About us

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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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Dustin’s passion for all things computing began before the advent of the Internet—back when the purpose of a computer was to print Print Shop banners on a dot matrix printer or play Wolfenstein and Oregon Trail. His first experience with the Internet was CompuServe and America Online.

It wasn’t until he graduated from high school that he received a computer to call his own. In 1998, while studying at the birthplace of Slackware Linux, Dustin installed Linux for the first time. After getting a job at the Fargo-Moorhead Family YMCA, Dustin was able to use Linux for web, email, and VPN services. Later, he used the highly reliable web platform to serve millions of pages per month at Forum Communications Company. Dustin is excited to bring his Linux knowledge to the table at 10up.

When Dustin is away from the computer, he can be found with his family, tinkering with his Raspberry Pi and Arduino, or playing video games.

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Evan has been working full-time with WordPress for clients ranging from small firms to international brands since 2010. Brimming with the experience of several small agencies, he has cultivated a robust skillset over the years, with experience in nearly every role related to web development.

In addition to creating bespoke client-centric solutions, Evan also has a unique background in product development with experience in developing and maintaining distributed software used by thousands. His passion for products and desire to give back fuel his own open-source projects as well as his contributions to others.

As an aspiring polyglot and student of software development, he embraces a life of never-ending learning, craftsmanship, and refinement.

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Starting his career as a developer by writing programs for TI-83 calculators when he was in high school, Gary has thrown himself into learning new technologies over the years. Since 2010, Gary has been building WordPress themes and plugins for businesses of all sizes.

Before working with 10up, Gary built custom WordPress themes and plugins for enterprise e-commerce businesses. Passionate about problem-solving, Gary has helped numerous companies overcome their unique business challenges by using WordPress’s robust technology.

In addition to his experience as a developer, Gary is also an active member of the WordPress community. He is an organizer for his local WordCamp and WordPress Meetups and has been Lead Organizer for WordCamp Portland, ME twice. Gary has also spoken at several WordCamps in the US and Canada.

When not working, Gary enjoys a pastoral life with his wife, child, cats, and chickens in Scarborough, Maine.

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Jeff is a Pisces, uses two spaces after a period, pronounces GIF with a hard g, and always waves goodbye on video chats. More relevant to his professional life he has a fancy piece of paper that says he knows Computer Science, has worked in-office and from-home for companies large (General Electric, NBC) and small (XWP), was educated in the waterfall software development life cycle method only to become an agile convert when he moved to Los Angeles in 2008, and first published with WordPress in March 2007. Most importantly, he’s a dog person and would live on the equator if he could.

Prior to joining 10up, he helped build products and lead digital media teams on behalf of BigCommerce, News Corp, Beachbody, Discover Financial Services, NBC, Universal Pictures, Universal Studios Hollywood, USA Network, and GE Capital.

Jeff’s biggest WordPress-related accomplishment is his first non-About Page, code-based commit in core. After that, he’s most proud of synchronizing his WordPress Slack and .ORG profiles to @jeffpaul and migrating away from his off-brand, historical @jbpaul17 profile in May 2018. He was also the WordPress 4.7 release deputy (with the ever-amazing Helen Hou-Sandí as release lead), the 4.8 release co-lead, the 4.9 release deputy, continues to provide product management for WordPress core while leading the weekly devchats, and is the Tide product maintainer (alongside Derek Herman).

Outside of 10up, Jeff is a husband to one amazing woman (hi Crystal, love you!), father to three five kids (twins born October 2018) and one Golden Retriever dog / officemate, enjoys time outside in warm weather near water, and relaxes with homebrew / craft beer or bourbon. He’s an active member of his kids’ school PTA, coaches his kids soccer / baseball / lacrosse teams, used to find time to run triathlons as well as play 8-bit games and anything on a Nintendo system, is a long-suffering fan of the Baltimore Orioles and Ravens, and is a strident believer in the Oxford comma.

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John became interested in programming in the late 2000s while running an oddly successful WordPress-based website on English grammar and usage. After earning an MFA in poetry in 2009, he entered the freelance market, selling himself as a writer, editor, and content strategist who could also build WordPress sites. It wasn’t long before developing themes and plugins became his main vocation, though to this day he can be talked into contributing web copy in a pinch.

A compulsive learner, John has branched from WordPress into technologies such as React, AMP, and server-side JavaScript and gained extensive experience collaborating on complex, cutting-edge projects, working across the stack. With Colby College, he integrated WordPress with React Native for a suite of internal campus communication tools, and built the website for the college’s $750-million fundraising campaign. With XWP, he worked with clients such as Rolling Stone and Google on projects merging the latest frontend technologies with backend engineering designed for the largest scale.

Though rooted in Colorado, John now lives in Chicago with his family. Outside work, you’ll usually find him reading, writing, playing games with his kids, or digging into new web technologies in service of labyrinthine side projects that somehow grow less complete with time.

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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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Asvin has been crafting websites for over a decade. After graduating from La Confiance College, he joined a local telecommunications company where he started playing with WordPress, and realized its power. Before long, he started deploying WordPress websites for many African countries. With his newfound knowledge of WordPress, he went out on his own as a freelancer for six years.

In 2009 he started working remotely with the agency Branderati where he was the lead developer. He spent his days hand coding a social media platform which powered hundreds of Facebook pages that had millions of fans. It was a unique opportunity to build applications for well-known American cable and satellite television channels. After his time at Branderati, and prior to joining 10up, Asvin was a technical consultant for Sprinklr where he worked with the biggest brands in the world.

When he is not in front of his screen, Asvin can be found hanging out with his wife, his little boy and his Coton de Tulear.

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After a chance discovery of Microsoft Frontpage on his mum’s old Windows 98 computer, Cameron began building his first websites at 12, laying the foundations for graduating from Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, Scotland, at 19 with a BSc Computing for Internet & Multimedia.

After spending time with a few companies in oil and gas, he eventually joined his regional news publisher. It was there that a passion for WordPress began. In 2014 as part of the rebuild of The Press and Journal website, he helped construct one of the UK’s first two-way content flows between WordPress and their editorial system, which proved to be one of the formative tools for digital-first workflows. This was then adopted across the other newspapers in the business and became the catalyst for a single large WordPress network powering over 100 websites. He takes a great sense of pride in guiding and mentoring friends and colleagues to replace almost everything he built in the subsequent years, before a – rejected! – pull request brought him to 10up.

When Cameron isn’t being the company’s resident Wookiee, he can be found sinking hours into a book or two, listening to music, working his way through Star Trek again on Netflix, or playing an immersive RPG on his PS4.

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Cole began his career in web development in 2000 when his first band needed a website. He picked up a book and has continued to do so still to this day. By 2007 he discovered WordPress and started building handcrafted themes and quickly thereafter, plugins. His experience with WordPress over the last 10+ years has been broad, ranging from basic blog structures to full-on web applications for enterprise-level clients. His experience in the industry found him a seat on the board of advisors for the Santa Rosa Junior College for the last several years where he has helped professors fine-tune their curriculum to position students for job-ready skills after graduation.

One of his first enterprise-level projects was with Maker Media where he worked on their online magazine, MAKE:, and on Maker Faire where he looked after the API system for their live event mobile app and website. All of which were hosted on WordPress.com VIP. He also loves community, which is partially what has kept him in the WordPress community, he helped start a thriving community for web professionals in his city of Santa Rosa, CA. Cole and others were tired of making the 1-hour drive to San Francisco to meet like-minded programmers and designers so they created their own. By the time he stepped out of leading the community in 2015, there were over 1000 people in the Facebook Group and the monthly meetups would see on average 20+ people which was astonishing for a city that isn’t known for its tech. Later, more focused meetup groups were formed as spin-offs from ours.

He has a passion for learning and adapts quickly to new concepts. His career has taken him through several different programming languages and tools to keep in his programmer’s utility belt such as Node.js/Express.js, MongoDB, C#, JavaScript, and of course PHP, just to name a few.

Outside of his career, he is a father to a 2-year-old “heart warrior”, a husband, a multi-instrumental musician, frequents concerts, having monthly board game nights at his house, and traveling whenever possible.

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Daine has been a committed (no Git pun intended) and passionate open source follower for over 6 years now. Completely self-taught from the ground up, Daine has managed to grab the attention of many award-winning agencies and media houses in South Africa, not to mention international brands such as Women’s Health, Men’s Health and award-winning author, Ken Follet.

Daine began his career in education. He trained some of South Africa’s biggest corporations in digital technologies, contributing to the business sector and educating those he worked alongside. Daine has planned, developed, lectured and implemented web courses for students, professionals and newcomers; covering everything from UX, HTML5, CSS3, Javascript and WordPress Development. He is also an Envato Tuts+ Author and contributes regularly to the site.

Daine gravitated to WordPress early on in his career, learning the ins and outs of theme and plugin development. He regularly contributes to the WordPress.org support forums, speaks at WordPress South Africa Meetups and WordCamp Cape Town

When the laptop closes, Daine fills his time traveling, running and spending most of his disposable income on coffee in and around Cape Town’s hip food and restaurant culture.

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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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Devin started his career in the early 90’s–when HTML still used table and font tags to declare layout and styles. As a Graphic Designer looking for a job, Devin needed a way to showcase his best work. He picked up a book on HTML, and was swept up by its speed and simplicity. No waiting for proofs or validating spot colors, just instant gratification in real time. This small step inspired him to continue his growth as a Developer through self learning.

While working for Live to Play Sports, Devin took the lead on 5 in house websites, building content management systems and stylistic frontends. During this 5 year post, he also dabbled in Flash Development, popular at that time, and landed an American Design Award for his production of the Mace Gear website, an urban cycle and lifestyle brand. Since then, Devin has worked for Rethink Canada, Engine Digital, and a small blockchain startup. His latest WordPress build allows authors to create immersive custom interactive stories using an array of flexible components that includes quizzes, slideshows, videos and more.

Devin joins 10up as a Senior Front End Engineer. Here he hopes to continue growing his knowledge of WordPress and Javascript, stretching the possibilities of theme development far beyond a simple blogging platform. He calls himself a “forever student”–one person can’t have all of the answers, so he continues to study and practice his craft. He enjoys pair programming and working with others to solve big challenges.

When not writing code, Devin can be found playing ball hockey or soccer with his kids, going for a run, or watching the latest Premier League match in support of Liverpool. On occasion, he’ll pickup the acoustic guitar and jam out on a few simple chords.

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Eduard has always been interested in technology and electronics. He learned Basic and built his first game in 4th grade, and, as he always wanted to build robots, in high school he introduced himself to C++ and assembly programming language. He then went to college and studied artificial intelligence, electronic engineering, and computer science.

In 2003 he had his first encounter with web development, and he fell in love at first with PHP. Since then he embraced a plethora of technologies, and he worked for a few digital agencies developing frameworks, custom APIs, web apps and cross-platform mobile apps. He’s been using and crafting plugins for WordPress since 2010.

Although originally from Romania, Eduard now enjoys life in sunny California. Outside of programming, Eduard is a fun father of 2 (a boy and a cocker spaniel). He loves to travel to new places, beer tasting and board game nights, listening to music and checking out new movies.

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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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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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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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Josh chose WordPress to write a blog when he was in school for environmental studies about ten years ago. Josh began learning PHP and JavaScript to customize his WordPress blog and later to develop themes and plugins. He joined the WordPress community by contributing to the theme review team and working as a developer and community manager for the Pods Framework.

Josh is best known in the WordPress community for his contributions to popular plugins and writing free tutorials and eBooks about WordPress, Laravel and React development. He has spoken at over twenty WordCamps, including WordCamp US and has written a ton of tutorials about WordPress development.

He was the co-founder of CalderaWP, developers of Caldera Forms, which had over 200,000 active installs at the time of it’s acquisition by Saturday Drive, the developers of Ninja Forms. Josh and members of his previous team joined Saturday Drive in 2019, where he contributed to Ninja Forms, SendWP and developed internal applications. Now in 2021, Josh joins 10up as a Lead Web Engineer.

Josh lives in Pittsburgh, PA with his wife Alicia and their dog Macy. He collects interesting rocks and Star Wars toys and grows house plants, mainly succulents and cacti to keep busy when he’s not working, going for walks or enjoying science fiction.

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It was in middle school that Karine made her first awkward website. Her love affair with WordPress started in 2004 after she made the switch from Movable Type to build personal websites.

After graduating from business school in France, Karine has worked for two years in South Korea as a project manager in charge of Facebook campaigns for clients like Air France and as a frontend developer, one of the websites she built won “Site of the Day” from Awwwards. Her travel bug made her leave the land of the morning calm for California, and she joined Brainstorm Media in the summer of 2013. Her relationship with WordPress got very serious and led her to 10up.

Karine has a hard time parting from her computer but when her fingers are not glued to a keyboard, she loves eating, hoarding pictures, and traveling. After spending some time in the U.S. and Canada, she is currently living in Paris, her hometown.

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Lukas is a typical IT geek. He 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 a developer in big Polish IT companies. He needed the next five years to work up the nerve to follow his dreams of becoming self-employed. With the Master Degree of Science, a scholarship for education results and strong experience he decided to give it a go and run his own business. Within the next 9 years, Lukas created, developed and serviced plenty of applications (from financial and sales systems to web portals with over 1,000,000 viewers per month) in various technologies like LAMP stack, Java and ASP.net.

Some time ago Lukas felt tired of being a manager, seller, employee and employer in one and started to work abroad remotely for Timely Network Inc. that provides a famous All In One Event Calendar Plugin with more than 100,000 active installs. By looking for more challenging work 10up seemed perfect place for developing his biggest love.

Lukas says that he is a creator rather than a craftsman, mostly focused on WordPress. He can barely be seen around any other place than his computers. But when he is off the computer it means he travels the world with his wife, walks with the dog Rosia (that he fell in love in a dog shelter) or is just watching American TV series, Discovery or National Geographic channels.

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It was by accident that Max got his start in QA over 20 years ago. With hopes of becoming a developer, Max quickly realized he was more excited by breaking things than deep diving into the code to fix the root cause. Transitioning into QA was a natural fit for Max.

Having served as the Lead QA Engineer on Netflix, Apple, Merck, and others alike, Max is able to comfortably thrive under pressure to exceed clients expectations. Despite having several years of experience, Max is constantly learning and growing on a day-to-day basis in order to take on the next challenge he’s faced with; whether big or small.

When Max isn’t busy dissecting software and “squashing” bugs, he enjoys beach days here in the Carolinas with his family and playing golf with his son regularly. Max’s true passion is collecting vinyl records and sample based music production.

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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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Peter has been developing for the web full-time since 2012. Unsure what to do after graduating with a philosophy degree from Indiana University, he started working on an orchard in Pennsylvania. As an excuse to get out off the tractor, he taught himself how to build a farm equipment inventory application with PHP and MySQL. He’s been hooked ever since.

Over the next four years, Peter worked as an in-house developer at a consultancy firm, converting their large static editorial website to a proper content management system, expanding the site’s e-commerce functionality, and implementing paid membership restriction—all with the power of WordPress.

Peter prides himself on clean, organized code and is always excited to learn new technologies. Prior to joining 10up, he contributed to various WordPress plugins including Restrict Content Pro and 10up’s own ElasticPress.

In his spare time, Peter enjoys playing music and exploring the northwest with his partner, Christine, and his dog, CJ.

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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, three hilarious kids, and big, shaggy golden-doodle named Blue.

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After graduating with an advanced diploma in Multimedia Design & Production, Simon strayed somewhat from the design aspect of his studies and taught himself how to develop. Simon hit the the web development ground running with PHP development as his sole focus, building sites on Joomla, CakePHP and various other frameworks and platforms. During his experience, Simon has worked, contributed and played key roles in the production of sites relating to key brands such as Cape Town Tourism, Mens Health, Womens Health & Eventful Conferences to name but a few. Simon has also contributed web development work for international brands such as Deloitte.

Simons true talent lies in his holistic understanding of the many functional and programmatic layers of the web, and how they come together to form beautiful web applications. His depth of knowledge in PHP is only rivaled by his experience and aptitude with the front-end and its related technologies such as Node, Angular, Electron and Ionic, to name a few.

Simon has had his fair share of lecturing at the Cape Town based Friends of Design – School of Digital Arts, where he co-authored and co-lectured courses for corporates, students and working professionals. It was there that he got his first taste of the WordPress. This led Simon to curate and lecture the WordPress Essentials course, where he taught amateur developers. Since then, Simon has held positions that have always involved WordPress development, and he is also part of the development team for one of the most highly rated podcasting plugins on the WordPress Plugin Directory, “Seriously Simple Podcasting”.

Simon spends his down time mountain biking, surfing, and practicing his marksmanship at some of the Cape Towns outdoor shooting ranges. He’s an avid biker and car enthusiast.

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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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Terry has been finding his home at the intersection of design and development for more than 10 years. He’s just as happy on the command line as he is creating a mockup in Sketchapp. His two pivotal moments in front of a computer came with the famous video, “Creating a weblog in 15 minutes” with Rails, and seeing WordPress for the first time (2.1). That first look at “Ella” sealed the deal with WordPress.

Terry has worked in health care and higher ed., and with a long list of freelance clients. Terry’s also active in the WordPress community—on the core UI team, and in the support forums and on IRC. He’s also actively trying to convert the entire publishing world to WordPress.

When he’s not working with WordPress, Terry is probably off on a walk with his wife and new baby, or working on his carpentry skills around the house. He lives just off Water Street in St. John’s, Newfoundland—the oldest street in North America.

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Tyler is a self taught web engineer that got started in middle school. His knack for coding came along side his passion for skateboarding and videography. Before YouTube was a hit, Tyler filmed and edited skateboard videos of his friends. Needing a place to share his creations with the world, he built his first website. While a sophomore at Western Michigan University his hobby of coding became an obsession and a love for the open source community quickly grew.

Before joining 10up, Tyler spent 6 years as Lead Developer at an agency out of Grand Rapids, Michigan. In his time there, he led the development on several award-winning, enterprise level WordPress projects and consulted on the development of startup websites and applications around the country.

Tyler’s passion for programming doesn’t just stop on the web, though. He also enjoys tinkering around with electronics and micro-controllers such as the Raspberry Pi and Arduino. From motion activated “smart mirrors” to voice controlled R.C. cars, his house could soon look like something out of an Ironman movie.

As an extreme sports enthusiast, Tyler can often be found at the local ski resort riding his snowboard or at the nearest paintball field getting some games in. In the summertime he enjoys golf, camping and riding his bike through the local trails.

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Barney is a self-taught developer who has over 20 years experience across front-end development, back-end development, mobile apps and a bit of design thrown in for good measure.

Starting out with an ambition to be a designer, he soon found that code was something he loved and wanted to pursue further. After working for various agencies, Barney set-up as a freelancer in 2008 and worked across a huge range of projects and apps, for clients such as Thames Water, Energy Saving Trust, Virgin

Barney has been contracting with 10up over the last 10 months and loved it so much he decided to transition to full-time. He enjoys being part of a highly skilled team and the drive to do great work.

Having recently moved back to his home county of Cornwall in the South West of England, Barney is finally getting around to learning to surf and enjoys getting out and walking the beautiful coast paths. He also loves music (playing and listening), reading, a good box set and hanging out with his family.

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Tinkering with design, video, interactive animation and the wonders of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, Barry’s career started in 2005 designing and developing sites with WordPress. As an independent consultant for over a decade, his focus moved from development to digital product design and back again. His biggest projects have focused on helping design mobile applications for some of the largest European online retail, food delivery and online publishing companies.

Today Barry specializes in creating bespoke WordPress themes and plugins with a knack for simplicity, usability and multi-language sites.

He studied product design and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from the Maastricht Academy of Fine Arts. Coming from the south of the Netherlands, Barry now lives in Berlin, Germany, where in his free time he enjoys spending time with his kid and the hustle and bustle of big city life (and the German autobahn).

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Björn has had a strong interest in web development and technology in general since high school and holds a degree in Management Information Systems from Iowa State University. With a desire to pursue a career working with the internet post graduation he began working for a local agency where a passion for WordPress began to grow and evolve.

Starting as a front-end developer but occasionally working with PHP his experience on both sides of the development spectrum increased and he was able to start focusing on WordPress development full-time at his second position. This focus on WordPress has continued throughout his subsequent roles at both local and international agencies.

Björn comes to 10up with over ten years of professional agency experience and has been working with WordPress for several years beyond that. He is actively involved in the local WordPress community through his attendance of meetups and WordCamps, he has developed a premium WordPress plugin that he continues to maintain and support in his free time, and he enjoys staying on top of the latest industry news.

When he’s not programming he enjoys hiking and cycling among various other outdoor activities, playing foosball, traveling, catching local music performances, watching foreign and independent films, following the financial markets and trying out new restaurants. He takes pride in his Swedish heritage and enjoys learning about cultural traditions.

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Brandon’s career in QA started over 10 years ago as a video game tester at Activision. What started as a college job ended up transforming into a passion for the QA practice — especially breaking things.

Over the last decade, he’s had the opportunity to engage with a wide variety of projects — ranging from simple marketing emails and websites to much more complex CMS sites, call center applications, and mobile applications for Android and iOS. He prides himself on the ability to jump head first into any project and adapt to a team’s needs. He’s looking forward to the next step in his career at 10up and is excited to get more hands on experience with WordPress.

Outside of the QA world, Brandon enjoys spending time with his two girls, which usually consists of swimming in their pool or at the beach, going for walks, or watching terrible shows on Netflix. When he’s not chasing them around you can usually find him trying out new restaurants (or repeating the good ones), drinking way too much coffee, working out in the garage, or playing the latest video games on Xbox.

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Bryan has been working in website design and development since 2007. Even at a young age, he had an interest in technology: first touching HTML in middle school and then C++ in high school. After getting a degree in Graphic Design, Bryan began working with WordPress and CodeIgniter to build rich web experiences.

He has worked on and led a wide range of web projects, including social network projects, web applications, as well as WordPress themes and plugins. He’s worked in many different verticals, building web properties for travel and tourism, healthcare, and the music industry. With experience in both design and development, Bryan enjoys connecting and building the many different aspects of a website.

Outside of building websites, Bryan spends time with his wife and English bulldog, Bowser. He can be found camping, biking, traveling, and enjoying the outdoors in general. He also enjoys building computers and being an active member of the Nashville WordPress community.

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Chelsea has always been passionate about creating and trying new mediums whether it was coding, cooking, or crafting. She still remembers the first HTML and CSS website she created for a high school club. Upon starting college she spent time delving into other languages than coding, graduating summa cum laude with a double major in English and Humanities. After spending several years managing nonprofit websites, earning a Masters in Public Administration with a focus on communications, and serving on the Tech for Good Board in Denver, CO, she decided to devote herself to web development full time and create products for larger audiences. She completed a Front End Engineering Certificate at a challenging and industry recognized program.

After learning the ins and outs of front end web technologies, she took her coding expertise and started working at Revolution Messaging, an agency based out of Washington, DC. For several years, she built impactful websites for social movements, national nonprofit organizations, and political candidates. She led development on websites that went on to win Pollie and Reed Awards including the Me Too Movement website that also won an Awwward for Mobile Excellence.

Chelsea is always excited to experiment with new web technologies and is especially interested in web accessibility, performance, and animations. She looks forward to using the latest JavaScript frameworks and WordPress Gutenberg updates to continue crafting delightful and useful web experiences. When she’s not at changing the world building websites, she’s traveling to new destinations, winning pub trivia with friends, and camping with her husband and two rescue dogs.

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In 2012, Curtis graduated from Full Sail University with a degree in Web Design & Development. After graduating he did 6 months of freelance work where he quickly adopted WordPress as a preferred platform for clients due to it’s powerful publishing abilities out of the box, it’s easily extensible nature, and the great community supporting it.

Since then, he has worked full time with WordPress agencies and VIP partners developing enterprise publishing systems for some of the biggests companies in the media industry. He has also contributed to WordPress core, many various plugins, and frequently offers assistance on the public support forums.

When he’s not building awesome publishing tools, you might have a bit of trouble finding him, he doesn’t seem to stay in one place for very long. On a normal day he might be at home gaming, or rebuilding his PC yet again. If he’s not home you might find him on some remote mountain snowboarding!

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Daniel Gent is from the north of England but has been living in the south of Spain. For the last few years, he’s been working exclusively in React.

He was born in Asia where he spent his formative years in Kuala Lumpur. At the time, computer technology was significantly cheaper than in England which most likely giving him a head start to his hobby. Even from a young age, Daniel felt a strong pull towards tech.

Daniel graduated with a degree in computer science from the the University of Manchester. Since then he has worked in a range of industries: investment banking, luxury holiday rentals, and influencer marketing among them.

No stranger to remote work, he spent several years in South America doing the digital nomad thing. Currently living in the south of Spain, outside of work you’ll probably find him on a bicycle looking at obscure archaeological ruins.

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After realizing that his passion for photography wasn’t going to pay the bills, Daryll started a BSc in Computing. He graduated in 2012 and has been writing PHP ever since.

Daryll worked for a couple of agencies in his home county of Cornwall, where he progressed from a fresh graduate to lead developer, improving his skills along the way. WordPress became a core component of Daryll’s toolbox which he leveraged to architect solutions whenever possible. Daryll has developed WordPress based solutions for countless businesses from small, local companies to multinational corporations and NGOs.

Within the WordPress world, Daryll has made several contributions to core, but Daryll’s best achievement has been Safe SVG; an SVG sanitisation plugin with over 300,000 downloads. Furthermore, this allowed him to give a 40-minute talk at WordCamp London on the subject of SVG security.

A lifelong learner, he hopes to continue honing his skills while learning more about PHP and Javascript development from the team at 10up.

When not writing code, you can find Daryll spending time with his young family, walking around the beautiful Cornish coastline, cooking, or training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in which he enjoys competing.

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After completing his education in Economics Study from Diponegoro University, David began working as a salesman for a multinational corporation. In his free time he loves to blog and write about his experiences. And that is how he was introduced to WordPress.

He started to build plugins and themes for his own website and eventually released his code to help others who were experiencing the same problems he was. Eventually, in 2012 David began freelancing full-time as a WordPress developer. As a freelancer, he helped build custom solutions for businesses and website owners, partnered with web agencies around the globe, and built various products for WordPress shops.

David is a WordPress Core contributor and has released 15 plugins and 10 themes at the WordPress.org repository with over 150k downloads.

When away from the keyboard, David likes to spend his time hanging out with friends, working out or meeting up with new people in the local community.

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David entered the WordPress space after an award-winning, decade-plus career as a culture journalist and photographer for the Oregonian, the Los Angeles Times, Billboard, Rolling Stone, and others. His work ranged from a dispatch from the world’s biggest Magic: The Gathering tournament to chronicling the vinyl revival, but with interviews with Garth Brooks, 50 Cent, and Carly Rae Jepsen behind him, it was time for a change.

Starting from theme-building on his own longtime music blog, David discovered a passion for web performance and was soon provisioning servers and load-testing caching strategies for clients including the Rose City Comic Con and Marijuana Moment—keeping their sites humming through ticket on-sales and breaking news days. As a self-taught developer, he has run the gamut of WordPress challenges, from securing hacked sites to modernizing aging theme codebases to full-stack speed optimization. His work untangling a years-long MySQL problem at Los Angeles music blog Passion of the Weiss became a talk on WordPress database optimization, which he’s given at WordCamp Seattle and WordCamp Portland, and he continues to write about systems and front-end topics and open-source his findings on GitHub.

With his journalism background, David believes firmly in the WordPress mission to democratize publishing, and sees performance as a way to reach broader goals of accessibility and sustainability for a greener, more open web. Joining 10up in March 2019, he’s excited to have a hands-on role in making the web faster for everyone, one benchmark at a time.

David lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, daughter, and cat, and spends his free time being first in line for Marvel movies and co-hosting a weekly TV podcast. He still listens to as much new music as possible, even though rock shows are past his bedtime now.

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From the day when Dhanendran wrote his first program in C during his school days (just to display some pattern using asterisks), he has been enjoying the magic of programming. Just to further enjoy the magic, he has picked up many a side project and wrote numerous lines of code for those projects! He has an interest in design patterns, security, standards, OOPS, caching and optimization.

He joined GlobalEnglish after graduating with a Master of Computer Applications. In his first corporate job, he mainly worked on content curation based products which were developed in Drupal and Angular.

Following his first job, he joined News Technology Services where he worked for NewsUK’s WordPress application where 250+ editors work 24/7 to publish 500+ articles per day. His major contributions are for TheSun newsroom and it’s child sites TheSun.com, Irish Sun, Scottish Sun, Dream Team and TalkSport.

With the experiences on these great sites, he learned about WordPress, Drupal, PHP, MySQL, Javascript, NodeJS, React, Micro Services Architecture, TDD, Web Services, different caching techniques, Automation, CI/CD, Agile development and gained knowledge about WordPress VIP Go infrastructure.

You can often find him volunteering at local meet-ups, speaking in multiple WordCamps across the country and contributing to WordPress core in terms of code, translation, plugins and as a meet-up organizer.

Outside of work, he really enjoys long drives with his wife and son along with Illayaraja music. He also reads historical or literature books and stays busy trying new recipes.

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Dmitry’s journey with web development started in school where he created a Linkin Park fan website that got him and one of his classmates an A (classmate was watching Dmitry code).

That first little project kickstarted a very exciting chain of events for Dmitry that include learning how to code, building a first client website, signing up for a scary project and figuring out how to build it later, building public themes and plugins for WordPress, speaking at and organizing conferences, contributing code to WordPress, building websites for Fortune 500 companies and NYT Bestselling authors, and many other things that don’t fit in one sentence.

Dmitry thrives on a cusp of development, design and project management. He is a strong believer in the Why behind all decisions and actions and likes to build things that make sense.

Outside of work hours, you can find Dmitry in the gym, running, or driving to the nearest (or distant) park or mountain to hike and try local food.

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Fabian is a life long learner, who started his technical journey in school. He was in charge of the marketing, lights and sound for all events happening at his school. While developing sites for events he found his passion for web development, which he later turned into his own agency.

Being passionate about all things creative he combined the two interests design and development, and began workin on custom WordPress themes and plugins. After graduating (and studying abroad in the United States), he jumped all in at his company. He spent five years developing custom WordPress sites for clients and helping them through all forms of media to share their message with the world. Being in charge of a small team and working closely with clients, he refined his skillset and grew as a developer.

When the WordPress team started development on Gutenberg, the new editor for WordPress, Fabian became more active in the WordPress community and began contributing to Gutenberg, TwentyNineteen, TwentyTwenty and other projects.

Away from the computer he spends most of his time outdoor walking with his dog Finn, taking pictures of nature or making movies. Since 2019 he’s also an elected member of his local town council.

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Felipe became interested in technology, electronics, and programming languages when his parents bought their first computer, a 486 back in 1996. In 2004, while attending college, he landed several internships learning languages from Classic ASP to Java, passing through HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP.

Felipe’s history with Content Managements Systems started with an early version of WordPress, going to Drupal 6.0 and then going back to WordPress. With it, he built several corporate sites, portals and complex systems.

In 2016 he started attending local WordPress meet-ups, and after joining the local community he became a Brazilian Locale Manager, Global Translator Editor, Brazilian Support Forums keymaster, and WordPress pt-BR Official Blog author. Felipe also gives back by being a plugins creator, core and meta collaborator, Docs Team member, WordCamp speaker and co-organizer of the WordPress community in Curitiba.

Felipe is also passionate about creating and sharing knowledge: he maintains a blog and a YouTube channel about WordPress.

When he is not working, you can find him hanging with his wife and 6-year-old boy, his companions to video games, movies, and TV shows.

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James has been interested in the web since the mid-1990’s when his Dad bought a family computer and he worked out how to plug in a modem. Discovering the “view source” link in a browser opened up a new world and he quickly learned how the structure of a page was made.

Despite a small setback when he took a computer apart, rebuilt it, and strangely it stopped working, over the next ten years, he taught himself how to program, build websites and discovered WordPress. After helping a few local businesses with their sites, he realized this was the beginning of a career began working full-time as a freelance developer.

Following this, James was invited to join a Brighton-based agency as a WordPress developer where he worked on (literally) hundreds of projects of all sizes and complexity, providing support, consultancy and engineered innovative solutions to complex challenges. Additionally, he was responsible for defining and introducing processes and mentoring and training colleagues.

Of many notable accomplishments, two that he is particularly proud of are: helping a global brand to significantly reduce page load times through an analytical investigation of their infrastructure and the implementation of a series of improvements; and building a bespoke Multisite setup to allow sub-sub-sub-sub-directory (you get the picture) mapping through a custom ‘sunrise’ process. The clients’ in-house team had spent months trying to accomplish this, and it was gratifying to see how happy they were once this was complete.

James never stops learning and loves to explore new technologies and being intellectually challenged. He has given talks at WordCamp Brighton and Manchester and local WordPress meetups and has a keen interest in WordPress Multisite, infrastructure, and process automation.

In his spare time, James spends time with his two (soon to be three!!) children, swimming, reading and working on side projects. And playing with Lego—who doesn’t love Lego?

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James happily discovered a passion for web development by chance in 2012 and hasn’t looked back since. This discovery was somewhat of a surprise to all as it came after studying Sports Science at university and a year teaching English in South Korea. James is largely self taught and has taken learning about web development from something interesting to do into a career.

Initially James cut his teeth interning in London for a small WordPress agency and quickly thereafter moved into freelancing. He feels fortunate to have a job that’s allowed him to follow his other passion – travel. He’s lived and worked as a front end developer in Sydney, Australia and in Vancouver, Canada for a number of years. Now he’s back at ‘home’ in the UK setting down some roots.

“Making things look nice” is one way to describe what James does, but that’d be severely underplaying it. He’s got a great eye for detail, an interest in accessibility and performant CSS animations. A problem solver who favours where at all possible keeping things elegantly simple.

Before joining 10up he was leading the UK development team for the Canadian based agency Domain7. One of the reasons James made the move to 10up was to be part of a fully remote company and to focus on WordPress development.

When not writing code or learning to play the piano James will often be found outside somewhere in the Cotswolds. Whatever the weather he’ll usually be hiking, foraging for food or mountain biking.

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Jamie started doing web development as a hobby while working in a different industry, but enjoyed it so much that he soon made the decision to make it a full time career. Early in his career Jamie operated a full service nano agency, and later focused solely on Front-End Engineering, partnering with digital and ad agencies to offer those services. In time he joined the Front-End Engineering team at Vancouver digital agency Domain7, where he advocated for greater use of WordPress, and built exciting WordPress projects for large companies and higher education institutions.

In 2017, wanting to continue to push the boundaries of WordPress development, Jamie joined the 10up team. He had the amazing opportunity to contribute to high profile projects such as ESPN fivethirtyeight and The Undefeated, the Microsoft News and Blog networks, and the 9to5Mac network.

In 2018, Jamie left 10up to take on the role of Digital Lead at Vancouver design agency Dossier Creative. In this multifaceted role he led efforts to create a new digital department within the agency, helped to introduce digital design practices, created DevOps systems and processes, and led development on projects.

In 2019, Jamie decided to return to his first passion, engineering, and jumped at the opportunity to return to 10up. He brings to the team a drive for modern Front-End Engineering methods, a love of web animation, and a passion for javascript frameworks like React. He is also a fan of headless WordPress, JAMstack methodology, AMP development, and is always on the lookout for performance improvements.

Jamie is a father of three children, with whom he loves to go on adventures exploring the outdoors on Vancouver Island. Jamie and his wife Jennica love to travel, obsess over their garden, and do brewery crawls by bicycle. On the rare occasions he has free time, Jamie finds great satisfaction doing woodworking, and attempting to write fiction.

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Jon has always had an interest in design and technology, computers in particular. He started learning how to code in high school, and built his first computer shortly thereafter.

After getting a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Graphic Design, he dove into the digital design world via the mid-west marketing agency scene. Working mainly with small businesses, as well as a few larger clients, he worked on making great solutions for all involved using the design foundations he learned at school as well as with clean code. Because of this bridging of skill sets, Jon has gone from designer, to hybrid front end developer, over to a full front end developer position.

He is always interested in the new and shiny things in the web world with CSS and JS, including flexbox, grid, front end frameworks, and the constant flow of new and updated APIs. That doesn’t mean he drops everything to go after them though. He believes in getting solutions that work for users first, with emphasis on performance and accessibility. For these reasons and more, Jon was drawn to working with 10up.

The self-proclaimed “all around nerd” also does plenty of things outside of work, including playing various board, tabletop, and computer games with friends, following local and national hockey, spending time with his family, and of course adding to his growing fantasy weapons collection.

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Joe is a self-taught developer, building his first website at the age of 11. Eager to learn more, he continued to teach himself other languages and frameworks, where he eventually found WordPress. With its strong community and resources available, WordPress became his go to when building websites. Over the years, he developed his skills further creating sites for family, friends and his local band.

As well as code, Joe has a love for gardening, and in 2008 he moved to Falmouth, Cornwall to study a BA in Landscape and Garden Design. After completing the course in 2011, Joe returned to web development as a freelancer creating websites for his peers. Over the years he built up a portfolio which helped him land a job at an agency, where he gained valuable experience over his six years there.

To this day Joe continues to learn, exploring different web technologies by creating small projects and releasing them on Github. His most notable WordPress project is PostTypes, a library that helps developers create custom post types easily.

In his free time, you’ll find Joe playing sports, strumming his guitar and exploring the beautiful beaches and landscapes of Cornwall.

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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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Junaid built his first website when he was 16 after teaching himself HTML, and has been in love with web development since. It’s his job and his hobby, and he can’t seem to get enough of it.

He built his own CMS on PHP before delving into WordPress in 2009, and has been a strong believer in open source and the WordPress community since. He has built a couple of open source plugins which are collectively installed on a few thousand websites.

He has been a professional freelancer for over ten years, working with clients from around the world, helping them architect and build scalable websites. Junaid enjoys constantly learning, and was introduced to 10up during his quest for engineering best practices.

When he’s not working Junaid enjoys spending time with his wife and friends, taking walks, watching movies and YouTube.

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Luca is a tech enthusiast with a strong passion for WordPress and automation. He built his first website for fun when he was just 8. 15 years and many different jobs later, his interest turned into a passion. He discovered WordPress and it was love at first sight.

He began his career as a freelancer helping local businesses with their sites and collaborating with some local agencies. A couple of years after, he joined a local agency as a Full-Stack Developer where he mainly worked on WordPress but also some Magento and frameworkless projects. His love for WordPress led him to WordCamp Brighton where he was invited to join one of the biggest WordPress agencies in the UK.

During his time there, he led many successful projects for enterprise clients and developed into a Senior WordPress Engineer. He also helped the company improve processes and workflows. Luca loves learning and sharing his knowledge. He has been speaking at some WordCamps in Italy and in the UK when he can.

Luca lives in Mondolfo, a small village in the middle of Italy and when he’s not working he loves traveling, supporting his favorite football team Inter Milan and binge-watching Netflix shows.

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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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Maggie has been passionate about technology even before getting her first internet connection. When she saw her first website, she was hooked and decided that wanted to learn how to create one. She learned the basics of programming on her own, started creating blog themes she gave away for free and learned how to use Photoshop and Illustrator.

She then deviated from the programming path and got a degree in language and literature, studying English and Chinese Mandarin. After University, she started working for a publishing company as a book designer. That’s when she realized her passion for technology was still keen, and she moved to London, UK, where she got accepted in a very intense and selective programming bootcamp and properly learned how to code.

Maggie immediately fell in love with frontend development, and in 2015 she got her first job for a digital consultancy where she built different websites, joined hackathons and created various projects, all using different technologies.

She is always keen to learn the newest technology and try out new things; she strongly believes in clean and organized code and follows the best practices. She has a particular passion for transforming visuals and designs into beautiful and pixel-perfect HTML and CSS pages, and also enjoys solving JavaScript problems, debugging, and trying out new frameworks. When she’s not at her laptop, you can find her reading a book, playing with her dog or watching football.

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With nearly 25 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. He’s been working with WordPress since 2013, and and his first WordPress core commit was in the 4.2 release.

Born in Minnesota and raised in California, Pete’s lived in Austin for more than 15 years. Pete enjoys drinking craft beer, performing karaoke, and working on his long-time side projects, baconipsum.com and baconmockup.com.

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Ravi started his career at Dell in the Inside Sales department. A major part of his day-to-day included working on reports. Given his curious nature, he started playing with Excel VBA and got sucked into the programming world. This new found interest brought about a career change and he hasn’t looked back since.

Dell afforded him the opportunity to shift roles to better align with his interests. So after learning and working on multiple languages including PHP, Javascript and C#, he earned the title of Software Analyst. While working for Dell, Ravi helped shape up a new Order Routing and Fulfillment process for the Americas region. Thanks to his efforts, the team was able to migrate all existing applications into one unified model.

Post-Dell, Ravi took up freelancing and was able to work on on a wide variety of platforms. Through freelancing, Ravi eventually discovered WordPress. Due to the flexibility and ease of use, he fell in love with the CMS. It became his platform of choice and he has been exploring the depths of WordPress ever since, creating themes and plugins, on a regular basis.

When Ravi is not working, he enjoys playing cricket, playing chess, traveling and watching movies.

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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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Ritesh holds a Bachelor’s of Computer Science and a Master’s of Information Technology from DA-IICT, one of India’s most reputed universities. His interest in computers began as a child, but it wasn’t until undergraduate school that he started playing with HTML and CSS. It was then that he began to take web development more seriously and decided to make a career out of it.

At the beginning of his career, Ritesh developed websites in core PHP. Over time, he transitioned into WordPress. In the last three years, he has dived deep into the world of WordPress, building and maintaining themes and plugins.

When Ritesh is not working with WordPress, he enjoys computer games, swimming, watching TV series and movies, and going on trips to explore nature.

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Ryan started his journey in tech just like most self-taught developers — with an idea, curiosity, and enthusiasm. While playing semi-professional baseball and getting his Master’s in Coaching and Athletic Administration, Ryan set out to build a website for baseball players to get scouted easier. After a fresh WordPress install, a free theme, a few plugins, and a handful of calls to GoDaddy support, he was hooked and never looked back.

Prior to joining 10up, Ryan has worked as a front end engineer in freelance, startup and agency settings since 2015. Throughout his career, he has had the opportunity to wear many hats in a variety of industries. He got his start at a small marketing agency designing custom WordPress themes. He then moved on to supporting a proprietary CMS built with CodeIgnitor for over one thousand mortgage brokers and lenders, including two of the top 5 nationally ranked lenders in the U.S. And in his most recent position, he created user experiences for Sony, Samsung, HP, and Calvin Klein, and helped build a startup SaaS product in Laravel, which is being used by an advertising agency with the second most Amazon ad spend in the world.

While he enjoys using the latest tech stacks, and on occasion lets himself succumb to shiny object syndrome, he understands and adheres to basic principals of software engineering, and believes the best code ever written is no code at all. He loves semicolons, tabs, open source, good documentation, and designs with lots of whitespace.

When he’s not writing JavaScript, tinkering with dotfiles, hacking on his Raspberry Pi, or starting yet another never-to-be-finished side project, Ryan loves watching the Dodgers, visiting local breweries, goofing off with his fiancée, Kayce, and being a dad to the sweetest, silliest little girl, their daughter, Ava.

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Sergio has been around computers since the age of three. His first computer was an Atari 600XL, followed by an Atari 130XE where later, with the help of his father, he started developing a computer game based on the cartoons of the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote.

After graduating from the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Lisbon with a degree in Computer Science, Sergio started working as a Java developer for banks, insurance companies, and telcos. Always passionate about the web, in 2011 he started working full-time as a web developer and discovered WordPress.

Before joining 10up, Sergio spent four years as a WordPress consultant, working on projects for local broadcasting corporations, retailers, media and newspaper companies.

Sergio is an open-source advocate. You’ll find some of his contributions on GitHub and in the WordPress repository where he has released and maintains some plugins. He is also involved in the Portuguese WordPress community through his attendance at meetups and WordCamps. He was also one of the co-organizers of WordCamp Lisbon 2017.

Outside of work, when he is not spending time with his wife and two kids, is always finding ways to expand his knowledge. He also likes to hang out with friends, play board games, travel and watch TV series and movies.

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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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Shazahan grew up in the quaint city of Rajshahi, Bangladesh before heading off to the capital city, Dhaka where he completed his Diploma in Computer Technology from Dhaka Polytechnic Institute followed by a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Daffodil International University.

Since childhood, Shazahan has been a tech enthusiastic and at the age of 17, he wrote his first computer program. This enthusiasm continued during university studies, where he was an active problem solver at Codeforces, Hackerrank and a URI online judge. His real fascination though was in Web Development and Shazahan can clearly recall creating his first website after a short course in college. It was a simple static website built with very basic HTML & CSS. He enjoyed the whole process so much that It pushed him to further explore other web related languages like PHP, JavaScript.

After graduation in December 2018, he joined Themeum and started working with WordPress. He was given the opportunity to work with some amazing WordPress plugins like, WP Page Builder, Qubely, and Tutor LMS. At Themeum, Shazahan joined as a Web Application Developer but thanks to his outstanding technical skills and leadership qualities, was promoted as Team Lead of Tutor LMS which is the most promising learning management system of WordPress with 30,000+ active installations.

Apart from programming, Shazahan loves to travel and play indoor games like Table Tennis, Foosball. He loves to sing and people around him often get surprised hearing him singing to his heart’s content out of nowhere.

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Stephanie has always loved to create. Whether it is writing music, sewing pillows, or a DIY woodworking project, she finds great joy in creating something from seemingly nothing. With that DIY spirit, Stephanie built her first website at the age of 13. In college, she had the opportunity to study web design and development more formally and went on to graduate summa cum laude from Rider University.

She began her career as a freelancer but soon moved on to a fast-paced, global marketing services firm in 2010 as a frontend developer. Throughout her career, Stephanie has worked for multiple agencies and created custom solutions for a diverse range of clients including Fortune 500 companies and big pharmaceuticals, as well as small law practices and young start-ups. One of her projects even received recognition from the NJ Ad Club taking first place in the category of e-commerce.

Stephanie was born and raised in New Jersey but currently resides in northern Virginia with her husband Darren and their two dogs, Emma and Bailey. She is an active member of the Potomac Curling Club, a yoga practitioner, and a New Jersey Devils hockey fan.

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Sultan attended university to pursue a degree in Mechanical Engineering. While he was in university, he discovered his interest in programming and started learning HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript. He hasn’t looked back since!

Sultan started his freelance career with a few Joomla projects. Later, he was introduced to WordPress thanks to one of those initial projects. From there, he became a fan of WordPress. He has been working with WordPress for over ten years now. Sultan has worked for various companies from small to large worldwide and helped them grow bigger. He enjoys solving problems, troubleshooting issues, and coming up with solutions.

Sultan has contributed to WordPress core codebase & many popular plugins, including WooCommerce, Easy digital downloads, etc. He has developed a couple of WordPress plugins too, which are being used by thousands of sites.

Sultan is a father of three sons. When he is not working, Sultan likes to spend time with his wife and kids, exploring outside with family members, watching movies, and YouTube. He also loves to contribute to open-source projects.

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Thrijith had his initial interactions with WordPress in U.G (2014-2015). When it came time for project submissions, WordPress didn’t interest him much. At the time, he scoffed at the ready-made plugins and themes which could have helped him complete his projects in a shorter amount of time. At that point, for unknown reasons, he didn’t want to take that route, so he opted to build a project using Codeigniter framework.

Fast forward to post completion of a M.Sc.ICT degree from V.N.S.G.U university, when Thrijith began looking for jobs in PHP and was hired as an intern at rtCamp Solutions. It was at rtCamp where he started digging deeper into WordPress projects. He finally realized what goes into making easy and ready made solutions for end users! Since then, he has had the opportunity to work on several projects and also be part of the WordPress community.

After leaving rtCamp, he spent sometime freelancing before making his way to 10up. Over the years, he has developed plugins, committed to the WP-CLI Project, and has also contributed fixes to WordPress core. He’s especially proud of having created a handy tool to manage maintenance mode using WP-CLI.

Before the pandemic Thrijith used to go out with friends to the beach or for bowling, but currently he watches series and has digital hangouts with friends on weekends.

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Tim is a talented designer and frontend engineer that’s worked on the web for over ten years building thoughtful, intuitive, and inclusive user experiences. He loves to share his knowledge by speaking at conferences, writing articles for his blog and other publications, and recording screencasts.

His writing has been featured in industry publications like A List Apart and net Magazine. Tim’s now retired podcast, The East Wing, was nominated for a net Magazine award two years in a row.

After going to college while in high school, Tim got his first web job at eighteen by building his personal portfolio with WordPress. While Tim has worked with many different CMS’ and frameworks, WordPress has always been a vital tool in his tool belt. He’s passionate about design details, performance, and accessibility and strives to approach everything in life with empathy and kindness.

When away from his desk, Tim is brewing coffee, taking pictures, spending time with friends, reading comics, making YouTube videos, watching movies, or working on his tan under the California sun.

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In 2012, Tung was introduced to WordPress. Since then, he has been building websites for clients, from medium e-commerce stores to big online magazines. He has experience in managing multiple websites, optimizing websites speed and extending WooCommerce functionalities. He is a big fan of TypeScript and enjoys writing clean and performant code.

Tung’s biggest WordPress-related accomplishment is rewriting admin-bar.js using only vanilla JavaScript which was merged to WordPress 5.3.1. The second is migrating and running a magazine with over 40k posts to WordPress. He helped create a payment gateway that allows marketplaces to accept payments and pay vendors commissions with Stripe Connect. He is also a Local Manager and General Translation Editor of the Vietnamese WordPress team where he helps translate WordPress into Vietnamese and organizes WordPress meetups.

Tung met 10up when he submitted a PR to the 10up Engineering Best Practices and, subsequently, WP Instructions.

When away from the internet, you can find Tung reading psychology, running, brewing coffee or hanging around craft beer stations.

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Wayne taught himself Atari Basic in grade school and promptly wrote the game of “Yahtzee” during an extended snow holiday from school. Unsure what to study in college, he dropped out his freshman year and ran off to Alaska to work on a commercial fishing vessel. Upon returning to school, he drifted into a Comp. Sci. degree, and spent time before and after graduation working in Southern Germany; first for an Artificial Intelligence research institute, then finally for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

He loves WordPress and has been involved with it in some fashion since the 1.x days. Prior to joining 10up, he spent seven years at an agency in New York’s Hudson River Valley building WordPress sites, mobile apps, and coding JavaScript for frontend and server. Wayne is proud of having swapped out the TinyMCE WP editor for a React-based replacement long before Gutenberg. He is passionate for coding tools & products, automating processes and finding ways to provide a better user-experience in the software and websites he works on.

Outside of work Wayne spends time in outdoor activities around his home in the Catskill Mountains of NY (skiing, snowshoeing, trout fishing, hiking), cooking, bread baking, fermenting vegetables, making hot sauces, and woodworking/crafting — often with a rustic flair.

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Will is a technologist with a long history of creating and developing in the digital media industry. Having worn a number of hats over his career at various agencies he has a keen interest in the meeting of creativity and technology, an interest that has seen him work alongside and consult with many household brands.

Originally self-taught, Will went on to pursue a Bachelors in Information and Computing before embracing a career amid London’s digital agencies, an environment where he championed best practice, accessibility and performance as well as cross-discipline integration. He believes in creating solutions that work for the user first, whilst also supporting the business and teams designing them.

Will is a family man who recently moved to his wife’s home country of France where they enjoy spending time with their two young boys amid the culinary delights of wine country and are now coming to truly appreciate the value of having grandparents nearby.

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Abdullah has completed his Bachelor’s in Software Engineering from GCUF (Government College University Faisalabad). Initially, he started working on C++ and though he completed some educational projects, he still wanted to learn more. He spent some time in ASP.NET as well before eventually shifting to focus on PHP. His final year project was on WordPress and that changed the course of his career!

After graduation, Abdullah kickstarted his career with a company where he dealt with the premium support queries. It didn’t take long and he was promoted to lead in three months. With experience under his belt, he found new employment and stayed with this next employer for around 5 years.

In these 5 years, he had many accomplishments! Abdullah worked on everything from projects to products as a WP Product Veteran. He introduced CMX Connect in Pakistan & organized one of the first successful contributor days at WC Lahore in Pakistan. He is also the AWS Startup Scout Ambassador from Pakistan where he is trying to align Pakistani tech startups in helping to scale businesses with infrastructural support.

In Abdullah’s free time you’ll see him at WordCamps, tech conferences & helping raise money for those less fortunate. He is also fond of cricket & football.

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Ajay graduated with a Bachelor of Computer Science from the University of Mumbai. He has been programming for nearly a decade!

During his college days, he got introduced to WordPress at a WordCamp and his life forever changed. He almost fell in love with WordPress, and since then, he has been a part of Mumbai’s WordPress Community. He has been volunteering and organizing WordCamp Mumbai since 2015.

His professional experience includes designing and implementing web apps, product dashboards, and developing WordPress plugins.
He has also got his hands dirty with Machine Learning and NLP.

When he is AFK, he spends time with his family, cooking, Netflix, or explores local eateries while playing Pokemon Go (yes, he still plays Pokemon Go). If you can quote Friends, you will probably be best friends, everything else is moo.

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Shortly after obtaining their Master’s degree in Computer Technology in Education, Ames joined Wisconsin’s only Macromedia Authorized Training Center, hired as the Lead Trainer for Director, Dreamweaver and Authorware. When they weren’t teaching, they were building Computer Based Training Courseware for Honda of America, Miller Brewing and MLS, all before Content Management Systems, like WordPress, grew in popularity.

In 2002, Ames began their own Computer Training and Development Center, where they trained clients on how to build their own sites, which quickly lead them to explore using WordPress as an easy and quick way to get their sites launched and keep it updated.

Looking for adventure and a change in pace, Ames sold their business, their car and their home and moved to Phuket (Poo-Ket), Thailand to teach STEM in a Bi-Lingual International School for several years.

For the past 5 years, Ames has been involved in developing apps and websites in .Net, Python and React. They have a passion for making sites pixel perfect and responsive, while ensuring the CMS can easily be managed by their clients.

Outside of coding for work, Ames likes tinkering with IoT using Arduinos and Raspberry Pis, cycling, kayaking, mountain biking, camping and all around enjoying nature.

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Technology has been Ankit’s passion ever since he was a young boy. He likes to understand how things work and tries to fix every problem he discovers. In each situation, Ankit finds a way to improve things by his creative thinking. QA is the field where he can show his passion (that’s why he likes it so much). He tries his best everyday to bring smiles and happiness to customers and clients.

Ankit has a Master’s Degree in Computer Applications. He started his career as a computer lecturer at a Delhi based college. To pursue his passion (as mentioned above), he switched to Software Quality Engineering in 2013.

Before joining 10up, Ankit spent 8 years of his professional life with rtCamp and BuddyBoss as a QA Engineer and Team Leader. Both companies also work in the WordPress space.

His mission is to make sure the WordPress experience for everyone is bug-free and friendly. This mission has gotten him ten consecutive contributions to WordPress as a core contributor for every version from WordPress 4.0 to WordPress 4.9 and WordPress 5.5 as well. Not satisfied with just core contributions, Ankit has also contributed to many releases of BuddyPress, bbPress, Translation, WordPress Docs, and WordPress meta sites. He is also an editor and locale manager of the Hindi WordPress Polyglot team.

Ankit loves to speak and share his learning and experience with other people. He has had the opportunity to speak many times in WordCamps and meet-ups related to WordPress and QA.

When not working, Ankit spends his time with his family. Long drives, exploring new places, and photography are some of his favorite hobbies.

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Ben is a web developer and news nerd. His professional WordPress career started with an internship helping a living-history farm move from a Dreamweaver site to WordPress. In college he helped the student paper move from College Publisher 6 to WordPress, broke news, and covered arts. He graduated college with a degree in Agricultural Communications, a minor in plant pathology, and many bylines in the campus paper.

After an internship at a cattle magazine, Ben joined the Institute for Nonprofit News’ tech and product team to build tools for news. Ben worked with a small, remote team, growing from apprentice to lead developer over six years. At INN, Ben helped create and maintain many plugins, including Pym.js Embeds, Super Cool Ad Inserter Plugin, and Trust Indicators. He maintained the Largo parent theme and built sites for dozens of nonprofit newsrooms. He’s also helped organize the Columbus WordPress Meetup and two years of of the WordCamp for Publishers conference.

In his free time, Ben reads, bicycles, and prepares for Halloween.

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In 2015, Darren left his IT job and employer of 24 years to start a new adventure working remotely, while traveling around the world. His journey in QA commenced around this time, working initially on SAAS products built with WordPress. Over the last five years, he has also worked as a QA analyst on an array of high profile WordPress powered websites and plugins.

Personally, he has used WordPress since 2005, when he created an award-winning travel consumer blog, which resulted in him being on TV, radio and quoted in newspapers across the world.

When Darren isn’t bug spotting (software bugs), he is eating, exploring, hiking and capturing it on YouTube, so family and friends back home can keep up with his adventures.

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Eric has been tinkering with web development since 2008. Technology and computers were a passion for him since age 5 when he took his family’s computer apart, much to his parents’ dissatisfaction. 

He graduated from college, where his focus was on graphic design and computer science. He began to merge the two together and started creating websites. In college he created a forum which was used by many of the students to communicate and talk freely. It was not long before Eric found WordPress to be the perfect platform for his exciting web adventures as a freelancer.

Through it all Eric has grown in his skills as a front end engineer, creating all sorts of different sites. Eventually, he began to wear many hats from web designer to front end developer to web consultant and has found himself leading some WordPress based projects from start to finish. 

He created a few starter themes, the latest of which is Ignition, a starter theme that utilizes webpack and the latest javascript technologies that has been downloaded hundreds of times. Recently, he has entered the React world and has been pushing to start creating headless sites with WordPress. 

Eric lives in New York where he tries to be active as much as he can. From working out at the gym, to hanging out with family and friends or playing some online video games where he wishes his javascript skills would somehow be more useful. Eric also loves animals, especially dogs. He is currently trying to write a fantasy novel and hopes to finish it soon.

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Frankie is a Brooklyn, NY native who graduated from Brooklyn College in 2015 with Magna Cum Laude Honors as a Computer Science major. Frankie has 5+ years of experience working as a web developer, specializing in WordPress development and responsible for creating dozens of custom themes and plugins for clients, friends, and family.

Frankie started his professional career as an intern at NPR’s StoryCorps in 2016 and hasn’t looked back since. After rising through the ranks at StoryCorps, he moved on to work at a digital agency called Experience-Interaction, where he had the opportunity to work with well-known clients such as Jose Cuervo, 1800 Tequila, and Mountain Dew.

When Frankie is not programming, he enjoys hanging out with his friends, catching up on the latest streamed television series, and playing sports. Frankie’s favorite sport is bowling, taking part in his high school bowling league and currently holding a personal high score of 297.

Frankie aspires to keep growing both professionally and personally in the years to come and especially looks forward to learning more about WordPress in the future.

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Hugo’s first attempt at programming was an unexpectedly popular mIRC script. After that, the journey continued when he fell in love with HTML/CSS by making his first website at the age of 14.

After spending 4 years studying for a Computer Science degree, Hugo started an introspective journey that led him to live in the south of Chile surrounded by trees, fresh air, and the smell of smoke from the fireplace.

Switching gears, Hugo finished his Bachelor’s, with a focus instead on Graphic Design. Soon after he started to work for a company that uses WordPress as its preferred CMS for projects with different companies and universities. There he learned a lot about the value and potential of WordPress, including the user-centered design and UX/UI. When he became father to an amazing, beautiful boy, he felt awkward going to an office and not spending time with his son, so he decided to resign and start a new life as a Freelance developer.

As a freelancer, Hugo worked on many different projects with companies, universities, non-profit organizations, social movements, and worker unions, many of them using WordPress in different shapes and sizes.

When he started working at Creative Commons he maintained and led improvements to the WordPress development at the organization, helping to architect the open source Design System at the organization, and contributed to building and engaging a thriving open source community.

When Hugo isn’t coding, he spends his time by hanging out with his son, drinking a lot of coffee, improving his gardening skills, and practicing Karate or kickboxing to achieve his zen-like state.

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Ian began his career as a professional web developer in 2008, after working as a web designer & prepress technician. Originally a Graphics major, he started learning CSS & PHP to get a better sense of how the website mockups he was designing would eventually work. This rekindled a childhood love for writing code, and he landed his first UX developer job in 2009. In 2012 he began his career as an WordPress engineer at a VIP partner agency, and has been developing enterprise-scale websites for the platform ever since, including the redesign of People.com, The Brookings Institute, OnBeing, the Guggenheim, and Entertainment Weekly.

As an advocate for open-source, WordPress and distributed work, 10up is a natural fit for Ian, who started in early 2019. His primary focus is developing responsive, performant and accessible user interfaces using both React and traditional PHP & CSS.

Whenever he’s not working, he spends as much time as he can hiking the Catskills, photographing old architecture, training Muay Thai, or exploring the streets of NYC in search of the best tacos, the most authentic dive bars, and the cheapest greasy-spoon diners. He spends the rest of his time living in Brooklyn with his girlfriend and two cats.

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Jacob is passionate about WordPress development though he took a unique journey to get there.

In 2012, after leaving school and dabbling in film and television production, his experience tinkering with WordPress on personal projects as far back as 2005 landed him an entry level position at a boutique web development agency in Sydney.

One of the highlights of working at the agency was starting with an off-the-shelf theme framework and editing live files over FTP. He used his initiative to lead himself and the company to adopt modern development practices like version control, CSS pre processors, HTML5 markup and BEM methodology, and modern JavaScript; all eventually implemented in their very own starter theme that he created.

When his contributions to the WordPress Stack Exchange lead to an opportunity at 10up, he jumped at the chance, thrilled at the possibility of learning from the best.

When not working, he can be found sharpening his skills at the WordPress Stack Exchange, sipping a fine bourbon, watching films, playing video games, or playing with his young nephews.

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Born and raised in the Windy City of Chicago, Jeff is a big city kid whose life has taken him from the midwest to New York City and finally to his current residence in the sunny state of Florida. He has been addicted to technology from the pre-internet days of dialing into BBSes and America Online.

His first taste of web development came when he helped out a friend going through college pursuing a degree in web design; she had trouble grasping the intricacies of CSS, but that came pretty easily to him. This tutoring led him to try out freelancing. WordPress was just starting to become popular, so he became very familiar with quickly building small sites for individuals and small companies. This led to a fulltime career in Front End Development, dabbling across multiple platforms but still specializing in WordPress. He thoroughly enjoys mentoring junior developers on web standards and best practices.

When not obsessing over cleaning up code debt, he likes to spend time outdoors living the beach life. In cooler weather, you’ll find him walking trails in state parks while catching them all in Pokémon Go.

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Jeffrey started freelancing while attending college at Lipa City Colleges, taking gigs where he was building WordPress websites. After obtaining a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science in 2011, he worked at several web agencies where he was able to gain more experience. He learned how to work closely with project managers and other members of development teams while ensuring timely completion of deliverables. During those early agency years, he had many opportunities to work on more complex projects than the initial freelancing work from his college days.

All the while, Jeffrey was (and still is) an avid fan of WordPress and open-source technologies! He started working on several plugins and that intense focus is what led him to quit his job and pursue a career in WordPress plugin development. He’s mainly known for Widget Options, CoBlocks (both sold in 2019), EditorsKit, and Iceberg Editor. He spent about 4 years focused on creating and selling premium WordPress plugins and eventually, working on several Gutenberg Editor open-source projects led him at 10up.

When he’s not coding, Jeffrey usually travels with his wife, binge watches tv series, or walks their dogs in the park.

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While pursuing a degree in Computer Information Systems, John landed an internship at Church and Dwight where he worked for a full year leading up to his graduation. It was during this time that he was introduced to real-world applications of HTML and CSS and he hit the ground running. Shortly after graduation, his first agency job introduced him to WordPress and he soon began focusing on development using the platform.

His experience with WordPress is ever-expanding – he has built multi-purpose themes for NPOs and beauty industry clients, led the development of websites for online education and healthcare providers, and designed and implemented WordPress technical architecture for government clients.

John enjoys collaborating with fellow team members to create efficient practices and processes, as well as introducing new technologies to solve problems and elevate the work of his team as a whole. He prides himself on writing understandable, extensible, and reusable code – a practice which has led to a few of plugin contributions to the WordPress community.

Beyond that, John’s ability to translate complex technical issues in a way everyone can understand makes him an outstanding client partner. He keeps client business needs top-of-mind to create successful approaches for a variety of requests including enhancements, revisions or maintenance needs.

When not at his computer, John likes spending his time outside with his dog. He enjoys skiing in the winter, surfing in the summer, and riding his bike or camping anytime in between.

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By the time József was thirteen, his curiosity led him to create his own web page. He knew that this was the beginning of something great. After he finished his studies, József moved to a hosting/IT solutions company. He was introduced to WordPress and his interest in Cybersecurity peaked. After he successfully received his Certified Ethical Hacker certificate, he transitioned to a company where he could combine his system engineering skills with his security-oriented mind. He suddenly became a Security Engineer.

József has mastered skills like vulnerability scans, server and end-user security, security best practices, and threat modeling. He enjoys hobby projects and learning new methodologies.

When he is not in front of his computer, József likes to hit the gym or cook. He is a big fan of eating and enjoying local handcrafted beers. He also loves playing video games—specifically Dota 2 and Hearthstone.

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Michele started building websites as a freelancer in 2003 in Italy, while attending University and has been building websites as a hobby for over 15.

His interest in design and development grew in step, at that period the two figures coincided and, moved by the interest in human-computer interaction, he became a professional full-stack developer.

He understood the potential of WordPress already from the early releases and a few years later joined NTTData as WordPress Specialist where he has been able to work on the largest Italian enterprise projects (telecommunications company, banks, media and e-commerce for large retailers).

When he’s not working on code, you can usually find Michele playing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Grappling, traveling and spending time with his family in Tuscany.

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Mohsin graduated with distinction from COMSATS University as a Software Engineer in 2007 and started his career as a Junior System Administrator. He is a well trained certified System Administrator with a decade of successful experience in web hosting industry.

Prior to joining the 10up family, Mohsin developed his rock-star skills with world renowned web hosting brands where he quickly established himself in lead roles. Because of his outstanding performance, Mohsin gradually got promoted and rose through the ranks. Thanks to the good work in his previous roles, he won best staff of quarterly year multiple times during his tenure in Arvixe LLC.

A calculated risk-taker with deep tech industry knowledge , Mohsin has never let go of his passion for technology. He is always eager to learn new technologies in the industry and has good hands on experience in virtualization technologies. He loves hunting suspicious processes, handling DDOS attacks and enjoys performing security/performance audits.

He not only enjoys helping WordPress customers with plug-ins, themes, customization, and performance tweaking but also love teaching customers how to solve for their problems.

When not working, Mohsin, a food lover, enjoys cooking food for his family. He enjoys traveling to explore nature and try food from different regions of the country. He loves being the part-time mechanic of his 4 years kid’s work – they have fun together repairing broken stuff.

Mohsin is crazy about horse riding and he loves to spend time in riding club to learn more control.

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Neil is a devoted Front End Engineer that has over ten years of experience designing and building meaningful online experiences. After graduating from North-West University (SA) in 2006 with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Graphic Design, he developed a clear interest in web development. Today, entirely self-taught, Neil focuses on front end development and has a passion for open-source platforms and new technologies.

Neil spent his entire career in advertising as both a UI/UX designer and engineer. He cultivated a library of knowledge at many award-winning South African and top international agencies such as TBWA and Ogilvy, earning several national and international awards. His years in the industry have nourished a wealth of experience throughout all stages of the design and development process, empowering him to understand interactive design and bridging the gap between design and development (design for code).

Early on, Neil further discovered his entrepreneurial drive, starting his first company, Columinate, with two friends in 2008. For the next few years, Columinate continued to grow and quickly became rated as one of Africa’s best marketing research agencies. However, Neil decided to leave the company in 2010 to continue his passion for development and digital marketing. Today, Columinate has left its footprint globally, having been acquired by InSites Consulting in 2018.

In 2014, Neil founded Gapshift, which offered various digital services on an overflow model to some of SA’s top-rated media houses and brands, exposing him to a diverse clientele network.

Over the last three years, Neil gravitated towards WordPress, reinforcing his development knowledge – specifically in custom WordPress theme development. He played a leading role in facilitating the rollout of a custom theme for one of Africa’s largest telecommunication companies, MTN. This effort enabled the client to create and distribute unique component-based websites to over 40 branches scattered across Africa.

Apart from his passion for development, Neil is also well equipped in After Effects, enabling him to stir his creativity and knack for animation and video post-production.

Outside of work, Neil loves being mesmerized by a campfire and the sounds of nature while treasuring the time he spends with his wife, children, and family. When he is not lazing on the couch with a good book, you’ll find him out on the road training as an avid ultra-distance runner and occasional cyclist. He also thoroughly enjoys the adrenaline rush of watching Formula 1.

When he’s not running, he is flying! Or at least he shares an enthusiasm for aviation, still holding onto that memory of landing a real plane for the first time.

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Nick is a web developer and tinkerer of all things technology-related. Everything he owns must be customized or modified, –especially if it has an API. Nick has been a speaker at various WordPress and web-related events talking about extending the capabilities of WordPress.

Prior to joining 10up, Nick worked with a remote company providing fullstack development to some large, important, non-profits and helped them to obtain their substantial dreams and goals.

Nick started his journey into the web as a kid with a dial-up modem and a PC. He got his start learning different web languages and technologies by stealing front-end code from sites he liked, modifying it, and adding it to add to his own website. Nick went on to learn design at a local community college, realized he had a knack for debugging and problem-solving and ended up working in the schools programming lab to assist students and teachers. He moved onto freelancing and got a sub-contracting job doing WordPress development and began learning all the ways he could extend WordPress.

In his freetime Nick enjoys exploring the various deserts of New Mexico with his family, reading about information security, and making noise with his musical instruments.

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Oscar got involved with technology when he was 12 years old. Spending many moons and sunrises in technology forums during his high-school years, he developed a love for computers and the internet since its puberty. Although he formerly studied sociology as a major, he never left his love for technology. While in college, he worked in IT for the Economics Investigation Center and the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Mexico. Eventually, he joined the Complex Systems group at the Interdisciplinary Investigation Center and learned to code.

Introduced to WordPress by a good friend, he quickly fell in love with the WordPress community and decided to develop full time.

Since then, he has released three plugins in the WordPress repository, as well as contributed to WordPress projects like AMP for WordPress, Jetpack, 10ups simple-page-ordering plugin and many more.

Outside of WordPress, he enjoys going out to meet new people and goofing with his friends. Throwing some back-flips at the local park while enjoying the looks of strangers also fits his interests well.

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Pablo started his career as a web designer in early 2010. As a web designer, he discovered the rush of good feelings from solving problems when coding. He forced himself to place the bar slightly higher with each new project he worked on and eventually landed in the WordPress world.

One of the first WordPress projects Pablo had collaborated on involved all kinds of advanced WordPress concepts and techniques (unknown to him at that moment) which forced him to rapidly adapt and learn, since then, he has been in love with WordPress.

Pablo is proud to say he worked for Publicis-Impetu (Publicis partner in Uruguay) and collaborated on several award winning digital projects during his time there. His career trajectory includes both time with digital agencies and freelance. Regardless of the format, Pablo enjoys working with clients and helping them make the best decisions for project heath and longevity.

Not too long ago, Pablo decided to apply to 10up after using one of our public repos on GitHub and the rest is history!

During his free time, when he is not walking Afro and Lerón (his dogs), he likes to spend time doing Woodworking or DIY projects.

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When he was only 14 years old, Ramon taught himself how to build and publish a website. This was his first contact with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and… FTP. Over the years, his interest in computers never waned and thus he got a master’s degree in Computer Science.

Ramon is passionate about contributing to open source projects. Specifically, he has been deeply involved in the WordPress community for many years. He has worked as a plugin and theme developer specializing in the WordPress platform. Outside of work hours Ramon is a core and meta contributor, and Brazilian Local Manager and Forums Keymaster.

When Ramon is away from the computer, he can be found playing guitar or video games, reading a book, listening to music, or watching a movie. He loves to travel and spend time with his wife.

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Raquelle comes from a long line of computer programmers who worked all over the world in the fields of video games, educational software, and classified technology. She found computer science working on premed studies in quantitative biology. Ever curious about logic and the connection the internet allows, she went into web development in 2013.

She has worked with nonprofits, hospitals, major airlines, world-class amusement parks, and international clients, with extra enthusiasm for empowering companies that are ethical and purposeful. Accessibility and user experience are at the forefront of each development project.
She has contributed to open source tools for WordPress that allow for better practices in development, and joining the front end team at 10up will allow her to focus on contributing to WordPress core and making the internet a more accessible platform for all.

Raquelle is drawn to problem solving, whether it’s a coding challenge within a project or making code animations for personal pleasure. When not behind a computer screen, you can find her rock climbing in the mountains of Peru, floating in the Dead Sea in Israel, upside down in handstand classes or hiking to bodies of water with her pup for a swim.

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Sajjad graduated with distinction from Comsats Institute of Information Technology Islamabad (Pakistan) as a Computer Engineer in 2007 and began his career as a Junior System Administrator. Since then, Sajjad has won several performance awards and has held many different roles. He finds enjoyment in catching malicious attacks and spamming activity and has great hands on experience in virtualization technologies.

Sajjad considers himself a calculated risk-taker. While holding numerous positions and a wide range of responsibilities can be demanding, Sajjad has never let go of his passion for technology and willingness to learn new things in modern cloud technologies. He enjoys helping WordPress customers with plug-ins, themes, customizations, and integrations.

When he is not working, Sajjad loves to travel and explore nature with his wife and daughter. Mountaineering and trekking are his passion. He likes to spend hot summer days in a cool, peaceful place enjoying delicious food with his family.

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Sanket has completed his Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology from DDIT (Dharmsinh Desai Institute of Technology). During his study, he started working on ASP.NET framework and he completed a couple of projects. But after his study, he shifted his career with PHP. He always says that PHP is so simple that anyone can learn it from scratch.

At the beginning of his career, Sanket started to explore Magento. He has done some theme integrations and styling in Magento. His introduction to coding was through PHP and got involved deeper with the WordPress world. In the last 5+ years, he has worked on many enterprise level clients. He has contributed to WordPress ( Core Development + Translation ) and many other open source projects, created some plugins as well. He is also one of the organisers for WordCamp Pune.

When Sanket gets some free time from work, he travels mostly on his bike, listens to music, watches TV series or movies, goes swimming. He loves cricket and often goes to play.

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As a Quality Assurance Specialist, Severine explores website functionalities to ensure the best product is delivered to users.

Severine’s early career started in France within the Media, TV and Film industry. With a Master’s degree in Production, she worked on movie sets, in television and in public relations. With this experience, she eventually moved to Canada to oversee challenging projects in the Digital Entertainment and Interactive industry.

Using her critical and analytical mind, she was able to manage teams focused on delivering major film projects, building up a reputation for meeting tough deadlines.

Strong from this managerial experience, she joined a healthcare software project as a Business Analyst. As part of the QA team, she tested software solutions that are now being used to improve the workflow in hospitals. At the time, her role was to represent the stakeholders and always put their requirements in the forefront, while testing the platform and writing detailed documentation.

With this new QA passion found, her natural tendency to problem solve and a testing certification from ISTQB, she freelanced to help numerous companies release high quality websites in hospitality, gaming, tourism and finances. This lead her to create detailed test plans, perform functional and exploratory testing for Fortune 500 companies.

Her superpower is being able to understand the bigger picture to run specific routine inspections and quality tests.

Severine defines herself as a citizen of the World after living in various cities in Europe, Oceania and North America. When she is not studying new frameworks, you can find her reading scripts and watching movies.

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Ever since he was a child, Syed wanted to become an engineer and craft houses just like his father. However, by the time he transitioned from lad to man, he realized that computers ate most of his time, sparking that little geek inside him. He pursued his passion for computers by completing his Bachelors in Computers Applications.

Syed started his professional journey with GE as a Technical Support Engineer soon after completing his graduation and continued to grow stronger in the same domain. Later in his career, he moved into Deloitte and transitioned through various roles like Trainer, Reporting Specialist, Knowledge Manager, ITSM Operations and WebTrends Engineer. He bagged the “Author Award” twice to become the author of the highest number of knowledge documents on the Service Desk in Deloitte. He was also blessed with the number 1 rating every year for five years consecutively.

While working with WebTrends, Syed started to explore web analytics avenues and bumped into Google Analytics. To get hands-on with Google Analytics, he needed to have a website. At this point, Syed came face-to-face with WordPress and it opened a gateway to a whole new web development world. He taught himself to build with WordPress and started building websites on WordPress for friends and family. He completed diverse WordPress website projects for small companies and non-profit organizations. Every interaction with WordPress encouraged him to do more. He decided to provide his services for free to local NGOs to get more opportunities to explore WordPress.

Syed loves to spend time with his six-year-old drama queen daughter and cook for his wife when he is off work. Some of his favorite activities to pass the time are developing excel/google-sheets training videos on YouTube, contributing photos on UnSplash, volunteer on Google Crowdsource, and Maps.

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Tina has been building websites for over a decade. Her love for the web started with a strong focus on visual design that quickly evolved into a passion for all things front-end development. She loves to work at the sweet spot you can find at the intersection of design and code.

After completing her MS in Media Technology, Tina got her career start working for the University of Pittsburgh where she built over 15 websites for the university and standardized the web process for the development team.

Next, she moved on to a local agency where she spent over 5 years leading the web development efforts and launching websites for nationally known CPG brands like Nestle, J.M. Smucker, Pinnacle, and Premier Nutrition, as well as many higher education clients.

When Tina is not spending time with her husband and son, you can usually find her outside walking, kayaking on Lake Erie, or planning her next climbing trip.

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The first 10 years of Treighton’s career were in construction management where he got his first taste of coding by designing systems that automated many of the paper based processes involved in managing construction projects.

After that he was hooked! So in 2015, he left construction to learn web development, where he started working with WordPress to build solutions for many local business and state commissions based in Sacramento, CA. Treighton has been using WordPress pretty much his whole career in web development and has given talks a WordCamp Sacramento on the use of version control and decoupled front ends.

After years of using of 10up’s engineering best practices site to guide his own development, Treighton decided it was time to reach out and try to join the team, and hey it worked!

Outside of engineering, he is an aspiring photographer, avid fitness and nutrition enthusiast, video game admirer, reader / listener, and game developer.

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Trey is a lover of all things technology, having started his technology journey in the late 90s by breaking family computers. As soon as he got his hands on an internet connection he became fascinated with building websites. After several career paths and while attending the Culinary Institute of Michigan, Trey was given an opportunity to work at Longerdays.com working on WordPress sites for their virtual assistance clients.

Trey quickly realized that he loved this work. He immediately changed his major from Culinary Arts to Web Development, later working at a local marketing agency and then freelancing for a year. In 2015 he was offered a job with Red Ventures in Charlotte, NC. Moving to Charlotte provided him three years working as a Front End Developer on Red Ventures Partnerships. Then, wanting a change and a move back to Michigan, he took a new role as Software Engineer with Red Ventures at Bankrate.com in Detroit where he’s been for the last two years.

During his time at Red Ventures, Trey used WordPress in a variety of implementations at the enterprise level, ranging from traditional custom WordPress themes and plugins to entirely proprietary solutions. Later working at Bankrate using WordPress to help manage Bankrate’s massive amount of editorial content.

Trey is excited to be joining the 10up team as a Front End Developer. He is interested in strengthening his core skills as a developer and using WordPress in new and interesting ways, and getting a chance to continue developing his React skills.

Outside of web development, Trey juggles a wide array of hobbies including: table top games, music production, technical theater, 3D printing, video games, and golf. He has worked as a volunteer on the Michigan Irish Music Festival for 16 years, the majority of that time as a Production Team Lead and manager of the events main stage.