Member Spotlight: Alex Stine

From Alex: Building my first self-hosted WordPress blog is what introduced me to the world of tech and eventually my first few jobs with Incsub. At Incsub, I started out in Tech Support for the first year helping clients fix their websites. Next, I transitioned in to Front-End and Accessibility Web Development. Here I picked up multiple skills about working with screen readers, ensuring equal access for all, and learning some modern tooling that improved efficiency working with static assets. Next, I found my way in to System Administration. I had a strong interest in learning how all that code developers wrote ended up becoming real applications. I learned a lot about Back-End Development as well through the process. Whether that was building a WordPress plugin, creating a serverless function for AWS Lambda, or writing Shell/Python scripts for automation. Understanding at a very high level how WordPress could operate at scale set the stage for later opportunities. At this point, my time at Incsub came to an end after about 5 years.

Between my transition from Incsub to Kinsta, I was working on earning industry certifications to set myself apart from the rest of the competition. After starting at Kinsta, I worked on a bunch of different DevOps related tasks. This is where I earned my experience with GCP, further improving my automation skills with Python, Ansible, Shell, and GitHub Actions, and learning the most valuable skill, how to communicate well between all teams. Towards the end of my time at Kinsta, I finished up my 1 year of technical school and then caught my next big break.

I left the WordPress industry after six years and started in the healthcare payments world with Waystar as a Cloud Platform Engineer.

(Note: Alex still works within the community to promot accessibility.)

What do you enjoy most about working in WordPress?

I enjoy the ability to give back and have most of my ideas respected by a caring community.

What do you love most about your Post Status membership?

The networking opportunities with other experts.

What business/web/WordPress advice do you have for others in our industry?

Find an area of the project and give back. I think some of us forget that the project is making us money so giving back is only fair in exchange.