A WordPress Adventure

I like to think of working at Automattic as a Choose Your Own Adventure career. Over the past couple of years, I’ve worked on a wide range of projects, from VideoPress, to the WordPress iOS App, through to Jetpack Likes, Two Step Authentication and most recently o2, the upcoming successor to P2. If I (or any of my colleagues) feel it’s time to mix things up, it’s as simple as deciding to work on something different. So, it’s hardly a surprise that I’m moving to a new project, except this time we’re trying an experiment.

It’s no secret that WordPress.com is the largest WordPress install in the world – behind all the custom plugins and themes is a single copy of WordPress. WordPress is the core of all of our day-to-day work, and we contribute on a regular basis – over 40 Automatticians contributed to the latest WordPress 3.6 release alone! But, when your day-to-day work involves working on things other than the WordPress Core project, it can be hard to allocate time to do some core work.

This is where the experiment comes in: for the entire WordPress 3.7 development and release cycle, I’m dropping all of my usual work, instead working full time on WordPress Core.

So, what am I be working on? Well, you may recall during Matt’s State of the Word talk, he mentioned that we’d be introducing Automatic Updates for minor WordPress releases. In what is clearly a massive coincidence, over the past year I’ve been experimenting with WordPress Automatic Updates, under the guise of my Automatic Updater plugin. (In other words, Dion and I will be copy/pasting some code we’ve already written, then taking the next few months off. :-D) If we can’t get away with that, however, there’s always plenty of work to be done on WordPress Core. We currently have around 3200 open tickets to get through, so “pick a ticket and fix it” contributions are a good thing to do!

As for the experimental part, this is the first instance of what we’d like to become an ongoing thing – every WordPress release cycle, a few Automatticians can drop their usual work, instead devoting time to contributing back to the WordPress Core project. The wider WordPress community has been one of the many factors contributing to Automattic’s success, it’s only right that we return the love.

So, that’s about it. Time to get on with writing some WordPress core code.