Hi, I’m Helen Hou-Sandí!
I am a Senior Software Engineering Manager for the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) at GitHub and a WordPress Lead Developer. As a technologist, I am a leader in open source software and management, and care deeply about building great user experiences. I am also a classically-trained pianist who’s performed extensively worldwide.
Latest blog posts
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It’s so hard to say goodbye to yesterday…
I posted this reflection on our internal blog on my 10 year work anniversary in August: Back at the end of July 2011, I had just returned to Rochester, NY from WordCamp Boston, which had been more of an incidental happening while in Boston for other reasons, and was looking at Twitter for the first…
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Exploring custom blocks from a PHP-centric developer UX point of view
I’ve spent the last 8 months telling anybody I talk to about custom WordPress block development that they were way less scary and much easier than I thought they were going to be as somebody with minimal React experience, and that achieving a 1:1 editor experience where you manipulate directly in the content area instead…
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Making my custom keyboard even more custom
The first time I saw the Naked60BMP it was sold out, but I knew it had to be mine. The layout I like and the ability to make it Bluetooth, in something so unique and portable? Sold. So when it finally came back in stock, I immediately grabbed a red one, because that was the…
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Updating a WordPress plugin with a publish metabox field for the block editor
Many years ago (October 2015, to be exact) I wrote a small plugin that allows you to add a note when updating a post, intended as a way to describe what was changed in that revision. For the developer set, it’s kind of like commit messages for your WordPress post/content updates. It was created to…
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KAT Dots: DIY dye sublimation keycaps
Like many people, between general interest and needing a pandemic-friendly hobby, I have gotten into mechanical keyboards. In browsing through endless photos of interesting builds, I discovered a really cool keycap set called GMK Dots by a really cool designer known as biip. Originally a joke, people loved them so much that they really got…
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On virality, or an egg bread recipe
Just kidding I’m not going to wax poetic on virality. But, I posted this timelapse to Twitter once upon a time and later set it to a truly annoying sound on TikTok because I was curious about the video editor and have almost 3 million views there, which just goes to show it’s all meaningless.…
