I’m a dev lead at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, and a bunch of other things that run a good chunk of the internet. I sit between product and engineering, which mostly means building things and then measuring whether they helped.
Work
Right now I lead the team building the WordPress Agent for WordPress.com. The goal is that anyone can show up with an idea and leave with a site that’s theirs, without needing to know what a block theme is.
I think a lot about websites becoming agents that act on your behalf, and what that does to trust, authority, and what a hosting company is even for. Some of that is in Authority to act. WordPress has always been about people owning their own voice online. I still believe that, and I try to build things that hold up to it.
How I work
I’m a generalist. I’d rather build a rough version of something than read about the right way to do it, and most of what I know came from breaking things and fixing them. The loop I care about is: notice something, fix it, go back and check whether it worked.
I’m also trying to write more down. Decisions that live in my head or a Slack thread stop working when I’m not in the room. This site is partly that.
Not work
I live in Portland, Maine with my wife Hannah and two cats. We travel a lot. I play chess, video games, cribbage, read, and spend as much time as possible outside.