Breaking Barriers and Constructing Community

Yumi Nishioka, widely generally known as Mimi, is a Tokyo-based freelance web and UI designer.

Mimi could be very enthusiastic about design and WordPress, which led her to initiate two Japanese-language study groups around these subjects. Eventually, her dedication to the local WordPress community made her recognized – Mimi was the recipient of the 2023 Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship.

This scholarship covered her traveling costs to WordCamp US, where she met with a whole lot of WordPress enthusiasts and attended useful sessions.

Read on to get to know Mimi’s WordPress journey and the way she has been pushing the bounds to make the platform more accessible to everyone, no matter language.

Embarking on the WordPress Journey

Mimi started off as an online designer, while designing logos and printed goods on the side. She has an in depth skill set, and is proficient in coding languages like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP.

Mimi particularly likes CSS. “I really like CSS, and it continues to challenge me. But let’s get one thing straight – I’m a designer at heart,” Mimi emphasizes.

This coding proficiency was not an afterthought but a necessity. Within the early 2000s, ‘front-end engineering’ was still a foreign concept in Japan. Being an online designer at the moment often also meant being a coder.

Mimi’s first encounter with WordPress dates back to a while pre-2005, a period when constructing a straightforward CMS in your needs from scratch was considered the norm. Using her PHP knowledge, she did just that. Her CMS worked nicely, so her small team began using it for client projects.

WordPress was still in its early years at the moment. Mimi thought WordPress’ design wasn’t outstanding back then, so she wasn’t immediately hooked by it.

Then, fast forward to 2009, Mimi attended a PHP conference. It opened her eyes to the expansive world of WordPress. Naoko Takano, a number one figure within the Japanese WordPress community, spoke about WordPress at that conference.

“It was still so rare for ladies in Japan to attend a tech event, let alone speak on stage. Seeing Naoko there was monumental for me,” Mimi recalls.

Mimi then took a break from work to deal with her role as a mother of two. Once she returned to work, she realized WordPress had turn out to be super popular.

“Just about all the projects I took after I gave birth were on WordPress,” Mimi says. Nevertheless, she noticed that its growing popularity was a double-edged sword. On one hand, WordPress gave the look of a magical tool that would accomplish anything. However, its misuse led to poorly constructed sites and performance issues. “Some sites were so messy, it gave the look of a patchwork of random code snippets from different blogs,” she says.

Her opinion modified once she found the Gutenberg project. Intrigued by the changes, Mimi decided it was time to be a part of the community. She began by attending a neighborhood study group. “The more I learned about it, the more interesting it became,” Mimi says.

Eventually, Mimi made her strategy to her first WordCamp in Tokyo in 2018, volunteering as a photographer. From there, Mimi has been an lively WordPress contributor since.

For Mimi, WordPress block themes are especially helpful for designing as they follow a certain design system. She also acknowledges how WordPress enables designers to construct sites without extensive coding knowledge.

Mimi is especially curious about Figma and WordPress integration, and is developing a plugin to auto-generate theme.json files. “AI services and other tools can do all of it for you, but I’m taking it a bit slower to attempt to create something I can use the way in which I need,” she explains.

She sees her commitment to WordPress as a hobby, not a business. Mimi is an unsponsored contributor but has been bringing so much to the table. For instance, she contributed to the Full Site Editing (FSE) Outreach Program, where she translated calls for testing to Japanese and gathered feedback from the community.

Nevertheless, Mimi’s journey doesn’t stop at contributing to WordPress in her spare time. She has also found a strategy to create and nourish a way of community through study groups. After serving because the lead organizer for WordCamp Tokyo 2019, Mimi realized she desired to dig deeper into this CMS. Many conversations at these larger events were business-centric, and she or he yearned for more in-depth discussions on design and WordPress itself.

She also noticed that many Japanese WordPress community members, including herself, sometimes struggled to precise their fondness for design in English on the official Make WordPress Slack. This then led to the birth of the Gutenberg Freaks study group in 2019.

Gutenberg Freaks is a gathering of engineers who’re obsessed with the Gutenberg editor. The group meets twice a month, reading the Gutenberg code together and discussing it in Japanese. The group also maintains a Discord channel for each day text chats, where they motivate one another to contribute to WordPress through writing issues and sending PRs (Pull Requests) on the WordPress GitHub repository.

Realizing the worth of a design-centric dialogue, Mimi began one other study group in 2020 named Design and WordPress. This group emerged from her collaboration with Junko Nukaga, a Community Team Rep. It holds open studies on YouTube monthly, focusing solely on WordPress’s design facets.

“I desired to focus much more on design. At first, I feel perhaps we don’t have to separate the discussions and create a brand new study group. Still, sometimes conversations about design don’t all the time resonate well with engineers,” Mimi explains her consideration.

Through these study groups, Mimi has learned so much. From understanding coding languages to learning from issues raised by community members worldwide, the experience has been each educational and enjoyable.

This shared community effort serves as a continuous learning opportunity, fueling Mimi’s enduring passion for design and WordPress.

Revolutionary Approaches to Bridge Language Gaps

Continuing her eagerness to make WordPress and design more accessible, Mimi recognized an important factor that sometimes goes unnoticed: language. While WordPress serves a worldwide audience, its documentation is primarily available in English. This poses a challenge, as over half of WordPress installations globally are in languages apart from English.

“I’m completely happy that the WordPress community has been discussing this matter on the Community Summit 2023. A proposal for documentation localization was already submitted,” Mimi says. She emphasizes the importance of translating the Teams’ Handbooks, because it’s often the entry point for brand new contributors. Doing so means democratizing access to information.

Addressing the problem of language accessibility, Mimi reflects on how the Japanese community uses a scraping tool to extract data from GitHub and translate the information. The scraping tool was developed by Mirucon, an engineer and fellow Japanese WordPress contributor.

“The Japanese WordPress community could be very lively in translation, so we will get around with the handbooks. But I feel this isn’t the case in other countries. Japan is blessed on this matter,” Mimi contemplates.

Mimi isn’t only concerned in regards to the translation but additionally the standard of knowledge available. She noticed many fallacious or outdated details about WordPress in countless blogs on the web. This proliferation of misinformation can lead to skepticism. Due to this fact, Mimi emphasizes the necessity to keep up up-to-date official documentation translation.

So, what’s her call to motion? While she knows that translating documentation and ensuring its accuracy is a big undertaking, she strongly believes in its necessity. “That is numerous work, but I might love to assist it go well,” Mimi says.

In this fashion, Mimi continues to assist break the barriers which will hold people back from fully engaging with WordPress. Whether creating local-language study groups or making information more accessible, she’s showing that where there’s a will, there’s all the time a way.

The Unforgettable WordCamp US 2023 and Future Aspirations

Attending WordCamp US 2023 was greater than just a visit to a conference for Mimi – it was an exquisite experience.

Mimi was encouraged to use for the Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship by her friend and design study group co-founder, Junko. She was then chosen as this 12 months’s recipient. She really appreciates this incredible opportunity, but sometimes she just cannot shake the thought that another person might higher deserve the honour.

On the event, she met many incredible people doing remarkable work within the WordPress community. Mimi is especially amazed by the ladies in tech she met there. It was a dream come true for her to converse with Core committers who’ve inspired her journey in WordPress. Their activities have encouraged Mimi to take advantage of her expertise.

She was also thrilled by the WordPress community members’ kindness and the welcoming atmosphere she encountered on the WordCamp, which boosted her spirits and made her long travel worthwhile. WordCamp US 2023 was a satisfying adventure from start to complete, full of memorable moments and latest friendships.

When asked about her current aspirations, Mimi said she desires to focus more on creating relatively than processing and distributing information like she has been doing along with her study groups and localization efforts. Along with her two friends, Mimi has been focusing more on her theme.json generator plugin while doing her most important designing job. It’s still a prototype now.

“I’m currently working on my plugin’s vertical writing functionality. I’m delighted to see the vertical writing feature added to WordPress, nevertheless it’s still not just like the vertical writing users expected,” Mimi says. “I’m planning to create a GitHub issue about it, to assemble insights from the Japanese community and folks from other locales with a vertical writing culture. I’d wish to invite them to share their opinions about this aspect,” she continues.

Mimi also emphasizes that the vertical writing functionality is greater than only a tiny feature improvement – it’s a culture. “It’s also related to the upcoming Gutenberg Phase 4’s focus, which is the implementation of multilingual sites to WordPress’s core. If we’re going to move forward with multilingualism, we’d like to assemble a broader range of opinions from people who find themselves used to coping with multilingualism,” Mimi argues.

Her blog, which began as a testing ground for WordPress, serves as an off-the-cuff journal where she records her experiences with WordPress and other tech-related subjects.

To this point, the posts are all in Japanese, and Mimi plans to complement the blog by adding more articles in English and about design. Nevertheless, as Mimi sees a blog as a log, she is going to proceed to post such miscellaneous articles at her pleasure.

For Mimi, that’s the fantastic thing about WordPress – it provides everyone access to publish. Due to this fact, she believes it should include higher language accessibility and efforts in community learning. While her focus has evolved, her mission is constant: to resolve problems.

It’s this continuous commitment that places her among the many women she once admired – the inspiring figures shaping the WordPress community.