Mike Little

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with Mike Little

mikelittle.org

In episode #22 of the WP Elevation podcast I had the pleasure of speaking with Mike Little, one of the founding developers of WordPress. It’s a true story that the entire WordPress project began with a comment that Mike left on Matt Mullenweg’s blog. This man started out programming monochrome computers to type his own name across the screen and ended up co-developing a piece of software that now powers 20% of the Internet. If you want to learn how belonging to a community can have a massive impact then don’t miss this interview.

Watch the Video


Win Prizes

I'm giving away a copy of Scott Berkun's book "A Year Without Pants" which chronicles his experience of working at Automattic for a year. To enter, leave a comment under the video and tell Mike the number one thing you would like to learn about WordPress in a video course.

Show Notes

The highlights of this episode include:

  • how Mike landed the UK Prime Minister’s website project
  • how one comment on one blog post spawned the entire WordPress project
  • how a competitor’s change to their business model was one of the turning points for WordPress
  • Mike explaining the Bazaar and the Cathedral models to open source software development
  • Mike’s passion for teaching and how that’s helped him find clients
  • how the openness of the WordPress community helps businesses to help each other
  • Mike’s move towards more personal branding, and
  • my new yellow wall background 🙂

Reach Out

You can reach out and thank Mike on Twitter.

Suggested Guest

Mike suggested I interview Simon Dickson from Code for the People. Simon, keep your eyes on your inbox.

Competition Hint

Hint: to enter the competition, leave a comment below and tell Mike the #1 thing you’d like to learn about WordPress in an online video course.

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Troy Dean

I am the Founder of Agency Mavericks. The reason I get out of bed every day is because I love helping people to grow their web design or digital marketing businesses. I do this through coaching, creating courses, speaking, consulting and heading up our awesome community.

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4 Responses

  1. wpwrangler says:

    Thanks for WordPress and keeping it Open 🙂 Number one for me would be learning to develop own bulletproof themes and plugins for WordPress. Other thing is building and using community knowledge to reach next level.

  2. Alex Chavez says:

    I know how to install themes, plugins, edit css and create child themes. But there is this dark side of the WordPress that is a mystery. I would take a course on architecture, files structure, database io. I want to know more about what’s under the hood. The red pill!

  3. Great interview. I would love to learn how to develop themes from a html framework like Foundation and create custom plugins for theme framworks. Thanks!

  4. Mary Finlayson says:

    Really enjoyed this interview. At the tail end of the podcast (57 minute mark) you briefly touched on a topic about using a clean framework and adding plugins vs using a theme that already contains the bells and whistles. I would love to have a course on why this is an issue and how non-developers can still create custom wordpress sites without delving too far into the code. And how do you determine if a theme or plug-in is well built.

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