WordPress
An open source software you can use to create a beautiful website, blog, or app
WordPress now powers 40% of the web and is driven by volunteers. I am a proud contributer having donated design and code work to the project.
I have been using WordPress for so long I am not even sure when I first started. It's been well over a decade. Before I started working at Automattic, I had been contributing here and there to the forums and the occasional project, but it wasn't until around 2013 that I was encouraged to apply for Automattic. That was the beginning of a head-first dive into the realm of WordPress. What follows are some highlights.
Editors
Most of my contributions to WordPress have been focused on the editing and site-customizing experience. My interest in contributing started with the idea that I could improve the design of parts of the editor that were frustrating to me. Down the rabbit hole, I went. Over the next several years, I worked on the various WordPress editors (Press This, Classic editor, Customizer, Gutenberg) and even some WordPress.com concept editors that eventually led us to Gutenberg.
Press This
One of my first major projects on WordPress was a redesign of a bookmarklet tool called Press This. It's effectively a tiny version of the WordPress editor that allows users to quote or repost content from other sites. It was the main feature in WordPress 4.2 Powell. I designed it and Stephane Daury built it along with some help from others familiar with the editor. It was also one of the first, if not the first, feature to be built as a plugin to speed up development. The next several releases used the Feature Plugin development cycle for major changes.
Looking back at it now, there is a striking resemblance between it and the new WordPress editor, Gutenberg.
Gutenberg
The most recent major project I worked on was the Gutenberg editor for WordPress. I contributed countless hours to the design and code of it. I also led the transition of it from being a post and page editor to a tool that can be used to edit any content on a site. Because of the depth of this work, I'm taking some time to write this up as a project of it's own. In the meantime, take Gutenberg for a spin.
I also updated several Jetpack features to work seamlessly with it.
Commit
In 2015, I was granted commit access to WordPress. I was one of the first designers granted access. I am still very much honored to be a WordPress core committer. You can read my blog post about it if you wish to know more.
Events
I designed the branding, website, collateral, and swag for a few WordPress events called WordCamps. WordCamps take place all over the world and usually are local to a city. I did design work for WordCamp Denver 2015, WordCamp San Francisco 2014, and WordCamp Denver 2013. I also worked on a handful of the State of the Word slides. You can even spot me on stage doing last minute updates (ask me about this) on one of them.
Musings
Because I spend so much time thinking about and working on WordPress, I sometimes have some interesting ideas that I write down. Here are a handful of blog posts that might be interesting.