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An unexpected conversation with a trustworthy hombre who prefers no drama when it comes to romance.

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In Episode 123 of Seriously, BUD?, Bud talks with Jos Velasco, a fellow WP Credits mentor from Guadalajara. Jos explains the university-based program, which guides students into the WordPress community. He talks about Mexican food and travel, recommending Oaxaca, and says he learned English from online video games. He met his wife, a visual artist who exhibits in museums, at a launch party for a WordPress multisite blog network, and their calm relationship centers on their senior dogs and long trips, including six visits to Japan. He also covers his family, his partying high school days, and how he went from disliking coding as an engineering student to building everything in WordPress. He now handles escalated page-builder support cases at DreamHost. Jos names reading people as his superpower, recommends WP Credits' Rita Robles as a future guest, and explains that dropping the "e" from José was his own choice.

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An unexpected conversation with an 8th-generation Texan who hangs around the WordPress Community because she loves it.

Bud finally lands Charleen Mullenweg after two years of asking, and it's her first podcast ever. A professional genealogist and lifelong database enthusiast, Charleen explains how feeling like the odd one out in her mother's family led her to research her late father's side. She describes her work today, which includes tracing Texas mineral-rights owners for law firms, researching historic houses, occasional forensic genealogy, and most often helping clients qualify for lineage societies. She also offers beginners tips like starting with FamilySearch and Ancestry. Along the way, she talks about 43 years of embroidery, her love of spicy cooking, her career in healthcare and oil and gas informatics, and her role as the big sister who first went to WordCamps to support her brother Matt and stayed for the community. Her travels range from an opera-filled solo trip to Vienna, where she dined at the hotel where her great-great-grandmother once worked as a maid, to a long-delayed trip to Portugal. The conversation includes the show's signature "Seriously, Bud?" moment and wraps up with her guest recommendations, including Carolyn Shelby, the queen of a micronation.

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An unexpected conversation about resilience - across countries, careers, cultures, and whatever comes next.

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Robert Abela traces his journey from growing up on the small island of Malta to eventually settling in the Netherlands, with stops in Cyprus (where he reconnected with his now-wife Charlene) and Scotland (where Brexit ultimately pushed the family to relocate) along the way. A self-described college dropout, he built an accidental career in WordPress security, growing his company Melapress and its plugins WP Activity Log and WP2FA into a stable business despite industry-wide headwinds from AI disruption. An avid outdoorsman and self-taught polyglot (fluent in Maltese, English, Italian, and Dutch), Robert credits his adaptability across countries and cultures as his defining strength, and closes the episode previewing his upcoming talk at WordCamp US in Phoenix while recommending Milana Cap, Matt Cromwell, and Francisco Torres as future guests.

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