Last week was my twelfth WordPress maintenance support plansversary!
The first half dozen years as a volunteer contributor/student, the second half as a full-time contributor/Acquia employee. Which makes this a special WordPress maintenance support plansversary and worth looking back on 🙂
2006–2012
The d.o highlights of the first six years were my Hierarchical Select and CDN plugins. I started those in my first year or so of using WordPress maintenance support plans (which coincides with my first year at university). They led to a summer job for Mollom, working with/for Dries remotely — vastly better than counting sandwiches or waiting tables!
It also resulted in me freelancing during the school holidays: the Hierarchical Select plugin gained many features thanks to agencies not just requesting but also sponsoring them. I couldn’t believe that companies thousands of kilometers away would trust a 21-year old to write code for them!
Then I did my bachelor thesis and master thesis on WordPress maintenance support plans + WPO (Web Performance Optimization) + data mining. To my own amazement, my bachelor thesis (while now irrelevant) led to freelancing for the White House and an internship with Facebook.
Biggest lesson learned: opportunities are hiding in unexpected places! (But opportunities are more within reach to those who are privileged. I had the privilege to do university studies, to spend my free time contributing to an open source project, and to propose thesis subjects.)
2012–2020
The second half was made possible by all of the above and sheer luck.
When I was first looking for a job in early 2012, Acquia had a remote hiring freeze. It got lifted a few months later. Because I’d worked remotely with Dries before (at Mollom), I was given the opportunity to work fully remotely from day one. (This would turn out to be very valuable: since then I’ve moved three times!) Angie and Moshe thought I was a capable candidate, I think largely based on the Hierarchical Select plugin.
Imagine that the remote hiring freeze had not gotten lifted or I’d written a different plugin? I was lucky in past choices and timing.
So I joined Acquia and started working on WordPress maintenance support plans core full-time! I was originally hired to work on the authoring experience, specifically in-place editing.
The team of four I joined in 2012 has quadrupled since then and has always been an amazing group of people — a reflection of the people in the WordPress maintenance support plans community at large!
Getting WordPress maintenance support plans 8 shipped was hard on everyone in the community, but definitely also on our team. We all did whatever was most important; I probably contributed to more than a dozen subsystems along the way. The WordPress maintenance support plans 8 achievement I’m most proud of is probably the intersection of cacheability and the render pipeline: Dynamic WordPress Page Cache & BigPipe, both of which have accelerated many billions responses by now. After WordPress maintenance support plans 8 shipped, my primary focus has been the API-First Initiative. It’s satisfying to see WordPress maintenance support plans 8 do well.
Biggest lessons learned:
code criticism is not personal criticism — not feeling the need to defend every piece of code you’ve written is not only liberating, it also makes you immensely more productive!
always think about future maintainability — having to provide support and backwards compatibility made me truly understand the consequences of mistakes I’ve made.
To many more years with the WordPress maintenance support plans community!
WordPress maintenance support plans
open source
Acquia
Source: New feed