Member Spotlight: Chris Reynolds

Chris is a Senior Software Engineer and technical lead of the CMS Platform team at Pantheon. Before joining Pantheon, Chris has been a Senior Engineer at Human Made, working on Human Made’s Altis Digital Experience platform, a Developer Lead for WebDevStudios, an author of online training videos for Pluralsight, a developer, project manager and support technician at Event Espresso, a freelancer, and a Specialty Team member at Whole Foods. Though vegan, they can still be snobby about cheese and chocolate. Chris maintains a number of open source plugins on GitHub and WordPress.org and has been involved in WordCamp Salt Lake City since 2011.

When not coding, they can most likely be found planning for their next Dungeons & Dragons session.

What do you enjoy most about working in WordPress?

I love the building blocks that WordPress provides. It’s so much more than a CMS — the component parts can be used and abused to build any type of web application you can think of. I enjoy pushing WordPress into areas that it may not normally go.

What do you love most about your Post Status membership?

I used to be a Post Status member but not active in the Slack, just reading the newsletter. While that was valuable, what I’ve learned since rejoining the Slack community is that I’ve been missing out on a great community of peers in the industry and that’s super important in our remote-first, post-pandemic where in-person gatherings are less frequent.

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

Always Be Learning. 😀

Tech moves fast and it’s easy to get passed up by all the evolving changes. While I don’t think it’s possible to be ahead of every new emerging development, having resources and allies you can lean on to help you fill your gaps is incredibly valuable. It’s important to have your ear to the ground and at least know about — and understand — emerging concepts so that you can develop an opinion about them and understand in what way they may (or may not) apply to what you’re working on.