Jake Spurlock (@whyisjake) – WordPress user profile

Jake Spurlock

Senior Director, Forward Deployed Engineering at Automattic

@whyisjake San Francisco, CA joined Oct 2008

jakespurlock.com github.com/whyisjake Slack: @whyisjake

Maintains Security Upgrade/Install

Teams Core Meta

Bio

Jake is a lead at Automattic on the WordPress VIP team. He was the release lead on the Core Security team and led the 5.5 release.

Interests

Photography, WordPress, Baseball, Bikes

WordPress Origin Story

I got really into podcasting and needed to move away from iWeb to something a little more robust, and Joseph Scott recommended that I check out WordPress back in 2005. The rest is history!

Badges

CODE

7 badges

C Core AI Contributor '26 Core Contributor '16 Core Team '19 Meta Contributor '19 Plugin Developer Security Contributor '22 Security Team '19

COMMUNITY

3 badges

B BuddyPress Contributor '19 WordCamp Organizer '19 WordCamp Speaker '14

Current Job

Senior Director, Forward Deployed Engineering

Present

Automattic

Recent impact

Score weights high-impact work (commits, releases, approved translations, props) at 3x routine activity.

Last 30 days

53contributions

high33

medium20

score119

Last 90 days

98contributions

high64

medium34

score226

Last 12 months

109contributions

high73

medium36

score255

Team focus

Share of contributions across teams during the last 365 days

WordPress releases

Contributed to 16 releases

Contributions

Type

October 2026

Oct 22 Thu · 18:04

GitHub high

Pull request #935 merged into WordPress/ai:
Update the message our validity check outputs

Oct 21 Wed · 17:58

Core high

Pushed 1 commit to WordPress/WordPress:
Security: Keep the previous secret version when a value is…

Oct 21 Wed · 17:56

Core med

Closed ticket #66353 on Core Trac:
Secrets API: Saving an unchanged value discards the previous version

Oct 21 Wed · 17:56

Core high

Committed [64674] to WordPress SVN:
Security: Keep the previous secret version when a value is saved unchanged.

Oct 21 Wed · 15:45

Meta high

Received props from @4thhubbard in Slack:
Props to @Clorith @johnbillion @desrosj @rfaile313 @barry @whyisjake @jorbin @peterwilsoncc @annezazu for wrangling all the…

Oct 15 Thu · 22:33

GitHub high

Pull request #1196 merged into WordPress/ai:
Abilities Explorer: trim the comments to the ones that explain why

Oct 15 Thu · 22:17

GitHub high

Pull request #1194 merged into WordPress/ai:
Abilities Explorer: trim the tests to the behavior they guard

Oct 15 Thu · 22:15

GitHub high

Pull request #1193 merged into WordPress/ai:
Abilities Explorer: header spacing, description column, no Refresh button

Oct 15 Thu · 21:52

GitHub med

Submitted pull request #1196 to WordPress/ai:
Abilities Explorer: trim the comments to the ones that explain why