When I graduated school, I had one objective in mind: obtain a development position where I could apply software engineering principles in the context of web application development.

Then I made the jump to self-employment at the end of 2010 and was dividing my time between two things: serving as lead developer at 8BIT and developing and sites and software for others out of my own business.

Initially, I was doing work ranging anything from vanilla PHP projects, Ruby on Rails projects, some typical client-side projects, and custom JavaScript work.

Achievement Unlocked

As time as passed, I’ve ended up spending more and more time working exclusively with WordPress so much so that I’m currently doing nothing but WordPress-based projects (save for a single Rails application).

Matt & 8BIT

Meeting Matt and others with my team at WordCamp Atlanta has been a highlight of 2012!

Specifically, some of the high points of my WordPress work includes:

  • Leading development at 8BIT as we continue to build out Standard into the best product it can possibly be for digital publishers
  • Officially having 8BIT partner with Automattic in the premium theme marketplace
  • Developing two commercial plugins – WP Social Icons and Author Admin – and killing off a few plugins that I no longer maintain in order to focus on those that I love
  • Building a number of a sites and even web applications using WordPress
  • Partnering with John Saddington at TentBlogger to help develop a number of plugins to give bloggers solid tools for helping them grow their readership
  • Hosting and participating in local WordPress meetups in an attempt to learn from others and share what I’ve learned
  • Building and maintaining boilerplates for both plugins and widgets in an attempt to helper foster best practices with plugin development

Simply put, I’ve begun to spend a lot of time applying software engineering patterns, principles, and techniques to WordPress-based development and I absolutely love it.

Level Up

Unfortunately, I’ve gotten out of the habit of blogging with any form of regularlity despite the fact that it’s something I enjoy. Given the diverse nature of the WordPress community and given that a significant amount of time that I spend working is with the platform, it seems to be an appropriate time to get back into it.

Granted, the web has a healthy number of WordPress-focused blogs. This isn’t an attempt to hop into the pile (though a case could probably be made that that’s exactly what I’m doing).

I believe that everyone’s career goal should be able to move as close to the center of the intersection of doing what they love and being able to make a living doing it. Some are able to do a better job of it than others, but I’m as close to the center as I’ve ever been.

So I’m going to attempt to get back into blogging from the perspective of a software engineer working in the context of WordPress. This includes sharing anything from my development stack, recommendations for tools and practices, as well as how I approach certain problems and sharing the why and how I end up tackling them.

Perhaps this will foster conversation and connect with those of you (there are a lot of you I’ve yet to meet!) that spend more time building products with WordPress and care deeply about doing quality development, but if not, I can be okay with maintaining yet another WordPress blog.