Meet LifterLMS Developer and Entrepreneur Brian Hogg

In this LMScast episode, Brian Hogg shares about his career journey. His journey is a combination of technical expertise in teaching and community development for the software development area.

Hogg highlighted his passion for creating accessible and actionable online courses with LifterLMS, the leading learning management system for WordPress.

He developed and lead the project like the Event Calendar Newsletter plugin for simple need for his local community which indicates the importance of solving real-world problems and evaluating user feedback and experience.

Brian’s career story showcases us the value of networking, continuous learning and teaching with in-depth understanding and keen interest for growth in teaching industry.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show from seven years ago. His name is Brian Hogg. That’s hog with two G’s at the end. Brian’s a developer at LifterLMS. He’s been with us for how long has it been?

Brian Hogg: About six months. A little over six months, I believe.

Chris Badgett: Yep, six months. He’s an amazing developer. We’re lucky to have him on the team. He’s also the creator of event calendar newsletter. You can find that at event calendar newsletter. com. His personal site is at Brian hog. com. That’s hog with two G’s. Welcome back on the show, Brian.

Brian Hogg: Thank you very much. Yeah. I can’t believe seven years. I had a little more hair back then, but yeah, I’m not sure.

Chris Badgett: It wasn’t a pro tip for you introverted folks out there. I came out of my shell and started going to some WordPress conferences, I went to something Chris Lima put on called Cabo press. And I think I went six times. I think the first one I went to, or the second one I met Brian Hogg and that’s how we connected first met in person seven years ago.

And then I had a podcast. So I started interviewing some of the interesting people I was meeting at conferences. So pro tip for networking out there. And here we are seven years later working together.

Brian Hogg: Yeah. And I can’t believe we’re reconnected off. I think a tweet and I’m not even really on social media, but I just happened to see it there and I’m like what are the odds?

So yeah, no, it’s a small world.

Chris Badgett: It’s cool. Before we started recording, Brian and I were talking about omnipresence and being in a lot of places, which is really hard to do as a course creator or a WordPress professional or entrepreneur, you’re very busy, but sometime, the name of the game, especially in the AI world.

Relationships matter. People are mad matter. People are behind the internet. So connecting with people and getting out there is important. And it’s stress reducing too, which we can, we’ll talk about a little later. The first Brian is prolific. He’s done podcasts. He’s an entrepreneur. He has his plugin event calendar newsletter.

He creates courses, which is what made him a really perfect fit for LifterLMS, because he’s already in the space. He’s created courses and he does a lot. He’s an amazing engineer and does things like mob programming, which we’ll talk about in a little bit. But first let’s start with the e learning thing.

What attracted you and made you fall in love with the idea of creating courses or teaching on the internet?

Brian Hogg: Yeah. So I for a couple terms, a couple of years taught at a physical college and so got the experience there actually working with students in person and so it was like design.

It was a last minute thing. It was like design with some development WordPress in there. A general course for a second year students at the college. But yeah, seeing the it was restricted, obviously, that people are only able to teach or take the class in person and see it there.

And just the idea that someone, you could put out content on the internet that people are able to access from wherever they are. Even if they have a slow connection, right? It’s if it’s not a live thing, they’re able to access the content, the videos like that. Download it might take a little longer.

But that anyone in the world, like just with nothing but a laptop and they don’t even need a laptop, they could go to a library and access it there is able to gain access to that content, learn from it at, in, in. The big difference between a physical college and online is, oh, a course might cost you X dollars compared to thousands and not just the cost of tuition, but also the cost of physically getting there and everything else.

That was a big draw is that just the reach that you have and that you can really get to the point like physical colleges tend to. a little more, it feels and so you’re really able to just hone in on, this is a actionable skill that you can apply in your daily lives, whatever that might be, quickly.

And just seeing the power of that was a huge job.

Chris Badgett: How did you learn engineering? What was your development as a computer scientist?

Brian Hogg: Woof. So I think I started coding when I was like 10 or 11 or something. Had a book it’s holding up the monitor right now. See, by example, it’s a little broken.

It’s been there a while. Learned that over a week, it was just had, had was fortunate enough to have access to, a laptop, decent internet at a younger age just people in my life. Used to play racquetball and. Friend’s father, was at the university of Rochester, one of their head tech people.

He had access to tools and software and knowledge that, that really just sparked a lot of it. And yeah, no, it’s been an interesting journey and it was 16 or so launched like an online bingo game that, which became very popular. And yeah, definitely more recently after meeting like Mike little when I lived in the UK and I was going to a PHP conference there.

Yeah, just getting more into the WordPress space and attending more camps. And and here we are.

Chris Badgett: So how did, I think it’s a challenge for some aspiring developers to learn WordPress and get going. It’s, there’s this whole ecosystem and like what advice do you have for a developer that wants to grow and how to think about it?

Cause You can’t really like all, almost every WordPress developer I meet, it’s like a windy road and they figure things out. Some are have like academic computer science training. Some are completely self taught or it’s a hybrid. Like how does one, if somebody wants to get involved in the WordPress development arena, What’s your high level advice?

Brian Hogg: Yeah, obviously you just need to go to plugins for beginners. com. Purchase my course. No, it’s it probably always will be a windy road. I don’t think there’s any straight line. But I think the biggest advice is just having a project of a tangible project in mind. It might not be for a client.

Ideally something that, that maybe you would use so that you, you’re more invested and interested in it, but just literally this is a thing I want to accomplish by the end of creating this plugin or the seam or whatever. So it just has more structure to it, obviously throughout the process.

That working on that project or or just in general, you might be just learning random things here and there, blog posts, whatever, but just having that tangible thing, which hopefully isn’t so huge, you’re not, I want to make YouTube for purpose. I don’t know. Yeah. Some things relatively small that you can just sink your teeth into it, it directs the learning a lot more.

As you’re figuring out how to do that thing you’re looking up some more specific things, not just like. How to make a plugin in WordPress. Cause that will tell you. Any number of results, which may or may not apply to what you ultimately want to do. Yeah, I think just having a project in mind I did do university a five year program, software engineering and management.

But to be honest with most of that content. Was, if you’re working on a nuclear power plant or an elevator or something, like there were some useful skills, but most of it, like you said is the, or we were talking about before is the personal relationships that were built there and.

The learning how to learn. And you can do that either at the university or online on your own. But yeah, being part of a local community is, it’s helpful as well. Cause then you can ask questions and things that AI and Google might not come back with someone with real experience who’s an actual human would able to answer for you a lot quicker and save you a lot of time in your So

Chris Badgett: what’s as you go through, I imagine.

Engineering is like a lot of things. It’s an infinite well and everything’s always changing, but what’s an example of the epochs for 20 plus years and engineering that. Something you learned recently that you weren’t ready for in the beginning, as an example.

Brian Hogg: Not sure.

Cause yeah, it’s funny how much things have changed, but yet a lot of things haven’t, if statements are still if statements while loops are still while it was like a lot of the fundamentals haven’t changed a lot. So now I’m struggling to think of like something, that I’ve learned more recently that maybe it wasn’t ready for.

And maybe it’s harder as you go down and that’s almost where teaching. Comes into play as well, right? There’s some expression, right? Where if you can teach someone something you’re, it, it shows you’re an expert in it, or it shows that, it’s really the true test of whether you understand and know something and just seeing what questions that students have really like prompts like, Oh shoot.

Yeah. I never thought of that. I assumed that I knew that. And obviously 23 years ago, I didn’t know that. But you forget. over time. Yeah, teaching and being involved in the community and hearing some of the questions that people are having keeps you more, grounded, or able to actually see what opportunities there might be to further everyone’s learning, including your own.

Chris Badgett: Yeah the learn do teach. It sounds like a simple framework, but it’s super powerful. And that’s, it’s you’re teaching in a lot of ways. You might be making a course, but you might also be writing a blog post or a piece of documentation or a social media post, and you’re like, Oh, wait a second. I’m not fully formed.

My idea isn’t fully formed here yet, or I don’t have all the details I need.

Brian Hogg: We’re just working with more junior developers. However you define that. Yeah, it’s super, super helpful to just see where they’re at in their journey and and also be able to to do one thing at a time, right?

That’s the biggest thing you can do probably with learning or or teaching is giving too much information at once. That’s the benefit of having more years of experience is that you can just, yeah, so you could explain in depth as to why, like you would do this versus this, but it’s just giving a solid piece of, and then if they ask questions or want a little more explanation, great.

But if you fire hose it, it can really. Detrimental to the learning process. I find

Chris Badgett: the other, we just recently on this podcast, one or two episodes ago, we were interviewing a teacher. And she was talking about the concept of scaffolding of not giving them too information. We need to build this foundation before we go on to this higher level thing.

And that scaffolding can be giant. It can take years or decades. So one step at a time. Tell us the story of events. Event calendar newsletter. That’s it. Event calendar, newsletter. com. How did that happen?

Brian Hogg: How did that happen? I was involved in the software and Hamilton community when we lived in Hamilton and the organizer of software Hamilton.

com had events as obviously as part of it. It was a demo camp and whatever other events. And I just would notice that the emails coming in sometimes would have, the link would be wrong to the event or the date would be wrong, right? Like you could tell that, Oh, he was probably copying and pasting it from a previous newsletter and forgot to update the date or time or venue or whatever.

So I just said, Hey, are you doing this manually? He’s yeah we’ve become really good friends since. And yeah, it was after one, I forget which event we, we just hit it, hit up a restaurant bar across the street. Like a few of us had my laptop and a couple hours created, the first version specifically for the calendar he was using doesn’t exist anymore, but yeah, that was the story of they’re here’s a physical need that I’ve noticed that That Kevin Brown had and was able to create a solution for it.

That great. Now you can copy and paste it. And then from there, just hearing suggestions and feedback from users and Hey, it’d be great if I could automate this. And you’re looking into it and you’re like, Oh, okay, shoot. You’re going to have to add an API to every single mail sender out there. It’s wait, if we do it with an RSS feed, that’s pretty universal and allows us to integrate with a lot of different services.

different email providers. And that was added and that created the first pro version and the way we went, but yeah, that was the origin story to that. And after creating the initial version for him, added support for a couple other popular calendar plugins, put it on WordPress to Oregon.

It grew over time. That spawned through that the events calendar short code plugin by taking some of the learnings from developing that and how to customize calendars and then be able to speak about it at work camps and that led to meeting someone who had that plugin, who wasn’t looking to maintain it anymore and then taking it over and then growing a pro version off the back of that.

One thing led to another from that.

Chris Badgett: Talk us through like the mechanics for somebody who is wanting to do events, like how this works, what are the pieces? So for example, I was in a software entrepreneur coaching program for a couple of years and there were courses. But there was virtual events every week on zoom.

There were three live events per year at different locations, different cities around the U S and Canada. And I could see and in the world today of like infinite content, community and events are important part of the learning stack. You don’t have to have them. But if somebody wants to add, I want to more easily organize my virtual and in person events.

What are the components that come together to make? Event calendar newsletter work.

Brian Hogg: Yeah, the core of it is really any number of WordPress calendar plugins. So basically they’re, that plugin is the way that you’re able to add the events, whether they’re in person or virtual. To your site.

So from you, by using that plugin, adding events, specifying the location, the time, the date what are some of those top plugins? Yeah. So the events calendar, I’d say far and away is like the most popular one in terms of like customizability and feature set and support and everything else. Yeah, so they’re one of the big ones.

There’s a simple calendar is one that is less supported. I knew the previous owner of that one and that one’s great. If you have a Google calendar and your events are within there it’ll import those but the events calendar also has an option to to import events from various sources.

Get them into WordPress. Then from there you can use event calendar, newsletter, any number of other add ons to, to promote and advertise the the events there. And there are a few other ones, but yeah, honestly, and more recently, we just had a support for event prime, which is a smaller plugin, a few hundred users or so, but really good support that we’ve seen so far.

But yeah that’s usually because the events counter has a free version, relatively feature rich doesn’t have recurring events and stuff unless you get the pro, but that’s probably the first place I would say to start and see how you like it.

Chris Badgett: And then how does the newsletter aspect work with the MailChimp or ActiveCampaign or AWeber and some of the other ones you support.

Brian Hogg: Yeah, so from there if you have event calendar newsletter, you can either use the free version and just have the events and then you’d be manually copying and pasting it into AWeber, MailChimp, whatever you use. But if, yeah, with the pro version, you’d be able to create what’s called, saved template.

You can specify what details do the events you wanna show venue time. Change the font size, all that stuff, how you want the events to appear, and then you save that template that generates, essentially a feed URL, which you can use as a, an RSS URL in MailChimp or active campaign or any other ones that support RSS to email, and then the content of that RSS feed is your list of events.

Yeah, you would just include that in your newsletter, either just Have that and nothing else, or if your email program supports it, or if you just want to manually type around the events content, you can then add, blog content or any other number of content or any other content that you want to add into each each newsletter or just automate it so every week it just automatically sends the list of.

However long upcoming events, two weeks, three weeks a month, you can specify and even specify by category, get really fine grained if you want to have, certain subscribers only get events from certain categories. More of a MailChimp thing to have those conditional interest based conditions, but it’s definitely possible to do something like that with my colors.

Chris Badgett: What one of the things I’ve noticed that’s important for events, like if you’re building community or you’re doing a lot of events is the key to show up. Is getting people to add it to their calendar that they’re using. And I think the airline industry figured this out. So like now when you buy an airline ticket.

It ends up on your calendar automatically, the time zones converted, even if you move around, whatever, like the calendar, heavy lifting just happens automagically. Do you have any tips around helping people understand how all that works and how to get events from the website to locked on their personal calendar, whether you’re using Google calendar or the Apple version or something else?

Thanks.

Brian Hogg: Yeah, most yeah, like iCal most calendars give you, like WordPress calendar plugins, give you the option to show or have a link, right? Add to calendar, right? And then you pick Google or iCal or whichever one that you use. And so that would be how you get it from the website equally because it’s like a list of events, right?

Like something sent by, say a newsletter wouldn’t, just add Oh, here are the next like 10 upcoming events. We’re just add them all to your calendar, right? It would just be a show having a link, a similar link in there to be like, Hey add this to your your calendar, or you’re just linking to your website and then from there they have a link, right?

To to add some, when you RSVP then would send you essentially a calendar invite and then that calendar invite would be like, an airline or a doctor’s appointment, like whatever appointment or calendar invite you would normally get. And most email providers like Google would parse that and then automatically add it to your calendar.

Either as an event that you like accept. To attend, but it still shows up there. You get reminders automatically and stuff. So yeah, having it within your calendar is pretty key. And especially if you have it, yeah, as an RSVP, I haven’t tried it. Cause I’ve run events in a while, but yeah, if you have it as an RSVP and then you update it, like that’s the magic of it too, right?

Is that it updates in their calendar automatically. Yeah, definitely. If you can set that up, that’s huge.

Chris Badgett: Nice. And for somebody who’s let’s imagine the most simple use case, let’s say they just have a blog post or a page on their website and they want to just have a link, like to add event to your calendar.

Is there actual, like just code you can write to the link to add all that? Or is it. Is that not even possible?

Brian Hogg: Oh, it is. Yeah. I’m trying to think if our default template has that and it may not, and it may add it after this. But yeah, like basically we’re using like say the events calendar shortcode or a show code that’s provided by whatever calendar you’re using.

A lot of ones come with one out of the box. Yeah, if you have a blog post and you want to promote like a specific event related to the blog posts or what have you, or say the next event that’s happening in a category related to the blog post then you would have the output of that event right there and ideally include a link within it to add to your calendar.

So no, it’s absolutely possible because yeah, the data is already there on the same site as the blog. And so you’re adding the the event information, right? Within your blog content, either at the bottom or in the middle, depending as a call to action to get people there, especially if you’re running, yeah, say a webinar or a virtual event that you’re trying to use as like a lead into your e learning.

Yeah, that’s definitely key and having it update automatically is key. So that you’re, you have this kind of evergreen content that’s in your blog posts, you have now you’re automatically updating as you’re adding webinars over time, or, maybe you’re running them every week or twice a month or monthly, it’ll just automatically update that content within the blog posts or at the bottom.

And then more people will get into your funnel that way. That’s

Chris Badgett: awesome. So what for event calendar newsletter? If somebody is like really interested in what we’re talking about here. What’s the. way for them to start and dive into these waters.

Brian Hogg: Yeah. I think it’s event calendar newsletter.

com. It’s got a demo video in there. There are a couple of courses on like I have a full course on the events calendar specifically and event espresso, I believe I’m on YouTube, so you can search for it on there and that’s end to end on like setting up the plugin and setting up, either shortcode to promote them within the site or event column or newsletter to promote it by email.

Set all that up and yeah, I can definitely reach out if there, are there any questions on that?

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Switching gears, talk, go into personal life stuff. Okay. What is. Let me back up and say, I see a lot of burnout in our industries, whether that’s entrepreneurship, web development, marketing how, for, when somebody has done what you’ve done for 20 plus years, and perhaps you’re like, I don’t know, I haven’t figured this out, but what What tips do you have for somebody who’s either struggling with burnout or kind of feeling a little worn down?

How do they keep going or fix the issue?

Brian Hogg: Sure. Yeah, it can be a lifetime thing and a thing to check up on all the time. No I’ve always been an active proponent and talk about this to anyone I can on the benefits of therapy or speaking with someone, I, obviously you can speak to family and friends, but having that therapist or someone you don’t need to invite to Thanksgiving to go through any struggles that you happen to be having in your life.

And it can take a few tries, to find one that’s a good fit, which can be tough. Especially if you’re not in the best spot, right? If you are experiencing burnout or fatigue or whatever, right? It can be hard to know is this, is it just, is it me? Or is it like, or is it just the relationship between the therapist?

That therapist is just not a good fit for me. Like it can be hard to know the difference. But luckily after I think four or five times, yeah, I found someone who I still check up on or with every month or two to just go through any challenges that, that I’m facing.

And But a huge component has been, exercise, which is obviously a common thing, but just last few years getting into running has been awesome. Not just from, the physical benefits of running, but also some of the social aspects of being part of a run crew or participating in races or what have you squash before that as well.

Kind of haven’t played it recently, but before COVID, so just having some or multiple ideally outlets to, step away from, the computer if the burnout is caused by work or what have you and just have that kind of your own space to rejuvenate, like clear your mind, what have you and work through things.

But yeah, it is something that You need to consciously keep up on, right? Cause it could be so easy to be like, Oh, I’m good now. I don’t need to do any of this. And then, a few months later, weeks later, even it can hit you and then it can be harder to recover from versus just keeping it as a maintenance thing that you integrate into your daily lives, ideally for the rest of your life.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. And related to that, one of the things I enjoy working with you is Positive person. There’s a lot of like negativity and tech and social media or whatever. But you’re a positive person and you like, you communicate well, which I’m learning is coming from a lot of that’s coming from the teaching background.

Maybe.

Brian Hogg: Yeah. I would say it was a most social computer nerd you’d ever meet. Yeah. Even as a younger oddly. Yeah, It was it’s just always been the thing for,

Chris Badgett: there’s a tool I use a lot called assume positive intent, intent and you seem to embody that and like working through issues or brainstorming or whatever, but how, is that just your personality or have you worked on crafting that outlook?

I think that’s also just part of. Being online and there’s so much information and data and it’s all overwhelming that it is easy to get negative or burned out or overwhelmed. Or anxious how have you developed that or, yeah, what are your thoughts on positivity and communicating well virtually?

Brian Hogg: Yeah, being on, I’m not really, like I said, I’m not really involved in social media anymore and that’s probably a big reason for it. There’s just a lot of not solely negativity, but just a lot of stuff that can feel like it. It should, and I hate the word should, affect your life more when it really, if you want it to, you can choose it too.

But a lot of times it’s completely unrelated and not important and distraction or stressor or whatever. Yeah, I’m not sure. Like when I was younger, I had a huge anger and you’d never know it now. Like anger. Problem, right? Or, and maybe related to ADHD. Like I’ve seen kind of friends with kids and stuff that seem to have that.

And that seems to be a more prevalent thing. So yeah, through therapy and medication for ADHD that’s certainly helped. But even before that, just letting go of some of that anger, just consciously, and just not being so quick to, to anger, has created a huge And yeah, I think that’s right.

I didn’t coin a term over it, but yeah, definitely assuming the positive intent in people has been massive. Cause yeah, most people are just trying to, fix an issue or help someone else or whatever. Yeah, that and just being helpful as, and it, I think at one point I was too far on that spectrum, right?

Like obviously you do want to be helpful and help people wherever you can, but it is okay and good to be selfish as well sometimes. Cause if you don’t take care of yourself, you’re not going to be helpful to other people for very long. So that finding that balance has been a more recent thing the last few years, I would say.

Yeah of knowing when to say no, that it’s okay to just say no, not oh maybe I could do that one day for you if blah blah blah because that leaves the door open and then it’s still in your brain and everything else but yeah sometimes it’s no I can’t help you with that I’ll, but I can see if I can find someone who can or I know this person who can and setting them up that way.

Chris Badgett: It’s a strange like conundrum or whatever where In my experience, I’ve similarly, like as a guy who’s run an agency before some of the best agency people are super helpful and also tend to learn the lesson the hard way about being over helpful or always available. Sure. We can solve that problem too.

You thought about this, and this, and next thing you know, you’re like inventing the business model for this person. And you were just hired to build a website, but at the end of the day, that’s what makes you an awesome agency person, but it’s a lesson. A lot of agency freelancers, helpers just learn those boundaries and stuff.

One more on the personal side. Working online either as an entrepreneur or as a developer, designer, marketer, sometimes people get isolated and that causes some of the other mental issues. And I know you don’t live alone. I don’t live alone. I have a family and stuff, and that definitely helps. We talked earlier about meeting at an event.

Which was like away from the computer which that starting to do that really helped me Feel less isolated and quote find the others like other helpers helpful people and creative people and problem solving people and that was really great, but What’s been what’s your advice and story with isolate isolation working remotely, or how have you figured that can of worms out for sure?

Brian Hogg: Yeah. Mob programming, which we’ll talk about later was certainly helpful. Especially, moving here. Three acres near a small kinda city, , , and then covid, right? Like we moved 2020. That was a great way to avoid is a lot of the isolation because you’re on a Zoom call with people, three, four or five hours a day working through problems and chatting and whatnot.

I’ve just certainly, I have a handful of people I regularly schedule, virtual calls with if I can’t get together with them in person or go and visit. If I can and that’s just maintaining those relationships. Even if it’s via text message, sometimes just to avoid said isolation you’re sharing kind of moments in your life.

And I find, yeah, like either hopping on a call, visiting someone in person or a direct text message or a group message, whatever. A lot more effective than social media, right? Cause social media is you’re. beholden to the algorithms to know like whether someone’s going to see it even and obviously someone just might be tired or busy or scrolling when they’re about to go to sleep.

So then, you could start to think, Oh, this person saw, but they didn’t hit the heart icon or whatever. And so that can add to, I think the isolation factor. Though it has its benefits. I’ve had a lot of really cool people via social media in the past. So that can be really good, but yeah, it does need to be a conscious thing to go out and yeah, it takes effort, right?

And especially with the run crew, right? Like you jumping into the water as being like, how fast are they going to run? Is this going to, how’s this going to work out? But pretty much every time especially if you go in there, you’re not going in there to like, Sell a group of people on something, right?

You’re going there to learn, to be helpful, to meet new people and learn about them. Pretty much always it’s going to be a positive experience that is energizing. But yeah, I could see that being a struggle if you’re less extroverted than others. But yeah, it’s worthwhile. I think.

Chris Badgett: Picking up the thread on mob programming. One of the challenges with being a solopreneur, freelancer, working alone and stuff, but collaboration is really powerful for learning and problem solving. Tell us, I hadn’t heard of mob programming until I met you. So tell us about it. It’s really fascinating and interesting.

Brian Hogg: Yeah. It’s basically structured pair programming with more than two people, right? The typical way you would run it is you have what’s a navigator and a driver. The navigator’s job ideally is so before you start, you come up with some goals like this, at the end of this one hour or whatever session.

Ideally we would, a good day would be we’d have this done, a great day would be we’ve had this done, and if, holy crap, this is an amazing day, we would get this done. So you have, you spend a few minutes at the beginning getting that all in line, and then you can just randomize, who’s in what spot.

So then someone starts as a navigator, someone’s a driver, the rest of the people are just in the mob, and ideally they’re not. They’re not shouting. This isn’t like a lynch mob or anything where everyone’s trying to do everything at once that doesn’t work. And it’s all on one computer. So it’s not like everyone, obviously people can use their own if they’re in the mob and they’re looking stuff up, but all the work is done on one.

So ideally the navigator would just say, Hey, like my high level intention is to do X, Y, Z is to make it when you click that button. It’ll do this. It’ll save this form or it’ll whatever, and that’s it. And then they just say, stop talking give the driver a space. The person who’s on the keyboard space to figure that out.

And ideally the driver is speaking, and that’s a learned skill for sure. Cause most developers will just throw on headphones and type and not say anything. But ideally you want to be talking. While you’re trying to figure out the solution so that others know your thought pattern and whatnot.

And then obviously if you have questions, you can be like, Hey, I don’t know how to do this specific thing or whatever, but the navigator and the rest of them, I really needs to resist the temptation to just be like, Oh man, you Got to do this, type this, you silly, you dummy, right? Like ideally, like you don’t want to be doing that because that will very quickly reduce the confidence of the person at the keyboard and just everything in general, and it’s just chaotic and stressful and not fun.

Yeah, so that’s the thing. And it’s really powerful in that. Something that you might spend a day or more, multiple days on a stock or not realizing a certain path or taking a whole other path, like a misinterpretation of what the task is or whatever through that environment, you’re, nine times out of 10, someone in the mosque and be like, Oh, are we sure that’s what we want to be doing?

Not like when you’re planning, right? Oh, is that the and that saves a bunch of time or you’re trying to figure out some technical problem and someone in the mob or whatever. knows the solution, right? And on their term, because you’re only doing four or four or five minute turns.

You rotate that way. Someone’s gonna have the solution for that. Other people see that solution being implemented, learn from it. And over time, they just, you just see a dramatic improvement. And the knowledge sharing and technical ability and just team atmosphere through that. Yeah, it’s a really cool way to work.

But obviously there’s benefits as well to struggling on your own a bit sometimes so that you actually really understand hopefully by the end of it, what you’re doing and the issues that you had along the way.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Awesome. Last question for you. And let me try to frame this in.

When you joined Left 4 LMS, one of the things that I was really impressed about was your ability to gather context quickly. And it shows six or so months in with your ability to quickly Let help a support team member troubleshoot something or troubleshoot something on your own. You’re like, Oh, I didn’t even know we had this.

And now I’m in it. And you’re like, get to the answer. To me, it looks very fast and speedy. So one, I’m just admiring you for that. But to your troubleshooting ability, if somebody is watching or listening to this, and let’s say their website, isn’t doing what they want, or they have some kind of conflict, or maybe they’ve Just bloated it out with too much stuff, too many plugins, two plugins doing the same thing, all kinds of stuff.

Like I’m wondering if you can package your troubleshooting wisdom and into some rules of thumb that can help people, whether they’re building a site for themselves or for a client and they’re hitting issues. How can they slow down and troubleshoot a little better?

Brian Hogg: Yeah, I think big part of it is, yeah, I isolate one thing at a time, right?

Like whether it’s troubleshooting something on a website or programming or whatever, if you’re trying to figure out why these five things aren’t working together, it’s going to be really hard. So yeah, slowing down it’s a very common thing where, oh, you have a problem with this thing, deactivate all other plugins and install a default theme and activate that.

And now you’re in this environment where it’s this is the only thing, that’s affecting anything, unless you have some other really wonky issue or something, but So yeah, drilling down because, yeah, a lot of the times I found it’s this isn’t happening when I do this and, and and throwing out all this information that, it’s not directly related to the one problem that we originally started with.

And so just backing up and being like, okay, what are the steps to reproduce? What you think is like an issue, right? And just through the act of going through that and actually not just saying this doesn’t work or, I want to do this. It’s what are you, what are, what physical steps are you doing right down to might be right down to install and activate this plugin.

Go to the settings, right? But what are the, what are you clicking on? And that’s where video can be like super powerful ’cause or, ideally hopping on a call, but. If not a video of just seeing and especially them talking through the issues that they’re having, right? Like you can actually physically see what’s happening.

But again, that’s less helpful if they don’t have, or if they have everything activated and they’re trying to do everything at once, like you’re still not going to be able to tell is this causing the issue or is this causing the issue or what? Yeah, just having things as isolated as I think it’s the biggest thing and just, yeah, just asking questions like how do you reproduce that?

Like, how can I do that thing that you’re trying to do step by step? And a lot of times when they’re going through oh shoot. Yeah. I didn’t go through this step, when they’re trying to communicate that they’ll usually, it’s like what the rubber duck thing, right? Oh, what is she already having?

I’m having this thing. I was like, Oh, shoot. Yeah. I missed this. I missed step four in what I was trying to do. Yeah, a high level of whatever, but every challenge that comes in is is different and that’s the nice thing about it where, yeah, there’s so many out on so many different use cases that there’s never a dull moment.

And it’s great to just see that you solve, that either bug or, lack of documentation or what have you or pointing to the right documentation and then they’re able to. It just cascades, right? They’re able to finish the course and then people are able to take that course and then they’re able to learn.

And then ultimately maybe they’re teaching things one day, right? Like it’s a really cool cycle. It’s not just, Oh, this is a bug. And this is they’re the users trying to be difficult. It’s no, like at the end of it, there’s a goal in mind and they’re trying to be helpful. And by you solving that you you you enable that for them and it’s it’s really cool.

Chris Badgett: As a as you were talking, I was thinking of really learning the difference between correlation versus causation and so a classic like support thing for that or tech support thing is I I updated your plugin recently and now this thing doesn’t work well, that’s likely correlated, but not causation.

Brian Hogg: It could be necessarily, it could be, but it’s

Chris Badgett: I like to think of it clinically like a doctor almost like I’m trying to diagnose what’s going on here. And yes, you just turned 40 or you did this yesterday, but I’m not sure I need to go through and, measure and find all these things.

details to actually find the cause of what’s going on here. Exactly.

Brian Hogg: No, it’s can you reproduce it in a separate environment? And if not, then that’s probably something unique to that environment. And then you can go back and, Hey, do you have a backup? Restore a backup? Oh, does it work now?

Great. Okay. Let’s see the difference, like it was getting to a working state. Which is a huge thing with if you’re developing, hopefully you’re using some kind of version control, ideally get, and yeah, just using something like get a bisect. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s just so powerful because it’s just Oh, this version it worked, this one is broken and it’ll just, it literally bisects, it’s like, cool.

All right. Halfway through. Does it work here? Yes. Okay, great. So it’s probably, so it’s fine. So this is fine. Let’s go here. Okay. Does it work here? And I’m like, no. And then you can isolate the very, The exact spot where it broke. Or at least one of the spots it broke. You might have broke it, fixed it, and then broke it again.

But at least you can find one spot where it broke and then look at the difference between that and diagnose the cause and not the

Chris Badgett: The other cool thing there, like related to what we were talking about with learning and teaching and experience is the cool thing is if you’re patient over time, you start to have pattern recognition.

You’re like, Oh, I’ve been in this kind of thing before. So your instincts are better and your speeds faster. Or it’s I’ve seen exactly this pattern before. I don’t even, I know exactly what it is because I’ve seen it 10 times. Exactly. Though it can be

Brian Hogg: a detrimental sometimes where, yeah, I’ve caught myself a couple of times where like assuming too soon.

Exactly. Yeah. You assume too soon. Oh yeah, it says to see this. It’s so I really try to never just ask at least one or two questions to verify that the assumption is correct in some way. And then always it’s often, it’s if you do this, it will be fixed.

It’s I think, or I believe that if you do this, it’ll likely fix it and let me know, if it doesn’t, right. And then, yeah, that solves that avoids any any issues there. And obviously it just continues to show that you’re willing to help.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. That’s Brian hog.

That’s G’s. You can find him at Lifter LMS. Go check out eventcalendarnewsletter. com if you’re thinking of adding events and community virtual in person events and make that whole show run better on your website. Go to eventcalendar. com. Brian’s personal site is brianhog. com. That’s hog with two g’s.

Brian, thanks for coming back on the show. I really appreciate it. We’ll have to do it again. Not we won’t wait seven years, but we’ll have to do this again. Any final words for the people or anything else you want them to check out?

Brian Hogg: No, I think yeah. Fenn counter newsletter. com Brian hog. com. I’d like to say social, but yeah, like I said, I’m not really on there anymore.

Yeah, those are the best avenues for sure.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thanks for coming on the show.

Brian Hogg: Thank you for having me.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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