Soma Design

I’m excit­ed (and maybe a touch sad) to announce that I’m shut­ter­ing Soma Design to join the great, grow­ing team at Automat­tic to help build the best pub­lish­ing plat­form on the plan­et. As a Theme Engi­neer, I’ll be work­ing with the brand-new Cus­tom Design team to pro­vide some awe­some tools for cus­tomiz­ing your WordPress.com theme into that state of “just right.”

It’s no under­state­ment to say that I became a web devel­op­er because of Word­Press. I start­ed blog­ging with Blog­ger in 2005, only to become frus­trat­ed and move myself over to self-host­ed Word­Press. I used the old K2¹ theme as the basis of my own theme, and tweaked it obses­sive­ly. WP pro­vid­ed just the right amount of ease and pow­er for where I was at, and revealed all the more pow­er the fur­ther I dug. Tweak­ing your WP tem­plate is a web devel­op­ment gate­way drug.

The rest is a blur. I grad­u­at­ed from SSU with a BA (Hon­ours) in the Human­i­ties in 2008, hav­ing tin­kered along the way with my ever-intrigu­ing WP blog. I even did my first paid work on my school’s web­site, attempt­ing to wran­gle some dis­as­trous table-based Dreamweaver tem­plates into some sem­blance of tol­er­a­ble. By the time I grad­u­at­ed with my glo­ri­ous­ly use­less degree², I real­ized that I could make bet­ter web sites than the major­i­ty of what I saw out there. So I took the plunge into free­lanc­ing with zero expe­ri­ence, con­nec­tions, or prospec­tive clients. And, many bumps in the road and umpteen trips to the codex lat­er, it actu­al­ly worked out.

I’d espe­cial­ly like to thank my friend and col­lab­o­ra­tors Mod­ern Tribe and David Pen­sato, with whom I’ve had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to do a lot of fun and mean­ing­ful work over the last few years. I’d also like to thank the Win­nipeg-based Automat­ti­cians Ian Stew­art and Krista Stevens for slow­ly con­vinc­ing me that I should apply. And of course, a huge thank you to the count­less peo­ple who have con­tributed of their time, skills, and pas­sion to the Word­Press project.

I’m look­ing for­ward to this next chap­ter. I get to iter­ate and improve rather than build and hand off, and work with super smart peo­ple every day. And my work will be seen my mil­lions of peo­ple. Fun. I start on Monday.