Nathan Wrigley interviews Topher DeRosia about how contributing in public and participating in open source communities like WordPress can shape careers, relationships, and purpose.
Background
Topher is a web developer with roughly 30 years of experience and about 15 years active in the WordPress community. He’s attended nearly 80 WordCamps around the world, helped start projects like HeroPress, and created educational materials, plugins, and tools across the ecosystem. WordPress reached him through a friend and a local meetup; organizing a WordCamp led to deeper immersion. His family also became part of the community: his wife and both children have presented at WordCamp US, and friendships span countries, creating a global extended family.
Why WordPress communities work
Topher attributes the community’s strength to two things: people and open source. The software and the 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. Local meetups and WordCamps reinforce bonds, turning online collaboration into real-world friendships and giving contributors direct evidence of the impact of their work.
Giving, gratitude, and motivation
A recurring theme is the motivational power of giving and of receiving gratitude. Feedback from people who benefited from his tutorials—sometimes messages saying a video helped support a family—has been deeply moving and sustaining. Topher traces some of his interest back to a college curiosity about motivation: gratitude, community, and helping others reliably predict personal fulfillment. Open source combines those elements with opportunities to make meaningful connections.
Working in public and career effects
Most of Topher’s public contributions were not part of a calculated career plan. He made videos, plugins, blog posts, and photography because they solved problems. Over time that body of work became visible and opened doors: contracts, speaking invitations, and client relationships that likely wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Examples include work with OS Training and WinningWP born from visible output, an aggregated portfolio at topher.how, and a client in Bangladesh who hired him for on-camera work because they already recognized him from community interaction.
These outcomes often arrive slowly and serendipitously. His advice is patient and long-term: do useful work in public, let a corpus of contributions accumulate, and trust that opportunities will appear over time.
Fame versus being community-known
Topher warns against chasing fame. He prefers to be “community-known”: recognized within the ecosystem for concrete contributions rather than seeking broad notoriety. Community-known status matters—people in the same space notice your work, which makes collaboration and hiring more likely—but it is different from mainstream celebrity.
Tensions between philanthropy and commerce
Open source communities carry a tension between philanthropic values and commercial realities. Companies that grow around plugins and services need to make business decisions that can include layoffs or reorganizations. Those moves may feel like a betrayal to community members, but they often reflect the hard realities of running a business that supports employees and investors. Topher believes WordPress compares favorably to many IT communities in inclusivity and openness, yet he cautions against complacency: continued effort on diversity and fairness is required to maintain that advantage.
A practical rule: make stuff and document it
Topher follows a simple rule: if he’s asked the same question three times, he creates documentation. That principle shapes his current work—short tutorials and beginner-focused videos that address what new site owners forget a few months after launch. He’s producing one-minute clips on basic tasks like creating links or uploading images because small, focused resources often help the most people.
Pivoting to stay free and accessible
Topher had planned a paid course but shifted when a sponsor offered a different route: publish on his YouTube channel, grow subscribers, and then receive payment. He chose to make these videos freely available rather than hide them behind a paywall, aiming to help people who cannot afford paid courses—like a hypothetical 17-year-old learning WordPress at a library.
HeroPress and playing the long game
HeroPress, Topher’s project that collects stories of people using WordPress to change their lives, exemplifies the long-game approach. Built slowly, piece by piece, the site now contains hundreds of stories and serves as both a resource and a network. No single push created it; persistent, incremental contributions did.
Advice and outlook
– Contribute publicly when you can. The impact is often delayed but substantial: visibility, credibility, and relationships grow over time.
– Create useful documentation. Small acts of generosity sustain the community and attract reciprocal opportunities.
– Aim to be community-known rather than famous. Recognition within your ecosystem matters more for collaboration and work than broad notoriety.
– Accept commercial complexity. Companies must balance mission and financial responsibilities, and contributors should expect trade-offs rather than purity.
– Preserve a philanthropic core. Free resources reach people who need them most and keep the ecosystem healthy.
Where to find Topher
Topher’s aggregated work is at topher.how; his personal blog is topher1kenobi.com. He posts tutorials and videos under the Topher1Kenobi handle across platforms.
Conclusion
Topher’s experience shows how working openly—sharing code, documentation, tutorials, and stories—builds a durable career and strengthens the community. Open source, remote work, and sustained generosity create networks that support livelihoods, friendships, and meaning in unexpected ways.