I can just turn around and have that same conversation the other way and say, hey, I just talked to a bunch of people about this. Where do you want to capture that? It’s a pretty easy turnaround spot, right?

Brian Coords (39:52)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah,

I know everybody has like different skills. Like I’m really focused a lot on the block editor and like I got, I got, I got my list of pain points. know, and sometimes it’s fly by and file a quick issue. And sometimes people, there’s some people in the community who they just build the prototype of what they want because that’s their skill set. And they’re like, no, I think it should work this way and they can physically show it. often can’t, but like they can do that and say,

Nik McLaughlin (40:03)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (40:26)
or they just make a product that says, we need this thing and I’ll just make the product that does it. I’ll make a plugin that does it. And that’s way to validate it too, if like that’s your skillset. But even if your skillset is just like, I can just give my feedback on something, but like it is hard and like you have to expect that it’s gonna be time consuming. I get tagged on things now because I’ve chimed in on some issue and then it’s like.

I mean, I filed that six months ago and I don’t remember. And now I gotta like get myself in that head space and you gotta really, it takes time to like get into that focus space for it. And so you do have to be prepared. Like if you go to that next level of raising the issue, like someone’s gonna tag you in three months with a solution and you’re gonna have to be like giving them actual feedback because you’re like, shoot, this mattered then and it didn’t, you it’s been a few months. it’s, you do realize like,

Nik McLaughlin (40:51)
Yeah, yeah.

Right, right.

Brian Coords (41:14)
WordPress in general, it’s like free software, but if you do really want to improve it, you will be paying with time. Like that’s, that’s going to be part of it. Like that’s the trade off. It’s free, but you’re, you’re going to put in time. And that’s just a WordPress thing. Like it’s harder to set up than a SaaS. It’s takes more tweaking than a SaaS. You pay more attention to your hosting than you would if you used a SaaS. Like that’s just the time investment. And so you really do have to like believe that you, that you’re, that it’s worth your time, you know?

Nik McLaughlin (41:21)
Mm-mm.

Right.

Yeah, yeah, that’s right that gets back into like the trust core of everything right like the root of it all right that like you have to be able to and that’s and I don’t like say that lightly I don’t say I don’t mean to say that like you should just blindly trust people because that’s how it works or something you know like it’s like that’s a responsibility or like a you know

evolved carries to continually develop and earn that trust, right? It’s very easy to burn out a committer by just harassing them with a bunch of things that you think need to be done. And it’s also very easy to burn out somebody on the community side of things who just sees a bunch of problems not getting solved.

Brian Coords (42:16)
Mm-hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (42:26)
gets dismissed in one case, like really aggressively or something, or passive aggressively or whatever, that can be, that’s detrimental to the trust foundation that kind of allows all of these exchanges to happen, that allows…

⁓ Marcus and myself to come from points like opposite ends of like what we expect or what we’ve seen from the, this implementation and build together toward a like constructive output, right? Like, ⁓ I, I dunno, maybe overplaying my own role in that. Like he did a lot of the work there and talked to a lot of other people too. but you know, like for myself, like I was able to engage in that because like, you know, I, trust Marcus. know that like he’s, he’s got more to say than just like, I don’t like.

Brian Coords (42:53)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (43:09)
and he’s gonna walk away. He’s invested in this very deeply, very obviously, for anybody who knows him. And so I know that he and I can talk about that together, can work on that together.

Brian Coords (43:11)
Yeah.

Yeah, and there’s plenty of people, especially on Twitter, where I mute a lot of people in the WordPress world because they’re not, you could tell they’re not rooting for anything. They’re just like here to just point and laugh and be upset. I kind of just have to let those people go. It’s like, I know their take. I know what their opinion is. And I’m not even saying I disagree with them on certain points. I probably agree with them on half their points, but I just have to turn it off because you only have so much attention in the world. But I do think it is a bit of a responsibility on

Nik McLaughlin (43:30)
Yeah.

Sure.

Hmm.

Brian Coords (43:53)
the people making the software, the people with the power that have the power of what gets in and what gets out. I’m not gonna say that I like everybody that is in those positions of power or agree with them all the time. Sometimes it just does come down to a personality thing or a person, and sometimes it’s just a priority that this is their priority, this is not their priority, and some of those things. so the best you can do is just…

Nik McLaughlin (44:04)
Yeah.

Brian Coords (44:17)
treat each other nicely in these situations and in these interactions. And I think assume the best intentions of people when you’re collaborating with them. Cause I think that’s a big issue, especially recently with WordPress. Like, you know, there’s a lot of things happening in WordPress. I’m not a fan of all the things happening in WordPress all the time. Like I have my own things I’ve I’m upset about, but like, at least we have to like to, maintain a community. We do have to look at people with and just assume.

Nik McLaughlin (44:24)
Yeah. Yeah.

Brian Coords (44:43)
that they also want the success of the project and they also want the best software and not just assume these terrible intentions. And I think that that’s like goes both ways sort of thing. goes to how you treat the people building it and it’s to how you treat the people that are just reaching out with, hey, I think this thing should be different, you know? And it’s hard. It’s a hard thing to do.

Nik McLaughlin (45:00)
Right. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. That was something that got drilled into me in a past job was like practicing generous assumptions was the language that we always use for that. Just like always like always assuming the best or you know like like even going beyond just like make making room for somebody to to be a better version of themselves or something you know but like really like

Brian Coords (45:11)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (45:24)
inviting them to that, you know, like sometimes you do sometimes like the The assumption doesn’t have to be they didn’t mean that or they didn’t like, you know, maybe they did mean that maybe they’re really being a jerk Yeah, like and that’s and that’s that but like like you can take responsibility for where things go forward

Brian Coords (45:35)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (45:41)
Yeah, I don’t know. I’m totally with you on that. Like, I’m not here to dismiss people’s complaints, even when they’re pointed at things that I might defend on any given day. it’s more nuanced than that. But it…

the whole thing only works if we are able to work on it together. The thing that we’re building is not just, is not only transactional. It also has layers beyond that. And that gets, I don’t know, I see that from the, I think on the, maybe on

there’s the concern that like, of like freeloaders or something, you know, like people are just going to take and not give or something. like, Hey, yeah, like as an ecosystem health measure or something, you know, like we should strive to do better than that. Like, absolutely. But also at the same time, we can’t, I don’t know, we have to like invite people into that. can’t like just expect that from folks and we can’t.

Brian Coords (46:18)
yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (46:39)
I don’t know, we have to tolerate that, guess. We can’t rule that out either.

Like what are the next steps, you know? And I think there is sort of a process to work through here, right? And like we said at the top, like if you don’t get all the way through the process, that’s fine. Like it’s still data, it’s still valuable. But, you know, I start with a like provide feedback invitation, right? And like then on the other side of it, like accept feedback, you know? And it’s important to like reduce the friction for that. And that might mean that you get raw,

Brian Coords (46:48)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (47:10)
actions, but actually that is a sign of health, think, that you’re getting people immediately in their response. Software companies build really complicated systems to detect that kind of thing. And if you can just get somebody to tweet it for you, there’s value in that. That’s not nothing, that’s something. both being willing to provide feedback and then being willing to receive it is sort of the first step. We’ve got to have that communication.

Brian Coords (47:25)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (47:39)
to start with and then within that is like can we develop that into the know, call it like finding the constructive notes here, right? Like what are the things that can actually shape into something? It’s not to say that we’re

Brian Coords (47:49)
Mm-hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (47:54)
discarding concerns about, you know, that are external to the product, you know, but, but even because even those can be constructive about how you do those other things and not only, you know, how this feature works, but what about the way it was built or who got to talk about it or whatever, you know, those all are things that have to in a big project and how WordPress works. Like that’s the product too. That’s like, I don’t know. It’s maybe a weird way to think about it, but ⁓

Brian Coords (47:59)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (48:19)
Yeah, so all that can be helpful, all that’s up for debate or discussion, right, in a community setting like this, but like, can we find whatever those constructive notes are here? That takes like, again, like that collaborative trust discussion that builds on top of, you know, the maybe initial reaction sort of stuff. And then the next step there is to like, do we connect that to the work being

done. ⁓

Brian Coords (48:49)
Hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (48:50)
through teams that are already doing it or something new needs to be spun up. Like how do we like actually connect this to action to really make whatever change needs to be made. And I think that’s kind of it. It’s like those three steps kind of satisfy everybody’s needs there. Right. And again, like seeing folks go through that or seeing processes or changes happen through that.

that builds the trust for everybody, right? So, yeah, as much visibility and transparency as you can have at each step of the way is gonna be beneficial to that. Obviously, you know, there’s…

Brian Coords (49:17)
Yeah.

Nik McLaughlin (49:26)
discussions and conversations that need to happen maybe outside of that to make things work or I don’t know, I’m thinking like security vulnerabilities or something, know, like responsible disclosure here. But also, yeah, like defaulting to transparency when possible, when it’s helpful, like that just builds the trust, right? So, yeah.

Brian Coords (49:34)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah,

that’s like a big thing we’re working on internally. We have like a, it’s, I think it’s called default to public as like a mantra. And it’s like, it’s really hard. And it’s just, it’s so easy to just be like, I’m going to build this little thing in private and wait until it’s perfect to share it. And we’re always like, kind of pushing to like just default to public. And I think that some of these things in WordPress actually would have been better served the being as public as possible, because then you catch these things earlier, but also like this.

Nik McLaughlin (49:51)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Coords (50:15)
you know, some of these features were just fast and things just moved fast and, and there’s only so much you can pay attention to, but WordPress is, it’s just this unique thing. Like it’s, it made it to like most of the web, like of that, like half of the web with like zero marketing and just a community driven thing. And like, that’s how it got to where it is. And now it’s kind of like, well, we do have to like value both sides of the relationship, the community and the core people.

Nik McLaughlin (50:18)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Coords (50:43)
because really it’s a symbiotic relationship and we need both to exist. so if I think people can find ways to be as healthy as possible in their discussion of things and WordPress itself can find ways to actually take more feedback and then actually respond to the feedback.

Nik McLaughlin (50:46)
Right.

Brian Coords (51:04)
Even if your answer is no, a really good, well-written no to an issue is extremely helpful. Even if you’re not gonna do a thing, it’s extremely helpful to have the reasoning and the logic behind it and not just dismissive because somebody dedicated time to that. Somebody put in their effort to flag something and to really write it out and stuff. I’m hoping that it’s gonna…

Nik McLaughlin (51:11)
Yeah, yeah.

Brian Coords (51:26)
hopefully be easier going forward because I think we are seeing like with AI like a leveling up of a lot of people, like people are getting really up skilled in certain development aspects. Like I work on a marketing team and our marketers are like learning how to use GitHub now because they want to use the clod skills that each other is doing. So they’re like learning version control and they’re learning all these things. I think it’s like this crazy thing where we are like closing that gap a lot. And I’m hopeful that the people that

Nik McLaughlin (51:48)
wow, yeah.

Brian Coords (51:54)
maybe we’re intimidated by some of this stuff and afraid to like voice an opinion, we’ll actually feel more empowered going forward and we can find more ways to get all of this stuff out in the open and we can have these conversations in public. And sometimes it doesn’t happen until beta four of the release cycle, but like it is what it is, know, like better now than, you know, after WordPress comes out or something like that. So.

Nik McLaughlin (52:10)
Right, right.

Right, right.

Yeah, yeah. And then I think like my other encouragement for folks is to remember that these are like…

energies or perspectives or whatever that we can bring or not at any time, right? And that requires like self-reflection, but also hopefully like there’s this, there’s, I’m optimistic when I say that, you know, like there’s an optimism there of like, that means we can, it doesn’t have to be this way. We can change it. We can, you know, we can find a better way. We can find, you know, we can, we can create the better way maybe like, like in our own interactions, you know, not like

Brian Coords (52:50)
Hmm.

Nik McLaughlin (52:51)
the whole project has to be fixed in order for this to work or whatever, but just like, I personally can interact with this in a way that, you know, helps people build trust and build better things for themselves and each other, right? Yeah.

Brian Coords (53:01)
Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. And, you know, keep, keep tagging people because like you said, you could just jump into a core Slack channel and they will respond to you. Like, like you just, you can just be as aggressive as you want. You don’t have to sit on the sidelines and you know, you’re, welcome. You’re welcome to. It’s crazy. Well, thank you so much for having this conversation. I hope we hit, I mean, I feel like we could go on this for hours and stuff and

Nik McLaughlin (53:14)
Yeah, it’s open. It really is.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Brian Coords (53:31)
stuff, but hopefully we hit all of it. And I’m just grateful that we have people still engaged because that’s like a, that’s a sign of health, you know, it’s a sign of health that like communication is still happening. So I appreciate you talking about it.

Nik McLaughlin (53:39)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, 100%.

Yeah, thanks.