GoDaddy Team Innerview: WordPress Five for the Future Contributors 

Our mission of radically shifting the world economy towards life-fulfilling ventures sees GoDaddy forging deeper connections within the WordPress community. Today, GoDaddy employs a talented group of individuals whose responsibilities include the WordPress Five for the Future project.

Contributing to WordPress is important, because the open-source application relies heavily on the volunteers supporting it for continued development. As a company, we meet the demand for WordPress-powered technology. But at the same time, our contributions to the WordPress project yield a stronger product.

GoDaddy’s contribution to the WordPress Five for the Future project spans a number of areas.

This commitment sees our Five for the Future contributors working in a variety of areas in WordPress, including hosting, themes, core and testing.

Hear it from some of our Five for the Future contributors

We caught up with our Five for the Future contributors to discover what it’s like working at a public company that supports a much-beloved open-source project.

What’s your area of focus and what are some of the things you do on the day-to-day?

As a Community Deputy, I help approve applications for meetup organizers, WordCamps, and other events. I mentor new organizers through their first event and ensure that the organizers’ questions are answered. Being a deputy means the world to me and has a lasting impact by working to make the community as open, inclusive, and welcoming as possible.

—Sandy Edwards, Sr Marketing Manager

The WordPress Training Team has been a key focus of mine since 2014. Our team creates the content for Learn.WordPress.org, helping individuals learn WordPress and assisting Meetup organizers, educators, and other presenters have materials ready to instruct others about WordPress. I help organize the materials that are to be revised or created with each release, facilitate team meetings, and collaborate with other teams in WordPress.

—Courtney Robertson, Developer Advocate

Being an active member of the WordPress community since 2019, I am aware of various initiatives where anyone could contribute. Some I support by applying existing skills like in #polyglots Make Team, but with some, I fulfill my personal agenda, like with #accessibility Make Team where I externally advocate for better website UX for blind people.

—Maja Loncar, Marketing Manager

As the manager for the Managed WordPress Platform team, it’s my job to think about the future vision of the platform and where we will go along with ensuring the product is delivering on all key performance indicators for performance, availability and quality

—Jeff Uberstine, Sr. Manager of Software Development

I primarily work on the core Block Editor (a.k.a. Gutenberg) project. Mostly, this means that I start my day with coffee and GitHub notifications. Then, once I’m all caught up, I try to help triage the new issues. After my morning routine, I focus on my ongoing tasks. These can be bug fixes, new features, or helping other contributors by testing their work. I’m also co-hosting weekly editor bug scrub sessions with Nick Diego.

—Giorgi Mamadashvili, Sr. Software Development Engineer

The WordPress Photo Directory is the easiest — and most fun — way to contribute to WordPress. As a team representative and moderator on the WordPress Photo Directory team, I approve new photos, lead team meetings, and help cultivate the experience that others have with the directory. Most days, I devote time to uploading and moderating new photos with the intent of making the directory a prime destination for creators that need free, public domain photography.

—Marcus Burnette, Sr. Marketing Specialist

I’m on the Diverse Speaker Support group, which is a subset group of the Community Team. I specifically co-run the Slack channel for the group.

—Ken Crockett, Sr. Marketing Specialist

My area of focus is on serving the WordPress Community as a whole, ensuring that our actions, products, and programs provide real value to the project itself but also to the wide audience of users. My day-to-day functions consist of managing our financial sponsorships of events and supporting those individuals who are bringing value to the project itself and to the average end user of the software.

—Adam Warner, Field Marketing Director

I’m a WordPress Core Developer, and one of the maintainers of the Media component, which handles images, videos, audio, and other media. Connected with that, I help out on the performance team, where I’m one of the points of contact for images there. Each day, I spend time connecting with other contributors throughout the WordPress ecosystem, to help move issues and new features forward, whether it’s through planning, development, or reviews. I also work closely with my colleagues at GoDaddy, both to let folks know about upcoming changes to WordPress, and to move forward issues that are found when WordPress is tested by GoDaddy teams.

—Mike Schroeder, Sr. Software Development Engineer

Can you describe a recent contribution you made? How would WordPress users experience it?

Recently, I served on the Programming Team for WCUS 2022. It was our team that built the schedule, selected speakers, and ensured the content had meaning and flow. Users from around the world came in to experience the sessions we helped organize.

—Sandy Edwards, Sr Marketing Manager

With WordPress 6.1 releasing in 2 weeks, we have a lot of content to create and revise on Learn.WordPress.org. You can find these revisions at https://github.com/orgs/WordPress/projects/33/views/10. I read all release communications information and triage the content we have available so that contributors can work on maintaining current information.

—Courtney Robertson, Developer Advocate

Most recent contribution was a translation of the Learn.WordPress.org lesson aiming to enable learning particular set of knowledge for users speaking Serbian only.

—Maja Loncar, Marketing Manager

We recently spent a considerable amount of money to uplift the webservers in one of our data centers. We have seen up to a 25% increase in website speed from that investment.

—Jeff Uberstine, Sr. Manager of Software Development

I recently worked on a feature allowing developers and users to enable block-based template parts for Classic themes. It’s an excellent way to look at a full-site editing experience without fully committing to a block theme. The block-based template parts can be a good start when migrating from a Classic to a Block theme. So, I’m excited that the feature is shipping with WordPress 6.1.

—Giorgi Mamadashvili, Sr. Software Development Engineer

Recently, the WordPress Photo Directory team hosted a global challenge for folks to share landscapes from their local regions. While I often take my corner of the world for granted, it was great to explore my own city and share photos from where I live. I uploaded these photos to the directory, tagged #WorldPhotograhyDay22, and these are now freely usable by all. In addition, these feed into another open source photo project, Openverse, and become available within the WordPress media library!

—Marcus Burnette, Sr. Marketing Specialist

Just currently in the group above. I created a Slack bot that welcome’s folks to the channel when they join and asks them some questions, which then pulls the answers so we can better help users either mentor other folks, or help folks find WordCamps and other related WordPress events to speak at.

—Ken Crockett, Sr. Marketing Specialist

In addition to the above, my most recent contribution has been in supporting and promoting the inclusion of underrepresented individuals and groups to ensure we’re helping to create a stronger and more varied Community of users and Contributors.

—Adam Warner, Marketing Director

I’m one of the Core Tech Co-leads for WordPress 6.1. This means responsibility for following up on emerging technical issues with the release as it’s built, making it as stable as possible. You’ll be able to try out the new release for yourself! You can see some of the things that are planned for the release, and help out with testing if you’d like, here.

—Mike Schroeder, Sr. Software Development Engineer

What do you think the future holds for GoDaddy’s contributions to WordPress?

Over the years GoDaddy has increased its contributions back to the project. I truly believe this is because we are a people first company. Contributing to the community is a vital part of being a lasting pillar of any community, WordPress is no different. I am excited to see the varying ways our contributions will shift, change, and enhance the community over time.

—Sandy Edwards, Sr Marketing Manager

GoDaddy will see increased involvement in Calls for Testing, integrating the content from Learn.WordPress.org, and sponsoring additional contributors, like Joe Dolson. We are committed to providing our customers and staff the most current information around WordPress releases.

—Courtney Robertson, Developer Advocate

Anyone’s contribution to the WordPress project, including GoDaddy’s contribution, is important and I am sure the interest will grow over time, as I see more colleagues of mine being interested to understand how by contributing to WordPress they can empower others and themselves.

—Maja Loncar, Marketing Manager

GoDaddy will continue to contribute both directly to WordPress, through events, and to ensure WordPress users have the very best platform to run their websites on.

—Jeff Uberstine, Sr. Manager of Software Development

The sky’s the limit for GoDaddy — or any other person or company — to contribute to WordPress. I know firsthand as part of the WordPress Photo Directory team how easy it can be to contribute; you don’t need to be able to write code! With 20+ different teams, there are tons of options for contributing to the growth of not only the WordPress project, but the community and ecosystem around it that so many have worked hard to create. With GoDaddy’s scale and global reach, contributions can come from anywhere and benefit so many different aspects of the WordPress world.

—Marcus Burnette, Sr. Marketing Specialist

I’m excited to see where it goes. We have a lot of folks contributing to multiple areas of WordPress. I can’t wait to see what comes of it all!

—Ken Crockett, Sr. Marketing Specialist

The future of GoDaddy’s contributions to WordPress has never been so bright. Over the past few years, we’ve been able to bring wider visibility of the value of Contributing to this open-source project and more tightly align those functions back to the business, and ultimately (broken record alert) back to the end user no matter their goals with WordPress. We are actively growing our Contributor program and you’ll be seeing a lot more of this as we move into 2023 and beyond.

—Adam Warner, Field Marketing Director

The post GoDaddy Team Innerview: WordPress Five for the Future Contributors  appeared first on GoDaddy Blog.

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