Note: This transcript was auto generated then some poor soul sat and listened to it, and followed through correcting any mistakes they spotted. Please however expect human error and shout if you spot an issue. Email: lee [fancy curly symbol] trailblazer.fm.
Verbatim text
Lee:
Welcome to the Trailblazer FM podcast. This is your host, Lee. And today we have on the show, the one, the only. It’s Zack Stepek with the best voice ever. Hey, Zack, how’s it going, mate?
Zack:
Hello, Lee. I’m quite good, my friend.
Lee:
Excellent. So everyone, sit back, relax. We’re now doing ASMR with Zack for the next 30 minutes.
Zack:
Welcome to the ASMR WordPress podcast.
Lee:
That actually should be a thing, by the way. For the folks that don’t know you, Zack, could you share a little What is your started history about yourself, where you’re from, all of that good stuff?
Zack:
Sure. I’ve been a business owner since 1997. Started my first agency out of high school in ’99. I started out in ColdFusion, went to Flash, built a whole bunch of crazy things, and landed in WordPress after Flash died. I’ve enjoyed my time in WordPress ever since. I ran a small e-commerce agency that a few people know about. Since 2020, I’ve been in the hosting industry, and now I work at Big Scoots as the Director of Partnerships there.
Lee:
That is so cool. Isn’t that incredible that Steve Jobs’ decision to not have flash on the iPhone changed your trajectory and drew you to WordPress?
Zack:
Absolutely. Yeah, it definitely is. That was part of how that happened. I took a year off to refocus, and of all things, ended up working for Apple for a year, which I thought was very funny, but worked for Apple for a year, left on my 365th day, moved into working as a user experience architect at a electronic medical records company. It’s been an interesting It’s been a interesting journey. I’ve had roles all across the digital ecosystem, from running an agency to working in UX, building front-end, doing JavaScript development, obviously ColdFusion, PHP. It’s run the gamut, and I think it gives me a well-rounded perspective now that I’m in the hosting industry into the types of problems that agency owners face. It’s cool.
Lee:
Basically, you’re such a nerd. I was reading the other day as well that back in the old days, an attractive proposition to an employer was somebody who’d been in one place for a very long time. But this is changing. All of us with that more richer, diverse history of being in different places for shorter amounts of time is actually far more attractive, I think, nowadays to employers because it literally proves that well-rounded thing. But let’s not make this about business because you came up with a really… You Just to throw away comment, something along the lines when we were chatting, we WhatsApp each other now and again and we were having chat. I told you that I was rekindling the podcast and you joked saying, Why are so many WordPress people musicians? I was just like, Wait a minute. I think he’s right. I thought of all the WordPress people I know, I’m like, Yeah, they’re a musician. They play an instrument, too. I’ve also just interviewed, just before this podcast, Phil VanDusen, who isn’t He’s a WordPress guy, but he’s a creative. He’s a web designer. I said, Oh, they’re nice headphones. He’s like, Yeah, I use them for my mixing and everything.
Lee:
He creates music. We started talking about the tech and everything. First question, as the expert that I’ve now claimed you are, why do you think that most WordPress people have that music crossover?
Zack:
I think it has a lot to do with the creativity involved involved in being a WordPresser. There’s a certain amount of right and left brain coordination required for understanding the difference between themes and plugins and how to build a good WordPress site. But it’s not a phenomenon that’s actually just in WordPress. It just seems way more apparent in WordPress because for some reason, WordPressers are much more open about their music. It’s funny, but I think it’s that combination of right and left brain necessity to build a website with a tool like WordPress that has led to so many people who are musically oriented being part of the community.
Lee:
That’s interesting as well that you said people are more likely to share. I think that’s quite a reflection on what a friendly community that WordPress has It’s built up anyway over the years, isn’t it? Because there’s so many WordPress groups, say, just on Facebook alone. In fact, you and me probably met, I can’t even remember now, but years ago through one of those very same communities.
Zack:
Yeah. The great part about all of that is, I think part of the reason WordPress became attractive to musicians when they’re looking for a solution is this fact that releases have been tied around jazz for as long as they have, right?
Lee:
Oh, I didn’t think of that.
Zack:
So I think that has something to do with it. But I don’t think that’s the primary reason. I think once people who are musically inclined realise there are so many more of us in the WordPress community that are also musically inclined, we talk about it. We converse about music in addition to just WordPress in those spaces where we gather. And even have had bands come together from WordPress community members at events. There are agencies where at their annual holiday get-togethers or their annual company retreats, they put a band together made entirely from members of their agency.
Lee:
I actually didn’t know that either. That’s crazy.
Zack:
Yeah, it’s a pretty common thing. When I started at Big Scoots, it was funny because I interviewed with Tim Monner, who is our Chief Marketing Officer, and he had a guitar in the background and a keyboard in the background. I’m sitting in a room here, and obviously on the audio podcast, you can’t see this, but to my left is a keyboard and a stand with six guitars on it. I’m sitting in a recording studio. I I have a Native Instruments machine to my right, a whole rack of audio equipment, a Kemper rack, a whole bunch of audio gear, because I record music in this room, where I also record podcasts. When I first was in that meeting with Tim, the first thing we talked about was music, and I have a feeling that had a lot to do with me ending up landing in the role that I’m in.
Lee:
That’s awesome. Again, this is an audio podcast, so people can’t see, but I do have a guitar hanging right behind my head, which you can see, mate, because we are on video for each other. Again, like you to my right, I have my keyboard. I, though, I’m very light on tech. I just plug directly into my computer. I run Linux, and I’ve got Q-Synth set up on here, and I love to do lots of MIDI, et cetera, and create my own music that way because I’m terrible at reading music, but I can play the keyboard, so I’ll then get it to notate everything for me, which is cool. But yeah, that’s my own background. Do you play any instruments as well?
Zack:
I play keys a bit. I play guitar a bit. I’m not great at any of them, but I can write music. I’ve got a couple of songs on iTunes and Spotify with a project.
Lee:
If you remember, can you send me the link to those? And then we can get you some downloads.
Zack:
Yeah, that’s a project I put together with some friends from I live here in Rockford, Illinois. We’re about an hour and a half northwest of Chicago. It’s called She’s Therapy. We’ve got two songs that we wrote together, and then everybody got busy, and we haven’t seen each other for over a year. But that’s how it goes sometimes. That was never meant to be a touring project. It was just something where we were a whole bunch of people that loved music, and we got together and wrote some music. I think that the reason why it’s so apparent in the WordPress community is, one, we all end up in a lot of places where we’re on Zoom meetings together. We are on video calls because so much of the WordPress community works remotely. We all like working in the places where we feel most comfortable. That tends to be also the place where our instruments are. Which is fun. Running the agency partnerships at big scouts, I have meetings with agency owners, and we will get on a video call, and probably seven times out of 10, there’s an instrument on the wall, or there’s a keyboard in view.
Zack:
It’s just this constant thing that has become more and more apparent to me the longer I’ve been in WordPress.
Lee:
Now, you mentioned jazz, and it got me to thinking, who improvises more? Jazz is more jazz musicians or clients telling you what they meant in the brief.
Zack:
Definitely clients. I mean, it’s pretty similar, sometimes equally hard to follow. But at least with jazz, there’s some structure and reason, 90% of the time, to why things are moving where they are.
Lee:
I did hear someone, though, say that jazz is like listening to five professional musicians who are all playing their own thing.
Zack:
Sometimes that is the way it is. It’s funny because there are a number of things in WordPress that are similar to that as well, right? So when you’re on a team building a site and you’ve got your front-end developer, your Themer working on your theme, and you’ve got your back-end developer working on custom code, and you’ve got a project manager working on trying to distil what the client wants into things that make sense for the other two people to follow, like a conductor. You have all of these different players who have different parts that fit together. And when you do it right, it’s all orchestrated together into this beautiful symphony that becomes a great website.
Lee:
That is a crazy good metaphor.
Zack:
When Can you do it badly, though, it just sounds like middle school band warmup.
Lee:
That’s true. There’s a lot we could learn from musicians.
Zack:
Absolutely.
Lee:
Let’s look at that. So your band all got together here and you essentially wrote together and laid down a couple of tracks, some pieces, and then life got busy, et cetera. What was the process for you guys doing that and what are the similarities for building a web project with the Well, we came together, we started just jamming, coming up with concepts, ideas.
Zack:
We all brought things we had written independently together into the room. One of the songs called Invisible Me started as this nearly video game-esque keyboard track that I had written. And we turned it, we orchestrated things into it. There’s strings and other things that weren’t there when we started. There’s a cello, a violin, and there’s a whole bunch of other electronic pieces that were added, and guitar, which was never there. So we brought all of that in, and we built the track together from just this vague concept of what could be a song, right? Yeah. And then Naomi, who was one of the two vocalists in the band, she She had written the beginning of some lyrics that she felt fit the melancholy sound of the song. We took those lyrics that are very melancholy, and then we brought that, wrote together as a group of four, wrote the rest of the lyrics, tailored it to fit the song structure a little better. Then we all came together at the end to make a really interesting decision. Most songs have a very delineated structure. You have verse, chorus, verse, chorus. Chorus is a one and one, right?
Lee:
Throw a bridge at the end. I’m sorry. And then another course.
Zack:
Exactly. There are these standard structures, and we decided we were going to go verse, chorus, verse, chorus, and then have a piano play the chorus a last time, and then just let the song devolve into sound from there. It was a very interesting decision, but it fits. It works well. It fits the melancholy vibe of everything else. That was how that song came together. I think in a site build, we all come with our preconceived notions of how the site should to be built. I’m in the middle of a site rebuild project for the BigScoots website right now. We all have come with our preconceived notions of what should be where and how it should work. Working with a company the size of the of big scouts is more like working in an orchestra. There are a number of people who all have opinions, and some of them are great and some of them are good, and very few of them have been bad, which is nice. That’s just how it works, right? Everybody’s going to have a bad idea sometimes. I have bad ideas all the time. It happens at least daily, right? But it’s how you all come together and then turn the good ideas into magic and the bad ideas get worked through and turned into something better.
Zack:
And in the end, it’s really about bringing a team together to reach a common goal, and it’s very similar to what happens in creating music.
Lee:
Now, one thing I was thinking, and I think you said it or I thought it, and sometimes it’s hard for me to distinguish which, but I think you said music is quite modular or something along those lines.
Zack:
I’m thinking of the way that a website is built as well.
Lee:
You have your theme, you have your custom written functions modules, which could be in the functions of the theme or in the actual or custom plugins you’ve created. But also modular as in you might try and create what the client needs through a series of off-the-shelf plugins which you will also configure. I’m thinking, especially when it comes to, say, me working with MIDI and layering all these instruments together, et cetera, but also using lots of different software tools to the magic happen. I’m wondering whether there’s a natural propensity for those sorts of problem solvers, i. E. Musicians with the different instruments or different tech, and people putting together a WordPress website in that same manner.
Zack:
I would say that’s probably very true. I think if we look at the core of the Western music scale, there are 12 notes. Everything is built on 12 notes. If we look at WordPress, the vast majority of sites have plugins that fill a certain number of roles, whether that’s SEO or image optimisation or performance optimisation, form plugins, all of these things that add functionality that’s required for almost every site, right? And they’re all on top of this base layer of WordPress, which is like our 12 notes. So WordPress provides that chromatic scale, and then we add embellishments to that to bring things together into something bigger than that. It’s cool how that parallel sits with how we build something in WordPress. When I’m writing, I’m not writing for a specific genre ever, which means I’m pulling from all of these various things that I’ve learned over the years, all the things that I’ve heard, all the music that I’ve consumed, all the content that I’ve consumed. I’m bringing all of that together into this cohesive hole. If you listen to a She’s Therapy track, you might hear some influence from something in a melancholy, sad, and sombre track, but influenced by industrial and rock the things that I traditionally listen to.
Zack:
Just as that happens in music, and we pull from all of our influences, I think we’re seeing that in the WordPress industry, we have people who, like us, have been through everything from using a generic text editor to build HTML before CSS even existed. Because we all We are, unfortunately. We lived through using tables as a design element and single pixel spacer gifs.
Lee:
I’ll die on that hill. I love tables.
Zack:
I do as well. But we lived through positioning with single pixel spacer gifs in order to get imagery where we wanted it and in order to create consistency. We lived through the browser wars and the complete difference in- And only being able to pick from 12 fonts or something like that, I think it was. Yeah. And then the fact that every browser rendered differently. So we had to have tools that showed us how each rendering engine was going to interpret our HTML, which is what drove me to flash in the first place, by the way, was consistency, right? So All right. All of those things, we’ve learned to use all of those influences that we have developed over the years. And now, as we’re all in the WordPress community together, we’re taking all of that influence, and it’s an open source project, right? So we can actually contribute back the stores of knowledge we have as individuals into creating a tool that works the way we think it should work. And if the core project doesn’t like the way we think it should work, or if we don’t think the way the core project does, then we’re free to build our own tools around it that make it work the way we want it to.
Zack:
So that’s why we have a plethora of page builders available, because WordPress core may not work the way everybody wants to work. So, Elementor found a path where it seems a lot of people enjoy what they build. Divi has done similar things. There’s a whole bunch of Divi users out there. And then we’ve got the block editor, which replaced our tiny MCE-based world for something that is a better building experience than a single- Well, it’s put Markdown, which I love, so I’m happy about that. Then on top of that, there are new page builders out all the time. You have Oxygen that came out quite a few years ago now. You have Breakdance, which the Oxygen team built. You have projects like Etch, where Kevin’s got his team working on building a builder now. All of these projects are because those people don’t necessarily like the way that CORE works. We have this ability in this open-source project to forge our own path if we want to. Some people will adhere to that path, and some people will adhere to another. How I’m probably not going to sit here listening to country music, but I listen to some, but it’s not my preference.
Zack:
And not everybody is going to sit listening to black metal from Europe as they as they work or listen to hard rock. I don’t think that that’s everybody’s cup of tea. I know there are people- You sounded really British when you said that.
Lee:
A cup of tea.
Zack:
Cup of tea. But that’s the thing. We all have our preferences, and WordPress allows us to live in our preference. And work within a structure that fits us. I think that’s- I want to rift off this as well to use a term.
Lee:
You mentioned that we’ve used all of these different platforms and have these different experiences. You, for example, started off in cold fusion, et cetera. I started off creating Windows applications. When I got into Windows applications, I was using Delphi by Borland and using the visual editor in there as well to lay out applications. I designed the database, and then I would then lay out the user interface, et cetera, and then compile these applications that would work in the security industry. This is like early 2000s. I’d gone from website to building programmes, but I now use WordPress in a very similar way still. I’ll use advanced custom fields and I’ll use Bricks Builder. Advanced custom fields allows me to create the data set, i. E, the database. Then I’ve got Bricks Builder, which is the visual layer on top that allows me to create all of the visual, what people are going to interact with in the forms, etc. I’ll throw in something like, I don’t know, formidable forms as well for some pretty forms, and then a whole load of code for my own logic, et cetera. But that would be a typical development stack for me, which is not at all what WordPress was designed for, which was posts and pages, i.e, a blog platform. But now, because I’m able to utilise these different tools, I’m able to lean on the experience I had back in the early ‘naughties’ when I was developing software for Windows and the ideas that I gained there, so the influences, just like you said, in music. Then I’m able to put something together, which I shared on LinkedIn, and I’ll put a link actually in the show notes as well. I made a matchmaking tool, which is a whole mix of all of those different things, those tools that I just mentioned, and also a whole lot of my own co-founders, code and experiences. It’s very freeing, isn’t it, with WordPress, that you can literally do whatever you want.
Zack:
It is. I mean, and that’s the thing. I think Jonathan Wold is the first person that I ever heard use the term the operating system of the web to describe WordPress.
Lee:
I’ve not heard that.
Zack:
But really, that’s what it’s becoming, right? It’s this ecosystem around ecosystems. So Yeah, and Elementor is its own ecosystem. WooCommerce is its own ecosystem. Easy Digital Downloads is its own ecosystem. Even form plugins have their own ecosystems around.
Lee:
And their own diehard fans as well.
Zack:
Absolutely. But it’s become the glue that brings all of it together, just like your operating system is the glue that brings all the software together that you use on your desktop, right? It’s an interesting paradigm to think that, really, WordPress has become the operating system of the web. And now that it’s, what, 45, 46% of the Internet, I think, is what was shared during the parts of state of the word that I could actually watch yesterday. Looking forward to finally catching up on that video today. But now that we’re at that ubiquity as a platform, right? Over four out of every 10 websites is built on WordPress, it truly has become the operating system of the web. It’s cool to see that. Like I was saying earlier with the we have 12 notes in the chromatic scale, right? WordPress provides that solid structure, those 12 notes, for us to be able to build on top of. And boy, do we build, and we build in so many ways.
Lee:
Sometimes not so good, like you said earlier.
Zack:
Sometimes they’re terrible ideas, and they- I’m responsible for that. Yeah. I mean, I’ve been responsible for some pretty horrible decisions myself over the years.
Lee:
Especially with post-meta, I have made some bad decisions. Yeah.
Zack:
Yeah. And that’s the thing when you’re given complete freedom and absolute power. Well, with absolute power comes absolute responsibility. Working in the hosting industry, I can tell you that we see sites of all shapes and sizes, right? And sometimes when we’re doing some performance optimisation for one of our customers, the the thing we’re seeing is that just bad decisions were made along the way, right? And we have to help them to untangle some of those decisions that are causing unnecessary queries to happen to the database or just all of these decisions that were made, right? And very similarly, when you are orchestrating a piece or when you are writing a song, there may be parts you have to take out to make the song work. It’s very similar. I can tell you that I’ve thrown away more music than I’ve released.
Lee:
Yes, same.
Zack:
That’s just part of the process. Maybe years later, that thing we’ve invested time into, that small little lick that you wrote six years before you got together in a room with a group of people, will become a full song. It’s just that’s how it works. Sometimes we put a lot of effort into building something, and that piece just doesn’t fit. But later on, you might end up with a project where that piece fits perfectly.
Lee:
I’ve lost count, actually, of the amount of times that’s happened as well. There’s been a function I’ve written, it’s not worked. It’s in GitHub, so I’ll never lose it anyway. Then one day I’m like, Oh, my word, this would be perfect, and I can just go and pull that and put it in, or it becomes the beginning of a completely brand new product.
Zack:
You think about how some of these musicians work when they’re in the studio. They’re coming with riffs they’ve written, with drum parts that they’ve been working on, but they may not have played those pieces together ever before they come together and do that. I was watching a video about how the song Kashmir by Led Zeppelin was written. He just came with the rift that was the foundation of the song. It was something he had been playing around with. It was the tail end of a recording of something else. He brought that in, and they built what is arguably one of the most recognised Led Zeppelin songs off of this throwaway rift that was at the end of another recording.
Lee:
Crazy.
Zack:
And that happens.
Lee:
And this very podcast was literally a throwaway comment.
Zack:
It was. It was. Yeah.
Lee:
And look how deep we’ve gone. This is ridiculous. I didn’t think it was this deep. I thought we were going to I’d be joking the entire time. I’m like, This is crazy deep.
Zack:
I tend to make things that are silly deeper than they should be, I suppose.
Lee:
No, this is mind-blowing, but it makes perfect sense. I guess what I should be asking you as we are talking about music is, if WordPress, the WordPress community were a band, what genre do you think they would There’s a really simple and lazy answer to this, and then there’s the answer that I think is the reality.
Zack:
The simple, lazy answer is, well, obviously, it would be jazz of some sort. That’s just the simple, lazy answer. We’re all doing our own thing. I don’t know that that’s true, though. I think that we cross genre so much as people in the WordPress community, that it would be some amalgamation of multiple genres, very similar to how modern rock has brought its influences from all over the place. It was all ready, a combination of jazz and blues. So you add to that the influences of electronic music and the country scene and all the things that have come together to form what is modern rock. We’re totally a modern rock band.
Lee:
I agree. Absolutely, wholeheartedly. Many people don’t listen to music as they work because they like the silence. I am a music listener, and I will listen to classical music as I work or film scores, particularly Batman: Dark Knight Rising, because that’s got a very If I need to do some work urgently. That’s me and my playlist. What would be your playlist if you needed listening to me some music whilst working?
Zack:
It depends on what I’m doing. If it’s something that requires intense focus, then I generally will play something that’s Synthwave covers of video game music, which is a lot of fun, like the very chill playlist, a lot of Zelda, a lot of that stuff. I love it. Then if I’m just working on something where thought is the most important thing, I turn on the music that’s the most familiar to me because that’s what engages my brain to fire the synopses that are recognising the lyrics and the things that are there without me necessarily having to consciously pay attention to it. I find that that helps me to keep my brain more active when I’m working on things that maybe don’t require the intense focus, but just require me to get into a flow state.
Lee:
Again, really valuable information. You went deep again, mate. I love it.
Zack:
I can’t help it.
Lee:
No, that’s fine. Well, I appreciate your time. Thank you so much. We are, however, at the point where I’ve received the notification that my dinner will be ready, and then I’ll be able to have dinner and then jump onto my next podcast So I had better go in a second. But before we do that, mate, what is the best way for people to connect with both you and the company that you rock with?
Zack:
So BigScoots.Com is the best way to find us as a company. I am @zstepek pretty much everywhere. If you want to see the one thing we didn’t talk about music related that I do, which is my photography, that is on my Instagram. Of course.
Lee:
And I’ve seen those pictures.
Zack:
Yeah. I actually photograph rock musicians outside of work. Then yeah, @zstepek, pretty much everywhere. I’m on all the social media, Which is a terrible, horrible, and also amazing thing.
Lee:
Even next.
Zack:
Yeah, I’m still there. I’m still there.
Lee:
I’m proud of you.
Zack:
No, you can find me, or if you just want to email me about website hosting because you think my take on music is awesome, [email protected].
Lee:
What a great call to action. I love it. Your copywriter will be blown away. Mate, thank you so much for your time. Have a crack-in day, and I’m off to go eat food.
Zack:
Enjoy.
Lee:
See you later.
