Profiles

Bio

Aaron is a polyhistoric man of the web who knows rabble-rousers get shit done. He has led engineering teams responsible for some of the largest and most prominent WordPress sites in the world including Rolling Stone, Variety, WIRED, The New Yorker, and Joe Biden’s White House. He is also a WordPress Core Committer that focuses on improving developer happiness and making the internet usable and enjoyable by everyone. You can contact him at https://aaron.jorb.in/get-in-touch/

Interests

Usability, JavaScript, Build Tools, Whisky, Smiles, Community, Usability

Badges

CODE
8 badges
Core Contributor '15 Core Team '14 Hosting Contributor '18 Meta Contributor '15 Plugin Developer Security Contributor '22 Security Team '22 Tide Contributor '25
CONTENT
2 badges
Documentation Contributor '17 Photo Contributor '22
COMMUNITY
4 badges
bbPress Contributor '19 B BuddyPress Contributor '19 WordCamp Organizer '19 WordCamp Speaker '19
PRACTICE
1 badge
Test Contributor '22
POLYGLOTS
2 badges
Translation Contributor '16 Translation Editor '16

Job History

Sr. Director of Editorial Technology
May 2018 – Dec 2022
Penske Media Corporation
Hired multiple engineers and lead training and onboarding; doubled the number of engineers and improved
diversity in the process.
Established and strengthen relationships with multiple vendors including negotiating new and expiring contracts.
Lead multi-year effort to update and standardize content editor across 20+ brands.
Rolled out Engineering Career Ladder with standardized salaries and normalized titles.
Oversaw the day-to-day work of multiple teams including direct and matrix reports.
Delivered success on multiple large high profile projects each year.
Enacted the first corporate hackathon and set up processes for future editions.
Improved corporate open-source contributions.
Initiated accessibility improvements including multiple product/engineering training and an organization-wide
workshop.
Redesigned the analytics product used by 20+ brands and senior executives.
Director of Engineering
Sep 2016 – May 2018
Some Spider
Directed product engineering by an internal team & contractors.
Relaunched flagship property, increasing time on site by 16% YoY .
Modeled revenue & costs around video distribution strategies to allow for data informed decisions.
Managed the launch of multiple new brands.
Instituted CI/CD processes leading to increased deployments with fewer side effects.
Technical Architect
Dec 2014 – Dec 2015
Condé Nast
Architected system & performance improvements for six publications.
Migrated infrastructure for six publications onto AWS.
Launched three publications onto WordPress.
Assisted in creating and rolling out standard job titles and descriptions and creating a standard hiring process.
Contributor, Core Committer, Release Lead
Feb 2010 – Present
WordPress
Contribute to over 30 major versions of WordPress, 20+ as a maintainer, core committer, and mentor.
Prioritize tickets to ensure successful and impactful releases.
Triage incoming issues after a major release to ensure maintenance releases are scheduled and executed
appropriately.
Create guidelines for use by contributors in areas including communication, release process, and triaging.
Organize a local meetup group and grow it from less than 20 to over one thousand members in three years.
Plan WordCamp NYC, WordCamp Publishers, & WordCamp US.
Mentor two Google Summer of Code students.
Speak at conferences and events around the world.

Key Accomplishments

- WordPress Core Committer
- Introduced Automated JS Testing to WordPress
- Built grunt-patch-wordpress
- Lead WordPress Core\'s compatibility with PHP 7.0, 7.1, and 7.2
- Deputy Release Lead for WordPress 4.7
- Release Lead for over over a dozen maintaince and security releases

Recent impact

Score weights high-impact work (commits, releases, approved translations, props) at 3x routine activity.

Last 30 days
112contributions
high104
medium8
score320
Last 90 days
230contributions
high206
medium24
score642
Last 12 months
625contributions
high541
medium84
score1707

Team focus

Share of contributions across teams during the last 365 days

WordPress releases

Contributed to 38 releases
  • 7.0
  • 6.9
  • 6.8
  • 6.7
  • 6.6
  • 6.5
  • 6.4
  • 6.3
  • 6.2
  • 6.1
  • 6.0
  • 5.9
  • 5.8
  • 5.7
  • 5.6
  • 5.5
  • 5.4
  • 5.3
  • 5.2
  • 5.1
  • 5.0
  • 4.9
  • 4.8
  • 4.7
  • 4.6
  • 4.5
  • 4.4
  • 4.3
  • 4.2
  • 4.1
  • 4.0
  • 3.9
  • 3.8
  • 3.7
  • 3.6
  • 3.5
  • 3.3
  • 3.2

Time commitment

20 hours per week

Contributions

Type
August 2026
Aug 20 Thu · 21:39
Meta high
Wrote a new post, Call for WordPress 7.1.x Release Managers, on the site Make WordPress Core:
WordPress 7.1.0 was released August 19, 2026. While the work of a major release team…
Aug 18 Tue · 18:12
Core med
Closed ticket #65906 on Core Trac:
Out-of-date Version (TinyMCE)
Aug 18 Tue · 16:35
Core med
Created ticket #65904 on Core Trac:
Add php8.6 to the test matrix
Aug 17 Mon · 18:33
Meta high
Aug 16 Sun · 18:35
Core med
Created issue #81708 in the WordPress/gutenberg repository:
When uploading an OpenEXR image, first you are told it is uploaded…
Aug 16 Sun · 18:15
Core med
Created issue #81707 in the WordPress/gutenberg repository:
Uploading an heic file with the wrong file extention doesn't fail or…
Aug 16 Sun · 17:16
Core med
Submitted pull request #13068 to WordPress/wordpress-develop:
Add a library of images and malformed images
Aug 13 Thu · 18:31
Meta high
Mentioned in [15074] on Meta SVN:
Credits API: Update credits for 7.0.2 and 7.0.3.
Aug 12 Wed · 16:36
Core high
Mentioned in [63254] on WordPress SVN:
Media: Prevent loading images into Imagick which might be PostScript.
Aug 12 Wed · 16:35
Core high
Mentioned in [63253] on WordPress SVN:
Media: Prevent loading images into Imagick which might be PostScript.

Developer

9 plugins

Plugins

2 favorites

Translations

1 locale
art_xemoji 🌏🌍🌎 (Emoji) (Emoji) General Translation Editor Translation Contributor