This weekend, a whole new set of committers were announced at the first ever WordCamp US. I was among those #blessed with commit.
What the heck is commit?
For those of you who don’t hang around making Internet all day, commit is just a term for the ability to send code somewhere. In this case, it members of the WordPress community entrusted me with the ability to approve and send code to the nightly build of WordPress. Historically, there haven’t been many people with this access so it’s a pretty big honor and a sign of trust. I take it very seriously.
So here’s what happened…
Unlike Mel, I did not find out in a bar. I was on the way to the store to get some well-deserved drinks for one of the organizers when I got a ping from Nacin. It went something like this:
This was great news already. When I originally created my account, my username was “Michael Arestad”… With the space. This meant that no one could mention me on any WordPress.org site. I was thrilled to finally have this fixed for me!
Then he followed up with something fairly ominous:
Oh? There is? I was immediately pondering what that meant and trying to figure out scenarios where it would make sense to remove all spaces from names. Way off.
It turns out, the real reason for the name change was so I could become a committer.
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The next few days were a bit of a blur partly because the conference was crazy, but that one completely unreal fact was bouncing around my head like Flubber™ wreaking all sorts of havoc.
Then Sunday happened. The new committers were tasked with committing something by the end of the day at the Contributor Day. This is when reality set in for us. I can tell you both Mel and I freaked out quite a bit even submitting a small change.
I have to say I am incredibly honored. I am one among very few designers who have commit. I plan to do my very best help guide the design of WordPress and maybe (if I’m lucky and have help) simplify some of those totes cray CSS selectors.
I was given commit with brilliant folks who I have the utmost respect for. Congrats to Mel Choyce (also a designer!!!), Rachel Baker, Joe Hoyle, Eric Lewis, Mike Schroder, and Pascal Birchler!
Fun fact
Mel Choyce was one of the first people I worked with in my initial attempt to contribute to core. It was on CEUX (rest in peace) which was an effort to introduce content blocks into the editor. Content blocks bring people together.