What is a hero? Who is a hero?

Growing up in the 80s, the answer was obvious. A hero was the figure who strode across cinema screens with fire in their eyes, the angry young man who fought the system with bare fists, who spoke truth to power and packed off the villains. Bold, loud, very gendered. The archetype was clear: stand with the people, defy authority, be ruthlessly honest, and win.

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In 2015, a message arrived in my WordPress Slack. The opener was disarmingly direct:

“Hi, there. Do you know who I am?”

I replied, honestly: “Nope.”

“Rock on! I hope to change that. My name is Topher, and I am working on a cool WordPress project!”

That project was HeroPress. And just like that, Topher pulled me into an orbit I have never quite left. The orbit of planet HeroPress.

I always figured HeroPress as an archive, a living oral history of ordinary people and their relationships with WordPress. A catalog of people and their journeys through anxieties, migrations from smaller to larger worlds, their small and big wins.

By 2015, I was not any sort of angry young man. I was not raging against any machine. What possible heroism could I claim?

But Topher has always understood something more nuanced than the cinematic archetype: that the first act of speaking for others is learning how to speak for yourself. Telling your story as worthy of an audience was the first important step.

HeroPress was built on that belief. He gave people a platform and declined to editorialise. He let each voice arrive in its own register, its own cadence, its own dialect of living that story. Then he called the essayists a hero and meant it!

South Asia took to this immediately. A remarkable number of the earliest essays came from India. Topher celebrated each of them. He did not curate them into a brand. He simply made room. He also travelled to India once. The only time I met him.

Over the years that followed, Topher and I became friends in the way that only the internet makes possible and only genuine curiosity sustains. We have talked and laughed about politics, faith or lack of it, books, old computers, films, and the particular texture of a very slow dial-up internet. We became friends across seven seas.

But the thing I have heard most often from others is not about his wit or his enthusiasm, though both are abundant. It is something quieter.

Dozens of people from across the WordPress world, from India, from other countries Topher has likely never visited, have told me that when they were lost, when they were searching for a job or weathering a personal catastrophe or simply trying to find their footing, Topher had time for them. He listened. He did not solve everything. He just showed up and walked with them.

If WordPress were a world unto itself, conjured by a Tolkien-like imagination, Topher would be a great axe-wielding dwarf who simply walked with you for a while, just to make sure you were alright.

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Two weeks ago, I co-led WordCamp Asia in Mumbai. It was one of the largest WordPress conferences ever assembled. People I had not seen in years showed up. Stories entwined together in corridors and over at the coffee and tea counters. I met several people who missed Topher being around. Several dozens of us who have written on HeroPress their stories, and several dozens more who will write them in the future.

I stood on the stage and felt the weight of an open source community that had shaped the past decade of my life.

I thought of Topher more than once. Thought how much he would have loved being in Mumbai. I missed his presence in the particular way you miss someone whose absence you notice in the middle of a moment of joy.

A few days later, Topher checked in. Asked how WordCamp Asia had gone. Asked how I had felt about it. Then, almost as an afterthought, he asked whether I would write the 300th essay for HeroPress.

Three hundred, is a number with some weight, a milestone of this great project. An essay Topher should have written himself, looking back at a decade of great conversations and the people he came across. But Topher1Kenobe’s way, that is not!

He deflects the spotlight and so he handed this number to me, and I accepted. Because Topher is persuasive.

I am no longer the child who measured heroism by the arc of a punch. A hero is someone who shows up when someone needs you to, to listen without agenda, to celebrate people as they are rather than as you wish they were.

Topher has been doing this for a decade. Three hundred stories. Thousands of conversations and dozens upon dozens of friends.

So if you are reading this essay, let’s raise a toast to Topher DeRosia, the Hero of HeroPress, the axe yielding dwarf who walks beside you, the friend who checks in, the man who has made more heroes than he will ever count or take credit for. He has a story.

He has hundreds of them. And every single one belongs to someone else but now also to him, which is fantastic!

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