Joost De Valk is an internet entrepreneur and investor with 14 years of experience building and advising web-native companies, best known for founding Yoast and growing its SEO products to over 12 million active sites. He blends hands-on backend development—contributions to popular open-source WordPress projects like Yoast SEO and Easy Digital Downloads—with strategic roles as partner at Emilia Capital and board member at Patchstack, Atarim and others. Joost focuses on clarity amid complexity, helping founders scale product, marketing and engineering without losing sight of open standards and trust on the web. His background spans product leadership, interim CTO stints and community-facing roles (including hosting the WordPress Podcast), reflecting a rare mix of technical depth, growth mindset and public stewardship. An often overlooked detail: he pairs this commercial success with active work on web trust initiatives such as WordProof, showing a long-term commitment to improving the internet’s infrastructure.
14 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Theology, Theology at Radboud University
International Business an Management, International Business an Management at HAN University of Applied Sciences
Contributions:2 releases, 18 reviews, 2201 commits in 10 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Joost implemented and modified PHP code within the Yoast SEO for WordPress repository. Their contributions focused on the implementation of features related to the Black Friday 2019 banner, including creating, integrating, and removing components of the banner. They also addressed issues related to the display of the banner, such as ensuring it was not shown on premium pages and removing it on non-dashboard pages.
Contributions:17 commits, 2 PRs, 6 comments in 3 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Joost primarily contributed to the back-end functionality of the Easy Digital Downloads plugin. Their commits involved adding new functions, improving existing code, and addressing specific issues related to payment processing and email templates. The user focused on enhancing the purchase process, refining payment-related queries, and incorporating new features into the email notifications. The user also made various code cleanup changes to improve readability and maintainability.
stripeecommercewordpress-apiwordpressphp
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