Nick Daugherty is a founder and seasoned full-stack engineer with 14 years of experience designing highly available, secure, and scalable platforms and APIs. He spent over a decade at WordPress VIP leading platform architecture, security programs (including FedRAMP work), Red Team exercises, and the engineering team that supports mission-critical government and Fortune 500 applications. Comfortable from TypeScript/React front ends to Elasticsearch-backed APIs and CLI tooling, he combines hands-on implementation with product vision and operational rigor. An active open-source contributor, he has made backend improvements to prominent WordPress projects such as Automattic's Jetpack and Co-Authors-Plus, improving performance and tooling for large sites. Based in Salida, Colorado, he pairs enterprise-grade security experience with entrepreneurial drive as the founder of Lightfall. Notably, his background in English informs clear technical communication and documentation across remote teams.
14 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Colorado Mountain College
English Language and Literature General, English Language and Literature General at University of Colorado Boulder
Contributions:38 commits, 8 PRs, 7 pushes in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Nick primarily contributed to the backend logic of the WordPress plugin, focusing on guest author management. Their work involved refactoring code using `call_user_func`, adding and reverting Twitter username fields, and implementing checkbox support in guest author profiles. They also addressed potential PHP warnings and errors in the code related to custom post types, and implemented new CLI commands for managing co-authors. Furthermore, they improved existing CLI commands and corrected redirection issues.
Security, performance, marketing, and design tools — Jetpack is made by WordPress experts to make WP sites safer and faster, and help you grow your traffic.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:5 reviews, 31 commits, 8 PRs in 5 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Nick primarily contributed to the Jetpack plugin, focusing on back-end functionality. Their work involved fixing line-height issues in CSS, making gallery widgets compatible with WordPress 3.9, and adding caching to the Flickr oembed handler to improve performance. Additionally, they implemented code style improvements and added functionality for filtering mobile user agents.
reactexpertswordpressphpsecurity
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