Brent Shepherd is a seasoned software leader and founder with 16 years building open-source commerce infrastructure, best known for founding Prospress (acquired by Automattic) and leading WooCommerce Payments to scale into a product with over 100,000 registered accounts. He combines hands-on engineering—contributing to core projects like WooCommerce and the Action Scheduler—with product and GTM leadership, growing payments engineering from a small team to multiple squads handling tens of billions in transactions. Based on the Sunshine Coast in Australia, Brent focuses on helping entrepreneurs succeed with open source and has driven substantial subscriber and retention growth for subscription commerce products. He brings a pragmatic mix of backend systems skill (asynchronous processing, webhook reliability, error logging) and product strategy, having shepherded Prospress integration and long-term billing roadmaps across Automattic. Notably, his work on Action Scheduler improved background job scalability for one of the Web’s most widely used ecommerce platforms.
16 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Business, Bachelor of Business at QUT (Queensland University of Technology)
Master’s Degree Internet & Web Technologies, Master’s Degree Internet & Web Technologies at University of New England (AU)
A scalable, traceable job queue for background processing large queues of tasks in WordPress. Specifically designed for distribution in WordPress plugins (and themes) - no server access required.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Contributions:5 releases, 254 commits, 215 PRs in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Brent primarily worked on the documentation for the Action Scheduler plugin, modifying the layout and content of the documentation site. The user implemented and tweaked the "Hacker" theme for the documentation, adding customizations like the Prospress logo and menu modifications. They also made general improvements to the menu structure and the content.
A customizable, open-source ecommerce platform built on WordPress. Build any commerce solution you can imagine.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:309 commits, 72 PRs, 1 branch in 8 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Brent primarily contributed to the WooCommerce platform by integrating and improving the Action Scheduler library. They added and modified code related to asynchronous webhook delivery, ensuring webhooks are scheduled and processed efficiently. The user also implemented changes to improve error logging, providing more detailed information for debugging. Furthermore, they updated the Action Scheduler library to the latest version.
ecommercecommercewordpressautomatticphp
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