viewSource

## [00:00:00] Introduction

[00:00:00] **Aurooba Ahmed:** You are listening to viewSource a conversation around tech, web development, and WordPress with hosts Aurooba Ahmed That's me and Brian Coords

[00:00:10] season finale. How does it feel to get to the end of season one, Brian?

[00:00:15] **Brian Coords:** I know, I, I'm glad we didn't kill off any main characters or, um, do any like terrible, like lost style reveals that this was all a dream, just a good classic season arc.

[00:00:28] **Aurooba Ahmed:** But we may have a cliffhanger, so there may be one of those, right?

[00:00:35] **Brian Coords:** I guess so, I don't know, is there?

[00:00:39] **Aurooba Ahmed:** I guess so.

[00:00:39] **Brian Coords:** It's a surprise for me. Hmm. Okay.

## [00:00:43] Introducting the viewSource Draft

[00:00:43] **Aurooba Ahmed:** All right, so today we are recording. This is the last episode of this season, before we go on a break, and we're doing a little bit something different today, what we're gonna do is something inspired by David Bisset and his draft episodes that he does sometimes in the WordPress community, which I've been a part of twice, and I really love them.

[00:01:06] And

[00:01:07] **Brian Coords:** Yeah, I think his invite didn't make it into my inbox, I guess. I don't know. I mean, maybe. Maybe it's in a unread dm, I guess. I don't know. David.

[00:01:15] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Check those spam filters. My goodness.

[00:01:18] **Brian Coords:** Yeah, that's probably where it is.

[00:01:19] **Aurooba Ahmed:** So basically how it goes is we have three topics, and for each of those three topics, we both knew them ahead of time and we have to come up with our favorite answer to that topic. However, if. Let's say you, Brian, choose an answer. I cannot give the same answer, so you have to have backups ready.

[00:01:41] Now it's just the two of us, so I think that we both just have one backup each and it should be okay, but I guess we'll find out. So although we said in our one of our reflection episodes that we don't wanna do surprises anymore, there's definitely surprises in this episode.

[00:01:57] **Brian Coords:** Yeah, that's true. I think you, you'll probably guess my answers, I bet. We should have done the one where, like, you ask a question and then I guess what your answer's gonna be, and we see how close, how well we know each other. Um, Nope, I'm ready.

[00:02:11] **Aurooba Ahmed:** okay. I mean, that would be cool, but I honestly don't know. We'll see. Let's find out.

[00:02:17] **Brian Coords:** It'd be like, how does Brian feel about dark mode? Then you'd have to answer. Just kidding.

[00:02:22] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Oh, that's an easy one. I think the whole internet can answer that one now.

[00:02:26] **Brian Coords:** Yeah. How do they, how does Aurooba feel about the documentation of the Gutenberg project in WordPress? Hmm. It's a mystery.

## [00:02:33] Favourite WordPress conversation of the season

[00:02:33] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Such a mystery. My goodness. All right, so our very first question, and Brian, you're gonna go first because I'm asking the question is, what is your favorite WordPress conversation or tidbit from the last season? This season, I guess.

[00:02:52] **Brian Coords:** So my absolute favorite. I don't know if, I guess it's a conversation. It's really like a whole episode. Well, really it's a whole two episode arc. It's the, but it's really one episode where from very early on where we did the Gutenberg block, three different ways. It was like the same block, three different versions of it.

[00:03:11] Because I think it was the most, like here's it was, I think the first time we hit it of like, here's a, a way. That we like, explained a thing that like I learned from it. People learned from it. It was a like a mental, like cloud was cleared.

[00:03:30] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Sniped on the first question. Oh my goodness. That was mine too.

[00:03:36] **Brian Coords:** Really?

[00:03:37] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Yes. That was definitely all one of my all-time favorite conversations, but I can't pick that one now. But you're right. I think that

[00:03:45] **Brian Coords:** Yeah.

[00:03:46] **Aurooba Ahmed:** it was a shift, right? It was like a defining moment for us in the podcast because once we did that, we were like, oh, that was kind of cool.

[00:03:56] Maybe we should do more things like that. You know, we'd never done something quite like that before.

[00:04:00] **Brian Coords:** Yeah, like just breaking apart code, showing like different ways it could be done. Talking through the thought process. Um, yeah, but mostly because I feel like I learned a lot from it. That's like half of the reason I picked it.

[00:04:12] **Aurooba Ahmed:** I think the reason I really liked it is because it felt so real in the sense that, you could see two people figuring something out together and talking through it. And that's a really big part of like regular tech dev work, work life. But you don't get to often see it with other people, you know, unless you're also involved.

[00:04:31] So I don't know, I thought that was just really, really cool and it felt authentic and transparent in the best way. But now I can't pick that one.

[00:04:40] **Brian Coords:** yeah, I forgot. What's your, what's your real answer now?

[00:04:44] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Okay, so now my answer and maybe could be considered a cop, but or not. Okay, well, we'll find out. Honestly, I got a huge kick out of our theme tangent from the last episode in the wishlist for modern WordPress. We had that conversation around default themes and what we liked and didn't like about it, and then had that moment, like I liked it enough that I went into Descript and I cut that piece out to share on social media because I thought it was so hilarious and so just fun to talk about and reflect on the bird theme and the other default themes that we like. I don't know, always makes me smile, so I really, that was my second one. What about you?

[00:05:23] **Brian Coords:** Yeah, that was a good, that was a good one. You you want my second one?

[00:05:27] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Yeah. What was it?

[00:05:28] **Brian Coords:** Curious? My second favorite conversation was the one where I had to explain what Bootstrap was to you and like we went through it and you were like asking all these things about like, yeah, but I want a design framework that does this, this, and this.

[00:05:41] And it was like, yeah, actually Bootstrap does all those things. And it was just a, it was fun because it's like, I don't think there should be like a bootstrap in WordPress, but like WordPress is so opinionated these days about your design framework and it has a lot of room to grow to be a good design framework.

[00:05:57] So it was kind of fun to like talk about kind of the OG great design framework, you know, and, and modern WordPress. And I felt like you,

[00:06:06] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Yeah.

[00:06:07] **Brian Coords:** you, it was fun showing you how Bootstrap works.

[00:06:13] **Aurooba Ahmed:** I think I definitely learned a lot in that conversation, and it also made me realize just how WordPress focused my worldview was around bootstrap because I had never experienced bootstrap outside of the WordPress world and within the WordPress world, I found it excruciatingly difficult to work with.

[00:06:30] Always, even before modern WordPress stuff, I just never thought it was like very great within WordPress. But when you walked me through all of it, I saw, I saw how if you weren't inside another kind of a framework, wannabe framework or a beginner framework, which WordPress in some ways always been cause always has classes and all kinds of things, um, I, it clicked for me how that could be really great and how it could be really advantageous and.

[00:07:00] Like we talked about in that episode, you know, there are lots of smart things inside Bootstrap and I really do appreciate some of them, especially at the JavaScript part, which I really like, enjoy in Bootstrap actually, how they do that stuff. But yeah, you know, you, you, you really showed me a lot there and I appreciated being called, called out for my, um, bias and maybe some prejudice around bootstrap.

[00:07:26] **Brian Coords:** Yeah, I mean, It's, I just think it's fun to see how like, A lot of the problems WordPress is trying to solve right now have been solved in the past and it's like WordPress is kind of going slow and trying different things and experimenting and they can't just like use the solutions that worked 10 years ago.

[00:07:43] They do have to kind of think ahead and even bootstrap is like constantly trying to change and like keep its classic-y grid 12 column grid stuff, but embrace modern stuff. So it's kind of fun just to dig into all of that cuz it really affects how you build, how you think, how you design all of that stuff.

[00:07:58] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Oh definitely. You know, just the way I think about how WordPress is going now, it's not about taking your some, it's a lot easier if you start with the framework in mind when you're creating these kinds of things because it has all these opinions that you have to work with and to some, some extent cannot even strip out or it's, doesn't make sense to strip out.

[00:08:19] It's not like sustainable to do so,

[00:08:22] **Brian Coords:** We should link in the show notes to, I don't know if you saw the recent post by our pal MRW about his events calendar skin and he was, it was really interesting cuz he was basically showing how like a very popular plugin is so opinionated in design and it just doesn't like, Why isn't it like using your theme.json values and why isn't it like, you know, for such a popular plugin and he had kind of written a little code to deal with that and bring in like your padding scale and all this sort of stuff.

[00:08:50] And it's the kind of thing that you're like, we're all hoping that plugins, I know we use gravity form sometimes, you know, you're like, okay, can you guys start bringing this stuff in? It's right there. There's a big JSON file with all these opinions. Like, you know, start bringing it in. So I think it will be the future, you know, it's just taking time.

[00:09:07] But we should link to that Cause it's a good one.

[00:09:09] **Aurooba Ahmed:** totally. Yeah, we'll definitely drop that in the show notes here. Um, Mark comes up with really awesome stuff when, when Mark drops a post, it's worth reading. You know, it doesn't happen often, but when it does, oh yeah. You wanna read that?

[00:09:21] **Brian Coords:** he was like, they should use design tokens. As I've kind of hinted at, it's like the guy who wrote like the like definitive, like, you know,

[00:09:30] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Yeah,

[00:09:30] **Brian Coords:** for like introducing design tokens. Yeah.

[00:09:33] **Aurooba Ahmed:** definitely. All right, so that was our first question. Good answers. I got sniped for sure.

## [00:09:40] Favourite side effect of doing season one

[00:09:40] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Second one. What is your favorite side effect from doing season one?

[00:09:47] I'll go first. I'll go first. I'll go first. Okay. Okay. Um, I think my favorite side effect from doing season one is the mini course that I did. I don't think that I could have done it. A 24 hour sprint when I la create, plan, create, and launch a little course. I don't think I could have done it if we hadn't been doing these weekly recordings where yes, we plan, but we also have like a lot of in the moment things and having to pivot and it was, it's almost like being in this masterclass of thinking on your feet and figuring things out and making sure it all makes sense together as you're doing it. And I feel like with this season, I got so much practice that it made something like the mini course sprint possible. So that is my favorite side effect. I don't think I'm gonna get sniped on this.

[00:10:44] **Brian Coords:** it's my mine is so close, so, so mine is similar, which is that since we started this, I finally like dusted off the like YouTube account and started doing tutorial videos on it and. It's like a thing, like teaching people things is like a thing I've done in like day job work constantly. So it's very natural to do that and to teach and to record things and stuff.

[00:11:09] But I'd had. Maybe some insecurity about like doing it more publicly or sitting down and like actually committing to like recording and looking in a camera and like making like little poses and all that stuff. But, uh, after this it was like, we like ripped the bandaid off of it. So, so mine was similar.

[00:11:25] It wasn't a mini course, but it was like, like you said, like the skills, like we went through like the college level course of like how to quickly make video content and how to edit and how to present it and all that stuff. And it was like, Definitely so much easier to get myself over the hump of starting it, and now it's been going and it's fun and I'm having a good time with it.

[00:11:48] **Aurooba Ahmed:** so

[00:11:51] **Brian Coords:** is that

[00:11:51] **Aurooba Ahmed:** I think it's a snipe. It's a snipe. It's, it's, it's, it's like essentially we both are saying the same thing, that it helped us do the content creation that we always wanted to do and helped us learn how to do it better and faster and on our feet. So I think you're gonna have to tell me your second one.

[00:12:10] **Brian Coords:** My second one. My second one's a little cheesy. You sure you want it?

[00:12:14] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Yeah, now I do especially

[00:12:17] **Brian Coords:** yeah. It's uh, my second one. The best side effect of this has definitely been like conversations with people in WordPress, um, since we started.

[00:12:26] **Aurooba Ahmed:** That's not cheesy.

[00:12:27] **Brian Coords:** It's like, it's like sentimental enough to where it, it makes me uncomfortable. Like, oh, the nice conversations in the heartfelt, uh, relationships we've made along the way.

[00:12:39] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Hmm.

[00:12:40] **Brian Coords:** It's like, I mean it, but like, it's hard for me to be that, that sentimental. But it's true. It's, uh, it's been a super fun getting feedback, getting conversation started. Uh, Hearing people say things about the topics that we've talked about, um, and people I don't, I'd never talked to before, so that would be my second one.

[00:13:00] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Okay.

[00:13:01] **Brian Coords:** close to your second one?

[00:13:03] **Aurooba Ahmed:** No, no. My second one is something we can't talk about yet. It's the cliffhanger we'll have near the end, but I don't know if that thing that we're doing might have happened if the podcast hadn't been a thing. The podcast came first, you know, so, Yeah.

[00:13:24] **Brian Coords:** Yeah, we have the WP Helpers Sprint of work that we did. Um, yeah, I know there's so many things we can't really talk about, but, but they're, they're, they're there and they're cool. And they will, they will be released at one point in a time.

## [00:13:40] Something cool we learned in the lasts 6 months

[00:13:40] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Okay. And the third question that we have here, and so you have to go first for this one now, is what is the coolest thing you learned during season one? And this doesn't have to be something that we covered on the podcast, it's just during this time, this time period of nearly six months that we've done viewSource season one.

[00:14:02] What is something cool that you learned that sticks out to you?

[00:14:06] **Brian Coords:** So that one was a very easy one, which is

[00:14:09] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Okay.

## [00:14:10] Brian digs into React

[00:14:10] **Brian Coords:** before we had started the podcast, I had used frameworks like Laravel and JavaScript stuff like Vue had been like the one that I'd mostly spent the most time with and actually Angular in some weird ways, but I'd never touched React. Like I touched it a little bit and like I understood it, like the concept of it, but I just never, picked it as a tool for a project and luckily I had never been thrown into a project that was using it. So I had gone all the way up until 2023, never really touching React except for like, you know, three lessons of a Wes Bos course. So the last six months I've definitely spent a lot of time in React, WordPress and otherwise, and that's been my favorite thing to learn just because, uh, it's such a huge ecosystem and community and there's a ton of, just stuff and it's a completely different and cool way to think about how you develop and how you code. Um, so it's been a big, fun experience, kind of like going from hating JSX to kind of enjoying react.

[00:15:14] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Yeah, I think that we even said that in the, one of the earlier episodes, you had a mini rant about how you didn't like how JSX looked and worked, and now you live in it.

[00:15:25] **Brian Coords:** There in our, in our list of all of our episode ideas, there's like an episode idea that's like, Brian thinks react is ugly. And I don't know how we thought we'd make an entire episode out of that. Like that's, the entire episode is just me explaining why JSX is ugly. I've gotten used to it, but it's, it's, you know, I, I don't know.

[00:15:46] I, I think I still like the, the Vue style, like, HTML throw some JavaScript in it. Yeah. Instead of like JavaScript and then like stick your html in it. But I'm used to it now. I'm used to it.

[00:16:02] **Aurooba Ahmed:** that's fair. I think I personally go back and forth on it like I learned JSX very early on. So it just made sense to me, I guess. I don't know, my brain just works that way perhaps. But after being exposed to other ways that other people do JavaScript and Vue and everything, I definitely see pros and cons for both.

[00:16:24] And there are times where I'm think, oh this, this would've been so much simpler to express, not in JSX, for example. So that does sometimes happen to me too. So I get that, but I'm also really excited that you have gotten to spend so much time in React, and I've gotten to spend so much time in React too.

[00:16:42] And it's a, it's a, it's a fun, interesting new, it's not new, but it's new for newish for me, still in the sense that it's in the last like few years and doing it in the context of WordPress or outside of it has just been, it's so much fun to learn new things. Sometimes it sucks, but sometimes it's so much fun.

[00:17:00] Right.

## [00:17:01] Dealing with change in the WordPress community

[00:17:01] **Brian Coords:** Yeah, I think there's like a, a side, especially in the WordPress community, if there's like a, a mindset that's like, please don't change anything ever, and let me just do things the same way over and over. And I get it. Like, if your job isn't to be a developer, your job is to just deliver sites to clients, then I get that mindset.

[00:17:18] But when you go back into like developer mode and you know, you realize like, oh, I just wanna learn something new. Try something new. It's fun to have all of this stuff. And then you hit a point where you're like, I kind of don't care if it's Vue or react or whatever. Like maybe at the higher level there's a place where you care.

[00:17:35] And maybe when you're a very beginner, there's a place where you care. But there's this huge space in the middle where it's like, eh, it's all just fun and the same. And you know, it's cool to just do different things, different ways. And why not? Who cares if it's ugly? It's, you know, it's just fun.

[00:17:50] **Aurooba Ahmed:** That was my second answer, so I didn't get sniped.

[00:17:54] **Brian Coords:** Okay. Okay.

## [00:17:55] Aurooba's relationship with build tools

[00:17:55] **Aurooba Ahmed:** it's in the maybe similar vein, so I don't think until this year I realized that I have maybe a core value in how I develop that perhaps others don't have, and that is I always want to understand my build tools. I don't like to work with build tools that I do not understand. So if I'm gonna take on a new build tool, I will work to understand it because we all as developers know the pain of trying to debug your build tools. And if you don't understand them, it makes it that much harder to debug. And I didn't realize that not everyone does that or thinks about it like that and that lots of people will just use it and then they have all these struggles. Brian just kind of mi minorly robes raised his hand. I didn't know that. So one of the things that happened in this season is I found myself actually working with webpack. A lot, which meant that I wanted to understand Webpack. And before that I didn't really, because I had some tooling that I understood the tooling, which was using Webpack under the hood. But I understood that tool, but not necessarily Webpack itself.

[00:19:18] But now I was working directly with Webpack. So then it became really important for me to understand Webpack and so, In some way or shape or form. For the last many months, I have spent a lot of time in the Webpack docs in the Webpack source code, and I feel like there's so much I know about Webpack, and still more to learn that I now, I have a deep appreciation for basically all tooling and I'm fascinated by the world of development tooling creation.

[00:19:51] And that was never a side of development that I had any particular interest in. Appreciation, yes, but maybe not interest in wanting to create or wanting to understand how to create. But now, whenever I'm in. Like terminal. I'm like, oh, okay. I wonder how they did that in this command line tool. I wanna know how they did that or how did they, what was the process for making this thing happen or this thing appear?

[00:20:16] Or were they like, can you combine, maybe composer and npm or, these are things and conversations in my head, I guess, and ideas that I never had before, and that was something that has happened in the last six months that is new for me.

[00:20:29] **Brian Coords:** Yeah. I've been watching that process happen, so I'm very aware of it and I'm also like, I'm like, I think I know how Gulp works now that we're like five years after the Gulp era, and I'm not a build process person. To me it's like I know how my car gets me, like to the grocery store, but like, I don't know, like literally how it does it, you know, I think there's like fire and some sort of explosions and like pistons that move.

[00:20:57] I, I think that's what's happening. Uh, I know that it's a minivan and that's all I, you know, I, I picked it because of that, but I don't understand what works under the hood. That's how I feel about build tools. Like, I could not tell you what Webpack is actually doing and why it's different from Gulp other than I just know what it's like to use it.

[00:21:16] And, uh, so I do think it's kind of cool that you're like digging into that, that side of it because, uh, that's like a, it's um,

[00:21:24] **Aurooba Ahmed:** It's a different world,

[00:21:26] **Brian Coords:** oh. Yeah. I don't know. I don't, I think also like you learn these things when it's the time for you to learn them. Like I'm a big fan of that sort of like just in time learning style of like, you'll learn it when it's when you get there and you need to learn it.

[00:21:42] **Aurooba Ahmed:** that blog post in the show notes

[00:21:44] **Brian Coords:** Oh, the

[00:21:45] **Aurooba Ahmed:** have one on it.

[00:21:46] **Brian Coords:** oh yeah, yeah, yeah,

[00:21:47] **Aurooba Ahmed:** time learning. Yeah.

## [00:21:48] The concept of "just in time" learning

[00:21:48] **Brian Coords:** yeah, yeah. So, and that's like the concept of like, Traditional schooling is like just in case we learn everything. Just in case one day you're asked, you know, who was like the 42nd president or whatever. I dunno, you know, but like, I mean, there's this other thing that's like just in time learning, which is like you learn things as they become important to you, and then you're way more motivated to learn them and you're way more curious because you didn't, you instead of thinking that learning is like this chore of memorization and stuff, it's actually this very practical process of learning skills and, and knowledge, um, when it's important to you.

[00:22:23] And I think that's where you're at with the, the webpack stuff. Um,

[00:22:27] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Yes, definitely.

[00:22:29] **Brian Coords:** I'm glad it's you.

[00:22:32] **Aurooba Ahmed:** I think. I mean, this is, this is also another thing that we can't quite yet talk about, but it all began last year. Last year in February. I had a wild idea related to some build tooling stuff, and I wanted to create it, and I didn't have time. And then you and I started a thing, and then I finally had time in this project that we started to make that come to life.

[00:22:56] And that was the beginning. Once I did that, I had to dig in more into webpack and more tooling and it's fascinating. I don't know if I would pick that as my like thing, but it has become one of my things and it is interesting.

## [00:23:09] Being a beginner at something

[00:23:09] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Uh, but it is still, I'm still a beginner in it, maybe in a lot of ways, not maybe, I am.

[00:23:16] And so I definitely have those phases of why isn't this working and this doesn't make sense. And it also helps me appreciate how hard it can be to be a beginner sometimes, especially when you're doing your hardest and to get over that hump and get to the past, get past the place where you don't understand what you don't know, and can figure out what you don't know, and then do something about it, you know?

[00:23:40] **Brian Coords:** Yeah, and what you're also dealing with is not just like I need a build process to get me, get my stuff built, but it's like I need a build process that like, in some ways doesn't exist anymore. So you kind of have to go deeper and deeper, or a build process that does a thing really well that no one's ever wanted it to do or cared about before.

[00:23:59] So yeah, you're, you're just gonna have to do it.

[00:24:03] **Aurooba Ahmed:** I know, I know. It's a, it's definitely. Hard. It's hard, but it's also fun. It's, it's hard and good and hard is not necessarily a bad thing. Like I, I, I wanna say that when I say hard, I don't necessarily mean that in a negative way. It's one of those things that's definitely is challenging me and it's stretching my ways of thinking, and that's a good thing.

[00:24:28] **Brian Coords:** Yeah.

[00:24:29] **Aurooba Ahmed:** So I got sniped. You kind of definitely got sniped. Like the content creation thing, that

[00:24:37] **Brian Coords:** Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought you were talking about this one. No, no, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

[00:24:40] **Aurooba Ahmed:** No. Yeah, so we both got sniped once. I am not surprised. You know, I think it's a probably a good thing that we have some favorites that we share,

[00:24:50] **Brian Coords:** yeah.

[00:24:51] **Aurooba Ahmed:** uh,

[00:24:52] **Brian Coords:** I mean, there was just content things that we went over this year that made a big impression.

[00:24:57] **Aurooba Ahmed:** yeah.

## [00:24:59] Looking towards Season Two

[00:24:59] **Brian Coords:** I think that leads us to the conversation of season two, which, um, I think just in the natural course of life, there will be some things that we're still very heavily focused on, like WordPress, for example, but there might be other things that we're just at a different place and what we're learning, so it might be a different season.

[00:25:19] What do you think, what are you, what are you predicting for season two?

[00:25:23] **Aurooba Ahmed:** I think. You're right that there will always be an element of WordPress. We both contribute. We both talk about it and work in it a lot. But yeah, I would like to say that season two will have maybe more WordPress adjacent conversations as well. Not necessarily WordPress, but like things that might help you in your WordPress journey or are close to the WordPress world, but aren't necessarily WordPress itself. You know, there's just, there's something I was thinking about just yesterday. I published a tutorial, uh, that had to do with CSS and I was thinking about how you use CSS all the time when you're doing front end development and WordPress.

[00:26:07] And that often needs its own conversations, you know, and we've had some, but yeah, I think that, It would be nice if season two had more WordPress adjacent stuff as well, and not just so heavily on the WordPress-y stuff.

## [00:26:21] WordPress is turning a corner

[00:26:21] **Brian Coords:** Yeah, I think. I think I go back and forth too because I, I think WordPress is turning a corner, not just because it's like phase two to phase three, but it's also like that weird valley of just around developer tooling and developer experience and stuff like the last few years. It was like, I mean, CSS Tricks.

[00:26:46] Chris Coyier wrote a post about it, right? Or no? No, I think it was the other, um, um, Jeff I think wrote the post maybe about the, the, we'll find, we'll open in the show notes. The one about like, where is all the WordPress tutorial content and where, what is happening? And you know, I think we're starting to see that shift again and we're starting to see, okay.

[00:27:08] We're starting to see site editing exists. This is how it is. I think people have maybe I, what I see is a lot of people coming to terms with like, there's a really good use case for it and there's not use cases for it. Or like use cases where you don't want site editing. And we're starting to see like that divide kind of grow and now people are coming up and saying, you know, like Bill Erickson just released his theme framework, which is awesome cuz anytime he releases something like, check it out obviously.

[00:27:34] So, We're seeing all those things kind of start to come out. I think so. I think that there will be plenty WordPress to talk about with all of that stuff. I think there will also be, like you said, you know, other things that we all need to kind of dig into and understand, like we should definitely do a webpack.

[00:27:52] You can explain Webpack to me like I'm a five year old cuz I, I need that.

## [00:27:57] When will Season Two launch?

[00:27:57] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Yeah. No, I agree. So I think that we're on the same page, and we've touched on this before, but you know, when will season two happen?

[00:28:07] **Brian Coords:** Season two, we're kind of following like a kind of like school calendar, I think. You know, like a classic school calendar. So in the fall, like summer break, take it off, come back in the fall and potentially do a season two that I think would be like a fall to spring and then we'll take another summer off.

[00:28:25] Um, that's kind of the goal. So, uh, I'm not gonna give us an exact date, but, uh, definitely in the fall after post WordCamp US for sure.

[00:28:36] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Yes. Which brings us to the last question is what are your plans for the season break, Brian?

[00:28:44] **Brian Coords:** I mean, I don't know. You know, I want to put a lot of, like one of the things you and I both were just talking about is like the time we put into other video content. So I know both of us have like kind of a list of like things we wanna get through. So not recording and editing this will be kind of helpful to put in time towards that.

[00:28:59] That's one of my big places I wanna put in some time. What about you?

## [00:29:03] Aurooba's next course: React in WordPress

[00:29:03] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Well, I have this course that I committed to releasing and semi announced last year and still have not released, and it's called React in WordPress, and I'm committing to getting that released during this season break. It's happening. I've told the world now way too publicly. It's happening.

[00:29:21] **Brian Coords:** I like, actually there's a few topics that are in that course that I like actually just want to see cuz nobody's done content on it yet. So I'm, I'm, I'm actually just like waiting for that.

[00:29:33] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Yeah, you bugged me about it a lot, which I really appreciate. I really do appreciate being bugged about it because I need it clearly.

[00:29:40] **Brian Coords:** Yeah. Well definitely been doing a lot. That's one of the things, we both have video content, um, we'll both take vacations, right? I mean, little summer vacation.

[00:29:52] **Aurooba Ahmed:** you know, and uh, go to a travel a few different places, get a little sun. Yeah, you have some vacation planned.

[00:30:00] **Brian Coords:** Yeah, see I made the mistake of having five kids that are all under the age of 10. And what you learn with five kids, including like a one, uh, the youngest one's gonna turn one this month is uh, nobody wants to watch your damn kids when you have so many kids. So we were maybe, we're gonna see if we can get a little anniversary trip with just my wife, or we'll just take the kids, or, we live in Southern California, so the beach is 15 minutes away if we just wanna go to the beach every day.

[00:30:27] So we'll see. I don't know if I, there will be any travel though, except for some travel in August. Right.

## [00:30:33] viewSource at WordCamp US

[00:30:33] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Yes, we're definitely gonna be at WordCamp US. I'm pretty excited about it. It's gonna be my first WordCamp, in the last one I went to was in 2019, like over in person one.

[00:30:46] **Brian Coords:** Whoa.

[00:30:48] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Yeah. You gonna be there?

[00:30:50] **Brian Coords:** As soon as I get that flight booked, I am, I have my ticket, I have my ticket. I'm gonna go, uh, yeah. It's very, it's very hard to get from the E West coast all the way to the East Coast, like early enough in the day. Like, I have to leave like a week before. It's like a ridiculous thing just to like, get there, get to sleep or whatever.

[00:31:09] Not a week before, but you know what I mean? It's, I gotta figure out the flights.

[00:31:14] **Aurooba Ahmed:** No, I found it to be the same situation. So this year, WordCamp US is in DC and there's two airports that are nearby. One is 40 minutes away from the venue and one is like only 15 minutes away. And I tried to get both of my outgoing and like incoming flights to that closer airport, and I could not get the times to work.

[00:31:36] So I'm even going on a red eye. And so the red eye is gonna get me there to the closer airport, but I couldn't find a reasonable flight like cost and timing-wise that would help, that would let me go from that same airport. So I have to fly out from that 40 minutes away airport and I'll be going international cuz I'm in Canada, you know, which means like having to get there early and so, you know, 40 minutes plus three hours, I mean that's a long time to like account for and kind of sucks, but.

[00:32:07] It is what it is, and I am very excited. There's so many people, there's so many people that I wanna see again. And also because of the relationships and friendships we've been making during the course of this podcast season. Um, I wanna see those people too, and hopefully some of them are gonna be there.

[00:32:22] I think it'll be really cool. Maybe we'll do like a podcast meetup or something. I don't know.

[00:32:26] **Brian Coords:** Ooh, that would be fun. We definitely have to do something because the last one I went to was WordCamp Phoenix earlier this year, which was great, but it was also very small, and I went to WordCamp US last year, which was great cuz it was very local and, but also very small, relatively speaking. And uh, so I'm excited to,

[00:32:43] **Aurooba Ahmed:** year.

[00:32:44] **Brian Coords:** I know I'm excited for like a big, I'm hoping, I know they're looking for extra sponsors so they can do another batch of tickets.

[00:32:49] I'm really hoping that comes through. I would love to see, it Sounds like it's gonna be a big one, so

[00:32:53] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Yeah. They already have 2000 tickets sold. I mean, that's awesome and wild. So cool.

[00:33:00] **Brian Coords:** Yeah.

[00:33:01] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Yeah, I'm excited about that. I think it'll be cool. But yeah, I think the last other thing that we wanna do, the season break is, I guess the cliffhanger that we've been hinting at this whole episode is you and I have been kind of working on this big project that we're really excited about, right?

[00:33:18] And we wanna release it. We wanna make that happen.

## [00:33:22] A secret project releasing soon

[00:33:22] **Brian Coords:** yeah, it's. It's gonna be completely open source, but we're just both, uh, we just have to get it perfect. So it's, uh, it's, um, a project we're working on and we're testing and testing and using and using. And so, uh, I'm very excited to do that. And I

[00:33:40] **Aurooba Ahmed:** close.

[00:33:41] **Brian Coords:** yeah, I think not having, having a break from this podcast, we will.

[00:33:46] Give us that just extra breathing room and like mental space to do things like just get some good documentation and all that sort of, all those things you need for a big project release. So I'm excited. I really hope it's released before season two so that it can be a topic.

[00:34:02] **Aurooba Ahmed:** it has to be released before then for a lot of different reasons. Um, yeah. But yeah, I'm really, really excited about it. I, I think we wanted to release three months ago, and then it couldn't happen three months ago. And it's a good thing. But also, yeah, you're right. We both are maybe a little perfectionist-y so there's just certain things we're just like, no, it it, there's no way we could release anything without this one thing.

[00:34:30] Oh my God, that's not possible. And then we're like, oh, okay, now this is gonna take another two weeks to actually do right.

[00:34:35] **Brian Coords:** Yeah, you're probably worse than me cuz I'm like, eh, I just release it. But, but there's, yeah, there's like mo it's like 99% done, but there's some technical stuff that you're solving and then there's a lot of like training, documentation, stuff that I'm solving. And once we have all of that, then we can feel confident and I'm so excited to, cuz there's some people in the community that you, I know you and I look up to and we're ready to be like, Hey, can you, um, Give us your feedback.

[00:35:05] Yeah.

[00:35:05] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Yeah, well, I think with that cliffhanger and hopefully release that'll come during this break, you know, I think that brings us to the end of season one of viewSource.

[00:35:18] **Brian Coords:** Woo.

[00:35:21] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Uh, so I mean, I'm not gonna say see ya because I'm gonna still see you during this, um, season break and we'll keep talking. But to everyone listening, you know, please uh, hang out with us on Twitter, on the socials and email or anything, and we'll be back with the podcast in, in the fall and maybe we'll see you at WordCamp US.

[00:35:40] That would be so cool.

[00:35:41] **Brian Coords:** Yeah, let us know com comment. Should we have a short, uh, viewSource meetup or something while we're all in the same place?

[00:35:51] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Yeah. Let us know. Mm-hmm. All right, so till season two then, Brian.

[00:35:57] **Brian Coords:** All right. See you then.

[00:35:59] visit viewsource.fm for the latest updates and links to the show notes. Review and subscribe to viewSource in iTunes, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.