Building the State Department’s Website with Tracy Rotton

Tracy Rotton: I got a LinkedIn request from an agency that said that they were looking for a technical architect. As I said, I’m running my own business so joining another agency wasn’t something I was interested in, but you throw out the word “Technical architect” when you mostly do solo development, that gets very intriguing. Because now you’re talking about team leadership and architecture and a whole lot of– It’s the next level. So I started talking to them, and this was for a federal agency with a diplomatic mission, and that immediately intrigued me.

 

Joe Casabona: Tracy Rotton is a longtime friend of mine from the WordPress space. We met because we happened to be writing similar books around the same time. Tracy has gone on to do some very cool things, one of which is leading a WordPress development team for the federal government, specifically to completely redesign State.gov, the State Department’s website. We talk about lots of stuff in this interview, from the actual development work to working on such a huge organization, and even how to handle working with different corporate cultures and some of the best ways to work through that. So let’s get to this interview, but first here’s a word from our sponsors.

 

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Joe: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today my guest is a good friend of mine, Tracy Rotton. She is a web developer and was the technical architect on the project that we’re going to be discussing today. Tracy, how are you?

 

Tracy: I’m doing great. How are you?

 

Joe: I am fantastic. The weather is nice as we record this, I don’t know about for you. You’re in the DC area. Here in the Philly area, it has been raining too much, but the sun is out, and that’s a welcomed surprise. But we’re not talking about the weather today, and we’re talking about WordPress development. Tracy, why don’t we get started with a little bit about who you are and what you do?

 

Tracy: Great. For a couple of years, I’ve been running my own business, Taupecat Studios. I’ve been doing mostly custom WordPress development, which I’ve been doing for a longer time than that, but it’s been my own business for a couple of years now. Mostly I’ve been working with other agencies, just developing sites mostly by myself. Taking other people’s designs and tossing them back as fully functional custom WordPress sites. Occasionally I do contract out for other people, and that’s where this project came from.

 

Joe: Very cool. We got on each other’s radars, and I think because we were both writing a similar book at the same time. Is that right?

 

Tracy: Right, and we were both on [ShopTalk] show at the same time, too. I was starting to be convinced that you and I were the same person for a while.

 

Joe: Yeah, I remember that. I think you were on the show first or we were definitely around the same time. I was like, “I should find out more about this person.” It turns out when we were in the same area, we’ve met at many WordCamps. I’m glad that we didn’t take the approach of like “I’m writing the same book, so we can’t be friends.”

 

Tracy: I’m sure at this point both of those books are horribly out of date. I know mine is because this is pre-CSS Grid, pre-Flexbo to some extent. I would love to find the time to rewrite some of those things, but maybe not in book form, maybe more of a series of blog posts and stuff. As you will soon see, time is something I don’t have a whole lot of disposable.

 

Joe: Yeah, time is tough. I will say, I spoke to my publisher, and my book is now officially no longer in print. I was like, “What about a second edition?” They told me point blank that people in the WordPress space don’t buy books, so we’re working on other options for me to get another book out there. This is great, you convert designs into WordPress sites, but you also contract out. When we talked, you said that we’re going to talk about the launch of a major redesign of a federal agency’s website, but the actual agency was under lock and key. Couldn’t tell me who it was. Can you tell me who it is now?

 

Tracy: Yes. Let me tell you a little bit about the origin story, because that’s how I got intrigued in this project. I got a LinkedIn request from an agency that said that they were looking for a technical architect. As I said I’m running my own business, so joining another agency wasn’t something I was interested in. But you throw out the word “Technical architect” when you mostly do solo development, and that gets very intriguing. Because now you’re talking about team leadership and architecture, and a whole lot of– It’s the next level. I started talking to them, and this was for a federal agency with a diplomatic mission, and that immediately intrigued me. Because way back before I even had dreams of becoming a web developer, I had dreams of becoming Secretary of State and working in the foreign service and doing all of this. I had interned right out of college at the State Department for a summer right before a misguided attempt to go to law school. There’s only one agency in the DC area that has a diplomatic mission, and that is the State Department. That ended up being what the project was, a redesign of the State.gov, State Department’s flagship website. You can obviously tell from somebody with my personal background that this was a project I wanted to be a part of. Team leadership, WordPress development, moving from their custom proprietary CMS that was antiquated and no longer doing the job that they needed to do, converting it to a modern WordPress. Plus, it’s an agency in DC that is near and dear to my heart, with a mission that– You may have your opinions about how an administration runs any policy, but they’re doing the good work. They are trying to promote peace and security throughout the world, not doing some of the things that make the bad headlines and such like that. This was definitely a project that I was very eager to become a part of.

 

Joe: That’s fantastic. State.gov, I will link that in the show notes, is being powered by WordPress now.

 

Tracy: As of last week, as we’re recording this.

 

Joe: First of all, congratulations. That’s a great accomplishment. It’s cool to see such a high-level federal agency using WordPress. I know that WordPress powers like 30% of the web and blah-blah-blah, but it’s still nice to see these huge organizations get on board with what a lot of people still view as this open-source blogging platform.

 

Tracy: Right. To be a part of the teams, plural, to usher that in. When I first came to DC again after a stint in California for a while, it was the beginning of the Obama administration, and everything was [inaudible] for a long time. Now the pendulum has definitely shifted, there is a lot more WordPress development going on in both the public and the private sectors here in DC. The WordPress community here, as you well know, is one of the top WordPress communities in the world. It has a very strong meetup community, very strong players live and do their work here. It’s been a great community to be a part of, and it’s been wonderful to see the growth of WordPress in this area.

 

Joe: Yeah. That’s cool. I want to ask you this question off the record, so feel free to answer if you’d like. I want to word it in such a way that will not betray either of our political views. Let’s speak generally if there were a political organization that you might not fully agree with, do you think you’d have a hard time taking that job or do you think you still get to do the good work?

 

Tracy: It’s interesting that you said that, so I’m going to answer that in a couple of ways. I’ve been reading Mike Montiero’s new book, Ruined by Design. He talks about some of the more controversial policies and how people of private companies have stood up against some of those controversial policies. I do feel like if this was not an agency that I agreed with their principles, then I would not have contributed to the project. One thing one of my teammates observed yesterday actually, we went down to [state]. We had a little celebration for the launch of the site. It’s like every agency in the federal government, the people there reflect the missions of that agency. So, working on the State Department’s website, it’s like any other client. The client’s going to have unreasonable requests, and they’re going to be petty about some things. That goes with web development, in general, and that’s universal. But they’re a little more diplomatic about it, and they’ll try to find a way to compromise. Whereas maybe people in another agency who have a different particular mindset may not have taken the same approach to problem-solving. There are aspects of the State Department’s work that maybe I’m not a particular fan of, and so maybe I will opt to not participate in particular subsites, or whatever. But that remains to be seen. The next goal on this overall project is to take all of the embassy websites for the United States embassies around the world and move them into this new design. One more comment, I know this was a small question with a very big answer, but one of the first tweets that I saw when it was launched but nobody had made any announcements, is somebody who said “They redesigned the website to be part of the administration’s propaganda.” That tweet ended up getting deleted, but that kind of hurt because we didn’t design this with any particular political view or administration ethos in mind. The design is meant to be agnostic. The content is whatever the current administration is going to put in as content. In two years we may have another administration, their priorities are going to shift, and we’re going to have different content, or it may stay the same, or who knows? We don’t know what the future brings. But the goal of this was not to support any one political view, support any one particular party. 99.9% of the people who work in the federal government in this area are career civil servants who have served through the Trump administration, the Obama administration, Bush administration back to Clinton, in some cases. So it’s not a political objective. It’s “Let’s promote the priorities of our particular agency.” The State Department has priorities that I can support, whereas other agencies, not so much.

 

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Joe: People think that every federal agency adopts the face of the current president. It’s not like you put any campaign slogan on the website. This is the State Department. These are, like you said, people like you and me. Maybe people slightly better than me because they’ve dedicated their life to civil service, and they’re serving the cause and the Constitution. I think that’s a very admirable viewpoint. I’m really glad I asked that because I was hoping you would answer in that vein and you definitely did. That’s fantastic. Let’s talk tech now. That’s why we’re both here.

 

Tracy: Yes, absolutely. There’s lot of tech to talk about.

 

Joe: Absolutely. You are the technical architect for a federal agency’s website. This website has probably existed since the Clinton administration, and I’m going to guess, in some way shape or form. In general, what was that like?

 

Tracy: As I said, they had a proprietary customized CMS that looked like it had been built in the Clinton administration, to be frank. Basically, if we just scrapped that whole thing and started from scratch, there was a lot of content migration that happened, because some things got preserved. But you could see what the old sites looked like because they archive after every administration. They don’t take the site down, so you can go back and see the Obama era website. It’s all archived on subdomains. Then go back to George W. Bush, etc. Those sites will still exist and will continue to exist permanently in their existing form. But as of last week, May 15th, 2019 onwards, it’s going to have this new design. They’ve ported over a lot of the content into the new format. That was a very painstaking process. There was no automated migration tool, and it was a bunch of people in the State Department just going over documents, 10,000 of them ended up getting moved over. That was an entire Atlassian task on its own to do that.

 

Joe: That’s wild. As you were talking, I managed to find some of the– It looks like it’s a year range. For example, 1997-2001.State.gov is the archive for the most recent Clinton administration State Department website. That’s super interesting. I think I caught the last one before your redesign, which looks very interesting. I’m going to say big improvement, your design over the most recent one. That’s a very interesting thing that it was archived, and I guess they hired you knowing that you were a WordPress person. Did you have to make the WordPress sell, or did they know they wanted to use WordPress?

 

Tracy: No, they had picked WordPress as the technology before I had come and then had found me out because of my association with WordPress. Part of the driving factor was that the embassy websites, that I had mentioned before, actually are already on WordPress and that’s a multi-site instance. One subsite for every embassy around the world, about 200 give or take. Using that synergy, to use those fancy buzzwords, was one of the driving factors of moving this to WordPress because they had the competency in place. They already have contractors who are responsible for the maintenance of the embassy sites, it was leveraging new technology on that front.

 

Joe: Gotcha. That makes sense. If they want to bring the new design into the fold, presumably it’ll be a little bit easier since they’re both on WordPress. We will talk about that when we get to the title question. As far as the research that goes into this position, because they had already chosen WordPress for a number of reasons, I’m sure they had other contractors. How did you prepare for this job? What kind of research went into “I’m about to do a redesign. I’m going to help with the redesign for a government agency.” How is that going to work?

 

Tracy: A lot of it was handled by the firm that hired me, and I am purposely not naming names because of all the contractual issues. Some companies are allowed to take credit for things, and others are not. I don’t want to step on any of those issues. The firm that had hired me had already started doing a lot of the UX work, a lot of the visual design work. What they did is they were working one sprint ahead of the tech team. When I came in, and this is like April of 2018, this had been 13 months in the works. It’s definitely the longest project I’ve ever been on, and you’re used to 3 months and move on. They had some contractors hired for the positions that they needed, they had a couple back end developers, a couple of front end developers who were staff of the agency, and they were looking for one more. Thank goodness, a friend of mine who I had worked with at a previous agency was available and came on board. He was instrumental. Basically, most of my early work was putting together the team, through the mixture of people who were already working for the agency and people who were brought in as contractors, like myself. Then it was basically, “Where do we start? What do we use as a starter theme?” That’s where it was less research and more of, “You hired me, so I’m going to do things my way.” That’s where we used underscores as the starter theme. We used Sass as the front end CSS pre-processor, and a lot of those decisions were driven by “This is the way I always do things, so it’s going to be quickest if we keep those practices involved, because they’ve worked for me for years and might as well stick with what works.”

 

Joe: Yeah, that’s great. You’re basically coming to a blank slate because you’re switching content management systems. It’s not like you were like, “We need to support these plugins, or we need to support the framework.”

 

Tracy: Yeah. There was no legacy code to have to deal with at all. The plugins that we brought in were the ones that I’ve used in the past, or we researched and were the ones that met the needs. Again, we can dive more into tech now, or we can dive more into tech later, but some other early decisions were not to use Gutenberg.

 

Joe: I was going to ask.

 

Tracy: I got that question on Twitter yesterday. The reason for not using Gutenberg was, A) this was before WordPress 5.0 was released, and Gutenberg was not stable. For the amount of development we had to do, it was not going to be a good choice to go with something that was still so much in flux. Instead, we used a heavy use of ACF PRO, Advanced Custom Fields PRO, to build the custom templates that the State Department needed. They needed a variety of different templates to meet their content type. Different template for bureaus, which would have particular information, then we have a different template for landing pages or policy issue pages or all those things that each require different information. It was a better way of sticking with the classic editor and using ACF PRO as basically your content entry system for most cases.

 

Joe: That sounds like an incredibly good approach. I know it’s something that I’ve heard other agencies doing. They will generously use ACF PRO, or some other custom fields thing, but I’m a big fan of ACF PRO. I’ll just straight up, in some cases, hide the editor and they’ll have these boxes that are specifically designed to display this information. To your point, If you started this 13 months ago, that is when Gutenberg and 5.0 were supposed to launch and then it got delayed. Making that decision early on in the process was probably a good one. Do you have plans to support Gutenberg in the future?

 

Tracy: No, not at this point. At some point, we can come back to that. We also, as I said, we have the embassy sites to work on next. Also, the amount of content, even today, I have worked on other projects since then. One of which I’m using Gutenberg and one of which I’m not. I find that the content entry process, using Gutenberg, is a lot slower than it is for the old fashioned content editor or classic editor way. When you’re dealing with the volume of data that they had to migrate over, if it took twice as long to enter in one page of content, that was going to significantly impact further. Not that we didn’t have some impacts and schedules. The one month furlough did not help, because the State Department was one of the agencies that got furloughed, so that was not conducive to the timeline, obviously. Any slowdown like that would have introduced more delays. At some point, you got to say, “No more delays.”

 

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. I think Gutenberg is in this weird, middle area between content editor and page builder. It’s certainly good for some things, but again, it’s a case by case basis. I think, in this case, it probably would have hurt the project more. As we’re talking about the tech stack. You mentioned underscores and SaaS, two tools I’m a big fan of. ACF PRO, another great tool. Let’s get into the title question, how did you build it? As you answer this question, I am curious to know if you designed with the multi-side project in mind, if they told you upfront, “We’re going to do this next.” Or if they told you that halfway through the project?

 

Tracy: First of all, we’re going to have to change the name of your podcast, because it’s not how I built this, it’s how we built this. This was a team, a cast of dozens. We had UX designers, content architects, front end developers, back end developers, full-stack developers, such as myself. It wasn’t one person and I really don’t want to fall into the hacker news, like “She did 10% of the work and takes 100% of the credit.” I’m not taking 100% of anything. This was a huge team effort. Again, it was an agile process. The designs, per template, were happening a sprint ahead of the development work, which I really wasn’t a fan of, because as the designers moved onto the next template, we didn’t really foresee certain modules being reused that ended up getting reused because they decided “This module works for this page, in this context.” We had named things in a certain way and constructed the file structure in a certain way. Now we have to go back and change it, because something that is specific to one template is now shared across multiple templates. I would have loved a little bit more of a holistic approach, in terms of the design. But we did go back and retrofit things as we had to. So that was that part of it. As far as designing with the mission and the multi-site in mind, that wasn’t even in the cards. That was a little bit because of how the structure of the contract worked. This agency that initially hired me, came in and all they were tasked with was state.gov and not even to get it to launch. It was basically the initial build. The contract ran until the end of last October. I remember going into a meeting the day before Halloween as basically “This is my handoff. This is how it works. This is where the code is. This is my email, if you need to reach me. Bye.” I thought I was done. I thought that was it, my contract with the other agency ended and I was off to do my other things with Taupecat Studious. Then about a month later, I got a call from the contracting firm, a federal government contracting firm, who had taken over the contract. They were like “We have this project. We’re redoing the state.gov website and we heard your name and we thought you might be good for this project.” I’m like “Let me tell you something about the history of this. You know I was the team that built that, right?” I think they did know, I think they were just being a little coy. I ended up getting hired by the federal government contracting firm that was taking this to launch. Then, they were the ones who were told “In the future, after the state.gov launch, you’re going to be working on the embassy sites.” That was my first inkling. After I thought I was done with this thing, I was going to move on to my next thing. I’m coming back in, I was like Michael Corleone, every time I think I’m out, they pull me back in. So that’s where we are now. Actually now, one of the things I’m working on, in the next [sprint] is a piece of the site that the original agency never actually got to, we just didn’t have the time. Kept kicking that can down the road, and now it’s ending up back on my plate. Guess what, I’m going to be coding in about 2 weeks, as this piece of functionality that still needs to be done. So, that’s where we are with that.

 

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Joe: You mentioned it’s a cast of dozens, all kinds of different positions and backgrounds and things like that. As a full-stack developer and the technical architect. What was your primary role? Were you mostly coding, or were you mostly managing, or were you splitting the time?

 

Tracy: It’s basically a split of the time. I would go in, in the days before sprint and create scaffolding of the templates that we were going to need and get things set up. I would go into [JIRA] and take the stories and break them out into the necessary subtext. Usually roughly broken up into the cost of fieldwork, the backend work, and the front end work. Then, we would go through and do the agile process, poker thing, whatever that’s called, an aside the points, aside the stories and the subtasks. There were people who were either just front end or just back end, so assign them the right subtasks and then collectively take whatever piece of the project needed to be coding code for like a week and a half. The agency only ran in two-week sprints, which I think was not enough time to do everything that was demanded in a sprint, but unfortunately, the schedule had been set before I came on board. Ideally, I think we would have liked to have two weeks for development, and then a week to fix any bugs that had come up in testing, over the course of those two weeks. Instead, we had just two weeks to do all the coding, testing, bug fixing, which led to frantic nights the night before demoing this to the client, to make sure things were working properly and didn’t break. In this federal contracting, because I had a little bit more influence of the schedule early on. That’s where the furlough helped, because we can get our acts together while they were off being idle, forced idle, I should say. I advocated for that position like “Let’s do two weeks of development, followed by a week of remediation, so our sprint cycles are three weeks, not two weeks.” That makes for a lot better pace when you’re dealing with a long-term agile project, like this.

 

Joe: Absolutely. You mentioned two things that I want to touch on before we wrap up this episode. That is testing and demoing to the client. Did you have a formal test process in place? Did you have automated testing? What was that like?

 

Tracy: The agency and the federal contracting firm do testing in different ways, but they both have dedicated testers who that is their job, quality assurance engineers. First time I’ve ever worked on a project where it wasn’t just the designer clicking around, making sure all the paddings and margins were done. This was serious testing. It was less automated at the agency level. It’s more automated now at the federal contracting level. I think that’s just the nature of the people who are doing the testing and their different philosophies. Again, it’s just like identify issues, create the [Jura] bug reports. The developer who worked on it would go back in and address those, or if they didn’t have time somebody else on the team would. Then, periodically demo this to the client and show them the accomplishments of the current sprint. Get the feedback, if there was any last-minute changes before wrapping up a particular sprint and moving on to the next one. Usually, that’s been pretty good. Occasionally they’ve been like “We don’t like how that turned out.” But that’s been very rare. Most of the time, they’ve been pretty satisfied with the work at the end of the sprint and move onto the next sprint.

 

Joe: Nice. Nice. That’s super interesting, is that it depends on the agency. I guess that makes sense. Each agency has their own method of doing things. Then, as far as demoing to the client. What was that? In my head, it’s a federal agency. It seems like a giant bureaucratic mess of designed by committee. But you also had a pretty strict timeline, and it sounds like some pretty well thought out processes along the way. What was that process like?

 

Tracy: Fortunately, we were working with a small group within the State Department. Yes, it’s a huge organization, it is literally a worldwide organization. But we were dealing with a particular team. In particular, a particular leader of that team. For the most part, what her decision was, was final. That made things go a lot more smoothly. We always talk about office politics, and here we’re dealing with actual politics. There were sometimes allowances that have to be made to some assistant secretary somewhere. But at the end of the day, it was this core team in International Information Programs office. I’m not sure if they’re going to change their name now that they that whole bureau has been reorg, but they were the ones who were in charge of the project. They were the ones that we answer to. They were the ones that gave the ‘yes or no’ decisions and gave us our marching orders. They are still doing that. They are still the ones who are requesting the new functionality as they deem needs. They’re getting their input from other bureaus, in the State Department and other offices. So it’s not like they’re decreasing amongst the whole agency. “This is the way it’s going to be done.” They’re getting input, but it’s nice to have that filter, that one point of contact and not have to deal with, like you said, the client by committee. That would be a nightmare. I think everybody recognized that. That’s not a model that works. We’ve been very fortunate to have a very organized structure and a great group of people at the State Department to work with.

 

Joe: Yeah. That’s fantastic. If I can impart some advice on the listeners here, it’s nice that you had a specific leader, a person on the team, that their word was the final one. For anybody who’s doing work with a committee. Get that defined upfront. I was working on a project where feedback from one person contradicted feedback from another. I was like “Who is the final, final on this? Whose word is the most important one?” Getting that defined as early as possible will make things a lot easier in the long run. Let’s wrap this episode up with the two questions that always end with. Starting with your plans for the future, you mentioned the multi-site project. Do you see yourself doing more work for the federal government in the future? Was this an enjoyable process for you, as much as you could say without risking your job, of course?

 

Tracy:  I’m on this contract for a while. The agency I’m working– I don’t like calling them an agency, because we’ll get to that in a second. The contracting firm I’m working with now hired me on. I think they have this contract for two years starting this past November, so another year and a half. So I’m on this for the foreseeable future. Again, it was just an incredible, weird, wonderful full circle to my entire career. Connecting two pieces of my life that I thought would never have any connection, coming together in this one incredible project that I am incredibly honored to have been a part of. It was an amazing experience, and I’m glad to have played whatever part in this that I have, because it’s an agency that is near and dear to my heart. I don’t know how much more I can answer that question, other than this was a very humbling and honorable experience to work on this.

 

Joe: Yeah. That’s perfect. That’s fantastic. I’m really glad to hear that. I’m very happy for you as a friend. I’m very happy that you’re coming on the show to talk about your experience. I think it’s valuable insight to the listeners and to me personally. Let’s wrap up with my favorite question, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

 

Tracy: This is one I struggled with because I know you ask this every time. I’m going to give two answers that I don’t think either or these are secrets at all. The first of all is before we started this conversation, you mentioned you’ve had bought a house, you were moving. Just as the contents of your life, grow to fill your house and the contents of the work that you do grow to fill your available time. I have found this to be true, working on this and still trying to keep my other business up and running. Whatever time you think you have, gets quickly swallowed up by life, and work, and projects. Let’s not forget, I have two kids who demand some of my time as well. Whatever available time you have will get eaten up by life. That’s not exactly a secret, but certainly a truism I found. The other is, there is a great variety of cultural differences out there, when it comes to different organizations and how they approach what is essentially the same project. The approach that the first agency I worked with and their culture is completely the young and the hip agency, they’ve got the warehouse office in northeast DC Then you contrast this with the agency I’m working with now, which is a lot more established government contracts, not really tied to any particular technology set. Maybe not as familiar with WordPress coming in. They’ve got the offices out in Northern Virginia by the airport. Same project, two entirely different cultures. Sometimes the key is just basically learning to adapt, becoming something of a chameleon. Being able to work in different systems, because you need to. There is still an end result that has to get done. You have to work within the system that you have in order to do that. Again, not sure if that’s a secret, but that is something I learned.

 

Joe: Yeah. Both fantastic pieces of advice. I love how you tied this back to me buying a house. Because you’re right, we– Excuse me. Clap my hands. I forgot to turn, do not disturb on. Man, on a rookie mistake for me. Aright, I clap my hands, and we’ll start again. I love how you tied it back to me buying a house because you’re right, the stuff fills the space that you have. We’re currently going through all of our stuff going “Do we need this? Why do we have this?” We’re guarding our space a little better as we continue to move. Maybe take Tracy’s advice and guard your time a little bit more, if you can. Then, learn to adapt and work in different systems. The biggest takeaway from my education at the University of Scranton was that I learned how to learn there. I used Java for my degree, and I haven’t touched Java basically since I graduated. But I learned how to program. I was taught to learn how to program. I love that advice. Learn to adapt and work in different systems, because you’ll have better opportunities, more opportunities and you’ll be easier to work with too, I imagine. Tracy, thanks so much for your time today. Where can people find you?

 

Tracy: You can find me on my Twitter account is @taupecat. That’s T A U P E C A T. That’s also my URL. My company is taupecatstudios.com. I’m still trying to keep that running and keep working on the State Department’s site as well. So yeah, that’s about it.

 

Joe: Awesome. I will link that, and everything we talked about, in the show notes today, over at HowIBuilt.it. Tracy, thank you so much for joining me. I appreciate it.

 

Tracy: Joseph, thank you so much for having me on.

 

Joe: Thanks so much again to Tracy for joining me today. I enjoyed this conversation because it’s always interesting to peek behind the curtain of working for a federal agency. Especially a diplomatic one. As Tracy said, the ones “Doing the good work.” It was cool to see her work at the federal level. It’s cool to see more WordPress development going on, at the federal level. Of course, she offers us some great advice about managing your time and learning how to adapt and things like that. Loved this conversation. If you like this conversation, be sure to subscribe to this podcast. You can do so over at HowIBuilt.it/subscribe. Thanks again to our sponsors, Ahoy! Pantheon and Cloudways. If you want to get more information about them and all of the show notes, you can head over to HowIBuilt.it/136. I want to tell you real quick, before we end this episode, about a special offer I have for a workbook, of sorts. A lot of people have been asking me lately about how to launch their own podcast, and so I put together a workbook. It’s a precursor to a course I am launching called Podcast Lift Off. You can get that workbook for free over at HowIBuilt.it/LiftOff. It’s a free workbook that’ll take you from choosing your topic and your format, all the way up to launching your show. It has a lot of templates and cool stuff there. Definitely check that out over at HowIBuilt.it/LiftOff. Until next week, get out there and build something.