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Episode 58: Andy Fragen

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Hallway Chats: Episode 58 - Andy Fragen

Introducing Andy Fragen

Andy Fragen is a WordPress hacker and hobbyist. He’s an acute care surgeon who is also self-taught programmer – doing this for fun while trying to solve problems.

Show Notes

Website | TheFragens.com
GitHub | afragen
WordPress.org | afragen
Twitter | @andyfragen

Episode Transcript

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions, and our guests share their stories, ideas and perspectives.

Liam: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Liam Dempsey.

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re joined by Andy Fragan. Andy is a WordPress hacker and hobbyist. He’s a self-taught programmer doing this for fun while trying to solve problems. Oh yeah, and his day job is an acute care surgeon. Hi Andy, welcome to Hallway Chats.

Andy: Hi, Tara.

Liam: Hey Andy. Thanks for joining us.

Andy: Thank you.

Liam: You’re welcome. Thank you. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

Andy: I live in Palm Springs, California where I grew up. I do the WordPress stuff for fun. My day job is an acute care surgeon. I work in a local hospital here doing acute care surgery. I have spent my time as a kind of a recovering trauma surgeon for the last 10 years or so and recently stopped that, I may end up getting back into that again, but we’ll see. I generally make WordPress plugins and stuff to solve problems with my own and it just kind of led me to be involved with community. I have met a lot of people both online and in person. A couple of years ago, I decided that in order to kind of step up my game and meet more people on the inside, I started becoming a sponsor for my local area WordCamps. I’ve been a sponsor for WordCamp Orange County, WordCamp Los Angeles, WordCamp San Diego, and WordCamp Phoenix in the last several years.

Tara: A sponsor meaning just as yourself, a personal sponsor?

Andy: Well, I kind of sponsor under the name of the plugin which I’ve done more.

Tara: Okay. Let’s back up a bit and talk about how a surgeon starts to become a WordPress aficionado, how did that come about?

Andy: I had my first online account that I used to have to go through as a SLIP account, later came PPP. This was probably around ’91 or so, if anybody remembers that far back. I’ve got my first Macintosh computer when I graduated from college in 1985, and sided with Macintoshes ever since. For a long time, I was using a software called Radio UserLand. It had an object-oriented database in the back-end but produced static HTML file. I’ve written a couple– it’s scripting language is very similar to Apple script. I’ve written a couple of– I kind of don’t know what they’re called anymore. Modules, plugins, whatever, for that. One of the first ones was to enable the user to edit their post and markdown. As that kind of went by the wayside, I pulled myself out. This was kind of around 2007 in Zen Garden days and I saw WordPress had a lot of traction. I exported, imported and been staying in WordPress ever since, mostly playing with back-end because I don’t blog that often. Bad for SEO, I know.

Tara: [laughs] Have you always been interested in technology and computers and that type of thing? I would think that dissecting, cutting into people is a very different interest than coding. Where does that come from?

Andy: I’ve always been coding. I took my first computer programming class in college, clearly before becoming a surgeon. But I’m looking at it as just a different way of problem-solving. You get to be creative, you get to figure things out. The computers only ever do– well, only supposedly ever do what you tell them to do, and it makes it a bit more interesting. The kind of parallel to surgery is that a lot of it’s problem-solving and a lot of it is problem-solving on your feet. You have to do it right then and right there.

Tara: Yeah.

Liam: Andy, it’s interesting that you got into computers when you were younger and in college, and taking programming and then pursuit a career in surgery. And then around ’07, you were coming back to look at coding and you discovered WordPress and the like. Were you coming back to coding– were you trying to market your practice? Were you looking for a hobby on the side? What was the impetus to look back at what’s the best coding situation for the challenges you were facing?

Andy: Actually, I did sort of come back to coding to market my practice a little, but I was using an application called VoodooPad which had a templating system. It was before I found WordPress, and you could script it in Lua. I had no idea about Lua but I did manage to figure out a couple of things in it. I basically hand-coded a static website out of it. It was very similar to Radio UserLand in that it was template system that produced static HTML files that you FTP and upload. So I learned CSS, I learned HTML.

Tara: I’m pretty much in awe of the fact that you do this alongside being a surgeon so I’m going to talk a little bit more about that and maybe the relationship between the two because I find it really interesting. I have often said to my family and myself when they’re frustrated or I’m frustrated, by how much attention I’m giving my clients and how much urgency with which I respond. I often say, “I’m not a brain surgeon, I’m not saving lives with my website. I don’t really have to reply right away.” In your case, you have a day job where you actually do save people’s lives. For you, I’m just wondering how WordPress fits in with that. Are you doing work for clients with your plugin, or how do you relate the two together in terms of hobby and business if you’re doing WordPress as a business?

Andy: It’s all hobby, I don’t monetize it in any real way, shape, or form. So at times, I’ve been asked if there’s a tip jar I have, a donate button on plugins and links that I have. I know too many brain surgeons, I have to say it’s not rocket science.

Tara: [laughs] Okay, thanks for that reality. That’s good to know. I imagine keeping things in perspective when your website goes down or somebody finds a bug with your plugin or something like that, do you relate that to the gravity with which your day job needs to be approached, I guess?

Andy: Yes and no. I can usually tell if I’m going to white-screen something right away, and god, I feel really bad if I’m doing that. I try to get those things fixed right away. The first plugins I ever coded, I was cowboy-coding on my test server on an iPad from the Carribean at my in-laws. That was kind of the first release of The Event Calendar Category Colors plugin.

Liam: Should I ask if that was a couple of holiday cocktails in, too?

Andy: No, it wasn’t. Fortunately, the software on the iPad was such that I could FFTP into the server as well so I could fix whatever I broke right away. I know I really broke it when I white-screened it.

Liam: I think we’ve all been there too, right?

Andy: Starting with an IDE has been tremendous, just speed increases and being able to code and do stuff. X Debug] has been phenomenal, figuring out how to use that.

Liam: Andy, I’m going to circle us around to one of our more pivotal signature questions here and I’m going to ask you about your definition of success and whether or not you have a personal definition, maybe a professional definition, maybe something that’s a combination of both. How would you define success?

Andy: Personally, I think, obviously, we all define our own successes. I’m not sure how we really think of ourselves as successful, because usually, you don’t say, “I’m successful.” Depending on who you are, maybe you do, but usually, other people tell you or they tell other people, “Yes, that person is successful.” I’m looking at it as I do what I do and I have enough time and means to be able to do the things that I enjoy.

Liam: That’s direct. I like that.

Andy: Surgeon.

Tara: Yeah. [laughs]

Liam: When you shared that you do acute care surgery, is there a sub-specialty of that or if somebody comes into the acute care center, regardless of the need, you’re the surgeon to take care of it? How does that work?

Andy: What it basically means it’s that it’s mostly stuff that comes to the ER. There’s a smaller elective practice, most of it’s what comes to the ER. For a good chunk of last 12 years or so, I was doing trauma and acute care surgery. That was basically entire non-elective practice. I found that acute care, just the stuff that comes to the ER better, more challenging, fun.

Liam: Are you attached to a hospital then, and not in a separate surgery center, right? Because if they’re in the ER, they’re not going to ship them over to you? You operate out of a hospital or two?

Andy: Yeah, I operate out of a hospital. Local hospital here, is Desert Regional Medical Center. It’s part of the Tenet Healthcare. They run it. I have held quite a number of jobs and positions in the last decade or so at the hospital, including just coming off a stint as a chief of staff.

Liam: Yeah, that’s a good job title. Let me ask you this, and I’ll steer back towards WordPress. You mentioned that you were digging into WordPress and you found it as a useful tool. And then as you began to use it more, you discovered WordCamps and thought, “Maybe I’ll go to one of those and see what that’s all about.” Talk to us about that, how did that process evolve for you?

Andy: First WordCamp I went to was Orange County in 2014. I took my son, who is now 23, who is sort of in the business but not quite. The pre-text was I took my kids so that my wife wouldn’t yell at me and allow me to go.

Liam: Well played.

Andy: And the standard deal I have is that I can go to any WordCamp I can drive to, which kind of limits me to Southern California.

Liam: Well, how far can you push that? Because technically, you could go to Lima, Peru and still drive. It would take you for a while.

Andy: It’s hard to get there for a weekend, though.

Liam: Well, to get there and back in a weekend is tough.

Andy: Well, okay. It’s also one of those, it’s like, you’ve got to be able to leave Friday and come back Sunday, right?

Liam: Yeah, fair enough. Go ahead, sorry. I got us sidetracked. You were saying?

Andy: So I went and I met a lot of people. A lot of people that you see on Twitter, you see on WordPress Slack.

Liam: I don’t know when that started, but yeah.

Andy: And just in core looking at things, it was a lot of fun. That’s when I kind of realized, “Hey, if I’m ever going to kind of get more involved–” They didn’t really have WordPress meetups locally, and the only way I would be able to do it is to kind of become a sponsor and show up and then be the one talking. I’ve given several WordCamp talks over the years, too, I think about three years or so, it’s been fun.

Liam: Yeah, that’s neat. I think that’s one of the best things I like about WordCamps too is meeting the people. The Twitter people, or the GitHub people, or the Slack people that we engage with over the internet, and to get to know them beyond their avatar and their sayings online.

Andy: GitHub’s amazing for that stuff. Before, when I was doing stuff, before I put it up on GitHub, it was just like, okay, I’d be doing things and put it there. I think the first plugin that I wrote was The Category Colors plugin. After I put it up on GitHub, I got a response from one of the guys who works for Modern Tribe to help me out with it.

Liam: That’s pretty cool, wasn’t it?

Andy: It’s been very cool. Actually, they came down for some– I haven’t met most of them because they’re all remote and I don’t think any of them are in Southern California. But they invited me out to dinner when they were down near LA for some meeting, so I drove in to come hang with them for a little bit.

Liam: That’s pretty cool. Within the WordPress community, or the WordPress environment, you’re writing plugins, you’re doing some code, you’re solving some problems, what’s your favorite thing to do about that? Is it to expand on a plugin that you’ve got and check in more functionality and watch it grow to see what the community does with your plugin? Is it troubleshooting? When you’re unwinding in your hobby, what do you like to do most?

Andy: I like to make sure it works.

Liam: Good call. [laughs]

Andy: It depends on where the plugin is. I recently put out a rather larger version update to the GitHub Updater plugin, made it much more modular, made it much more able to kind of peel off parts if I so desire to maybe strip it down into two different plugins to be able to put part of it in the repository and part of it not. Because originally when I wrote it, I submitted it to the repo and was denied because, essentially, they didn’t want to promote outside repository. It wasn’t against the guidelines at times but I think it is now since the guidelines have been rewritten. It led to very interesting conversations, very professional conversations with the plugin teams. I had great email interactions with Mika Epstein, Pippin Williamson and with Otto. I actually met Pippin and Mika in real life at various WordCamps and had mailed with them and stuff. They’re great people.

Liam: You know, they are. You know what? I’m remiss at not asking you sooner. Tell us about what plugins you have? You’re mentioning them and you’re mentioning them sometimes by name. But if you could just– I think you said you had three or four. If you could just name them and tell us a little bit about what they do, that would be great?

Andy: There’s a number of them that deal with the event calendar. The most lively used one is The Event Calendar Category Colors, it has probably about 6000 active installs and it’s been downloaded over a hundred thousand times give or take. There’s a couple of other smaller event calendar plugins. One as kind of an alarm feature to the event. If you subscribe to the feed or subscribe to it, it will put up the alarm on your phone.

Liam: Cool.

Andy: Another plugin fixes the exported URL through using Outlook. I wrote one for the second WordCamp Orange County Plugin-A-Palooza because it filled a need I had, just to embed PDF into a webpage and called it Web PDF Viewer. I thought it was great but there were like at least 400 downloads by the time that the Plugin-A-Palooza came around, which means that it only had been out for a couple of months because it’s like from March to June.

Tara: Cool.

Andy: I kept that updated and updated things. As I found either errors or I found better ways to improve it. The GitHub Updater, I’m actually on my fifth-year anniversary of its first commit to that. It’s changed tremendously, to the point where I probably ought to rebrand it as just Git Updater because it’s for GitHub, and BitBucket, and GitLab, Gitea.

Liam: How does that work? Is that if you’re editing from within the theme editor in the dashboard, it can push it to your repo?

Andy: If you have a plugin or a theme that you’re developing and you keep it in GitHub, let’s just stick to GitHub at the moment, you keep it in GitHub, when you push a version change or a release or something like that, if you add a single header to the file, and someone is running my plugin, they will see an update. If they– depending on their site, if they want to, they can also create a webhook to have it update automatically.

Liam: Okay, it’s for individuals running themes to know when the master theme, if you will, has been updated?

Andy: The original idea was that the update would just show up in the plugins or themes page or on the update page. It’s like any other other plugin that came out of the dot.org repository.

Tara: Okay. I’m going to move away from tech for a minute, maybe we’ll jump right back in and I suspect it might because I can tell this is a passion and your brain was always turned on. What would you say is the most important thing that you do every day towards this idea of success and doing what you enjoy?

Andy: I can’t say get up and drink coffee?

Tara: You can, sure. That is absolutely a valid answer, for sure.

Andy: Honestly, you get up, you jump in the shower, you put on some clothes, and you get to work, whatever that work may be. Whether it’s going to the hospital, seeing patients, getting called by the ER in the middle of the night and crawling out of bed and running in there, or not. Coffee, of course, is part of it no matter what time of day it is.

Tara: Yeah, I’ve got some here myself. Because you’re not monetizing your WordPress work and it’s something that you love and are doing as a hobby, do you set goals for yourself for what you want to accomplish and what you want to learn, or has it just sort of been an organic process that you’ve just kind of moved, progressed from one thing to the next. Because obviously, the type of code you’re talking about, some of which I don’t even know what it is, takes a lot of learning. So you’ve committed time to that. Do you spread out goals for that? How does that work?

Andy: New things come up in the world. All the new PHP and things like that. Yes, I have gone kind of more in taking efforts to learn what that is and how it works. One of the first programming classes I took was in Pascal and Pascal was subroutines and routines, it feels very similar to an object-oriented programming method. There’s still things that I need to learn how to do. Write UNIX tests, Javascript, I kind of faked my way through some Javascript just enough to figure things out but I haven’t really spent any time learning it.

Tara: Is that a goal that you have? Do you keep a list of things that you want to do or do you just kind of–?

Andy: I have a list of some things that I want to do. They’re either feature things to add or they are just kind of longer-term ‘learn Javascript’ kind of goals.

Tara: Right. And when you’re not behind a computer screen or in your scrubs, what other kinds of things do you do for fun? I’m almost afraid to ask this question. [laughs]

Andy: Chicken. I hang out with my wife and kids a lot. My son is 23, my daughter’s 17. They’re both living at home although my wife and daughter are away on vacation right now, so it’s good to be my kids and my wife in the summertime. [laughter] And I’m here authentically working.

Tara: Right. Are either of your kids interested in medicine or technology programming?

Andy: No. Technology yes, medicine no. I have successfully scared them clear of that, I think.

Liam: Deliberately or just coincidentally?

Andy: Sort of deliberately. I don’t think it’s practice like it used to be, I love it and I enjoy it and I have a good time, but it is certainly there are a tremendous number of rules, policies, procedures, law that it’s becoming less and less fun at times and I can certainly see where in the future that could be problematic.

Tara: Yeah.

Liam: You’re certainly not the first medical professional to have expressed that opinion to me that there’s value in some rules and regulations. If people are just doing whatever they want, that’s a problem. But when it goes to the point where it becomes difficult to practice medicine because of the rules and regulation, that’s another problem, isn’t it?

Andy: Yeah. You can just look at the difficult– I can see somebody and take them to the operating room and make them better, and that’s great. And then if I haven’t documented everything properly according to the federal government, I may not get paid for it. Medicine is one of these very few activities where you get reimbursed sometimes much after you have provided the service.

Tara: Right. As patients, we don’t think about it from that perspective very often. We think more about what our insurance is going to cover and we don’t think about maybe when our provider is going to be paid or how much they’re getting paid.

Andy: And I’ll also tell you that having the patient, and I’m a patient too, having the patient not be directly responsible for paying the person who’s providing the care is an interesting process.

Liam: I mean, we can get really carried away and get into all sorts of insurance things here, but that’s something I’ve long wondered about is the disconnect. And you wouldn’t go into the grocery store and say, “I want a loaf of bread, four eggs, milk, and some bacon, and that person over there will pay for it.”

Tara: Right.

Andy: “And that person over there will pay 78% of what you’re charging for it.” [laughter]

Liam: Andy, let me ask you another one of our big signature questions here, and it has to do with advice. I wonder if you’ll share with us the single most valuable piece of advice that you have received and implemented in your life? That can be personal advice, professional advice, maybe a mix.

Andy: Given or received. Received?

Liam: Yep, what did somebody tell you that made a big difference in your life?

Andy: When in doubt, just go see the patient.

Tara: Does that apply to your code too? [laughs] Or is it life in general? I guess your family. It could apply to everything, right?

Andy: Fundamentally, I guess you can break it down if you want to be more general about it. Don’t always take other people’s words for things. Check it yourself, make sure you investigate it yourself to figure out what the problem really is. We all get advice and we all get information from lots of places. One of the things I’ve learned very apparently when I was chief of staff is that there are always two sides to every issue and problem. The vast majority of what I felt like when I was chief of staff was the kindergarten teachers because all the little kids were getting in fights and I would have to be the referee.

Tara: Yeah, communication is really important. I think that’s the essence of that advice.

Liam: I suppose it also ties into an impates to not just communicate but also to not be afraid to go and have those difficult conversations. Not in a sense that the patient is going to mind if a doctor comes in and says, “Can you tell me more specifically?” But maybe with your colleagues, they’ll say, “Hey Andy, I already told you they have this or they have that.” And the risk and to reputation and to collegial camaraderie of, “It’s not that I don’t believe you or I don’t trust you, I just need to hear it from them to make sure that I’m understanding it in a correct way.” That can be a challenge, can’t it?

Andy: Especially if they’re not correct, yes.

Liam: [laughs] Yes, yes. And learn to tell people that they’re not correct in a way that is respectful and still doesn’t disrupt the teamwork.

Andy: Because usually, I’m a consultant. People are coming to me for my opinion about something and they’re coming at it from a different perspective. So while we both have our different issues and perspective, we have to figure out what’s the right thing for the patient.

Tara: I was going to bring up something I will probably going to run out of time before I get into this conversation, but this whole idea of communicating in general– but I listened to a podcast recently where Alan Alda was the guest and he has this whole thing about communicating in– this was specific to medical field actually, come to think of it, about the definition of communication. That we think about talking is not communication, that’s a two-way street. Anyway, he has a really interesting perspective on it. I don’t know if you’re familiar about what I’m talking about.

Andy: I’m not but I will tell you I talk all the time to people about very technical things and they are not very technical. One of the things I have to make sure is that they understand what I’m saying. In the computer parlance, it’s very much, tell me like I’m five, or explain it to my rubber duck.

Tara: Yeah, I think that was the essence of what he was saying, yeah.

Andy: Communication’s probably more about listening than speaking.

Tara: Yes, I like that combination of the two.

Liam: Absolutely. And I would love to keep communicating but we are out of time here. Andy, before we say goodbye to you, I’ll ask you to share with us where people can find you online, please?

Andy: They can find me on Twitter at @andyfragan, at my website where I publish occasionally at Thefragens.com or on GitHub, my user is afragan.

Liam: Excellent, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been an absolute pleasure. We can go on for hours here.

Tara: Thank you, Andy. Thanks for joining us and thanks for all you do in the world and general.

Andy: You are both quite welcome. Thank you very much for having me.

Tara: Have a great day.

Liam: Bye-bye.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

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176 episodes

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Archived series ("Inactive feed" status)

When? This feed was archived on May 15, 2018 10:06 (6y ago). Last successful fetch was on November 18, 2023 09:52 (4M ago)

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Manage episode 214111432 series 1452699
Content provided by Topher DeRosia and Nyasha Green, Topher DeRosia, and Nyasha Green. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Topher DeRosia and Nyasha Green, Topher DeRosia, and Nyasha Green or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.

Hallway Chats: Episode 58 - Andy Fragen

Introducing Andy Fragen

Andy Fragen is a WordPress hacker and hobbyist. He’s an acute care surgeon who is also self-taught programmer – doing this for fun while trying to solve problems.

Show Notes

Website | TheFragens.com
GitHub | afragen
WordPress.org | afragen
Twitter | @andyfragen

Episode Transcript

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions, and our guests share their stories, ideas and perspectives.

Liam: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Liam Dempsey.

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re joined by Andy Fragan. Andy is a WordPress hacker and hobbyist. He’s a self-taught programmer doing this for fun while trying to solve problems. Oh yeah, and his day job is an acute care surgeon. Hi Andy, welcome to Hallway Chats.

Andy: Hi, Tara.

Liam: Hey Andy. Thanks for joining us.

Andy: Thank you.

Liam: You’re welcome. Thank you. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

Andy: I live in Palm Springs, California where I grew up. I do the WordPress stuff for fun. My day job is an acute care surgeon. I work in a local hospital here doing acute care surgery. I have spent my time as a kind of a recovering trauma surgeon for the last 10 years or so and recently stopped that, I may end up getting back into that again, but we’ll see. I generally make WordPress plugins and stuff to solve problems with my own and it just kind of led me to be involved with community. I have met a lot of people both online and in person. A couple of years ago, I decided that in order to kind of step up my game and meet more people on the inside, I started becoming a sponsor for my local area WordCamps. I’ve been a sponsor for WordCamp Orange County, WordCamp Los Angeles, WordCamp San Diego, and WordCamp Phoenix in the last several years.

Tara: A sponsor meaning just as yourself, a personal sponsor?

Andy: Well, I kind of sponsor under the name of the plugin which I’ve done more.

Tara: Okay. Let’s back up a bit and talk about how a surgeon starts to become a WordPress aficionado, how did that come about?

Andy: I had my first online account that I used to have to go through as a SLIP account, later came PPP. This was probably around ’91 or so, if anybody remembers that far back. I’ve got my first Macintosh computer when I graduated from college in 1985, and sided with Macintoshes ever since. For a long time, I was using a software called Radio UserLand. It had an object-oriented database in the back-end but produced static HTML file. I’ve written a couple– it’s scripting language is very similar to Apple script. I’ve written a couple of– I kind of don’t know what they’re called anymore. Modules, plugins, whatever, for that. One of the first ones was to enable the user to edit their post and markdown. As that kind of went by the wayside, I pulled myself out. This was kind of around 2007 in Zen Garden days and I saw WordPress had a lot of traction. I exported, imported and been staying in WordPress ever since, mostly playing with back-end because I don’t blog that often. Bad for SEO, I know.

Tara: [laughs] Have you always been interested in technology and computers and that type of thing? I would think that dissecting, cutting into people is a very different interest than coding. Where does that come from?

Andy: I’ve always been coding. I took my first computer programming class in college, clearly before becoming a surgeon. But I’m looking at it as just a different way of problem-solving. You get to be creative, you get to figure things out. The computers only ever do– well, only supposedly ever do what you tell them to do, and it makes it a bit more interesting. The kind of parallel to surgery is that a lot of it’s problem-solving and a lot of it is problem-solving on your feet. You have to do it right then and right there.

Tara: Yeah.

Liam: Andy, it’s interesting that you got into computers when you were younger and in college, and taking programming and then pursuit a career in surgery. And then around ’07, you were coming back to look at coding and you discovered WordPress and the like. Were you coming back to coding– were you trying to market your practice? Were you looking for a hobby on the side? What was the impetus to look back at what’s the best coding situation for the challenges you were facing?

Andy: Actually, I did sort of come back to coding to market my practice a little, but I was using an application called VoodooPad which had a templating system. It was before I found WordPress, and you could script it in Lua. I had no idea about Lua but I did manage to figure out a couple of things in it. I basically hand-coded a static website out of it. It was very similar to Radio UserLand in that it was template system that produced static HTML files that you FTP and upload. So I learned CSS, I learned HTML.

Tara: I’m pretty much in awe of the fact that you do this alongside being a surgeon so I’m going to talk a little bit more about that and maybe the relationship between the two because I find it really interesting. I have often said to my family and myself when they’re frustrated or I’m frustrated, by how much attention I’m giving my clients and how much urgency with which I respond. I often say, “I’m not a brain surgeon, I’m not saving lives with my website. I don’t really have to reply right away.” In your case, you have a day job where you actually do save people’s lives. For you, I’m just wondering how WordPress fits in with that. Are you doing work for clients with your plugin, or how do you relate the two together in terms of hobby and business if you’re doing WordPress as a business?

Andy: It’s all hobby, I don’t monetize it in any real way, shape, or form. So at times, I’ve been asked if there’s a tip jar I have, a donate button on plugins and links that I have. I know too many brain surgeons, I have to say it’s not rocket science.

Tara: [laughs] Okay, thanks for that reality. That’s good to know. I imagine keeping things in perspective when your website goes down or somebody finds a bug with your plugin or something like that, do you relate that to the gravity with which your day job needs to be approached, I guess?

Andy: Yes and no. I can usually tell if I’m going to white-screen something right away, and god, I feel really bad if I’m doing that. I try to get those things fixed right away. The first plugins I ever coded, I was cowboy-coding on my test server on an iPad from the Carribean at my in-laws. That was kind of the first release of The Event Calendar Category Colors plugin.

Liam: Should I ask if that was a couple of holiday cocktails in, too?

Andy: No, it wasn’t. Fortunately, the software on the iPad was such that I could FFTP into the server as well so I could fix whatever I broke right away. I know I really broke it when I white-screened it.

Liam: I think we’ve all been there too, right?

Andy: Starting with an IDE has been tremendous, just speed increases and being able to code and do stuff. X Debug] has been phenomenal, figuring out how to use that.

Liam: Andy, I’m going to circle us around to one of our more pivotal signature questions here and I’m going to ask you about your definition of success and whether or not you have a personal definition, maybe a professional definition, maybe something that’s a combination of both. How would you define success?

Andy: Personally, I think, obviously, we all define our own successes. I’m not sure how we really think of ourselves as successful, because usually, you don’t say, “I’m successful.” Depending on who you are, maybe you do, but usually, other people tell you or they tell other people, “Yes, that person is successful.” I’m looking at it as I do what I do and I have enough time and means to be able to do the things that I enjoy.

Liam: That’s direct. I like that.

Andy: Surgeon.

Tara: Yeah. [laughs]

Liam: When you shared that you do acute care surgery, is there a sub-specialty of that or if somebody comes into the acute care center, regardless of the need, you’re the surgeon to take care of it? How does that work?

Andy: What it basically means it’s that it’s mostly stuff that comes to the ER. There’s a smaller elective practice, most of it’s what comes to the ER. For a good chunk of last 12 years or so, I was doing trauma and acute care surgery. That was basically entire non-elective practice. I found that acute care, just the stuff that comes to the ER better, more challenging, fun.

Liam: Are you attached to a hospital then, and not in a separate surgery center, right? Because if they’re in the ER, they’re not going to ship them over to you? You operate out of a hospital or two?

Andy: Yeah, I operate out of a hospital. Local hospital here, is Desert Regional Medical Center. It’s part of the Tenet Healthcare. They run it. I have held quite a number of jobs and positions in the last decade or so at the hospital, including just coming off a stint as a chief of staff.

Liam: Yeah, that’s a good job title. Let me ask you this, and I’ll steer back towards WordPress. You mentioned that you were digging into WordPress and you found it as a useful tool. And then as you began to use it more, you discovered WordCamps and thought, “Maybe I’ll go to one of those and see what that’s all about.” Talk to us about that, how did that process evolve for you?

Andy: First WordCamp I went to was Orange County in 2014. I took my son, who is now 23, who is sort of in the business but not quite. The pre-text was I took my kids so that my wife wouldn’t yell at me and allow me to go.

Liam: Well played.

Andy: And the standard deal I have is that I can go to any WordCamp I can drive to, which kind of limits me to Southern California.

Liam: Well, how far can you push that? Because technically, you could go to Lima, Peru and still drive. It would take you for a while.

Andy: It’s hard to get there for a weekend, though.

Liam: Well, to get there and back in a weekend is tough.

Andy: Well, okay. It’s also one of those, it’s like, you’ve got to be able to leave Friday and come back Sunday, right?

Liam: Yeah, fair enough. Go ahead, sorry. I got us sidetracked. You were saying?

Andy: So I went and I met a lot of people. A lot of people that you see on Twitter, you see on WordPress Slack.

Liam: I don’t know when that started, but yeah.

Andy: And just in core looking at things, it was a lot of fun. That’s when I kind of realized, “Hey, if I’m ever going to kind of get more involved–” They didn’t really have WordPress meetups locally, and the only way I would be able to do it is to kind of become a sponsor and show up and then be the one talking. I’ve given several WordCamp talks over the years, too, I think about three years or so, it’s been fun.

Liam: Yeah, that’s neat. I think that’s one of the best things I like about WordCamps too is meeting the people. The Twitter people, or the GitHub people, or the Slack people that we engage with over the internet, and to get to know them beyond their avatar and their sayings online.

Andy: GitHub’s amazing for that stuff. Before, when I was doing stuff, before I put it up on GitHub, it was just like, okay, I’d be doing things and put it there. I think the first plugin that I wrote was The Category Colors plugin. After I put it up on GitHub, I got a response from one of the guys who works for Modern Tribe to help me out with it.

Liam: That’s pretty cool, wasn’t it?

Andy: It’s been very cool. Actually, they came down for some– I haven’t met most of them because they’re all remote and I don’t think any of them are in Southern California. But they invited me out to dinner when they were down near LA for some meeting, so I drove in to come hang with them for a little bit.

Liam: That’s pretty cool. Within the WordPress community, or the WordPress environment, you’re writing plugins, you’re doing some code, you’re solving some problems, what’s your favorite thing to do about that? Is it to expand on a plugin that you’ve got and check in more functionality and watch it grow to see what the community does with your plugin? Is it troubleshooting? When you’re unwinding in your hobby, what do you like to do most?

Andy: I like to make sure it works.

Liam: Good call. [laughs]

Andy: It depends on where the plugin is. I recently put out a rather larger version update to the GitHub Updater plugin, made it much more modular, made it much more able to kind of peel off parts if I so desire to maybe strip it down into two different plugins to be able to put part of it in the repository and part of it not. Because originally when I wrote it, I submitted it to the repo and was denied because, essentially, they didn’t want to promote outside repository. It wasn’t against the guidelines at times but I think it is now since the guidelines have been rewritten. It led to very interesting conversations, very professional conversations with the plugin teams. I had great email interactions with Mika Epstein, Pippin Williamson and with Otto. I actually met Pippin and Mika in real life at various WordCamps and had mailed with them and stuff. They’re great people.

Liam: You know, they are. You know what? I’m remiss at not asking you sooner. Tell us about what plugins you have? You’re mentioning them and you’re mentioning them sometimes by name. But if you could just– I think you said you had three or four. If you could just name them and tell us a little bit about what they do, that would be great?

Andy: There’s a number of them that deal with the event calendar. The most lively used one is The Event Calendar Category Colors, it has probably about 6000 active installs and it’s been downloaded over a hundred thousand times give or take. There’s a couple of other smaller event calendar plugins. One as kind of an alarm feature to the event. If you subscribe to the feed or subscribe to it, it will put up the alarm on your phone.

Liam: Cool.

Andy: Another plugin fixes the exported URL through using Outlook. I wrote one for the second WordCamp Orange County Plugin-A-Palooza because it filled a need I had, just to embed PDF into a webpage and called it Web PDF Viewer. I thought it was great but there were like at least 400 downloads by the time that the Plugin-A-Palooza came around, which means that it only had been out for a couple of months because it’s like from March to June.

Tara: Cool.

Andy: I kept that updated and updated things. As I found either errors or I found better ways to improve it. The GitHub Updater, I’m actually on my fifth-year anniversary of its first commit to that. It’s changed tremendously, to the point where I probably ought to rebrand it as just Git Updater because it’s for GitHub, and BitBucket, and GitLab, Gitea.

Liam: How does that work? Is that if you’re editing from within the theme editor in the dashboard, it can push it to your repo?

Andy: If you have a plugin or a theme that you’re developing and you keep it in GitHub, let’s just stick to GitHub at the moment, you keep it in GitHub, when you push a version change or a release or something like that, if you add a single header to the file, and someone is running my plugin, they will see an update. If they– depending on their site, if they want to, they can also create a webhook to have it update automatically.

Liam: Okay, it’s for individuals running themes to know when the master theme, if you will, has been updated?

Andy: The original idea was that the update would just show up in the plugins or themes page or on the update page. It’s like any other other plugin that came out of the dot.org repository.

Tara: Okay. I’m going to move away from tech for a minute, maybe we’ll jump right back in and I suspect it might because I can tell this is a passion and your brain was always turned on. What would you say is the most important thing that you do every day towards this idea of success and doing what you enjoy?

Andy: I can’t say get up and drink coffee?

Tara: You can, sure. That is absolutely a valid answer, for sure.

Andy: Honestly, you get up, you jump in the shower, you put on some clothes, and you get to work, whatever that work may be. Whether it’s going to the hospital, seeing patients, getting called by the ER in the middle of the night and crawling out of bed and running in there, or not. Coffee, of course, is part of it no matter what time of day it is.

Tara: Yeah, I’ve got some here myself. Because you’re not monetizing your WordPress work and it’s something that you love and are doing as a hobby, do you set goals for yourself for what you want to accomplish and what you want to learn, or has it just sort of been an organic process that you’ve just kind of moved, progressed from one thing to the next. Because obviously, the type of code you’re talking about, some of which I don’t even know what it is, takes a lot of learning. So you’ve committed time to that. Do you spread out goals for that? How does that work?

Andy: New things come up in the world. All the new PHP and things like that. Yes, I have gone kind of more in taking efforts to learn what that is and how it works. One of the first programming classes I took was in Pascal and Pascal was subroutines and routines, it feels very similar to an object-oriented programming method. There’s still things that I need to learn how to do. Write UNIX tests, Javascript, I kind of faked my way through some Javascript just enough to figure things out but I haven’t really spent any time learning it.

Tara: Is that a goal that you have? Do you keep a list of things that you want to do or do you just kind of–?

Andy: I have a list of some things that I want to do. They’re either feature things to add or they are just kind of longer-term ‘learn Javascript’ kind of goals.

Tara: Right. And when you’re not behind a computer screen or in your scrubs, what other kinds of things do you do for fun? I’m almost afraid to ask this question. [laughs]

Andy: Chicken. I hang out with my wife and kids a lot. My son is 23, my daughter’s 17. They’re both living at home although my wife and daughter are away on vacation right now, so it’s good to be my kids and my wife in the summertime. [laughter] And I’m here authentically working.

Tara: Right. Are either of your kids interested in medicine or technology programming?

Andy: No. Technology yes, medicine no. I have successfully scared them clear of that, I think.

Liam: Deliberately or just coincidentally?

Andy: Sort of deliberately. I don’t think it’s practice like it used to be, I love it and I enjoy it and I have a good time, but it is certainly there are a tremendous number of rules, policies, procedures, law that it’s becoming less and less fun at times and I can certainly see where in the future that could be problematic.

Tara: Yeah.

Liam: You’re certainly not the first medical professional to have expressed that opinion to me that there’s value in some rules and regulations. If people are just doing whatever they want, that’s a problem. But when it goes to the point where it becomes difficult to practice medicine because of the rules and regulation, that’s another problem, isn’t it?

Andy: Yeah. You can just look at the difficult– I can see somebody and take them to the operating room and make them better, and that’s great. And then if I haven’t documented everything properly according to the federal government, I may not get paid for it. Medicine is one of these very few activities where you get reimbursed sometimes much after you have provided the service.

Tara: Right. As patients, we don’t think about it from that perspective very often. We think more about what our insurance is going to cover and we don’t think about maybe when our provider is going to be paid or how much they’re getting paid.

Andy: And I’ll also tell you that having the patient, and I’m a patient too, having the patient not be directly responsible for paying the person who’s providing the care is an interesting process.

Liam: I mean, we can get really carried away and get into all sorts of insurance things here, but that’s something I’ve long wondered about is the disconnect. And you wouldn’t go into the grocery store and say, “I want a loaf of bread, four eggs, milk, and some bacon, and that person over there will pay for it.”

Tara: Right.

Andy: “And that person over there will pay 78% of what you’re charging for it.” [laughter]

Liam: Andy, let me ask you another one of our big signature questions here, and it has to do with advice. I wonder if you’ll share with us the single most valuable piece of advice that you have received and implemented in your life? That can be personal advice, professional advice, maybe a mix.

Andy: Given or received. Received?

Liam: Yep, what did somebody tell you that made a big difference in your life?

Andy: When in doubt, just go see the patient.

Tara: Does that apply to your code too? [laughs] Or is it life in general? I guess your family. It could apply to everything, right?

Andy: Fundamentally, I guess you can break it down if you want to be more general about it. Don’t always take other people’s words for things. Check it yourself, make sure you investigate it yourself to figure out what the problem really is. We all get advice and we all get information from lots of places. One of the things I’ve learned very apparently when I was chief of staff is that there are always two sides to every issue and problem. The vast majority of what I felt like when I was chief of staff was the kindergarten teachers because all the little kids were getting in fights and I would have to be the referee.

Tara: Yeah, communication is really important. I think that’s the essence of that advice.

Liam: I suppose it also ties into an impates to not just communicate but also to not be afraid to go and have those difficult conversations. Not in a sense that the patient is going to mind if a doctor comes in and says, “Can you tell me more specifically?” But maybe with your colleagues, they’ll say, “Hey Andy, I already told you they have this or they have that.” And the risk and to reputation and to collegial camaraderie of, “It’s not that I don’t believe you or I don’t trust you, I just need to hear it from them to make sure that I’m understanding it in a correct way.” That can be a challenge, can’t it?

Andy: Especially if they’re not correct, yes.

Liam: [laughs] Yes, yes. And learn to tell people that they’re not correct in a way that is respectful and still doesn’t disrupt the teamwork.

Andy: Because usually, I’m a consultant. People are coming to me for my opinion about something and they’re coming at it from a different perspective. So while we both have our different issues and perspective, we have to figure out what’s the right thing for the patient.

Tara: I was going to bring up something I will probably going to run out of time before I get into this conversation, but this whole idea of communicating in general– but I listened to a podcast recently where Alan Alda was the guest and he has this whole thing about communicating in– this was specific to medical field actually, come to think of it, about the definition of communication. That we think about talking is not communication, that’s a two-way street. Anyway, he has a really interesting perspective on it. I don’t know if you’re familiar about what I’m talking about.

Andy: I’m not but I will tell you I talk all the time to people about very technical things and they are not very technical. One of the things I have to make sure is that they understand what I’m saying. In the computer parlance, it’s very much, tell me like I’m five, or explain it to my rubber duck.

Tara: Yeah, I think that was the essence of what he was saying, yeah.

Andy: Communication’s probably more about listening than speaking.

Tara: Yes, I like that combination of the two.

Liam: Absolutely. And I would love to keep communicating but we are out of time here. Andy, before we say goodbye to you, I’ll ask you to share with us where people can find you online, please?

Andy: They can find me on Twitter at @andyfragan, at my website where I publish occasionally at Thefragens.com or on GitHub, my user is afragan.

Liam: Excellent, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been an absolute pleasure. We can go on for hours here.

Tara: Thank you, Andy. Thanks for joining us and thanks for all you do in the world and general.

Andy: You are both quite welcome. Thank you very much for having me.

Tara: Have a great day.

Liam: Bye-bye.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

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