About

I’m Tom Herudek, and for 17 years I’ve worked at the intersection of business and technology. Today I keep WordPress running at scale: I lead a platform that serves thousands of sites, with a team of engineers behind it. That world teaches a specific discipline — things have to be fast, safe, and boringly reliable, because when they’re not, real businesses lose real money. So most of my time goes to performance, reliability, and leading technical change: the unglamorous work that keeps the lights on.

I build AI agents as well, and they’re part of that work — automations that quietly absorb the repetitive work eating a team’s week and run unattended. As my team’s AI Steward, I’m working out what a genuinely AI-native engineering team looks like in practice. I care about the useful slice of AI: shipped, and measured in hours saved, not demos and hype.

I didn’t start in a big company. I spent 13 years running my own: I co-founded a WordPress product company at 19 — 50+ themes, 100,000+ users — then worked for years as the technical partner to WooCommerce store owners, keeping their stores fast, stable, and selling. That’s where I learned what actually breaks e-commerce, what it costs the owner, and how to head off the 3am phone call. It’s still most of what I write about.

Underneath it all: a master’s in finance and a long detour through business before tech took over. I think in systems, I like problems that touch both money and machines, and I’m allergic to complexity for its own sake — so the analysis tends to come with numbers rather than vibes.

This is where I think out loud — reliability and performance at scale, what keeps WooCommerce fast, leading engineers through change, and which parts of the AI wave survive contact with production. I share principles and lessons, never client or employer specifics. If any of it is useful to you, that’s the point.