About us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Christian has been active in the web industry for over 10 years, filling diverse roles encompassing everything from project management to backend programming. He got his start at an agency building small marketing websites for small to medium sized businesses using WordPress. He quickly set himself apart and was given the opportunity to come on as an engineering consultant for several large companies in the healthcare and travel industries using WordPress.

After a few years of consulting, Christian joined a prestigious WordPress centric agency, Lift UX, as a backend developer. Here he was able to concentrate fully on providing robust engineering solutions to major enterprise media companies. As the backend engineer of this user experience design company, Christian embraced newer Javascript technologies like React and Angular to push WordPress into new and uncharted territory. After 2 years with Lift UX, he joined the 10up team through an acquisition.

When Christian isn’t writing code, he is out hiking, kayaking, fishing, and enjoying the beach lifestyle in sunny Clearwater, Florida with his fiancée and their dog.

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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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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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Joe has many years of experience planning, crafting, testing, and maintaining websites – primarily utilizing WordPress as a CMS. Joe began working in the digital space in the early 90’s while at the University of Washington. After college, his passion for web technologies was fueled behind the scenes during careers that were not necessarily technical. Even then, Joe was consistently working in IT and digital marketing – building websites during the table-layout days and using social media before it was a term.

In 2010, Joe followed his passion for web development and ‘sharpened his blade’ by taking courses in Digital Marketing Strategies, Internet Design, and Interactive Producer at Portland State University. As a Senior Front End Developer at the agency level, Joe led an internal charge to evolve processes, systems, tools, and web performance. He successfully implemented new concepts including responsive, mobile-first, and content-first design; Grunt; BEM; atomic design principles; iterative processes; style tiles; and web-based style guides and pattern libraries.

When Joe isn’t deep in code crafting websites or learning new web technologies, his primary life passion is his family. He enjoys outings with his wife Michelle, including wine tasting in Oregon’s Dundee Hills. His biggest joy is often found through the pride he has in watching his daughters, Shaena and Emma, tackle the journey of life. He is a rabid fan and season ticket holder of the Portland Timbers and follows many other favorite sports teams. Joe also enjoys camping, hiking, skiing, video games, and spending time with the family dog, Ruby.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Tyler first began programming in high school, and it quickly grew into a great love. He has worked on all types of WordPress sites—from simple marketing sites to large enterprise solutions. He loves to solve complex business problems with simple-to-understand code.

Tyler graduated from the University of South Florida with a degree in Management Information Systems. While learning Java in college, he taught himself WordPress and PHP, and began working on diverse pro bono projects. Before joining 10up, Tyler worked for various WordPress agencies as well as a medical device manufacturer where he built WordPress sites and led Salesforce development. He is passionate about security, usability, and performance in everything he creates and is excited to bring that passion to 10up.

When not coding, Tyler enjoys spending time with his family and teaching others about the power of programming.

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Some would say Zachary has been a Systems Engineer since he decided to take apart the family computer back in middle school. Before discovering WordPress, Zachary created a content management system for the Kentucky Mesonet where he learned the ins and outs of MySQL and PHP. In 2010, he discovered WordPress during a 14 month stay in Africa where he used the platform to keep a journal and share his experiences with friends back home. Since turning his attention to WordPress, he has built scalable WordPress implementations for a diverse range of customers. The constant innovation within the WordPress community and the unique infrastructure challenges each customer brings keeps Zachary excited about logging on every day. 

As Director of Systems Engineering, Zachary focuses on the infrastructure side of WordPress, establishing high scale, high performance, high security implementations whose environments range from single shared hosts, to high scale, multi-datacenter implementations. Zachary is 10up’s go to for WordPress security, systems performance optimization, and general maintenance. Zachary also serves as a Web Strategist, providing project management services primarily for customers with significant systems requirements and in general maintenance and support states.

Zachary has a Master’s degree in Meteorology from the North Carolina State University and he brings the same rigorous attention to detail to his work with WordPress as he did his thesis work on hurricanes. When not at the command line, Zachary enjoys cycling, buffalo wings, and any activity that happens in the ocean. He can often be found frequenting the many food trucks of Portland with his dog.

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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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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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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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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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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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Antonio started toying with websites back when phpBB was something and it wasn’t long before he got hooked into making websites come alive. Community taught, he started to gain experience with Java, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and decided that Front End Engineering was going to be his focus.

He crafted a real-time tool to manage calls and agents back when there was no Angular or React. After getting some experience, he decided to move to London with his family for some time to expand his career. After a brief gig on a gambling company, he worked at a big agency where he had the chance to work with clients such as Google and Microsoft. Working on the Google promotion with Star Wars or Google Summer of Code revamp (among others), gave him invaluable experience in making websites fast and accessible for everyone. He started to share his knowledge within the company and delivered some talks about Accessibility and how to make it part of your day-to-day toolkit.

After his second daughter was born he moved back to Seville, Spain, where he continued working remotely for a different agency. Doing work for Lean In, he helped enhance storytelling to teach about how women are treated differently and raise social awareness. Antonio also had the opportunity to work brands like Billboard and Facebook – he was even part of the recent Billboard redesign. He managed the Front End team and set the basis for the team to grow. He’s been always a WordPress lover. At one time, he had a fansite for a famous video game made with WordPress. Lately, as a developer, he has grown to love WordPress more, especially with Gutenberg which gives a lot of power back to the user.

When he’s not working he likes to read some fantasy, watch any TV Show, play some video games or be with his wife and daughters.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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Jared’s career in digital started as a UX/UI designer. After enrolling in a Media Design and Technology program on a whim, he ended up earning a full-ride, graduating with honors, and on a mission to deeply understand the mechanics of how the web worked.

Due to the interactivity and rich user experience, Jared was initially drawn to Flash ActionScript. In 2011, when the switch to HTML5 became more necessary, JavaScript became the natural choice. Rather than investing too much time into any specific framework and/or library, he chose to learn the underlying language. This has proven to be the single best decision of his career and has allowed him to build highly dynamic fullstack solutions, such as a WordPress S.P.A. themes in nearly all major JS libraries/frameworks. While JS will always be his favourite high-level language, he has recently added a low-level/systems language to his repertoire, Rust, adding to his passion to create performant software for on and off the web.

Hailing from Cape Town, South Africa, he has had the privilege of building WordPress solutions for many of the major South African publishing brands including Men’s Health, Women’s Health, and News24. Jared has led the build of several turn-key solutions including a DFP plugin, drag-and-drop post ranking tool, multiple Gutenberg Blocks and hundreds of scalable WordPress sites.

As a new US resident, Jared now lives in Kentucky with his wife and their three children (two human, one canine). When not at his computer, he’s probably drinking an obscene amount of coffee and chasing one of the aforementioned kids, with the occasional dabble in woodworking or honing his intermediate gardening skills.

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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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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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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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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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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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Aleksander is a UI focused Engineer with a strong design background. Having started his professional career at 17 years old as a graphic designer, he quickly became passionate about digital design. After few years he specialized in UI/UX Design and decided to go further and started to practice Web Development with focus on UI Engineering. Not surprisingly, it all started with WordPress. In 2015, at the first stage of his career as an independent Front-End Engineer he delivered small projects for individuals and companies incorporating WordPress as a core of their websites. In the meantime he added Vue.js and Nuxt.js to his tech stack, willing to have more flexibility and effectiveness in developing UIs.

After 3 years of working as a freelancer, he founded newfantastic — a boutique software house that focused on developing eCommerce PWAs with Vue Storefront, the most popular Front-End framework for Headless eCommerce. In 2019 he managed to achieve Core Partner status by contributing to Open Source repositories and being active member of Vue Storefront community. Over the course of 2 years, he delivered a handful of eCommerce PWAs for European brands.

Having worked with Vue Storefront he was inspired to try to work out a similar solution for WordPress. He wanted to enable Vue.js developers to work with WordPress as a Headless CMS, putting REST API as an external data source for their Vue/Nuxt apps. As a result he had co-created Vue WordPress as an experimental Open Source project. After more than half of decade, Aleksander has included multiple technologies into his tech stack with Svelte, Vue.js and Storybook being his favourite Front-End technologies while still having WordPress as his first-choice CMS/Back-End technology.

In his free time he loves skateboarding, playing piano or guitar, and taking his whippet and polish greyhound to parks & forests together with his girlfriend.

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Alex is passionate about creating. Be it art, puzzles, web development, tools, or writing. He began his first steps in web designing at the age of 15, selling products on the most popular premium WordPress marketplace. In his earliest days, he has been through building Analog-looking clock in Pascal, C++, C programs and basic scripting, all leading to his love for all things web — new CSS technologies, React, Houdini APIs, 3D renders and more.

Alex began his career as a designer, turned into a front-end developer, then into project and team lead. Having been in the WordPress community since 2012, he made his first core contributions a few years later. Alex has been helping and advising businesses to grow their web presence and help their editorial and marketing team meet their goals.

Alex joins 10up after eight years of previous experience at a European WordPress agency. The drive for further growth and work with top-tier clients led him to join the 10up team, where he puts all the detail into crafting ever-growing and improving products, websites, and tools.

Alex has built several open-source themes in the WordPress Repository, has several patches to the WordPress Core, and security-related contributions to the WordPress.org website. Had several talks in WordPress Meetups.

In his spare time, Alex is working on more content for his blog, working on guides and videos, occasionally streaming and practicing his drawing, guitar or chess skills. Previously participated in international cycling races and became a top 5 country-wide track sprinter.

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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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Arafat is from Bangladesh, a small, lush green country in South Asia. Originally a WordPress evangelist, he has been working in React and React Native since the introduction of ES6 which ignited his love for the JavaScript.

He was born in a rural village in the flatlands of the country but he has moved all over the country in his formative years due to the peripatetic nature of his fathers job. He was drawn to technology and the internet in his desire to keep in touch with his friends from all over the country.

Arafat came across WordPress when he wanted to create a personal blog and he fell in love immediately with it. In a couple of years he was proficient in various parts of WordPress and had starting doing some freelance work while studying for his Computer Science degree. Once Arafat graduated, he worked full time as an associate instructor in a local polytechnic college and as a web and app developer at software agencies.

Eventually he made his way to 10up to be a part of 10up JavaScript Engineering Team.

Outside of work, he likes to spend his time by creating and maintaining open source libraries and playing PC games with his friends. While away from keyboard, he likes to spend time with his cats. If he’s not home, you’ll probably find him in a local tea stall talking with his friends about programming, tech and gaming.

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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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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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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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Chris started playing around with websites way back, when platforms like Geocities and MySpace were the platforms to be on. Learning the basics of HTML, designing with table layouts and overzealousness of the marquee tag, he soon discovered a keen interest in building things in the digital world.

In 2010, Chris decided to leave his current employment and made the jump to being a self employed web developer, following a dream to be a web developer from those earlier days. He gave himself 3 months to study and get up to speed with the front-end. Amazingly and luckily he landed himself a remote developer role for a web agency in Halifax, Nova Scotia and was then introduced to WordPress.

Since then Chris hasn’t taken his foot off the gas, and has worked with many clients, small and large, building solutions for WordPress which make it do anything and everything other than being a simple blogging platform.

In his previous role as Senior WordPress Developer for a leading UK web agency, he oversaw and developed complex integrations involving third party APIs, large data migrations and custom plugin development. His best work saw him combining Vue.js and WooCommerce, bringing together his passion for high performance front-ends with the fantastic extensibility of WordPress as a CMS.

When he’s not at his desk or reading yet another JavaScript book, Chris is Dad to a little boy and enjoys spending as much time as possible in the outdoors, exploring nature, attempting to be a photographer and generally being a little bit silly.

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Clayton is an PADI open water dive instructor, budding real estate investor, aspiring wine connoisseur, two-time high school hockey state champion coach, husband to an amazing wife, and fur-dad to a precious labrador retriever. He is a proud graduate of Jesuit College Prep and Southern Methodist University; both in his hometown of Dallas, Texas. His degree is a Bachelor of Fine Arts where he concentrated in making wheel-thrown, functional ceramics after the rigors of Computer Science got the best of him.

Prior to joining 10up, he started building websites in 2008 as a way to work abroad for a Fiji Island Dive Resort, then a non-profit organization in Eastern Africa, and lastly, a local Dallas art collection. It was not until 2015 that he landed his first agency job building websites for small law firms. His mother, father, and brother are all attorneys in the Dallas area so it was an easy entrance into the industry through a local marketing agency. It was at this company that he started to build a suite of themes and plugins tailored specifically for law firms. For the past seven years, Clayton has been building, molding, and honing this codebase–it’s his baby; his pride and joy; and sometimes his tormenter as many creators can attest to.

Outside of 10up, Clayton loves to invest in rental properties, play and coach ice hockey (go Stars!), go on long walks with his dog, Mochi, eat delicious Chinese food, and drink big bold reds from California. Dislikes include working in an office and driving to said office in rush hour traffic. When not coding, he and his wife, Lizzie, enjoy walking to many of their favorite shops, restaurants, and parks.

Clayton’s biggest WordPress accomplishment was submitting a single line of code to version 5.5.1. His addition was adding “local” to the list of available environment types. It might not be much, but it’s honest work!

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Crisoforo graduated with a Bachelors of Information Systems and Technology from the University Anahuac. He has spent over eight years as a professional software engineer and almost eleven years on the web.

Crisoforo has worked with a variety of clients crafting different solutions to resolve clients needs. He’s done work with mobile applications, background jobs, APIs, applications architecture, data migrations and full site redesigns translating client requirements into actual code.

Crisoforo was part of the team that was in charge of migration of The Events Calendar UI into the new blocks UI using Gutenberg and has been involved with Gutenberg block since before the merge into WordPress core.

When Crisoforo is not in front of a computer he enjoys going outside to capture the landscape or the sunset using a camera and his 34mm lens.

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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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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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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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Gabriel is a multidisciplinary problem-solver obsessed with creative solutions and discovering the “why” behind everything. Gabriel began their journey as a drafter and painter, studying visual art and art history before going on to obtain their BFA in Graphic Design in 2014. An obsession with the technical side of design inevitably led them to web development, and a job working as a web designer and developer at Mark&Phil, a nonprofit-focused web agency in Poughkeepsie, New York.

It was at Mark&Phil that Gabriel became involved in the Hudson Valley tech community, working alongside local leaders to establish the Hudson Valley Tech Meetup, an organization that now has over 3,000 members and hosts bi-monthly talks in the Hudson Valley region of New York.

Not long after, Gabriel would continue on to work at another agency. They quickly established themselves as a thought leader in front-end development at the company, developing sites for Fortune 500 companies while taking ownership of a codebase powering over 1,000 web properties. A firm believer that the internet can be both beautiful and accessible, Gabriel’s work has earned numerous MarCom Awards while being built for accessibility at all levels.

Gabriel lives in Troy, New York and spends much of their time outdoors mountain biking, hiking, and swimming. They love 70s–90s cinema, video games, good sci-fi novels, and their spoiled rotten cat, Adelaide. When not at home or outdoors, Gabriel volunteers with the various trail conferences throughout the Hudson Valley—such as the NYNJ Trail Conference—working to build and maintain hiking and biking trails.

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Holding a master’s degree in Cultural Policy, Management, and Communication and a bachelor’s degree in Communication, Media, and Culture, Giorgos (if you find it hard to pronounce, call him George) should have been a journalist or work for some Greek museum. Instead, after a very brief career in journalism, he became a consultant specializing in Information Architecture of websites, portals, and web applications. At the same time, writing code always intrigued him, and what started as a hobby eventually became his full-time job.

Before joining 10up, he had been a remotely working freelancer for more than a decade, developing custom themes and plugins for WordPress. Over the years, he had the opportunity to familiarize himself with every step of building a website, from requirement analysis and project management to content management and frontend and backend development. A long time ago, there were even a few small projects where he did the design and copywriting.

That helped him realize how important it is for a programmer to get into the shoes of others, creating experiences that are user-friendly and pleasant not just to the visitors of the web app but also to the people who manage it. A firm supporter of the idea of lifelong learning, he is in a constant learning mode, trying to improve his skills and acquire new, on both the professional and personal level.

In his free time, Giorgos enjoys consuming stories, whether it is literature, movies, or TV shows. He also likes to watch football (call it soccer, if you live on the other side of the ocean) and basketball, loves writing, and will always make time to work on some side project.

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Hussain is a JavaScript enthusiast and enjoys working with serverless technologies. He is the co-founder of a WordPress agency and has been one of the early adopters of WordPress as a headless CMS, with React and React Native as his preferred front-end choices.

One of Hussain’s key achievements was the creation of a booking portal for a popular adventure park in the Middle East. The project involved the integration of an offline ticketing kiosk with the WooCommerce-based online booking site. The availability of booking slots was displayed in real-time. His work helped the adventure park earn $100,000 through online sales in the first year.

Hussain was part of an effort to build annotation tools for a legal research platform. The front end used React, and data was obtained through a WordPress backend. Although the project didn’t launch in the market, it helped make complex problem solving second nature for him.

At his stint at Capbase, he was the first employee to have worked on major features like company contracts, bank account integrations, cap table, fundraising SAFEs, and priced rounds. His contribution helped the company raise seed funds and boost hiring.

Hussain hasn’t restricted his skills to the JavaScript ecosystem — He’s also worked with languages like PHP, ASP.NET, Java, and AWS Serverless technologies like Lambda, Amplify, AppSync, DynamoDB and others.

When not working, Hussain is fond of learning and teaching various programming skills. His sons in primary school are learning from Scratch thanks to his inspiration, pun intended.

When stepping away from the keyboard, Hussain loves spending time with family and friends, going on long drives, and treating his taste buds with great food.

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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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John began his career in QA over 9 years ago when he did a side project testing the interface at the car rental company he was working for and he decided “I enjoy this much more than what I am currently doing”. That enjoyment allowed John to build the foundation for a successful career.

Most of his time has been spent working with an ad agency where he has done both retail and loyalty landing pages, complex CMS Rewards Sites, or high volume emails. Testing on all sorts of platforms such as desktop, mobile, and applications working with his team to get the project done correctly and on time. He is looking forward to diving into word press and beginning the next step in his career at 10up.

During his free time you are very likely to find John spending time at his golf course with his wife Matti. Xbox and golf! Cartoons and golf! Working out in his garage gym and then… you guessed it, golfing in his garage! With all of the time John has put in at the golf course he can proudly say he has gone from not very good to totally average. If you find yourself in Minnesota, reach out! He would love to take you out to play 9!

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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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Luiz was born in a small city in the northeast of Brazil and realized his passion for computers when he was very young. When he was only 17, he moved himself to another city, Mossoró, to attend a local university. He graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science. Following his bachelor’s degree, he also went on to receive an MS in Computer Science at UFERSA, a Brazilian Federal University.

After completing his MS, Luiz started his career as a software engineer at UFERSA, where he built different kinds of features that were used by more than 10,000 students. He also became the Director of Systems Engineering and managed the entire team for about a year. While working at the university, he enrolled in a React course from an American educational company and he fell in love with the JavaScript world! After completing the course he was hired by the same company to work as a freelance project reviewer to provide the students technical reviews about JavaScript, React, and React Native.

He decided to leave the university and moved on to an American agency where he spent over a year mostly creating the frontend of web apps and mobile apps for different customers of the company with React and React Native. Eventually, Luiz made his way to 10up to be a part of the JavaScript Engineering Team and he plans to use those skills to build delightful experiences for the final users of our customers.

In his spare time, Luiz loves walking and running in Brasilia’s public parks or watching movies or TV series with his wife, Jamila. He plans to take his little boy “Dudu” to take a bike ride at the city park when he gets a little older (he was born a few weeks ago). He also enjoys meeting his friends, having some good food and wine, and talking about life and happiness. He truly believes that we can make the world a better place through technology use!

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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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Marco is located in a tourism hot-spot in Colombia: Cartagena de Indias. When he’s not at the computer, he’s brewing the perfect cup of coffee, or driving through the twisties on his motorcycle. In Cartagena, he managed a team of designers and engineers in the leading creative agency in the city, where he was the Director of Engineering until he decided to go freelance.

Marco’s web development experiences come from early 2003 when he first started crafting websites using Microsoft FrontPage with plain HTML and CSS, slowly transitioning to PHP, and later on integrating his work into the WordPress ecosystem. One of his biggest accomplishments was the creation of Cryptocurrency NewsFeed in 2017, the first real-time newsfeed for cryptocurrency investors based in WordPress, where they had thousands of people signed up, and later was acquired by BraveNewCoin. Later, Marco skipped programming for a year to join Toptal as the Community Lead where he managed the online community of Toptal with more than 5000 people around the globe.

He decided to join 10up in a pursuit of a career using the technologies he loves, while contributing to open-source, after being a freelance engineer for almost a decade.

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Mehul is a tech enthusiast who is passionate about Code and WordPress with a strong curiosity to learn something new. He was introduced to Pascal and Visual Basic during 10th grade and 12th grade respectively. That introduction sparked an interest in code. So, he completed his Bachelor’s of Engineering in Computer Science in 2012.

He got his first job back in November 2012 and has worked with amazing agencies like Medma Infomatix, Uplers, GiveWP, and well-known platforms like Toptal and Codeable. He was recognized at his first job for various reasons whether it be Rising Star, Employee of the quarter, or runners-up for the Employee of the year due to the consistent performance during the tenure of 3 years. He came to know about WordCamps in 2016 and wanted to organize one. Then, he collaborated with other like-minded people and become an active member of the local community. Also, Mehul has been a WordCamp Organizer at WordCamp Ahmedabad 2019.

Mehul has always believed in learning and implementing the learnings. The curiosity to learn more and connect with like-minded people has exposed him to being a part of the local community in Ahmedabad.

Prior to 10up, Mehul was full-time freelancing as a Full-Stack WordPress developer and has been working on challenging projects coming from clients. He specializes in custom plugin development and third-party API integration. He strongly believes in open-source and giving back to the community. So, he has allocated at least 5 hours each week to open-source contributions as a part of the Five for the Future initiative.

When he’s not working, you will find him contributing to open-source projects, spending time with nature and family, playing strategy games, or connecting with new people.

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Mehul comes from a very humble background of Gujarati family where getting a basic computer was very expensive. Mehul had a mad interest in playing video games in his childhood. He started doing basic HTML in school but it was never a plan to go into computer science. But destiny was written for him to choose computer science. He completed his M.Sc. IT from DAIICT, Gandhinagar. Mehul was majorly into Enterprise Java and built most of his college projects in it. 

After completing his post-graduation, Mehul was introduced to freelancing and started doing whatever came his way. Surprisingly, most of his projects were in WordPress and he ended up only doing projects for WordPress. He built some plugins for WooCommerce and BuddyPress as well. As her learned more, Mehul started contributing to WordPress and other open-source projects and has been working with WordPress for more than 7 years now. He has contributed to major WordPress releases like 4.2, 4.4, 4.5, 4.6, 5.3, and 5.7, and to BuddyPress 2.4.0. He is also a translation editor for the Gujarati language in WordPress.

Before 10up, Mehul worked at BuddyBoss as a senior web developer and was one of the lead developers of some of their products like the BuddyBoss Platform and theme. He started following 10up and their work when he started going to major WordCamps and meetups. It was always on his list to work for 10up and he got a chance to contract on one of their projects as a freelancer backend developer in 2020. Now, Mehul is building enterprise-level projects at 10up as he dreamed of doing during his college years. 

When not working, Mehul loves to play and watch Cricket. He also enjoys spending time with family and watching movies. When he gets the chance, he love to travel to new places as well.

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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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Rami is an engineer with sixteen years experience building a wide variety of web and native applications, beginning with freelance contracts building custom PHP applications and websites in 2005. Discovery of WordPress occurred at version 2.8.3, and was adopted within weeks as the starting platform for relevant client projects. Since then, he’s worked on a wide variety of projects on a few different teams. His first enterprise project which included engineering and a team leadership role was in 2013, for a Maryland state government site. 

Since then, he’s had the opportunity to work on a wide variety of enterprise projects for various state and federal agencies, private companies, and nonprofits. This led to a role as team lead for various enterprise clients, with tasks including infrastructure maintenance from dense IIS errors to automated containerized microservices, as well as new feature development and SLA support. Following this, he worked as a WordPress product developer at Sandhills Development, working on several of the most popular WordPress plugins.

Most recently, Rami completed a two-year contract with a health insurance company, building an employee referral system and insurance quoting application using extensive actuarial data, which included WordPress development, custom REST API implementations, dedicated native applications, and numerous security and ops considerations he stumbled through.

Rami has served as WordCamp organizer for multiple WordCamps, meetups, and has happily mentored several first-year camps when requested by the .org team.

When not coding, scoping, managing, or experiencing the psychologically bizarre phenomenon of writing a bio of himself in the third-person, he enjoys building various hardware electronics, creating firmware for audio, USB, and MIDI devices, woodworking, and reciting Bach lute suites and other late-Baroque pieces on classical guitar. 

He has consistently failed to rebuild his guitar repertoire to the state it was in his twenties, but has a vague plan in his head to ‘get it back’. Also, he has a cat.

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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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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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Siddharth’s passion towards mathematics resulted in him pursuing a major in Computer Engineering. Then in 2009, he first came across WordPress while planning to set up his own blogging site. This got Siddharth started with tweaking themes which slowly grew into him developing his own custom themes that eventually landed him a job as a WordPress theme developer at Ink My Web.

His career brought him to rtCamp where he worked on WordPress VIP projects for clients like Penske Media Corporation and Government of Singapore Investment Corporation. Simultaneously, he began contributing to WordPress Core and the WP-CLI Open Source Project regularly which earned him a place in the Core Committer Team.

Prior to 10up, Siddharth worked as a Senior Software Engineer at News Technology Services, a technology division for NewsCorp where he mentored cross-functional teams and guided architectural decisions for the sites – The Times Literary Supplement and The Sunday Times Sportswomen of the Year Awards.

When he’s not working, he actively reads up on UI Design Systems, Software Design Patterns, and techniques to optimize Page Speed Performance. At heart, Siddharth is an art fanatic, especially music and cinema. He plays the Drums and Guitar for recreation, enjoys hiking, riding his bike and trying out new eateries.

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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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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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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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Adam was born in North Devon in the South of England but has lived all over the Country. He moved from South to Midlands to North and back down South where he has now settled in. Even with living all over, Adam made sure to stop long enough to graduate from the University of the West of England Bristol with a 2:1 in computer science.

Adam didn’t know what he wanted to do when he left school. He was always on his computer so thought he would go to college to study IT. He gained his degree and started his career in software development. Software development eventually transitioned to software testing before finally moving into software/platform support. After 2 years in his previous role as a product support engineer he was promoted to senior on the team which is a proud moment in his career.

In his previous role, Adam was initially introduced to WordPress by supporting the companies 100 WordPress events sites. Nearly 5 years later, he has gained a wealth of knowledge about the WordPress platform, managing site go-lives for big food and drinks events, plugin installs and testing as well as any issues within site themes and PHP/JS files.

Adam is a very outgoing individual who likes to travel and explore new places. He enjoys watching/playing sports particularly football and darts. He is also making his way through England’s vineyards one by one (all 700+ of them).

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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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Alejandro was born on the sunny island of Gran Canaria, where he graduated from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria with a degree in Computer Science. But really, his interest in technology started back when he was at high school, and he began his self-taught journey into web development by creating a website to share desktop wallpapers with his classmates – just like the good old days of Microsoft Frontpage and Dreamweaver! This was his first contact with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

In 2009, he discovered WordPress and started playing around with it until, what was a hobby, then became a real job when a few local businesses in his town offered him to build their website. After completing his studies, he moved with his girlfriend to the southern Spanish city of Seville, where he has worked for some digital agencies as a Front-End developer on a wide range of projects involving Angular, Ionic Hybrid apps, Chrome extensions and Shopify development.

A little later, after having now built a good relationship in the web development world, he continuously pursued to improve his tech skills. Lo and behold he found once again in his path, WordPress, which was when custom blocks had been already introduced. This gave him the final push to immerse himself into the platform and find a passion to want to know more. Since then, he’s collaborated in some WordPress projects for big clients like Facebook, creating delightful experiences while keeping an eye on performance and accessibility.

These days, Alejandro doesn’t stop requiring the know-how and is also involved in some open-source projects and contributes to public libraries. But not only coding, he actively participates in translation projects such as Mozilla MDN and Vivaldi Browser to make them available in his native Spanish language.

When Alejandro is away from the keyboard, he’s likely cooking at the kitchen, drinking a shot of espresso at his favorite coffee shop, assisting local meet-ups or planning his next travel adventure.

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Anjula loves knowledge and technology. His eagerness to try new tech exposed him to WordPress during his early teenage years when he wanted to build a website that provided tech tutorials to visitors.

He used his self-taught experience with WordPress to clinch an internship at the biggest English digital magazine in his home country. He quickly rose through the ranks, and was promoted to Assistant Editor and was also given an additional role as the Head of Public Relations during his last months. Among his many other responsibilities at the company, he was in charge of training and assisting Content Writers on publishing content through the WordPress backend, and liaising between the web developers and the Editor-In-Chief to build additional features for the website.

In 2016, after a 7-year long stint at the digital magazine, Anjula left the company to pursue his passion for web platforms and WordPress. He then joined an agency in his hometown providing web development and WordPress support services to clients in Sri Lanka and Australia. Initially joining as a Support Specialist, he progressed to lead a team of support specialists towards providing customer-centric support services.

Anjula joins 10up as a Support Specialist with over 7 years of WordPress, Customer Support, and Remote Work experience. Anjula enjoys troubleshooting WordPress and providing support for clients. His next big dream is to become a Web Engineer in the years to come.

Anjula mostly lives in Colombo, Sri Lanka — right next to the sunny beaches, but has also been traveling to Singapore and Malaysia as a “trendy” digital nomad for the past few years. He is an avid photographer who loves taking pictures of his friends and family. He spends his free time researching world history, politics, and science. Among other things, he also “dreams” about going to the gym during his free time but prefers sleeping in.

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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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Dharmesh completed his Bachelor’s in Computer Science and Engineering from Gujarat Technological University. In his college days, he majorly worked on C# and .NET for build projects but, after graduation destiny had some other plan. He started his career with WordPress at Xylus Themes a WordPress-based web agency in 2014 and never looked back. Initially, he started with WordPress by developing custom themes and plugins, and gradually, he moved to complex WordPress projects.

A major turning point in his career came when he joined Tatvasoft, a well-known IT Service provider company where he got exposure to working on some enterprise-level projects which helped him to grow better and he also got chance to work with some other technologies like NodeJs, TypeScript, Microservices architecture, serverless framework, and CI/CD.

He has contributed to WordPress Core and some popular WordPress plugins like WooCommerce, Autoptimize, etc… Also, he has developed a couple of WordPress plugins, which are being used by thousands of websites and have more than half a million downloads.

He started following 10up and their work after using one of their open-source WordPress plugins for developing client websites. Since then, it was always on his list to work for 10up. Now, Dharmesh is excited to start building enterprise-level projects at 10up and following his passion for open-source.

When he’s not working, he enjoys spending time with family and hanging out with friends. Also, he likes to watch movies, tv shows, and travel.

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Douglas got involved in technology in 1999 at the age of 14 when his parents bought the first computer for him and his older brother. After 1 year of use he discovered Linux and felled in love with it. Douglas then spent his high-school years installing and trying multiple Linux distributions, installing packages, applications and researching/learning about operating systems in general.

At the age of 21 he got his first IT related job as a Junior System Administrator in a small tech company where he got the opportunity to use and grow his knowledge about operating systems, hardware, networking and technology in general.

In 2008 Douglas joined the Systems Administration team at San Services, an affiliate of Sandals and Beaches resorts were he started to take his skills to the next level. Douglas, along with a team of 2 system administrators, built 2 big data centers for web applications from scratch (hardware, hypervisor, operating systems and applications configuration) and 2 small data centers for financial data bases. He also played a key role implementing DevOps practices by automating tasks and processes with bash scripting, Rundeck and Puppet, implementing CI/CD pipelines for applications lifecycle and dockerizing new and legacy applications.

During his last years at San Services Douglas was the IT – Infrastructure Manager, in charge of data center and cloud operations for the entire organization.

He got his hands into WordPress for the first time in 2013 when he was building his personal blog douglasbarahona.com (now running in ghost xD but will switch it back to WordPress for sure). From that moment, he was amazed at how simple WordPress is for the average user but also how robust and scalable it is for large and highly available applications.

Outside of work Douglas spends his time running, playing football (soccer) and spending quality time with his 2 daughters and beautiful wife.

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Since his early school days, Faisal found himself interested in “the HTML stuff.” Hence, it was no surprise when he chose the Web Development field for a career. Faisal holds a BA in Computer Engineering from Gujarat Technological University.

Initially, he worked on the ASP.NET project and then worked on some Joomla projects. But later, he shifted his career to WordPress completely! He found WordPress easy to learn and customize.

In the last 7+ years, Faisal has worked on dozens of WordPress projects, including small-level and enterprise-level projects. He has experience in almost all kinds of projects. He has also contributed to the WordPress core and WooCommerce. He has been a speaker in WordPress meetups and internal organizational sessions.

Most recently, Faisal was a Full Stack Developer at Multidots Solutions, a WordPress Silver Partner. In joining 10up, he hopes to continue learning more and growing his skillset.

When away from his desk, Faisal is interested in spending time with family, hanging out with friends, swimming and trading stocks.

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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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Ivan is a self-taught programmer. When he was about 12 he got Commodore 64 and started dabbling in the Basic programming language. It clicked and he was writing simple text UI programs, that was a magical experience and since then he was engaged with programming. When the web started to get popular he began learning about creating web pages in public libraries and internet cafes. That is how he got his first website live on Tripod in the late 90s. Creating web pages was something that instantly pulled him in and he could not get enough of it.

When he got his first PC he started learning Flash, ActionScript, Java and in the end landed on WordPress. Since 2009 he has been working with WordPress on client sites. Since 2013 he has been working exclusively on WordPress plugins at WPMU Dev where he worked as Lead Developer and later as Head of Development overseeing the development of the entire plugin suite. During his career Ivan loved working with client sites over anything else, so 10up was a perfect choice for him. Ivan’s favorite aspect of working with client sites is the diversity of technologies involved and constant learning.

When he is not working he is either gaming, either working on his mountain house renovation and maintenance. He spends a lot of time with his lovely wife and they have really long coffee sessions. Ivan has three dogs, all adopted from the streets, and they are a huge joy in Ivan’s life. Over the years Ivan and his wife have adopted about 10 dogs and spoiled them to nonsense.

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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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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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From a young age, João developed an interest in both art and technology. Little João would either be drawing cartoon characters, playing games, or exploring WordArt and animations in Powerpoint on his father’s computer.

Later, he got a bachelors degree in Software Engineering in Isep and an internship in Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade do Porto (Porto Medicine’s school). The project consisted on a cardiopulmonary resuscitation training add-on that can be associated with a common mannequin for feedback and scoring of the technical maneuver. It’s still being used by the Med students today.

As a software engineer, João specializes in mobile and web development. Over the years, he has mastered many technologies and languages such as React, React Native, Ionic and Javascript. In the past four years, has helped several companies across different industries, including tourism, finance, and healthcare, to create successful products. João ensures flawless functionality across all platforms, delivering cutting-edge apps.

He endeavors to grow professionally and personally with 10up, and will continue to apply his knowledge and creativity in all future projects.

João enjoys spending time with his family and friends, as well as reading, watching movies, drawing, playing the guitar, and learning about music and art in his free time.

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Josh started working with the world wide web in 2009 where he found a love for new and innovating technologies that shaped the web we know today. During his time at a small company named ithemes.com he wore wear many “hats” within the company. Josh has spent time in support, development, project management and sales. While he enjoys all aspects of a fast-paced moving business, what Josh really enjoys is problem solving. With a knack for critical thinking and problem solving, he looks forward to using those skills at 10up.

Josh has monumental experience in supporting customers and clients alike. He prides himself in his ability to break down an issue for a customer and explain it so that it’s understandable for all parties involved. Even during his free time, he loves to hop over to the wordpress.org forum to lend a hand to those in need.

While he has worked with many content management and web systems, his bread and butter is working with WordPress. He has built and maintained multiple WordPress commercial plugins and has been instrumental with planning their inception. If you are familiar with the backup plugin BackupBuddy then you have probably run into Josh at some point. He has also been a presenter and volunteer and WordPress meetups in his area to help give back what WordPress has given to him.

During his free time and when not on a computer, Josh enjoys playing videos games (challenge him in super smash bros!), longboarding, fishing, hunting, basketball, and anything else that keeps him active. He is also his friend’s car mechanic and computer repair man.

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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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Kemal completed his Bachelor degree in Information Technology at Eastern Mediterranean University in Cyprus. During his studies, Kemal worked on projects involving C, C++, C# and Visual Studio .NET. These projects provided a strong foundation for the beginning of his engineering journey.

After completing his undergrad, Kemal moved to the United Kingdom where he completed his Master’s degree in Software Engineering at the City University, London. His focus was working on projects involving C++ and Java. His first developer role led him to work with HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP. He would later be involved working on WordPress projects converting HTML sites to WP themes.

In his subsequent roles, Kemal worked in variety of fields including fintech, digital agency and SaaS companies servicing both SMB and enterprise level clients. At 10up he will be working on the new project with the Facebook CMS and Hacklang.

When he’s not working, he enjoys exploring and learning new technologies and expanding his developer skills; the latest ones being Golang, NodeJS and MongoDB. If he has any additional free time, he enjoys hanging out with friends, reading books, swimming, chess and watching movies.

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Max started to write simple programs with Pascal in the late 80s. It wasn’t until 1998 that he finally made his first commercial website. Fast-forward a few years and in 2005 Max launched his first WordPress website. It was love at first sight (love at first website?). After a few years working in related areas such as SEO and management, Max decided to shirt his focus back to development. He chose WordPress as his primary platform, remembering his old passion.

Max has spent several years working in agencies and as a freelancer. He has built a number of newsrooms and corporate websites for leading US companies in insurance, game development and medical supplies. Max is an active contributor to WordPress with translations, speaking at WordCamp 2019 and other regular meet-ups.

Besides work, Max enjoys spending time with his family, learns to play guitar and loves to explore the world with a car and tent.

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Mehidi was born and raised at Rajshahi, a serene town by the mighty Padma River in Bangladesh. He started his career as a Frontend Engineer and worked at various local agencies. There he got introduced to WordPress and fell in love with the ecosystem and community. Since then he worked extensively in WordPress theme and plugin development. Which ultimately led him to become a WordPress core contributor.

With the advent of the latest front-end technologies, he diversified his skillset into ES6 and popular front-end frameworks like React and Vue. His passion for technology has led him to work in decoupled WordPress architecture projects built with Next.js and Gatsby. After working as an engineer both in local and international markets, he finally made his way to join 10up as a Web Engineer.

Outside of work, he likes to spend his time with his friends by roaming around the countryside.

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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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Mohit’s love for computers started as a gamer, and later he pursued a Master of Computer Applications. Mohit started his career as an intern C# developer. But once he got familiar about the product and business logic, he started noticing critical bugs in the product (which were not easy to find out). It was at that time Mohit discovered his interest in testing and became a Software Quality Analyst after the internship.

He was introduced to WordPress when he started his journey with Multidots in 2017. Mohit’s first career success was completing 3 VIP projects as a single QA, after-which Multidots became WordPress VIP silver agency partner. After that, Mohit worked on every VIP project for Multidots. Later, he joined BuddyBoss and had time to work on popular WordPress Plugins and Themes. In BuddyBoss, he worked as Lead QA for the Web Product Team.

For the last five years Mohit has been working with WordPress and enjoying this focus. He contributed as a developer and tester for the dot store WordPress Plugin. He is also a member of the Hindi WordPress Polyglot team and looking forward to contributing more to WordPress.

As a QA, Mohit worked on several WordPress websites, Plugins, Themes, WooCommerce web applications, and mobile applications. Despite having 6.5 years of experience, he is constantly learning and making himself better to face bigger challenges.

Mohit’s previous team members would say he is friendly and very easy to work with. His previous managers love his calm and logical approach in critical situations.

Outside of working hours, Mohit loves spending time with family and friends. Being a member of a Social organization, he also spends time doing different social work as a Volunteer. He loves reading and watching news related to technology, economy, sports and the auto sector. Mohit loves traveling and exploring places through different and local modes of transport. Furthermore, he loves spending time between mountains.

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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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Pablo unknowingly began his career when he tried to make his laptop into a Hackintosh and had a lot of fun doing it. Later on, when he was trying to decide what to get his degree in, someone suggested, “You like computers, why don’t you do that?” This suggestion unlocked that very memory of trying to set up a Hackintosh and led him down the road to getting his Bachelors of Science in Computer Science from SUNY New Paltz.

Pablo worked as a DevOps Engineer at a small digital agency in the Hudson Valley where he gained proficiency with Linux and Unix systems. While there, he applied his expertise to migrate a single monolithic server to a distributed docker system. He is also fluent in the Agile methodology, and worked with his team to create biweekly retrospectives for sprints. Pablo loves the process of learning, and is always excited to work with new technologies. Elsewhere, at another digital agency based out of NYC, he gained experience with ASP.NET, Windows, and Azure. While here he was able to create a custom blue-green deployment script that included the possibility of rolling back to an earlier release and pre-warming cache. He also loves to code and is particularly passionate about Ruby and Go, as well as learning more about cybersecurity. He’s excited to continue his career as a Systems Engineer at 10up.

When Pablo isn’t hacking into the mainframe, he enjoys a variety of hobbies. He plays guitar with his hardcore punk band SALT and has recently started learning jazz and funk on both guitar and saxophone. He also enjoys cooking (and even more so eating the great food that he makes), hiking, movies, anime, video and analog games (some of his favorites include: Twilight Imperium and Quest),

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Curiosity and passion for technology began for Rahul in his high school. He graduated in 2014 with a Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) majoring in Information Technology from C. G. Patel Institute Of Technology, India. It was during his college days when he learned some programming languages and picked up a few freelancing gigs building PHP based websites, Android apps, etc. The first few months post graduation consisted of creating Windows desktop apps with VB.NET/C#, ASP.NET websites while also looking for job opportunities. Soon after, he was hired on at rtCamp.

Rahul joined rtCamp Inc. as a Backend Engineer in 2015, where he was introduced to WordPress and open source in general. He started with developing custom themes and plugins then gradually moved on to complex projects requiring data migration, performance optimization and decoupled projects. Simultaneously, he continued to explore the open source world and contributed to WordPress core and other open source projects. Over the last few years he worked with large enterprises to provide WordPress consultancy. During his term there, Rahul went on to win the ‘Progressive Employee’ and ‘Employee of the Year’ award in 2017 and 2019 respectively.

Prior to Covid, Rahul would try to attend as many WordCamps as possible in his country and also volunteered for WordCamp in his hometown. He can’t wait to get back to attending WordCamps, meetups, and other community events in-person and hopes to be more involved as things open back up.

Rahul has been following the WordPress community for a long time and that’s where he heard about 10up. He had heard so many good things about 10up work and culture from his friends/colleagues and wanted to be a part of the 10up team for a while. And now Rahul is finally a part of the team and he is looking forward to his next adventure alongside 10up.

When away from work, he can be found playing games on PS and Nintendo. He does love taking a few short road trips with his friends for a quick refresher, be it on bike or in car, luckily for him – a couple of beautiful hill stations are just a few hours away from his residence in Pune, India.

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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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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.

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Varun studied Computer Science with a focus in advance 3D modeling and AI at Rutgers University. He has been a full stack developer for as long as he can remember. From managing Fortune Magazine’s backend to tackling marketing dev obstacles for Fortune 500 clients, there’s no dev challenge Varun hasn’t been exposed to.

He has a keen eye for UI/UX and is also an experienced React engineer. He has taken apps (and startups) from concept to realization with his design and coding skills. If you ask him, he will say that he hasn’t worked a day in his life because he loves what he does and its a wonderful feeling when clients admire the work he has put in and his efforts in bringing many abstract ideas to life.

He has been a developer for around 14 years and when he’s not writing code he loves to swim and go hiking with this family in and around Raleigh, NC.