To the people who used to work on those StellarWP brands, I feel for you viscerally right now.

For people like us, these jobs were special. They were at a special time in WordPress in a liminal space where remote work was new and cool, everyone is happy to be there, and everyone genuinely cares and loves each-other’s company.

I feel like I’ve spent a lot of time the last several years trying to find work like that again, and I genuinely don’t know if those places even exist anymore.

So much so, that one of my core reasons for making my own business now is to try to recreate that again. I miss it. I see people around me grieve about the loss of it, and I would give anything to create that again. Someday, maybe.

I know for you this is laden with grief, and I am thinking of all of you constantly, but particularly this week. Take care of yourself.

It’s okay to grieve that, and don’t for one second think that it “was just a job”, because we all know these places were so much more than that.

I often just need to spin up a quick WordPress install to test something very, very specific, and then tear it down when I’m done.

So I had AI whip up a little utility for me. It loads a fresh WP install in your /tmp directory, and has a way to quickly remove the install when you’re done (but of course if you don’t it’ll just go away because it’s in tmp.)

Nothing too flashy, and obviously built specifically for my use-case, but I figured I’d share it publicly just in case it would be useful to someone else.

https://github.com/alexstandiford/wp-fresh