Sarah Semark
CDO (Chief Design Octopus) at Octopus Think
City of Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSarah Semark is a multidisciplinary product and visual designer with 13 years of experience blending thoughtful UI/UX with hands-on front-end and back-end development. As Chief Design Octopus at Octopus Think and a former Product Designer at Automattic, she has shipped design systems and WordPress themes used by millions while leading user research and innovation efforts. Her open-source contributions include front-end improvements to WordPress’ widely used Gutenberg editor and back-end enhancements to Automattic’s Jetpack plugin, showing fluency across the stack. She routinely combines art direction, prototyping, and technical implementation for clients ranging from Tim Ferriss to feminist and literary projects, and she runs projects end-to-end from branding to hosting. Based in Edinburgh, she’s a frequent international speaker, voracious reader, and outdoors enthusiast who brings curiosity and a deep commitment to diversity and inclusivity in tech.
13 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Literary Arts, Literary Arts at Canterbury High SchoolJournalism/FYP, Journalism/FYP at University of King's Collegediploma, Graphic Design, diploma, Graphic Design at Nova Scotia Community College
Github Skills (13)
html10
plugin-development10
wordpress10
schema-org10
php10
javascript10
gutenberg10
react10
ui-design9
front-end-development9
uid9
accessibility8
css7
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
WordPress/gutenberg
Jul 2018 - Jul 2019
The Block Editor project for WordPress and beyond. Plugin is available from the official repository.
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:17 commits, 24 PRs, 27 pushes in 1 year
Contributions summary:Sarah primarily contributes to the Gutenberg block editor project by focusing on improving the user interface and overall user experience. Their work includes enhancing the pre-publish panel's styling, wording, and prompts to create a more intuitive workflow. Additionally, the user addresses issues related to label clarity and help text, improving accessibility and user understanding of image settings and other block elements. The commits demonstrate a strong understanding of the project's front-end components and user interface.
block-editorwordpressgutenbergwordpress-pluginbeyond
Automattic/jetpack
May 2016 - May 2017
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
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 commits, 1 comment in 11 months
Contributions summary:Sarah focused on enhancing and improving the recipe shortcode functionality within the Jetpack plugin. Their work involved adding new features like notes, directions, ingredients, image, and description fields to the shortcode. They also addressed Schema.org markup issues, ensuring proper semantic HTML for improved search engine optimization, and included the correct HTML structure and attributes, as well as adding a 'source' attribute to the recipe shortcode.
reactexpertswordpressphpsecurity
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