The WordPress Engineer Who Built a LEGO Robot to Teach Kids How to Code

Nikole Gipps's grandmother worked at Apple and brought computers home for her to play with. That single fact — a grandma with a badge, a kid with free time and a machine to tinker on — may explain everything that came after.

Gipps, a WordPress engineer who joined X-Team after more than 15 years of remote work, has spent much of her career at the intersection of building things and handing the tools to others. She writes server-side code by day. After hours, she walks into elementary school classrooms in Eugene, Oregon, with a custom-built LEGO robot and a curriculum she designed herself. In this story, Gipps traces the path from a Silicon Valley childhood to a career in WordPress, explains why remote work became non-negotiable for her family and describes the open-source robot she built to normalize diversity in tech — one classroom at a time.

A Silicon Valley Childhood and the Long Road to WordPress

Gipps is quick to credit luck as much as talent. Growing up in Silicon Valley with a grandmother who brought home Apple hardware, a mother who broke gender barriers by putting herself through a civil engineering program and friends with video game systems gave her access that most kids — especially those in households that struggled financially — simply didn't have.

"I feel like I was also blessed with the freedom of free time," she says. "I did activities, but I also found myself with a lot of unstructured free time to just play with a computer."

That play turned into fluency. She started with Pascal as a kid, moved to rudimentary HTML and DOS in high school during the Netscape 1.0 era and picked up C, UNIX scripting, CSS and JavaScript in college, along with Cold Fusion and PHP. She found WordPress around 2003–2004 and has been working in the platform ever since, with a lean toward the server and backend side. More recent dives into JavaScript frameworks, Python and R haven't changed the gravitational center. "I keep snapping back to WordPress," she says. "I guess that ended up being my one true love."

What she loves most about the work isn't a technology or a framework — it's a specific kind of client situation. When a developer has left a mess behind, or a client has been stuck on something frustrating for months with no help, and Gipps can leave them in a measurably better place, that's the win. A cleaner user experience, a streamlined workflow, a site that's actually secure. Or simply a client who finally understands their own technology.

"That is the kind of project that makes me happy to jump out of bed in the morning," she says.

Remote Work as a Life Strategy

Gipps didn't become a remote worker because it was trendy. She made the shift over 15 years ago when she was pregnant with her first child, leaving a job she enjoyed but that came with a rigid travel schedule that couldn't accommodate a growing family. The move to remote work wasn't a lifestyle experiment — it was a practical necessity.

What started as a way to manage maternity became infrastructure for her whole life. A second child, a move across state lines, family illnesses that required travel — remote work absorbed all of it. "Being able to work around my life and not being tied down to a specific location made everything possible for me," she says.

The flexibility compounds in small ways too. No commute means hours reclaimed each week. A sick kid doesn't trigger a negotiation with an office manager. During one extended illness, she was able to work from the children's hospital so she didn't have to stay alone. She's matter-of-fact about what that access means for parents who don't have it: "Parents without that flexibility have the heartbreaking decision between their child and income to care for their family."

Now that her kids are older, the calculus has shifted but the conclusion is the same. Remote work lets her take her job to conferences, check messages between classes while she's teaching coding at a local school and work from wherever the noise level is right. Counterintuitively, she prefers ambient noise and people-watching to quiet. "I don't enjoy the quiet — I find it too distracting," she says. Silence, for her, is the distraction.

Her productivity system is similarly unconventional. She cycles through her current projects mentally, prioritizes by importance and works down the list. When she hits a wall, she doesn't force through it. She takes a nap. "If I am super stuck, I just look at the issue, lay down for an hour, and come back with an answer." Self-care, she's found, is part of the engineering process.

Jimmy-Kyle, the LEGO Robot, and Fixing Tech's Pipeline

The classroom work started as a local effort and grew into something she wanted to open up to anyone. Gipps designed a LEGO-based robot — her kids named it Jimmy-Kyle — built around Mindstorms EV3 kits, and wrote the curriculum herself. The instructions are publicly available so any educator or parent can build the same robot. "I wanted to make this available as an open-source project so that everyone had access to it," she says.

The goal in the classroom is twofold. The kids learn the building blocks of coding without necessarily realizing that's what they're doing. And they meet working professionals — local engineers and developers Gipps recruits from her industry network — who look like people they might become someday.

"The kids learn the building blocks of coding without realizing it, but they also get to learn to see themselves in these jobs in the future by meeting the local pros," she says. The pros benefit too: seeing their field through a first-timer's eyes has a way of sharpening how you think about it.

She's also active with women-in-tech programs at colleges in Eugene, with high school students navigating career paths their families don't always understand and with efforts to help normalize what the tech workforce looks like before kids have formed fixed ideas about it.

The driving force behind all of it is partly selfless and partly honest. "Maybe I just want to protect the future of tech and bring really cool people into the industry so I can collaborate with them someday," she says. She's candid that being female, of Mexican descent and what she calls "sort of a tech OG" puts her at an isolating intersection in the industry. Teaching isn't just outreach — it's world-building. "I want a future where that is not the case."

For Gipps, the classroom work and the WordPress work aren't separate tracks. Both are about leaving something better than she found it — whether that's a broken site, a struggling client or a kid who's never imagined herself as an engineer.

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