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The First WordCamp Sacramento

Jake Goldman on November 6, 2015

Nov 7

WordCamp Sacramento

Sacramento, CA

Speaking Sponsoring

Rumors of a WordCamp Sacramento started in 2012, after I rebooted the WordPress Sacramento Meetup. Fast forward to 2015: there are 4 meetup organizers and northern California’s WordCamp San Francisco has been displaced by WordCamp US. The Art Institute of Sacramento volunteered its campus for an event, a professor offered himself as lead organizer, and indispensable local leaders stepped up to take an active role.

I’m proud to have played a small role in co-organizing the first WordCamp Sacramento, which takes place tomorrow, and even more proud that 10up is sponsoring the event. I’ll be joined at the event by three 10uppers who are speaking: Sacramento’s own Ben Ilfeld, who will be teaching site advertising basics, Northern California’s Vasken Hauri, who promises to improve lives with event-driven caching, and Luke Woodward, joining us from out-of-state to debut “Robots Write the Docs.”

2015 Annual Summit: Boulder

Jake Goldman on April 24, 2015

Boulder

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.

Scaling StoryCorps.me and the WP JSON API

Jake Goldman on March 31, 2015 • 1 Comment

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.

PostStatus published a detailed, insightful write up that describes the project and technical implementation, including kind words from their program manager:

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.

Be sure to check out their coverage, and try out StoryCorps.me. You can find the app that relies on their WordPress build on the iOS app store and Android Play.

10up turns four

Jake Goldman on February 13, 2015

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.
Launched our first product – and since pushed over 1 billion website notifications.
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.
Welcomed our first Chief Executive Officer.
Launched a brand new 10up.com.
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.”
Led the release of WordPress 4.0, saw our Director of Platform Experience promoted to a Lead Developer for the project, and kicked off leading WordPress 4.2.
Open sourced and publicly released our engineering best practices. We’ve seen contributions from renowned Google experts, and community translations into languages like Japanese.
Engineered an interactive holiday card projected in downtown San Francisco.
Helped a hosting partner, WP Engine, build Mercury: the next generation of their platform.
Graduated Varying Vagrant Vagrants (VVV) from a 10up project that has changed the way many develop locally to an open, external community project.

WP Engine Mercury: Building a WordPress Jet Engine

Jake Goldman on November 20, 2014 • 1 Comment

Putting problem solving before technology often means figuring the technology out – sometimes as we go. From push notifications and search to standardizing local development, we’re most proud of contributions that advance markets and platforms, not just 10up.

Months ago, WP Engine, a market leader in managed WordPress hosting, reached out to us for candid feedback with an eye toward the platform’s future. The Labs team was determined to invent not only the future of WP Engine, but the future of WordPress hosting; to be as disruptive as WP Engine was in its earliest days. From better hardware and developer tools to bleeding edge performance technology, the vision was compelling, and it was clear that from CEO Heather Bruner to Founder & CTO Jason Cohen, they were all in.

Its 10up’s position that a rich, forward-looking ecosystem of managed hosting choices is vital to the success of a web platform; we’re only as strong as the weakest part of our stack. Membership, integrated social engagement – even e-commerce – are increasingly entangled with content and publishing, and there are, unsurprisingly, a dearth of hosted WordPress choices tackling these use cases. As the fail-whale oft-reminded us, these cases are very hard to scale, particularly with run-time languages like PHP atop traditional SQL databases. Just ask Facebook. (Actually: we did. Read on.)

WP Engine wanted to tackle this problem. They had us at “do you want to help us build it?”

10up takes WordCamp San Francisco 2014

Jake Goldman on October 24, 2014 • 2 Comments

WordCamp San Fransisco was the first WordPress conference, has historically remained the largest (certainly on the North American continent), and is home to WordPress co-founder and project lead Matt Mullenweg’s annual State of the Word address.

In 2012, we brought the “whole team” out (all 14 of us), and watched with delight as our own Helen Hou-Sandi was called out in the State of the Word as a rockstar. In 2013, we decided that taking a team of ~35 was neither logistically practical nor a great way for us to focus on team building, so we brought a contingent of 8, and were proud to showcase four speakers and see Drew Jaynes called out as a rockstar.

WordCamp San Francisco 2014 is this weekend, and this time you’ll find a dozen (12) 10uppers roaming the conference. This year we’re proud to have 5 speakers participating:

On Saturday, Helen Hou-Sandi connects her training as professional musician with her career as a code poet.
Kicking off Sunday, Paul Clark inspires us by reminding how web publishing and WordPress can save lives and move governments.
The three “WordPress in Context” lightning talks on Saturday feature 2 10uppers – and one 10up alumnus! 10up CEO John Eckman and Senior Engineer Rachel Baker are joined by former Engineering Director (now a leader in the university system) Jeremy Felt.
Finally, our Creative Director, Taylor Aldridge, joins a set of Saturday lightning talks on Design & Business.

Staying on top: 10up Learning Summit 2014

Jake Goldman on April 25, 2014

Around this time in 2013 we held a Developer Summit – an in person gathering of our team focused on skill building. We covered everything from PHP unit testing to JavaScript performance optimization, and even rolled out Varying Vagrant Vagrants. From SASS to duck punching, that summit influences how I write code today, when I still have the occasion to do so.

10up has grown since April 2013, not just in raw numbers (we’ve tripled), but in scope. Add a talented design team and nearly a dozen web strategists and project managers and our second annual “developer” summit already needs a rebranding: let’s call it a Learning Summit.

10up Summit Git Talk

This time, we’re taking over a resort in beautiful Scottsdale, Arizona. We’re kicking off on the afternoon of Tuesday, May 13, with practical activities focusing on the art of effective, consistent, and thoughtful client engagement. Wednesday we have three tracks filled with incredible workshops: design, engineering, and project management.

A Conversation about the Future of WordPress

Jake Goldman on February 24, 2014

10up is a digital agency that hangs its hat on the viability of open source web platforms – WordPress in particular. We think WordPress is the platform of choice for content management and publishing, and we’ve built a team that shares these open values and grasps WordPress like few others. More than 25 of us have made core contributions, and we’re home to two core committers. Needless to say, as President, I spend significant time thinking about this platform, from its underlying code quality to the healthy – and less healthy – habits of its considerable community.

Where is WordPress heading? Where should it head? Where are the biggest opportunities? How can WordPress continue to dominate the CMS space in another 5 years? Does it make a good app platform? Is there another platform we should be mastering?

So when WP Elevate’s Troy Dean invited me to participate in a live panel on the “future of WordPress” with leaders like WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, Woo’s Scott Basgaard, and Modern Tribe’s Shane Pearlman (among others), I didn’t hesitate to accept.

You can catch WP Think Tank tomorrow (February 25) at 8 pm UTC / 12 pm Pacific / 3 pm Eastern.

Rumor has it that, based on the reception, this might not be the only episode of WP Think Tank!

Varying Vagrant Vagrants: All Grown Up

Jake Goldman on January 27, 2014 • 2 Comments

Just a bit over a year ago, then-10upper Jeremy Felt decided it was time to part ways with MAMP and make friendly with Vagrant. With a little help from fellow 10up senior engineers and systems experts, Varying Vagrant Vagrants was born, introducing a consistent and shareable approach to a WordPress development environment that better represented the real world production environments agencies like 10up build for.

With a 1.0 release, almost 800 commits, and nearly 40 contributors, it’s safe to say that Varying Vagrant Vagrants, or VVV as it’s become known, is an active and stable open source project. We’re so proud to have served as its founders and creators, and look forward to continuing to play a major role in its development and maintenance.

And now, it’s time to give VVV a community of its own. A new Varying Vagrant Vagrants organization on GitHub has been created, and ownership of the main VVV repository is being transferred there.

It’s a little bittersweet to see your project take on its own life, and this is no different. Yet, as strong advocates for open source and the rising tide it fosters, we’re even more excited to see one of our investments in open R&D take flight, and look forward to contributing to VVV, its community, and its future.