Content:
Nathan Wrigley interviews Topher DeRosia about how working in public and contributing to open source communities like WordPress can shape careers, relationships, and purpose.
Background
Topher is a web developer with roughly 30 years’ experience and about 15 years in the WordPress community. He attended nearly 80 WordCamps worldwide, helped start projects like HeroPress, and has made educational materials and tools across the ecosystem. Discovering WordPress via a friend and a local meetup led quickly to organizing a WordCamp and then full immersion in the community. Topher’s family also became part of the community: his wife and both children have spoken at WordCamp US, and friendships span countries—providing a kind of global extended family.
Why WordPress communities work
Topher believes the community’s strength comes down to people and the nature of open source. He’s seen similar dynamics at other tech events and smaller CMS communities: the software and remote-work possibilities let people everywhere compete and collaborate. Open source lowers barriers so someone in Malaysia or Malta can pick up WordPress and build a livelihood like someone in New York. Events—meetups and WordCamps—reinforce bonds and let contributors see the impact of their work.
Giving, gratitude, and motivation
A recurring theme is the motivational power of giving and receiving gratitude. Hearing from someone who learned WordPress from Topher’s videos and then supported a family moved him deeply. That kind of feedback validates effort and sustains long-term giving. Topher traces some of his interest back to college curiosity about what motivates people. Gratitude, community, and the act of helping others are strong predictors of personal fulfillment; open source contributions combine those elements with friendship.
Working in public and career effects
Topher stresses that most of his public contributions weren’t a calculated career strategy. He made videos, plugins, blog posts, and photography because they were useful, and over time those efforts accumulated into a visible body of work. That visibility generated opportunities: contracts, invitations, and relationships that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Examples include:
– OS Training videos and later work with WinningWP because others had seen his prior output.
– A project aggregating decades of his work at topher.how so people can find it easily.
– A client in Bangladesh who hired him for on-camera video work because they already knew him through community interaction.
These outcomes usually arrive serendipitously and slowly. Topher advises a patient, long-term mindset: do useful work publicly, build a foundation, and trust that a corpus of contributions will create future possibilities.
Fame vs. community-known
Topher cautions against chasing fame. Instead, he prefers being “community-known”: recognized within the ecosystem because of concrete contributions, not notoriety for its own sake. Community-known status is powerful—people in the same space recognize your work and are more likely to collaborate or hire you—but it doesn’t equate to mainstream celebrity.
Tensions between philanthropy and commerce
The conversation touches on the perennial tension in open source: the mix of philanthropic culture and commercial pressures. Plugin and product companies can grow into sizable businesses with employees and investors, requiring hard decisions when times are tough. From an outsider’s perspective, layoffs or reorganizations may feel like a betrayal of community values, but they often reflect the realities of running a company responsible for employees’ livelihoods.
Topher notes that WordPress probably compares favorably to other IT communities in terms of inclusivity and openness, but he warns against complacency. The community must keep working on diversity and fairness; otherwise it risks losing its relative advantage.
Practical approach: make stuff, help repeatedly
Topher follows a practical rule: if he’s asked the same question three times, he creates documentation. That approach drives his current projects and explains his emphasis on small, focused resources. He’s building short tutorials and beginner-focused videos—one-minute clips for basic tasks like creating links or uploading images—because these are the things a new site owner often forgets a few months after launch.
New projects and staying free
Topher was planning a paid course for clients, but after getting sponsorship interest he pivoted. A sponsor asked him to publish videos on his own YouTube channel and offered payment once he reached a subscriber milestone. So instead of a paywalled course, Topher is producing free videos on YouTube, posting three times a week, with the aim of helping people who can’t afford paywalls—like a hypothetical 17-year-old with limited means discovering WordPress at a library.
HeroPress and the long game
HeroPress—Topher’s project highlighting people leveraging WordPress to improve their lives—exemplifies the long-game approach. He built it one piece at a time: essays accumulated into hundreds of stories documenting how WordPress changed lives. That slow, steady accumulation of contributions created a resource and a network no single push could have produced.
Advice and outlook
– Contribute publicly when you can. The impact is often delayed but can be substantial: visibility, credibility, and relationships form over time.
– Focus on helping others and creating useful documentation. Small acts of generosity sustain community and attract reciprocal opportunities.
– Don’t pursue fame for its own sake. Aim to be “community-known” through work that matters.
– Be mindful of the commercial realities. Companies in the ecosystem must balance mission with financial responsibilities, and contributors should expect complexity rather than purity.
– Preserve the philanthropic core. Make free resources where feasible to reach people who need them most.
Where to find Topher
Topher’s aggregated work is at topher.how; his personal blog is topher1kenobi.com. He publishes tutorials and videos under the Topher1Kenobi handle across platforms.
Conclusion
Topher’s experience illustrates how working openly—sharing code, documentation, tutorials, and stories—creates a durable, long-term career and community benefits that often arrive in unexpected ways. The combination of open source, remote work, and sustained generosity builds networks that support livelihoods, friendships, and meaning across the globe.
