07 Jul From the Netherlands to Automattic: Niels Lange’s WordPress Journey
From the Netherlands to Automattic: Niels Lange’s WordPress Journey
7th July, 2022
As a proud media partner of WordCamp Europe 2022, we had the chance to sit down with Niels Langefor an insightful conversation about their journey from Netherlands to Automattic and the future of WordPress. This episode captures the moments, thoughts, and stories that stood out. Here’s our full chat – enjoy reading!
All right, everyone, we are back in the next episode of WP Shoutout. So in this episode we have Niels Lange with us. Yes, correct. He’s working with Automattic. We’ll get to know more about it in the coming questions. So Neil, welcome to the show.
Thank you very much.
It’s lovely to host you.
It’s great to be here.
So, see, we can go on and on, talk about you. We would like you to introduce yourself to our audience.
That’s always a slightly tricky question because I was born in Germany, but I lived in the Netherlands for many years. 8 or 9 years ago, I moved to Indonesia, initially to Bali. currently I’m based in Jakarta, but I kind of lived between both worlds. So I usually spent the summer in Europe. Partially in Germany, partially in the Netherlands. I really love sailing, catching up with family, friends. I also really enjoyed living in Indonesia. So I’m kind of home in both worlds, so to speak, half European, half Asian.
But is it too much difference when you move from, when you moved there, like about the life there?
Initially, it was very different. because I lived there for 8 years now, I’m pretty much local, so I walk slower, I Act like locals, kind of, I speak a little bit the language. I really love the food, I enjoy the weather, people in Asia are really, really friendly, probably also because of the weather, there’s a lot of sunshine, people are just smiling, Yeah, so it was, it was definitely different. I also went through. If you, if you move to a different country, and the further you travel, the more extreme it is. You move to a different country and you enter the first phase, everything is beautiful, everything is brilliant, you just love everything. Then you enter the next phase where you kind of relate back. What is better back home and oh traffic doesn’t work, engineering doesn’t work, power outages, the internet doesn’t work, so you have a massive list of of of all the negative parts. And after a while, you enter the 3rd stage, where you kind of put the pros and the cons against each other and you ask yourself, is it worth to stay in a foreign country or should I actually move back? And I’m in the phase where I say, it’s actually really like, really nice, like I enjoy it. Even though we plan to move back to the Netherlands, maybe this year or next year and kind of live partially in the Netherlands during spring, summer, autumn, and then in the winter when it gets like really, really cold. That’s when we go back to Indonesia for 3 months to kind of enjoy the warm weather and see our friends there. So kind of the perfect life, living in both worlds, take the max out of it. And thanks to my job at Automatic, which works 100% remote, we don’t have any offices anywhere on the globe. it actually allows me to just, Take my laptop, relocate and work on a completely different spot anywhere on the globe without any problems.
That’s really perfect. I mean, you choose the perfect conditions. Summers in Asia and winters. Summers are here actually, you said, right?
in spring, summer, autumn here. A little bit of winter, like we really want to enjoy the Christmas markets. I’ve heard you told me before that you currently live in Frankfurt in Germany. So you probably know the Christmas markets in Germany, which are fantastic. I haven’t seen a Christmas market anywhere around the world which comes anywhere near a German Christmas market. There are Christmas markets also in Asia. There are Christmas markets in, in different countries. It’s just a different feeling to me, a Christmas market. To fully enjoy it, it has to be freezing cold. I cannot enjoy a Christmas market when it’s like 35 degrees in the shadow. That just doesn’t feel right. Same as we celebrate New Year’s Eve a couple of years ago in Sydney. it’s really, really hot. Everyone kind of wears these, these, these hats, sometimes even Christmas hats. It just doesn’t feel right to celebrate, celebrate Christmas when it’s really warm. To me, Christmas and New Year’s Eve has to be cold. But then January, February are really, really cold months in Germany as well, so that’s the moment when I actually want to. Kind of escape that cold weather and go to Asia.
But in my, so I, I love Heidelberg’s Christmas Market, by the way. It’s really beautiful. And also I love the blue wine there. So, Christmas market is incomplete without a blue wine.
I couldn’t agree more. There’s no Christmas market without blue wine. It’s definitely part, but also roasted peanuts, which go really hand in hand, like all the candies that you have there, the small houses like the candles, yeah.
Anyways, so when was it that you entered to the world of WordPress and what motivated you?
It’s quite a story or quite a journey. I actually started WordPress in. Oh, a while ago, during my study, I think in 2006, I started with WordPress with a very early version. I think it was 2.0. I used it for a few months, but then my my fellow student, study mates, they actually convinced me to move to a different platform. So we created our own CMS. Obviously because it’s much better than WordPress and I know a lot of developers and there’s not a single developer I know that never created their own CMS because they believe your own CMS is always better than than than an open source CMS. Years later, I actually came back to to WordPress, that was in, I don’t know if it was was version 3.something or 4.something. It was 8 years ago when I moved to Indonesia. So by the time I’d lived in the Netherlands, I worked for a scientific publisher. And before I worked for that scientific publisher, I had an agency in Amsterdam with a Dutch designer, who then decided to go back from web media into print media, classic newspaper, magazines. So I was kind of alone and then I went into a business analyst role at a scientific publisher. My friend then moved to Ibiza and he ran into a client that needed help with with with a big project and they flew me from Amsterdam over to Ibiza. We had a chat there. He offered me a job on Bali, which I refused initially because I’ve never been there. I don’t know how it is. I also didn’t really felt the need to do something different back then. I got more and more involved in the project. Eventually he invited me for a two week holiday in Bali. I moved over. I immediately fell in love with the island, with the culture, with the people there. I went back to Europe, quit my job, moved back to moved to, to Bali, just to realize that 4 weeks after I actually moved to Bali, I could not work for that person. It was kind of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. H Hyde. He was very nice, initially, but the moment I started living full time on Bali, I signed a contract. he completely showed a different face. He criticized my decisions. he gave commands to the developing team behind my back. I was hired as a CTO for the company, and we talked about the backlog. I explained how Agile works, how sprints work, How to create user stories, epics, the full spectrum of agile development. He fully agreed that we would work agile. Yet at the same time, every evening he came back to the office and said, I just had a fantastic chat, we do it differently. He tried to move user stories in and out of. Of the sprint all the time. And I told him that, that’s just not how agile works, because we can’t make a prediction when the product is done, if he keeps changing the scope all the time. Now, long story short, after 4 weeks, I quit my job. So now I was on the other side of the planet, and I had no idea. What to do next? Should I go back to Europe? My best friend back then told me, well, you’re probably chasing, some kind of weird dream. I’m pretty sure in 4 weeks you’ll be back in Europe. So I thought, OK, well technically I could go back, but then I would prove my friend right. And I decided, nah, let’s see if I can actually survive. Like I had a little bit of savings. Let’s just make the best out of it. Because all my life I worked in web development. I started with HTML and CSS was was starting around that time. I do have to say I was born in 1980. So I started with web development in 1995, 1996, around that area. It was really, really early. And, I decided now I’m on Bali, I have to make some kind of money. I’m good with websites. If anyone needs a website, I can help that person. I created websites on Wix, Spotify, Shopify, Weebly, Squarespace, Pretty much every system that was available, I created a website. I said, you need a website, I can help you. I got all kinds of different platform requests, I helped all of them. I realized that there’s a high demand in WordPress. More and more people ask me about WordPress and because my background as a PHP developer, I was actually able to read the core, to create plug-ins and themes. So, except of just, Choosing a random theme or a random plug-in and click everything together and and and and use a little bit of duct tapes and tie wraps and hope that the whole system didn’t fall apart. I listened to the requirements of the of the clients. And I said, OK, well, actually, we might not need a plug-in, we might not need an an existing theme. We can actually build that stuff. In a more minimalistic way, more efficient, more performant, less error prone, and that’s kind of within 6 months, I was considered the WordPress guru in Ubo on Bali, because I was the only guy that I was actually able to create plug-ins and themes and and and look under the hood and explain how WordPress works. That’s kind of how I, In a curveball way, found my way back into WordPress.
That’s really inspiring actually. Thank you. All right. So, let’s talk about your current role at Automatic. Could you please tell us what your day to day activities look like?
So currently I work as a JavaScript engineer at the WooCommerce division. I’m part of Team Rubik and Team Rubik maintains the WooCommerce blogs plug-in. Now the WooCommerce blogs plugin, the main intention of WooCommerce blogs is to convert all the existing short codes from WooCommerce core into WooCommerce blocks. You can think about a card block, a checkout block, all products block, filter products by attributes block, Search block. So pretty much everything that is available in WooCommerce currently that is kind of hidden behind a short code, we kind of convert it into a block to make it more transparent, more visible, but also more understandable for an end user to see what’s going on. Think about the, the, check out the card block. The card block is a classic example. in the card. No, actually the the checkout block would be a better example. In the checkout block, you have all the different fields. You have the billing address, you have the shipping address, you have shipping options, you have billing options. If you only see the short code, it’s really hard to understand in the editor, you can’t really tell what’s going on on the front end. You might want to show a company field in the address section. You might want to show an additional field for a housing unit or for a floor. you might want to add an additional title like professor or doctor, like academic degree. You can’t really tell based on a short code. What you will see in the front and of course you have all these attributes in short codes which you can add, but it’s very cryptic. Now with blocks, you simply add the block to the page or to a post, and then in the sidebar, you can easily control which fields you want to toggle on, toggle off, you can see the billing options, you can see the payment option. So everything becomes way more visible and it, Doesn’t really make sense to use WooCommerce short codes when the rest of the WordPress environment moves towards blocks. So it’s a logic step that we decided also to move all of the existing functionality from WooCommerce into WooCommerce blocks. That’s what I’m doing currently. For 1 year, before that, I was a happiness engineer for 3.5 years in support. And The interesting thing is how I actually got hired by Automatic, because jumping back to Bali when I started building websites by myself, and then slowly moving away from Squarespace, Weebly, Wix, all the other system towards WordPress, and I decided to really go deep in in the WordPress ecosystem. I kind of missed the interaction with other people that like WordPress. So I thought it would be fantastic to sit together on a regular basis and talk about WordPress. So I created WordPress cafes, which I run for. Probably a year Before someone told me there’s actually a concept called WordPress Meetups. That was when I realized, actually I’m running WordPress meetups for an entire year without even knowing that I’m running WordPress meetups. So we changed the name from WordPress Meetup towards WordPress Meetup and from from WordPress Cafe towards WordPress Meetup. we run them for a few more years. We started creating, the first Wordcamp in Bali, which was 2016, Wordcamp Denpasar. The funny thing is half a year earlier, I decided I want to go to a Word camp, but, I was a little bit too reluctant to travel around, so I decided if I can’t go to a work camp, the word camp has to come to me. So I’m going to organize a work camp. I reached out to Wordcamp Sandra and and asked them, I want to create a work camp. And I say, OK, do you have an organizing team? And I said, well, I am the organizing team. And I said, you’re alone? Yes. OK, you might want to find 10 other people that help you. You can’t organize a work camp alone. And I said, well, I’m sure I can. And I said, no, we’re sure you can’t. Long story short, I created Facebook page Word Kambali. I created a Twitter handle Word Kambali, like all the social media channels were already reserved for Word Kambali, but there was no Word Kambali because I didn’t get the approval. Obviously, as a one man show, you can’t do that. Word Kambo organization is a lot of effort. Half a year later, someone from Sannoor approached me and said, I see that you organize Wordcamp, WordPress meetup, group Bali. Would you be interested in talking in Sannor? And I said, yeah, I’m interested. And he said, oh, by the way, we’re part of an incubator program. We’re gonna have Wordcamp Ubo, Word Camp Bali, end of the year. I said, oh my God, that’s fantastic. Can I join the organizing team? And he’s like, yeah, absolutely. And then he told me that an idiot registered all the social media channels. Wordcamp, Bali is already gone like Facebook, Twitter, everything is already registered by someone and they have no idea who that dude is. I said, well, actually, I am the dude and he has full access to these channels. So that’s how I came in touch with them. We organized Wordcamp Denpasar 2016. We organized Wordcamp Ubot 2017, just six months later, because it was a huge success. and on the first Wordcamp, I already got approached by folks from Automatic. we had really good chats, but then on Wordcamp, Ubut 2017. I got approached again and people asked me if I ever considered working for Automatic. Now my reply back then was, That would be too good to be true. I’m afraid I’m not good enough. And that’s when they told me, you just passed the first. Job interview tests, so to speak, if you think you’re good enough, then you’re probably not, but if you say, oh no, I’m not there yet, that definitely qualifies you, I encourage you to apply. I sent out the application. I went through the trials, which took a month. Did several tests, I did support in the public forums, then I moved into a live chat. I had a little bit of coaching, I had a buddy, it was the onboarding session was really, really good. I got an offer from them. I started as a happiness engineer and I worked as a happiness engineer for 3.5 years, which I really, really enjoy. It was just after a time, I missed the engineering part. Happiness engineering is fantastic, but it’s also limited in a way that the problems are reoccurring and you’re limited by specific limitations of the platform. For example, you can install plug-ins if you use a business plan, but you cannot install plug-ins if you use the free plan or a personal plan. So explaining the same question over and over again, why can’t I install plug-ins using free plan is kind of frustrating and I also miss, give me a problem. And give me some time to work on a solution. Now, fast forward what I do now with WooCommerce blogs, we work on blogs which are based on Gutenberg. The technology that we use is so advanced that Gutenberg doesn’t even have that functionality yet. So we kind of have to create our own approach. An example would be inner blocks, which can be locked or moved, which also auto load. sibling inner blocks, which is a concept that does not yet exist in that way in Gutenberg. So, That also means there’s no documentation. There’s no one to ask. We have a specific use case, we have a specific problem. It’s my job to make that happen. And now I’m not only a developer, but also a researcher. So what I’m doing is I explore brand new land. No one was ever there before and and we literally create technology that, Didn’t exist before that, and that is something I really enjoy. Speaking about development, it’s also funny because I thought a developer writes code, and being a developer at Automatic for a little over a year now, I can say that most of the time I don’t write code. I probably read code 95% of the time and I write code 5% of my time.
Yeah, it’s absolutely. So it’s not, you’re just coding, you’re also figuring out what to do and even debugging the issues and stuff like that. So that’s more like a misconception among people.
I also believe so. Yeah, absolutely. And it’s easy to write code. It’s very hard to write efficient code, performance code, secure code, although to write code in a way that it’s backwards compatible and it doesn’t create other problems or break existing systems.
Absolutely. All right. Let’s move to our next question. what is the one thing that you love about WordPress?
Community Absolutely, the community, like you and you and you, you. I also love me because I’m also part of the community, but the community is by far the best thing I love. it’s, It’s said that that that that support and it it it almost feels like a family in a way. I’ve seen so many familiar faces. I’m really happy that Wordcamp are finally back again. The last Wordcamp was 2019, Word Camp Europe 2019 in Berlin, where I was. And It’s absolutely incredible to see so many familiar faces. Like it really feels like a family and and and I know a lot of people, I meet them in person. I had chats with them, video calls. it’s just, it’s, it’s fantastic. What I also love is how diverse the WordPress community is. We have people from pretty much every country. we have every religion, every color, every orientation whatsoever, And yet, We’re so diverse and we’re so. Open minded and and and and kind of like like like we all live close together in in in a very harmonic way, which I really, really enjoy.
Yes, community. That’s why we are here for. I also totally 100% agree to that. So, another question is, what is the one thing that you could suggest to the person who just entered to the Word of WordPress?
That’s a good question. I would probably suggest to. Try out everything to see what really kind of triggers you, what you really like, and a lot of people when they hear WordPress, they think, oh, I would like to contribute to WordPress, but I’m not a developer. How can I contribute if I’m not a developer? Now, it’s very simple. Everyone can contribute. There’s a there’s a polyglots team, which ensures that WordPress is available in every language possible. There’s the documentation team, there’s the support team. we have the WordPress TV team. There’s the training team. There are so many teams where you don’t have to be a developer, and yet you can make a really, really big impact for the WordPress community. But back to your question, if I Could give myself a tip, like years ago when I started, go to a WordPress meetup, get in touch with people from the community, ask questions, questions, questions. People are more than willing to answer them and don’t be afraid of big names in the community. If you see that. Someone works on a specific plug-in, or a specific, theme, a specific feature is involved in core, and you see that name popping up over and over again. Don’t be afraid to pin these people direct or reach out via Slack and ask them questions. no one in the WordPress community is isolated or Better than anyone else just because those people are longer in the community. So whenever you have a question, ask the question, join WordPress meetups, go to Word camps, reach out to the community, ask, ask, ask, and, and communi, yeah, contribute. What I really like about the community is initially when I started, I knew nothing and there were a lot of people that helped me. Now I’m part of the community for A little over 6 years, I’m deeply involved. I create themes, I create plug-ins, I contributed to core, I organize meetups, I organize word camps, And I think is if people ask me questions. I’m more than willing to help. I jump on a Zoom call, I help them debugging problems. I help them starting create a plug-in or find out why a theme isn’t working the way it works or where a performance bottleneck is. So, all the help that I got when I started, now I’m returning the favor to the next generation. If anyone has a question, ping me and by all means, I’m more than happy to help.
Yeah, the community aspect is the perfect part, and everyone is helpful. I also found it whenever I had a question, if I reached out, they were immediately helping me on these questions. Yes, yes. All right. So we are almost at the end of the ques interview. Our last question is, what is your favorite song?
Eleanor Rigby by The Beatles. I absolutely love that song. It’s a little bit of sad song in a way. But it’s I always get goosebumps if I hear that. So Eleanor Rigby, Beatles, it’s probably from the 60s, mid-60s. That’s definitely my favorite song.
Guys, that’s a great choice. Guys, do listen to it and tell us in the comments how, how did you find it?
Perfect. Thank you very much for having me.
Oh, I love that song. Perfect. So Taeke, it’s really nice meeting you. Thank you guys — we will wrap this up now.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you so much for being part of it. We we had really fun talking to you.
Yeah, thank you.
All right guys, till next time. Bye-bye.
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Meet the Host
Vineet Talwar is the founder of Some Tech Work, a Germany-based digital consulting studio, and the creator of Jump.ac, an AI-powered EV fleet charging platform built through the Carbon13 accelerator. When he’s not building products or fixing websites at scale, he’s usually experimenting with new tech ideas or polishing his next WordPress talk.
Meet the Guest
Niels Lange is part of the engineering team at Automattic, contributing to some of WordPress’s most widely used products. His journey spans multiple countries and roles, giving him a unique lens on remote work, global collaboration, and open-source innovation. Outside of work, he loves discovering new cultures and tinkering with ideas — though never while pushing code to production.
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