Jonathan Desrosiers: Seven Years a Committer: My WordPress Commit-iversary

Today officially marks 7 years since my first changeset was committed to the WordPress open source project.

Within WordPress, a committer is a contributor who has the ability to modify the main WordPress source repository. Since 2004, roughly 117 people have been given commit access, and 111 have made at least one commit.

In previous years, I linked to posts from other contributors about what it means to be a great participant in open source. Over the past year, though, I have spent a lot of time thinking about what being a great contributor means to me and how decisions are made at scale in open source projects.

This year, instead of pointing to others, I am proud to share an essay of my own. It is a piece I drafted for the Maintaine.rs book, inspired by my talk at WordCamp Europe, where I explored how Core Committers think and how decisions take shape within the WordPress project.

I also started drafting a few other posts on related topics, so stay tuned for those in the coming weeks. I hope to use the quieter days of December to get those over the finish line.

Lucky Number Seven

Each year I try to give this anniversary post a theme. Since seven is considered a lucky number by many people (especially those on the pass line), this year’s theme is luck.

I am writing this while on a plane to San Francisco for the 2025 State of the Word. This year took me to two countries I had never visited before. I spoke at several conferences and events, and I had the chance to mentor many contributors in different ways.

I feel incredibly lucky not only to have a job that allows me to help maintain open source software that powers more than 43% percent of the web, but also to have the trust of the community that maintains it right along side me.

Commits by the numbers (2024-2025)

Here are some commit stats from November 30, 2024 through November 29, 2025:

• 365 total commits (up ~42% from the previous year)
• 123 commits to trunk (down ~5%)
• 21 version bumps (up 320%)
• 5 reverts (down ~44%)
• 4 “unprops” (no change)
• 22 tags created (up 2,100%)
• 162 total props given out in my commits (down 42%)
• 66 unique contributors given props in my commits (down ~59%)
• Of those 66 contributors, 8 were receiving props for the first time (down ~70%)

Roughly grouped, here are my commits organized by component (* designates a component that I help maintain):

• Administration: 1
• Build/Test Tools: 175*
• Bundled Themes: 7*
• Coding Standards: 3 (focus, not a component)
• Date/Time: 1
• Database: 1
• Docs: 1 (focus, not a component)
• Editor: 3
• Emoji: 2
• External Libraries: 4*
• General: 4*
• HTML API: 2
• Import: 1
• Media: 2*
• Press This: 1 (retired component
• Security: 83
• Site Health: 1
• Tests: 5 (focus, not a component)
• Toolbar: 1
• Upgrade/Install: 1*

Add it up: All Seven Years

Here are stats for all seven years of being a WordPress Core Committer (November 30, 2018 through today):

• 2,552 total commits
• 1,201 commits to trunk
• 265 version bumps
• 174 version tags created
• 4 branches created
• 58 reverts
• 24 “unprops”
• 11 commits with hidden song lyrics
• 4,846 total props given out in my commits
• 747 unique contributors given props in my commits

I have also now entered into the top 5 list of contributors with the most commits to the code base across all branches:

1. Ryan Boren (9,081)
2. Sergey Biryukov (8,342)
3. Andrew Nacin (5,418)
4. Andrew Ozz (3,366)
5. Me (2,552)

A Few Other Observations

I realized while writing this year’s anniversary post that my first commit falls on Blue Beanie Day. I may have to get a WordPress logo blue beanie for next year.

And hat tip to Simon Willison for pointing out that ChatGPT was launched on November 30th, 2022.

As Always: Thank YOU!

Being a WordPress committer would not be nearly as meaningful without the countless contributions from people across the community who choose to support and maintain this free software in so many different ways. So thank you to every single one of you.

Previous Commit-iversaries

• Two
• Three/Four/Five
• Six

Featured image credit: CC0 licensed photo by CCC from the WordPress Photo Directory.

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