After ten years at WashU, I’ve moved on to Pagely. It’s been a long time since I was so overwhelmed. Honestly, I feel a bit dumb, in the best possible sense of the word.

I’m proud of the work I did at WashU. They hired me to be “the WordPress guy,” and over time I built up a platform that was efficient, resilient, highly available. The main bottleneck was the “I” in that first sentence. Especially in the first year or two, there wasn’t a lot of not-Windows experience around, and most of the design decisions that I made were inherently limited by my own knowledge and skillset at the time.

Pagely is larger than WashU, in terms of the volume of traffic on their WordPress sites. As I write this, their home page lists clients including Disney, Cisco, and WB. They only started a couple years before I started at WashU, but they had the benefits of being a “they” — a group of smart people are going to generate better ideas than any one smart person can alone.

Obviously, some of the complexity is a matter of scale. The WashU environment I built effectively only had one customer (WashU itself), and only hosts a few hundred sites. Pagely has more customers than that, and many of them are bigger than WashU’s biggest sites. And they have to worry about things like “getting paid,” whereas being internal-only saves a lot of paperwork. But in the past week and a half, I think I’ve learned more about how to host WordPress sites at scale than I did in the ten years previous. I’m being exposed to so many new-to-me technologies and ideas. I feel overwhelmed and a bit stupid, and I’m fighting my fair share of impostor syndrome this week. But it will pass, and I’ll learn All. The. Things. and it will be great.