Aaron Jorbin (@jorbin) – WordPress user profile

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