About
Shawn Hooper is a developer with over 15 years of experience creating user-friendly…
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2K followers
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Shawn Hooper shared thisAttending the BSides Ottawa Offensive AI Cyber Threat & CTF tonight! https://lnkd.in/egBUG2QS
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Shawn Hooper reposted thisShawn Hooper reposted thisThe United Nations' adoption of the #WSIS20 Outcome Document marks a key milestone for multistakeholder internet governance and a free, open, interoperable internet: https://lnkd.in/gFNR9D_h CIRA was proud to contribute alongside Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, Global Affairs Canada | Affaires mondiales Canada and experts worldwide. We look forward to continuing this work with our partners at #TCCM and the global technical community. To learn more, read our latest statement from CIRA President & CEO Byron Holland MBA, ICD.D.
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Shawn Hooper reposted thisThis is tragic and heart breaking.Shawn Hooper reposted this🙏 Heartfelt condolences on the passing of Zeel Thakkar 🙏 This news has been incredibly difficult for many of us in the WordPress community. Zeel wasn't just a familiar face at meetups and WordCamps. She was someone who showed genuine enthusiasm, supported others, and brought a positive energy wherever she went. Her contributions, her kindness, and the way she connected with people made a real impact. Losing her so suddenly is heartbreaking. The community has lost a warm, supportive, and dedicated member far too soon. My thoughts are with her family, friends, and everyone who had the chance to work with her. May her soul rest in peace. #WordPress #WordPressCommunity
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Shawn Hooper reposted thisShawn Hooper reposted thisAs a part of an organizational restructure, I was laid off from my position at Liquid Web/StellarWP today. I am immensely proud of what we accomplished there, the teams I built, and the customers we made giddy with excitement over their websites. It's poetic that on the very day I got the most meaningful recommendation of my life (go on, check my profile... I'll wait), I was let go. I'll lick my wounds for a day or two, but make no mistake: you're not done with hearing from me. If you're ready to revolutionize your technical support, you know how to reach me. #openforwork
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Shawn Hooper shared thisYears ago (more than I care to count) I sat on the board of this school. They're looking for some new blood. If you have, or want, some board experience, this would be a great opportunity. They're a fantastic organization.Shawn Hooper shared thisLeading the Ottawa School of Theatre has been the most engaging, rewarding, and fun 4 years of my career - and there's still so much more to do and explore. We're looking for new Board members to join our team; here are a few reasons why you should consider it: -Incredible community impact, each year serving ~600 unique students of all ages in our drama classes and camps, ~1100 more in school and community workshops, and selling over 3,000 tickets to our shows -Our top priority is a kind, accepting atmosphere that instills a love of the art form and a strong sense of belonging -Our large-scale, multigenerational plays create a true community spirit that you can be a part of, on or off stage -We're a well-established charity experiencing a period of exciting growth, which we aim to do with the same heart as has been present for the last 36 years -Our current Board is motivated, highly engaged, and fun We have a particular need for people with legal, HR, or accounting experience, would love to have more members of our Francophone community, and we truly believe that diversity is beautiful. We welcome applications from all backgrounds. Check out the attached package for more information; you can also apply directly at this link: https://lnkd.in/gPNvQSqR Bruce Deachman Jennifer Rowberry Jason Morris-Jung Sam LeClair Claire Masson Colleen Sutton Aileen Martella Barry MacDonald Amanda Putz Kelly Rigole Erin MacDonald Brittany Burden Cassandre Mentor Cassandra Olsthoorn Nicole Milne (She/Her/Elle)
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Shawn Hooper reposted thisShawn Hooper reposted thisAfter over *seven years* in the StellarWP universe — from GiveWP to LearnDash and across the galaxies in between — my time there has come to an end due to the latest organizational changes at Liquid Web. It’s actually surreal to write that sentence. I’ve had the privilege of working with some of the smartest, kindest, and most creative people in WordPress, and I’m deeply proud of what we built together. From launching new products to stabilizing old APIs, to finding joy in the chaos of every big release — it’s been one incredible ride. So, I’m officially looking for what’s next... If you know of any openings for Product Management, Platform Strategy, or similar roles, I’d love to hear from you. If we’ve worked together, or you’ve seen what I do from afar, a referral, intro, or even a simple “you should check out this company” would mean the world right now. Change is never easy, but I’ve learned that endings are just launchpads in disguise. #OpenToWork #ProductManagement #PlatformStrategy #AI #APIs #TechLeadership
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Shawn Hooper shared thisWho’s going to WordCamp Canada in Ottawa this week? https://lnkd.in/g6tkY2yW I’ll be there - likely the last conference of the year. Looking forward to being back in the beautiful venue at Carleton U. #WordPress #WCEH #Ottawa
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Shawn Hooper reposted thisShawn Hooper reposted thisSecuring your Laravel app has never been easier! 🔒 Check out how Spatie CSP 3 presets simplify your CSP setup. https://lnkd.in/ewexYfdRConvenient Content Security Policies with Spatie Laravel CSP 3 Presets - Shawn HooperConvenient Content Security Policies with Spatie Laravel CSP 3 Presets - Shawn Hooper
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Shawn Hooper shared thisAttending the Ottawa OWASP Meetup tonight. The topic - (Finally) Sufficient Logging and Monitoring (MCP Edition) It’s being live streamed here: https://lnkd.in/gd_z_Gt4
Shawn Hooper commented on a post
4mo
Congratulations! 🎉
Shawn Hooper replied to a comment
6mo
Jacki Hollywood Brown Well, at least you have a good reason! Congratulations, Grandma!
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Shawn Hooper liked thisShawn Hooper liked this❤️ Thanks to the BSides Ottawa community for a terrific event last night! Our April Meetup featured the incredible Brad Edwards from Palo Alto Networks presenting: Offensive AI Cyber Threat Briefing & CTF. For those of you who don't know - Brad Edwards is a Domain Consultant focused on security operations. Former RCMP constable (15 years, digital forensics, economic crime), former enterprise software developer, and former SecOps lead at BC Lottery Corporation. He researches autonomous cyber threats and built a cyber range platform at Palo Alto Networks for testing offensive AI agents. After Jarett Parent kicked off the evening, Brad delivered an excellent agentic threat briefing including a timeline depicting how AI tools are showing up in real attacks, what the adversaries are doing, and what it means for defenders. After the briefing (and some pizza) everyone into the CTF: Operation Northstorm - and proud to say our group was the first to be hands-on and eye-balls deep with this mixed IT/OT cyber range. 😄 It was amazing to watch people connect in-person, work together, and learn! (and eat more pizza - thanks C3SA Cyber Security & Audit for sponsoring the food!) You can see from these photos (and more will be posted for sure) how dynamic this was. Thanks KPMG for hosting and letting us stay into the night. JF Provost then led the wrap-up with recognition and reflections on the night and what we can do when we all get together. BSides Ottawa Meetup Magic. 💫 Can't wait to do it again. Become a member on Meetups and be notified of our next events, and learn about new ways to build our community and our capabilities. https://lnkd.in/eNimvBVM #BSidesOttawa #paloalto #redteam #ctf #hackathon #llm #agents #secops
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Shawn Hooper reacted on thisShawn Hooper reacted on thisprincipalwp.com is live. It's a consulting practice I've been building since leaving XWP. I'm working with enterprise WordPress teams helping them move from individual AI usage, to organizational AI usage. The idea is that everyone gave their developers AI tools, but we haven't really changed how we work to take advantage of them. I've written my "thesis" about it, and while I'd put a link to it here, Claude tells me I should actually put it as the first comment to be sure this post gets blessed by the LinkedIn algorithm 🙄. It's a really exciting time and talking with folks in the last few weeks, it's clear just how many people are grappling with solving this issue. If you've also been thinking about this, I'd genuinely love to hear your thoughts. And obviously this wouldn't be a "new business post" if I didn't at least imply that you should consider hiring us. That being said, the whole idea is on the site, so you don't need to hire me to get access to my suggested solution. I will give a hint of the next couple of posts. What you'll read may sound theoretical, but we have a working reference implementation. It interacts with the team on Slack, Jira or via Claude Code and it does what someone called "a scary good job" of producing incredible WordPress functionality in a few hours. We're hoping to open source it mid-may and give newsletter subscribers access 2 weeks early. Let me know what you all think! (I guess I should also ask you to help me with the algorithm by liking the post, resharing it or even better, if you did get a demo, share your thoughts in the comments)
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Shawn Hooper liked thisShawn Hooper liked this🍁 Look Back: What Happened at WCEH 2025 🍁 From the halls of Carleton University in Ottawa to the late-night debates at the afterparty, the energy last year was unmatched. Incredible event and awesome energy. Are you ready for WCEH 2026 in Vancouver? 👉 Check out the highlights from last year below and get ready for more! #WordCampCanada2026 #WCEH26 #WCEH #WordPress #CommunitySupport #WCEH2025Recap
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Shawn Hooper liked thisShawn Hooper liked thisHere are my photos from #PressConf2026 https://lnkd.in/gFz9uRVq
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Shawn Hooper liked thisthis is what open source is all about. i wrote that plugin years ago using a list maintained by someone else, and now Jason has used that as the framework for something even better.Shawn Hooper liked thisWordPress has a built-in way to filter comment spam locally. No API calls, no monthly limits. It's called Disallowed Comment Keys and not a ton of people use it because it's requires people to maintain their own blocklist. Also, it's kind of terrible at scale. By default the list of keys lives in `wp_options`. It's autoloaded on every dynamic page load. When a comment comes in, it gets matched with regex. Stick tens of thousands of terms in there and you're dragging that weight across every single request your site serves, comments or not. I just released We Spam Econo. It loads Grant Hutchinson's 64,000+ term blocklist from GitHub into a custom database table and replaces the regex matching. We Spam Econo takes 1.3ms per comment check versus 108ms with core. That figures out to 83x faster. Many of my clients are professionals who are paying for Akismet licenses because they sell things or run ads. They end up hitting API limits and still wind up with spam on their site. Now, Akismet does a lot more than We Spam Econo does. But I've been pairing We Spam Econo with Simple Cloudflare Turnstile and the results have been hard to argue with. Local filtering plus a bot challenge. Zero per call costs. The plugin was forked from Andrew Norcross's excellent Comment Blacklist Manager, then substantially rewritten. The name is a Minutemen reference as well as a reminder… Do more with less. Stay lean. No waste. Twenty years in WordPress and that's still the best engineering advice I know. https://lnkd.in/gCSJFSU3GitHub - littleroomstudio/we-spam-econo: Block comment spam using a continuously-updated blocklist of 64,000+ known spam terms.GitHub - littleroomstudio/we-spam-econo: Block comment spam using a continuously-updated blocklist of 64,000+ known spam terms.
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Shawn Hooper reacted on thisShawn Hooper reacted on thisI have been saying "S3 is not a filesystem" for over a decade. On stages. In newsletters. To engineers who were too polite to tell me to go to hell while they went back to their FUSE monstrosities. AWS launched S3 Files yesterday and made me a liar. You can now mount an S3 bucket as an NFS share: real NFS, the mount command, shrieking NetApp enthusiasts, etc. It works on EC2, Lambda, EKS, and ECS. I've read the pricing. I've done the math. I have opinions. https://lnkd.in/gV-fEqBw
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Shawn Hooper liked thisShawn Hooper liked thisI built M̶a̶g̶e̶n̶t̶o̶ ̶3̶ a brand new, truly modular PHP framework. It's called Marko. I took everything I've learned from 10+ years of working with Magento -- the parts that actually work -- and rebuilt them without the baggage. No XML. No generated code. No cache gymnastics. Just clean, modern PHP. Think of it as what the Magento architecture could become, if it didn't carry nearly 20 years of backwards compatibility. Here's what makes it different: → Overrides via PHP attributes (#[Preference], #[Before], #[After], #[Observer]) -- no di.xml, no config files to hunt down → Loud errors that teach -- every exception tells you what went wrong, where, and how to fix it -- no more silent failures → Everything is a module -- your code, even the framework -- the same override system works everywhere → Pure PHP config -- no XML, no YAML -- PHP is a first-class citizen Yes, it launched today on April Fools Day. No, it's not a joke. Version 0.1 is live. Docs, code, everything. I have a lot to share about how I built this and where I think development is headed. But for now -- go check it out. 🎥 YouTube: https://shu.st/4THnde 📖 Docs: https://shu.st/gQxB1L ⭐ GitHub: https://shu.st/Ol9Ons Marko: Pragmatically Opinionated.
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Shawn Hooper liked thisShawn Hooper liked thisI just released version 4 of my Query Monitor plugin for WordPress which adds a handy new timeline view, and finally switches from rendering its panels server-side in PHP to rendering them client-side in Preact. Check it out!
Experience & Education
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Actionable.co
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Licenses & Certifications
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Secure Software Programmer - .NET (GSSP-.NET)
Global Information Assurance Certification (GIAC)
Volunteer Experience
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Co-Lead Organizer
WordCamp Canada
- Present 2 years 8 months
Science and Technology
Helping to organize the first Canada-wide WordCamp. WordCamps are conferences for enthusiasts of the WordPress content management system.
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Director
Capital East Technology Enterprise Network
- 2 years
Economic Empowerment
CETEN was founded to raise the profile of technology firms in the east end of Ottawa, in the former municipalities of Cumberland and Glocuester. I served on their board of directors and was involved in the development and maintenance of their website.
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Information Technology Chair
Claudette Cain Campaign
- less than a year
Politics
Coordinated IT services for the campaign to elect Claudette Cain for the Mayor of the amalgamated City of Ottawa.
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Director
Orleans Young Players Theatre School
- 1 year
Arts and Culture
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Secretary
Orleans Young Players Theatre School
- 2 years
Arts and Culture
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Technical Director
Russell Association of Performing Arts
- Present 3 months
Arts and Culture
Elected to the Board of Directors for 2026 to grow the sound and lighting team for this great community theatre company, and make sure this year's productions have what they need.
Languages
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English
Native or bilingual proficiency
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French
Native or bilingual proficiency
Recommendations received
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