Becoming a WordPress Plugin Developer with Brian Hogg, Part 2

Joe Casabona: This episode of How I Built It, is brought to you by two great sponsors. The first, is our season-long sponsor. Liquid Web has been best known as a managed hosting company with tons of options. It’s also designed a managed WordPress offering that is perfect for mission-critical sites. If you’re looking for improved performance, maximized uptimes, and incredible support, Liquid web is the partner you’ve been looking for. Every liquid web managed WordPress customer has ithemes synced integrated into their managed portal allowing them to update several sites with a single touch. Liquid web hosts all of my critical websites and I couldn’t be happier with them. If you Sign up today, using the discount code ‘howibuiltit33’, you get 33% off for the next six months. Visit buildpodcast.net/liquid to get started. That’s buildpodcast.net/liquid.

It’s also brought to you by Modern Tribe, the WordPress artisans behind the Events Calendar, Event Tickets, and a full suite of Event Management plugins. With over 8 million downloads and counting, these folks know how to build things the WordPress way. Today, we’re continuing our conversation on plugin development with Brian Hogg, author of several WordPress plugins including his Events Calendar newsletter plugin that integrates with the Events Calendar by Modern Tribe.

One of the great things about Modern Tribe is that their plugin team builds code with other developers in mind. Not only do they encourage folks to build customizations and extensions but they also have loads of documentation to help you out. If you’re working on a project using the WordPress rest API, make sure you check out the all new rest API endpoints they built into the Events Calendar to help you take your event data to the next level.

The Events Calendar plugin is available for free on the ‘.org repo’. If you need Events Calendar features, they’ve got several paid add-ons available at buildpodcast.net/events and that includes access to premium support. While you’re checking out all of their plugins at buildpodcast.net/events make sure you use the code ‘howibuiltit’, all one word to save 20% on any of the premium add-ons through the rest of the year. That’s builtpodcast.net/events and use the code ‘howibuiltit’ all one word to save 20%.

Hey everybody. Welcome back to part two of my interview with Brian Hogg. We continue our conversation about Brian building his pro plugins but also peppering in there just advice about plugging development in general. I know last week we left you with the cliffhanger of Grunt and Gulp and built tools and things like that. So we’re going to pick up with that but we’re also going to talk about, you know, how to choose what features to put in a free version of a plugin and what features to put in the pro version of it, architecting Premium software, and how to combat shiny object syndrome. That and more on part two of my interview with Brian Hogg up now. So without further ado, on with the show.

So first you mentioned Grunt, so I’d love to, as part of this, the end for this question, ‘how did you build it?’, what kind of tools do you use? Because I mean, I’m a front-end developer and front-end development is not just writing HTML CSS, anymore. It’s like gotta get Grunt or Gulp, and Compass and maybe, and they can do react, you need a million things. So what’s kind of your development stack look like?

Brian Hogg: Yeah. No, I mean I really try to keep it as simple as possible. I definitely use Git obviously for version control and have that and I created a little script which I show as part of the course just to be able to go say, Git push production master automatically create the zip. I could then link that up to say EDD and automatically release the pro version but really like to take that zip tested first. I don’t want to do too much all at once. But yeah, essentially packages are all up so I’ve got that script but no, not a lot of it’s really PHP storm.

I’ve switched from VVV which I just found was getting pretty slow even on a 16 MB MacBook Pro. I was just getting a little felt bloated under vagrant tsunami using Local by Flywheel as kind of the local thing, you know, very easy to spin up a new development site and one click button you can pop into SSH or the database or whatever you need. So I’ve got that, yeah, Grunt is just kind of silently working in the background and just syncing any changes that come up between the…so basically if I make a version of change the free version it will automatically sync over into the core folder of the pro. And that again there are two separate get reposts so that I can just push the changes separately as required. So yeah, I mean that PHPStorm has been a great editor. I think I overheard someone mention it at WordCamp Toronto, the first one that I ever went to and I’ve been kind of stuck on it since then. Once I’m using Zend Frame, yeah. Man, you run that for more than like an hour and your computer is just done.

Joe Casabona: Oh I know! my man my first programming language was from college and it was Java and so I used Eclipse. and Eclipse for those of you who don’t know is a destroyer of laptops. just like, I don’t know if they’ve optimized it in like the seven years since I haven’t touched it, but man I went like that made me go the complete opposite. I’m like, give me ‘Atom’. It’s just a text editor with some nice little packages, for Gitand stuff like that. But man oh man, yeah.

Brian Hogg: But the PHP service, it’s been great in terms of its features but also you know, relatively lightweight in terms of memory like I’ve just I’ve never had it bogged down on me…has a lot of good WordPress support. So yeah, I definitely recommend that one.

Joe Casabona: Nice, yeah. And then you mentioned Local by Flywheel, one of my favorite tools ever right now.

Brian Hogg: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: Cool, very cool. Yeah. I like this. It is really light, it reminds me of something that Pippin Williamson said, he said, as far as his development stack goes in his machine, if he dropped his laptop into a lake right now, he wants to be able to get up and running as quickly as possible. And so he keeps things pretty light which is I like that a lot ’cause I mean it’s it’s you know, it’s really easy. I’ve used like a starter theme that required things like power and all of the things that Bauer requires but then also Compass like compiling SaaS took seventeen seconds.

Brian Hogg: Wow!

Joe Casabona: And I’m like, “this is wonderful. I’m sure it does just a lot of things, and I don’t need any of those things.” So…

Brian Hogg: It was like, I tried CodeKit for a bit. I was thinking, “Oh, I shouldn’t go.” Instead of having Grunt running in a terminal tab I should use something like CodeKit or whatever and you just fire it up. But yeah, it just, I could not get it to do even just the basic things and I just…

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s exactly right like I was like, “yeah, Okay!” like “oh, this will…Great! So this will run like Compass for me and compile my stash.” That’s me. It’ll automatically refresh the active tab that I’m working on but like, I really, you know,?

Brian Hogg: That sometimes, I actually don’t want right? Because if I’m making, it means something in the back end right? I don’t want to refresh the whole thing. I just want to click the button again and then look at the console of the browser and see what changes are made from the open, right? So yeah, yeah, sometimes you don’t want to be too smart.

Joe Casabona: So the moral of this story, if it sounds tangential to people listening is, just choose the right tools and they’ve gotta be what works for you. So that’s very cool. So we talked about the tools, we talked about Git, now submitting to the WordPress plugin repo .

Brian Hogg: Yes.

Joe Casabona: requires SVN

Brian Hogg: Sure it does.

Joe Casabona: So maybe you can, maybe you could talk a little bit about that. Let’s say I’ve never submitted a plugin into the repo before and I want to, what’s like the top three or five pieces of advice you would give me the things that I need to know?

Brian Hogg: Yes. So I have another article on that at brianhogg.com which yeah, based on what I do is, there are tools that you can use just solely Git. So there are ones where you do like a Git push whatever, it’ll check out your SVN repo, it’ll pull in your changes from Git, it’ll package it up, it will push, it’ll do everything for you. For me, I again, I found that okay, you know, what I want to want is a little more control, like that. Yeah, I don’t need all the control but, so what I’ve done is I’ve taken the Git repo, I put it into the Trunk folder that you get when you get your SVN repository so I can go into that Trunk folder inside against the SDN folder structure do we get pulled. And then that way now, I can, I see all the changes that have been made. Do an SVN status, and that just, you know, SVN add for any new files, and then SVN CI-M, and then whatever message. And then I can go back, and you could actually do it in one step for you, then just add the files and then copy your Trunk and create a tag and do that. And that’s documented on, you know, the wordpress.org SVN instructions.

But I also did that in the article because sometimes you just want to make a change to say, Readme, right? You’re not making any code changes, you just wanted to, you know, maybe there’s a typo or something you don’t want to go nuts and make a change every two seconds to tweet because it does cause actually a rebuild of all of your versions and the zip file so it does put a lot of strain on the.org server which has happened a few times where people will trash it so to speak, yeah. But yeah, basically if you want to make a change to the Readme,. you have to change it in the Trunk and then copy it over into your tag for it to be visible on there. So just all these little things and I think there is actually a new get script which will, you know, detect that in Git you only need to change the Readme and not create a new tag for you because you don’t want to create a new tag just for Readme change, right?

Joe Casabona: So it’s just to take it back for a second in terms of SVN in the WordPress repo or maybe SVN in general, I’m not that familiar with it. Trunk is essentially like the master branch right? So Trunk is the latest version of the completely working production code right?

Brian Hogg: Yes. Well, you know, it can be your development branch actually.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha, okay!

Brian Hogg: So in your Readme file, you specify the table tag that it is, right? So if you, so you update stuff in just Trunk and you shouldn’t use your, again your SVN repository is a development thing. You can…the time it just when you’re pretty much ready and you just want to have some people test it, you can push one kind of push and that should be fine. But you don’t want to be doing your live development changes in Trunk. But if you do it, it’s fine but you should have your tags which then you are versioned, version 1, 1.1 whatever 2.0. And then once you’re ready to actually release it, you copy Trunk into a new tag and make sure that your Readme stable tag is updated. If that stable tag doesn’t exist in the tags folder it’ll, then it’ll use Trunk because then it’ll be like “Oh, your version 2.6”, “But there is no version tag 2.6, were you stuck?” because we don’t know what else to do. So yeah.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha! That makes sense. So Trunk is kind of where you’re writing the code and then when you’re ready to move it to production, good practices to move it to a new, essentially if I’m using again GitHub terms a new branch that’s called, that’s tagged the latest stable version.

Brian Hogg: Yup! which is literally copying like use SVN copy but essentially you’re just literally copying Trunk into tag 1.1or whatever.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha!

Brian Hogg: Right, so yeah. That’s how you’re taking it.

Joe Casabona: Theoretically you should not be, like once it’s moved to tag, right? Theoretically you might not want to touch that again.

Brian Hogg: No and you shouldn’t because if you edit the code and say that tag after you’ve done an SVN push or Git you know, the equivalent of like a Git push, it won’t, you know, people who have already downloaded that tag in that version won’t get an update right? So you know, if it anytime that there’s any change that you want people to, even if you, you know, discovered the bug an hour ago, when you’re released you need to do a new tag every time and that’s where you get those you know, 2.5.1,2,3,4,5,6 although total it 15 because yes it just happens.

Joe Casabona: Right. Yeah, absolutely. Meant okay so that’s actually, so I just learned something today. I mean I generally learn on every show but this was a process I actually thought I knew. And so that is really good information especially if you do want to release to the WordPress plugin repo and this is a really great follow up point, right? So you have your pro plugin which is hosted on your website, and then you have the free version on the repo, is there like a big benefit to having your plugin on the WordPress Repo?

Brian Hogg: Oh, my gosh! Yeah. So I mean, I, well it’s funny because I scheduled the, or structured the course to the pro version first and the reason behind it, and so just if you haven’t heard of the course it’s making pro plugins to just help launch and grow WordPress plugin. But I just decided to pro first because then you can just, you know, get it out there if you’ve already written the plugin for a client, you just get it out there, and you have a site. And now someone just asked you, you may be word of mouth or they just stumble upon it somehow. Boom, you know, you can just send him to the website and they can buy it right away, you’re good to go. But man, like from the people in the mastermind and for pretty much everyone I talked to like what I actually thought, you know, yeah. I was thinking and yeah, you know, what I’m doing, all this content marketing, you know, so I think, you know, about 50/50, you know, 50% of my sales are coming from traffic from the repo and 50% is coming from all this content marketing, and YouTube, and articles, and all this other stuff he’s doing. Now it turns out it was closer to 80 to 90% was coming from .org. The other 10% was, you know, the results of this year’s efforts in content marketing which again, it depends on your plugin, depends on the market, right? Like if you can find a, you know, a vertical and you can target them and, you know, it can be a lot more effective than that. But man, yeah. ‘.org’ is by far because just think, this is millions of people who might never even be touching Google or just be able to go to plugins, add new, they’re able to, you know, search Finder plugin, try it, develop some trust and then that, you know, you created something that’s adding some value. Hopefully you’re not too naggy and then like, “Hey, you can’t do anything with this”, you know, but until you upgrade, you know, you’re giving them at least some value and then you know, the trust is there.

And then so basically the traffic that’s coming there as they note, they have for…press ’cause a lot of times it’s the business owner maybe who doesn’t even know what platform they are on and just Googling and has no clue if they have WordPress. So they know they have WordPress, they’re coming right from you know, the, your free version, they will be there a lot of times who will see the features in the Readme or the description and just automatically go to your plugin from there. But a lot of times again they’ve installed your plugin, they tried it and you’ve got some subtle nice little upgrade links you know, in appropriate spots. So again they’ve tried to plug in, they know your plug in you know, and then they just, they know they need this feature and then at that point they’re just making decision, is your price worth it to me or not. So that’s why bad traffic is so qualified, invaluable, and yeah. So it really is silly not to do a free version but then again there have been instances like LearnDash and some other ones where again he has a lot of marketing, you know, like he was doing a blog for many months. So we had our mail and a big mailing list he could launch too so he was able to, you know, that’s one example of someone who’s done a lot of the separate marketing that builds up that way. But yeah, not having that free version can definitely be hugely valuable.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, yep. And Learndash specifically, if you are listening and you want to learn more about the Learndash story, I will link to Justin Theremin’s episode. He is of LearnDash, I’ll link to that because he touches on a lot of that. How he kind of had a blog, and just kind of blogs about online courses in LMS and gathered information. And then about a year later started building a plugin. So you just see that, you know, you see that Gravity Forms is another.

But then you have Ninja Forms. They are very popular and they’ve got the free one on the repo and they probably get a lot more eyeballs. I don’t know if they get more paying customers but they certainly get more eyeballs on their plugins. So the circle is back to your plugin Events Calendar newsletter.

Brian Hogg: Well it’s funny ’cause there’s the Events Calendar Shortcode as well, so the other…

Joe Casabona: Right, right, yeah. And I was like mixing them all up in my head. So Events Calendar, Events Calendar newsletter, you’ve got the two versions. So what are some of the, aside from splitting of the two versions, what are some of the major transformations with plugins gone through since launched?

Brian Hogg: Yes, I mean it really just supported the one calendar. So adding more support for other calendars was a strategy that…

Joe Casabona: Sorry, when you say, the one calendar is that like, the proper name or…

Brian Hogg: So the one calendar, no, it was literally just supporting a calendar.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha.

Brian Hogg: What’s that? It was called ‘Ajax Calendar’ when using keys and switched as well to the Events Calendar and Ajax Calendar and even on the repo anymore. But yeah, so just supporting that one so I added support for others, eventually had to stop and where I’m like, ‘Okay, any new calendars are now going to be pro only” because there are some specific ones like there’s one that’s for the, there’s this one theme that some…runs and a couple other ones that vantine you know, so their calendars that are you know, that are usually paid calendars that have specific needs some like, you know what, like for me, to offer that support it’s gonna be in the in the pro only. But that used to be not a cut off. Usually just getting all the calendars are free but stuff like automation with MailChimp and Whatnot was the problem. So that was a huge one as well where I really wanted to have it where it could automate and automatically inject the vents into MailChimp. But I mean there are API has gone through a lot of transformations in the last few months and years. So I’m like, how to, you know, like yeah, I could add it to the API but I’m gonna make sure that’s going to be a bit of a headache and stuff. So I can’t just come up with the idea, “Oh, I could actually create like an RSS feed” and then have that pump into MailChimp. MailChimp has been pretty decent support for RSS feeds and turns out a lot of the other ones like active campaigns and Aweber and Whatnot also do as well. So that in one fell swoop was able to add some of this automation support in the pro version for a lot of different email clients. So yeah coming up with them like, “Oh, I could totally do this,” you know, instead of messing with the API and having this huge thing, I could still have that same value and make it easy. You just copy and paste the exact thing or like with a mail post. It’s like a little short code you just copy and paste into your email and then it just makes it really easy just automatically sucking those events every time you send the campaign without having to do any copying and pasting. So yeah, that was a huge transformation when that launched so that if I start to kick it up quite a bit.

Joe Casabona: Nice. So I’m looking at the website right now, you have, you know, integrations with a whole lot of things, MailChimp, Aweber, Active Campaign, and then some of these pro calendars you mentioned.

Brian Hogg: Yup.

Joe Casabona: So do you have like a pro subscription to each of these so you can test it or is there like a sandbox area where you can test?

Brian Hogg: It depends, yeah. I mean I’ve got some automated tests for the Events Calendar and I want to add some more for others. But now some of them you know, there’s like, “Oh, here’s a pro version” like I become friends with a lot of the owners of these calendars which is kind of cool. So you know, like one base in Canada, one I’m like “Oh cool. You’re moving where now?” So it was nice keeping in touch with the calendar owners of these calendars. So they’ve been super helpful in terms of adding the integration and even optimizing it at dependings. So, note, they’re all kind of basically just you know, again keep it simple and rather than have a bunch of differences even in Local by FlyWheel which makes it easy, just spin up different sites. When I do that I could just have them all in kind of one and then activate, deactivate depending on which one that I’m testing or developing against. That has caused a couple issues because some are over zealous in their dealer rating and everything. So, for the most part it works quite well. They keep it separated and yeah, they’re not overlapping with each other at all really, so…

Joe Casabona: Cool, very cool. And then did you mention that you have some automated tests?

Brian Hogg: Yeah. So I’ve yeah. So there’s a test folder and yes automating some, especially some of the important stuff like if the RSS feed format breaks, now I know that just breaks automation for all the people that are using that, right? So I try to keep the important stuff under some automation test. But it took a bit to figure out because it’s not just you know, a unit test where I’m just testing there. There are some of those but a lot of it is pulling in you know, the calendar plugin in addition to my plugin and then testing them to integrate together. So yeah, that can be a bit of a hurdle to get PHP in and everything else to work with it. But worth it because yeah, it just helps test all these things that would happen, fire up every calendar and test everything individually.

Joe Casabona: Absolutely. And I mean you want to find you know, you want to find the issues before your customers, find the issues. So what do you use for automated testing?

Brian Hogg: PHP storm has integration with PHP in it. So yeah, you just, you can just run the tests right within PHP storm and have it run that, give you the report. And then it was a little buggy for a bit. So actually I literally just installed the latest version. So I heard the test yet but it was having some issues with, you know, like you would click on the test that failed and instead of taking you to the test, it would take you to like their internal code for the assertion or something which was of no use to anyone. So I think they fixed that now or it actually takes you to lying in your tests that’s failed and then you can come back up from there. So…

Joe Casabona: Awesome. Very cool. Well automated testing is something I’m so interested in learning more about. I had a really good conversation with Daniel Bachhuber when he was on the show about all sorts of stuff like that because I mean he makes WP CLI, so you need to properly test those.

Brian Hogg: Is there a course for that? That sounds like a good course, I think.

Joe Casabona: That sounds, I know. We’re both gonna like that though.

Brian Hogg: Who will get it first? We’ll see.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, right? Well since you’re doing them now, all the facts to you and I’ll take the course when it’s out.

Brian Hogg: Okay, yeah.

Joe Casabona: So cool. And so what are your plans for the future of this plugin?

Brian Hogg: Yeah. So I mean I’m just adding new features like I just added the often requested full calendar view to the shortcode. So before it’s just the list, now it actually fires a full calendar if you want that, and it shows your events whichever events that you want to show for that one.

Yeah, just listen to customers and come up with ideas on that. But definitely have the itch like, “Oh, do you want a certain other plugin or course?” So I’m not…So yeah, I try to keep it where it’s, you know, one week on one thing and then another week and another thing because flipping back and forth between a bunch of different stuff can be a little taxing on the brain.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. And actually this is a great follow-up question to that because you do have a few plugins. So you have the courses, I’m sure you’re working on probably other things based on conversations we’ve had. How do you determine what is a good idea to pursue, and how did you allocate time to actually pursue it?

Brian Hogg: Yeah. I mean for the course, it was probably a few months of well, being like who should I, who am I to actually build this course. I’m not Pippin, you know, I’m not like the Godfather of WordPress plugin development. But yeah, like a lot of good advice and being like, Oh well yeah, you’ve been doing it for less time so you remember what it’s like to start. So you’re kind of maybe a better candidate for doing some of that stuff. So, but no, I really was blocking it like I have a the between to post podcasts for WordPress and you know, they do just some scheduling issues. But being just like I need to focus on this one thing you know, I stop you know, stop going to coworking spaces because I can’t really record the course videos from there, right? So yeah, just really kind of irked out.

And thanks to having the plugins as well. I was able to count on them during that time and have them kind of you know, to do their thing in the background and then work on the course during that time. So yeah it’s really just once I do actually decide to do it, then it’s just blocking that out in the calendar and being forceful about it because there’s so many easy ways to say yes, the things and then you’re saying no to other steps. So, and plus then you know, as you freelance, I’m sure if you say yes it does many things into anything sweep up then you have less time with family and everything else. So yeah but it can be a challenge for sure because of shiny objects syndrome. Just take everything at the end of the day. I want to help as many people as possible so if someone comes with a suggestion and when that’s amazing, I go ahead right away but it’s gonna take awhile. Again that starts other things that are help to other people so yeah, it’s a balance

Joe Casabona: Yeah, yeah. The classic, “Oh I could just try a plugin that does that.” Sure you could but it’s not as easy as you think it’s gonna be, you know, that’s what I need to tell myself. And then you need to test it and then what are you going to do if you can’t just release it and then expect people to use that.

Brian Hogg: Exactly.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, you gotta go through a checklist of things like, you know, this is something I want to put my time towards, what will suffer, if I do it.

Brian Hogg: It just, because you can do it doesn’t mean like you said, I mean it’s not all about enjoyment. Obviously part of it is you know, it’s, so you’re doing something business wise for income so it’s not all gonna be unicorns and roses and rainbows and everything. I know there was one if it was human cloud he wrote a book on like ignore everybody and 29 other things to creativity came over the exact title and met him when I was a thing in Miami and he’s all about like he just little cartoons on the back of business cards and he’s been doing this for years you know, there’s the whole story as to why he does and everything else. But his thing is like well if someone wants to just either copy it or start something or whatever the someone else is kind of doing and they think “Oh I could do just right that. I could do that better” this is like, “Well, goodluck to you” because it took me so many years to get to where I am. You know, I did it because I enjoyed it and I iterated through it and I learned from experience. You’re just doing it because you have the selfish vendetta you know, a thing where you just wanted to make some money and just be good at it right away. So goodluck you know, slogging through all these years essentially to get to where I am now.

So yeah, I can’t be here telling this, yeah. And actually just mentioned this in the WP roundtable podcast recently like last week were used like yeah, like they wanted to acquire a forms plugin, they didn’t want to rewrite it. Another one because they knew the work that was involved was quite that’s quite large. So but no one wanted to sell none of the ones that they want to acquire want to sell. So they had no choice and they had to write one from scratch just worked out well for them. But definitely a lot more work it would have been to just take an existing one and then iterating and then improve on that. So yeah, I definitely need to question what’s a good use of your time, you know, what you think you’ll enjoy now and for the foreseeable future and just kind of go for it.

Joe Casabona: Nice. I love that. That sounds like a trade secret that I’m gonna ask you. Anyway, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Brian Hogg: I don’t know. I mean it’s just listening to customers. I just found it has always been the biggest thing for me. And just genuinely being there wanting to help people, right? Because if you’re just doing it for selfish reasons, then, that’s, people gonna see through that pretty quick. I think I do, for sure. If you encounter anyone doing it, it’s so obvious that they’re just kind of doing it for the wrong needs and they don’t really care if that actually helps you. They just want you to buy whatever they’re selling. So I don’t know, I hope, hopefully everyone listening to this podcast genuinely wants to help people. So maybe not a trade secret but something that definitely doesn’t lose focus on that nitty gritty sort of thing.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. Especially because you know, if you’re going to dedicate the time required to build a plugin or build a course or build a product, it’s something you really need to be passionate about if you want to do it, right?

Brian Hogg: Yep. There have been some course ideas that come like maybe collaborating with someone else but if it’s not like the thing that you do or want to, you know, learn about it, then in trying to teach it can be a tough sell to go through that effort and create it. And then also be able to support and market and they’re putting else afterwards. So, yep.

Joe Casabona: Absolutely! Well, so I did not prep you, and this is being recorded before Season Three came out. So, I have added a new segment in Season Three called ‘Fast 5’. And I’m going to ask you five questions. You just give me your gut reaction or gut answers.

Brian Hogg: Oh jeez! I did this on my podcast and I always prepared people. What were you doing?

Joe Casabona: I know I forgot to mention that and like it was, I don’t include it in the Show Notes. It’s experimental, you know, so these are hopefully easy questions, I’m not going to ask you like any tough. How much money do you make? That’s rude. So I, so question number one, what’s your favorite book?

Brian Hogg: Jeez! So what am I reading at the time? Actually there’s one, Eleanor and Park fiction novel. Yeah, that I read recently. It’s funny because I read on the Kindle, right? So a lot of times you forget which book you’re reading because you never see the cover, you never close the book, and then look at the covers and so I’m, “Oh, there’s this great book about this thing in Japan and they’re”, “What’s the color?” I don’t know. I have to pull up Kindle and even looking at the covers, I still have no clue. I have to dive into it and stuff. Yeah, I don’t know, that was one of my favorite books. I’ve been reading a lot less business type books and just getting advice from other people. So yeah, mostly fiction to wind up at the end of the day.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Man I’ve been trying to really dig in on more fiction. I think last year I read like three fiction books, there’s like 20 books. So I’m trying to kind of alternate between fiction and non-fiction. So, yeah. What’s your favorite kind of music?

Brian Hogg: Oh, electronic, no question. I have a podcast about that, I’ve been to actually try it. I went to like, EDM in Amsterdam, EDMbiz for a couple years in Vegas to try and just again see if I could help people. I’ve met a lot of artists and labels. Everything was like I got the song I was listening to hundreds of thousands of people and clubs and stuff. But you know, it didn’t get anything for it because they don’t do any tracking with the music, right? So now they’re, I’m still lightly involved in it and on a couple of committees. But yeah just trying to get just music recognition technology like, Hello, Shazam. I like it! We’ve got the technology, it’s not that right to just know what songs are being played and then pay the people who made it, right? So, anyway, yup, electronic music preferably.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s awesome! That’s a game show now and Jamie Foxx is like the host. It’s called like…smarter than Shazam or something. It’s like…I don’t know man.

Brian Hogg: I played that in, when I worked to Kazam in British. So I worked in England for a while And they’re like, “Oh, you’re gonna….” and I’m like, “Yeah, yeah I’m going to the king” because growing up I could totally hear a couple notes and do that. And then they would be like, “Oh, here’s the song”, and I’m like, I have no clue and I never ever heard that song growing up. So I’m sorry! Trivia night, and burns, and they just never worked.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, nice. Number three, what’s your favorite food?

Brian Hogg: Uhm, vegetarian. So I guess veggies, I actually eat fish. So basically anything my wife cooks because she’s really good. She cooks, I clean and we have a good, good rapport there. And nobody wants me, you know, except for, I don’t even know, an omelet. I’m really good at omelets.

Joe Casabona: Nice, nice. I see, I’m 100% Italian so I am a good cook when I cook.

Brian Hogg: I don’t even have confidence like a boiled fresh pasta. So, I’ve lost confidence now. I just enjoy the food.

Joe Casabona: I’ll call my mom with questions and I’ll be like, “Hey what do I, you know, like, I’m making, like your lasagna, what would I do? how much…?” she’s like, “Just choose what you think is right” and I’m like, that’s like every Italian mom.

Brian Hogg: Just add stuff, whatever.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, right. Use as much cheese as…so that looks good.

Brian Hogg: Maybe a little more so it will melt-up. At least that’s a better answer than just stop, you’re never going to be as good as mine.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, right? But hey, it works. But she makes the best lasagna every Italian has. It is obligatory to say that their mother makes the best of something and my mother makes the best. So, all right. Who’s your favorite sports team or athlete?

Brian Hogg: Don’t really watch sports. I kind of just hop on, you know, at the playoffs. I lived in Montreal for a while so I guess I’ll say Montreal Canadiens because it was definitely fun being there. One time they’re on the playoffs so I went there and my wife likes the Toronto Maple Leafs so it’s like, there’s a rivalry thing or whatever. So yes I did, I watched a lot of football when I knew it but I could not tell you who the players are, what the team said.

Joe Casabona: This is football in the British?

Brian Hogg: Exactly, yes, with the feet.

Joe Casabona: I don’t want to, I don’t want to disparage the Canadian heritage but I love ‘How I Met your mother’ and so I chuckled a little bit at that book.

Brian Hogg: Yeah, ofcourse. and I watched it while eating. It’s just how it rolls, right?

Joe Casabona: Ofcourse! Yeah of course. Yup! So I guess I shouldn’t worry too much. I just spent like 30 seconds talking about all the italian stereotypes I knew. So yeah, it’s Okay!

And then the last question, I’m going to post this question on the way. It was supposed to me, if you couldn’t work with computers for a living, what would you do?

Brian Hogg: That’s so funny because I was saying that I’m most social computer nerd you’d ever meet and that was a huge struggle to because like basically the, you know, to try and keep up on the latest and greatest code whatever it was that uncle Bob I think says you should spend twenty to thirty hours a week on top of your forty hours. So we get to jump to like, you know, to always be practicing and always and I’m like, “Whoa!” So that’s another, you know, eight hours on Saturday and two to three hours every day which I can’t do that. I don’t know, I think, teach. I mean I do a lot of that stuff with you know, I’ve taught a course at the college level and then it’s interesting because it’s you know, instead of someone buying your course and taking it or, you know, seeing and choosing to see it on Lynda or Udemy or whatever you’re on, you know, they’re they’re kind of forced intercourse by their program, right? So I definitely prefer you know, either do workshops or you know, like they really do certain code here, add locally all mentor or leader sessions and stuff. So yeah. No, if I couldn’t work with computers that couldn’t code, I would love to do more speaking and teaching and stuff like that. So…

Joe Casabona: Nice yeah. Well we are certainly cut from the same thought there. I always said in college, especially grad school I’m a little bit too social to be the best programmer. I, you know, it’s and that’s a trade off I’m happy to make. Because that’s kind if, you know, I’m an extrovert and I’m like, energized by crowds, seeing people, so I couldn’t spend all my time.

Brian Hogg: As my wife is like, no, I will not hide crowds you know, or the opposite. They take energy away right? So, but that took a few years because you know, I did software engineering programming since I was 12 you know, it just felt like I should do that because that’s what everyone expects. I should just always be at the computer. But then realizing, you know, that disconnect between you know, like you know, amazing, super well structured code versus, you know, the business end of it and, you know, what people actually care about and the value they get from that code. Again like you said, it needs to be reasonably structured so when you go to make changes you could do so under a reasonable amount of time. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t need to know over architecting and spending all your time on that. And like you said, you don’t get to interact with as many human beings as possible. So…

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. and as a closing, I will say that I spent the first few years out of grad school teaching in person college classes. It was a course called Computer Information Literacy. It was required for all freshmen, they had to take it. It was like a beginner computer course and I thrived at the challenge of making them interested in that class because nobody wants to take that class. To class They have to take and luckily I don’t know, maybe it was just like I was young enough, like I was fresh out of school myself. Maybe it’s just that, you know, we have that teaching personality right? You are passionate about it. We’re not just teaching the textbook but it was very interesting. It’s a big challenge right? Because you can’t always assume that they know what you think they know but it’s another interesting challenge. So that’s why I love to get back into the classroom one day. I’m pretty close to Villanova University here so maybe I’ll see. Yeah, yeah, right. Just I think I know somebody around here. I’ll try. I got to know what I got, right?

Brian Hogg: Just cook some Lasagna and you got a job.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, exactly. Cool, right? Thank you so much! We are now at the end of Part 2 of this two parter on developing plugins and specifically Events Calendar Newsletter and the Events Calendar Shortcode Pro and then ChimpBridge as well. Yes!

Brian, thanks so much for joining today. Thanks to everybody who tuned into this two part series on plugin development. Hopefully you’ve got the inspiration that you need to get out there and build your own premium plugin.

And if you have been enjoying the show why don’t you get out there over to Apple podcasts and leave us a rating and review. I would really appreciate it because it helps people discover the show. And plus, I love hearing from listeners like you about what I’m doing, what I can do better, what you like about the show, things like that. So get over there, and please leave a rating and review. Maybe I’ll read it on the air.

So thanks to you, for listening. Thanks to Brian for being on the show. Thanks to our sponsors Liquidweb and Modern Tribe. Definitely check them out, they’re both great great companies.

And until next time, get out there and build something.