About Us

Jason is a self taught Systems Engineer with a passion for open source software and learning new systems. His obsession began at an early age when his family purchased their first computer. Once dial up internet was available in the small Louisiana town where he grew up, Jason knew there was no going back.

Jason spent most of his career working at a small ISP/Phone Company delivering Internet services to small towns in rural Louisiana. His first job was spent working the phones providing dial up support; from there, he worked his way up the company to Lead Systems Engineer. He built the network that allowed an ISP in a small Louisiana town to provide advanced services like IPTV and Fiber-to-the-Home.

Jason has worked on many websites over the years using nearly as many technologies. He was an early WordPress adopter and ran several successful websites during the “Blog revolution” in the early 2000’s.

During his spare time you will often find Jason with his wife, binge-watching TV shows and playing various board and video games. He also enjoys the preparation and consumption of various meat products.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ivan graduated with a Bachelors of Computer Science and Technology from the University of Sydney. He has spent over ten years as a software engineer.

Ivan’s clients have included niche social media platforms, advertising agencies, telcos, banks and online retailers. He has experience in design, development, architecture, systems administration, security hardening, and streamlining business process. Ivan recently focused on building feature rich web apps targeting desktop and mobile clients, with an emphasis on performance, reliability and cleanliness of code at Amazon.com.

Ivan’s career has spanned two continents and three countries (Sydney, Vancouver and San Francisco). In his time off, he loves to travel the world and write about it on his WordPress powered site, adventureivan.com.

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.

Lukas is a typical IT geek who 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 an engineer for big Polish IT companies. He needed the next five years to work up the nerve to follow his dreams to become self-employed. With his Master Degree in Science and strong experience under his belt, he decided to start his own business. Over the next 9 years, Lukas created, developed, and serviced applications including financial and sales systems and web portals with over 1,000,000 viewers per month, using technologies like LAMP, Java and ASP.net.

After growing tired of being a manager, salesman, employee, and employer he took a position with Timely Network Inc., maker of the All In One Event Calendar for WordPress, which has more than 100,000 active installs. In searching for more opportunities, Lukas came upon 10up.

A self described “creator rather than a craftsman,” he is rarely seen way from his computers. When he does step away, he can be found traveling the world with his wife, walking his dog Rosia (that he fell in love with at a dog shelter), or watching American television shows.

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.

Seeking change from a career as an audio engineer, Ryan graduated from the International Academy of Design and Technology and began working as a web developer. From 2004 to 2011, he ran an independent agency, where he had the pleasure of working with clients such as Denny’s Canada, Veritas Canada, and Canadian music icons Rush.

In 2009, Ryan discovered WordPress while working for Les Stroud – T.V’s Survivorman – and was immediately hooked. Not long after, he released his first plugin for the WordPress community. He began working with WordPress full-time in 2010 when he joined an agency in Ottawa, Ontario; within a year, Ryan became a Senior Web Developer. During his time there, Ryan used WordPress to power large sites, online games, and mobile applications.

Ryan is active in the WordPress community and contributes as often as possible. He loves helping new WordPress developers by giving presentations and answering questions at his local Meetup group.

When he’s not writing code, Ryan is typically found hanging out with his amazing wife, three hilarious kids, and big, shaggy golden-doodle named Blue.

Adam has always had an interest in computers and technology in general. Starting out with nothing more than HTML and Notepad, Adam learned to build web pages in a highschool business class and never stopped.

Teaching himself HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL, Adam worked his way through a variety of programming jobs in various industries before finding one that gave him the opportunity to work with, and sparked his love of, WordPress. Since 2012, he has worked on a countless number of WordPress sites of varying size and complexity, each with its own unique challenges (he calls that the fun part).

Outside the office, Adam enjoys spending time with his family, helping his kids with homework, taking family trips, and programming. Being one of the biggest Star Wars nerds you will ever meet, Adam never turns down an opportunity to chat about the movies, books, characters, or any other aspect of Star Wars you can imagine.

Adrian graduated with honours at Curtin University and has been working on the web professionally since 2005. Adrian has contributed to award-winning and nominated sites at the WA and Australian Web Awards. He has experience developing web apps, e-commerce products and other websites large and small.

Adrian takes pride in his work and is ever honing his craft. He loves to deliver distinctive and creative products that are backed by solid engineering. In 2012 he began using WordPress and was impressed with its ease of publishing content. Since this time Adrian has learned the features of WordPress inside and out.

When he is not turning caffeine into code, Adrian may be found exploring Perth, dancing with his toddler or listening to music.

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).

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.

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.

His full name is actually Dandreb John Bitanghol but he goes by the name Dreb Bits on the web to save a couple of bytes and to easily register in peoples memory. He hails from the countryside of the sunny Philippines.

During his senior year in college, he led a team awarded best capstone project for a project that took inspiration from WordPress. It was around that time when he began to take enormous interest in WordPress and the underlying language, PHP. Before he knew it, he started tinkering with JavaScript and database management as well.

After college, he went straight into the wild world of freelancing as a web designer and developer for websites powered by WordPress. Prior to joining 10up, he was one of the top rated freelance contractors in Upwork, formerly known as oDesk. Helping clients build simple, unified, and goal-oriented websites led him to start a few self-initiated projects, which he published to the WordPress plugin repository. Wanting to connect with local freelancers creating things with WordPress, he founded a small, local community of WordPress developers and evangelists.

When he’s not plugging away with WordPress, Dreb likes taking photos, camping, almost anything outdoors, and fantasizing about travel.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

After graduating Magna Cum Laude from Atma Jaya Yogyakarta University with his Bachelor Degree in Informatics Techniques, Ivan spent the last 15 years developing web applications. Most of his career has been spent working in digital agencies.

Ivan loves to explore new technologies—like Google, Docker, Node, and ReactJS. He fell in love with WordPress in 2007. Since then, he has been a major contributor to Jetpack and WordPress Core. Ivan is very active in his local WordPress community and acted as an organizer for couple WordCamp in Indonesia such as WC Denpasar, WC Jakarta, and WC Ubud.

When away from the keyboard, Ivan loves to spend time with his family watching movies, trying out new food, and traveling.

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?

After accompanying his sister to sign-up for a course, with no substantial direction in life, he ended up leaving the campus, enrolled in a Media Design and Technology diploma. Fast forward two years – graduation, with honours and a full ride in his final year. Jared’s career in digital, started as a UX/UI designer. Balancing right and left hemisphere influences; the need to deeply understand the mechanics of how the web work became priority number one.

Due to the interactivity and rich user experience, Jared was initially drawn to, Actionscript Macromedia Flash. In 2011 the mandatory 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. The choice to “Learn JavaScript deeply”. This has proven to be the single best decision of his career and has allowed him to build highly scalable solutions for the front; successfully built a WordPress S.P.A. theme in nearly all major library(s) and/or framework(s), and backend (using Node).

Hailing from the tip of Africa in Cape Town, South Africa. He has had the privilege of building WordPress solutions for many of the major publishing brands; including, amongst many others, Men’s Health, Women’s Health and 24com. Jared’s accomplishments, at his most recent appointment, include several runner-ups for Hackathons and a 1st place in Engineering Innovation for a WordPress solution that saved millions in development costs and generated significant, measurable, revenue. In addition, he has built, and lead builds, of several scalable turn-key solutions including a DFP plugin, drag-and-drop post ranking tool and 100s of microsites using a single code base.

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.

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.

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.

Marco Pereirinha received a Master’s in Information Management from Aveiro University, Portugal. While obtaining his degree, he was responsible for the digital department of his family’s advertisement company. For 15 years, he led a team of designers, copywriters, and developers, as well as dealt with clients and suppliers. It was during this period that Pereirinha’s CMS was born—a not-so-open-source project. But, all the duties of running a department didn’t leave him much time to keep this project evolving. In the late ’00s, he reached the breaking point, and his professional path started to change: WordPress appeared as a natural solution and embracing the open source movement was a gained bonus.

After setting up the kickoff of WordPress Porto Community back in 2012, Marco became a co-organizer of WordCamp Porto 2013 and 2016 and gave a talk at WordCamp Lisbon 2015. He is also an active member of the Portuguese community, not only as a frequent speaker at local meetups, but also as a support provider at WordPress forums. On Marco’s WordPress you’ll find some plugins Marco has released and maintains.

Outside of the coding world, what he really loves is to walk Lucas — the family dog — with his little daughter and have a loud laugh with his family and friends. He also enjoys live music and likes to freeze moments with his camera. He lives in a quiet village near Porto, in the charming North part of Portugal.

Matt started developing in his hometown of Virginia Beach and has been in the IT field for over fifteen years. He started computer networking in high school and shortly afterwards was introduced to web development. Though he attended college for Business Administration, he never stopped developing and after graduating he found that his passion was in Web Development.

WordPress was introduced to Matt in 2009 and after working with several other content management systems he’s come to the conclusion that WordPress is one of his favorite to work with. He has experience from building large-scale, complex sites to managing support and maintenance for 50+ clients at a time. Matt is a big fan of Elasticsearch and writing clean, manageable code.

In Matt’s off time, when he is not spending time with his wife and son or playing disc golf, he is always finding ways to expand his development knowledge.

Mustafa is a software developer with 10+ years of experience. His interest in the web started in the early 2000s, while he was playing a browser-based online game. While in high school, he published his very first websites, which he built using old-school website builders and GeoCities, of course.

Around 2008, and while facing some struggles with Joomla, he discovered WordPress, started his journey on it and never looked back. He is passionate about making large-scale websites with WordPress and trying new technologies.

Mustafa loves to spend some of his spare time contributing back to WordPress. On top of being a WordPress Core Contributor and plugin author, he’s a general translation editor for the Turkish locale and an active member of the local WordPress community.

Other than being passionate about his work, he loves archery, coffee, traveling, and listening to music. In fact, he’s probably, scrobbling on last.fm right now.

With nearly 20 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. More recently, he’s been working with WordPress for the past four years. His first WordPress core commit was in the 4.2 release and he’s an active member in the Austin WordPress meetup.

Born in Minnesota and raised in California, Pete’s lived in Austin for more than 10 years with his wife, Michele, and his dog, Clyde. Pete enjoys drinking craft beer, building his own exercise equipment, and working on his long-time side projects, baconipsum.com and baconmockup.com.

By the time Ricardo received his diploma as a Public Relations major in 2005, he had already bootstrapped news content and communication websites, newsletters, a couple of intranets and even a web radio in areas ranging from non-profit to education, from culture and lifestyle magazines to metalworks. Creating communication strategies and actively publishing stories, he steered his career towards the Internet.

In 2010, after leading a team of 5 developers at an agency for two years, and shortly after receiving his Project Management Specialist title from Fundação Dom Cabral (an internationally acclaimed Business School), he decided to step back from client-facing positions and dive into web development. It was the perfect time to catch the WordPress as a CMS train.

As a freelancer, he partnered with with small to large agencies and digital bureaus, advocating, leading and delivering WordPress-centric projects for global brands such as Whirlpool, Toyota, L’Oréal and C&A, as well as small to large businesses in Brazil, even receiving an honorable mention for “Best Practices” at the Webby awards. He has also become an advocate within the Brazilian WordPress community, as a Brazilian Portuguese forum moderator and WordCamp speaker/sponsor. He’s contributed code to WordPress itself and the ubiquitous Jetpack plug-in.

Ricardo is married to a corporate finance lawyer and is the proud stay-at-home dad to their son Vinícius, born in 2014. When he’s not coding, studying or rolling on the floor with his little one and their Labrador named Morgana, you can find him playing the drums, cooking, or being a handyman around his house.

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.

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.

Having finished his BSc, Shah left the UK to travel through Asia. While in Indonesia he worked for a language school developing courses based on Computer Aided Learning systems.

Upon returning to the UK, he started an MSc in Computer Science which resulted in his first job in the industry at a software house specialising in building logistic systems for the petroleum industry. Here he developed his skills in C++ and Java and learnt new skills in SQL, DB’s & Informix NewEra. Working with corporate clients gave him the opportunity to develop his client communication and leadership within the team. Eventually he left to join a new software company before going into freelance work.

A chance meeting at an antenatal class with a graphic designer resulted in the his first introduction to WordPress and web development. Skills such as PHP and Javascript now became his core skills. Together they built WordPress based sites for their clients. During this part of his journey he also built sites in some of the other CMS’s available but it was always clear to him that WordPress was the standout CMS.

After several years he started to miss the inspiration of being around his developer peers and hence started working at a Brighton based web agency. Here he developed into a Senior WordPress Developer and became the Tech Lead to one of the world’s largest drinks manufacturers, which involved him being responsible for a team of developers and over 100 sites. A fantastic experience but he never lost the ambition to work with the very best developers in the industry, which has now lead to the opportunity to progress that ambition by working at 10up.

During his spare time Shah cherishes his time with his wife and son, the motivation which drives everything he does. Having played rugby and boxed in school and college he still loves watching and going to sporting events.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tyler Bailey 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.

Ashar’s keen interest in computer programming flourished at a very young age of 13. Following his passion, he got a degree in Computer Science from one of the most prestigious universities in Pakistan — University of Engineering & Technology, Lahore.

During his undergraduate studies, Ashar stumbled upon WordPress while working on a website. His love for WordPress grew when he joined a WordPress company as an intern to learn theme development. Later on, after graduating in 2016, he started his career in WordPress by getting a job as a WordPress developer in a Power Elite Theme Shop of the Envato market.

Ashar joined 10up with more than five years of experience in professional WordPress themes and plugin development while searching for the next big challenge in his career as a web developer.

He also contributes to WordPress core, organizes local community events, learns and creates projects in new web technologies, and occasionally blogs on his personal website. At the moment, he is a big enthusiast of JavaScript and NodeJS.

While not on the job, Ashar likes to spend time with his family, go bowling, watch movies and tv shows, and go on road trips with his friends. He also loves trying out new restaurants.

Ayebare had a strong love for programming since university where he pursued a Bachelors in Information Technology and Computing from the University of Kyambogo. Having C++ fresh in memory from his university days, he designed a mock dynamic country train routing and scheduling system which won him an accolade in the local programming community.

His interest in programming stemmed from how fast the world was becoming a global village through IT and what opportunities it presented locally – he just had to join in! Initially designing websites using Joomla, he stumbled across WordPress while doing a research on other existing content management systems.

Before he knew it, he was checking under the hood and learning everything he could about WordPress and its underlying languages. He started freelancing, and in short order was hired by a leading WordPress plugin developing company serving a community of more than 200,000, providing technical support and writing integration patches for conflicts with commonly used plugins. He was soon entrusted to mentor new recruits, teaching them how to approach/quickly troubleshoot issues encountered by clients, writing the blue print and methodology for handling common support issues, all while handling 3rd tier stubborn bugs.

Spending more than 8 hours every day writing and studying code, Ayebare takes time off to play competitive tennis or hit the track. In a country where putting food on the table from “working online” is a rarity, he spends quite some time voluntarily tutoring youths that come to him seeking to start out on their own professional programming journey.

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.

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!

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.

Fahad is passionate about the intersection of business, the internet, and cloud-computing. From the age of thirteen, he was learning and absorbing as much information he could in his family’s business, and by the time he was sixteen he founded a small business of his own providing software development services to local clients.

Fahad chose to focus on learning cloud technologies with the belief that it is the future, and worked his way towards earning the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate certification to showcase his skills in the cloud. He hopes to use his knowledge of product and service offerings across cloud service providers to keep clients’ sites up and running with minimal downtime

When he’s not managing services in the AWS console or learning new technologies, Fahad loves relaxing, whether that be at home with his family, reading a good book, or grabbing a cup of coffee and going for a drive.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.