When I was in college, I thought about where I wanted to be when I was 45. Three years ago, I was already working on passing off projects so I could part with my corporate job. Using vacation time I switched to working part time. At WordCamp San Francisco, two years ago, Matt announced that the WordPress lead team had decided to merge the WordPress and WordPress MU code bases.
One of the things I’ve been thinking about this weekend is how those are all tied together.
Andrea & I had been working at the WordPress MU consulting thing about a year prior to the merge announcement. For about a month after what we spent a quite a bit of time discussing was, “what were we going to do?” There was always the option for me to go back to corporate development, so we never felt that we were out of options.
With all of the time Andrea had put into the WordPress MU support forums, she had interacted with thousands of other people with a wide range of technical skills who were also using MU. So, the second question we pondered was, “what were the other users of MU going to do?”
The third question we discussed was, “what do we want to do?”. This question is what ties together the three disparate things in the first paragraph. Whether we would have discussed this at some point, it was the merge announcement that precipitated that discussion.
Once we were fairly sure of what we wanted to do, we started to work toward those goals by doing three things:
- I volunteered to work on the merge. The worst that could happen was I might have been turned down. You don’t get anywhere if you don’t try or in this case offer. In addition to offering, I went ahead and did some preliminary prototyping work on a merged codebase using the 2.7.1. versions.
- We chose and registered the WP eBooks domain. We had this domain for more than a year before we started developing the site but our goal for the site was established before we chose the domain name.
- I started looking into developing a theme framework for BuddyPress. That work eventually turned into GenesisConnect which currently supports 34 themes.
All of these are done and/or established. This year we’ve been moving toward the other things that we discussed two years ago. Hopefully, we’ll be able to talk about those plans over the next few months.
At the beginning of the post I wrote about three separate things. The way that they are tied together is that twenty-some years ago what I wanted to be doing when I was 45 was working at something *I* wanted to do vs working at something because it paid the bills. When I turned 45, I was primarily working on the merge, a project that I had volunteered for.
Since then I’ve had a year to reflect a bit on that. Without a doubt I was fairly naive back in college. But it’s pretty amazing that I ended up where I wanted to be anyway. If there is a moral to this story, I would say that it’s true that life is 10% what happens to you and 90% what you do about it 
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