Four years ago today, change set #13446 landed in WordPress core. It was a day that changed my life. The patch landed while I was sitting at Java Shack in Arlington, VA. I went back to my then girlfriend’s place and exclaimed “You won’t really understand this, but I just had a patch added to WordPress”. From that day forward, my code was going to be used by millions of people. Yes, this change wouldn’t affect most of them. It was a small incremental improvement. But it’s small incremental improvements that make good projects great.

In May, I celebrated WordPress’s 10th Anniversary and noted all the friendships I made because of WordPress. That remains even more true today. I moved to NYC late last year and the person here who I’ve become closest with is someone I first met at a WordCamp. I found my apartment because of a friend that I made at a WordCamp. My involvement with WordPress even got me the job that I have.

WordPress isn’t a perfect project. If It was, I wouldn’t want to work on it as much as I do (that is a somewhat paraphrased quote I originally heard Andrew Nacin say). We have a lot of code to improve. The diversity of our contributor community needs improvement. We also need to do a better job of going outside of our community and bringing others into it. But hopefully in the next four years, I’ll have a chance to help improve all of it.