So I haven’t been using WordPress for 10 years, but even despite my late arrival to the game, it turns out that my now favorite CMS officially turned 10 years old a few days ago.
It actually wasn’t until around 2008 that I first discovered WordPress and began using it first for my humor site, and then eventually for everything else. Before that I had used a myriad of home brew options … obviously, I used LiveJournal for my personal blog, something where I copied all of my posts into PHP files as text for one (maybe an early PHP-Fusion?), I think I toyed around with Drupal at one point, but it ended up being more confusing than I could deal with at the time!
So needless to say, I was a little skeptical when I stumbled across WordPress simply because I’d been so used to doing everything the hard way all of those years. It was weird to have an interface that wasn’t Notepad to work in, and even though I’ve still spent plenty of time tinkering with plugins and themes to get my sites where they are today, it’s meant a lot more time actually spent writing as opposed to fighting with code for simple, core features, and really at the end of the day, I’d much rather be writing than creating a system to facilitate writing, anyways. 😉
I’m very grateful for all of the amazing work that goes into WordPress, and even infinitely more so that it’s all available to me free of charge. It’s really crazy to see just how vast the open source community is with regards to WordPress, and it’s something that I have to actively push myself to keep in mind so that when I manage to figure out something new and cool on my own, I too share it forward for other people just like me.
So in five years time, I’m now running WordPress on 10 different sites, across which I’ve published an excess of 1.5 million words. WordPress makes it easier for me to share my writing with the world, and in celebration of this 10-year milestone, I for one am looking forward to seeing what Matt and his team manage to come up with over the next ten years! 
Congrats, and thank-you, guys.