This year has been a wild ride for me so far, and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. I became a member of the WordPress Theme Review Team, had my first patch make it into Core, worked with Lance Willett and Drew Strojny on Twenty Twelve, was invited to the WordPress Community Summit, graduated college, moved to the United States and also attended my first WordCamp.

Today marks my first day as a full-time Theme Wrangler at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. I’m beyond excited about joining this crazy talented team of Themers and to become a member of the Automattic family. This is without a doubt the highlight of my WordPress career and truly a dream come true!

Inspired by Amy Hendrix‘ post on her first patch to an Open Source project, I want to briefly outline my first steps on WordPress Core trac:

My first patch to WordPress was basically just turning the recommendation that was given in-ticket into a patch. This was in June 2011 and is still waiting for further attention. But to be honest, at that time it wasn’t necessarily as much about the content of the patch for me as it was about creating a usable SVN patch in the first place. And actually submitting it. So it seemed like the perfect opportunity, since the content was pretty much outlined already.

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2012 has been pretty great to me so far, especially when it comes to the WordPress site of my life:

• I joined the WordPress Theme Review Team in March,
• Released my first Theme to the repository in the same month,
• Had my first patch committed to Core in May, therefore
• Became Core Contributor to 3.4 in June and
• Made it on the Twenty Twelve core development team in July.

But all this was topped today, when I received an invitation to the WordPress Community Summit on Tybee Island, GA in October!

With my first three contributions to WordPress core, I also made it on the Credits page for the new release, which is a huge honor for me:

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