Profiles

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I started blogging in 2008. Before that it was static HTML pages, free CMSes, and a lot of time in forums, mostly trying to figure out how any of it worked.

My first real blog went up on blogspot.com in Q3 of 2008. February 2009 is the date I actually count, because that’s when I moved to self-hosted WordPress. A WordPress.com blog followed in September 2010, when I wanted somewhere to write without touching a server.

The development part happened because hosted platforms kept telling me no. I wanted layout changes, custom output, small things the theme options didn’t cover. WordPress said yes, as long as I learned PHP. So I started learning PHP and WordPress development in 2009, and I’ve only added to that since.

A rough timeline:

2008: first blog, on Blogspot.
2009: first WordPress blog, and the first lines of PHP I wrote on purpose.
2010: WordPress.com blog.
2011: bought my first commercial domain and started treating this as a business instead of a hobby.
2013: joined WordPress.org in October and started contributing instead of only consuming.
2015: first translation contributions.
2018: founded Gatilab, where I build WordPress software, fast websites, publishing systems, and tools for independent creators.
2024: first core contribution, shipped in WordPress 6.7.

The plugins came from the same place the PHP did. Dynamic Month & Year into Posts exists because keeping the year current inside evergreen posts by hand is a terrible use of a January morning. It runs on 8,000+ sites now, which still surprises me. GT Link Manager, Formatting Extender, Beautiful Recent Posts Widget, and Dynamic Functionalities were all private snippets on my own sites first.

What keeps me here is the same thing that got me here. WordPress lets you open the hood. When something doesn’t behave the way you want, you can read the code, understand why, fix it, and then hand that fix to everyone else. Not many platforms let you do that, and the ones that do rarely have a community this large arguing about it in public.

Eighteen years in, it’s still the same loop. Hit a limitation. Read the code. Ship a fix. Write about what I learned so the next person doesn’t have to dig as long as I did.