John Blackbourn
Director Of WordPress Security at Human Made
Norwich, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
RockstarJohn Blackbourn is a Director of WordPress Security and seasoned web engineer with 18 years building and migrating enterprise publishing platforms for clients like Siemens, News UK, Time Inc., Oxford University and the Scottish Government. He combines leadership of large-scale platform redevelopment with deep hands-on WordPress core expertise as a long-time core committer and member of the WordPress Security Team. At Human Made he progressed from Senior Web Engineer to Principal Web Engineer and now leads security efforts, bringing practical experience in Docker-based local development, MariaDB/MySQL tooling, and WP-CLI improvements. His open source work spans core improvements to the WordPress core, Gutenberg, WP-CLI and contributions to PHPStan that demonstrate strong PHP type and static-analysis knowledge. He maintains widely used plugins and developer tools, improving code clarity, documentation, and auto-escape/security rules across the ecosystem. Based in Norwich, he pairs pragmatic engineering with public speaking and cross-organisational collaboration to make large WordPress deployments more secure and maintainable.
19 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
818reputation
37kreached
4answers
4questions
Github Skills (34)
application-framework10
editors10
static-analysis10
type-check10
wordpress10
app-framework10
blocks10
editor10
php10
web-framework10
blockly10
type-checking10
phpstan10
php-codesniffer10
documentation10
Programming languages (23)
Github contributions (5)
WordPress/wordpress-develop
May 2022 - Jan 2023
WordPress Develop, Git-ified. Synced from git://develop.git.wordpress.org/, including branches and tags! This repository is just a mirror of the WordPress subversion repository. Please include a link to a pre-existing ticket on https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ with every pull request.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:249 reviews, 12 commits, 408 PRs in 8 months
Contributions summary:John primarily focused on improving the WordPress core codebase, addressing documentation issues and standardizing argument formats within the taxonomy functions. They also contributed to build and test tools, specifically related to local development environments using Docker and MariaDB/MySQL. Furthermore, the user made improvements to documentation and inline docblocks throughout the codebase.
subversionwordpress
wp-cli/wp-cli
Aug 2013 - Aug 2022
⚙️ WP-CLI framework
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 87 commits, 22 PRs in 9 years 1 month
Contributions summary:John primarily contributed to the WP-CLI framework, focusing on core functionality improvements and documentation. They made changes to several core files related to the command-line interface, including enhancing help text, updating the command structure and synopsis, and optimizing existing features. The user also introduced and refactored some functions that are related to the command-line interface and its interactions with WordPress.
wp-cliwordpressphpframeworkcli
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