In case you missed the announcement on Twitter: Meet the two new developers to join the WebDevStudios team! As you know, we’re pretty community oriented, and bringing new people on board is always a happy event. It’s just an opportunity for us to expand the WDS family!
We’re so excited to welcome these two to the WDS madness! I’m sure you’ll be introduced to their expertise, insight, and humor very, very soon, but here’s a starter on who they are and what they’re about:
Bobbie Wilson
Bobbie began programming very young, which started when she went with her mother to her college courses in programming (with punch cards then) and later to computer lab shifts. Bobbie’s first computer, the Timex/Sinclair 1000, only ran BASIC. When her elementary schools had computers, Bobbie was usually at one of them every chance she had. Later in middle school, she was the only girl in her computer club.
Fast forward a few years later, and Bobbie was getting started in HTML during the browser wars, still connecting to the Internet through AOL (after a brief stint connecting to USEnet and BBS). Her first design tool was PaintShop Pro, creating filters and using the dreaded lens flare. Her favorite site was Dr. Ozone. She followed the up and down security risks of Javascript and was thrilled when CSS made the scene.
Through the first years of her twenty year (so far) career, Bobbie has been called many things: Front End Designer, Web Designer, Web Developer, and Web Person (seriously!). She dabbled in PHPNuke and enjoyed the simplicity of use of a CMS, excelled at finding the pieces of the puzzle to create something she wanted. She learned more PHP and ASP than she thought she would, trying to hold on to her design skills as much as possible.
Some years later, a blog post by Chris Spooner about WordPress caught her attention, just as she was about to use Joomla. She liked PHP, but wanted to focus more on the front end. WordPress was this perfect solution. Bobbie created a web server on her machine, installed everything and fell in love. Only a few months later, a close friend reached out for help with working on a site for a company in New York. This led to that company contacting Bobbie again for her expertise with WordPress for the Lord & Taylor blog site. With only a Photoshop file, she wrestled early Genesis to do her bidding and got the Lord & Taylor blog in shape. During this time, WordPress ran on all of her personal sites, including the site for her EQ2 guild (yeah, Bobbie is a gamer too!).
Now, Bobbie loves helping people learn how to use WordPress as much as she can, in addition to building sites and maintaining them. She’s developed 3 Woocommerce plugins, and is currently developing another involving Pinterest. Bobbie helps out in the Austin WordPress Meetup, and in the Advanced WordPress and Advanced Woocommerce Facebook groups. She has worked with many Austin small business to create themes, secure sites, and update code.
Aubrey Portwood
Aubrey’s WordPress age is version 2.2 when he decided to move his university towards the future by building the first WordPress Theme for New Mexico State University in 2007. Since then he’s been hooked on WordPress! Before coming to WebDevStudios, he spent his days building Websites on WordPress and coding custom Themes and Plugins for clients, friends, and family. Aubrey loves to write code to design and build things. He also loves working with people, teaching them how to use WordPress.
Tennis is Aubrey’s other passion, and he has been playing since he was a kid. When Aubrey is not at the keyboard turning coffee or Diet Cokes into code, he’s probably on the court. He enjoys Tennis with friends and family, Reggae music, meditation, authentic Mexican food (a New Mexico native), the Green Bay Packers, and being a dad.
You can follow Bobbie @BobbieWilsonTX and Aubrey @aubreypwd, and, of course, the rest of the team can be found here (in case you weren’t already following the brilliant bunch).