My WordPress Career: Joel Liriano

My WordPress Career is an employee spotlight on the StellarWP blog. In each edition, we highlight a different team member’s professional journey. 

While each story is unique, they all demonstrate that there isn’t one single way to arrive at a career in WordPress. Our team members come from different backgrounds, and each person brings a different type of expertise to their role. And we think that’s pretty stellar.

Today, we’re talking to Joel Liriano, Director of Quality Assurance at StellarWP.

StellarWP: What was your very first job? Tell us what your duties entailed.

Joel Liriano: My very first job was right out of college, back in 2012, at a small web agency. They were in the process of growing their team and had this vision of hiring based on a mix of skills and potential, and then they’d train you on the job. As a recent graduate, that was a huge win!

I was very lucky to start my tech career at this company, because they really cared about their people and about giving everyone the tools they needed to get the job done. I was initially hired as a Frontend Developer to work on a Drupal-based project, but a few months into the job, my boss pointed out that I had strong leadership skills and asked me if I wanted to work as a Project Manager instead, which actually sounded like a pretty good idea at the time. Almost a year later, the same boss came back to me and told me I was a good Project Manager, but he still felt that many of my skills were not being taken advantage of in this role, so he handed me a couple of books about Agile Testing and Exploratory Testing and asked “Have you ever thought about doing QA?” and that’s where the rest of my career kicked off.

Working within this company and within that team was an amazing experience for me, because self-training (as well as getting paid training for us) was encouraged, so I got to explore many different sides of software testing for web development, from writing and executing test cases and test plans, to working with exploratory testing or developing automated testing. Many of the things I learned then I still apply today!

What’s your current job at StellarWP? What do your duties include now?

JL: My official title is Director of Quality Assurance, but that would be misleading if we’re talking about all the things I do at StellarWP! I’m also part of the Leadership Team and I’m usually involved with things related to company culture and team-building-related activities across the organization. 

As Director of QA my job is to lead and support teams and QA Analysts in the development, maintenance, and improvement of the overall quality and usability of our products and services. This includes anything and everything from the process of how testing is done for each team or product, the tools and systems we use to test different products or services, and the “side quest” tasks we all need to complete in order to be able to effectively maintain the quality of our products and services. It’s also not uncommon for me to jump into projects as “on-the-ground” help by increasing the team’s QA resources.

As part of the Leadership Team, there’s really no list of duties. I will do anything that I think I can do well, from discussing and championing improvements in our Diversity and Inclusion efforts, to suggesting changes or updates to company culture policies and Slack Best Practices all the way to putting spreadsheets together with info that we need to plan a Taskforce meeting to adding folks to systems and platforms that I have access to. Sometimes these duties are related to the work we do, and other times to the people we work with.

When did your career shift toward WordPress?

JL: I’ve been dabbling in and out of very small WordPress projects since around 2010, but my career completely shifted into WordPress in 2017, when I joined Modern Tribe as a QA Analyst, and I’ve been with this fine group of humans ever since!

Is there anything you learned on your first job that you carried with you to your current role at StellarWP?

JL: Absolutely! The importance of taking care of your people and setting your team up for success, implementing the right process for all teams and projects, regardless of size, how crucial it is to have strong communication skills, especially when we work in a remote, distributed company, and focusing on principles and fundamentals instead of shiny new tools.

How is working in WordPress different from other jobs you’ve had? What do you like best? Are there any parts that are more challenging?

JL: Working in WordPress hasn’t been very different to previous jobs, mainly because I’ve always worked within Web Development, so there’s a lot of shared ways of working. What I like best about WordPress is its community and the way people tend to hype each other up and learn from each other, WordCamps are quite the experience! One of the most powerful things about WordPress is its flexibility and how many plugins and themes there are available to site admins, but to me this is also the most challenging part of it: it’s quite challenging to develop products for WordPress that need to play nice with dozens or even hundreds of other WordPress plugins and themes. There’s always a sense of accomplishment when you can solve or prevent conflicts with other plugins and themes, but sometimes the journey to the top of that mountain can be brutal.

What do you wish you had known when you first started working in the WordPress world?

JL: That WordCamps were so awesome! I would’ve gone to one sooner.

What are some of your hobbies, interests, or pastimes outside of work? How did you get started? What is a favorite memory?

JL: I would probably describe myself as a “light hobbyist,” which is my attempt at explaining that although I have many hobbies and interests, I’m not necessarily strongly attached to any of them. I enjoy TV shows and movies, playing video games (mostly story-based, solo player games) and reading books across a wide range of topics: anything from recent scientific studies around nutrition and weight management, to a high fantasy novel by Robert Jordan, stopping by a witty fiction novel on the way there. I will also spend time trying out different restaurants in my city, going to the theater if anything playing catches my attention, and traveling to cities both new and unknown or old and beloved.

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