Profiles

When I’m not working, I’m probably painting. I’m a watercolor artist working toward my Master Painter designation with the New Mexico Watercolor Society, mostly painting landscapes and portraits. I post about that occassionally on karen-arnold.com. I also serve on a couple of nonprofit boards, including as Secretary for an adult literacy organization and a classical music public radio station.

My WordPress story starts with my brother who wouldn’t stop talking about some software he’d discovered. My brother in San Francisco kept nudging me toward WordPress while I was happily stay-at-home-mom blogging about childbirth research on Blogger. I eventually listened to him and then fell down the rabbit hole of building websites. I had an embarrassing Joomla phase, found clients to trust me with their website visions, and finally built an actual business building sites for small businesses. It grew enough that my husband left his job to handle the back office. Then in 2011, I co-organized the first-ever WordCamp Albuquerque and in a moment of kismet a conversation between my husband and an Automattic employee changed the trajectory of everything. I applied for a job I hadn’t planned on applying for, got it, and spent the next 14+ years at Automattic.