ashfame
Dubai · GST +4

Hey there,
I'm Ashish.

Senior software engineer in the WordPress ecosystem. I work on Playground, the thing that runs WordPress in your browser.

See my work mail@example.com
17+
Years shipping
WP
Core & Playground
Ashish Kumar

I see myself as God's instrument in everything I do — my role is to show up, do it well, and stay out of my own way. The outcomes aren't mine to claim; they're just what happens when I stay aligned and useful.

Work

Full history & CV →
  1. 2026
    WordPress Playground
    Reliability fixes and new features across the project.
    Playground on WordPress.com
    Refining the Playground-powered onboarding shipped last year.
    SQLite database driver
    Reviewing pull requests, plus a few fixes of my own.
    Sabbatical
    Three months off, paid — an Automattic perk.
  2. 2025
    WordPress Playground
    WordPress running entirely in the browser, on WebAssembly.
    Playground on WordPress.com
    Onboarding that spins up a real WordPress site in the browser, before signup.
    Collaborative editing in Gutenberg
    Real-time co-editing in the block editor, powered by PHP alone.
    WordPress Studio
    Features and fixes in Automattic's agentic local development app.
  3. 2024
    Data Liberation
    A browser extension: select parts of any website and preview them as WordPress content, live, in the browser.
    Parental leave
    Six months off, paid.
  4. 2021–23
    Matrix at Automattic
    The goal: move Automattic's and WordPress.org's Slack to Matrix.
    Slack-to-Matrix migrator
    Takes a Slack export archive and brings the whole workspace over.
    Neurobot & Maubot plugins
    A workflow builder and bots, for parity with what teams relied on in Slack.
    Automattrix
    A hosting platform for Matrix homeservers.
    Chatrix
    A Matrix client as a block, embeddable anywhere in WordPress.
    OpenID Connect Server
    Turns a WordPress site into an identity provider, so its users can log in to other services.
    Upstream & forks
    Contributions to Synapse, Hydrogen and synadm; custom builds of the Slack bridge and Hydrogen for Chatrix.

Projects

All projects & tools →
WordPress Playground
Open ↗
WordPress running entirely in the browser, on WebAssembly.
WordPress/wordpress-playground★ 1972·JavaScript
Nadi
Matrix homeserver written in PHP
Not released yet.
Gutenberg Collaborative Editing
WordPress plugin to enable realtime collaborative editing without any external service.
ashfame/gutenberg-collaborative-editingTypeScript
PagePerch
A browser extension providing notes to be saved for each URL. Later to be used for URL specific AI communication.
ashfame/pageperchTypeScript
Sojourn
Open ↗
Browser based app to track your presence in many countries for residency purposes.
ashfame/sojournTypeScript
AirTrust OS (Air-Gapped Raspberry Pi Custom OS)
Build script to prepare the ISO of the OS, by remastering PiCore.
ashfame/air-gapped-raspberry-pi-custom-linux-osShell
Dossier
Local tool to merge PDFs in a single one stamping annexure notations. Runs in a docker container.
ashfame/dossierPython
GIT
Secret project not launched yet.
Soon.
Journalware PDFs
Pick a spread and paper size, get a print-ready PDF.
Not released yet.

A year of commits

29,990 contributions · github.com/ashfame

NovDecJanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOct
GitHub Enterprise commits are not reflected here.
Burned 230B+ tokens during May to Aug 2026
GitHub Enterprise commits.
Nov 2025 – Feb 2026 · the three marked months
Burned 230B tokens
May – Aug 2026 · the four marked months

Annotations are hand-written.

Journalware

Off-screen

Analog systems I design for paper: daily and weekly spreads, brain dumps, an Eisenhower matrix. Print them, bind them, use a pen.

All spreads →

Weekly Spread v3 A5 · dot grid · PDF Daily Spread A5 · ruled · PDF Eisenhower Matrix A5 · grid · PDF

Lately

  • Enjoying my first audiophile headphones — FiiO FT1.
  • Slowly consolidating everything in my life.
  • Trying to feel more of every emotion.

Writing

from blog.ashfame.com

Compute

Four machines
  • DAILY
    MacBook Pro 16″ M3 Max
    48 GB unified · Daily driver and the top-most orchestrator. Everything ships from here.
  • HOME
    HomeServer (Gaming rig)
    Ryzen 7 2700X [8c/16t] · RTX 2080 Ti 11 GB · DDR4 16 GB · 11+ TB storage. Where agentic sessions run. Containers like Immich, Samba, local LLMs, backups, custom Playground builds.
  • VPS 01
    Linode (California, USA)
    2 vCPU · 4 GB. Hosts ashfame.com, blog.ashfame.com, pr{N}.pg.ashfame.com and anything else.
  • VPS 02
    Linode (Mumbai, IN)
    1 vCPU · 1 GB. Tunnels.

Stationery

On the desk
  • Leuchtturm1917notebook
  • Pilot G2gel · daily
  • Pilot Hi-Tecpoint V5 / V7rollerball
  • Pilot Metropolitan (MR) — Retro Pop Purple Ellipsefountain pen
  • Pilot Iroshizuku Tsutsujiink