Kickstarting a career in tech

I rolled into the 2009 recession with a college diploma in Advertising. Turns out there wasn't a huge demand for print and broadcast media sales at the time. 😬

Last week I shared my journey into no-code, how it started with our local public library, and how I went from “playing on the computer” to pursuing a career in tech.

This week I’d like to pick up from where I left off: rolling into the recession as a recent college graduate with a borderline useless diploma in Advertising.

(Turns out there wasn’t a huge demand for print and broadcast media sales at the time.)

Kickstarting my career

A nice thing about college is that it forces you to be social. Students in my program were together for nearly every class over two years. That spilled over into evening and weekend hangouts.

Unfortunately those relationships didn’t last after I graduated. So, to find some semblance of a social life, I turned to meetups. 

A small group gathered at local coffee shops to talk about tech and the web. This was in 2009. Twitter was still very new, podcasting was in its early days, and Instagram wasn’t a thing.

Where it all started: Coffee & Company in downtown Kingston, ON

I became the “WordPress guy” in the group, taking on small client projects and evangelizing WordPress to pretty much everyone who would listen. 

In 2010 I was approached by an managed IT services company in Toronto. They needed to get their corporate site off an old, proprietary CMS. I recommended WordPress, and suggested they hire me to work on it in-house.

They accepted, so I packed up and moved to the big city.

In hindsight, that role was effectively a paid internship with a ton of wiggle room for experimentation. I learned the fundamentals of B2B marketing, lead gen, consultative sales, remote and field tech support.

I remember working on three projects, in particular:

• Integrating LogMeIn with the company’s website. Rather than sending our clients to some service portal, we’d ask them to go to our website and enter their support session key on our homepage.

• Setting up our intranet on BPOS. Microsoft BPOS was the predecessor to Office 365, now Microsoft 365. BPOS was my first taste of SharePoint Online. I built internal knowledge bases, custom lists, and workflows to manage employee compliance.

• Implementing Connectwise, an IT-specific ERP. Sadly I didn’t see this one through to the end. I jumped on an opportunity to join a startup and go deeper into WordPress.

For the next five years I hopped between in-house roles, agency work, and freelancing as a WordPress developer.

Some folks would take issue with my use of that term, because my work was less “writing code” and more “plugging things together”. The thing is, my clients needed solutions. They didn’t care how I built them!

Besides, whether writing code or not, there were broad themes, universal to all web projects, that I had worked with since I was a kid: data, interfaces, and interactions.

• Compiling info from around the web to build a site? That’s data.

• Creating webpages in Netscape Composer and Microsoft FrontPage? Those were interfaces.

• Setting up forums so site visitors could have discussions? Those were interactions.

Building solutions by piecing things together is the essence of what we do, whether it’s through code, low-code, or no-code.

Joining GoDaddy

When I moved to Toronto in 2010 I had joined WordPress meetups as a way to meet people. Attending meetups led to organizing meetups, which led to organizing conferences, which led to GoDaddy.

I joined GoDaddy in 2015 as the first Community Manager for GoDaddy Pro, a new partner program aimed at web designers & developers, aka “web professionals”.

GoDaddy was looking for someone who had experience with online and offline communities, experience with WordPress, and experience working as a freelancer and in agencies.

The entire job description was like a biography. It was too on the nose. I needed that job!

When I joined the company in 2015, I was stills a diehard WordPress advocate and a champion of the WordPress Way.

I believed that managing your own web hosting, installing software, configuring plugins, and customizing themes was the best way to do things. When I taught others how to use WordPress, I’d drag them into cPanel, FTP, and the WordPress Codex.

Looking back, I realize I was just forcing others to follow the same path I took. Rather than thinking about what they needed, and what solutions were best for the job, I leaned into my own experiences, and my own biases.

“Everything can be solved by WordPress”, I thought.

Until it couldn’t.

The world runs on spreadsheets

GoDaddy was the first enterprise company I ever worked for. I wasn’t prepared for the vast ocean of disparate software that awaited me.

My bookmarks ballooned with shortcuts to different internal tools, and many of those tools were spreadsheets.

Why so many spreadsheets? Because people were trying to make sense of all the information – all the data – they needed to manage.

Teams turned to spreadsheets because their existing software wasn’t doing the job, because the software they needed didn’t exist, or because it existed but wasn’t practical.

Spreadsheets, on the other hand, were ubiquitous and familiar.

Related: The world runs on Excel (Björn Wilmsmann)

I added my own contributions to the pile. I created databases for researching topics and analyzing competitors, calculators to help with budgets and timelines, and project trackers to assign tasks and monitor progress.

If I wasn’t in a meeting, I was deep into lots of Google Sheets, lots of Excel workbooks, and lots of Airtable bases.

This was all invisible, behind-the-scenes work. I did it for years, culminating in my final role as a Senior Product Manager overseeing community operations.

Joining Glide

I left GoDaddy in early 2022 to pursue other opportunities. One of those opportunities was with Glide.

I was already familiar with Glide because of their early sheets-to-apps premise. By the time we started talking, they had expanded to include Excel and Airtable as data sources.

I loved that Glide focused on software and not websites. I loved the choice to ship progressive web apps, rather native mobile apps. I loved that they made an intentional choice to restrict design options, so that users could focus on creating solutions rather than tweaking designs.

Building custom apps in Glide was a dream. It was a better version of what I tried cobbling together at GoDaddy.

Aside: David did a grand job explaining the philosophy during last years’s No-Code Summit in Paris.

There’s also a striking similarity between Glide’s approach to building apps and how I learned to build web projects.

In fact, Glide has a lot of similarities to the “WordPress way” of building things:

• WordPress has the “back end” in /wp-admin/. Glide has the builder.

• WordPress has post types. Glide has data sources.

• WordPress has widgets and blocks. Glide has the layout editor and components.

• WordPress has plugins. Glide has actions and integrations.

• WordPress has users. Glide has the users table.

I joined the team in August 2022 to help with events and advocacy, starting with our presence at the No-Code Summit. My role expanded to include partnerships in the fall, and for the last few months I’ve been heads down on refreshing our Glide Experts program.

What’s next?

Since joining Glide, most of my work has been behind the scenes. As we head into the spring, I’m itching to get out and do more with other Gliders and the larger no-code community.

Next week I’ll shift this newsletter to its intended purpose: a weekly digest about no-code, productivity, and remote work.

Thanks for sticking with me through this trip down memory lane! It’s been a treat. 🍻

Have a good one,

Andy