End of an Era
Joining the team
Since May 2021 I have been on a long-term contract as part of one of the internal agency teams at Automattic. Having spent many years working at local agencies and contracting with other teams, this was a real eye-opener.
When I joined, the team was small and made up of some extremely skilled engineers who had created some of the biggest tools Automattic now owns. Imposter syndrome doesn't quite cover the feeling, but it's close, ha. The goal of our team was to show what was possible with WordPress when it is done right, not just example or sample sites.
Migrations and WooCommerce
My role was to be the migration and WooCommerce specialist, and that was put to good use. Over the years I have imported extremely large subscription systems with tens of thousands of subscribers, blogs with comments numbering close to a million, and everything in between. For a backend developer with a passion for WooCommerce, it has been heaven.
The team has grown over the years, and so has WordPress. I have had the pleasure of being forced to use Full Site Editing while it was still in beta, and of finding ways to make non-FSE systems work alongside it. A few colleagues and I will continue to wake up in cold sweats working out how to make BuddyPress and the block editor play nicely.
While I can't talk about much of what I worked on during the placement, I have touched well over 140 websites, ranging from small local charities to <redacted>.gov, via huge subscription stores and jazz clubs along the way. Being forced to be pioneers in the world of WordPress meant we ran into plenty of issues, so over time I have helped identify and fix bugs in WordPress Core, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Jetpack CRM and lots of third-party plugins.
The Wayback Machine Link Fixer
My proudest achievement for my time there was working with the wonderful people at Archive.org (opens in new tab) to create the Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer (opens in new tab) (a bit of a mouthful). It is a utility plugin that tries to find or create a snapshot for every link in your website's content, so that if a target site goes down, the links in your content switch to the snapshot. Your links keep working long after the targets are gone.
The concept sounds much simpler than it is, but it has been an incredible experience to create and release it on the WordPress.org repository (opens in new tab). It has been a delight working with Chuck over the past three years on the development, improvement and support of this useful tool.
What it taught me
My time there taught me a lot. We supported over 500 websites with a small, dedicated team of engineers and skilled technical account managers. It took a collective effort, not only working smarter but also taking the time to make sure our internal tooling helped.
We spent a lot of time putting in full QA suites: unit and end-to-end tests, static analysis, code sniffers, mess and complexity monitors, server-level monitoring, and then, over time, more and more AI assistance. That set us up nicely for the agentic era. All of our repos had strict QA and testing gates, so it was fairly easy to increase the automation gradually.
I'm glad the news that our contract was coming to an end was not delivered face to face. I'm not sure I would have held back the tears as the reality hit: the friends and projects I'd worked with daily would soon be no more. It really has been one of the most amazing experiences of my working life. I leave not only with lots of new skills, but also with solutions to the problems you only meet when looking after sites with 50k posts, 300k comments and owners who want to throw the kitchen sink at them.
What's next
So here I am, in the dying weeks of the contract, looking ahead and ready to share these skills and experiences with the next team who would like to work with me and the wider PinkCrab collective. If you have complex problems you need help with, please get in touch.
If you have a big migration, a busy WooCommerce store or a site that has outgrown its setup, get in touch. We have done this at scale and can help you do it properly.
Get in touch