Jesse Friedman: Welcome to Impressive Hosting, where we seek to uncover the core tenets of great WordPress hosting. I’m your host Jesse Friedman, and with me today is Chris Reynolds, the developer advocate at Pantheon.

I wanted to have Chris on because I think he has a unique perspective for us to explore within Pantheon, a company that’s servicing WordPress websites at a high enterprise level, and also doing some unique work advocating for developers. Chris, thank you so much for joining us. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Chris Reynolds: Thanks for having me. Yeah, I’ve been in the WordPress ecosystem for oh, a really long time. My very first WordPress blog was I think probably in 2005, 2006. I first started using it as a way to share pictures of my newborn son. And then that turned into freelancing. And in freelancing I decided, hey, this WordPress thing is pretty good. I want to do that exclusively for clients. And then freelancing is hard. So I wanted a real job. I started working for Event Espresso, which is a WordPress event management plugin. Worked there a couple years, started getting involved in the WordPress community through WordCamps. So I volunteered and then started speaking. It was through speaking probably about theme development that somebody from Pluralsight, it’s an online developer training company that’s local in Utah, was there and said, “Hey, do you want to come and do WordPress related training content for us?”

I’m like, “Sure, I’ll do that. That’s surely not—”

Jesse Friedman: That sounds fun.

Chris Reynolds: That surely that’s not any different than just presenting at a conference, right? No, it’s very different. Did that for a while. And then again, because I wanted a steady paycheck and those were like very sporadic and quarterly royalties, I started working in agencies. I got a job at WebDev Studios, became a lead developer at WebDev. Moved on to Human Made as a senior software engineer. And then I came to Pantheon because I liked—I liked Pantheon. I met them probably back in 2016, early 2017 or something, and hung out with their dev rel team at the time. But also, I really liked doing the sort of product development side of stuff that I was doing for some of the time at Human Made on Altis. And I decided that I really wanted to dig into that. I was a senior software engineer at Pantheon for a couple years, and then over the summer, right before WordCamp US in Portland, I made the transition into developer relations because developer relations really digs into being a developer, but being a developer in the spaces where other developers are and being able to do that sort of translation layer between knowing the technical stuff, but then communicating it to other people, whether those people are potential customers or those people are other developers. And the thing that always appealed to me about Pantheon in particular, their dev rel team is I always felt like they got me when I talked to them.

I didn’t have to explain, “Oh, I know what I’m doing,” the way you do sometimes when you talk to tech support or something. I know I’m a technical person. I know what I’m doing. I always felt like they met me where I was and they did it really well. And they have a really interesting, very technical, sort of developer-centric software. And it allowed me to sort of flex the muscle of being able to be that translator from developer speak into normal human English.

Jesse Friedman: That’s really cool. I would imagine that they loved finding you from the perspective of your experience. I mean, coming from WebDev Studios and Human Made, those are some major agencies that we know in this community. And so you’re coming to Pantheon from a unique perspective of having worked at companies that are basically core to their audience of customers.

So you’re coming with that unique perspective, but it also doubles back to a concept that I’ve been really thinking more and more about lately, which is the need for us when we’re building software or building solutions for end customers to think empathetically, to think from an empathetic design standpoint or development standpoint, that you are building something by putting yourself in the shoes of your customers.

So how does that apply to the work that you do every day? Having been working in agencies, building plugins, all that from the past?

Chris Reynolds: That certainly in engineering and but also in dev rel, having the experience of being on the developer teams that we are now basically targeting with our product is incredibly valuable. I was part of a wave of WordPress developers that were hired at the time, who pretty much all kind of had some level of WordPress development experience. One person came from 10up, another person was doing development for a smaller company, but really sort of enterprise-level stuff for his family’s company. And just being able to speak for those things has really pushed the needle for understanding the actual challenges that our customers have and the things that our platform needs to do to make those things, to ease the burden of some of those things. And—

Jesse Friedman: Sure.

Chris Reynolds: That’s been a really big part of the, you know, last three and a half years or so that I’ve been here.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. So, for folks who are not watching this on video, Chris, his background looks very much like he’s currently in a spaceship. So other than the fact that you’re orbiting above us right now, where are you actually located?

Chris Reynolds: Salt Lake City, Utah. Yes, I—

Jesse Friedman: Very nice.

Chris Reynolds: Which is why I’ve got the angled sides. But because I’ve got the soundboards on the walls, a friend of mine saw me on Zoom and said, “Okay, now what you need is you need to have a light behind you that’s flashing.” I’m like, “So like, yeah, last Christmas I got the LED lights so that I could really lean into the being on Star Trek.” Yeah.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, I mean it’s so funny because it’s just at the tip of the top of the video there. So it looks very much like it’s doing something functional rather than just being some lights on the board. That’s cool. Yeah. So Salt Lake, so do you work from home at Pantheon or do you go into an office?

Chris Reynolds: No, I work from home.

Jesse Friedman: Cool.

Chris Reynolds: There are a couple official sort of offices. The headquarters is in San Francisco, and I’ve been there a couple times. We’ve got I think a WeWork in Vancouver. We used to have something in Minneapolis, but that closed. We might have something in the UK now, and we’ve got a big office where there’s a lot of customer support stuff in Manila. I’ve only been to the San Francisco office. Maybe someday I’ll go visit the Vancouver office though.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. Very cool. Awesome. So yeah, it sounds like you and I had a very similar coming up inside of WordPress. I came upon it when a professor and a friend of mine recommended it as a new CMS. At the time I was using something else. It was like 2003 and oh man, it was like TextPattern or something. I forget the name of it.

It was an old CMS and she said you know, you should really give this thing WordPress a shot. And I fell in love with it instantly. And the reason for that was because at the time, I mean even in its infancy, it was still very intuitive. It made a lot of sense. But there was just this layered level of understanding of the WordPress community that just kept coming.

So you try it first, you download it, then you get exposed to the wiki and the documentation, and you find out how easy it is. Then you sort of start to realize that your development chops are increasing just from using WordPress. And I think, you know, Matt’s vision for WordPress was not only as a tool for building websites, but I remember him distinctly in the past talking about how it’s a great entry into development that students could cut their teeth on WordPress development and really learn how to write PHP and JavaScript, and now incorporate things like AI and all that stuff.

Then all of a sudden you start to realize that there’s local WordPress communities and there are people around you who share these interests and they want to help you and then you go to a WordCamp and you’re blown away by how people there feel so empowered by WordPress, they feel like they have to give back to it. And the way in which they do that often is giving back to the other people around them that have questions and need help and everything else. And so, and then you, you know, from the community, you get into other things and it’s just, it feels like as you progress through WordPress there’s always another layer to kind of help you reinforce the feelings that you have about that and the open web. And so you’ve worked on plugins and other parts. Is the primary focus of your past and your experience being in the open web and building in open source, or do you do other—have you been in other areas as well?

Chris Reynolds: It’s funny. Before venturing into freelancing, I had made a decision after college that I didn’t want to go into web development intentionally because it was something I did for fun. It was something that I did as a hobby and I had friends.

Jesse Friedman: What did you go to college for?

Chris Reynolds: Well, I went to a school that allowed me to create my own major. So the degree is titled Creative Arts in the Digital Revolution, which is like a—

Jesse Friedman: Oh, nice.

Chris Reynolds: That meant like I did a lot of creative stuff like art and graphic design and filmmaking and stuff. But basically all through the lens of doing that stuff on computers, using computers to help with that stuff.

So, you know—

Jesse Friedman: Sure.

Chris Reynolds: Film editing, I took an actual film class with Super 8 film and actual splicers. But then I also took a class where I’m doing video editing in Premiere and stuff like that. But I had friends that had gone to art school and then got a career, had got a job in some sort of artistic graphic design kind of pursuit, and it just killed their passion for the craft that they went to art school for. And I didn’t want to, because doing stuff on the internet was fun, I didn’t want it to not be fun. So I—

Jesse Friedman: Sure.

Chris Reynolds: My first couple jobs besides just retail, were like customer support. I was doing tech support for MSN and then I did tech support for Qwest, which is now CenturyLink. And then I did tech support for Albertsons, the grocery chain. I was doing backend support for their Windows servers inside stores. And I was doing the stuff on—

Jesse Friedman: Wow.

Chris Reynolds: Yeah. Right. And then I decided, okay, well let’s give this web development thing a try. What I found interesting and what I still kind of hold onto from that experience is coming from the perspective of doing technical support for several years, it puts you in the headspace of what the customer experience is.

And it doesn’t matter what you’re talking—

Jesse Friedman: Yep.

Chris Reynolds: Like I understand the frustrations that people have and 90% of being good at tech support is being empathetic. And it’s understanding that the words coming out of the person’s mouth are not necessarily describing the problem, it’s like there’s an outcome that they’re looking for and they think that it might be this particular sequence of processes or tasks or whatever that is the solution to that, but what you really want to address is what is the outcome that is the right thing. And I did tier three support for MSN, which is like the escalation, right? So a lot of the stuff that escalated up to tier three is “I’ve got some billing issue, I’m really upset,” or “I’m really upset because my program isn’t doing X.”

Right? So, the first half of those conversations are trying to de-escalate, but also trying to understand what—

Jesse Friedman: What—

Chris Reynolds: The frustration is and what’s going to make this better. But moving on, like as a developer, as I got deeper and deeper in, understanding that sort of user experience and the ways in which people are going to interact with the software that you’re creating is probably not the way that you intended it as a developer. And so being—

Jesse Friedman: Yep.

Chris Reynolds: Come at it from a perspective of what is the actual experience of somebody using this thing and then anticipating those things, and also I benefited the most when I was actually able to talk to the people that might use the thing that I’m building, right? It seems obvious, but a lot of us, especially when I first got started, we write things for ourselves or we write things in silos.

We don’t necessarily have direct interaction with the people that are consuming the thing that we’re building. And I think that is a really important part of the whole process, which conveniently dovetails into the type of stuff that I’m doing today. I’m basically still having the same conversations, right?

Developer advocacy is all about being in the developer spaces and understanding what their challenges are and both being able to come up with solutions or recommend best practices, but also bubbling stuff up from that space to the powers that be. Because if five people over here are like super power users and they’re having this problem with the software, then that’s probably a big indicator that the software should behave in a different way.

Right.

Jesse Friedman: Right. Yeah. Yeah. You know, that idea that you should—that you gained a lot from doing support and understanding and putting yourself in the shoes of your customers. So at Automattic, for example, you get hired, you do a two-week rotation, you’re immediately dropped right into support.

We have, instead of customer support reps, we have what we call happiness engineers. And it’s very much like the idea that, you know, when you pick up the phone, you probably remember this from the early days of technical support on the phone, they always tell you to have a smile, right? So they can hear your smile.

And so the idea that a happiness engineer has the title of a happiness engineer, it already sets the stage that we’re trying to help you have a better experience. And then every year at Automattic, we do an annual rotation where we, no matter who you are at the company, you go back and you do a week of support.

And I can tell you firsthand, how helpful that’s been for me, reminding myself of what it’s like to be in the shoes of these individuals who are trying to use our products. I remember when I was a kid trying to, you know, I was making some money on the side. I was building websites back in ’98, ’99. At the time I was living on Cape Cod, which for anyone at home is off of Massachusetts. It’s basically a fishing village slash tourism location. And so, the technology on Cape Cod was already a decade behind the rest of the world. So in the late nineties, the idea of websites and businesses having websites was just beyond them.

So it was actually a greenfield. I made a lot of money, put myself through college building websites in that area ’cause nobody had any idea how to do anything down there. But I ended up falling into a space where I started helping people do tech support for computers. And so these were individuals who hadn’t grown up with computers.

They hadn’t had computers for a long time, and they had no idea how to do things. And I remember getting a phone call at one point saying something. It was an older gentleman saying something like “my email’s gone.” And I’m like, “Okay. So let’s open up your email. All right. So, do you see the little envelope on your desktop?”

“What’s a desktop?” “Okay, so when you’re looking at your monitor and you have no software open—” “What’s software?” “All right, so let’s start at the beginning. Is your computer on?”

Chris Reynolds: Yep.

Jesse Friedman: You know, and—

Chris Reynolds: Sounds familiar.

Jesse Friedman: And I reflect on that because you had mentioned before that it’s not necessarily like the person who’s asking for support knows exactly how to define the problem.

They’re coming to you with a specific set of things that they need done. They’re trying to help you understand the struggle that they’re dealing with. And it’s only through the lens of the information that they have, the scope of the knowledge and experience that they have that they can even explain the problem.

And sometimes support is playing investigator. You have to be a Sherlock Holmes to just even figure out what it is that they’re doing or how they’re experiencing things. And then you can start to provide support to them. So it’s very cool that you started in that realm and then were able to come up and then transitioned briefly into developer advocacy.

And so you mentioned that it’s about empowering these developers, but let’s take a quick step back. So anybody at home who’s listening may not know this term. You are not necessarily—this is not like an HR position where you are helping the developers and engineers within Pantheon.

Chris Reynolds: Correct.

Jesse Friedman: I mean, you are, but it’s not advocating for them. You’re advocating for the people who are developing on your platform. The end customer. Right.

Chris Reynolds: The sort of—

Jesse Friedman: Okay.

Chris Reynolds: Developer relations kind of motto that’s passed around a lot within sort of dev rel kind of circles is basically the idea of being customer zero. So even now, myself and my boss, the director of developer relations, one of the things that we’re working on is a product that is not quite beta, not quite ready for people to use, and we’re just being customer zero using that thing as much as possible, talking to people internally and getting them to use it as much as possible. People that deal with customers and saying, “Does this help? Is this good? What is your feedback?” So that we can filter that to the product managers and give our feedback to the product managers and really trying to put the thing through the ropes.

Before we even give it to even early access type of customers. And then when we do, we already come with “this is what I’ve done. These are the situations where I’ve used it to build a thing. And this is what I’ve learned in the process.” And then, you know, as the product like that matures, then we can sort of document and solidify what those best practices of how to use it and what the best way of doing these things. Those things turn into docs or maybe they turn into videos or maybe they turn into use cases or whatever. And that’s sort of the space where developer relations and developer advocacy kind of lives.

Jesse Friedman: So if there’s a big new thing that’s being worked on and maybe it takes a few cycles—yeah, I would love to hear about them. But in this theoretical situation, like there’s something on the horizon that’s coming down the pike. Are you involved in it in the sense that you are helping to shape it or are you purposefully making yourself ignorant to it so that you see it for the first time when it goes to beta and you’re not biased by watching its evolution?

Chris Reynolds: I think it depends on the thing a little bit and it depends on how the product was built. The two things that I can think of off the top of my head that we’re kind of developing right now. One of them is called Content Publisher, which is the idea—well, right now the implementation is if you write your content, WordPress posts, blog pages, pages, whatever, if you already have a workflow where that content is written and shaped in Google Docs then you could continue like—I’ve known this from working in agency space. A lot of the customers that we’re working with use Google Docs extensively, or Office 365 or whatever because of the collaborative editing and because of commenting and whatever. And it’s really difficult to move them away from their existing sort of system, their expectations. Right. I remember begging and pleading teams to please just use the cool stuff we built for you in Gutenberg, in WordPress. Please just use the editor. But they were so, it had just been part of their content workflow for so long that it was a really hard sell. So in this—

Jesse Friedman: Yeah.

Chris Reynolds: Ecosystem, you can continue doing that thing. And there is a Pantheon—

Jesse Friedman: Interesting.

Chris Reynolds: Stack in the middle where your Google doc, you authenticate the Pantheon content cloud stuff in the middle with your Google account, and then your Google document can go into that, and then it’s immediately fed into like a preview on your website. And you can publish stuff from Google to your WordPress site, your Drupal site, a Next.js site, whatever. That’s the current implementation. The future implementation is sort of a many-to-many kind of thing where we still have this stack in the middle where Pantheon does magical Pantheon things, of which I only vaguely understand the technical—there’s a GraphQL and Firestore and stuff in there and there’s an API. And these things are really just tools for connecting to that API. But the idea is you could use Google Docs. You could use Notion, you could use Figma, you could use Office 365.

You could use whatever tools you’re already using on this site, feed in here into the Magical Pantheon product, and then output to whatever—WordPress, Drupal, Next.js, markdown, JavaScript, whatever you want. We just kind of control that middle thing. I think that it’s a really interesting idea.

And so for us, using this as an example of where we were, a lot of that development, a lot of the really early development was sort of done in isolation, in kind of a black box. We’re getting more and more involved in it now because we’re getting to a place where we are starting to show it to people.

And in order to show it to people and talk about it to people, we need to be using the thing and start thinking about the ways in which we could implement this thing. So an idea that I had even just this morning: The Pantheon documentation site is all on GitHub, uses a Gatsby build process. All the pages and documentation are all in markdown, and that’s intentional because we want people to be able to contribute to our documentation, whether you’re a Pantheon employee or you’re just a normal person who found a bug in one of our docs. Right. We want—

Jesse Friedman: Not to say that Pantheon employees are abnormal.

Chris Reynolds: Yes. So, the GitHub repository is ideally the source of truth. But sometimes I get requests from people within Pantheon. We have release notes, right? And release notes can be anything from “we updated this version of the plugin that we maintain,” or “we launched this particular feature on Pantheon and we’re giving you updates about it” or it could be a new thing. And I had gotten a request yesterday for a release note, but it was written in a Google Doc. And so I took the time this morning to translate that Google Doc into markdown, put up a pull request so it can get reviewed, and then we’ll merge it in on Monday.

And it started me thinking, okay, we’re doing this Content Publisher thing. The content is already existing in Google. How can I make my job easier and somehow use this magical middle layer API that we have so that I don’t have to manually transcribe a Google Doc into markdown. That’s literally what the thing does, right? Maybe not the exact use case of the examples that we’ve built yet, but that doesn’t mean that we couldn’t and it’s just using the same technologies in different ways. And those are actually, honestly the types of questions and things that I find really exciting about being in dev rel, honestly, because in my experience of building things but also interacting with users directly, as being customer zero for this thing, I’m using it like I’m having ideas that are not necessarily within the confines of the thing as it was built intentionally. I’m already kind of thinking of ways that I can stretch things and if I’m thinking about those—

Jesse Friedman: Sure.

Chris Reynolds: People are going to, right, other people are going to have—

Jesse Friedman: Yeah.

Chris Reynolds: Interesting ways to break the system.

And I’m all about breaking things.

Jesse Friedman: And that’s the key there is synthesizing ideas around how you can continue to improve the process to make everyone’s lives easier. It sounds like AI might even play a part in trying to solve that too. Like you could have, I feel like AI would be very good at saying, “take this human-made document, turn it into markdown, give it some technical speak so that it’s a little bit more meticulous in its writing.”

And then pump it right into GitHub.

Chris Reynolds: I’m—

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, that’s really cool.

Chris Reynolds: Seeing—I had an idea a few weeks ago of could we enforce a style guide in terms of voice and tone through AI, like have AI review documentation or have AI review even blog posts and make sure that the voice and tone is consistent to whatever we want that voice and tone to be in all of our outgoing materials.

Right? If we want it to be super professional, it could be super professional. If we want it to be super casual, it could be super casual, but having AI do that first kind of review and then provide suggestions is a thing that I’ve been entertaining the idea of.

Jesse Friedman: Very cool. So we’re almost at time for this episode. I have one more question that I want to ask you before we take a pause here. So one of the things that I’m actively doing at WP Cloud and working with our partners is to maintain strong communication with our partners to watch how they’re using WP Cloud and then feed that information back to the systems team and use that to build products and iterate very quickly. And some of the things that our WP Cloud partners love from us is that we take their feedback and we solve for it very quickly, and we give back to them the exact thing that they needed.

And so we have several WP Cloud partners, but I have a group of individuals that I’ve found that are using the platform more effectively or more robustly, or maybe they tend to be on the fringes of what’s actually possible. And so they’re always pushing the envelope and stuff like that.

So when you’re doing this work and you’re starting to test into the products that Pantheon’s pushing out, do you have like a hive, like a group of people that are end customers who are using Pantheon that you are interviewing or talking to, to keep yourself in the mindset of how they’re working.

And another way to think about this is like, how are you keeping yourself abreast of all the changes that are happening in the industry and the workflows and the ways in which people are working and incorporating AI and other things. How do you keep up with that so that when you do test these products, you’re not stuck in an isolated silo of, you know, five years from now, you’re not even up on the latest trends or something like that.

Chris Reynolds: A couple different ways. We definitely have customers that sort of push the envelope in terms of what is currently possible or recommended even to do on Pantheon. Not to say that those specific customers drive direction, but I always see those sorts of customers that are really pushing things and maybe finding places where there are gaps in the product as being ways that can identify things that we can stretch into or decide not to—maybe we don’t want to support that thing. But those are opportunities to stretch what the product can offer. We have a community Slack anybody can join. It’s not super useful if you’re not a Pantheon customer or potential Pantheon customer, but it’s open to anyone. But that is where a lot of our heavier users will come and ask questions.

So that’s a place where I can kind of get a little bit of the pulse of what people are thinking about and talking about. We also have a lot of opportunities for touchpoints, particularly with partners and people that are really driving some of that stuff. And I’ve been when I’ve had conversations with people either from the community or from partners or whatever, I’ve been amazed by some of the things that some of these folks are building and a lot of things are like, “Man, I wish I could pull that directly and can we just build that thing into the platform? ‘Cause that’s amazing.” Somebody built, for a university, he and his team built basically like a Java-based interface for their IT operations for this university that integrated directly with Pantheon using our command line tool, but it was written in Java because they needed more control over user levels and access, but the idea—and they also wanted to have the part of their partner plan and whatever, so basically they white-labeled a dashboard that allowed different departments of the school to spin up new websites, to manage those websites and had all of the correct provisioning within their institution that might be independent or different than the user interface, the user permission system that’s built into the Pantheon dashboard.

And it’s just like I’ve seen it and it’s just amazing. I’m floored. Like, this is so good. I wish that—if we couldn’t do this, I would just at least like to make it easier for you to get to maintain that thing. That’s amazing.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, it’s very cool to think about how you’re building a foundational layer to be creative in the way in which you integrate with something, but you’re not necessarily dictating the exact parameters of how you use it. There’s no guardrails there. It’s just creating the necessary components that are needed to build something there.

That’s very cool. All right, so we’re going to take a break here. When we get back, I would love to talk more about some of the things that you’ve seen developer advocacy actually have as an impact on hosting and what other hosting companies should think about when they’re considering whether or not they need to have a developer advocate and what it could actually mean for an end customer.

So, thank you very much for being here, Chris. And everyone at home will be back with part two of this episode shortly.