In this episode, I'm chatting with Matt Pritchett. He is a UX developer at Lift UX and lives in Atlanta GA.

We're talking the good, the bad and the ugly about local development environments. What's out there now and why Matt plans to build one of his own called AnchorWP. Matt is a super smart guy and I've had the pleasure of being in a weekly mastermind group with him this year.

Let's get started.

Meet Matt Pritchett
Matt is known for transformational WordPress development and bringing integrity to each relationship, sale, project, and interaction.

He's a developer, blogger, business owner, product maker and proud husband and father of three.

Show Notes
Matt's Website: Pritchett Media
Matt's Blog: Matt's Blog
AnchorWP link: AnchorWP
Helpful Links:

Desktop Server
MAMP & MAMP PRO
Vagrant
Varying Vagrant Vagrants
Docker
Local by Flywheel (formerly Pressmatic)
VersionPress
Migrate DB Pro (Awesome!)

Special Offer for listeners
Receive 15% off Version 1 of AnchorWP when it launches. Use code RETHINK. Visit AnchorWP.

Complete Transcript:
Open PDF version of this transcript in new window

Jackie:
Hey everybody, it's Jackie D'Elia with another episode of Rethink.fm for you. Today, I have my guest, Matt Pritchett. Hey Matt, how are you?

Matt:
I'm doing well, Jackie, how about yourself?

Jackie:
I'm well. Thank you very much for joining me. For those folks who don't know who you are in the community, would you introduce yourself and tell us what you do?

Matt:
Sure, my name is Matt Pritchett and I hail from Atlanta, Georgia. I am a UX developer at Lift UX. We are a small agency that focuses mainly on UX development and design. We're scattered all over. We're a remote first workplace. We're scattered all over. We've got people in Florida, and Texas, and Michigan. I'm the only person in Georgia for now, but we're scattered all over the place.

Jackie:
Very cool. When did you start as a developer?

Matt:
I took my first developer position in August of 2007, straight out of high school, actually. I worked for a small missions non-profit that sent high school and college students overseas. I took the position because I was interested in non-profits and the church world. I spoke fluent Spanish at the time and I know I don't speak it fluently anymore. At the time I did and I served as a translator for them and took teams overseas. Part of the role and how they were able to hire me was I was the director of multimedia, which basically meant I took care of hardware and software. I had to learn how to do websites. I started out with table based development in Dreamweaver, like a lot of people did, and taught myself from there.

It's been a journey ever since.

Jackie:
You didn't start off developing in WordPress then. When did WordPress come into the picture, and how big of a part of it is in your daily work now?

Matt:
In August, I started that position. By December of that year, part of what my role was they had this ancient PHP system that allowed teams, when they were overseas, to upload these text and picture based updates so parents could keep an eye on their kids while they're overseas and make sure they're not in harm's way or anything like that, but this thing was so ancient that anytime you touched it, breathed on it, looked at it the wrong way, it fell apart, it errored out, it deleted things. Honestly, I found WordPress because I was in trouble with my boss for having deleted a bunch of the...