An Interview with Mark Jaquith
November 19th, 2006
As the old saying goes, better late than never. So goes our second installment of interviews with members of the WordPress community. Our first, way back in the beginning of the year was with Skippy. Though it was well received, life and other online endeavors got in the way, and the idea fell far to a back burner. However over the past few months it kept creeping its way back up, and I began looking around for someone who’s been active in the community, yet hasn’t received some of the attention that perhaps others have. Not an easy task, as there are numerous contributors to the WP community that deserve some spotlight. That said, Mark Jaquith (also can be found at Mark on WordPress) has shown more and more on my radar. From his video tutorial on how to write a plugin to his many contributions to the core code development, Mark is continually giving back to the community.
In addition to his many contributions, I’m quite excited about the prospects of him
moving to my neck of the woods, and getting a WordPress meetup going, but I digress. I approached Mark on his willingness to answer some questions to help put a person behind the code.
Enough rambling, WordPress Station is proud to present a recent email interview with Mark Jaquith.
So in the spirit of Skippy’s Interview, Atari 2600 or Intellivision?
Atari 2600.
What is your earliest memory of being online?
The first online service my family had was Prodigy, running on an IBM PS/2. My first truly memorable online experience was seeing the results of the 1992 presidential election come in live. Prodigy had a map of the United States up, and the states would turn blue or red. It felt more raw than the television version. It wasn’t some guy in a suit telling me what was happening. It felt like I was getting the data directly — cutting out the middleman.
What was your first exposure to WordPress, and how soon thereafter did you start using it? Hacking it?
I first tried WordPress in the fall of 2003. I was comfortable enough on Movable Type, so I didn’t really investigate further. In the following months, I found myself frustrated by Movable Type. I didn’t know Perl, and it didn’t seem like the best language to learn. So I started taking my MT templates and manipulating their output using PHP. I soon reached the limits of what that could do. Then MovableType 3.0 happened in mid-2004. Mark Pilgrim switched to WordPress, and wrote a very compelling entry on his reasons for doing so. I was feeling constricted both by the language and the license of Movable Type, so I made the leap. I published my first bit of WP code on May 24th, 2004, and my first plugin on May 25th, 2004. I moved to WordPress on May 26th, 2004. So I pretty much hit the ground running.
Do you have formal training in coding, or is it something you’ve self taught and now run with it?
I have no formal training. I bought a book to learn PHP and MySQL in early 2004. Before that I tinkered in JavaScript (also learned from a book).
What was your first official hack/plugin release?
My first official plugin was a quick-and-dirty function to return the comment count instead of echoing it. One of my first gripes with WP was the lack of functions that returned data. The system’s improved quite a bit since its introduction however.
Which release are you the most proud of?
Subscribe to Comments is by far my favorite and most popular plugin. The plugin adds a checkbox to the comment form that, if checked, will e-mail the commenter all follow-up comments to that entry. It’s a great way to keep people coming back to your site, and keeping them engaged in the conversation. The initial plugin (version 1.0) was written by ScriptyGoddess. I wrote some improvements for it, but in March of 2005, I started writing version 2.0… almost completely from scratch. It’s now seen a few minor version iterations, and I’m
currently working on Subscribe to Comments 2.1 for a tentative December, 2006 release.
What aspect of the Internet do you most feel needs addressing by society?
I feel pretty strongly about network neutrality. Data is data, and ISPs shouldn’t be discriminating between different types of data or different senders of data.
What is your favorite aspect of WordPress?
Its extendibility is what has won me over. I’ve done some pretty crazy non-blog projects using WordPress without changing a line of core code. When it is upgrade time, I am worry-free, because everything is done in plugins.
Least favorite?
The role/capability system is done in a really bizarre way on the backend. It supports a lot of things that WordPress itself doesn’t support (like multiple roles per user), and it doesn’t support some things that it should support (like role-to-user associations). I’d love for this system to be streamlined, with unnecessary features
being dropped and simple role management brought into core.
I read your blog, where do you get your inspirations for non-technical posts?
Amazement will prompt me to blog. Absurdity can also do it. Frustration is also a common motivator. I stay pretty up to date on news and politics, and my views put me in major opposition to both the Left and the Right… so there’s no shortage of contrarian opinions for me to put on display. I’ve slowed down a lot — mostly because I don’t have as much free time as I did when I was in school.
What do you do to get away from the computer?
Not enough. But when I do manage to pry myself away, I like to go to the gym, the shooting range, or (and most often) just curl up on a sofa with my girlfriend and watch a movie. In an ideal world, there
would be a rock wall and a mountain biking trail near enough for me to use… but such things are in short supply in Florida.
Where do you see WordPress going?
I see CMS features being fleshed out a bit more, while still staying very close to the main goal of being simple personal blogging software. I see the interface improving in both functionality and visual appeal. I see performance enhancing features being integrated into core.
And yourself with WP? I really think you’d be a great asset to Automattic.
I’m going to continue offering independent WordPress consulting services through Covered Web Services for the foreseeable future. Right now I have a pretty good deal going because I can work with Automattic on an independent contractor basis, but still pursue other
avenues.
Finally, any cool new WP projects you’ve got going you could hint at?
A recent thread I started on the wp-hackers list about injecting some life into the readme.txt standard for WordPress plugin documentation might provide a clue.
Are there any other open source projects that you are involved in?
None that aren’t WordPress-related. Obviously working with WP has given me general LAMP skills that would be applicable elsewhere, but none of the other projects I’ve considered has had as much potential as WordPress. I pretty much live and breathe WordPress. That’s been a blessing to me, as it puts me in a unique position to offer independent WordPress consulting, and it allows me to basically “write off” my volunteer work for WordPress as job-training, improvement of the tools that I use, and even as a form of marketing. I don’t have a portfolio on the Covered Web Services site, because my work on WordPress sufficiently speaks to my credibility. That said, I’m always on the lookout for the next big FOSS opportunity, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up involved in many such projects.
Thanks again Mark for participating, and we look forward to continued involvement in the community. Let me personally thank you for your contributions.
If anyone has any suggestions for our next interview, feel free to contact me. As I said, there are many people who deserve attention, not to mention all too often the Internet can almost dehumanize us. I’ve been quite overwhelmed by this particular online community, and genuinely enjoy bridging that gap when ever possible.
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