[wp-hackers] Introduction: WordPress Developer from Bluehost

[Bryan Petty]

Bluehost has been very generous, and made some room in the budget to 
hire on a couple full-time developers who will be dedicated to working 
on WordPress core. I am one of those developers, so I wanted to 
introduce myself to the list, and give everyone a little background on 
myself (the other developer hasn't been hired yet, but will be very soon).

My WP.org username is "bpetty", and I've been programming professionally 
for right around 10 years. I've been using PHP since version 3, but the 
first 7 of those 10 years was also spent writing C++ desktop application 
for both Windows and OSX (Phoenix Project Manager if you're curious).

I'm also one of the official developers on the open source wxWidgets 
project where besides working on the actual C++ library itself, I also 
run the official website, wiki, online documentation, and the forums. As 
one of the wxWidgets developers, I have mentored students in the Google 
Summer of Code program, and I have actually met a few of you in person 
at the Mentor Summits from the last 3 years (to be honest though, I 
don't recall any names).

If you didn't catch me in the #wordpress-dev IRC channel yesterday when 
I gave this introduction there, I will be lurking in there from now on 
under the nick "tierra".

My existing experience with WordPress is simply as a developer that has 
launched a few sites using WordPress. I have built new themes from 
scratch for a couple of those sites, and I have also already made 
several fixes to 4 or 5 existing extensions. I am very familiar with the 
custom post types, fields, and taxonomies having built sites with 
WordPress as both a blog and as a full CMS. However, I have not dug 
myself in much deeper into core WordPress code until now.

My initial plans here are simply to submit bug patches and perform 
testing as needed on the backlog of Trac tickets on core as well as 
helping with unit tests once I'm a little more familiar with the system. 
We'll see where my strengths land after the first few months here, and I 
can start digging into larger new features and changes later on down the 
road. I do know that some of the most annoying parts of WordPress that 
I'd like to see improved lie mostly in the mess that is the public 
template functions and tags (I am strong with developer APIs and 
backwards compatibility), so that's one likely area I will jump into, 
but only after high priority stuff is taken care of first.

Regards,

Bryan Petty
Wordpress Developer
bpetty at bluehost.com

P.S. If WordPress is considering a migration from SVN to git/GitHub, let 
it be known that I've been using git for over two years now, so no 
training is needed here. In fact, I plan on using the GitHub WP mirror 
for my patches until it's time to look at possible SVN commit access way 
down the road here.