Shameem Reza

I'm a Happiness Engineer at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, and Tumblr. I spend my days inside broken checkouts, failing subscription renewals, and plugin code that almost works. I like it there.

What I do at Automattic

I handle the complex technical cases that need both deep product knowledge and hands-on coding skills. Subscription renewals failing silently, payment gateways that stop processing mid-launch, checkout pages breaking after a routine update. I work across WooCommerce Subscriptions, Bookings, Memberships, AutomateWoo, Product Bundles, WooPayments, Stripe, PayPal, and more.

I also review plugin submissions to WooCommerce.com for code quality, security, and UX, and I carry what merchants tell me in tickets back to the product teams.

How I approach support

Four years of support taught me a way of working that goes beyond tickets. Investigate before answering. Trace every claim to something real: the logs, the plugin's code, an official doc. Write the reply so it doesn't need a second read.

I also went through Automattic's Emerging Leaders program, which changed how I frame problems and give feedback. The short version: own what's yours before asking who dropped it, and spend most of your time understanding the problem instead of defending a solution.

What I build

The problems I see in support often become the products I build. HappyAccess handles temporary admin access with OTP and magic links, so nobody has to share a real password. SnipDrop is the WooCommerce code snippets I kept rewriting for merchants, tested and one-click installable. Assistify for WooCommerce adds small tools for store owners. On the theme side there's Larder, a warm block theme for food shops and farm stores, and Kairo, a clean one for personal blogs and portfolios. Everything lives on WordPress.org and GitHub.

The biggest build so far is the one I couldn't find anywhere else: an AI agent made for support work.

How I use AI

AI didn't replace the way I work. It moved in with me. My setup is a personal system I call dotbrain: 60+ custom skills for Claude Code and Cursor that carry my writing voice, my plugin review checklists, and my debugging habits from one machine to the next. The AI sounds like me because I taught it to.

Heya is where that thinking became a product. It's a local-first terminal agent for WordPress and WooCommerce support engineers. You hand it a bug report, it reproduces the issue on a disposable test site, finds the cause, and hands back evidence you can check yourself. It runs on any model, including small ones that never leave your machine.

And when the tooling breaks on me, that becomes a blog post.

WordPress.org contributions

I'm a member of the WordPress.org Plugins Team, where I review plugin submissions on WordPress.org for code quality, security, and guideline compliance. I also provide support in the plugin forums for WooCommerce (7M+ active installs), WooPayments, Stripe, PayPal Payments, Google for WooCommerce, and more. Beyond that, I'm active as a plugin developer, theme author, pattern author, and translation contributor.

What drives me

Before Automattic I freelanced for ten years through Upwork and Elance. 60+ projects across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, Top Rated with a 100% Job Success score. More than the projects, those years taught me what a broken store costs the person who owns it. Rent money, staff wages, sleep. That never left me. So:

• A fix the merchant can apply in five minutes beats a clever one they can't. Most store owners don't have a developer on call.
• Most “impossible” bugs are three ordinary bugs stacked on top of each other. Patience finds them one at a time.
• If a reply needs a second read, it isn't finished. Clear writing is part of the fix.

Support is more than troubleshooting. It's making technology work for people who have a store to run.

Beyond work

I'm a father and husband from Khulna, Bangladesh, grateful for a family that keeps me grounded. I graduated with a BSc in Computer Science and hold a Postgraduate Certificate in Project Management. When I'm not debugging, I'm probably exploring a new city, learning a new language, or overthinking my next side project.