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10up at php[tek] 2016

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php[tek] 2016

Saint Louis

Speaking

Join 10up at php[tek] 2016 on May 23-27 in Saint Louis. We are co-sponsoring the event with our cloud infrastructure partner Joyent, and will be demoing our WordPress Docker composition. Plus, team 10up Senior Web Engineer Steve Grunwell will present two sessions.

In Steve’s first talk, “Professional Development for Professional Developers,” he will show how developers can continue to learn new web development skills without being overwhelmed by an industry characterized by new frameworks and tools cropping up weekly. His second talk, “Building for the PHP Command Line Interface,” covers the characteristics of well-written PHP CLI scripts. Steve will also make the case for writing custom commands, and provide an overview of different command line tools, including WP-CLI, Artisan, and Drush.

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I will be a panelist at Brightcove PLAY 2016 on May 17 in Boston. The panel, CMS Integrations: Best Practices, will discuss integrating the Brightcove Video Cloud with popular CMS platforms like WordPress and Drupal. I will review the Brightcove Video Connect plugin, which we developed as Brightcove’s official WordPress development partner, and present the plugin’s roadmap, which we will advance with the open source community; we opened the Github repo to the public this month.

The First WordCamp US

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WordCamp US

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Attending Speaking

In 2006, the first WordCamp was held in San Francisco–followed by subsequent camps in cities around the country. This weekend, the first WordCamp US will take place: an expansion of the traditional San Francisco conference, now attracting the WordPress community on an even larger scale.

Our team regularly contributes to open source projects and community initiatives, and I am thrilled to be one of seven co-organizers of the inaugural WordCamp US. Hosted in Philadelphia, PA on December 4-6, the conference is a jam packed 3-day event: kicking off with a yoga session right after registration, and moving through the weekend with more than 80 speakers and sessions, including 15-minute “Lightning Talks.” Matt Mullenweg will also present the annual “State of the Word” address: a summary on the current and future outlook of the WordPress project and community. The conference will conclude with Contributor Day: an event for novice and seasoned contributors to give back to the WordPress project, co-organized by colleague and Web Engineer, Drew Jaynes.

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10up speaks at WordCamp NYC this weekend

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WordCamp NYC

10up is thrilled to sponsor WordCamp NYC 2015 this weekend in Brooklyn. This year, Chief Executive Officer John Eckman and I are presenting, with Director of Platform Experience Helen Hou-Sandi in attendance.

In “Modernizing WordPress Search with Elasticsearch”, I’ll cover the benefits of Elasticsearch and teach attendees how to use ElasticPress: a 10up plugin that integrates WordPress with Elasticsearch, and significantly improves search results, relevancy, ranking, and filtering within WordPress.

John’s presentation, “The Enterprise Disconnect: WordPress and the Complexity of Simplicity”, will cover the challenges of advocating for WordPress in the enterprise, and different perspectives inside and outside the WordPress community. John will propose approaches that preserve the simplicity of WordPress, while better exposing enterprises to powerful solutions which can be built atop the platform.

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10up speaking at ZendCon 2015

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ZendCon 2015

Las Vegas

Speaking

This year, Lead Web Engineer Eric Mann and I are attending and speaking at ZendCon, the largest global gathering of the PHP community, on October 19-22, 2015 in Las Vegas. ZendCon brings together industry thought leaders, recognized PHP experts, enterprise PHP adopters, as well as independent developers for four days of professional development and networking.

On October 19, Eric will present his first talk, “Sandboxing your Development Environment with Vagrant”, which covers best practices in developer-side virtualization and some of the options available for runtime system configuration. On Wednesday, he’s talking about WordPress and unit testing in “A Tale of Two Test Suites.” Eric will cover fundamentals like API mocking, and comparing and contrasting the standard WordPress integration test suite with mock-powered unit testing alternatives.

Also on Wednesday, I’ll  present “Best Practices for WordPress Enterprise”. I’ll explain how 10up successfully builds highly efficient and scalable WordPress websites for some of the world’s largest companies and organizations. Although I’m focusing on engineering, I’ll also touch on team coordination and workflows.

Catch four 10up speakers at WordCamp Europe

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WordCamp Europe 2015

WordCamp Europe is this weekend, and four 10uppers have made the trek to Seville, Spain to mingle and share insights.

I will be presenting on Friday on the experience of setting up WordPress for new users, raising questions about how WordPress can continue to drive adoption by catering to that audience. I’ll also be teaching attendees how to write documentation for the handbooks, inline docs, and examples for the code reference.

Director of Platform Helen Hou-Sandi is presenting Developing for Capabilities, covering approaches for mobile, responsive, and accessible development. Lead Engineer Eric Mann will be giving a short talk on Saturday on how to sandbox a development environment with Vagrant. Finally, Senior Engineer Adam Silverstein will talk about Backbone.js and WordPress, in Putting a little Backbone in your WordPress.

With a packed schedule and huge attendance, WordCamp Europe looks to live up to its name once again as the premier WordCamp abroad.

10up at WordCamp Philly

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Once again, 10up is back for WordCamp Philly! This year, co-organizer and 10upper extraordinaire Doug Stewart will be joined by John Eckman, Allen Moore, and myself as speakers.

On Saturday morning, I’ll be presenting “User-First Approaches to APIs“, which will touch on what we mean by users, what it means to be a maintainer, and the excitement of a potential fields API in WordPress.

Right after that, Allen will be presenting “A Need For Speed: Performance Driven Front End Development,” focused on how front end performance affects User Engagement and Experience; best practices for performance driven front end development; and tools to measure front end performance.

Then  John will take us into lunch with “Getting outside the WordPress bubble“, a topic perfect for somebody with deep experiences with other CMS’s and their communities (including commits to Drupal 8!), as well as other communities at large.

WordCamp Philly holds a special place in 10up history, as the place where I first met Jake in 2011 and began my time as an agency-backed core contributor to WordPress. Doug even found this photo from that 2011 contributor day in the archives! We’re really excited about all of the great talks scheduled for Saturday, and what’s sure to be another fantastic contributor day on Sunday.

WordCamp Philly 2011