Last week was my final week at GoDaddy. It was a little over four years ago, when I joined GoDaddy as a full-time WordPress contributor. I went in with a goal to help make WordPress better, and GoDaddy really empowered me to do that during my time there. It was truly great and I’m going to miss it in so many ways!
What’s Next?
I continue to be passionate about the open web and open source software, like WordPress, as a part of it. I still strongly believe that the internet is the single most effective information sharing tool in all of history, and keeping it open and accessible to all is critical to humanity’s ability to make forward progress. And I’m still as excited as I’ve ever been to be a part of that.
But I’ve also become increasingly focused on the sustainability of the open web and the open products that make it up. If you look at the time and resources required for these things to exist, it’s expensive! Which is why in successful projects like WordPress, we see so many people who are paid in some way or another to work on it. Without those people WordPress would not be where it is.
And it’s good when companies do this as a social good or as something tangentially related to what they do, but I think true sustainability here requires more than that. I want to help companies align their products and services, their success, with the health and success of open source software and the open web. I want to help build symbiotic relationships that bring sustainable, ongoing benefit to the WordPress community and the web as a whole.
Where?
I’m super excited to be joining Endurance and the Bluehost family, to do just this. Endurance has already shown their commitment to the WordPress project and community. I look forward to helping them continue to align with that commitment in an effort to build toward the sustainability of the open web.