The slide deck from “How WordPress let me quit the rat race”: a talk on WordPress as a career-replacing platform across consulting, plugin and theme sales, and maintenance practice, drawing on a personal trajectory from film stripper to graphic designer to WordPress developer. The deck title slide dates the talk to October 2013 in Toronto, prepared for WordCamp Toronto’s run that fall.
What 2013 WordPress looked like
2013 sat in the WordPress 3.6 to 3.7 cycle. The Customizer was new and trying to find its shape. Automatic background updates had just arrived in 3.7, which felt larger at the time than it reads in retrospect. The Representational State Transfer (REST) API project was incubating in plugin form, still years away from core. Most production WordPress work was still on stock themes or first-generation custom themes: the Underscores starter existed but had not yet become the default starting point.
The piece that survived
The argument that aged well from this deck was the diversification one. The WordPress economy in 2013 had more than one revenue stream open to a practitioner: consulting hours, plugin and theme sales, maintenance retainers, training and writing, and the talks that taught how to balance those streams stood up over time. The streams have evolved since 2013, but the principle of “no single line item on the invoice is load-bearing for the whole career” has held.
What the years have changed
Block themes, full-site editing, the Interactivity API, the maturity of the plugin and theme review processes, the dramatic improvements in mobile user-experience expectations: every one of these has moved the technical floor since 2013. The career-replacement frame still works for senior WordPress practitioners in 2026, but the specific implementation paths look different. The deck is archived here as the period record of one argument.
Slide deck from a 2013 WordPress talk in Toronto, archived for reference.
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