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My First Patch: Helen Hou-Sandi

Helen Hou-Sandi on January 27, 2014

We’re kicking off a series about first patches that became a part of an open source software project, beginning with my own story. With 25 of 50 10uppers – at the time of writing – credited as core contributors to WordPress, credits in a number of other projects, and communities of hundreds of contributors at large, we won’t run out of material any time soon. We hope that these sometimes inspiring and often humbling stories, from one-time contributors all the way up to the most prolific WordPress core developers, will entertain and offer some perspective to open source’s newest would-be contributors. Do you remember your first patch? Tell us how to get ahold of you in the comments, and we just might feature you!

My first committed patch to WordPress was for #17887 in June 2011, just a few months before I joined 10up. I was running trunk in my testing environment to ensure that our live site would upgrade smoothly and to be able to explain the impending 3.2 redesign to our users at the university. In hindsight, my experience is probably typical for first-time contributors, and may surprise those who know me today.

Helen Hou-Sandi on January 24, 2014

I’ll be speaking about “Who is WordPress?” at the New Jersey WordPress Meetup down in Asbury Park, NJ next Tuesday, January 28. We’ll take a look at how WordPress is made and grows with the help of an amazing community, and how you’re already a part of it. This is my first time joining this meetup, and I’m really looking forward to it!

WordCamp in the frozen north

Ryan Hellyer on January 21, 2014

The frozen wilderness of Norway will not keep a 10upper from attending a WordCamp! I’m heading to WordCamp Norway this weekend to talk about my experience learning WordPress security best practices. I’ll be discussing the (many) mistakes I made along the way, how I learned from them, and how you can learn from them, too.

This is the third WordCamp Norway to be held in the capital city of Oslo. The first day consists of presentations from speakers from countries as diverse as the Netherlands, Ukraine, Sweden, Switzerland, USA, New Zealand, Spain and Norway. Day two is an optional contributor day for anyone wanting to contribute to WordPress core, documentation, or the WordPress.org support forums.

Anyone in Europe interested in WordPress should come join us at WordCamp Norway. If the past two years’ were anything to go by, the 2014 event will be awesome fun for all.

10up on Fire at WordCamp Phoenix 2014

Paul Clark on January 16, 2014

WordCamp Phoenix holds a special place in my (Paul Clark) heart as a place of many firsts.

In 2012, Taylor Aldridge and I watched 10up’s Helen Hou-Sandi present on Maintaining a Beautiful WordPress Admin UI. It was our first WordCamp as a small agency called Brainstorm Media.

In 2013, I returned for my first time as a speaker, presenting How WordPress Saves Lives: Freedom, Hope, and Custom Post Types.

This year, Taylor Aldridge and I are proud both to be speaking and to a be a part of the 10up team. As the start to an exciting new year, Brainstorm Media joined the talented team of WordPress developers at 10up.

In total, that makes five team members and six talks that will be presenting at WordCamp Phoenix this year. Find us on the schedule, and come chat with us at the after party!

Taylor Aldridge: You Know it’s Good, Cause it’s Blue
Paul Clark: Cowboy, meet Ninja: How to never crash a site again
Heather Hogan: Scoping, Contracting, and Getting Paid
Eric Mann: Ten Lessons on Customer-centric Development and {12} Needs Unit Tests
Adam Silverstein: Revising WordPress Revisions

Proud to announce Brainstorm joining 10up

Paul Clark on December 24, 2013

Over the past few years, the Brainstorm team was pleasantly surprised each time we encountered 10up. While meeting at conferences around the country, we discovered a deep-set of shared values and goals. 10up and Brainstorm believe that democratized, open publishing platforms like WordPress can make the web — and the world — a better place. We embrace community contribution, and improving the lives of those around us.

As a co-founder of Brainstorm, I (Paul Clark) will be focusing on building new business opportunities, with a special focus on non-profit and cause-oriented engagement. Anyone who has seen my 5-minute talk, “How WordPress Saves Lives and Moves Governments,” knows I hold a special place in my heart for big ideas and humanitarian causes.

Taylor Aldridge, Brainstorm’s co-founder, will bring his decades of creative and design experience to 10up’s quickly growing design team, and is eager to see 10up’s creative reputation match its software engineering cred.

Mixed relationship taxonomy queries in WordPress

Helen Hou-Sandi on December 16, 2013 • 9 Comments

Earlier this year we launched a membership component for my very first project with 10up: LearningWorks for Kids. LearningWorks’s content focuses on making the most of digital content to support learning, academics, and development of critical thinking skills. Memberships come with support for multiple private child users, each of whom has a profile that includes their age, thinking skills, academic skills, and special learning needs. Each member can also indicate which digital platforms and devices are available to their child users.

The central benefit of membership, beyond access to exclusive content, is the personalized recommendations across four different content types for each child user. These recommendations take into account the child’s age and available platforms, as well as a combination of skills and needs as indicated in their profile. These are related by five custom taxonomies – platforms, age, thinking skills, academic skills, and special needs. In this instance, we need to get content matching this set of criteria: age AND one of the platforms AND one of thinking skills OR academic skills OR special needs. This is a mixed relationship taxonomy query, and I’ll show you how we pulled it off.

LearningsWorks recommendations

Catch 10uppers at WordSesh 2 starting tonight

on December 6, 2013 • 1 Comment

In just a few short hours, three of my favorite 10uppers (myself included) will be participating in the second annual WordSesh — it’s 1 full day of live WordPress presentations from all over the world streamed live to your screen.

At 6:00 UTC, our founder, Jake Goldman, is joining prolific free-agent designer James Dalman; together they’ll be presenting “Don’t be the Unicorn” – a talk about finding your specialization within web and WordPress, and effectively collaborating with different specialists!

At 17:00 UTC, one of our always charming and extremely talented senior engineers, Eric Mann, will flex some JS muscle and help pump you up in his session aptly titled: Rock-solid JavaScript and AJAX. Having recently spoke at jQuery Russia about the HTML5 web worker API and Monkeys, this is a session you will not want to miss.

And me? At 11:00 UTC, I’ll be doing round 2 of last year’s fireside chat, where I’ll naturally be talking about BuddyPress, bbPress, 10up, and hopefully taking questions from a lively international audience (since it will be about 5am here in the U.S.). I don’t have unicorns or monkeys, but maybe Paul the Dog will make a special appearance.

This year’s lineup of speakers is practically an all-star cast of WordPress contributors. If you can’t make our sessions, try to tune in at least for a bit. It starts Saturday, December 7, 2013, at UTC 00:00, and hopefully we’ll see you (or you’ll see us) there!

Helen Hou-Sandi on December 5, 2013

I’ll be presenting a flash talk entitled “Redefining Traditional Media Workflows in WordPress” tonight at the December Big Media WordPress Meetup in NYC. The topic is “big media editorial experiences”, and I’ll be joined by professionals from the Washington Post, WordPress.com VIP, and Parade. I’ll offer a quick look inside the editorial experience we built for Global News, serving over 1,000 contributors across 11 localized editions, along with the centralized web-to-print content management workflow we built for Variety. If you’re working in media and New York City, be sure to swing by.

Upping our commitment to the WordPress community

Helen Hou-Sandi on November 18, 2013 • 5 Comments

Here at 10up, we strongly believe that a vibrant and active WordPress community is crucial to our success and longevity. After all, our business is built on the confidence that our favorite piece of free open source software serves as a great publishing platform. As we’ve grown, we’ve been able to expand our commitment to creating amazing publishing experiences for our clients and partners to the WordPress open source project itself.

At WordCamp Philly 2011, Jake and I finally met in person for the first time. Over dinner, we talked about our shared values in the community and the conversation led to an intriguing proposition: time each week to spend contributing to WordPress – a donation to the community by way of hours and effort. It began with 5 hours a week, and as 10up grew, it increased to become 8, then 15, then 20 hours each week. Today, I am really excited to announce that I am officially endorsed to work full-time on WordPress core as a guest committer and leader in the community.

I am officially endorsed to work full-time on WordPress core as a guest committer and leader in the community.

In practice, I have chosen to continue being active on some client projects. We are especially valuable in contributing back to the community in the areas we handle deeply in our work for clients and partners, and I feel that the best way for me to do that is to remain grounded in the world of implementation and especially custom administrative interfaces. I also regard our team as incomparable (for which we’re always hiring) and would hate to miss the opportunity to work with and learn from such an incredible group.

WordCamps and 10up everywhere: Orlando, Denver, and Edmonton

Aaron Holbrook on November 15, 2013

This coming weekend I’ll be traveling to sunny Orlando, Florida to speak at WordCamp Orlando, along with my friend and coworker, Carl Danley. Meanwhile, Grant Landram and Luke Woodward will be speaking at WordCamp Denver, led by our own Drew Jaynes, while Vasken Hauri speaks at WordCamp Edmonton.

Carl and I will be giving back to back talks on Saturday morning in Orlando, so make sure to wake up early and get the best seats. I’ll be opining on the joys of interactive debugging, which should be a core part of a developer’s tool set. If your go-to debugging tool starts with var and ends with dump(), this talk is for you! Senior Engineer Carl Danley will be covering sensible approaches to JavaScript. In his own words: “More often than not, as WordPress developers, we focus on PHP and often overlook the important aspects of JavaScript. In this presentation, I’ll reveal a series of steps that will help you rock your next JavaScript application by taking it the next level.” On Sunday, Carl and I will help lead the Contributor session along with Mark Jaquith, Andrew Nacin and Pippin Williamson – sure to be a good time!

WordCamp Orlando is also sponsored by seoslides, a WordPress presentation creation and sharing solution built and partly owned by 10up.

Westward in Denver, local Web Engineer Drew Jaynes is leading WordCamp Denver, where he’ll also lead a session on WordPress contribution. Senior Strategist Grant Landram is dropping in to take part in a panel exploring the importance of user experience. Senior Strategic Engineer Luke Woodward continues the quest to kill classic MAMP / WAMP developer environments in favor of the popular Varying Vagrants project seeded by 10up.

Finally, up north in Edmonton, our Vice President of Strategic Engineering, Vasken Hauri, will cover both theory and practical tools for automating code scanning and maintaining code quality. As a former adjunct Computer Science professor, Vasken is no stranger to tackling complex subjects.