Podcast E585 – Interview With Wes Tatters  ## Metadata - Author: [[Podcast – Kitchen Sink WordPress]] - Full Title: Podcast E585 – Interview With Wes Tatters - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/1ef4a872-0abf-4e21-9a28-d1ee8bd1c28a ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Early Tech Career and Data Center** - Wes Tatters started programming with punch cards before the internet existed. - He built one of Australia's first large data centers for 3D animated TV rendering. Transcript: Wes Tatters I've been in the IT world for almost 40 years as you said I was there before the internet was a thing when I first when I first started programming I'm originally a developer a coder was Using punch cards. I think my first university degree course that I studied, my assignment was on those little punch cards. You punch the holes out and send it off to a data centre. So I've seen some changes. I've been on a journey. But all the way through my journey, I've been adjacent to servers and adjacent to hosting infrastructure. It's kind of been a passion of my life in understanding how the internet and how server technology before that can be optimised and, you know, made performant regardless of, you know, Where you are. I have an odd career that transferred from IT into media and media back to IT and IT back to media. And even during those journeys in the early noughties, we produced a television series in Australia. It was a 3D animated television series. One of the requirements of that was doing that no one had ever done before, which was to build a massive data centre of render farms to render all this 3D animation. You know, sort of 35,000 frames of animation that had to be rendered every week for children's television series. No one had ever tried to build a data center like that in australia and i think we're about the third in the world that had even contemplated it um you know sort of at the tv series level pixar Had certainly done it at the um at the feature film level but we were knocking these things out weekly as opposed to pixar taking you know four years to do toy story so even back then learning What servers were and learning how technology interacted with the media space and the data space, it's always been a part of my life. ([Time 0:03:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/221329f2-1100-48ba-bf5a-5f1cfce561b5)) - **WordPress Hosting's Success Problem** - WordPress often fails when sites become successful due to hosting limitations. - Cheap hosting struggles with higher loads, giving WordPress a bad reputation for scalability. Transcript: Wes Tatters And it's what, over the years, i've come to develop a concept which is effectively called the success space um and it's somewhat unique to wordpress at the point where a wordpress site Starts to get successful it starts to have problems unfortunately most of the wordpress hosting space doesn't scale very well. And it's not intended to. $5 hostings from GoDaddy or Bluehost, great ways to get into WordPress. Adam Philby But those days, even those days are even kind of over. Those cheap $1.99 a month. Yeah, I remember those days. I mean, you and I, just so you know, for your backstory, we have a lot of overlap. I mean, I was also back in the days of Baltimore systems and dial up stuff. And my first modem was 110 bod, you know. Yeah. And then I went into theater and then back to technology. And, you know, now here we are. But yeah, you're right. I think back when WordPress started, we're at 22 years old now, just about right. Just about, yeah. You know, you had these hosting options. Everybody was a host or a reseller posting. Cheap hosting. It was easy. It was $2, $4, $2 to $4 a month. You know, cPanel, as many sites as you want to put on there. But once you scale, things break or slow down or stop working. Wes Tatters Yeah. And the sad thing is that unfortunately, WordPress has gotten itself a bad name. ([Time 0:10:32](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5ffc8a6e-2ba9-4cd1-9caf-041f792d3203)) - **BuddyBoss App's Hosting Challenges** - BuddyBoss launched a React Native app that caused severe hosting load issues due to high Ajax requests. - Each app interaction produces multiple page requests, overwhelming typical hosting environments. Transcript: Wes Tatters As I said, I've been building these sites for customers and looking at it going, WordPress hosting isn't designed for these customers. And in every case, they were going, we need to either fix the hosting problem or we're moving to a sas we're moving to teachific or you know sort of some other sort of you know mighty networks Or circle.io type products so i started to put that 40 years of experience in what i knew about you know scalable performance hosting and put it back into the wordpress space um at around That time buddy boss did something that broke themselves um they released an app buddy boss react native right in the app store on google and apple anybody boss customer could buy it 200 bucks a month probably the world's cheapest app you know sort of if you're shopping around for some of the build your app was 50 to 100 000 these guys were saying 200 300 bucks a month And we can get you an app in the app store a lot of people jumped on board and the success problem happened right even worse because unfortunately headless wordpress react native connected And all those sorts of things is more higher concurrency than just a standard word site of course see it's about how the users consume it if you think about how you view a web page you www Okay wait for it to load scroll down click a link read that maybe click another link read that and that's how we consume the web when we stick it in an app we go into swipe dash click swipe Dash click um people can move through an app you know 40 pages of swipes and clicks and and drags in the same time that they consumed three pages of a word page every one of those swipes clicks Likes comments is another page request coming back to that web server right and they put that poor little go daddy server or that poor little you know one core you know sort of server on Cloudways or you know wherever starts going right yeah i sorry, you've just generated a thousand page requests in the last hour. Adam Philby And honestly, things are even progressing faster than expected now because of the AI in the app building and the vibe coding with Bolts and Lovable. There's like you know every week there's five new services or platforms using that technology with llms to automate non-developers to become quote developers air quotes of developing You know i mean i mean that's and unfortunately while the code's there right it's complex um a ([Time 0:12:19](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8a932802-4c00-4843-96aa-a50f8e9af6cd)) - **Focus on Niches and Problems** - Identify niches and problem spaces well-served in your local area. - Focus your WordPress work on solving specific problems for targeted communities. Transcript: Wes Tatters Look at the space. Look at the area where you live. Look at the audiences and look at the problem spaces. And look at ways that you can help in that problem space. I'm very passionate about contributing to the WordPress community and contributing to the WordPress space. ([Time 0:31:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/22296e20-84fd-44f8-9655-abbfb08567ea)) - **Contribute to WordPress Non-Coding Roles** - Get involved in the WordPress community by contributing to documentation, testing, or joining launch parties. - Contributions don't require coding but help the ecosystem and give valuable experience. Transcript: Wes Tatters So contributing, again, to answer that question, what can people do? Get involved. Join make.wordpress Hang around. One of the craziest things, and unfortunately we're not going to – the cadence is now changing, but one of the craziest things that anyone could ever do is show up at a launch party. Right. It's 15 or 30 minutes of your life where you watch the process. And there's a bunch of people in the different teams calling in and checking in. And there's a bunch of test runs. And then there's a countdown. They release. Then there's a 15 to 20 minute mad dash where everyone at the launch party's responsible for installing it on their platforms installing it on their servers installing it on their infrastructure And reporting back they've got success right it's a silly little event it's only half an hour so stressful but people but well it's not even stressful it's actually kind of fun it's fun It's a bunch of nerds nerding out, but get involved in WordPress, but you don't need to be a coder to do that. Two more questions for you. Get involved in the test team, get involved in documentation. ([Time 0:34:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ae7d3f93-91cc-4c53-9f6c-5b27f3d08088)) - **Essential Daily Tools** - Use Slack for team communication, ChatGPT for support automation, and GitHub for developer collaboration. - AI integrates into many work areas, handling 20-25% of support tickets successfully. Transcript: Adam Philby What are your three go-to tools on a daily basis? Slack. Wes Tatters That's fair. We live in Slack. Rapid is an entirely disconnected, no office company. 75 staff all on Slack, 24 hours a day. I would say these days that's my biggest go-to tool. ChatGTP and its various derivatives are part of how we do business these days. Right. We use ChatGPT in many parts of our platform. We use AI now in many parts of our platform. We use it to help us manage our test building. We use it to help manage our documentation. We have a real-time live online support platform with live chat. But sitting in front of it, we have a fully loaded AI tool that actually is currently responding to between 20% and 25% of all our tickets. Adam Philby Okay. Wes Tatters You know, successfully with, you know, happy customers going, thanks, Finn, you know sort of um so um various combinations of ai um right across our platform uh and i guess the the last Tool that is my uh go-to day-to um look it's an entire ecosystem of developer tools that start with github ([Time 0:35:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3489ed34-be9e-425f-887a-f225b32e684e))