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I never thought I would be a WordPress developer.

For the vast majority of my life, I wanted to be a journalist. A sports journalist to be more specific. I grew up loving to play sports — especially baseball — and I developed a love of writing in the fourth grade.

So in high school, I joined the school newspaper covering the sports teams. At the University of Texas at Austin, I joined The Daily Texan. There I covered both golf teams, women’s soccer, softball, volleyball, baseball and basketball. Then in my final semester, I became the sports editor for the paper. And in August 2016, I got to go to Rio de Janeiro to cover the summer Olympics.

I ended up graduating with a journalism degree, but that’s not what I’ve been doing professionally. Instead, during that time there was another thing that kept trying to get my attention: web development.

My introduction to WordPress came at my high school newspaper. Fascinated by the software and wanting to learn more, I started my own WordPress site — a blog that covered arena football. As my time in high school went on, I became more interested in how WordPress worked.

Finally, in the summer after my high school graduation, I took the time to teach myself web development. I learned HTML, CSS, PHP and JavaScript and how WordPress worked. It definitely wasn’t the best learning, looking back at it now, but it was a start. And by the end of the summer, I had a custom theme for my arena football blog.

Eventually, my interest in arena football faded, but not my interest in web development. In fact, it was quite the opposite. I only became more intrigued by WordPress and web development. I took programming classes at UT and ended up with an Elements of Computing Certificate. And I created a theme for the WordPress theme directory.

But in the summer of 2014, web development went from a hobby to a job. Through an interesting set of circumstances, Christopher Harris hired me to be a development intern at his company, Faith Growth. It was the much-needed next step, and I learned a lot about how to properly do things in WordPress and web programming.

I now have a couple of more themes in the directory and a few plugins in the repository plus a premium sports plugin. I’ve also created numerous websites for churches and ministries at Faith Growth. But through all of that work, I hadn’t quite unlocked the true power of WordPress — the community.

In September 2016, I attended my first WordCamp DFW. Although I listened to a lot great talks, my biggest lesson came with how big and how awesome the WordPress community is. With WordPress and web development, it’s easy to feel like a lone wolf. I know that there are obviously online communities for WordPress, but it can be tough to feel that personal interaction online, especially for those of us who are just starting out.

But that WordCamp DFW got me excited about web development. Seeing so many people using the software and being excited about it gave me energy to keep going with WordPress and opened my eyes to what I could do with it.

After that experience, I became an active member of the Fort Worth WordPress Users MeetUp. There my experience with the WordPress community has only become more positive. I’ve met people who are wanting to learn more about WordPress and people who are willing to teach. It’s undoubtedly the best community I’ve ever been a part of.