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10up takes Salt Lake City

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WordCamp_SLC_2014_logoThis Saturday, September 13th, I’ll be presenting at WordCamp Salt Lake City on the topic of JavaScript and jQuery best practices in WordPress. In light of the upcoming integration of the WP JSON API into WordPress Core, my presentation will focus on building high-quality, performant front-end code that can be safely distributed in the WordPress.org repo.

As WordPress grows beyond a publishing platform to become a powerful and highly extensible CMS with its own JSON API, the need to write clean, readable, and efficient JavaScript is becoming increasingly critical. My talk will cover some common pitfalls that can occur in JavaScript engineering, including overuse of DOM elements, improper variable scoping, and lack of closures within script files. In particular, I’ll explore current best practices in PHP WordPress engineering, with an eye towards applying those same lessons and standards to JavaScript.

Heckling me from the crowd will be various members of an entire 10up pod, visiting Salt Lake City as part of their annual pod retreat. 10uppers in attendance include Kailey Lampert, Rachel Backer, Cameron Benedict, Faison Zutavern, Erin Crutcher, Darin Kotter, John Bloch, Cole Geissenger, and Grant Landram.

If you’re a WordPress engineer looking to find out about the latest and greatest that the upcoming JSON API has to offer, as well as how you can create plugins that use the API effectively while still playing nicely with other plugins, this talk is for you.

 

NERD Summit? Count me in

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New England Regional DevelopersThis weekend I’ll be headed out to Amherst Massachusetts for the New England Regional Developers Summit (see what they did there?).

While most of the WordPress community is familiar with the concept of a WordCamp, it’s great to see more conferences which are multi-platform or platform agnostic, bringing together designers, developers, and users of Drupal and WordPress into the same conversation.

I’ll be giving a talk on Saturday on “The Word and The Drop: How Drupal and WordPress Handle Structured Content.” It’s way too much to really cover in 45 minutes, but I think it helps developers in both communities to see how the “other” platform handles content types and fields.

Wearing Two Hats at WordCamp LA

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WCLAXWordCamp Los Angeles keeps getting better. This year, by adding another full day of talks for designers, small business owners, and beginners, the organizers have improved upon an already stellar and full weekend of sessions and activities.

I have the honor of speaking not once, but twice. Friday morning, in the business track, I’ll wear my former small business owner hat, joining Wes Chyrchel for a short Q&A session covering what web shops need to know when scoping a project. After lunch, I switch to my Creative Director hat where, in the design track, I’ll present Uncommon Design for a Common Web.

I’m looking forward to connecting with WordCamp friends, and meeting up in-person with fellow 10upper, Senior Engineer Mary Cadwell.

WordCamp Boston Turns 5, 10up Helps Celebrate

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This weekend, Boston will hold its fifth WordCamp, and 10up will be there to help celebrate the #BestWordCampEver.

Jake and I will be part of a panel on “What Boston Gave WordPress, and What WordPress Gave Boston,” which will include the story of the first WordCamp Boston, which we helped plan back in late 2009 / early 2010. In many ways that first WordCamp Boston set in motion a series of events that would result in his founding of 10up and my joining as CEO. It’s really exciting to see the impact the camp (and the meetup) have had on the WordPress community in Boston and across New England.

Taylor Lovett, our Director of Web Engineering, will also be giving a talk about the JSON REST API targeted for WordPress core in 4.1.

Finally, we’ll be joined at the 10up sponsor table and throughout the weekend by 10uppers Dave Ross, Sara Tirrell, and Helen Hou-Sandí. Stop by and say hello!

From West of the Hudson to East of the East River

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They say good things happen in threes, and the next week of meetups in NYC are no exception.

At the WordPress NYC Meetup next Tuesday, August 19, I’ll be showing off a preview of the upcoming WordPress 4.0 and talking a bit about what it’s been like to lead the release.

On Thursday the 21st, I will be presenting “Code is Poetry: A Musician’s Tale” at the JerseyScript takeover of Brooklyn JS, which 10up is excited to sponsor. I’ll be giving a longer version of the talk at WordCamp San Francisco in October, so no spoilers here! Be on the lookout: our Director of Engineering, Taylor Lovett, will be in attendance as well.

Finally, Brooklyn JS will turn the tides and take over the JerseyScript meetup on Tuesday, August 26, also sponsored by 10up. I’m especially excited to be coming on board as a co-organizer for JerseyScript proper. We’ll be releasing another block of tickets soon, so get on the waitlist now if you’d like to join us and check out Jersey City, just a quick subway ride over from Manhattan.

If I won’t see you here on one of the sides of the rivers, there’s always WordCamp Boston the weekend in between. If you will be at any of these places, come say hi!

10uppers, Code, and Lobsters at WordCamp Maine

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WordCamp Main 2014While four 10uppers are down south for WP Y’all in Birmingham AL, another contingent of three 10uppers is heading up north to speak at the first WordCamp Maine this weekend.

Fresh off his popular talk on modernism and responsive design at WordCamp NYC last weekend, CEO John Eckman will take the stage twice in Maine: first joining MaineToday Media’s Director of Digital Services to present Delivering the News – a look at their online relaunch, and second, to give the keynote address! Senior Strategic Engineer Rachel Baker joins the development panel to answer Maine’s toughest engineering questions, and I’ll be discussing empathy for our clients and teammates, and how that leads to better projects.

Tickets are still available – including a harbor cruise with the requisite lobster dinner – so it’s not too late to join us this weekend for some WordPress-centric learning and conversation during the beautiful Maine summer!

10up at WordCamp Birmingham – #WPYall

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WordCamp Birmingham 2014On August 16th, Birmingham will have the chance to hear from 4 10uppers as we pay a visit to the Magic City. WordCamp Birmingham is the South’s oldest WordCamp, starting back in 2008. We say WPY’all loud and proud and look forward to sharing with this community.

Being local to Birmingham, I’ve had the pleasure of o-organizing the camp this year. I’ll also be talking to designers about How to Use WordPress to Present a Design in the Browser. Senior Designer Louis Dorman will be presenting his experience Designing for Growth, and Design Engineer Allen Moore will describe how 10up used child themes to quickly turn out big features on multiple sites in his talk, 3 sites in 6 weeks? WordPress can do that!

Last but not least, our President, Jake Goldman, will be giving the keynote address following lunch: Don’t Create For WordPress* (*Create With WordPress). He’ll inspire us to build the next great sites on WordPress by focusing on project vision, and worrying about tools like WordPress after the fact.

It’s going to be a great weekend in the Magic City and we’re excited to be a part of it!

10up at WordCamp NYC

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WordCamp NYC 2014 is this weekend and we’re excited to take part as speakers, attendees, and sponsor. WordCamp NYC is always a great time, and this one is no different, with four full tracks across two days at the Marriott at Brooklyn Bridge.

On Saturday, Adam Silverstein will be presenting Put a little Backbone in your WordPress! and our President, Jake Goldman, will share Best Practices for Plugin Development. Then on Sunday, catch Drew Jaynes’s insight into the core docs initiative and the major part he played as the docs committer for WordPress. Director of Platform Experience Helen Hou-Sandí and CEO John Eckman will be presenting simultaneously with a deep dive into WP_Query and ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’: Modernism, Post-Modernism, and Responsive Web Design, respectively. Doug Stewart and Amy Hendrix will also be in attendance, and you’ll also find many of us at Friday’s Contributor Day at NYU.

We’re also Park Avenue sponsors under the PushUp Notifications brand, so stop by the 10up/PushUp sponsor table and say hello. We’ll be happy to chat with you, especially about push notifications and 10up, and get you signed up for PushUp with the help of our team for just 99 cents.

Asynchronous WordPress

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When John Bloch and I (Eric Mann) started working with TechCrunch last year on their site redesign, one of the main goals was to improve site performance. Among the various tools we built to help meet that metric was a library called WP Async Task: an abstract library meant to give structure to asynchronous background tasks.

Thanks to WP Async Task, we can offload time-consuming requests (like Twitter interactions) from the main WordPress thread. Editors can publish posts as usual while expensive tasks run in the background rather than holding up the publication process.

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In June, the TechCrunch team presented on “Non-Blocking WordPress,” explaining some of the approaches we took. Attendees were interested in learning more about WP Async Task and particularly interested in whether the code was available anywhere.

Being big believers in the power of open-source and giving back to the community, we’re thrilled to say that TechCrunch has decided to open-source the library and make it available on GitHub. Check out the library and look at the documentation on how to use the library in your own code.

10up in the Brew City at WordCamp Milwaukee

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This weekend, 10up will be making its midwestern presence known in Brew City.  Seven 10uppers will be taking part in the event, many taking on multiple roles to make this an amazing WordCamp.  Learn more about WordCamp Milwaukee on the official website.

The organizing committee features two 10uppers: lead organizer Dustin Filippini, and Kara Buffardi, who is organizing the Charity Hackathon which will build a web site for a Milwaukee area non-profit dedicated to helping young women and girls in the city.

10uppers will also be speaking throughout the day. In a can’t miss talk, Rachel Baker will be presenting on the new WordPress JSON REST API, which she took a major role in developing.  VP of Strategic Engineering Vasken Hauri will be presenting “jQuery: The good, the bad, and the anonymous.”  Faison Zutavern, Web Engineer, addresses Ethics in Web Development with his talk on Sunday, and Alison Barrett rounds out the schedule, discussing cooperation between developers and designers in “So I Married a Developer.”  Jess Jurick, our VP of Consulting Services, will also be in attendance.  Check out the full schedule.

We’re also sponsoring the camp under our PushUp Notifications product brand; so if you’ll be at WordCamp Milwaukee, stop by the 10up/PushUp sponsor table, talk with one of the many 10uppers, and sign up for PushUp with the help of our team for just 99 cents.