Summary
AI Edward
Bud starts by teasing Jos about his hair, which Jos says he’s growing out because his wife likes it long. Then they explain how they know each other. They’ve never met in person, but both are mentors in the WP Credits program, which partners with universities around the world. Students who are new to WordPress, including developers unfamiliar with its ecosystem, are guided toward becoming contributors. Jos says it’s the kind of help he wishes he’d had when he started. Bud credits the program’s founder, Isotta Pierra, a past guest. There’s also a quick detour about Jos’s two senior dogs, one of them a three-legged cancer survivor, who are now taken out in a dog stroller.
Jos lives in Guadalajara. He describes it as having once-mild weather that’s getting hotter, and as the home of tequila and mariachi. He’s traveled much of Mexico and recommends Oaxaca as the country’s best food destination, along with Puebla and Chiapas. Bud recalls living with a Spanish-speaking family in Xalapa for three months. Jos says he learned English mostly by playing Worms Armageddon online, where he chatted with players from around the world. He’s also starting to learn Japanese.
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The middle of the episode is about Jos’s personal life. He met his wife, a visual artist who has exhibited in galleries and museums for 25 years, at a launch party for a large WordPress multisite blog network where he was a webmaster. They got close when his small agency built her website, and the launch was just a single click, which disappointed her because she’d hoped for something more dramatic. Both had come out of dramatic relationships, so at first their calm relationship felt almost boring. Now they rarely fight. They don’t plan to have kids. They put their money into their dogs (including a live-in pet sitter while they travel) and into trips: they’ve been to Japan six times and hope to stay for months at a time someday. When they travel, they try to live like locals.
Jos also talks about his family and his school years. He has an older sister, formerly an accountant, and a younger brother who is both an architect and a lawyer. His mother is already a grandmother through his sister. He was a top student early on but ended up focusing on partying in high school, which included a foam-party graduation trip to Cancún. He studied computer systems engineering, found he disliked coding, and was drawn to graphical interfaces. He found WordPress after seeing a non-programmer’s blog built on it, then skipped Joomla and the other platforms entirely. He eventually split from a friend’s hosting business because he wanted to build every site in WordPress.
These days Jos works at DreamHost, where he handles escalated support cases involving page builders like Elementor and Divi, using both experience and AI tools. He sometimes fixes simple problems for customers as a courtesy. He says his superpower is reading people and breaking complicated problems into simple steps, and he shows it by correctly guessing that Bud was about to ask for a guest recommendation. He suggests Rita Robles of Costa Rica, a new Latin manager in WP Credits. The episode ends with a joke about his name: he’s José but goes by “Jos” on purpose.
What’s Jos Up To? Find Out At The WP World.