To My Friend, Who Makes Money From WordPress
I’m afraid I don’t know how you work;
I thought I knew; the résumé, the code
We talked about. You shipped many lines
And yet you didn’t do it the old way
The hand-coded craftsmanship way
Where we count the 80 characters until
Hitting Enter for the next line so that
Your code comments fit the style guide.
Linting, debugging, Consolas, solarized
Are my daily companions while you are
Building Beavers with WordPress visual
Drag-and-drop. A gooey mess is all I see.
Does it compile? Does it white screen?
You build menus within menus, screens
Of pages and templates and metaboxes
With no regard for template, load order,
Stylesheet and script. It feels lazy to me.
What are the tradeoffs? What is the prize?
If only I believed what you believe, I could
See the magic, the art rather than a sham.
You are right, though, to not bother with
The console, the Terminal, the SFTP, rsync
Up and down and up and down in unison
You and yours represent large markets,
Markets products like mine don’t know.
So many lacunae. These are high stakes.
This is existential.
So where should craftsmanship and code
Skills survive? As I walk the road from craft
To connection to grace I see I’m uncovering
A deep distrust of people that don’t know
Or care how things should work properly.
“Just toss it together” means assemble it,
Build it. What happened to working with
Our hands? Craftsmanship? I’m disconnected
From the people on the other side, the digital
Divide. Yet it’s one more step removed; I don’t
Agree with the people who build for the people
Across the digital divide. Now I have two gaps.
Why are both of them right? Because you don’t
Need to know how something works to see its
Beauty. To use it. To love it and treasure it. To
Put it to another use, one the designer missed;
If you see utility, it’s useful. If you see beauty…
I cannot argue. You are right and I’m wrong.
To Lance, Who Loves WordPress Themes
I don’t see beauty, I see my livelihood.
I can code if I need to, I’ve done it;
Hours at a time, in a cubicle, alone.
Not that fun. What is fun is going out
To a restaurant, learning about the food
Before helping the owner take charge
Of his business and website because
It’s simple to make changes. No code!
I empowered him; we both made money.
This is what WordPress is made for.
What I love about my tools is that they
Enable me to build out superbly fast.
Yes, they could be more elegant, clean,
More robust. It’s really just a shortcut.
I’m making a ton of sites at once and
Truly helping out business owners.
I think you should try it sometime
You might be surprised that
Like with digital photography,
You focus better on the subject.
I love my tools and I love my work.
