I didn’t have a wide imagination back then, but I had an idea of how things worked, so I learned how to do cool things with WordPress by simply helping and learning alongside people in the forums who had cool ideas but didn’t know how to execute them.
I filed bugs, I wrote patches that were committed to core, I wrote patches that were committed to plugins and themes, I wrote docs, I wrote for a WordPress news blog, I volunteered at WordCamps, I worked directly alongside the WordPress Support Team and became a forum and Slack admin, I’ve been a WordPress Support Team lead twice, and somewhere out there, people are having the time of their lives with WordPress (maybe even making tons of money) because of a sentence or two that I wrote in the forums.
Working at Automattic was something I had always wanted to do. It was a job that would sponsor me to contribute more to WordPress and a job that had a creed I was aligned with. But back then, their job openings were scarce. When I was laid off from my job before Automattic, I spent a year unemployed during an economic downturn (and without unemployment benefits because I was young, foolish, and took the job as a contractor), but I was committed to keeping up the grind. I worked 9 AM to 5 PM in the WordPress Support Forums while also watching the official WordPress job board for any paid gigs that I could do.
Fourteen years ago, a Happiness Engineer job opened, and honestly, the bulk of my résumé was my WordPress Support Forum profile and the rest of my WordPress contributions; contributions that I continue to make to this day.
WordPress taught me how to help others, how to build and manage sites, and how to be a part of a functioning open source community. WordPress also introduced me to some of my best friends, quite possibly saved my life, and kept me from being homeless.
If you want to get involved too, you can start contributing to WordPress anytime!
It’s been a fun and enlightening twenty years, and I’m looking forward to the next twenty years!
https://macmanx.com/2024/10/04/my-wordpress-journey-20-years/
