Community rockstar Drew Jaynes joins 10up

Drew Jaynes on March 4, 2013

I never seriously considered web development to be a career path, since tinkering with it off and on as a hobby for nearly 10 years. It all began when I built a static tournament portal for a Yahoo! pool league I played in when I was 16. In 2008, many websites and lessons learned later, I retrofitted my college newspaper’s website to run on WordPress. Needless to say, I was hooked.

When I started actively contributing to the project in 2010, the community’s vibrancy left an impression. Here you have this mass of publishers, developers, designers and volunteers all working to make something that was already great even greater. I’d found my people.

These days, when I introduce myself to people at community events like WordCamps, the top two responses are: “Oh, so you’re DrewAPicture! I’ve seen your tweets or your work on [insert project here],” or, “Drew Jaynes … now where have I heard that name before?!” The answer to that second question, if you’re wondering: probably all over the place.

A big part of what drew me to 10up is their commitment to giving back to the very project that gives them life. When I saw that they donated significant employee time to WordPress I thought, “I want to do that!” And now I am doing it!

I’m active on the WordPress.org support team and was elected as a team rep on the Docs team this spring. I’ve written a couple of plugins, a theme and have contributed to core for every major release since WordPress 3.3.

With WordPress, there’s always something new to learn, and 10up is a great new challenge that will pay many dividends. I can’t wait to get started.

Editor’s  Note from Jake: At 10up, we believe that volunteering isn’t just the right thing to do – it’s good business, especially if we want WordPress to stay on top. Drew embodies these values – and, fittingly, his impressive voluntary contributions to our community and core development sealed the deal for us. Drew will focus about 50-75% of his time on a high priority customer – the balance of his paid time will be donated to the WordPress community. I’m excited to watch Drew grow even further with our community.