Dion Hulse
Dion is currently one of a select few with the privilege of WordPress core commit access. Having made close to 300 Trac tickets, uploaded well over 500 Trac patches (as well as too many commits to count) and had over 200,000 downloads for his Plugins this will be a talk not to be missed!
We asked Dion a few questions in the lead up to his talk which he has kindly answered below:
You’ve been working with WordPress for 5 years and must have seen the community and user base change dramatically in that time. What are some of your fondest memories from the last 5 years?
Fondest memories would have to include the day I gained commit access and also meeting other developers at WordCamp SF and elsewhere. To meet a bunch of people so smart with the same philosophies at heart is an amazing thing, to be a part of that group however, is an amazing feeling
Watching the community rally around new functionality in WordPress, and realise how they can scratch an itch with them also has to be a high point, knowing that I’ve helped them solve a problem motivates me.
What does a typical day look like for a core contributor?
A typical day varies between contributors, for me personally it’s taken as little as 5 minutes per day, to many hours a day, it all depends on your level of dedication.
Over the past few years that I’ve been involved with WordPress, I’ve seen this from many different perspectives. First as a University student looking for a distraction from course work (a few patches a week), As someone with a fulltime job who became a core committor, as a freelancer specialising in WordPress (and working on core when I have no paying work), and each of those cases has involved a differing amount of time and dedication.
My current typical day is to wake up to anything from 50 to 200 emails in my inbox from WordPress Trac, WordPress SVN, wp-hackers mailing list, and too many RSS feeds to count. I usually spend up to an hour going through the emails catching up on what has happened overnight, I often find that using a mobile phone is a easy way to flick through messages and flag which ones need a follow up. Typically as a committor I’ll spend an additional few hours during the day testing patches (there can never be enough patch testing!), debugging issues being reported, and occasionally helping others get involved in WordPress as well.
What are the 3 most valuable lessons you’ve learned by being a part of the WordPress development team?
- WordPress can do anything – and I mean anything
- Contributing to an Open Source application is the best way to increase your programming abilities and skills, not only do you get peer review, but you get exposure to a new program, you learn to understand the different development methods, learn neat tricks and language features you didn’t know, but best of all, by contributing to an Open Source program, your learning helps others too!
- You can’t keep everyone happy – No matter how hard you try, you’ll never keep everyone happy in a product used by millions, take for example, the estimated 50+ million WordPress sites, if 0.1% of the users of those sites disagreed with a decision in WordPress, that’s still over 50 thousand users who are potentially unhappy!. But at the same time, one small change can make millions of other users lives easier.
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