Seven years ago today, I typed svn commit for the first time in my checkout of WordPress core. I’ve since done it an additional 388 times. Most of those were in the first few years, but I’m glad that in the last year I’ve done it 35 times, and in WordPress 5.8 my face came back to the credits page.

Three years after my first commit, I said:

I’ve not been a high volume committer in my three years ( I’ve made 283 total commits), but I have had the pleasure of working on user-facing features such as Shiny Updates for plugins and “Logout everywhere” along with helping to maintin multiple underlying components. I also had the honor of being a deputy release lead for WordPress 4.7.

I’ve become an even lower volume committer, but I hope I am still having an impact. I helped drop support for old PHP versions.

Committing is an honor, but maintainership can be a burden. Saying yes is hard with a strong commitment to backward compatibility. No can be a temporary answer but yes is forever. You have to think not how something will be used now, but how it will affect the maintenance of the project in the future.

One of the hard parts of not being as active as a committer is that my confidence is lower in my decision-making, so I need to spend more time thinking through if something is ready. It can be a vicious cycle and eventually it will lead me to take emeritus status, but I’m not there yet. I still feel I can contribute, and I still want to contribute.

Here’s to seven years of helping to democratize publishing 🍻