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Varying Vagrant Vagrants: All Grown Up

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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.

5 speakers, 1 organizer, and a Platinum Sponsorship: 10up loves WordCamp Boston

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WordCamp Boston 2013WordCamp Boston has a special place in team 10up’s heart, going all the way back to Boston’s first camp, which I helped organize in 2010, before there was a 10up. In 2011, not 6 months after founding 10up, we reached into our pocket to offer a Silver sponsorship, and I spoke about WordPress as a CMS. In 2012, we again extended a Silver sponsorship; I debuted a talk on Enterprise, and was joined by fellow 10up speakers Jess Jurick and Luke Gedeon (who runs the neighboring Providence WordCamp). Today, two 10uppers live in the Boston metro area: Senior Engineer Dave Ross, and Engineer Kelly Dwan, who also organizes the monthly meet up and helped organize this weekend’s event. Three of our senior staff – Jess Jurick, John Jacoby, and I – all lived within ~100 miles of Boston at some point since 10up’s inception.

So it goes without saying that, above and beyond Kelly’s co-organizing, we were going to make a meaningful contribution to WordCamp Boston 2013. With more resources in hand, we’ve provided a top-tier, Platinum Sponsorship; we’re sponsoring Saturday’s lunch! You’ll find 7 of us at the conference, 5 of us speaking:

You’ll find more 10uppers roaming the halls and manning the 10up table (did someone say free swag?): local Senior Engineer Dave Ross and prolific core contributor (find her face on your credits screen) Helen Hou-Sandi.

Check out my guest blog post on the WordCamp Boston website for more reminiscing about 10up and Boston connections, like our work for Boston Magazine. If you’ll be in town, find a 10upper, visit our table, be sure to see our talks, and enjoy lunch – it’s on us!

10up at WordCamp San Francisco 2013

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WordCamp San Francisco was the first ever WordCamp, organized by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg back in 2006. It has since grown into one of the largest WordCamps in the United States, and is considered WordPress’s canonical annual community event. I’m excited to reveal that we’ll have eight 10uppers in attendance, four of whom will be presenting.

10up WordCamp San Francisco 2013

One of our newest employees, Grant Landram, will be attending WordCamp San Francisco for the first time. Grant is excited to experience the WordCamp that started this international phenomena and meet WordCampers from around the world. As a WordCamp organizer in Seattle, he’s eager to learn from the organizing team and bring that knowledge back home. Grant’s presentation explores collaboration with non-technical stakeholders, and offers an anecdotal overview of the pitfalls technical personnel may encounter when working with non-technical stakeholders. He’ll cover techniques for identifying and understanding a stakeholders’ true knowledge, and actions that help non-technical participants follow technical conversations. Grant is also volunteering at the Happiness Bar on Friday, so stop by to chat with him if you’re going!

Eric Mann will also be attending WordCamp San Francisco for the first time, and is eager to connect with online collaborators he’s engaged on Twitter and IRC. Eric will be giving a short talk on Saturday morning, highlighting ways developers can automate their coding process using Grunt. Like his presentation in Seattle earlier this year, this version will focus on the goals of automation and practical tools, along with a live demo. At 10up, we’ve built two fantastic tools that leverage Grunt for WordPress development: a template that builds the foundation for a new plugin and one that builds the foundation for a new theme. Eric also built out a template that builds a new theme based on Automattic’s _s (Underscores) starter theme. Attendees will walk out with access to plenty of tools to kick-start, simplify, and improve their development processes.

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Jake Goldman

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KSAC FMThis coming Tuesday, June 11, at 10 AM I will be on Sacramento’s 105.5 FM Money 2.0 with Andrew Rogerson. I’m excited to talk about 10up, our distributed business model, and the future of web development. I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with Andrew a few times; he’s an experienced, savvy business thinker who always challenges me to rethink the business of marketing and building websites. I’m eager to tell 10up’s story to a different kind of audience, and to engage with Andrew.

To listen to the show, you can tune into Money 105.5 FM on the radio or online with TuneIn or on iHeartRadio.

Publishing Workflows for WordPress & CMS Expo 2013

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Last week, I had the opportunity to participate in CMS Expo 2013, where I presented Publishing Workflows for WordPress. The final talk is broken down into three major sections: (1) a review of inherent WordPress workflow, including some improvements coming with 3.6, (2) a look at plug-ins that enrich its native workflow, from full featured editorial plug-ins like Edit Flow, to narrow, helpful tools like Ice Visual Revisions, and (3) inspiring case studies that illustrate just how far WordPress workflow and curation can be extended in the hands of a strong engineering and user experience team.

I’ve published the slides to YouTube, since a large portion of the presentation includes screen recordings, demoing some built in features, plug-ins, and showcases. I want to thank the awesome, engaged audience, which ranged from fellow WordPress professionals to novices who have never even opened the software.

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Talking WordPress at CMS Expo this week

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This coming week I’ll be participating in and speaking at the annual CMS Expo in Chicago. CMS Expo educates and informs business leaders, content marketers, website implementors, and other professionals looking for an in-depth review of the latest web-based publishing solutions. With three full days of content and more than 50 speakers, CMS Expo covers a cross-section of popular content management systems, including Drupal, Joomla, MODx, and of our favorite, WordPress. I’ll be one of four speakers offering insight and content focused on WordPress.

10up and WordPress CMS Expo 2013

Assuming planes run on time, I’ll be there on Monday evening for the Welcome Kickoff Meetup at the Orrington Conference Center, where I’ll look forward to joining lead WordPress developer Andrew Nacin’s WordPress breakout meetup.

The conference fully kicks off on Tuesday, May 14, where I’ll be presenting Publishing Workflows for WordPress at 4:30 pm CST.  On the heels of a session reviewing WordPress’s CMS chops, I’ll dive into scenarios where light weight, out-of-the-box WordPress just doesn’t cut it. Here’s my session description:

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Celebrate 10up’s Birthday – Three WordPress Events

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10up birthday map

On Monday, February 18, 10up will turn 2 years old (more on that in a future post). On Tuesday, February 19, a handful of team 10up employees will celebrate across the country by doing what we’ve done all along – playing an active role in the WordPress community at three different meet ups on the 19th (plus a belated fourth event on the 26th)!

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John Bloch joins 10up

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Hi! If you don’t know me from a WordCamp, the WordPress DC meetup, or the broader WordPress community, my name is John and I love LAMP. Building websites started as a hobby for me, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that this was my professional calling. I’ve always been fascinated by the process of architecting software; watching something I’ve helped craft come to life from mere concept still fills me with wonder.

I started working with WordPress in 2008 and it quickly became my platform of choice for building websites. After publishing plugins and engaging the WordPress community, both online and at the local DC meetup, I quickly became hooked. I started attending more WordCamps, and even had the privilege of speaking at a few. From multilingual sites to multisite networks, from store locators to TinyMCE extensions to combat shortcode madness, the applications and sites I’ve built upon WordPress testify to its flexibility and power.

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