Welcome the 4.5 class of committers!

As announced in the State of the Word this year at WordCamp US by @matt, there are seven new committers to introduce.

Many of you have seen Michael Arestad‘s (@michaelarestad) design and front-end development contributions over the last couple of years, notably with the redesign of Press This in WordPress 4.2. His numerous, high quality contributions are a welcome addition to core. I personally am looking forward to his work on markup and styling, having relied heavily on his judgment for quite some time now.

WordPress 4.4 adds a new embed feature to WordPress, making it an oEmbed provider for the first time. Work on this new feature was done in a large part by Pascal Birchler (@swissspidy), who has been doing great work for the past few releases. Pascal’s clear communication and thorough support of the flow mindset are things we can all be inspired by.

Rachel Baker (@rachelbaker) is the co-lead of the REST API, a Comments component maintainer, and a major contributor to WordPress 4.4. Her work has made it possible for sites around the world to utilize the REST API, making WordPress a great application platform. Look for more of these contributions as the REST API iterates within core.

Likewise, Joe Hoyle (@joehoyle) is a major contributor to the REST API. As we prepare to commit the REST API endpoints in an upcoming WordPress release, there will be more and more to come from both him and Rachel.

As a Media component maintainer and a long-time contributor across many components and features, Mike Schroder (@mikeschroder) helped shepherd the responsive images feature plugin into core for WordPress 4.4. He was also a backup release lead for WordPress 3.9.

Throughout the WordPress admin interface, everywhere you look you’ll see the work of Mel Choyce (@melchoyce). Her design and experience contributions are long-standing and have benefited the entire ecosystem. As one of the maintainers of the Dashicons project, the icons you interact with daily are a big part of her contributions, as well as themes available in the WordPress.org Theme Directory.

Eric Andrew Lewis (@ericlewis) has been contributing in various forms for many years, exploring lesser-known areas, documenting them, and challenging assumptions. Most recently, you may have seen his work as a Media component maintainer or with the shiny updates feature in WordPress 4.2.

Additionally, Ella Van Dorpe (@iseulde), Konstantin Obenland (@obenland), Weston Ruter (@westonruter), Tammie Lister (@karmatosed), Andrea Fercia, (@afercia) and Ryan McCue (@rmccue [that’s one M, two C’s]) have all had their guest commit renewed.

Please join me in welcoming this great set of new committers!

Welcome the 4.5 class of committers! by Helen Hou-Sandi was originally posted at https://make.wordpress.org/core/2015/12/09/welcome-the-4-5-class-of-committers/