Every year, around this time, our distributed team gets together for a few days to focus on developing our soft and technical skills, to celebrate our past and plan for our future. The 2015 summit is next week at a beautiful hotel in downtown Boulder, Colorado. It begins Monday afternoon with an optional tour of the Celestial Tea Factory and a mouth-watering prefixed dinner catering to myriad 10up diets. Our summit ends on Thursday night, with most 10uppers traveling home on Friday.
This weekend I’ll be giving the (very early!) keynote at WordCamp Minneapolis, on “Building Software, Building Community.” I’ll be talking about the really unique opportunity WordPress presents as a platform and a community capable of changing your own career – and potentially the world.
I’m very much looking forward to my first WordCamp in the twin cities, which has a special meaning for me since the venue is less than 10 miles from where I lived through all of middle school, junior high, and high school.
The schedule is impressive: a full day of four tracks on Saturday plus two tracks on Sunday, plus an after party Saturday night and brunch on Sunday.
If you’re attending, and are interested in learning more about 10up or working with us (as an employee, partner, or client) I’d be happy to chat with you.
Net Magazine’s latest cover story details 8 “dos and don’ts” for architecting WordPress themes with best practices and an eye towards maintainability. In this article, I cover the WordPress template hierarchy and the loop, foundational concepts necessary to build and understand WordPress themes. A few 10up clients, like H.M.Clause, also get shout outs.
Net Magazine is a 20-year-old publication for professional and amateur web designers and developers; having published insights and stories from 10uppers in the past, they’ve come to recognize 10up as an expert resource.
We had the privilege of working with StoryCorps to help them engineer a reliable, scalable WordPress implementation for their new, TED prize winning project. StoryCorps.me enables anyone to record and share powerful stories using an iOS and Android app; the app’s infrastructure is built on WordPress, and leverages the WP REST API.
We built a custom, elastic infrastructure on Amazon Web Services, provided strategic consulting and direction for the WordPress JSON API integration with the app, and comprehensive code review and auditing for the custom theme and plugins built by StoryCorps’s internal developers.
Even as the app was unveiled at TED, and picked up in subsequent press coverage from NPR, Fast Company, Recode, the Globe and Mail, Forbes, to name a few, the site and its deep app integrations have scaled and performed like a champ.
Dean noted, “You have to be willing to completely submit to the process.” He says it wouldn’t have succeeded if 10up and [app developer] Maya weren’t committed as StoryCorps to the success of the project.
WordCamp London is happening this weekend, March 20-22, and our CEO John Eckman and I will be flying over the Atlantic to join in on what is sure to be a fantastic event. I’ll be speaking on Saturday on what it means to apply a user-first approach to metadata and fields, a topic that is near and dear to anyone who’s extended the WordPress admin, as well as on a core developer Q&A panel on Sunday.
The entire schedule looks great, in addition to Friday’s Contributor Day. We’re especially looking forward to seeing:
Between all of the great talks, networking, and delicious food (who says the British don’t have good food?), this will definitely be a memorable WordCamp. If you’re on Twitter, follow along with WordCamp London on Twitter and via the #wcldn hashtag.
Four years ago, 10up came to life with a couple of clients, and a centrally located team of one. Today, our 100+ team of engineers, designers, and strategists span the globe, privileged to serve Fortune 500 (and 50… and 1…) clients, as well as an array of well respected startups and lesser known brands invested in first class technology solutions. Here are a few highlights since our last birthday:
Continued to launch projects for renowned clients, like FiveThirtyEight: one of the most anticipated website launches in 2014.
Grew our full time team by 100%. More came aboard in the last 2 months than our entire 2nd year.
Grew our revenue. We’ve invoiced more in the last 2 weeks than we earned our in our first year. We’ve collected more revenue in the last two months than we earned in our entire second year.
Invested thousands of hours into open source projects, mostly WordPress. WordPress is our third largest client by effort. And that’s only the “company time.”
Three and a half years after her very first props in WordPress core and two years after becoming a core committer, Director of Platform Experience Helen Hou-Sandí has been promoted to Lead Developer for the WordPress project. She joins 5 other leads atop the WordPress credits screen, including project founder Matt Mullenweg. 10up is now the first and only consulting agency to have the honor of a Lead Developer in its ranks, as well as the only agency with not just one, but two WordPress releaseleads. We’re proud of Helen, and proud of our growing contributions.
10up Web Engineer Drew Jaynes will be leading the WordPress 4.2 development cycle, slated for release in April 2015. WordPress’s releases come a few times a year and involve hundreds of people and thousands of lines of code. A release lead coordinates all of these contributors and contributions, while also managing schedules, priorities, and announcements. As a committer for the past year (with direct access to change the source code) and a driving force behind WordPress documentation, Drew has proven that he’s well-suited to the task, and we’re looking forward to this next release.
As a part of our commitment to the WordPress and open source community, roughly half of Drew’s time is donated to working on core and community initiatives. Building on my own experience as the WordPress 4.0 release lead and fellow committer, I’ll also be close at hand as a ready and willing mentor. We were really excited to be the first agency to sponsor a release lead, and we’re even more excited to do it again so soon. Please join us in congratulating Drew!
ElasticPress is coming to Paris this weekend. I will be speaking at WordCamp Paris on January 23, 2015. Day one of the camp is being held at MAS Paris, and day two is at the EEMI school.
My session, occuring Friday at 3pm, is titled “Modernizing WordPress Search with Elasticsearch”. I will describe the limitations of WordPress search and present an alternative, Elasticsearch and ElasticPress. I will explain some basic Elasticsearch cluster configuration tips, run through ElasticPress setup, and demonstrate some really interesting queries that can be achieved with the plugin.
Whether you are a novice WordPress developer or an expert systems engineer with Elasticsearch experience, my session will demonstrate the power of WordPress and ElasticPress and hopefully spark some ideas on how you can improve your site’s search experience.
If you are attending WordCamp Paris, please come say hello! 10up is hiring, and I am always happy to chat about opportunities.
When WP Engine came to us to help engineer Gif the Halls – part digital holiday greeting, part holiday art exhibition – we were more than a little intrigued.
The WP Engine Labs team commissioned six digital artists to create holiday themed animations, to be projected onto buildings in San Francisco – and they needed a way to collect holiday messages from the masses. Enabling visitors, directed from the exhibit, to build digital holiday cards on the (WP Engine hosted) website was the easy part.
First, we had to build an output system to project cards onto the buildings in San Francisco, and that output system needed a queue manager, so that only approved cards would appear. Still doesn’t sound too hard?
We also had to engineer remote controlled video capture. Collecting and displaying cards wasn’t enough: we wanted to capture reactions to the exhibit right on the street. Our set-up would determine when a camera should record, transcode that video recording, and share the reaction with the original card creator, who would in turn share the video with friends and family. Without getting too technical, we created a bridge between WordPress and a digital SLR so that when cards are presented, the camera in San Francisco begins recording.
You can check out the result of our partnership with WPEngine, featuring art curated by Grey Area and presented in partnership with YBCBD, by heading over to GiftheHalls.com and visiting the Humboldt Bank Building or Monadnock Building on Market Street between the hours of 6pm and 6am, December 20-22.
Jake Goldman on
John Eckman
Corey Ellis
Net Magazine’s latest cover story
Helen Hou-Sandi
10up Web Engineer 
Taylor Lovett
David Peralty