When I joined Automattic almost two years ago, it was my first opportunity to work with WordPress full time. Up until I joined, WordPress was only a hobby, though I did some client projects and administered a multisite network at the company I worked for during college.

I joined as a Theme Wrangler, and managed to release only eight themes on WordPress.com during my stint with the Theme Team. The primary reason was probably my WordPress.org focus, working on Twenty Thirteen and Twenty Fourteen, and submitting and maintaining our free themes in/to the Theme Repository. The two default themes were some of my proudest work, and among the most rewarding projects that I had the chance to work on. Especially Twenty Thirteen since I got to do the majority of the development work on it, before it hit Core for breaking.

In December of 2013, after a little over a year with the Theme Team, I switched to a more development-heavy role, working on improving the user experience around finding and selecting themes on WordPress.com. It was a great learning experience for me, predominantly working on a Backbone application, with some REST API sprinkled in between, and creating an internal Theme Utility API (around WordPress.com’s theme showcase) along the way.

Today, I’m changing roles again, joining a new team at Automattic. Alongside of Andrew Ozz, Gary Pendergast, and others, I will be contributing to WordPress Core full-time! I can not put into words how happy this makes me and how excited I am!