Ryan McCue

Hi! 👋 I’m Ryan, a web developer frying to a crisp living in sunny Brisbane, Australia. That’s my goofy face over on the right.

I’m a WordPress guest committer, and co-lead developer on the REST API project. I started the project a few years ago, and have been leading it ever since with my partner-in-crime Rachel Baker.

I’m also the lead developer on a few other projects, including Requests, a HTTP client for PHP 5.2+ with a focus on compatibility; and SimplePie, the feed parser used by WordPress and other projects.

There’s also a lot more stuff I do. Read about some of that below.

Across the Web

Follow me on Twitter, see what I'm listening to at Last.fm, or check out my latest work on GitHub.

If you're interested in a talk I've given recently, check out Speaker Deck for the slides, or one of the recordings on WP.tv.

Latest from GitHub

Most code I work on is available on GitHub. Here's a few of my latest changes.

  • Chassis/vip-classic Commented on #11: FWIW, this behaviour will be enshrined into Chassis with v2…
  • Chassis/Chassis Commented on pull request #381: Is there no better way to do this? Surprised that…
  • Chassis/Chassis Commented on pull request #381: AFAIK, the `nfs` flag isn't specific to VB anyway, so…
  • WP-API/client-js Closed #167: Settings is incorrectly registered as a collection
  • Chassis/Chassis Commented on pull request #356: We assume `extension` is a string in the above checks,…
  • humanmade/wp-permastructure Commented on #2: Thanks @mmaton! @roborourke is there a reason for maintaining our…
  • Chassis/Chassis Commented on pull request #381: Does this apply just to VB, or can we use…
  • humanmade/coding-standards Commented on #11: This is due to the way autoloading works in PHP.…
  • humanmade/hm-platform Commented on #7: It's more of a secondary level of authentication, and also…
  • Chassis/Desktop Pushed 13 commits

Latest Articles

I write articles sometimes, often on projects I’m working on. Here’s the latest stuff I’ve published.

  • Requests for PHP: Version 1.7 Requests 1.7 is now available with a tonne of changes. Here’s some of the highlights: Add support for HHVM and PHP 7: Requests is now tested against both HHVM and PHP 7, and they are supported as first-party platforms. Transfer & connect timeouts, in seconds & milliseconds Rework cookie handling to be more thorough: Cookies […]
  • Patch WordPress via GitHub A few days ago, I started tweeting about the Stack Overflow Developer Survey, where 74% of developers surveyed said they dread working with WordPress. I received a tonne of replies that I’m still working through, and I’ll post about that soon. One reply that did come up a few times was contributing via GitHub. Matt […]
  • The (Complex) State of Meta in the WordPress REST API One of the other discussion points in our recent API meeting was the state of meta in the REST API. We recently made the somewhat-controversial decision to remove generic meta handling from the API. As we didn’t have time to get into the specifics in the meeting, I wanted to expand on exactly what we’re […]
  • Progressive Enhancement with the WordPress REST API In a REST API discussion today, we discussed the future of the REST API. Something I touched upon briefly in that meeting is the concept of progressive enhancement with the REST API. Since this topic hasn’t been brought up much previously, I want to elaborate on how progressive enhancement works. Progressive enhancement is our key […]
  • A Future API I published a post today over on Post Status about the future of the WordPress REST API. The year is 2020. WordPress powers over 35% of the web now. The REST API has been in WordPress core for a few years; the year after the REST API was merged into core, WordPress gained nearly 5% […]

Featured Projects

I work on a lot of projects, so here’s a non-exhaustive list of my favourites.

  • Requests
    A HTTP client library built for usability and compatibility.
  • Falcon
    GitHub-style notifications (with reply-by-email) for your WordPress site.
  • Cavalcade
    Drop-in replacement for wp-cron. Scales horizontally for multi-server setups.
  • Gaussholder
    High-quality placeholder images using miniscule amounts of data.
  • Mercator
    Completely-rewritten domain mapping for the 21st Century.

Contact Me

Drop me an email at if you want to get in touch.

I'm terrible at replying, but I'll definitely read it. Please don't send support requests; those are better off filed as an issue on the relevant issue tracker.

Let’s Work Together

In all of my spare time, I'm a Senior Engineer at Human Made. We work on sites for clients like USA Today, Airbnb, and ustwo. Get in touch with our lovely Director of New Business, Ant; you won't regret it.

Did I mention we're hiring? We're always looking for awesome people.