Rachel Baker brings engineering expertise to 10up

Rachel Baker on August 14, 2013

Oh hey, I didn’t see you there. My name is Rachel Baker, and I am overjoyed to be joining 10up as the newest Senior Strategic Engineer. I am the third 10upper located in the Windy City of Chicago, IL.

My fascination with web development began in 1996, when I learned HTML and FTP from a unique writing course at the University of Illinois in Chicago. I began teaching myself anything I could from the college computer lab including computer networking and CGI scripting, and landed a job doing IT support for the failed Kozmo.com. I started using WordPress for a personal site using the timeless Kubrick theme in 2005, but focused on Drupal for my freelance client work. Through a strange twist of fate, a friend and fellow web engineer gave me his ticket to the first WordCamp Chicago in 2009. After surrounding myself with the amazing WordPress community I turned my full-time and attention to WordPress. Since than, I’ve worked in a few WordPress and BuddyPress core contributions, was a Dev Bootcamp mentor, spoke at a few WordCamps, and even released some popular plug-ins and themes.

Over the past 4 years, I have led engineering on WordPress projects for start-ups, small-business, non-profits, and large enterprise clients. My desire to be a polyglot has taken me to other back-end platforms such as Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, Zend, CodeIgniter and Laravel; but I always come back to WordPress, largely because it’s just so friendly for the publishers and content managers that interact with the software every day. I am really looking forward to being a part of the great work being done here at 10up, and learning from my super smart co-workers.

Go Cubs!

Editor’s Note from Jake: When Rachel informed me that she was interested in exploring a role at 10up, I tried to contain my enthusiasm. I’ve been a fan of Rachel’s work, including her popular BootstrapWP theme, for a few years, and have always been impressed by the strength of her communication and engineering skills. Rachel has experience in project management, high scale programming, and presenting – the perfect mix of skills for a 10up Strategic Engineer. I’m thrilled to be working with her.