Yoast Care fund: An interview with Enrico Battocchi

This week’s Care Fund recipient is Enrico Battocchi, who was nominated by Stefano Cassone. Enrico is a freelance developer and WordPress contributor from Tuscany, Italy. Let’s find out more about Enrico and his contributions to WordPress!

What do you do?
I’m a freelance web developer. I guess I could say I’m a full-stack web developer, as I jump from PHP to JavaScript to HTML/CSS and back and I’ve been a sysadmin for a long time. But I’m a bit old fashioned and still not really at ease with the proliferation of labels: it already took a long time for me to let go of ‘programmer’ and embrace ‘developer’!

How did you know about WordPress?
I’ve been working with WordPress since 2007, and after all this time I can’t really recall where I read about it first… But I remember that I was carefully looking at the emerging CMS scene and when I found WordPress, I almost immediately chose it for many of my projects because of its extensibility and user-friendliness, even if it was just a sketch of what it has come to be in the following years. Back then there were no custom post types, nor plugin installation/update from the dashboard!

Why did you start contributing? Share with us the first time you contributed?
My first contribution to the WordPress community is also my main one: a plugin called Duplicate Post, which you can find in the WP.org repository and use for free. Its origin story is probably similar to the majority of other plugins: I needed something for a job I was doing­ at the moment – allowing the final users to easily create copies of existing posts. So I developed my solution by watching other plugins’ code to learn about WordPress APIs. Then I thought that it would have been nice to share it with others. It seems that many people have found it useful, so far it’s been downloaded more than 13 million times and installed on more than 3 million websites.

What contribution or moment are you most proud of?
Duplicate Post is certainly something to be proud of, but feeling to be part of the community really takes you to another level. The highlights are the two times (in WordCamp Milano 2017 and WordCamp Dublin 2019) when I gave a talk about the lessons I learned maintaining a piece of free software, albeit small. Both times I received a lot of positive feedback about the power of sharing. The process of using, developing, modifying and debugging code really leads to a common satisfaction only if everyone feels connected to a wider community, and only if everyone is willing to put themselves in others’ shoes.

Where can people find you? Online, WordCamps, other meetups?
Besides my website duplicate-post.lopo.it and Twitter, I’ll be attending (sometimes volunteering, maybe speaking?) most of the WordCamps in Italy this year, plus the unmissable WordCamp Europe in Porto*. There are no meetups close to my town so WordCamps are crucial to me to feel connected to the broad WP community and to stay updated on what’s going on. I think this is true for many people: I really like to see how newcomers at WordCamps get charged with the vibrance of staying together and sharing knowledge and experiences.

*Unfortunately, WordCamp Europe 2020 was postponed, due to recent COVID-19 concerns. For more information visit their website.

Do you happen to know someone like Enrico? Someone who loves contributing to WordPress and/or its community? Visit the Yoast Care fund page for more information and nominate that someone now!