May 2022.
Hello friends!
My name is Carolina Nymark. I am a developer and WordPress theme nerd from Stockholm, Sweden.
I have contributed to WordPress for over a decade, with countless of hours, 2000 theme reviews, Twenty Twenty-One, code contributions and more. I am a former team representative for the WordPress.org themes team, and still passionated about themes.
Since January 2021, I am a sponsored WordPress contributor at Yoast.
Right now, I work three days per week on internal Yoast projects, and two days on Gutenberg and WordPress core. Yoast helps me keep the site free and I am grateful for their support and the chance to work with a great team.
On this site, I share lessons and tools for full site editing and block themes.
A lot of things have changed since May 2020 when I first created this site. It is surreal that this page has already existed for two years!
The back story
For 18 years, I was employed by a government agency (administration and customer service) and WordPress was something I contributed to on my spare time.
My employer was not able to offer me working conditions during the first covid outbreak that would have been safe for my partner, and I became unemployed.
My job at the government agency was highly specialised and I felt that the only thing I had to lean back on was my WordPress knowledge.
First, I freelanced a little bit, but I found it difficult to compete on market places because while I had knowledge and experience of WordPress, I did not yet have the necessary workexperience in tech.
When I first started thinking about creating a course about full site editing, my first plan was to have some free articles and a paid course.
I quickly learned that creating course plans, videos and using LMS plugins is hard!
For one, I struggled with a problem with my voice (due to sjögrens) when I tried recording the videos. But most of all, Gutenberg development was and still is so fast that I could not keep the video material up to date.
I needed to change the format to something more practical that would be easy to update. I also decided to not have a paid course, because I was definitely not comfortable charging for material that would be out of date.
When discussions about creating Twenty Twenty-One started, I volunteered to be the development lead. This was a huge honor for me and I still feel that for a theme developer, it doesn’t get bigger than getting to create a default theme. It was not always easy, but it was an important experience for me. The team was also tasked with creating a block theme version of Twenty Twenty-One.
At that time, I had to take a chance and I dedicated all my time to creating the theme, without having an income. This was when I was contacted by Yoast who decided to sponsor my work on the theme, and I was able to continue working with Yoast after the theme was completed.
If you have questions about the courses, please email me at carolina@fullsiteediting.com