Contributor Spotlight: Laura Adamonis

Welcome to a new series, called the Contributor Spotlight! In this series, the Training Team introduces you to one of our many valued contributors, and you can learn more about their contribution journey.

Laura’s Background

Before finding WordPress, Laura’s background took several different turns. She has a degree in set & lighting design, worked in a department store, and a visual merchandiser setting up displays and Christmas. “​​I thought about being an interior designer or architect because when I was little I always loved rearranging my room,” she adds.

Laura started her journey as an educator when she became a Montessori teacher for 6-9 year olds and taught for several years. She did several years of volunteer work from coaching, to library helper, to mentoring. She then went back to teaching at the local science center and became the robotics coordinator in charge of LEGO classes, engineering, robotics, and coding for kids.

Laura started her own website design business, Add A Little Digital Services, last year.

Outside of WordPress, Laura loves spending time with her family, scrapbooking, baking, gardening, and exploring new places. 

Laura’s WordPress Journey

“I like using WordPress for the ease and that 40% if not more of the world’s websites use it.”

When Laura discovered WordPress, her job at the time required her to work weekends and she was at a point where she wanted to have the flexibility to pick up and do things, so she quit her job. She was just taking time to do some projects around the house when she was scrolling through social media and found a woman-owned website coding course that focused on WordPress.

Discovering Contribution

Laura’s motivation to go beyond using WordPress was a two-fold decision:

“I had impostor syndrome and felt I didn’t know enough to call myself a designer. I was taking all the workshops and watching tutorials to learn more to build my confidence. The second part is as an educator I want to help others learn and understand. We all learn in different ways and I have a good sense of the different learning styles to help others. That is what drew me to the training team.”

Laura’s first contribution was as a co-host for an Online Workshop:

“After co-hosting I felt amazing. The fact that I was co-hosting for someone on the other side of the world and that people from all over were attending.” 

Overcoming Challenges

“Last year when I decided to contribute I also decided to not contribute. Finding information about how to do things was impossible for me to find or I would find it then spend hours trying to find it again. I overcame this by setting a goal and started bugging people, asking questions. I wrote out the steps I needed to do, I created folders in my browser so I could find pages more easily. The Training team has done a great job in the past year to update the handbook and document the steps to take in order to do different things. You might even see my name or face within those documents. I love that I am able to contribute as I navigate through the different processes.

The Training team has been focused more on improving the handbook and creating tutorials and workshops to show the steps on how to contribute. This has been very beneficial.” 

Memorable WordPress Moments

• Publishing my first tutorial has been very exciting.
• Going to my first WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more..
• Most of all, being a part of a special community where we learn together and help each other.. 

Check out Laura’s latest tutorial, “How to create a menu with the navigation block”. Laura was also co-lead of the Training Team’s table at WordCamp US 2023 Contributor Day!

What advice would you give to someone who wants to get started with contributing to WordPress?

• DO ask questions. There is this awesome community called WordPress just waiting to answer your question. 
• Be alright with not getting it right.  A great way to learn is from our mistakes. Own them. Let them make you confident. 

Thank you Laura, for all your dedication and contributions to the Training Team and to the WordPress Open SourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. Project!

#contributor-spotlight