Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.
-Benjamin Franklin
Because your success is our mission, growth and progress continue to develop at WebDevStudios (WDS). Keeping in alignment with that philosophy, WDS has just added two new Senior Backend Engineers to our team. Both are experienced, savvy, and love WordPress. Please take the time to get to know Richard Aber and Keith Frey.
Richard Aber
Richard attended Alexandria Technical & Community College in the 90s, where he was exposed to a “new” technology called the “World Wide Web.” He began building websites as a hobby, but it was when a former employer sent him to web design classes that he was introduced to MySQL, Perl, and Java. In 2009, Richard began dabbling in WordPress, and he’s been in love ever since. He’s especially drawn to the WordPress community.
“I like how people get together to share information and teach other to be better WordPress users, site owners, and developers. I feel like they really care about helping each other,” explains Richard. “When I started attending WordCamp Minneapolis / St. Paul, I made some good friends in the community, and I enjoy seeing them again at every WordCamp.”
Richard also appreciates the simplicity of WordPress. He says that previously, he used to “roll everything by hand,” building database tables, setting up and managing database connections, creating custom frontend templating, etc.
“When I found WordPress, I realized I didn’t have to build everything by hand, from scratch anymore,” he elaborates, “This made spinning up new sites much easier, and reduced a lot of the boilerplate code I had to use prior. WordPress enabled me to rapidly develop more complex sites for clients, and allowed my clients to easily make changes to their site without always needing to call me to write code. It was a revolution for me, personally.”
Richard has known of WDS and our involvement in the WordPress community for years. In fact, at a former position where he worked as a development manager, he had his team use wd_s for their starter theme. “When I saw that WDS was looking for a backend engineer, I thought it would be a good opportunity to join a WordPress-centric agency that is involved in the community,” says Richard. It definitely was a good idea! And we’re happy to have him join us.
Keith Frey
Keith’s career began when his employer, whom he worked for as a podcast producer, asked him to build a website for one of their clients. Now, more than ten years later, he has gained a broad range of experience as a full-stack engineer.
What Keith loves about WordPress is that he is constantly solving problems and learning new things as a result. “I’ve always liked puzzles and mysteries. Well, with web development, every day there is a new puzzle or a new mystery!” Keith tells us. “Every project is like a bunch of pieces that you have to make fit together. And with the speed at which web development changes, there is always something new to learn. For instance, I didn’t know about WP-CLI before recently. It’s awesome!”
Keith’s background includes experience in a variety of different industries, including public relations, advertising, card services, music and radio. He says that he applied for the open backend engineer position at WDS because he thought it would be a good opportunity to work with people who know more than he does.
“I love the philosophy behind the culture and the attitude towards both development and just work in general. It made me really excited to be a part of the team and the culture,” Keith explains, adding, “I’ve been on a few distributed teams before, but despite being fully distributed, this team is more tightly knit than most on-site teams I’ve been on!”
We certainly are a tight-knit group, and we’re glad to have Keith on board. Would you like to be a part of a passionate team that is devoted to our clients and strives to attain a beneficial work-life balance? Take a look at our currently open positions. Start your career with WDS today and submit your application.
Get to know the rest of our team by visiting our Team page. PS: Did you find our Easter egg?
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