Automattic

Worked on services for WooCommerce, initially focused on shipping and then heavily on payments, including bootstrapping, expanding, and reworking the “WooPayments” service. Used PHP heavily – which I'd first learned properly before and after joining – for WooCommerce extension development, often in coordination with a central service that was in fact part of the WordPress.com REST API. We made significant use of JavaScript as well, of course (or, TypeScript more recently), and my official job description at first was “JavaScript Wrangler”.

Helped onboard and guide many fellow developers as the one small team grew rapidly into multiple groups of larger teams – after which I'd served on the small "Architecture" team, providing guidance and high-level coordination for the payments engineering focus area.

Taking full advantage of an emphasis on clear and effective written communication, I appreciated using P2 as the internal, permanent home for asynchronous collaboration and discussion on any given subject, with a network of many separate P2 sites each having their own scope – yet enabling cross-posting between them and pinging any individual or group at the company. (And enjoyed using other common communication and collaboration tools as well…)

I was rather well-known within my group for gathering and sharing (sometimes obscure) information, and for showing up anywhere that I thought I could make a contribution, whether it's to supply potentially helpful context, avoid a misunderstanding, or anything else. I found much value in helping to get everyone involved with a focus area on the same page and using consistent terminology and connotations.

Another impactful mode of mine was around research and putting together prototypes, sometimes related to existing priorities, sometimes more in the skunkworks category or looking ahead to future possibilities – such as expanded support for headless client configurations, or a central marketplace for products across self-hosted stores (or a 3D storefront in Godot though that one was mostly during my time off). One team lead, well-connected across the company, noted that I embodied, moreso than anyone, the “I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me” portion of the company creed – which could be an excellent backhanded compliment if it were the only praise they'd ever offered!