January & February were very busy and eventful months for me, as I’ve been working full-time on WordPress Core & Community related endeavors thanks to two companies, and largely 2 individuals, who decided to take a bit of a risk and try something relatively new with me.

The scene is WordCamp US 2016 in Philadelphia, PA – the weather is surprisingly warm and the event is abuzz with close to 1800 WordPress fans in attendance. For me, it’s a reunion of sorts, because it’s only a few times per year I’m able to have in-person time with many of my ex-coworkers, current open-source colleagues, and friends I’ve made thanks to WordPress but maybe haven’t collaborated with yet.

I had several really productive conversations, mostly me pitching the idea of asking for financial support to “work on WordPress” in a way that does not place the burden on any one specific company, and Josh from Pagely and Josh from Pantheon both welcomed the experiment with open minds and were excited to get started.

January

I refer to the WordPress 4.7.2 release as “January” as I spent the majority of it reviewing & hardening several important security improvements to the core codebase (namely, the REST API and Press This.) In addition, I upgraded bbPress across all of WordCamp.org, and laid the groundwork for upgrading bbPress across all of WordPress.org in the coming months.

The security team also paired up with liaisons from almost all major hosting companies and CDNs to bring awareness to and monitor for any public exploitation attempts, and I was actively involved in on-boarding and expectation setting while we introduced an entirely new workflow for all of us.

Thanks to Josh & Sally Strebel at Pagely for supporting me and WordPress during this critical month. 💜

February

With WordPress 4.7.2 “January” out, things “settled down” and I switched to LoopConf mode where I gave a talk about how Unix Philosophies apply to WordPress development, and was interviewed by Brian Krogsgard of Post Status fame about the longevity of open-source software (I’ll embed that video below.) LoopConf was great, Salt Lake City was fun, and I’ll do a separate write-up about my experience soon.

I’ve also focused more the backlog of issues and nice-to-haves for the bb’s, largely related to how the WordPress.org Support team works with it as a tool. Working with other volunteer contributors like Boone Gorges, Stephen Edgar, Brandon Allen, and Sergey Biryukov again, has been a treat.

Thanks to Josh Koenig from Pantheon for an awesome groundhog’s day, happily looping for 28 days working on WordPress. 💜

March & April

I have 2 weeks “off” planned in March for WordCamp Miami and my wedding anniversary, and I’ll be speaking at CypherCon 2.0 in Milwaukee and I think a few other events that I can’t remember right now that I’ll come back and update later. Development wise, I suspect will be more of the same: security, on-boarding, WordCamp.org, and bbPress upgrades across WordPress.org.

I’m also going to help Pantheon with some marketing, which is something I’m excited to help with and learn more about, since I’ve spent most of my career helping build the things other people get to pitch to the world.

And here’s that Post Status video I mentioned earlier.