Daniel Walmsley
Founder And CTO at Gravity Rail
Grass Valley, California, United States
Summary
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RockstarDaniel Walmsley is Founder and CTO at Gravity Rail and a seasoned software leader with 14 years of experience building AI-driven systems and large-scale web platforms. At Automattic he served as Principal Architect for AI, designing and shipping customer-facing products including a help chatbot that handles a large portion of support volume, and extracting an open-source SDK (Big Sky Agents) to accelerate cross-product AI integration. He’s an active open-source contributor to high-profile WordPress projects like Jetpack, AMP for WordPress, and wp-calypso, improving backend APIs, AMP integration and front-end UX to better align platform and product needs. Based in Grass Valley, CA, Daniel blends hands-on engineering with product leadership—he moved from theatre producing into CTO roles—and still describes himself as an AI developer who loves robots and coffee, a small clue to his practical curiosity.
15 years of coding experience
28 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
2,795reputation
277kreached
28answers
45questions
Github Skills (40)
api-rest10
javascript10
restful-api10
ampl10
wordpress10
s610
google-amp10
php10
javascripts10
rest10
back-end10
rest-api10
backend10
react10
jetpack9
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
Automattic/jetpack
Feb 2016 - Apr 2022
Security, performance, marketing, and design tools — Jetpack is made by WordPress experts to make WP sites safer and faster, and help you grow your traffic.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 45 reviews, 1662 commits in 6 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Daniel made several modifications to the Posts API, sharing buttons, and endpoints to improve data formatting and consistency with the WordPress.com platform. They modified PHP code to include boolean flags for reblog, like, and follow status in post data and ensured that these fields were displayed with correct data types. The user also updated API endpoints to use the Site Abstraction Layer (SAL) implementation and refactored the code base.
reactexpertswordpressphpsecurity
Automattic/wp-calypso
Jan 2016 - Aug 2022
The JavaScript and API powered WordPress.com
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:30 reviews, 161 commits, 171 PRs in 6 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Daniel primarily worked on front-end components within the WordPress.com Calypso interface, focusing on the Jetpack connection flow and related features. They implemented and then reverted an A/B test related to Jetpack plans, demonstrating experience with conditional rendering based on A/B test variations. The user also addressed UI issues, such as fixing broken links and adding styling classes for popup windows, and made adjustments to the display of the Jetpack plans.
apireactwordpressjavascriptes6
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