About Women In WP

Women in WP is a bi-monthly podcast about women who blog, design, develop, and market in the WordPress community created by:

@amymasson – @askwpgirl – @tapps

Amy Masson

Creator of Opportunities

I’m the co-owner of Sumy Designs, a web design company I founded with my sister in 2006. I’ve been a lifelong nerd – started my coding career by writing programs in BASIC on my brother’s Commodore 64 back in the 80s. In college, I taught myself HTML by looking at the source code on other websites and made my first website in 1995 on the University server. One of the required courses for my degree in Education was “Computers in Education.” I really liked the professor and learned about options for getting licensed to teach computers, so I added that to my track and somehow ended getting a job teaching middle school computer technology.

I loved that job and did it for five years and I always thought I would go back to teaching when my kids were older. Instead what happened was that my hair dresser asked me to make her a website. So I did. And then one of her clients saw that website and asked me to make a website for her boutique. So I did. And then my babysitter’s mom asked me if I could help her out. And 13 years later I now have this super fulfilling career making websites full time.

Tracy Apps

Designer and Disrupter

Tracy, ( or @tapps) has been working with WordPress since before it was WordPress, and has gone from making the worst websites on the planet in the late 90’s (Lets just blame all the hair spray used for those bangs)–to creating robust, enterprise-level web applications… and everything in between.

Equipped with a generic art degree and an innate urge to disrupt the norm, she has been working over 20 years as a creative in technology. Using WordPress as her go-to tool, she has used WordPress to create simple websites, intranets, design system language & developer documentation sites, application prototypes, community & marketplace sites, hybrid web/mobile applications, and even as a dynamic replacement of a Word document template.

Currently, Tracy runs her own company–which officially turns 10 this year–but also sometimes works as a full-time contractor for fortune 500 companies, or teaching web development, design & UX at her alma mater, UW-Milwaukee, or working on getting a startup off the ground as UX and design lead, or sometimes all four at the same time. She enjoys speaking at WordCamps all over the US (and canada), playing the drums, lifting heavy things repeatedly (also known as crossfit), photobombing (#tappsbomb) your photos, doctor who, Sid Meier\’s Civilization games, and collecting bowties.

Angela Bowman

Chief Cheerleader

I have been using WordPress since 2007. I learned the hard way, as most of us do, the best practices for developing and maintaining WordPress websites. I am still learning. It is an endless process. I am passionate about sharing what I have learned with others through organizing Meetup.com groups, teaching, and presenting at WordCamps. I have empathy for people just starting out and not knowing what they don’t know.

I entered high tech with a degree in Religious Studies from the University of Colorado getting my first job out of college at a software company in tech support. After the dot com crash, I reinvented my career through a random set of events which ultimately put me on this path to WordPress. I now run a company building highly customized websites for businesses, the university, and several nonprofits.

In our Boulder WordPress community, I’ve encouraged people to partner and collaborate with each other on projects. This has allowed everyone to expand the scope of their offerings and succeed in ways they couldn’t on their own. It’s this energy of collaboration that has also helped make this podcast a reality, and I’m so excited to be a part of it!

I can be found just about everywhere as @AskWPGirl.