John James Jacoby brings Alliteration to 10up

on August 1, 2013 • 15 Comments

Howdy. My name is John James Jacoby, and I’m really excited to be joining the crew at 10up as the Director of Web Engineering. Some people know me as J-trip or JJJ, or that guy will not stop talking about BuddyPress and bbPress. Other people know me as that nice young man that walks his tiny dog around the block a few times every day. Everyone else just thinks I’m tall.

From 2010 to 2013 I was the Master of Alliteration at Automattic (most popular for running WordPress.com.) During my time there, I worked on some fun projects: Post Likes, Reblogs, Jetpack Comments, and most recently WordPress.com VIP, where I brought my passion for writing secure, performant, easy-to-read code into their network of partners and in-house client teams.

Before finding WordPress, BuddyPress, and bbPress in 2007, I spent a few years working on a fork of phpBB 2 that was the canonical solution for hierarchical categories. That project has long since been retired but was an enormous amount of fun, and taught me a lot about PHP scaling and performance. Going back to the late 90’s, I was the lead in-house Visual Basic developer for a multi-million dollar tool & die operation, tasked with creating their entire inventory and sales system from scratch. In this role, I learned a lot about database schemas, caching, user interface, and user experience.

I really enjoy teaching. I find being super fluent in a topic and translating that knowledge into smaller and easier to comprehend parts to be extremely rewarding. It’s rare that we have the opportunity to share our perspectives and what we’ve learned with people that actually want to listen to us, so I try to teach every chance I get.

Along with my 10up responsibilities, I’ll continue to lead the ongoing development of BuddyPress and bbPress, two official sister projects to WordPress itself. These powerful plugins provide social-networking and support-forum functionalities to WordPress in a native and familiar way, taking it beyond a blogging platform to flex some serious CMS muscle. I’m also a site-administrator for WordPress.org, and actively enhance and maintain sites in the WordPress.org network.

I’m looking forward to directing our web engineers at 10up, and am sincerely psyched about what we’re going to accomplish.

Editor’s Note from Jake: I’m struggling for words that adequately express my excitement. I’ve admired John’s contribution to the WordPress ecosystem for years, and been proud to call him a friend since we overlapped in Providence. As a Director at 10up, John will have a tremendous impact on our standards, strategic direction, and vision. At the same time, John is going to enable 10up to dig deep into social projects, and we plan to show off just what BuddyPress, WordPress, and bbPress can do. Welcome, John!