Get To Know Sallie Goetsch
Sallie Goetsch (rhymes with ‘sketch’) first got online in 1985, via the mainframe at Brown University. She founded an online journal in 1993 and built her first HTML website in 1994. Since discovering WordPress in 2005, she hasn’t looked back. Sallie became the organizer of the East Bay WordPress Meetup in Oakland, California, in 2009.
Sallie has produced WordPress videos for Peachpit Press, taught introductory WordPress classes for Mediabistro, and acted as Technical Reviewer for O’Reilly’s WordPress: The Missing Manual. She runs her WP Fangirl consulting and development business from her home in Oakley, which she shares with her husband and two cats. She appears regularly on the WP-Tonic Live panel on Saturday mornings.
We’re thrilled Sallie will be speaking at WordCamp Sacramento 2016 on Falling In Love With Flexbox!
Speaker Q&A With Sallie
To help you learn even more about Sallie, we asked her to answer a few questions for us, some WordPress-related, and some others we think you’ll appreciate 🙂 Be sure to give her a shout out on Twitter and don’t forget to use our hashtag #wcsac.
What inspired you to give this talk at WordCamp?
Not only was speaking at WC Sacramento last year a great experience, I’ve been raving at people about Flexbox for quite a while, and several people encouraged me to do it because they want to learn more about how to use Flexbox.
How did you discover WordPress?
I first encountered WordPress in 2005, when I heard a teleseminar about blogging. I decided to see what my then-webhost offered, which turned out to be b2. That was a little rough for me, so my first blog was on Blogger. A couple of months later, I heard podcasters talking about WordPress for podcasting, and this time when I checked, my hosting company had a WordPress installer. I installed it and began to learn how to use it and what it could do, and I was hooked.
How has WordPress Or WordCamp impacted you?
WordPress took over my life and my business. I make my living by building WordPress sites, so that’s a pretty big impact. I’ve met amazing people at WordCamps and seen inspiring and informative talks. And the Sacramento WordCamp organizers just impressed the pants off of me last year by doing such a great first event — not to suck up or anything.
How do you primarily work with WordPress?
I build websites for (mostly small) businesses and non-profits. That’s a combination of content strategy, implementation, and development. I do a lot of theme customization and build custom themes on the Genesis framework, and create a lot of custom post types and custom taxonomies to help arrange content properly. I haven’t built any plugins beyond functionality plugins and the odd widget…yet, anyway.
What does the WordCamp theme Discovery mean to you?
WordPress was a revelation for me when I discovered it, even as primitive as it was then. It updated the menu automatically when you added new pages! And it set me on a path of continual, constant, and sometimes overwhelming learning.
What is the latest book you read?
The last business book is Smashing Magazine’s Real Life Responsive Design. In hardcover. I read fiction at such a rate on my Kindle that I can hardly keep up with myself and don’t always remember the title of the book I’m reading at the moment. The current one is one of Marc Secchia’s books about dragons.
What is your favorite restaurant? Favorite menu item?
My favorite restaurant was Yummy Chinese in El Cerrito, but they closed a couple of years ago. I used to get the deep-fried tofu and spicy eggplant with garlic.
What TV series are you current binging on/into?
What’s a TV?
What do you do for fun?
Between working and driving my husband to the airport every week, I don’t have a lot of time for fun, but I’m a fairly boring person, so that doesn’t bother me. I walk every day and I dote on my two cats, one of whom makes regular appearances with me on the WP-Tonic live panel.