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Dave’s parents took him to see Star Wars when he was a month old, instilling in him a love of science fiction and technology right from the start. He taught himself to program in second grade and started building web sites in 1996. He’s watched the web grow from a nerdy novelty to a major part of our lives, and he’s excited to see what the future holds. We may not have flying cars, but booking a vacation from a smartphone is almost as good.

In his fourteen years in the industry, Dave has built interactive displays for a major metropolitan museum, web sites explaining such cutting edge topics as high-energy particle physics labs across the globe, and the online home of a world conference focused on improving conditions in growing urban areas. He has worked with a variety of web platforms and technologies, including WordPress, Drupal, and other popular content management systems. But it’s the WordPress community that made the biggest impression on him, with its focus on user experience and its welcoming attitude toward newcomers. He’s spent the last five years building sites, developing plugins, and troubleshooting core issues with WordPress. You may have also seen him speak at WordCamp Boston 2012 or a Chicago-area meetup group.

Dave was born & raised in Chicago, where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in computer science from Roosevelt University. These days, he calls the Boston area “home”. When he needs a break from his futuristic digital cocoon, Dave enjoys jogging, kayaking, gardening, crossword puzzles, and volunteering at a local cat shelter. He also has a good time watching bad movies with his wife, Amy.

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Since picking up his first book on HTML in 2001, Luke has been fascinated with building for the web. When Luke was introduced to Content Management Systems, he jumped into the WordPress deep-end and immediately started developing custom themes and plugins for clients to tailor WordPress to their exact needs. He believes that the web should be device agnostic, and as a result has familiarized himself with responsive design techniques and patterns.

Luke takes pride in making products that are not only effective, but easily understood, updated, and maintained. He holds that the WordPress experience should be unified among plugins and themes so that interactions are consistent and natural across the entire platform. He also believes in having the heart of a learner, and having the heart of a teacher. To fulfill these philosophies, Luke is an avid reader and has an enormous appetite for podcasts. He is constantly observing new ideas, learning new techniques, and hearing the messages of new voices on a variety of subjects.

Most of Luke’s free time is spent with his wife and cat in Portland, Oregon. Beyond reading and podcasts, he enjoys disc golf, soccer, cooking, and assisting his wife on photo shoots.

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Adam started programming long ago by learning assembly code for his Radio Shack Color Computer (with 4K!). He started a software company in his college dorm room, wrote code for clients in C, Java, PHP & JavaScript and eventually focused on web development services back in the days when Netscape Navigator was king.

Adam has worked on everything from small business websites, to writing a custom content management system, to large-scale e-commerce projects. After years building custom HTML/PHP solutions he embraced WordPress as his platform of choice, developing client sites with customized themes and custom coded plugins and eventually releasing a few plugins to the WordPress.org repository.

Adam is a contributing developer to WordPress and was recognized as a “Rockstar” for his role in the revisions rewrite for WordPress 3.6. Adam currently works as a Senior Web Engineer at 10up. He loves long rafting trips, playing mbira, travel, taking walks and tending his over sized garden.

When he’s not working on deferred JavaScript promises, Adam is probably on a rafting trip with his kids, playing mbira, taking a walk with his wife and dogs or tending to his oversized garden.

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Chris has been a professional web developer for the past 5 years, and has been building websites as a hobby for over 10. His interest in programming began in elementary school, when his grandfather taught him QuickBasic. A few years later, he had built his first static HTML website, and began helping family and friends do the same. 

In his freshman year at the University of Arizona, he started doing freelance web development projects for small local businesses. He quickly discovered WordPress and has been using it as his platform of choice ever since, even contributing a few plugins to the official WordPress plugin repository. After freelancing for 4 years, he joined a web agency in Tucson, AZ as their lead web developer, and in addition to building websites in WordPress, he worked on web apps for project management and document sign off.

When not making websites, you might find him tinkering with electronics, playing his saxophone, or working on his car.

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Darin has a passion for good code and building sites that are easy to use. He discovered his affinity for WordPress, a platform that lets him do just that, while employed as the lead web developer at a marketing agency in Idaho. Today, Darin is excited to be focusing his career on building top shelf themes and plugins for the platform. A few of his plug-ins can already be found on Github and the plug-in repository, today.

Darin’s attraction to web development was sparked by the notion that he could take a blank canvas and build a fully functional product on top of it. It’s the perfect outlet for his creative impulses and desire to be challenged.

When Darin is not up to his elbows breaking order to a digital mess, he loves spending time with his wife and two kids. A sportsman, he can often be found outdoors, usually playing basketball and golf. He lives in Idaho Falls, Idaho, and loves the slow life of a smaller city with all the benefits of the great outdoors.

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Darshan began programming with embedded systems in VHDL. Thankfully, that experience didn’t scare him away from all programming, and he soon found a new calling… building games in Flash. After a memorable stint in DevOps and an even larger collection of scars, he made the transition to Full-Stack Developer, and has never looked back.

Darshan is a minimalist by nature, and an avid Vim user. He enjoys writing clean code and building simple, highly scalable solutions. Darshan is also the one man army behind the WordPress.vim plugin.

Darshan has worked at a few different agencies in a variety of roles, including Lead Architect. Complimenting his PHP expertise, Darshan has significant experience with Ruby, C, and Python, along with several popular JavaScript frameworks, including Backbone and Ember.

When he’s not coding or thinking about coding, Darshan enjoys spending time with his family and working on Vim plugins.

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Eric has been building websites recreationally for over a decade, and professionally since 2006. He’s been a WordPress developer and advocate ever since a friend bribed him with a ticket to WordCamp Portland back in 2007. Ever since, WordPress has been Eric’s preferred platform for both serious development and rapid prototyping. Since before joining 10up, Eric put WordPress at the core of projects ranging from corporate websites to Facebook apps to slideshows.

Eric spent 2006 to mid 2012 working with a variety of software paradigms and languages, including Microsoft’s VB.Net and C#, JavaScript, and even some Ruby and Python. At the same time, he always remained active in the WordPress community by speaking at WordCamps, contributing to core WordPress development, and answering questions on the WordPress Stack Exchange.

Today, Eric works on amazing projects with WordPress – his favorite tool, that he helped to build.

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Ivan started building websites as a freelancer in 2006 while attending college, immediately after taking a course on HTML and CSS. After graduating, he worked with several web agencies in Central Florida. At the time, Flash was booming and he had the opportunity to build rich video experiences and several games. Since that time, Ivan has had the opportunity to work with several languages (in addition to PHP), including ASP, ActionScript 3, JavaScript and some C#.

After working with numerous Content Management Systems – including one that he built – Ivan discovered WordPress and was instantly hooked. WordPress quickly became his CMS of choice; he even found himself building on it in his free time. Ivan thinks of WordPress as a “canvas,” a “foundation of great masterpieces”.

Over the last seven years, Ivan had the opportunity to lead and work with small to medium sized teams to deliver time sensitive projects to high profile clients like Walmart, and Hilton Grand Vacations. His last role involved leading a team of 6 developers in support of a major retail client.

When he’s not working on code, you can usually find Ivan cooking, traveling and spending time with his wife and daughter in sunny Orlando.

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John has been building websites since 2005 after picking up HTML for fun while studying abroad in Italy, which quickly led him to PHP and JavaScript. Eventually, he realized his hobby was also a marketable skill and he made it his full time job. He’s been happily hacking away ever since.

After John first discovered WordPress in 2008, it quickly became his platform of choice thanks to its combination of user-friendliness and power under the hood. This is the same balance that John strives for in all of his work. John is passionate about using WordPress to build effective client solutions and making WordPress sing.

In addition to building websites, John enjoys studying just about anything computer related. A true engineer, John automates any computing activity he performs more than once by writing a script. He has even hacked together desktop applications in Python for Ubuntu.

When he’s not in front of his computer screen, John enjoys spending time with his wife and daughter, participating in local tech meetups, and building a bonfire with a few dozen people, drinking beer, and singing folk songs into the wee hours of the night.

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Jon began writing code at an early age, when his parents bought their first family computer. His interest grew out of a desire to build websites for his various gaming interests (mostly StarCraft), so with the help of Geocities, Microsoft FrontPage, and some HTML Goodies, he started on the journey that eventually led him to WordPress.

Jon has been working with WordPress for several years now. In that time, he has worked with a variety of clients ranging from small, Mom and Pop businesses to Fortune 500 enterprises.

Prior to joining 10up, Jon was Director of Web Development at a boutique advertising agency near Dallas, TX. In early 2014, Jon launched a small premium theme shop that he’s since sold to the crew at UpThemes.

In addition to WordPress, Jon has also spent time tinkering with Ruby on Rails, Node, Backbone, and Angular projects over the last few years.

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Mary had her first taste of the Internet back in the 90s, when a website would take minutes to load and modems made noises connecting. She built her first website with tables, animated gifs and telnet. While attending college at DePaul, she realized she could actually major in “computers”. She quickly switched, earned her degree in e-Commerce, and has been heads down in the web ever since.

Mary has spent the last few years being a go-to freelancer for several agencies, building WordPress sites and plug-ins and, in some cases, cleaning them up. She’s worked with such notables as the University of Chicago, Apartments.com, and Riddell.com.

Mary loves music, and is attempting to master guitar, but has so far found it a bit less natural than WordPress. When she’s not on the Internet, you can find her practicing Aikido (a Japanese martial art), biking or cooking something vegetarian.

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Thorsten is 10up’s first European employee, living near Cologne, Germany with his wife, son and a crazy Beagle. Thorsten worked in software development for over a decade before joining 10up; he led the web development department for a large dedicated hosting company and Germany, and even ran his own web agency in Bulgaria.

From 2008 to 2012, Thorsten was one of the original engineers supporting the Automattic WordPress.com VIP team. He wrote and contributed to essential WordPress developer tools and plugins including Exploit Scanner, Debug Bar Extender, WordPress-CLI-Exporter, and WordPress-CLI-Importer. He is also a core contributor.

From 2012 to 2013, Thorsten did a quick detour into the Cloud Computing, OpenStack and the Python world, working at a start-up called PistonCloud, though he never managed to keep his hands off of WordPress.

When he’s not engineering websites or spending quality time with his family, he’s usually cooking, tinkering with electronics, and developing Arduino style projects.

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Aaron has been working with and on WordPress for over 10 years. In 2004, he setup his first blog on WordPress way back on version 0.72, to start writing. His hacker instincts took over, and he began modifying WordPress. Over time, he made his name building importers as he was drafted to move other sites onto WordPress.

As a core contributor, he brought to the table time zone capabilities, as well as abstraction of file templates into theme template tags. As a consultant, he’s worked on behalf of big companies like Bloomberg, Atlassian, and TigerLogic, as well as small little league teams and schools.

In 2009, he released the first version of the WordPress Bible, a book that has been a bond for him and many others including random developers at WordCamps as well as odd birds at bars. Aaron is also one of the founders of WP Engine, a highly successful, optimized WordPress hosting company based in Austin, TX (he is no longer involved in day to day operations).

In his free time, Aaron hones his photography hobby, snuggles with his 26 lb terrier and samples a variety of IPAs and Pale Ales. He has grown up, and currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland… a place he considers a stepping stone to Austin, Texas where tacos and queso await.

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Aaron started crafting websites came at the age of 14, when he built a fan site for his favorite video game: Age of Empires. This passion led to a degree in Computer Science and Mathematics and, befitting the game, a minor in Economics. Aaron cultivated a passion for HTML, CSS and PHP and built his own Content Management System months before discovering WordPress in 2004.

After managing a hospital website for 5 years, Aaron’s passion for engineering online publishing solutions drove him to focus on WordPress full time. Before he knew it, Aaron found himself speaking at WordCamps across the country as well as leading the organization of WordCamp Chicago 2013. He’s contributed to core and has released multiple plugins on the WordPress Plugin repository.

When Aaron isn’t rocking WordPress, he’s spending time with his family, taking a walk or playing legos with his two young boys.

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Allan built his first website in 1999 and was immediately hooked. That year he entered a web page contest and won a new iMac for his middle school. Shortly after, he found himself taking on clients before he started his freshman year of high school. Over time he found himself drawn to PHP and ended up writing his own content management system to update his sites.

In 2006, he was hired by an internet marketing agency as a web designer where he was first introduced to WordPress. Since then, he has written plugins and has made some contributions to the WordPress core.

In his spare time, you can find Allan hanging out with his wife and daughter, fishing or bowling at the local alley.

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Ben has developed web solutions for clients large and small, utilizing a variety of technologies for 10+ years. His first creation was a popular Seinfeld fansite during the late 90’s. As he dug further into HTML, CSS and Javascript he continued to hone his web development skills and hasn’t looked back.

Ben started his professional career working as a software engineer at MBNA/Bank of America, focusing on developing automation software using ASP.NET and SQL, saving the bank time and money. Most recently, he has worked in higher education as web manager/senior web developer at Colby College where he was responsible for the strategy and development of the college’s award-winning websites and mobile apps. He successfully established web governance, migrated the college’s websites to a WordPress multisite environment, developing many custom themes and plugins for the college.

Working on freelance projects provided a reason to learn additional technologies. After developing many of his own custom PHP content management systems for clients, he discovered the power and flexibility of WordPress and has since used WordPress to power most of his projects. In 2009, he taught himself iOS app development and, being a Mainer, created the first app focused on eating and ordering lobster. He has since developed several iOS apps for clients and is particularly excited about the field of mobile web applications.

In his spare time, Ben keeps active by training for half marathons, climbing mountains and exploring the world. He lives in Waterville, Maine and holds degrees in Computer Science and German from the University of Maine.

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Brent has been building top notch web solutions for over seven years. After graduating from college, he cut his teeth as a PHP developer for a bespoke university e-learning framework; an experience that opened his mind to the endless possibilities that diligence and a simple computer can achieve. His next move would be to Habari Media, one of South Africa’s leading digital media houses, where in just one year he worked his way up to lead developer and team manager.

In 2010, feeling the need to expand his skill set and dive into more self-satisfying projects, Brent founded his own company, Kaira. It was around this time that he also discovered WordPress; since then, he has not looked back. Leveraging WordPress as a CMS, he developed successful websites and campaigns for top advertising agencies across Africa, worked on amazing projects like a web application and CRM for a major charity supplying gifts to over 100,000 underprivileged children. Brent has engineered custom integrations with social media platforms, built intranet networks, and developed successful WooCommerce extensions.

When Brent isn’t writing badass code, you can find him hiking up Cape Town’s beautiful Table Mountain, playing guitar, or cooking a delicious vegan meal.

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Brian remembers sneaking downstairs in the early morning to play on his family’s Apple IIe, deciding at a very young age he wanted a career in programming. He’s since amassed a broad range of knowledge on topics ranging from web and mobile app development to systems integration.

Brian first discovered WordPress in 2008 when a coworker suggested it for a client project. He saw the potential for the platform, but didn’t have another opportunity to use it until 2012. While working at an advertising agency in Bethesda, MD, he had the opportunity to build out custom themes and plugins. He considers the extensibility of WordPress its second greatest feature, only behind the amazing community that builds, shares, and advocates for it.

Brian has been in full time software engineering roles for over 10 years, starting with Lockheed Martin back in 2003 and Paychex in 2007. Since 2008, Brian spent about 4 years working for agencies in senior roles, with a stint freelancing and helping a startup in between. He joined 10up from a DC area agency, where he was the Director of Technical Production, applying his diverse skills to projects ranging from Adobe CQ5 implementations, to iOS app implementations, to Arduino-based applications, to fun and sophisticated WordPress implementations like Ripley’s Believe it or Not! Times Square.

When he’s not in front of the computer, Brian enjoys spending quality time with his wife and three kids. While typically found indoors, he’s also an occasional golfer and soccer player.

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With over 10 years experience developing complex solutions for clients large and small, Chris combines a background in software development, marketing and education to bring together the resources, both technical and personal, that solve the complex problems faced by businesses and people.

After earning a Bachelor’s degree in Aviation Management, Chris first learned how to manage people and technology as a pilot for various business jets and airlines throughout the US. After a few years of moving people around he realized it was time to solve more complex problems and returned to school to earn a Master’s degree in Computer Science while building out various websites and other systems for the Aviation programs at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. For the last five years Chris has built solutions including websites and products for clients ranging from individuals to large universities including The U.S. Air Force Academy, Southern Illinois University Carbondale and St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX. He also taught in the Computer Science department at St. Edward’s University and served as technical editor for numerous tech books including titles on WordPress and Backbone.js.

Chris came to 10up from iThemes.com where he built and managed the iThemes Security WordPress plugin, one of the largest and most complex plugins on WordPress.org with over 4.1 million downloads.

When not writing code for his plugins in the WordPress.org repository (or other projects), Chris gives back to the WordPress community by helping organize the Sarasota, FL WordPress Meetup group (previously he was a co-organizer of the Austin, TX WordPress Meetup). He is also an administrator for the Advanced WordPress Facebook group, and has spoken at numerous WordCamps and other tech conferences, including SXSW and HighEdWeb.

Chris resides in Sarasota with his wife and their 4-legged children. When not building something awesome with WordPress, he can most often be found at a local beach.

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Doug has been using Linux since 1997 or so, but don’t hold that against him. He brings over 15 years of experience in the IT industry to bear on problems related to networks, systems and software, with a special penchant for solving problems in the Linux space. He has spent time at software giants like IBM, in the advanced US Defense Department research community, working with geneticists and medical researchers as a high-performance computing administrator and has even spent a bit of time in a startup or two back in the first Internet Bubble. Lately, he has been working heavily in the areas of systems automation and virtualization.

Doug first came across WordPress in 2004 during the Great Licensing Wars and has been a dedicated WP user and contributor since version 1.0. He has experience in developing themes and plugins, contributing to the core WordPress software, participating in the greater community and helping WordPress users get the most out of their sites.

Doug also co-organizes the monthly Philadelphia WordPress Meetup and the yearly WordCamp Philadelphia and Tech Week Philly events and is very involved in the Philadelphia metro area WordPress community.

When he’s not wrangling Linux, Doug can be found keeping busy with his wife and four kids. He coaches his son’s lacrosse team, is an avid reader, actively participates in his church and community events, and is consumer of music of all kinds. He also owns a kilt.

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Eugene’s adventures in engineering started in the late 90’s when he learned Pascal. After his time with Pascal, he worked with Delphi, C++, and C#, eventually digging into PHP in 2009. Eugene spent some time with frameworks like Symfony and Zend, before finding the platform he decided he wanted to concentrate on in 2011: WordPress.

Since 2011, Eugene has been a freelancer (in the top 10% for PHP on StackOverflow), Senior WordPress Developer at an agency, and a Lead Developer at WPMU Dev. He has an affinity for normalized, maintainable, clean code, and clearly loves a challenge.

In his spare time, he likes a good chess match, skiing in the winter, and “building his own death star to rule the world”.

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Faishal started experimenting with website and software develpoment at 16, learning enough ASP.Net and HTML to play a significant role in the development of a major travel and tourism website. From there, he went on to earn an MS in Information Technology from DA-IICT, one of most the reputed technology universities in India. Over the next several years, Faishal worked with several of the web’s emerging and popular platforms, including PHP, node.js, Ruby on Rails, and nginx.

Faishal came across WordPress in late 2012, when he joined rtCamp Solutions as a Web Developer. Within no time, WordPress became his hobby, passion, and the center of his profession.

Faishal is proud of his core contributions to WordPress 3.6 and 3.7, and the handful of plug-ins he’s released on the official repository. Like most 10uppers, he believes that open source is the future of web, and that an open future is built on reciprocal volunteerism.

When Faishal isn’t crafting websites with WordPress, he can be found playing guitar, exploring his surroundings, and watching movies.

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Faison’s journey toward programmer began in middle school, when he learned to edit programs on his TI-83 Graphing Calculator. He quickly mastered the TI-Basic programming language before finding his next challenge in high school: the web. Creating a website for his high school band, Faison discovered that iframes didn’t work in Firefox. One Google search later, Faison found an answer that would change his life: “Don’t Use iframes, Use PHP Instead.”

Faison continued to experiment with PHP, eventually earning his Associates in Web & Software Development from Waukesha County Technical College. Fresh out of College, he landed a job focused squarely on WordPress. Over the next two years, he created and maintained numerous WordPress-powered websites for local businesses, released four plugins, and spoke at WordCamp Milwaukee 2013.

Faison spends some of his free time programming, but also makes time for his vegetable garden, video games, and keeping up with current events.

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As a recovering Englishman now residing in beautiful British Columbia, Canada, Grant is one of 10up’s more international employees. Having studied film at university in the 90s, the obvious next step was to be come a web developer, and he has been making websites go ever since. He has worked for outfits both large and small, and also spent some years in the wilderness of freelancing. Along the way he became the architect of a successful SaaS project, developed the GTmetrix for WordPress plugin, built the Stanley Park Ecology Society website in his spare time, and frankly did so much other stuff that he’s forgotten most of it, but he’s sure it was really neat.

Grant is a strong believer in giving back to the WordPress community, and consequently sometimes distributes advice on WPSE, attends WordCamps, and contributes the odd plugin to the repository. He can be quite passionate about writing clean, efficient code, and likes the plugins and sites he works on to run like well oiled machines. He is drawn to WordPress due to it’s generally being a pleasure to work with as a developer and a user, rather than it being an ordeal.

When not immersed in code at his Mac, he can frequently be found criticizing movies, listening to various forms of raucous or weird music, or hiking. He attempts to learn guitar, and procrastinates around writing a book. Mostly, however, he enjoys spending time with his girlfriend and their baby daughter.

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Hampton began learning and creating in the digital realm a little over 15 years ago and hasn’t eased up since. His first experiences with code came from programming industrial automation in theme parks, hotels, and convention centers. After that, he spent several years working on superyachts designing and implementing control systems with remote web-based interfaces.

Hampton’s first professional introduction to WordPress development occurred while working at a marketing and communications consultancy where he implemented WordPress VIP sites for clients such as Disney, ABC, CBS, Bloomberg, ESPN, The Pioneer Woman, and PlayStation Networks. Hampton also later spent some time working at Canonical helping to further the quality of open source software.

Right before joining 10up, Hampton was the PHP Course Developer and Instructor at Treehouse. There he spent time supporting students, writing tutorials, building new course curriculums, and writing challenges to help students improve.

When Hampton is not working on the computer, you’ll find him spending time with his family, hopefully outdoors, enjoying life’s simple pleasures.

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Ivan graduated with a Bachelors of Computer Science and Technology from the University of Sydney. He has spent over ten years as a software engineer.

Ivan’s clients have included niche social media platforms, advertising agencies, telcos, banks and online retailers. He has experience in design, development, architecture, systems administration, security hardening, and streamlining business process. Ivan recently focused on building feature rich web apps targeting desktop and mobile clients, with an emphasis on performance, reliability and cleanliness of code at Amazon.com.

Ivan’s career has spanned two continents and three countries (Sydney, Vancouver and San Francisco). In his time off, he loves to travel the world and write about it on his WordPress powered site, adventureivan.com.

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Jason built his first websites in middle school, carefully inserting as much animated fire and stylized typography as browsers would allow. While website design has changed a bit since those heady Geocities days, those first projects sparked a desire to learn more about web development. Jason attended the University of Albany and received a Bachelors in Computer Science.

After college, Jason moved to the Bay Area and landed his first job as a developer for a stealth start up using Perl Catalyst and jQuery. In 2008, he struck out on his own as a freelance Web Developer and was quickly drawn to the power and flexibility of WordPress. Jason would go on to build hundreds of custom websites clients with streamlined back-end administration, courtesy of WordPress. Today Jason is a full stack developer and enjoys creating highly functional websites with meticulous code.

When he’s not coding, Jason is often found running, snowboarding, playing video games or brewing beer. If you can’t find him, assume he is exploring the world with is wife.

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Jason is a self taught Systems Engineer with a passion for open source software and learning new systems. His obsession began at an early age when his family purchased their first computer. Once dial up internet was available in the small Louisiana town where he grew up, Jason knew there was no going back.

Jason spent most of his career working at a small ISP/Phone Company delivering Internet services to small towns in rural Louisiana. His first job was spent working the phones providing dial up support; from there, he worked his way up the company to Lead Systems Engineer. He built the network that allowed an ISP in a small Louisiana town to provide advanced services like IPTV and Fiber-to-the-Home.

Jason has worked on many websites over the years using nearly as many technologies. He was an early WordPress adopter and ran several successful websites during the “Blog revolution” in the early 2000’s.

During his spare time you will often find Jason with his wife, binge-watching TV shows and playing various board and video games. He also enjoys the preparation and consumption of various meat products.

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Joey wrote his first line of code in 2nd grade, and flirted with coding in high school. He didn’t get serious until college, where he wrote his first lines of code professionally, jumping head first into full stack web development.

In 2004, after graduating with a degree in Computer Graphics and Design from George Mason University, Joey co-founded an interactive agency and built a couple of large Flash sites for the National Library of Medicine. Craving more experience and a broader toolbox, Joey went to a slightly larger digital agency where he developed hundreds of client sites using an in-house custom CMS, going from blank Photoshop canvases to complete, pixel perfect sites with complex backend functionality. Joey even built and submitted a cross platform mobile app.

After a presentation on mobile development at a meetup, Joey was approached by the COO of Squidoo, who – impressed by his approach to solving problems – asked Joey to join Squidoo full time as one 3 developers. In the 3 years Joey was at Squidoo, he refactored 80% of the site’s features, wrangling a dozen 3rd party APIs, and eliminating bugs and complexity accumulated over 9 years in a million line codebase. Squidoo grew to a rank of 37 in the US for Internet traffic in 2012.

In 2014, Squidoo was acquired, and Joey knew it was time to pursue his next adventure. Seeking an adventure involving WordPress, he went to a nearby WordPress meetup where he discovered 10up. He knew that 10up was supposed to be that next adventure.

Joey has personally used WordPress since 2009, implementing custom themes, and writing the occasional custom plugin, including custom plugins for the part of the Squidoo stack that used WordPress. This experience led to an opportunity to co-build and support a successful premium plugin that has over 100k downloads to date. He has also begun contributing to WordPress core.

When he’s not crushing problems, you can find Joey spending time with his wife and 3 children, soaking up the outdoors, or biking whenever, and wherever it suits him.

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Josh built his first WordPress site in 2008; after 4 years of dabbling with pro bono gigs and otherwise, he was hired by a Charlotte web design agency. Josh learned everything from theme and plugin development, to pitching responsive design, to systems administration.

Josh attributes much of his current knowledge and position to the available resources in the WordPress community. Through attending and speaking at WordCamps, he has become passionate about building web applications with all user personas (editor and reader!) in mind. Josh is ardent about giving back to the community through attending/speaking at events, taking opportunities to educate others, and contributing to WordPress core.

Josh connected with 10up while apprenticing at a Boston-based design firm. He was drawn to 10up’s pool of world-class talent, as well as the consistent high-profile solutions 10up produces.

Josh is married to his high school sweetheart; he spends his free time with his wife and family—2 year old August and (any day now!) Elouise. He also enjoys the outdoors; kayaking, camping, fishing, and spelunking are among his favorite activities.

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After earning a Computer Science degree, Joshua was introduced to WordPress at his first job, where he was supposed to set up WordPress blogs. Curiosity got the better of him: he started reading the core code like a novella, in his words, “engrossed in the deft interactions of code, semantics and user experience.” There was no looking back.

Before joining 10up, Joshua worked at rtCamp Solutions, where he quickly climbed from Senior Web Developer, to Team Leader, to Product and Project Manager. In his first year, he was awarded “Most Geekish Employee”; the following year he was awarded “most valuable employee.” During his time there he built a responsive theme framework, wrote documentation for their products, developed an internal help desk module leveraging bbPress, and provided mentorship and training for employees.

Joshua has also been putting his WordPress expertise to good use by helping the wider community. He’s amongst the top 6% for WordPress on StackExchange; he earned bragging rights and some goodies by reaching the top 50 within two months of joining! He’s also a proud contributor to WordPress 3.8 and 3.9, and maintains a couple of plugins and themes on the WordPress repository.

When he’s not building powerful websites with WordPress, he cycles around town, swims, exercises, and frequently travels to exciting places.

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Justin has been obsessed with computers from the first time he used his grandmothers IBM Pcjr at 7. What followed was a lifetime of devouring anything and everything computing. By the time he was 11 whole Saturdays were spent researching his passion at the public library; a passion that landed him to a programming job in high school writing software for a local map making company.

After high school, Justin pursued a degree in Information Science from Penn State, during which he began developing WordPress sites with some college friends. 5 years later that team founded a hacker space after winning seed capital in a business plan competition. The goal of their hacker space called Innovatrix LABS was community outreach, getting kids involved in big idea projects and providing a community work shop.

As an admin Justin has planned, deployed and managed WordPress installations for the Penn State World Campus, Penn State Outreach Marketing as well as dozens of other large scale deployments. His years of experience administrating clients environments for not just WordPress, but other popular web applications, has fueled Justin’s passion for the web. He brings experience from several hosting providers, strongly believes that the deployment process should be customer centric, and loves helping a client solve their problem. Justin’s particularly loves securing servers and applications against malicious attacks; it is the constantly evolving nature of the web that keeps him coming back for more.

When he isn’t getting his hands dirty behind the scenes, Justin splits his time between traveling with his wife and beagle, and his many hobbies, including sports, video games, and, well, tinkering.

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Michael’s digital journey began in 1997 after his parents bought their first computer. Suddenly, he had a lot of “homework” that required Internet access.

Michael has been solving problems as a web designer and developer professionally since 2005. An appetite for learning has led him to acquire a broad range of skills: he has built full-featured web apps, designed front-end interfaces, released an iOS app, and even dabbled in Ruby on Rails. After trying every publishing platform on the planet, and working on a team that wrote their own CMS, Michael became hooked on WordPress, and has been building on it ever since.

When Michael unplugs, he enjoys spending time with his wife and dog, roasting coffee, CrossFit, and attempting to play his favorite Beethoven Piano Sonatas.

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Mike is an international traveller who fell in love with WordPress in 2010. Hailing originally from South Carolina, USA- Mike has lived on three continents ( North America, Asia & Europe ) and visited many exotic locations.

Along the way he nabbed a BS in Computer Information Systems, led student-organized Tsunami relief efforts in 2005, served as applications & databases manager at an international security company, started a travel agency, and happened to bump into Paul Clark in Chiang Mai, Thailand. This chance encounter introduced Mike to the wonderful world of WordPress and provided the awesome opportunity to co-build the WordPress tools that are still being used to save lives in Burma today.

Since 2010, Mike worked alongside Paul Clark & Taylor Aldridge at their company, Brainstorm Media, which firmly believed that democratized, open publishing platforms like WordPress can make the web, and the world, a better place. During this time, Mike built and maintained powerful systems with clean interfaces for a number of clients, representing a wide range of industries and non-profit organizations.

In January 2014, Brainstorm Media joined forces with 10up and Mike was able to add his skills and experience to the incredible pool of talent that resulted from this acquisition. Mike has a passion for travel, community and helping those in need, and has found that WordPress serves as an excellent platform for bringing all of these passions together.

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Nick started as Music Composition student blogging on WordPress. Slowly tweaking the WordPress theme to his liking, Nick found his true passion and started creating custom themes for WordPress. While not completely giving up on music, he applies the same principles of form and flow into every line of code he writes. You might say code is a form of poetry, for Nick.

An avid learner, Nick has embraced new technology after new technology, but is always drawn back to WordPress as a great tool to engage clients and consumers on an easy-to-use platform. He has released a few custom plugins, but focuses his efforts on making complex issues simpler for software users to understand.

Nick is a full stack developer, with strength in front end layout, experience with multiple JavaScript libraries (Angular, Backbone, Ember) and MVC frameworks, a strong understanding of database design, and comfort with NodeJS, MongoDB, and Python. He spent the last 2 years as Lead Developer at Burst Marketing, and has a B.S. in Information Science, in addition to his BA in Music.

When not typing furiously, Nick is riding his bike through Philadelphia, playing online video games, or spending time with family. He can often be found attending meetups and events in the greater Philadelphia area.

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Nicola’s first Personal Computer was a 386DX his father bought him and shortly after that he started learning how to program in C. When he was 17, he started getting his first programming jobs, mostly Access and C++ works.

He studied medicine and started a DJ career, quickly becoming one of the most famous Rock DJs in Milan, but he always kept freelancing, doing projects in Java, ASP.net and the LAMP stack. He managed various nightclubs, a restaurant, and ran websites for most of the pubs and clubs in Milan. He hosted a weekly program on two national radio stations and traveled a lot until he decided to finally start working as a full-time engineer.

He started working for a company incubated in the Engineering School of Milan, which mostly specialized in WordPress and Drupal, but also had a great focus on project management. He got very involved in the Stackoverflow community, ranking in the top 100 for three months in 2012. In that same year he joined Timely, which focuses on WordPress plugin development. He worked for three years on the All In One Event Calendar plugin, which has more than 100,000 active installs and is one of the top event plugins for the WordPress platform. Looking for bigger challenges led him to applying to and eventually joining 10up.

Outside of coding, he loves finance, playing soccer and squash, and card games (Hearthstone is his current favorite). He also loves everything related to science and cooking health foods.

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With nearly 20 years of experience as a programmer and developer, you could say Pete has had computers in his blood.

Pete first got interested in software as a child when he learned from his grandfather who ran a company developing maintenance management software that ran on IBM mainframes, and his father is a developer for the IBM AS/400 and iSeries systems. He first started programming in sixth grade using LOGO on an Apple II and the Compaq Portable they had at home. After high school, he got started with BBSes and taught himself to code by writing add-ons for his 4-node Wildcat BBS and working at his first job supporting SQL Server and Foxpro applications at a multiple listing service.

Pete started professional web development in the mid-1990s, first with ASP, VB Script and SQL Server, and eventually switching to ASP.NET Webforms and ASP.NET MVC. More recently, he’s been working with WordPress for the past four years. His first WordPress core commit was in the 4.2 release and he’s an active member in the Austin WordPress meetup.

Born in Minnesota and raised in California, Pete’s lived in Austin for more than 10 years with his wife, Michele, and his dog, Clyde. Pete enjoys drinking craft beer, building his own exercise equipment, and working on his long-time side projects, baconipsum.com and baconmockup.com.

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By the time Ricardo received his diploma as a Public Relations major in 2005, he had already bootstrapped news content and communication websites, newsletters, a couple of intranets and even a web radio in areas ranging from non-profit to education, from culture and lifestyle magazines to metalworks. Creating communication strategies and actively publishing stories, he steered his career towards the Internet.

In 2010, after leading a team of 5 developers at an agency for two years, and shortly after receiving his Project Management Specialist title from Fundação Dom Cabral (an internationally acclaimed Business School), he decided to step back from client-facing positions and dive into web development. It was the perfect time to catch the WordPress as a CMS train.

As a freelancer, he partnered with with small to large agencies and digital bureaus, advocating, leading and delivering WordPress-centric projects for global brands such as Whirlpool, Toyota, L’Oréal and C&A, as well as small to large businesses in Brazil, even receiving an honorable mention for “Best Practices” at the Webby awards. He has also become an advocate within the Brazilian WordPress community, as a Brazilian Portuguese forum moderator and WordCamp speaker/sponsor. He’s contributed code to WordPress itself and the ubiquitous Jetpack plug-in.

Ricardo is married to a corporate finance lawyer and is the proud stay-at-home dad to their son Vinícius, born in 2014. When he’s not coding, studying or rolling on the floor with his little one and their Labrador named Morgana, you can find him playing the drums, cooking, or being a handyman around his house.

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Ricky Lee has been building sites for over a decade. During college, a passion for print publishing he found while serving as Campus Life and Photo Editor for the yearbook evolved into a love of web publishing. In 2009, he found WordPress while working on a university online training program; he knew he’d found his calling.

After graduating from Auburn University with a degree in Management Information System, he moved to Atlanta where he would spent five years as lead developer for a local agency with clients primarily in healthcare, manufacturing, and real estate. After creating far too many static brochure sites, he persuaded the team to make WordPress the agency’s CMS of choice. For the next few years, he made countless happy clients as he migrated their websites from clunky, closed-source platforms to WordPress.

Ricky Lee is a core contributor to WordPress, and is the author of the Piedmont theme in WordPress.org repository.

When Ricky Lee isn’t making websites, he enjoys exploring Atlanta’€™s restaurants and outdoor activities, and venturing home to Alabama to his family’€™s farm to ride horses and camp beneath the stars. He’s also not-so-secretly obsessed with typography; his family and friends lovingly taunt him when he points out typefaces used in everyday life.

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Seeking change from a career as an audio engineer, Ryan graduated from the International Academy of Design and Technology and began working as a web developer. From 2004 to 2011, he ran an independent agency, where he had the pleasure of working with clients such as Denny’s Canada, Veritas Canada, and Canadian music icons Rush.

In 2009, Ryan discovered WordPress while working for Les Stroud – T.V’s Survivorman – and was immediately hooked. Not long after, he released his first plugin for the WordPress community. He began working with WordPress full-time in 2010 when he joined an agency in Ottawa, Ontario; within a year, Ryan became a Senior Web Developer. During his time there, Ryan used WordPress to power large sites, online games, and mobile applications.

Ryan is active in the WordPress community and contributes as often as possible. He loves helping new WordPress developers by giving presentations and answering questions at his local Meetup group.

When he’s not writing code, Ryan is typically found hanging out with his amazing wife, two hilarious kids, and big, shaggy golden-doodle named Blue.

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Scott comes from a family of engineers and tinkerers. He grew up with an interest in building with anything he could, be it legos, lincoln logs, computers, and eventually he moved that love of building to the web. By high school, Scott had already found his passion for web development and began to explore his way through HTML, CSS, ASP, and then finally to settle on his true calling with PHP.

Loving to push boundaries with clean efficient code, Scott became the lead developer of the open source WordPress plugin, Pods Framework. His work with Pods and other plugins have afforded him the opportunity to speak at several WordCamps since 2009. At conferences he is known for the performances of his original song “WordPress as a CMS”. He enjoys supporting and growing WordPress, the Pods Framework, along with other plugins he has built and is involved with.

Over the last few years, Scott’s independent and agency experience included working with WordPress clients like YMCA, Realtor.com, Microsoft Blogs, Southwest, Ford Canada, and Nissan America, to name a few.

While not coding, you’ll find him spending time with his wife and daughters, playing music, or watching Doctor Who.

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Years ago, Scott started working with WordPress by promising his previous employer a website – without having the experience to fully back up that claim. As luck would have it, the WordPress community came through in helping this beginner succeed and launch his first website. It’s this very community that made Scott love working with WordPress and eventually led to a full-time development role.

Scott has spent most of the last 5+ years at various publishers and agencies as their only WordPress developer.

When his laptop is closed, Scott enjoys being a husband and father of two. If he’s not at home, he’s probably out running, mountain biking or sharing new music with friends.

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Steve holds a B.A. in Telecommunications with a focus in video production from Bowling Green State University, where he graduated Cum Laude with minors in Recording Technologies and General Business. A video internship his junior year at Sea Lion Studio, a small, locally-focused digital agency, exposed him to the world of web development and drummed up a level of passion that video production could never match.

Returning to his old home in Columbus, OH, he landed a Developer position with a mid-size advertising agency: Fahlgren Mortine. With the mentorship of Rubyist Matt Jones, Steve was able to hone his craft and focus on building clean, sophisticated applications for larger clients. While not his first exposure to the platform, Fahlgren was also where the WordPress bug first bit Steve, resulting in dozens of sites, each one built stronger than the last.

In late 2012, he was recruited by Buckeye Interactive, an interactive media agency in New Albany, OH. Though smaller than Fahlgren, Buckeye gave Steve the opportunity to take more of a leadership role on development projects and strongly influence the technical direction of the small, but talented team of developers. During his tenure at Buckeye, Steve was also the driving force behind Buckeye’s open source efforts, culminating in two separate projects (a WordPress plugin and a Laravel application) being released from The White House in 2013 and 2014.

It was during his time at Buckeye that Steve started seeking out public speaking opportunities, and has since given talks at regional WordCamps, Columbus Code Camp, and the php[world] conference. While he blogs about software development occasionally on stevegrunwell.com, he has also recently started contributing to larger publications, including Net Magazine and php[architect].

When he’s not writing software, Steve enjoys hiking, traveling, and music, and dog ownership. He’s also a coffee and craft beer enthusiast, purveyor of fine GIFs, Netflix addict, and a fan of Tiki bars.

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Sudar has been programming for more than a decade and is a polyglot. He has written production code in more than half a dozen programming languages – and most of it was using Vim!

Sudar started his career as a web developer, working with various technologies and framework. He moved on to building distributed applications using MapReduce and other big data frameworks to process and mine huge amounts of data. Prior to joining 10up, Sudar worked at Yahoo Labs as a Research Engineer, where he analyzed user interaction data using machine learning techniques to better understand user behavior and interactions in web applications. His work resulted in increased conversions and improved user engagement.

Sudar first discovered WordPress in late 2005 while searching for a self hosted blogging platform for his migration away from Blogger. After tinkering with WordPress for his blog, he published his first WordPress plugin in late 2007 and has since continued to release more than 20 plugins with a total of nearly half a million downloads.

When he is not in front of a screen, Sudar enjoys reading and is a diehard fan of Isaac Asimov and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Other favorite pastimes include traveling, playing table tennis, tinkering with electronics and building small hobby robots.

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Ayebare had a strong love for programming since university where he pursued a Bachelors in Information Technology and Computing from the University of Kyambogo. Having C++ fresh in memory from his university days, he designed a mock dynamic country train routing and scheduling system which won him an accolade in the local programming community.

His interest in programming stemmed from how fast the world was becoming a global village through IT and what opportunities it presented locally – he just had to join in! Initially designing websites using Joomla, he stumbled across WordPress while doing a research on other existing content management systems.

Before he knew it, he was checking under the hood and learning everything he could about WordPress and its underlying languages. He started freelancing, and in short order was hired by a leading WordPress plugin developing company serving a community of more than 200,000, providing technical support and writing integration patches for conflicts with commonly used plugins. He was soon entrusted to mentor new recruits, teaching them how to approach/quickly troubleshoot issues encountered by clients, writing the blue print and methodology for handling common support issues, all while handling 3rd tier stubborn bugs.

Spending more than 8 hours every day writing and studying code, Ayebare takes time off to play competitive tennis or hit the track. In a country where putting food on the table from “working online” is a rarity, he spends quite some time voluntarily tutoring youths that come to him seeking to start out on their own professional programming journey.

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Bobby has spent the last 13 years managing high performing teams of electronic technicians, while serving in the United States Marine Corps. During this time he earned a number of personal awards, and has seen a lot of technological change. Through it all, Bobby’s curiosity has been his driving force to continue learning new skills.

While in the Marines, Bobby demonstrated his ability to work under challenging and adverse conditions. From 2006-2008 he served two combat tours in Iraq with 3rd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, as the communication maintenance shop foreman.

Recently, Bobby fell in love with open source software like WordPress. Since 2013, Bobby has spent an unhealthy amount of time learning everything there is to know about WordPress. In addition to his technical knowledge, his entrepreneurial spirit truly shines when in partnership with organizations to achieve their larger online goals.

Over the past year Bobby has worked with a number of clients who chose WordPress for their primary website. Bobby quickly realized that helping clients solve tough problems with custom tailored solutions built on WordPress is what makes him excited to start each and every day.

When he is not exploring WordPress APIs, Bobby can be found attempting to grow things in his garden, challenging himself physically with long distance bicycle rides, and spending time with his family.

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Brent got his start blogging about sports cards in 2008. After getting frustrated with Blogger he checked out WordPress and the rest as they say, was history. It didn’t take too long before Brent was custom coding his own plugins and themes and freelancing around small towns in Kansas. His first tech job was a Technology Coordinator at the University of Kansas but was quickly promoted to an Application Developer working on Drupal, Symfony, SharePoint and WordPress applications.

After his time at KU he joined an agency and continued to promote WordPress as more than a blogging platform by pushing that agency to use WordPress whenever possible and reasonable. He also supports WordPress by doing e-commerce development with WooCommerce, speaking at WordCamps and teaching PHP and MySQL at a local community college.

He embraces new technology as it comes but somehow always finds a way to use it in conjunction with some WordPress awesomeness. He has a lot of love for Laravel and NodeJS when not working exclusively with WordPress. Brent is pretty new to contributing to open source projects but contributing more in the future is currently his #1 priority.

When Brent isn’t going full nerd with a keyboard he’s usually enjoying some time with friends playing or watching sports, but only if he’s not hanging out with his awesome wife and fur children (two corgi­mixes and a Bassador).

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Bryan’s love of the web started back in 1997 when his family got their first computer. He quickly discovered the “view source” menu option and fell in love with reading code from popular websites, attempting to recreate what he saw.

Bryan started his first web job in a designer role at Homes.com in 2010. There his aptitude for JavaScript lead him to teaching the entire design department how to utilize jQuery.

He then spent 3 years at Doejo, a Chicago-based agency, as a Web Developer working with a variety of brands both big and small, playing an active part in interviewing new-hires, mentoring junior developers and organizing the annual hackathon event. It was there that Bryan was introduced to, and fell in love with, WordPress.

When not coding, Bryan enjoys playing guitar, reading comics, and binge-watching television with his girlfriend, Anne. He currently calls Portland, Oregon home.

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Chancey’s first computer was a rummage sale Tomy Tutor (a rebranded TI-99 variant) without a tape drive. He learned the basics of Basic by typing programs over and over and over again on “terribly rubbery keys” because he couldn’t save them. Over the years, Chancey picked up some more useful languages and skills, along with a bunch of useless ones, many of which come in handy when building websites.

In 2007, Chancey became the seventh full-time member of the GigaOM team, after working with Om part-time for several years prior. He was their only tech guy for quite some time, so his responsibilities covered everything from front-end and back-end development, sysadmin, migration, design, support, analytics, and ad-ops – you name it, he’s had his hand in all of it at some point.

In his free time he likes to fix broken things, learn useful and fun (if useless) skills, and (weather permitting) get outside.

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David, is a long time software engineering professional and author, who has been involved in Internet development since 1994. Before joining 10up, David worked as Chief Software Architect for a web services company specializing in SaaS eCommerce, where he created a plugin that integrated his company’s eCommerce services with WordPress.

Before focusing on WordPress, David wore many hats. He was the Director of IT and Software Engineering for an international health insurance company where he created and maintained a web based health insurance enrollment system. As Chief of South Eastern Operations for an international IT consulting firm, he had to “MacGyver together” a network out of old parts so that his client could locate missing cargo vessels in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In that position, he also provided testimony as an expert witness in Federal court, weighing in on alleged software copyright infringement.

David has also worked as a consultant for Fortune 500 companies in the manufacturing and insurance industries. When he repaired a legacy inventory and ordering system for a major greeting card company just before one of their biggest sales days, he became known as, “The Programmer who Saved Mother’s Day”.

His professional writing has been published by SitePoint, Microsoft, Dice, C/C++ User’s Journal, PC Techniques and John Wiley & Sons. During his time as the Web Development Community Guide for DICE, he was impressed with the elegance of WordPress not only as a publishing tool, but as a web application platform.

David has four major game titles to his credit as an artificial intelligence and physics simulation programmer: NFL Full Contact Football, Indy Racing – Road to the Indianapolis 500, Jeff Gordon XS Racing and Centipede 3D. Lest his “Geek Cred” be remotely in doubt, he has also been published in Dragon magazine.

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David’s interest in building code developed the moment he discovered the viewable source code of web pages back in 1998. However, after starting college, he soon realized that what he wanted to learn, wasn’t being taught in the classroom. So David left school behind, and joined a moving company where he traveled the U.S., gained life experience and continued his self-study of web development. Eventually he settled down and started a computer repair company, while also serving as a youth pastor along with his wife.

David spent more than a decade building websites, online games, and robots, when eventually the plummeting costs of PCs led him to cease repairing computers and start offering freelance services online. He started out creating solutions for clients, but soon began focusing exclusively on WordPress as his affinity for the platform grew.

After years of working solo, David eventually decided to join an agency so that he could work with a team and further refine his skills. It didn’t take long for him to decide on 10up.

David’s biggest personal endeavor with WordPress has been creating a plugin to build role-playing games. Now he has his eye on contributing to WordPress core.

When David isn’t at the computer, he’s usually either reading about theology, watching cartoons with his two daughters, or pestering his wife with the latest random fact he learned — probably about the late Fred Rogers.

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David is utterly obsessed with technology, and the first time he played Hangman on his family’s Tandy computer was a life changing experience to say the least. At age 8, he was already writing his own Hangman program with QBasic.

David remained a technology addict and eventually found a job to support his habit as a computer repair technician in 2006. Later that year, he discovered WordPress when asked to create a website for his employer. Long after his initial introduction to the platform, David just couldn’t forget how remarkable WordPress is for lowering the barrier of entry to the world of online sharing, and its ability to empower anyone with access to the internet.

Enabling information sharing and collaboration became personally important to David as he grew into the Systems Engineer he is today. Now at 10up, he is able to ease the use of technology for others and provide clients with reliable, scalable, and automated solutions.

Right now, David is probably riding his bicycle between various coffee roasters in Portland, hiking around the mountains of southwest Washington, bouldering on fake walls, or drinking the hoppiest IPA available. Since 2008, he’s also been volunteering at Penny Arcade Expo, one of the largest gaming conventions in North America.

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His full name is actually Dandreb John Bitanghol but he goes by the name Dreb Bits on the web to save a couple of bytes and to easily register in peoples memory. He hails from the countryside of the sunny Philippines.

During his senior year in college, he led a team awarded best capstone project for a project that took inspiration from WordPress. It was around that time when he began to take enormous interest in WordPress and the underlying language, PHP. Before he knew it, he started tinkering with JavaScript and database management as well.

After college, he went straight into the wild world of freelancing as a web designer and developer for websites powered by WordPress. Prior to joining 10up, he was one of the top rated freelance contractors in Upwork, formerly known as oDesk. Helping clients build simple, unified, and goal-oriented websites led him to start a few self-initiated projects, which he published to the WordPress plugin repository. Wanting to connect with local freelancers creating things with WordPress, he founded a small, local community of WordPress developers and evangelists.

When he’s not plugging away with WordPress, Dreb likes taking photos, camping, almost anything outdoors, and fantasizing about travel.

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Drew got his start building websites at 16, learning just enough HTML to build a tournament portal for his online gaming league. Since 2010, he’s worked as a full-time WordPress developer and occasional student mentor.

Drew believes those who benefit from WordPress should do their part to give back to it. His contributions to open source have spanned his career, starting with phpBB ten years ago and continuing with WordPress today. He’s been a credited core contributor for every major release since 3.3, and was named a “Recent Rockstar” following his work on menus in 3.6. He’s since earned permanent commit access for his efforts improving documentation in WordPress.

In his spare time, Drew enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, local beer culture, and traveling to conferences across the country.

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Elliott’s passion for web development began when he was 15 years old and he’s never looked back since. Elliott is 10up’s first UK-based employee; before joining 10up he led a development team at a local web agency where he was introduced to WordPress.

Elliott graduated with a BSc honours degree in Computer Science. He loves a good challenge, especially when it involves a deep dive into WordPress’s core. He often contributes to open source projects, develops his own plugins once in a while, and has earned his fair share of badges for his contributions on StackExchange. An aficionado of the popular Easy Digital Downloads WordPress module, he’s both a recognized regular contributor and an extension developer.

When he’s not working with PHP, he likes to tinker with databases and APIs. Elliott also has hands on experience with JavaScript, in particular jQuery and Backbone. He’s often referred to as being “obsessed with neat code,” and is especially particular when it comes to missing indentation.

When he’s “off the grid” he can most likely be caught eating a curry or playing his favorite (and only) sport, Badminton.

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Kailey can’t remember a time when her family didn’t have a computer, however it wasn’t until the seventh grade that her interest in building web pages was piqued. She barely knew what she was doing, but she kept at it anyway. It wasn’t until some post-high-school classes that she filled in the gaps and started really getting into web development.

A few years later, Kailey was tasked with working on a WordPress site. She’d never heard of it prior to this assignment, so there was a little learning curve, but she saw the potential and began focusing on WordPress development. Starting with some basic theme customization, then moving on to plugin development, and finally giving back by making some core contributions and getting more involved with the WordPress community.

Today, she keeps up with the latest changes in WordPress, attends (and sometimes speaks at) WordCamps, and tries to contribute back to other parts of the WordPress ecosystem – she knows that the enthusiastic community behind the software is what makes WordPress unique.

When Kailey isn’t doing techie things, she might be traveling or looking for new playing cards to add to her collection (more than 250 decks at last count). She also has a fondness for wearing mismatched socks.

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Kaitlyn has grown up alongside computers, beginning with MS Paint at the age of 3. Originally following a path in the arts with an approved portfolio for 3D game animation, a Java programming course in high school completely changed her mind. Graduating high school early allowed her to be whisked away to college; she loved it so much that she even stayed an extra year to take more courses of interest.

She’s been using and loving WordPress since 2011; dabbling with other content management systems has only strengthened her affinity for the platform.

Kaitlyn has spent most of her post-college time at agencies. Before joining 10up, she spent 9 months at an enterprise cloud computing firm (Sightline Innovation) where she worked with AngularJS, ExtJS, Node.js, and MongoDB. She spent the prior 2.5 years at a creative agency where she focused on PHP (and JS) based solutions, most notably WordPress.

While Kaitlyn currently resides in downtown Toronto, her home and heart are in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her big interests include video games, green foods, crocheting, puppies, kitties, & drinking tea.

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Kyle’s first experience with programming involved playing with HyperCard in the elementary school computer lab. When the World Wide Web rolled around a few years later, many of the fundamentals were already familiar.

WordPress first popped up on Kyle’s radar in 2009, and it quickly became his tool of choice. Since then, Kyle has developed themes and plugins with a focus on performance, responsive design, and creative presentation of information. Today, Kyle thinks of himself as at the intersection of people and technology— “using technology to help people work together and accomplish the best of what’s possible”.

Prior to joining 10up, Kyle wore many hats for Grassroots Solutions, an organizing firm, where he learned the fundamentals of organizing people for action. Kyle picked up a fondness for flying kites while living in China in 2007, and is a sucker for Masterpiece Mystery on PBS.

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Lucy became interested in computers during her early teenage years: the time where you couldn’t connect to the internet and speak on the phone simultaneously. Although she loved everything about technology, the field of art also piqued her interest, and it wasn’t until her early 20’s when she decided which direction to take.

After successfully completing her studies in filming and photography, Lucy decided to also study web development. She took her first job as a junior developer at a Belgian agency, where she learned alongside a team of experienced web engineers. She later moved on to work with a Spanish agency as a web developer for 7 years. There she got involved in several high profile projects for well known clients. It was during that time that Lucy also became familiar with WordPress: falling in love with the CMS and the amazing community behind it.

Today, Lucy is an active member in the WordPress community. She strongly believes that contributing to the platform is the best way to keep the open source project alive, and that consistent involvement is one of the best ways to continue learning and staying apprised of the latest WordPress updates. To date, Lucy has released a few plugins on the WordPress repository, organizes a local meetup in Valencia, Spain, and occasionally helps out in the WordPress forums.

When she’s not coding, Lucy spends most of her time with her husband and daughter. She also likes cooking, watching Netflix, and loves running to clear her mind.

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Lukas is a typical IT geek who has been working in the field of development for over 14 years. Everything started in a small, Polish town, when his parents bought him his first Commodore C64 computer. Without any doubts, Lukas knew that computers would become his biggest passion. At the age of 14 he created his first ‘database’ application that was an easy phone book. Two years later his first PC computer helped him to develop the hobby.

In 2001, Lukas started his professional career as a network administrator and was quickly hired as an engineer for big Polish IT companies. He needed the next five years to work up the nerve to follow his dreams to become self-employed. With his Master Degree in Science and strong experience under his belt, he decided to start his own business. Over the next 9 years, Lukas created, developed, and serviced applications including financial and sales systems and web portals with over 1,000,000 viewers per month, using technologies like LAMP, Java and ASP.net.

After growing tired of being a manager, salesman, employee, and employer he took a position with Timely Network Inc., maker of the All In One Event Calendar for WordPress, which has more than 100,000 active installs. In searching for more opportunities, Lukas came upon 10up.

A self described “creator rather than a craftsman,” he is rarely seen way from his computers. When he does step away, he can be found traveling the world with his wife, walking his dog Rosia (that he fell in love with at a dog shelter), or watching American television shows.

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A proud “computer geek”, Morgan first learned programming in elementary school from source code printed in the back of magazines. He built his first website in 1998, and continued to tinker with computers and Web technology over the next decade.

After a brief (10.5-year) stint in the Navy, he decided to study Information Systems in college, eventually earning his degree in Liberal Studies. After college, he took a job managing a 6,000-page website using Dreamweaver. Seeing the futility in this, he started looking for CMSs, finally landing on WordPress. He’s since used WordPress to build sites large and small, from eCommerce and membership sites to nonprofits, community organizations, and blogs.

Morgan is active in the WordPress community through IRC, forums, the Codex, and the OKC WordPress Users Group. He has also written plugins, themes, and is a WordPress Core Contributor.

When not geeking out on a computer, he likes to visit the zoo with his wife and daughter, take photos he never does anything with, and choke back tears when a companion leaves Doctor Who.

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Nícholas is a tech lover who realized his passion for computer programming at a very young age, and went on to write his first program in C++ during his teenage years. At just 14, he joined a technical college, and later attended a local university, where he took computer science courses to further hone his skill and develop a solid understanding of the discipline.

Having been delighted by the Web since 2009, Nícholas has since worked as a web developer and discovered his love of WordPress in 2010. In 2012, he worked for Ufersa, a Brazilian Federal University for three years before joining 10up.

Nícholas has a strong knowledge in C++, HTML, CSS, PHP, and WordPress, and he’s dedicated to the continuous study of JavaScript and its frameworks. As a WordPress core contributor, Nícholas has helped develop several plugins, which can be found on the official WordPress repository. And since 2014, he’s been speaking at WordCamps throughout Brazil.

Nícholas is a Christian who loves studying the Bible and church history. When he’s not working, he’s likely at the gym, watching movies or TV series, and spending time with his wife.

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Paul has been designing, building, and fixing things his whole life. He wrote his first computer program on a TRS-80 Model III in 1981, fascinated by the ability to build, test, and change ideas rapidly. Since then, Paul has used computers for graphic design production, theatre lighting and set design, teaching music skills, game development, and of course web engineering.

Paul found WordPress after discarding several CMS tools while working for local government, building internal and public sites using various open source systems. After building some custom themes and plugins, he eventually started freelancing. He would go on to write numerous WordPress-focused technical articles, develop custom multisite features for the real estate market, become a technical lead for a local web studio, and help complete a major web front end for a scientific computing platform. Paul is most proud of his Content Scheduler plugin and his work in support of his state public universities adopting WordPress as a campus publishing solution.

2014 thrust Paul outside of WordPress: he learned Java, C#, and the Laravel PHP framework by the seat of his pants. A year for new languages, he also learned more advanced JavaScript, and explored general design patterns used across languages.

When not coding, Paul can usually be found playing games with his kids, reading, or backstage wrangling with theatre set pieces.

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Philip got his start in coding while still in middle school by copying BASIC programs from a book into an MS-DOS 3 machine. His first web pages were letters to friends created as HTML documents, sent on floppy disks through the mail. Eventually he discovered PHP, dynamic sites, and WordPress, and things really took off from there.

While creating websites for local small businesses, WordPress was his go-to CMS. As he honed his development skills, he contributed a number of plugins to the wordpress.org plugin repository, and eventually developed and sold several premium WordPress themes. Prior to joining 10up in March of 2015, he worked for over three years as an independent WordPress developer and freelancer, delighting clients from around the world.

Philip is passionate about open source, clean code, and easy-to-use interfaces, and tries to learn something new every day.

When he’s not in front of a computer screen, you’ll find him traversing the great outdoors via foot, bicycle, or canoe, or camping in remote wilderness locations. He enjoys photography, gardening, a good book, and spending quality time with his family. Philip lives with his wife, baby daughter, and a multitude of tropical fish in midcoast Maine.

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Rachel earned her BA in Interactive Media from the Pratt Institute and accepted her first job as a Front End Developer in 2011. During this stint, Rachel developed a love for WordPress and became known for her expertise in custom CMS integration.

Inspired by a WordCamp talk in 2014 titled, “Free Software, Free Labor and the Freelancer”, Rachel turned a childhood passion for writing into RachieVee.com, her personal slice of the internet where she dishes all about her WordPress adventures. In fact, it was Rachel’s blog that connected her with 10up, and as they say, the rest is history.

Rachel is on a mission to learn everything about WordPress, and has dreams of eventually mastering back-end roles as well. When Rachel’s off-duty, you can find her writing up a storm on her blog, helping out on WordPress forums or the WordPress Stack Exchange, and volunteering with make.wordpress.org. When she isn’t obsessing over code, she’s either sipping tea with a good book in hand, watching anime, playing a video game, or spending time with her family and their royal majesty, a shiba inu named Tali.

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After completing his education in Computer Engineering in 2008, Shakir began his career as an internee in the web-hosting industry. Due to his quick learning abilities, he was promoted to a Level-II Technical Support Representative within just a few months, and he spent the last eight years working as both a Systems Administrator and Support Engineer for various web hosting organizations.

A problem solver at heart, Shakir is passionate about accepting new opportunities to expand his knowledge, implementing solutions for clients’ toughest challenges, and resolving programming related needs in WordPress. He has engineered several applications that are currently used in various laboratories and medical clinics throughout his home city in Pakistan.

When Shakir’s not working, you can find him making or repairing small electronic items or spending quality time with his two kids.

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Tyrel started his career working with the web by templating course content for Utah Valley University’s Distance Education Department. Tyrel taught himself PHP and JavaScript by building and improving internal tools used by course facilitators. Before he knew it, he was providing consulting services, using WordPress as his platform, for small businesses and non-profits. He built everything from single page sites to survey/reporting tools, emphasizing usability and performance.

Before joining 10up, Tyrel spent 3 years as WordPress consultant; hand coding projects from internal tools for global companies to websites for local schools and non-profits.

Tyrel also volunteers with the local tech/open source community. He’s a core team member of the Utah Open Source Foundation, which supports local meetups and organizes the Open West Conference. Tyrel also organized UtahWP, which helps WordPress groups in Utah get on their feet, and is Lead Organizer of the Salt Lake City chapter of UtahWP. He’s also contributed a few patches to WordPress core, alongside patches for popular plugins like WooCommerce and BuddyPress.

When Tyrel isn’t online, he can be found hanging out with his wife, two boys, and their dogs; or volunteering with local dog rescues and animal shelters.

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Tyson has a strong Linux and Unix System Engineering and Administration background with over 17 years experience. His working knowledge and hands on involvement with large scale enterprise level environments has provided him with a wealth of production experience. His expertise includes a myriad of computer and network hardware and software administration and troubleshooting. Once a software quality assurance engineer, his main responsibilities constitute real­ time stock market data applications, with bug fix and enhancement request. In addition, he assisted in the porting of the Reuters flagship Windows application to Solaris and Linux.

In 2012 he transitioned from Systems Engineering to a certified ITIL Application Engineer at CenturyLink Technology Solutions. Working with product owners and Agile methodologies, Tyson automated WordPress, and MySQL installs in cloud and bare metal instances. He developed a fully automated installation of managed MySQL, and the entire managed WordPress stack enabling a completely hands free deployment utilizing HPSA and ADM while staying current with CIS compliance.

When he is not in the lab, or the data center floor he can be found working on Arduino and Raspberry Pi projects and planning the next big expedition for some outdoor fun. As desires are rapidly crossed off his bucket list, new and exciting ventures are added. He is also a recently certified amateur radio technician.