My history as a Web Developer

WordPress is a software script that become extremely popular for building blogs. There’s no doubt you’ve been on a WordPress website before, whether you realized it or not. According to W3Techs, WordPress is used by 43.2% of all websites on the internet. That’s not a typo.

The vast majority of my web development experience has been on the WordPress platform. I’ve done everything from design and build WordPress themes and plugins to contribute to the core WordPress code base itself. Here’s my WordPress profile.

A few statistics

I’ve contributed to, or created from scratch, 12 WordPress plugins and themes that have been downloaded over 4 million times from wordpress.org itself. I’ve created, and possibly sold, many more plugins and themes on my past websites that have come and gone throughout my career. Some of those projects are still available on GitHub.

If you look closely, you’ll find my image among the list of contributors to underscores, an incredibly popular WordPress starter theme that has been used to create countless WordPress themes over the last 10+ years.

Many of my past projects were for Sandhills Development, a company that I worked for and co-owned for several years. Upon its acquisition, I left the company to pursue my own passions. During my 8-year tenure with the company, I completed a number of projects in isolation, as if they were my own. WordPress themes like Vendd, a free e-commerce theme designed for use with Easy Digital Downloads, at the time of this writing has 206 code commits from 10 different developers. I authored 179 of those commits.

There are many such projects that have either reached the end of their lives, or I no longer have access to them. It would be nearly impossible to quantify all of my code contributions across all projects since 2008. Hopefully this glimpse will suffice.

Languages I write

For the most part, websites are nothing more than digital files with several lines of code in them. That code is interpreted by your internet browser, or some other program, in order to display the website in a highly specific way and with certain behaviors.

Multiple code languages are used to achieve this. At a minimum, HTML is used to display content and CSS is used to style it. JavaScript is typically used to make the content more dynamic. For example, a page form may respond to your input and submission without refreshing the page. That’s usually JavaScript. PHP‘s influence is hidden from the website visitor. It does work on the website before it reaches the web browser, ensuring the correct content is displayed, among other things.

I write all four of these languages, to varying degrees.