In some ways, technology has reshaped the way I approach and solve problems — forcing me to think in terms of adoption strategies first, rather than always trying to find the simplest, cleanest design, because of the disadvantaged position I occupied as a non-coder.
Chris Messina, “Happy birthday to me! I’m joining Google“, Jan 7th, 2010

I think all of us, non-coders or non-non-coders, could benefit by focusing more on solving customers’ problems, and  focusing more on how we get our solutions into customers hands.

Oh, and congratulations Chris on the new job!

Yesterday , we, WordPress won Best Open Source Social Networking CMS.

Who are we?

Well, this is a really hard question to answer, and you aren’t going to find me trying, but I can share a little bit about the small percentage of the people I know that make WordPress amazing.

WordPress 2.3 is the third major release since WordPress became my working life. This is a special release for me because mid-September marked my one year with the Automattic team.

The greatest reason why it is the most special release for me so far is not the awesome improvements to the product, but the collaboration… and yeah, the awesome improvements to the product are a direct result of the collaboration.

As I wrote the other day, “Before WordPress, I haven’t ever been part of a community of this size where people support each other so well”. When I think of the tens of thousands of people that participate in WordPress, I get totally overwhelmed. What really boggles my mind is that these people aren’t participating passively, and each individuals contribution can be identified, whether it is as simple as choosing WordPress, helping a friend set it up, or as unexpected and involved as the year that Robin Adrianse spent among the top five code contributors to WordPress — I miss you Robin, but I know you are up to awesome things with more ahead for you.

Almost all of the people that I saluted in WordPress 2.2 Source Code Worth $1 Million! deserve recognition, but I’m not going to duplicate the link love fest — though they all most certainly deserve it. I will mention some of the many WordPress members that inspire me and keep me excited about my work.

Ryan continues to get his WordPress pump on while balancing his boy Ronan in his other arm. Equally, Donncha does a similar act with his little one, Adam, and his other baby WordPress MU.

It gives me headaches just thinking about the problems that Mark Jaquith solves. The bugs that Canonical URLs would cause gave me nightmares to go with my headaches, but Mark methodically and thoroughly borrowed, designed, coded and tested this feature, and it hasn’t disturbed my sleep at all.

In that post for WordPress 2.2, I wrote, “Peter Westwood (westi) continues to earn the most consistent contributor award”. Well, that would still be true, except that he is contributing even more now! At the end of September, Matt announced Peter becoming a lead developer and since then not did he play a large role in getting 2.3 polished, he has complimented his debugging and coding by started an invaluable weekly post on development work in WordPress.

Otto42, after the core developers probably considers tickets the most. Along with Otto, Bas Bosman (nazgul) is the chief trac manager and lends a lot of his development expertise to WordPress. Jeremy Visser is a trac worker, a regular contributor, and does not let things fall off the radar.

Daniel Jalkut (dcj) (Red Sweater), developer of MarsEdit worked with our Joseph Scott to scratch a lot of itches and treat some rashes with XML-RPC support. Joseph also worked with the brilliant Tim Bray, Pete Lacey, Elias Torres and Sam Ruby on giving WordPress a good AtomPub.

Jennifer Hodgdon has become WordPress’ development documentation specialist. She is also very generous with her expertise on wp-hackers, and clearly an awesome WordPress plugin and website development.

One month later, it is clear that WordPress 2.3 is the smoothest release . The proof? Maintenance release 2.3.1 with little to scare me.

I’ve made my kudos purposely short, and risk offending many of the amazing people that contribute to WordPress, so please help me out here!

I would love to find a way to met more both online and in real life. Who are your WordPress heroes? Have you remembered to thank them lately?