Supporting the first WordCamp for Publishers

Aug 17

WordCamp for Publishers

Denver, Colorado

Speaking Sponsoring

The first WordCamp curated for publishers begins Thursday in Denver, and features sessions for engineering, product, and editorial teams at news rooms big and small.

With our mission to make a better web for content creators, it’s no surprise that many of our clients are publishers, from storied giants like The New York Times and Time Inc to breakout digital voices like 9to5mac and Uproxx. Combined with our committed support for open platforms like WordPress, we’re proud Gold Sponsors of WordCamp for Publishers, the highest tier publicly offered.

I’ll be participating in the event along with fellow 10uppers Ben Ilfeld, Whitney Yadrich, Jay Moore, and Derrick Koo. We’re eager to learn, and eager to share: four of us will present at the event.

Engineering challenges: Caching under high load

Ivan Kruchkoff on July 25

What’s wrong with this piece of code?

function get_foo() {
	$cache_key = 'fookey';

	$data = wp_cache_get( $cache_key );
	if ( false === $data ) {
		sleep( 10 );
		$data = 'foodata';
		wp_cache_add( $cache_key, $data, '', HOUR_IN_SECONDS );
	}

	return $data;
}

Sponsoring WordCamp DC

Taylor Lovett on July 14

Jul 14

WordCamp DC

Carnegie Library

Speaking Sponsoring

As one of the Washington, DC metro area’s local 10uppers, I’m proud to share that 10up is a Silver tier sponsor of this weekend’s WordCamp DC. With our diverse client portfolio including government, political, nonprofit, and national news organizations, an event celebrating open platforms and a better web in Washington, DC was a natural fit for our support.

If you’re attending, be sure to catch Lead Engineer Adam Silverstein speaking on Friday afternoon, in his session, Ten tips for securing your WordPress JavaScript. Pick up our postcard on the swag table, and find Adam and me roaming the event: ask us about working at 10up, hiring 10up for your project, and our newest hosted solution, ElasticPress.io.

Operation LiftUp: Welcome Lift UX to 10up

Jake Goldman on July 11

We’re delighted to announce that after nearly one year of discussion and due diligence, 10up has completed an acquisition of Lift UX: a boutique, distributed, Emmy-nominated agency that specializes in making user experience design driven websites powered by WordPress. The Lift team, including its founding partners, Chris Wallace and Brad Miller, join 10up effective immediately.

Founded as a boutique digital creative shop in 2009, Lift has delivered web projects for clients like Frito-Lay, The Next Web, eBay, GoDaddy, and Disney. Lift earned acclaim when a “second screen” experience built for AMC’s Walking Dead was nominated for an Emmy Award in the interactive program category in 2012. Their work earn a second nomination in 2015 for Mad Men: The Fan Cut. Among their innovations, Lift built and sold a WordPress themes shop (UpThemes), and started a career center for distributed companies, RemoteJobs.com. They recently launched CampusInsiders.com, a project spotlighted by Automattic’s WordPress.com VIP program; the project earned Lift an invitation to become an official VIP agency partner.

As 10up’s President & Founder, I am elated to welcome this outstanding team, award recognized portfolio, and client roster to the 10up family. This acquisition accelerates our growth in Experience Design, adding executive-tier design leadership and enriching our growing portfolio of design stories. It represents a special opportunity for all parties to go further and faster as we partner with clients to make a better web.

Restricted Site Access for WordPress optimized for multisite

Taylor Lovett on June 16

We’ve released a major update to Restricted Site Access, our popular WordPress plugin that intelligently limits website access. Designed to keep unwanted visitors out of staging, test, and private sites, the plugin is active on more than 20,000 websites and has a 5 star rating.

Restricted Site Access 6.0 adds full support for WordPress network (multisite) installations. Network administrators can enforce restriction rules across the entire network, or set default restriction rules that are applied as new sites are added. If you have a network of private blogs or internal sites, or need time to configure new sites in your network before taking them live, this is the update you’ve been waiting for.

Estimates and estimation

Dave Ross on June 8

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
–Dwight D. Eisenhower

Why we estimate

Suppose you’re preparing for a trip and deciding which suitcase to take. You have a small suitcase that you like because it’s easy to carry and will fit into an airplane’s overhead storage bin. You also have a large suitcase, which you don’t like because you’ll have to check it in and then wait for it at baggage claim, lengthening your trip. You lay your clothes beside the small suitcase, and it appears that they will almost fit. What do you do? You might try packing them very carefully, not wasting any space, and hoping they all fit. If that approach doesn’t work, you might try stuffing them into the suitcase with brute force, sitting on the top and trying to squeeze the latches closed. If that still doesn’t work, you’re faced with a choice: leave a few clothes at home or take the larger suitcase. —Steve McConnell, Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art

As an engineer, nothing pleases me more than rolling up my sleeves and writing code. But before doing that, a sense of how to approach a task and the required resources (people, time, software licenses, third-party API access) need to be determined. These details support clear project expectations, which are foundational to the great client experiences we strive to create. Estimates, give all project stakeholders—internal and external—a chance to agree on a few key things before work is begun:

That we understand what is being asked for;
That we have a plan to efficiently deliver quality results;
That we’ve asked (and answered) all project team questions;
That we’ve considered all the risks, edge cases, and alternatives;
That we’ve considered the effects on usability, accessibility, and SEO;
That the available budget and desired timeline support the approach.

Get to know New Relic Reporting for WordPress

Vasken Hauri on May 31

New Relic is a SaaS product that offers application performance monitoring (APM), which provides developers with real-time data for use in proactive diagnostics as well as debugging. This data—including basic information about WordPress hooks, plugins, and themes—can be queried and visualized using the New Relic Insights dashboard.

Seeing an opportunity to maximize the utility of APM and Insights, we created New Relic Reporting for WordPress, which supplements out-of-the-box data collection with additional WordPress-specific information.

Allen Moore on May 12

I’m excited to be presenting “An Introduction to Test-Driven JavaScript Development” at Syntax Code and Craft Conference on May 18. SyntaxCon, held in Charleston, SC, is a multi-day, full stack code conference for developers and engineers. My talk introduces the concept of test-driven development (TDD) when working with JavaScript, highlights its benefits, clarifies some common misconceptions, and provides examples of how to implement TDD into your everyday workflow.

Introducing WP Docker

Taylor Lovett on April 27 • 10 Comments

Back in 2013, 10up introduced Varying Vagrant Vagrants (VVV), a project led by then 10upper Jeremy Felt. One of the first popular WordPress development environments based on Vagrant, VVV has since been moved out of 10up’s GitHub and into its own, where it continues to thrive as a community-led project.

Now, Docker and container-based server architectures have emerged as powerful tools for creating and managing development environments. Last year, we partnered with Joyent to release a scalable, production-ready Docker environment for WordPress. Today, we’re proud to release WP Docker: an open source Docker configuration optimized for local WordPress development.
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How to become a WordPress Core contributor with one line of code

Derrick Koo on April 27 • 1 Comment

[To better illustrate our core value of community service, we are sharing an internal post from Senior Front End Engineer Derrick Koo, who recently made his first code contribution to the WordPress project. We hope his story encourages more people who are “on the fence” about contributing to take the plunge and start giving back to the WordPress community. —Jake Goldman, President & Founder]

Contributing code to WordPress Core can be intimidating for a first-timer. With thousands of tickets out there, it can be hard to know where to begin. With development out in the open, it takes a lot of courage to submit a first WordPress patch.

For the benefit of new and aspiring contributors, I’m sharing my experience making my first code contribution to WordPress. Starting with little knowledge of the Core contribution process, I embarked on a journey that resulted in one line of CSS, and my first Core props.
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