Another Two Devs Join the WDS Team: Meet Shannon and Carrie!

Shannon MacMillan

Shannon’s illustrious web development career began in 2006 with a $100 online class in HTML/CSS, intended to supplement her (non-)income as an actor/theater director in NYC. She took the leap into WordPress a few years later (v. 2.8.2) and never looked back. In 2012, she left all of her weird-actor-side-jobs to freelance full-time as a front-end developer, met some really cool collaborators at a WordCamp, and thus started down the path towards maintaining a reasonable standard of living.

She loves to teach people about WordPress, and frequently leads workshops for businesses, artists, and actors about creating and maintaining WP sites on their own. A graduate of the Dell’Arte International School for Physical Theater, Shannon can now claim fame to literally teaching clowns how to make websites. She recently started delving deeper into the code and is now a little obsessed with writing plugins and launching apps on WordPress, in addition to her normal addiction to building themes.

When not in front of a screen, Shannon loves totally unplugging via camping or hiking, and also building and making tangible things out of wood or other materials that don’t require code dependencies. When out of the woods, she can otherwise be found at her standing desk with a strong cup of tea, a huge bottle of water, her partner asking if she remembered to eat, and her big black pointer-mix Leopold looking wistfully at her to stop coding and play some Frisbee already.

Carrie Forde

Carrie previously spent eight years wrangling sales data in the tech industry. While on work assignment in the UK, she attended a blogging workshop where she was first introduced to WordPress. After spending several weekends learning about WordPress child themes and customizing her first site, she realized that web development is where her true passion lies.

After moving back to California, Carrie had an opportunity to pursue her passion, and enrolled in a graphic and interactive design program at a local community college. Before graduating her program, she created her first theme on the Genesis framework, and knew that creating easy-to-use websites on WordPress was what she wanted to do for a living.

When she’s not designing and developing websites, you can find Carrie cuddling her three cats K2, Whitney, and Minnie, enjoying a latte or cold brew at a nearby coffee shop, or exploring the greater San Francisco Bay Area with her husband Darren.

You can find out more about them, including where to catch them on social media, on their team pages. Join us in welcoming them aboard!

And remember, we’re still looking for back-end developers who love WordPress!