WordPress open source · 2020 · Release coordinator
Context
WordPress runs over 40% of the web. Each major release is shipped by a volunteer release squad, and 5.6 had the first squad made up entirely of women and non-binary contributors. Human Made funded my time to coordinate it.
The challenge
5.6 brought together 605 volunteer contributors, nearly 350 Trac tickets and more than 1,000 GitHub pull requests. Nobody reports to the release coordinator. The ship date is public, and the release lands on millions of sites. It also carried changes that touch compatibility: wider auto-updates, the first steps towards PHP 8 support, and the middle stage of a jQuery update spread across three releases.
What I did
- Coordinated the release from planning to ship across sixteen squad roles and the wider contributor group, keeping everyone moving towards a fixed date without line authority over any of them.
- Worked inside a squad model that paired each lead with a cohort of newer contributors, so the release grew the next set of leads as well as shipping. My cohort had two.
- Ran the retrospective afterwards, asking contributors what to keep and what to change in future releases.
The outcome
Shipped in December 2020. A core developer called it the smoothest release in several cycles.
What I took from it: “there wasn’t a single person who didn’t deserve to be there on merit.” Removing a barrier to entry is what let that performance happen. That is why representation matters.