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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.

tc performance

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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WordCampMKE-2014-banner

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.

WordCamp Seattle

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WordCamp Seattle

Seattle, Washington

Attending Speaking

This weekend 10up will be bringing some sunshine (and ten 10uppers!) to the Northwest for the 5th annual WordCamp Seattle. Seattle is a two day WordCamp this year with a jam packed Saturday featuring speakers, panels, lightning talks and even workshops. Sunday is a special contributor day with a number of core contributors leading groups who will be contributing back to the WordPress project. If you’re in the Northwest and haven’t already picked up your ticket, don’t miss this massive, 700-attendee WordCamp!

Kicking off the day on Saturday, Kailey Lampert and Adam Silverstein will each be delivering a presentation as a part of the developer lightning talks. Their sessions will focus on the hidden treasures of WordPress core and working with WordPress revisions in Backbone. Kailey will be pulling a double feature on Saturday, also being a part of the How to Become a Better WordPress Developer panel with Kronda Adair, Jeremy Felt, Zack Tollman and Morten Rand-Hendriksen.

Next, Paul Clark will be running an excellent session on Performance, Scale and WordPress, using real world examples from 10up’s experience with sites like Ted.com and hosting platforms like WordPress.com VIP. For anyone considering WordPress and it’s application in an enterprise context, don’t miss Paul’s presentation!

At the same time as Paul, Taylor Dewey will be running a workshop on SASS, walking through real life examples and breaking down some of the complexities of the workflow. If you’re thinking about getting into SASS, or have started and need a good tutorial, make sure you check out Taylor’s workshop. Taylor is also pulling a double feature, and will be giving a lightning talk on Responsive Web Design Workflows.

In addition to the four 10uppers presenting this weekend Andrew Mowe, Zach Brown, Luke Woodward, Cole Geissinger, Drew Jaynes and myself will all be on-site organizing, volunteering and contributing to the event. We’d love to see you there!

Telling my story at WordCamp Romania

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WordCamp Romania

Universitatea De Vest Din Timisoara

Attending Speaking

I love working in a global community! WordPress touches every corner of the globe and attracts both writers and developers from just about every country on the planet. Many of them are so enthusiastic they hold annual WordCamps to celebrate the application that ties us together. This weekend, I get to visit one such WordCamp.

WordCamp RomaniaOn Saturday and Sunday, I’ll (Eric Mann) be visiting the far reaches of Europe at WordCamp Romania – my first international WordCamp experience! It’s going to be a trip to remember.

WordCamp Romania is themed around telling stories, so I’ll be telling a bit of my own history with WordPress as well as encouraging new developers to become even more involved in the platform.

Sunday is a “leisure day” when I hope to touch base with some other WordPress aficionados to sit down and work on core code (the WordPress 4.0 beta is coming near, we need all hands on deck!).

Above all, though, I’m excited to connect even more with the global WordPress community. WordPress is global, and 10up has a growing global presence. I’m just honored to be a part of both!

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I’m excited to be the lead-off speaker at the 3rd annual WP Summit today. This one-day online conference brings together some of the most talented presenters covering various aspects of WordPress.  My talk will focus on the nuts and bolts of putting together a WordPress theme.  If you have ever wanted to start building your own themes then this talk will get you started.

Catch PushUp and 10up at WordCamp Chicago 2014

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WordCamp Chicago

Chicago, Illinois

Attending Speaking Sponsoring

10up will be brewing up a storm in the Windy City this upcoming weekend at WordCamp Chicago, with wall to wall speakers supported by a John Hancock Sponsorship under the PushUp Notifications product brand.

Our rundown of speakers starts with Dustin Filippini presenting a Comprehensive Dashboard Walkthrough on Foundation Friday. On Saturday, Kelly Dwan kicks things off with A Walk Around the Loop, a study of the post loop from an advanced developer’s perspective. Alison Barrett takes the stage for a lightning talk at noon with Knowing What You Don’t Know followed by James Barrett on Wireframing Essentials.

On Sunday I’ll pause from organizer duties for an Introduction to IDEs and Debugging, which makes the case for IDEs by showing off the amazing powers they bestow. John James Jacoby will dive into Multisite and Multi-network, emphasizing the lesser used multi-network feature. Wrapping up the day on Sunday, Rachel Baker demonstrates how developers can Put Your Content to REST With WP-API, a look at the exciting new JSON REST API (WP API).

WordCamp Chicago 2014

In addition to our speakers, you’ll also find 10uppers Kara Buffardi and Gus Gerhardt at our PushUp sponsor table, showing off our website push notifications product. We’ll be on hand to demo the product, answer questions, and provision new customers as they sign up – and we’re offering a 99¢ sign up code (discounted from $14.99) for anyone who registers on the spot!

I’ll also be leading the Networking lunch activity at noon on Saturday; stop by and say hello!

Design visionary Louis Dorman joins 10up as Senior Designer

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At 10up, we think that a truly outstanding web publishing experience happens at the intersection of great design, strategy, and engineering. We also know that the modern web requires talent that understands that great design is not just how a website looks, but how it feels across input interfaces and screen sizes. As we continue to grow our design team, we’re very excited to welcome a designer that embodies our vision of client-centered design, as innovative in its aesthetics as its interactions.

Louis Dorman has been designing for the web since the days of dial-up. After graduating from the Art Institute of Phoenix in 2001, he went on to be responsible for the design and manufacturing of millions of products around the world. Louis was one of the first employees at Mashable, one of the most popular WordPress-powered websites. As Art Director, he managed all areas of design, from the web presentation and UX to marketing collateral, as the company scaled to 30 million+ monthly unique visitors.

Louis was also a founder of AdCamo, which would become a pioneer in the development of background ad units under his direction. In addition to steering vision and project development, Louis hired and mentored creative and engineering teams, managed communication between sales and engineering, and created campaigns for clients like ABC, Comcast, Craftsman, MGM, Sony, and WWE, to name a few.

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Keynoting WordCamp Philly 2014

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WordCamp Philly

Philadelphia, PA

Attending Speaking

I’m really excited to debut my first WordCamp keynote this coming weekend at the illustrious WordCamp Philly! I’m presenting a remix of a my WordCamp Connecticut talk, “How I convinced my boss to let me work on WordPress full-time”, arguing for personal and company investment in open source. I’ll look at how and why teams like 10up donate back to the community, and offer ways that attendees can give back, too.

10uppers will also be quite well represented: Dave Ross will be speaking on “Easier, More Secure Deploys with Docker and Dokku“, Doug Stewart pulls double duty as co-organizer and “working from home” panel moderator, and Cindy Kendrick and Spencer Hansen will be in attendance. Hope to see you there, whether in a session, Sunday’s contributor day, or in the hallways.

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I have the pleasure of speaking about Designing a Theme in the Browser next week at WordCamp Orange County. With In Browser Design gaining popularity on the web and here at 10up, we began to ask ourselves, “What is the best way to present a design to a client?” We use WordPress, of course! In my talk I’ll be showing how you can use the most basic of templates and functions to move your design out of it’s initial creative phase and into the browser where pixel perfection lives and where responsive layouts and interactions really come to life.