Steel Wagstaff
Customer Experience Lead at Pressbooks
Eugene, Oregon, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolSteel Wagstaff is a Customer Experience Lead with a decade of experience helping educators and institutions publish accessible, open educational resources using Pressbooks. He combines product ownership, user research, and hands-on backend contributions—like improving JSON-LD metadata and accessibility in the Pressbooks core—to close the loop between developer teams and real-world teaching practice. With a Ph.D. in English and an MA in Library and Information Studies, Steel brings deep pedagogical insight from roles as an instructor, instructional technologist, and former product manager. He excels at translating educators' needs into usable features and scalable workflows, and is particularly focused on increasing enterprise user happiness for large academic programs. A former land surveyor turned academic technologist, he pairs practical field experience with a passion for open, remixable learning materials.
10 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Ph.D., English (Literary Studies), Ph.D., English (Literary Studies) at University of Wisconsin-MadisonBA, English, BA, English at Brigham Young University
English, French, chinuk wawa
Github Skills (8)
php10
json9
api8
apidoc8
google-books7
accessibility7
publish7
webhooks5
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
pressbooks/pressbooks
Aug 2019 - Jan 2023
Open publishing. Open web. Open source.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:13 releases, 573 reviews, 222 commits in 3 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Steel primarily focused on updating and fixing JSON-LD metadata within the Pressbooks core, modifying PHP files to correct inconsistencies. They addressed heading order issues and implemented accessibility improvements to the top menu navbar. Additionally, the user whitelisted and registered new oEmbed providers and added support for Lumen's Candela books shortcodes.
ebookspublishingwebbooksopen-publishingpb-active
pressbooks/pressbooks-book-directory-fe
Jun 2021 - Jan 2024
A Vue.js frontend for the Pressbooks Directory
Contributions:11 releases, 189 reviews, 284 PRs in 2 years 7 months
vue-jsvuedirectoryfrontendpressbooks
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