2024·10·11 · 24:18
AnyoneCanWP Hackathon Keynote by Joost de Valk from Yoast SEO and Emilia Capital
This is my opening keynote for the AnyoneCanWP hackathon, where I talk about where WordPress stands today and where I think the ecosystem is heading. I discuss what it means that WordPress now powers such a significant portion of the web, and why that scale creates both responsibility and opportunity for developers building on top of it. I also share what I look for when thinking about new projects in the WordPress space.
0:06 might we live already okay hi everybody I hope you can see us hey good morning good evening and good afternoon to everybody wherever you are uh I'm vikas from in WP and today with us we have yok from Y and Amelia capital hello y thanks for having me Vias it's it's so nice to be here yeah I
0:39 appreciate it you taking your time today uh and opening us for the keynote for anyone can WordPress uh I think this event is something new for everybody in the WordPress ecosystem and uh something more fun uh like building stuff which we are all fond of um to get started I have a little bit of slide uh and then I will pass it over to you y looking forward to it all right and on
1:10 the live stream thanks everybody for joining in I really appreciate your time today uh we already have 40 people tuning in I hope we'll have more as we progress so let's get started um again welcome everybody to this event uh this is the beginning of anyone can WordPress which is is uh kindly sponsored by automatic and a bunch of other uh friends companies uh from all over the
1:43 world so we have automatic Stellar ATM vlob SEO press cocko block food plugins airlift deify security good ID and PX uh most of these companies I think uh people know already and we thank them for their sponsorship this is the world's first uh WordPress online hackathon as we would like to call it um maybe there are more but uh we we don't know that right so and we have about 20 topics to choose
2:14 from we have kept it very simple uh just choose one of the topic and start building we already have 700 plus teams registered and but it's not late you can register today uh today is actually the commencement of the building process itself so just register and starts start building um I will talk about more on the dates and other uh Logistics at the end of the presentation a brief history about how
2:45 we started in stwp and how it all led to this event uh my entry into WordPress was about five years ago where I started building a website for my brother for his shop as people do always and uh then I built a e-commerce uh shop sh in prer shop I don't know if you know those is that software is very popular in Europe and then I built a plugin on prer shop and I thought okay this is cool and then slowly discovered WordPress and then started a plug-in in theme shop bootstrap to 30 plus member team and
3:19 then one day in WP idea came came about so how why why there is no instant website builder so that's what inst was all about you know the history if you are following us uh and then eventually we thought why not do a fun event which is first online and fingers crossed maybe a physical event in years to come so this is how first chapter begin and today we have uh yok from Yost we which I admire and I think a lot of
3:51 people actually look up to uh because you you are one of the ogs who have made this possible uh that a Plugin or somebody is coming from from mean we we call it like a nobody right me coming from a web developer or any kind of background can make it big I think uh that's the journey we can all follow so um with that I will welcome Yost U to this I we have a small uh introduction about your I know yours may may think
4:23 this is a little bit of uh uh cheesy but uh yeah here we go so yog is the Visionary behind y SEO one of the most widely used WordPress plug-in globally helping over 13 million websites optimize their SEO ranking hailing from the Netherlands Yos began his journey from uh a webkit developer which is kind of a weird developer generally become people become web developer but B kit is even more core so yeah and quickly becoming an expert in
4:55 SEO transforming Millions uh who manage their search search optimization on their website he has been an integral part of Wordpress Community Driven by Deep belief in the powerful open source for US Open Source is more than just about software it's about empowering users sharing knowledge and Building Together Beyond his incredible success with Yost SEO uh y continues to make an impact in the tech world through Amelia Capital those who don't know uh uh he supports early stage startups aligned
5:26 with his passion for Innovation and open- Source principles Emilia Capital enabled us and uh his wife Marik to Mentor the next generation of digital leaders helping them grow and create meaningful products in the ecosystem with progress planner his latest fora into the WordPress plug-in Market us is solving real challenges for website owners by offering tools that boost productivity and organization from his early days as a web developer to his ongoing dedication to making a web a better place a more accessible space
5:58 your journey is one of the constant innovation let's give a warm welcome to Y everybody oh thank you that wasn't Fus no it never I'll never get used to that but it's fine um thank you for the kind words and thank you for having me um no problem yeah let me just adjust this one just yeah go ahead so yeah I uh of all
6:29 the things you you mentioned I'm a father I'm I'm married to my lovely wife Ma I was the founder of yast which we sold in 2021 um and then I uh became an investor together with my wife as well we invested in many companies I saw atarim is one of the sponsors here well they are one of our portfolio companies I talk to veto the founder almost every week and we're currently building progress planner um you should check it out I think it's fun um we are
7:01 having fun building it I think that's the most important bit but today um when vus asked me to do this I was like yes this is what we need in WordPress we need fun we need the the fun of building and the fun of really playing with what WordPress can do and what we can do with WordPress so I think it's good to take you back a bit to where this all started uh for me at least and and honestly h l this started
7:34 with me scratching my own age literally I had a website called css3 info um which was all about CSS I was um basically doing things as a webkit committer I was helping uh build new CSS features and I wanted to show people how they could use these new CSS features on their websites and what that would look like but I wanted to show them and I and I needed these things to be found so I built small plugins plug a plugin called robots meta a plugin
8:07 called RSS footer a plugin for canonical and all these things I did and then at one point decided to merge them into one big plugin called WordPress SEO that later became y SEO now I was like like this behind my laptop most of the time because honestly I was not a good developer when I started doing this and I think that it's very important when you look at an event like anyone can WordPress that you don't have to be
8:40 a good developer today you don't have to know it all you don't have to need you don't need funding you don't need backing from anyone you just need to do it all you need is the willingness to learn and learning is super important but it also requires a kind of humility and me talking about humility should be very funny if you know me in person person I'm not normally always the most hum well I'm not very good at that but it but it needs a kind of humility to learn from everyone from your own
9:12 mistakes from feedback from from everything around you and you need what the Italians call grinta which I love it's a it's grit and dedication and you need to just go at it you need to really make sure that you keep going you learn from your mes and you make the next step and you're going to make mistakes and that's fine because Building Product is hard it is really really hard you can only learn by doing
9:44 it it's a it's a sort of muscle that you need to that you need to flex you need to train like how do people interact with with software how do people use things I have learned over time that building simple software is probably the hardest thing there is to do it is harder to build simple software than it is to build a a a piece of software with tons of features and uh and checkboxes to
10:17 enable or disable things it is harder to make it simple and to make the right choices for people so you have to try and you'll fail and failing is fine as as soon as you fail you try again and you try again so fa fast this is something that even the biggest companies in the world still say today at meta if you walk around one of my best friends works there you you'll still see fail fast posters you'll you'll they want you
10:48 to fail because they know that not every experiment is going to succeed but trying is the only way to getting to success and there's this open-source Mantra that has become a mantra for a very important reason and I I want to urge you to as you go into anyone can WordPress the this period to release early and release often get feedback as soon as you can while building progress planner one of the things we did is we actually sent out my my wife wrote them
11:20 handwritten cards to a lot of our friends asking them to try progress planner because they get and they gave us tons of good feedback that's what you need you need feed Fe back from people you need to really learn and to see how people interact with your software what they think it is when you give it to them without too much instructions and see where they go and what they do with it because a good product isn't just about good code it's important but it's not the most important thing what's even
11:53 more important is a good user interface and even more important than that is a good user experience because in the end the experience is is what really matters and it should solve an actual user's problem so find that problem that you want to fix for people it can be your problem that's absolutely fine in fact in most cases I think it it's one of the reasons why people build great software is when they when they solve their own itch when they solve a problem that they
12:25 really feel is very important but don't go too far in it don't become dogmatic check with every one like is this really a problem that I should be fixing and of course I can make jokes about the best time to start would have been 15 years ago but honestly in the WordPress world the best time to start is now you can't start yesterday but you can start now and there's a lot of opportunity we've gotten Gutenberg the last few years we have a new block editor and a new full sight editor and
12:57 there's tons of opportunity there and I'm actually surprised by how few people are actually interacting with all those new opportunities you can create blocks patterns new types of themes or whatever you can come up with I think there's a huge opportunity out there to build new fun stuff because what you have to realize is that even today new people are coming online new companies are coming online
13:29 if you walk around in any major city around the world you'll still encounter shops restaurants Etc that don't have websites yet they are still only now coming online so new websites are built every hour of every day and for all of us what we can do is we can make help building those websites easier we can make building those websites faster to do we can make all of it more fun and we can help all those people build better websites and if you contribute a tiny
14:01 bit to that then that can be very worthwhile and a lot of fun to do so I'm not going to keep you very long because I actually want to get you building but you have to get started today so learn WordPress learn. wordpress.org has actually come a great step in the in the last few years the the team there has been doing great work there are incredible courses on pretty much anything you want to learn about
14:32 how to use WordPress but also about how to develop for WordPress and you can also go to web.dev this is mostly run by the Google team and they are explaining all the new web standards and honestly for people on the web we should really be reading all of this all the time and most people don't because there are new web standards coming out every day and we we don't take enough advantage of that there is so so much cool new stuff that you can
15:04 do and use and I really think that if you combine these two that you can do amazing things so I look forward to what you all come up with and what you start building I will follow along in the competition I will definitely look at the winners and and see like hey what can we do with this what can we learn from this and how can we maybe apply this to The Wider world and with that I just wanted say get going start building and thank
15:38 listening that was so cool thanks you my pleas start building today yeah that was so so uh insightful and I think uh that gives that boost of energy which people need uh to start this event a lot of people have t tuned in thanks everybody for joining we have about 186 viewers watching now uh online yeah I I hope I didn't I didn't disappoint um and I hope and I hope that they get the the I think the most important
16:10 message that you can learn from all of this is to a start doing and B keep it simple and that's super hard keep it simple yeah somebody said Elliot said simple is hard in the comments so I think that's the yeah it is it is it is really um it's funny also because people a certain group of users will always ask for more toggles for everything exactly it's not always the right decision exactly so Tom says very
16:43 inspirational thank you and thanks Tom and halimat makco OT everybody tuning in so I have just few uh last Logistics to add to the event so I'll just quickly go to the slide just give me a moment yeah so we have five jury members who will be uh judging the final shortlisted uh entries and I will talk about that really quick really quickly so we have Kevin Miriam
17:14 uh Jamie Marshland and Amika and davinda uh I don't think any one of these needs an introduction so looking forward to the demo day uh we have a lot of Media Partners who are working to spread the word so thanks uh to our Media Partners the price pool is about $10,000 in Cash Plus credits from our partners and ourselves first is the $3,000 cash price and $1,500 and then $500 third place I think third place
17:46 will be more than just one person so you will get more details on the website so what are the next steps so register yourself as a team or you can be your own team um anyone can want any can wi can w .c you need a free inst WP account but you will get temp access to paid features so you don't need to buy anything choose a topic from uh SL topics and you we have 20 topics uh we will be linking the details of each
18:17 topic I think in in an hour or so the last day to submit a project is 26th October that is 15 days from today uh two weeks voting begins on middle of this uh 15 days so after 7 days from now the voting will become the voting will be live and you will be judged uh by public on six different parameters design maintainability ease of use responsiveness performance and accessibility um I think uh these are really important in the in the new era
18:50 of uh where we are going of of website uh the short listed entries will be presenting a 2 minute live video in front of our jury member on the demo day the road map can be seen on the website uh and then you will get constant updates through email and through social so don't forget to follow us and don't forget to tweet um I cannot say just 2x right so don't forget to tweet and if you want to join our Discord to do live communication live chatting with other
19:22 participants just scan this QR code and you will be inside the Discord community in no time and we will be posting all of these uh this will be recorded in YouTube and also in y's uh personal Twitter account uh you can always watch the recording at any point so yeah so that's it from my side and just to close it off u y i don't do you do we have any questions uh there is one question from
19:54 Elliot which says who says that it's hard to ask people to give feedback do you incentivize feedback how do you incentivize feedback um yeah it is hard um so what what we did was and and you can't copy that because we we already did it so it's no longer original but we we wrote a a handwritten card to well quite a few people I don't want to say how many because they won't feel as special anymore
20:26 um and we we sent them a a small erasable to-do list so so uh it's a it's a very offline thing um but it is uh it's I think it's the gesture that people appreciate most and that at that point a lot of them actually did get feedback and they were and of course these were all relations of us that were already happy to give feedback so I would start there start with your friends start with people you already
20:57 like and and ask them to be honest and and tell you like like what can you do with this do you feel that this is something you would use um and then try and release something to the public uh and see if you can get real user feedback because in the end the the harsh words of someone Anonymous out there on the internet telling you what's what is wrong with the software where you just wrote is a bit painful in the beginning but it is it is very good to learn that and to
21:31 hear all that so would definitely just I don't think that that means that you have to in incentivize it I think if you're giving away something for free then a portion of those people that that will start using it is already happy to give feedback exactly yeah and I think even I when I give advice I say just talk to your customers that's it and if you are open to feedback people will get will will give feedback and if you are not and if you just say okay okay I don't want to listen to you anymore and then people will not give feedback yeah
22:05 so it's up to you how thick of a skin you are uh about the feedback and then accepting that feedback which will help you in the long run so as you said in the beginning it is a little bit challenging so that's that's it might be and and uh yeah people aren't always nice unfortunately uh but but that's also something that you'll deal with and you're not looking for nice you're looking for blunt feedback about your software that's how you improve yeah and what neilo is saying in the chat is if friends and families are not Honest by
22:37 default you have to tell them it's someone else's project You' you've got a better family than I [Laughter] have no I hly um people people will ask those that you think will actually give you honest feedback and it's up to you to figure out who that are who those people are yeah speaking about feedback so people once you log into your any1 can WP dashboard you will get a link to your
23:08 profile once and then you can put your banners you can put your profile pics and uh once you are live you can share the link with your family friends and everybody on social so that uh people will upward you uh on various parameters so that you get feedback right speaking about feedback um yeah so with that uh this is the big of a new chapter in hopefully for a very very long time I hope so too I think it's an amazing new format and I I'm looking forward to what
23:41 comes out of it all right so thanks everybody for attending and thanks yours for your kind time today really really appreciate it uh from everybody at in WP and everybody who is on online I I uh I believe everybody is has learned a new thing today so everybody thanks for being on the on on the chat on the on the live stream and uh if you need any help reach out to anyone can WordPress hello at anyone can.com um and we'll be able to help you
24:14 thank host thank you bye-bye good luck building