Veteran · Developer · Systems Thinker · Rotterdam, Netherlands
B.S. Information Systems & Technology — University of Missouri–St. Louis

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Hey there, I’m Sean Davis. 👋 I’m from St. Louis, Missouri, USA, but I am currently living in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Feel free to poke through my personal site.

Back in 2014, I became the first official employee at Pippin Williamson‘s company Sandhills Development, the original team behind WordPress plugins like Easy Digital Downloads, AffiliateWP, Restrict Content Pro, and more.

I started as a support technician and WordPress theme developer, focused on Easy Digital Downloads and our company websites. I became a Partner in 2017, and was part of the company’s leadership through its acquisition in 2021.

As the team grew over the years to around 28 people, so did the complexity of keeping everyone aligned. Dropbox handled shared files in the early days. Trello was crucial to operations for many years. GitHub played an obvious role as developers started to collaborate. Basecamp became central to operations in the later years. Let’s not mention Slack, Help Scout, email, text message, etc.

Each tool earned its place, but none of them were built to answer the question a team member or manager needs answered.

What do our team members need to know, where does the information live, and how do we know they know it?

Knowledge pertaining to each tool lived wherever it happened to land. Which meant it was hard to find, hard to verify, and hard to hand off.

Looking back, I know exactly what tool I wish had existed. It should have lived inside WordPress where the team already was. That’s why I built Keystone.

Sean Davis – Owner, Keystone