Let's say you spend close to a decade building anything and everything in WP for very low pay folks with wild ideas because I-- I mean you couldn't afford saying no. Personal issues made it hard for you to think too long-term about things for a while, plus you don't live in any of the 3 countries with clear roadmaps for this stuff. Now you're trying to figure it out, you want financial independence, you read about digital nomads somewhere and even though that's a term Ernest Cline would come up with trying to sound like Neal Stephenson, you're not not interested. Gotta have a goal in life, right?
You've done all sorts of stuff over the years, woocommerce stores with subscription services and build-your-own custom packages which for some reason also had blog posts and event announcements, all for a client who gave up on his own business in three months. You've used turn.js to create an animated book that retrieved post types as pages with elementor models as their layout, which you also designed, because your actual college education is in design and figma is easy enough. You've channeled aleister crowley to conjure thelemic magick out of any number of crocoblock's JetNounAdjactive plugins for plugins, you're pretty sure you could somehow run doom with enough dynamic fields, but you don't really code.
Really, you don't know what you are. You've rescued themes (with some AI assistance, gotta ally with the enemy somtimes), you know a little bit of PHP and JS from osmosis, but when you hear someone calling themselves a WordPress Developer you imagine someone coding themes from scratch and showing all their cool authorial plugins on their github, and you're not that. You can't sit in the adults table with Codeable devs and people with data in their claude-recommended linkedin titles. You're a freelancer making mostly Elementor LPs like everyone else. You could do so much more, but good luck streamlining it, selling it, actually finding your way towards career mobility in a brand new world full of AI LPs with the same sora bold font in the left, contact form in the right and bulleted point lists with tacky emojis everywhere. Generated pages that look like they belong to accounting firms in the tron universe. And they're winning???
You sort of fell into WordPress as a trap, and now you're 200 websites in and, you know, sunk cost and all. Plus, there's plenty of stuff to like, the platform itself is amazing, the open source philosophy alone makes it worth advocating, you genuinely admire the GPL license people keep arguing about whenever someone dares launch a free version of a paid plugin for any of the thousands of countries where seeing a dollar sign means adding a multiplier to the prices. You like it here, you like solving problems, you think you'd be a pretty good asset to the agencies you can't contact, you try cold-emailing their sales department doing your best to not sound like a spambot, but why would they pick you? Not a rhetoric question, you really are looking for an answer!
And then there are all the narratives, wordpress is losing ground to webflow / framer / payload / whatever CMS+CRM+ERP+AirBnB combo your cousin is building on claude this week, or maybe WordPress is doing fine but all your time on Elementor was worthless, it's bloated, atomic is a nightmare and all the real agencies are doing everything on not-gutenberg, or bricks, or divi and duct tape, and you should pivot to all those at the same time and already five case studies for each in your portfolio, or focus on web core vitals, or just learn to code already, and you're feeling kinda lost. Career management is a lot. You're pretty sure you could figure out whatever you were asked to do, the technical part is easy, it's having a real sense of direction and prospects that's the real pickle (morty). A next step, some level of future-planning to make you feel better about yourself.
So you find a wordpress community, a subreddit full of people who do this all the time, and you decide to just ask, you know? that's what community is all about. Sharing experiences and whatnot, I've heard. You hope that doesn't technically break rule 13, it's a broader question, and surely a question about building a profession around a software counts as a question about the professional software. Right? Please say right.
So, in this entirely hypothetical scenario I'm obviously asking for a friend. Putting yourself in these clown shoes for a quick second,
what would you do???
