What drives you to speak at WordCamps?

1. My husband, if it’s more than six hours or so in the car. Oh, wait. That’s a who, not a what.
2. I’m pretty sure CSS jokes don’t go over too well at Open Mic Night. So WordCamp is my comedy store.
3. I really think it’s possible to render in CSS almost any design we can conceive of, subject to browser support and its limitations.

AND I think it’s possible for any designer to learn to render their vision in CSS and template PHP, irrespective of age, temperament, education or professional background.

What would you like to see change about the WordPress platform in the next 5-10 years?

The Media Library. I’d like to be able to upload media files with FTP or push them from version control, with their meta data intact.

I love that Core automagically makes images responsive (shout-out to fellow STL peep Joe McGill on that!)

And happy as I am with the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin, which keeps going and going and going, shouldn’t that functionality be part of Core at some point?

Who do you think is under represented in the WordPress community?

Fat Jewish tennis ladies over 55, of course! Tennis pros and other athletes …

In my experience of the STEM space, the two most welcoming communities for white women and people of color are probably WordPress and aerospace (or at least Boeing fighter programs).

Now, my real experience is of WordPress. My perception of aerospace is skewed by who shows up at Taco Tuesday here in the high desert of Aerospace USA in California.

So I don’t have much standing to say either way, and we can always do better.

What was the most challenging WordPress project you’ve worked on?

The most fun I’ve had recently was building a Genesis child theme that uses Flexbox every which way from Sunday. It’s called GardenFlex, because I used some shots of flowers and leaves as the featured images.

What’s a problem you recently solved creatively using WordPress?

I’m still working on it at stltennishall.org – in the Inductees category, I want each archive to show only its immediate subcategory archive (there’s a plugin letting me add featured images to the categories, so I can make pretty layouts on the archive pages).

Right now, I’m hiding things I don’t want with hacky CSS. I need to write a better function, with better array arguments, to control those archive pages properly.

Where can people find more about you?

racquetpress.com is the product/service site I’ve been soft-launching for two years now 😜 ; marginhancers.com has endorsements and some non-tennis case studies.

I live on Twitter, basically, unless I’m on the court or doing something halfway productive. There’s my somewhat pathetic Github account – my Genesis child themes live there. I’m marybaum both places and on wordpress.org.

And if you’re in the mood for lame comedy mixed into somewhat more solid CSS and templating how-tos, check out my speaker page at wordpress.tv/speakers/mary-baum.