Chris is a Senior Developer Advocate at Pantheon, where they help bridge the gap between WordPress and Drupal engineers and Pantheon’s developer tools. They have a background in development, including tenures at top WordPress agencies like Human Made and WebDevStudios. Chris maintains open source plugins on GitHub and WordPress.org, has authored training courses for Pluralsight, and has been an active part of the WordPress community since 2011. Outside of work, they’re likely planning their next D&D session, cheering on their local professional women’s soccer team, or tracking down the best vegan food in town.
Q&A with Chris
Who or what helped you find your footing in WordPress, and how do you try to pay that forward today?
When I first really got started in the community, I was working with the documentation team, because WordPress docs were really the way that I learned and grew as a WordPresser. And probably the single person who was most responsible for making me feel welcome is Kim Parsell. I remember being invited to the WordPress Community Summit in the old Automattic offices in San Francisco, seeing Kim and introducing myself as Chris and she said “hi” politely, but when I said “jazzsequence” her face lit up and she gave me a hug. The thing that kept me coming back to WordPress in my early freelance career was knowing that whenever I had a question or problem, there was always a blog post or a page in the Codex with the solution, and I started speaking (and later making online developer training courses) as a way to pay it forward and help others develop in their WordPress journey.
If you could engineer one connection at WCEH 2026 — a conversation, an intro, a collaboration — what would it be?
I pretty passionately believe that WordPressers should go to Drupal events and Drupalistas should go to WordPress events. Our communities are so similar, I feel like there’s so much shared knowledge and experience that we could learn from each other. If I could wave a magic wand and make one connection happen, it would be joining the Drupal and WP communities and having one big hangout.
WordPress powers 43% of the web, but it’s the people who keep it alive. What’s a moment in this community that reminded you why you stay?
I’m reminded why I stay when I talk to and hang out with other people in the community. Human connection is a superpower and that’s why events like WordCamp Canada are so important.
What does the WordPress community get right that other tech communities don’t. What could we still do better?
I think we do a really good job in the commercial space being “frenemies”. I feel like, despite the fact that companies (like my own employer, Pantheon) are in direct competition with other companies in the ecosystem, but we can still be friends, interested in what everyone else is doing and working on, and invite folks to our events and podcasts. Where I think we can still do better is a way to let the community participate in the direction of the project, what features are added into core, what changes are made, etc. I don’t know what the best mechanic for this would be, but I feel like a lot of folks have felt disenfranchised by some of the decisions that have gone into core and that they don’t really have a voice.
What’s a form of contribution you think is undervalued, and why does it matter?
Spicy take: I think simply running WordPress sites at scale, of every size, shape and traffic pattern, is a hugely undervalued contribution to the software. And not just because I happen to work for a hosting company. We wouldn’t know that WordPress can be the backbone of media conglomerates, that multisite can run thousands of sites, that a WordPress site could get millions of pageviews per day and keep on ticking during a Sony Playstation announcement if people weren’t out there making it work and figuring out the secret sauce. There are lots of other forms of contribution that I feel are undervalued, but the role hosts play in the ecosystem is a big one, because it’s frequently the hosts that are seen as simply feeding off the success of the software and not giving back in any substantive way.
A lot of people want to contribute but feel they’re not technical enough. What would you say to them?
There are so many ways to contribute without being technical. I got my start in docs. The community team is always looking for folks to help organize and run events. And even technical teams benefit from project managers. I’d say come to a contributor day and hang out and figure out what makes the most sense for the skills you have.