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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!

What happens when 10up is in Las Vegas…gets shared with the community!

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Nearly all thirty-nine 10uppers are descending on Las Vegas tomorrow, from as close as Los Angeles and as far as Germany, for our company Annual Meeting, running through Saturday morning. In addition to many first time face to face meetings, we’ll be reflecting on the last year, talking strategy for next year and beyond, relaxing around the sky-high pool, sharing contributions and best practices, and even venturing out on a city-wide scavenger hunt. Rumor has it there are even a few team building exercises, including a symbolic game of team bumper cars.

We’ll be taking photographs aplenty for a post-meeting round-up, as we did for our Developer Summit back in April. In the mean time, follow all the action via the team10up Twitter list, and if you want to be a part of future 10up meet ups, be in touch!

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Tomorrow, Saturday the 12th of October I will be speaking at WordCamp Louisville!

I will be giving a talk on WordPress and the Command Line, which I’ve polished and refined since WordCamp Birmingham back in August. If you’re just starting out building themes and want to learn how command line tools can help improve your process, my talk is for you!

Non-Profit Hackathon Puts WordPress Center Stage

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givecampThis weekend 22 Non-Profit Organizations and over 180 Volunteers willbe gathering on Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington for the 4th annual Seattle Givecamp, a weekend-long “hackathon” style event where software developers, website wonks, project managers and designers donate their time to design and build solutions for non-profit organizations in need. From health and wildlife outreach programs to community food coalitions, participating non-profits submit technology projects that require assistance they don’t have funding or expertise to carry out. Volunteers will gather on Friday to learn more about each Organizations’s Project, form teams, and spend the rest of the weekend (often working through the night) hacking together solutions.

On Saturday morning I will be leading a 2-hour workshop for participating organizations and volunteers on how to better leverage WordPress on their projects during the weekend and beyond. Many of the participating organizations are either already using WordPress, or have identified their project as requiring a WordPress component. In my session I will cover a variety of WordPress topics ranging from how to start using WordPress for the first time, to using some it’s more advanced APIs, to simple every day tips and tricks. The session will be Saturday morning from 10am to noon, and is open to the general public.

For more information about GiveCamp visit http://seattlegivecamp.org/ and follow them on twitter @SeattleGivecamp. Best of luck to all the project teams this weekend, and if you’re in the Seattle area I hope to see you there!

Doug Stewart brings in extensive systems, WordPress experience

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Howdy all, my name is Doug Stewart. I’m the newest addition to the 10up systems team, and I couldn’t be more excited to be joining the company.

I’ve been using Linux since 1997 or so, but don’t hold that against me and I’ve been going by the nickname “Zamoose” for at least that long. I’ve over 15 years of experience in the IT industry to bring to bear on problems related to networks, systems and software, with a special penchant for solving problems in the Linux space. I’ve spent time at software giants like IBM, in the advanced US Defense Department research community, working with geneticists and medical researchers as a high-performance computing administrator and have even spent a bit of time in a startup or two back in the first Internet Bubble. Lately, I’ve been working heavily in the areas of systems automation and virtualization.

I first came across WordPress in 2004 during the Great Licensing Wars and have been a dedicated WP user and contributor since version 1.0. I have experience in developing themes and plugins, contributing to the core WordPress software, participating in the greater community and helping WordPress users get the most out of their sites.

I also co-organize the monthly Philadelphia WordPress Meetup and the yearly WordCamp Philadelphia and Tech Week Philly events and am very involved in the Philadelphia metro area WordPress community.

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Heather Hogan brings passion for web strategy to 10up

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Hi, I’m Heather Hogan, and I’m honored to be at the helm of an amazing team within 10up. After stints freelancing, creative directing, and managing municipal website projects, I’m excited to focus primarily on client services using just one content management system, the best one: WordPress. I thrive on building relationships with clients, partners, and engineers to envision and execute seamless and intuitive interactive communications.

My previous adventures include designing and building award-winning websites for the Sacramento Library, ACE rail, Sacramento Beer Week, the City of Santa Monica and other municipal agencies and small businesses. I thoroughly enjoy teaching and exploring design, technology, and web development whether at Sacramento City College (where I’ve taught for the last seven years) or at local (geek) networking events.

Originally a beach baby of San Diego, California, I’ve settled in the lakes and mountains, enjoying a fruitful decade in Northern California. My loving and supportive husband and I enjoy raising our two wonderful children along with Chongo, our dog, in the Curtis Park area of Sacramento. Local fodder and libations top my favorites list, along with live music, art, travel, and the outdoors. I’m excited to shape all of my earlier disparate efforts into a laser-beam focused awesomeness at 10up!

Helen Hou-Sandí

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Although I only lived in the Midwest (specifically Wichita) for a brief 11 months, I enjoyed my time there and am very excited to head back to the area on Friday, September 27, to speak at 200 OK, Oklahoma’s premier web conference. I’m excited to be on a roster that includes a fellow WordPress developer from iThemes, as well as representatives of other open source supporters such as Adobe, GitHub, Mozilla, and Etsy. The WordPress Foundation is also proud to be sponsoring the event.

I’ll be talking about Tailoring the WordPress Admin for Workflows; not an uncommon topic for me, but to a non-WordCamp audience and as always, I’ll be similarly tailoring my own presentation. Tickets have sold out, but there’s a waitlist. If you’re in the area, I’d love to meet you there!

Making our home in Portland

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A few months ago, as 10up’s Portland contingent continued to grow, we decided that it was time to put down roots in the city and set up our first brick-and-mortar office. To celebrate our new space, we hosted an open house on the eve of this year’s WordCamp Portland. We invited the Portland and WordPress community to come check out our new office, and meet some of our team.

Senior Designer Megan Gray (visiting from Orange Country) and I spent the week preparing the office for the open house. Located in the former Oregon Cracker Building, our space was very much a blank canvas. With a nod to the history of the space – and the work ahead of us – we set out give the office an industrial vibe.

In just one week’s time, we transformed the office into a warm, welcoming atmosphere for Portland 10uppers (and their guests) to collaborate and host community events. By the end of the week, the office was full of 10uppers – both local and out-of-town – enjoying the space and the opportunity to collaborate under one roof.

Redecorating Portland office

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Thorsten Ott brings years of senior WordPress engineering cred to 10up

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Ahoi! I’m Thorsten Ott and I’m 10up’s newest Senior Web Engineer and first European employee. I live near Cologne, Germany with my wife, son and a crazy Beagle. When I was 8, I was given my first computer and quickly discovered that making software is more fun than using it.

After studying communication electronics and developing  on assembly languages with microcontrollers, I quickly switched to systems administration and web development.

After leading the web development department for a large dedicated hosting company in Germany from 2000 to 2007, I started an agency in Bulgaria, which I ran for two years, employing 6 developers at its peak. The agency focused on web-based video processing and archiving solutions leveraging the Zend Framework, but also executed some projects on WordPress.

I finally had a chance to focus on WordPress full-time when I joined Automattic in 2008, becoming one of the earliest engineers on the WordPress.com VIP team. During my tenure at Automattic, I met Jake and 10up, and in reviewing their projects, developed a great deal of respect for the quality of their code. While at Automattic, I wrote and contributed to a handful of WordPress plugins and tools, including the Exploit Scanner, Debug Bar Extender, WordPress-CLI-Exporter, and WordPress-CLI-Importer.

I did a quick detour into Cloud Computing, OpenStack and Python over the last year while working at a start-up called PistonCloud. I became relatively fluent in Python and improved my Linux skills, but my heart never left WordPress and PHP.

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Welcome “WordPress Rockstar” Adam Silverstein

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My name is Adam Silverstein, and I started tinkering with code when I was 10 years old and began building websites for small business clients in 1996. I tackled everything from front end design, to custom Java client/server code, to web server management, building a huge range of sites for clients large and small, and eventually choosing WordPress as my platform of choice. WordPress was perfect for quickly building rock-solid sites that were easy to extend and enhance with custom code.

Not one year ago, I jumped full force into contributing to WordPress Core. Finding real room for improvement and a chance to hone my programming skills, I spearheaded the rewrite of the new Backbone.js based revision system for WordPress 3.6 – earning me the humbling title of ‘Recent Rockstar’ on the credits page.  I’m hooked (no pun intended), and plan to stay an active contributor to WordPress Core – I love the feeling of community, collaborative effort and helping a platform doing no less than democratizing the web.

When I’m not reading programming books and writing code, you can probably find me on a rafting trip with my two teenage kids, playing mbira (african thumb piano), taking a walk with my wife and dogs, or tending to my oversized garden.

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