From the classroom to the block editor

I didn’t come to WordPress through code. I came through writing.

During my doctoral studies in Rhetoric and Professional Communication at Iowa State University, I was teaching composition and helping students find their voice in digital spaces. Someone needed a volunteer to pilot a new platform for student ePortfolios — a massive multisite WordPress network the Online Learning Team was building from scratch. I raised my hand.

That decision changed everything.

The work grew into something real. I co-authored published research on open source learning management, presented at national conferences alongside faculty like Dr. Barbara Blakely, and helped scale the ePortfolio system to serve thousands of students across ISUComm’s foundation communication courses. If you’re curious, there’s more where that came from.

But the deeper thing I took away wasn’t academic. It was this: WordPress is where modern communication happens. Building on the open web; that’s the work that matters.

How I got to Automattic

It wasn’t a job application. It was a friendship.

While I was still wading through grad school, our daughters auditioned for small roles in Iowa State’s production of A Christmas Carol. My wife struck up a conversation with another family in the lobby; the kind of easy, wandering talk about kids and life that you don’t think twice about at the time. That conversation became a lasting friendship.

Years later, that friend — Mike Bal — knew about a job opening at Automattic. He thought of me. He made a recommendation. And that was it.

I’ve said it before and I mean it: personal connections are at the center of every meaningful change in my life. The open web brought me to WordPress; a chance encounter in a theater lobby brought me to Automattic. I couldn’t have engineered either one.

What I do at Automattic

My official title is Technical Account Manager on the Special Projects Team; the job is harder to describe than that.

At its core, I work with partners to understand their goals and translate their ideas into action using WordPress. Organizations like Joyful Heart Foundation and Kindness.org come with a vision; my job is to help them realize it on the open web. It’s less about building things for people and more about empowering them to own what they’ve built.

On the product side, I’ve had a hand in shaping features in Jetpack Forms and WordPress core blocks by advocating for what real users actually need. That instinct came from teaching. It never left.

The work I do with the Special Projects public website and the Cool Tools initiative has also given me a chance to function more like a product manager; thinking about what tools exist, what’s missing, and how to communicate that to the people who can do something about it.

The no-code thing

I don’t write code. I never have.

What I do is describe what I want, clearly and specifically, and then use AI tools like Telex, Claude Code, and Cursor to build it. Custom WordPress blocks. Plugins. Things that would have required a developer a few years ago. I build them on evenings and weekends, often in a single sitting, and then I share how I did it.

That’s the part that genuinely excites me. Not that I can do this, but that you can too. The barrier between having an idea and shipping it has collapsed in a way that still feels a little unreal. You don’t need a computer science degree. You don’t need to hire an agency. You need a clear sense of what you want to make and the willingness to learn by doing.

I write about all of it in No Code Required, a newsletter about building on WordPress with AI tools. The process, the experiments, the things that work on the first try and the things that absolutely don’t. If you’ve ever thought “I wish WordPress could do X” and assumed you’d need a developer to get there, that’s exactly who I’m writing for.

A little more about me

I studied Rhetoric and Professional Communication at the PhD level at Iowa State, hold a Master’s in Rhetoric, Composition, and Professional Communication, and a Bachelor’s in English from Grand View University. I’ve taught writing at the university level, built eLearning platforms, managed creative agencies, and hosted a podcast about publishing workflows called Publishing Flow on the Open Channels FM network.

Outside of WordPress, I build things with wood, make pizza from scratch, and think too much about why some writing sticks and most of it doesn’t.

The through line

Everything I’ve done professionally has started with writing. Not as a skill to put on a resume, but as a way of thinking, making sense of things, and communicating clearly enough that other people can act on what you’re saying. That’s what I taught. That’s what got me hired at Automattic. And honestly, it’s what makes the AI tools work, because describing what you want precisely is still the hard part.

If you’re building on WordPress, curious about what AI tools can actually do, or just want to follow along as I figure it out, I’d love to have you. The newsletter is the best place to start.