Fred Harper loves connecting with people — and with hundreds of talks under his belt, he’s a conference pro with his own distinct, laid-back style.
“My job is communication,” he says. “I’m the approachable, friendly, social face of Tiny — so, come and tell me about the good and not-so-good. I’m here to listen.”
Fred started his two-decade tech career as a software engineer building mobile and web applications, working across the stack. For the past 14 years, he’s been a developer relations professional, sharing his expertise with a budding new band of coders all over the world.
A self-described “social extrovert”, Fred is affable and easy to talk to, but also knowledgeable, sincere and solution-orientated. More than anything else, he cares about people — about what they need, and how he can help them thrive.
Not long ago, we caught up with Fred to learn more about his approach to teamwork at TinyMCE, his passion for better content, and how he believes we can shape the AI revolution. Here’s what we discovered.
It’s all about people
“Working with the people at Tiny is great. They know what they’re doing, they have expertise in their specific focus, but they’re also willing to work with others,” explains Fred, “and because of the nature of my role, I work with everybody, or mostly everybody. I love it.”
Fred believes the key to great teamwork lies in clear communication and working with as many people as possible across the organisation.
“From the developer relations point of view, it’s impossible to be successful without partnering with the engineering team, or the marketing team,” he says. “Thankfully, everyone at Tiny is on the same positive wavelength.”
A people-first approach also underpins Fred’s attitude toward artificial intelligence, which he believes will shape people’s educational experiences in the future. Augmented reality and virtual reality, for example, could add an extra dimension to the way people experience content. Ultimately, though, it’s the human element he values most.
“What really matters is the quality of the content and the learning experience — not just how good the material is, but how easy we make it for people to learn,” he explains. “So, AI will disrupt, but it’ll make my job even more important because I’ll need to rebuild those human connections.”
Making lessons better
Fred’s role at TinyMCE is broad — and so is his audience.
“Previously, my target audiences were tech developers with tech products,” he says, “but here, I’m talking to a lot of different people.”
A big part of Fred’s day-to-day remit is helping explain what TinyMCE can do to people who’ve either never heard of it before, or who need help understanding all of its features. Unlike many other Moodle-centric tools, TinyMCE’s “what you see is what you get” rich text editor helps embed accessible content into courses as they’re being built.
“When we became Moodle’s default editor in version 4.2, we saw an opportunity to go beyond just basic text editing,” he explains. “With our premium features, educators can now do things like paste content from Word without losing formatting through PowerPaste, create professional-looking tables that actually work the way you’d expect, and even edit images right inside the editor without needing separate tools.”
What excites Fred most is how features like spell checker and spelling autocorrect help catch those little mistakes before they go live — after all, nobody wants to publish course material with typos. Clean, well-structured content with things like an automatic table of contents and proper footnotes just makes the learning experience so much smoother.
In the end, TinyMCE’s approach is about making the technology invisible so educators can focus on teaching and students can focus on learning.
Looking forward to MoodleMoot Global
“Every time our team attends MoodleMoot, we’re blown away by the passion and innovation we see,” says Fred. “It’s an incredible opportunity to connect face-to-face with the people actually using our tools day-to-day. There’s nothing quite like hearing directly from an educator about how a feature we built helped them explain a complex concept more clearly, or made their workflow just that little bit easier. That real-world feedback is gold for us.”
At MoodleMoot Global, Fred will talk about on-the-spot accessibility checking and supercharging course design in Moodle with TinyMCE’s premium tools.
Meanwhile, we can’t wait to chat with Fred in person. If you don’t have your MoodleMoot Global ticket yet, now’s the perfect time to register and join us in Edinburgh next week. We’ll see you there!
