Hi, my name is Irene Strikkers, and I’m Head of R&D at Yoast. I enjoy running, baking, cooking and traveling. I’m also a bit of a history and linguistics nerd. During my first months at Yoast, I actually worked as a linguist, developing content checks to help our users to write more readable content. When I was asked if I wanted to assist in writing the code for those checks as well, I immediately said yes!
My temporary move to the development team turned out to be quite permanent. After implementing the readability checks, I started to work on our internal linking tool that suggests to which related post users might want to link. Over the years, I’ve been part of many development teams: I joined the inaugural MyYoast team, switched back to the plugin team, became team lead of the Gutenberg integration team, and later of all plugin development teams. In 2021 I became Yoast’s engineering manager.
In 2022, I was promoted to Head of R&D, and became part of the leadership team. My focus is offering our users the best products. My main goal is shipping great features that are easy-to-use, stable, up-to-date, and helpful. On top of that, I’m determined to build a more diverse R&D team. I enjoy improving processes, quickly responding to changing circumstances, and getting things done.
The reason I mention my entire growth path within Yoast on this ‘about me’ page, is not to pat myself on the back. It’s because to me it shows what an awesome company Yoast is: if you want to move to a different department or grow towards a different position, and are willing to work for it, Yoast offers tremendous opportunities to help you grow and keep reinventing yourself.
As plugin developers, we are continuously working on implementing features and fixing bugs. We’re not flawless, but fortunately we, at Yoast, have a QA team that tests our plugin daily, both manually and automatically. Sometimes when they find a bug, a specific commit or pull request comes to mind that is the likely cause. Sometimes […]
Read: "Using git bisect to find the commit that broke your code"
At Yoast, we like to release often. We’re a fan of continuous delivery and currently release every two weeks. As we sometimes get questions about our release cycle, we’d like to tell the entire story on why and how we release and test our plugins before they are ready to be installed on millions of […]
Read: "Continuous delivery at Yoast"
Irene likes to talk about readability, linguistics and the Yoast plugins.
SEO
[Dutch] At WordCamp Nijmegen in 2018, Irene used 3 examples to explain what linguists can do for your SEO.
