Contributor Spotlight: Jonathan Bossenger

Welcome to another edition of the Training Team’s Contributor Spotlight!
In this series, we introduce one of our many valued contributors and invite you to learn more about their journey.

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Hi Jonathan! Can you briefly introduce yourself and share a bit about your background?

Sure, so as you know, my name is Jonathan. I live in Cape Town, which is in South Africa, a country right at the tip of Africa. For most of my youth, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life until I found my way to programming/software development. 2024 marks my 20th year writing code.

Outside of WordPress–professionally or in your spare time–what do you usually like to do?

I’m a husband and father of two growing boys, aged 9 and 12, so much of my spare time involves family activities.

When I do have time to myself, I spend it either staying fit and moderately healthy at the gym or working through my Steam gaming backlog, which built up over the years when the boys were very little, and I had no free time 😀

One of my other interests is martial arts, and I’ve been actively involved in Brazilian jiu-jitsu for the better part of the last 17 years.

How did you first discover WordPress, and when did you decide to use it for your projects?

When I first started web development in 2009, I was teaching myself PHPPHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. https://www.php.net/manual/en/preface.php. from a book (you know, the way we learned before online learning was a thing!), and I wanted somewhere to document what I had learned. So I bought a domain and, after a Google search, installed Drupal on that domain. I went looking for alternative content management systems, and found WordPress.

Here’s the original blog post I published about the PHP script I wrote to migrate all my blog posts over to WordPress.

What motivated you to start contributing to the open-source project?

In 2015, I went to my first WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. in Cape Town. One of the talks, by Jenny Wong, was about how and why to contribute. This was something I’d been thinking about for a while, and so I was lucky to be able to chat with Jenny afterward, and she guided me further. After that WordCamp, I went home, found the Make WordPress site, and started looking for my first contributions.

I’m a volunteer by nature, and I’m a big believer that if I get something for free from an open-source project, I need to give something back. So, contributing to one of the Make teams made sense.

What drew you to the Training Team?

My journey to the Training team is a bit of a long story, so I’ll try to keep it short.

In 2020, when Learn WordPress launched in the format we know it today, I was learning to build WordPress blocks. One of my WordPress friends, Hugh Lashbrooke, was part of the team working on launching Learn WordPress with the newer tutorial videos (we called them workshops back then).

Hugh and I had spoken at a few local WordCamps together, so he knew that I liked presenting WordPress development topics. He asked me if I could create a developer tutorial, and so I did, on building your first block. I enjoyed creating that tutorial, but I never got another chance to create more.

About a year later, I moved to another company as a developer educator, creating online content for WordPress developers. However, that content was very specific to our WordPress products. I wanted to make more general WordPress development videos, so I joined the Training team channel, and the rest is history.

What was your first contribution? How did you feel seeing your work reach so many people?

My first contribution was helping to copy pages from the Codex to the new user documentation pages that now exist at Documentation team’s website (also known as HelpHub). I’ll be honest: I never really thought about the impact, it was just very cool to be contributing in this way.

Could you share any challenges or obstacles you faced when starting to contribute to the open-source project and how you overcame them?

My biggest challenge when I first started contributing was finding information. I hope the folks in the Docs team didn’t find all my questions annoying, but if I’m lost, I ask questions.😊

Were there any specific resources that helped you along your journey as a contributor?

That’s also my biggest piece of advice to new contributors: if you’re stuck, or you’re not sure, ask. Someone will reach out and help. Each of the WordPress Make teams has a team repTeam Rep A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts. or two, and they’re usually the right folks to reach out to.

Can you share any memorable moments or achievements while contributing to WordPress?

There have certainly been a few.

Speaking at my first WordCamps, first in Cape Town and then in Johannesburg.

Getting to present a workshop at WCEU is also a pretty big highlight.

Oh, and recently someone shared with me that I have the highest number of contributions on WordPress.tv videos, at 179.

What advice would you give to someone interested in contributing to WordPress?

I’ll share the same advice Jenny shared with me: Go to the Make WordPress website, read about all the different teams there, such as the Training team, and pick a few that interest you.Then join the Make WordPress’s Slack, and poke around in a few of those teams’ channels. Ask questions, and you’ll soon find the right place for you.

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Thank you, Jonathan, for all your dedication and contributions to the Training Team and the WordPress Open-Source Project!

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