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Code with me: Digital Journalism

Taylor Dewey on May 2, 2013

Code with me: Portland is a two day, student-mentor workshop that teaches journalists the foundations of coding in languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Founded by Sisi Wei and Tom Giratikanon, Code with me has been successful in Washington DC and Miami, and Code with me: Portland promises to be the biggest workshop yet, with 36 student and 22 mentors! With about two students to every mentor, the classes are very personal and hands-on. Between learning how to code, the journalists use mentor time to help with personal projects.

Portland’s organizer, a former WordPress.com VIP support engineer, helped organize the workshop and invited Jeremy Felt and me to be mentors. The mentors are talented and diverse, ranging from 10uppers and Automatticians to designers, developers, and editors from newspapers like the Seattle Times.

The primary goal of Code with me is to help journalists understand code so that they can better integrate into their work. Many of the attendees were inspired after reading the New York Times’s “Snow Fall”, a showcase for crafting and coding an online presentation around a single, great story. Snow Fall is a great example of how technology can enhance storytelling without restraining or complicating it.

WordPress.com VIP, Global News talk redesign and 10up

on April 27, 2013

Less than one month ago, Global News released a brand new website, engineered by 10up and hosted on WordPress.com VIP. With features like content tailored automatically to the visitor’s geolocation, highly curated home pages, and beautiful responsive design, we couldn’t be more proud to have been part of the Global News redesign team. You can read more about our involvement by checking out our extended case study.

On Thursday, the WordPress.com VIP publisher blog posted a Q&A with Keith Robinson, Manager of Digital Products at Global News, where he took some time to highlight some of our contributions:

“10up helped us come up with a curation system that powers a lot of the site: the navigation, carousel, featured story, top story. It’s all one system that gives different choices.”

“We engaged with 10up in the fall to do the WordPress integration…we were very fortunate to hire some really top talent to work with us, and we’ve been working with really good partners.”

“10up brought a lot in terms of being able to listen to our needs and turn it into a functional site. They were great for us because we were at a stage where we needed things done very quickly and needed to discuss exactly what we were looking to do and how we were looking to do it–they helped us go from the discovery process to the implementation…we really benefited from the partnership and they were good to work with.”

You can read the full Q&A here.

Megan Gray on April 25, 2013

I’ll be attending WordCamp Reno-Tahoe this weekend, along with our Jake, our President. Jake will be presenting 10 Questions I Ask Every Developer – a guide to interviewing developers that touches on basic and advanced WordPress programming, along with some broad WordPress philosophy. I will debut Extreme Theme Makeovers, a presentation that demonstrates just how far design can be pushed with a child theme, even for beginning front end developers with minimal knowledge of HTML/CSS or WordPress. It’s my secret recipe for customizing a site on a budget (dollars and time). Hope to see you there!

WordSesh Archives: Watch Team 10up Anytime!

Christopher Cochran on April 19, 2013

WordSesh 2013 may no longer be live, but you can keep learning by checking out the session recordings over on the WordSesh YouTube page!

If you missed it, WordSesh 2013 was the first ever free, live-streaming WordPress presentation venue. It ran uninterrupted for 24 hours on April 13th, 2013 (UTC), featuring a new session every hour on the hour. 10up was excited to be a part of WordSesh, with four presenters across three sessions! Now that the event is over, the organizers of WordSesh have archived all 24 hours worth of presentations. Each session has been separated into its own video, so you can browse their videos by presentation title.

Go below the fold to check out videos from Jake’s 10 Questions I Ask Developers, my (Christopher’s) Anywhere , Everywhere WordPress Themes, and Carl and Eric’s WordPress Javascript Hooks.

That should keep you busy while we eagerly WordSesh II!

Summarizing the Summit

Elizabeth Hillis on April 18, 2013

The Developer Summit was a few weeks ago, but our team is still buzzing. I asked a few my teammates to share their main take away from our first ever Developer Summit – here’s what they came back with:

Jake Goldman: There were so many highlights: learning from the smartest minds I’ve ever worked with about unit testing, advanced JavaScript, and Vagrant… seeing a great group of Portland-area WordPress pros show up at our social… seeing a few members of our team in person for the first time. The real highlight was being able to sit back and watch the team brainstorm the big process and technique questions we confront, so effectively. It’s one thing to have great “online” chemistry in IRC chat rooms, small video conferences, and status blogs, but it was amazing to see just how much chemistry this team has when we get together in person – more than any brick and mortar group I’ve ever led or been a part of.

Taylor Dewey: On the first day of our summit, only a few people had lunch together. On the second day of our summit, there were a few groups of folks in different spots. On the last day of our summit, everyone was eating lunch together in the same area. Seeing everyone come together organically proved that we actually do have a team, not a group of individuals, and that has tremendous value.

10up and WordSesh: Free WordPress Presentations

Elizabeth Hillis on April 12, 2013 • 1 Comment

If you ever wanted to learn about WordPress, but never had a chance to attend a WordCamp, now there’s an amazing opportunity to attend WordCamp-style lectures from home! It’s called WordSesh, and we’re proud to be a big part of it.

WordSesh 2013 is the first ever 24 hour free, live-streaming WordPress presentation venue. Starting at midnight UTC on April 13, 2013 (that’s 8:00 pm EST and 5:00 pm PST tonight, April 12) and running uninterrupted for 24 hours, WordSesh will feature a new session every hour, on the hour.

Documentation

Taylor Dewey on April 12, 2013

At our 10up Developer Summit, we collectively decided to document our workflow, tools, and process. With a handful of employees it’s easy to spread collective knowledge, but we’re growing fast and now have a need to document web technologies such as Vagrant, Git, and Grunt; who to contact and how to use our internal IRC channel; and how our staging servers are set up.

But who writes those docs, where do they go, and what should they look like?

Earlier this week I attended Write The Docs: a conference for technical writers that was created in the domain of software and web development. Many of the talks at this conference were devoted to who should write the docs. The consensus is that engineers compose technical documentation which is then edited by more experienced writers. Other presentations covered technical writing itself, careers, and documentation platforms.

Our code is well documented – and soon our internal processes will be too. Our engineers are already documentarians. The docs are being assembled in an internal WordPress-powered website and I’ve started the initial concept of a theme to make those docs easily readable and navigable.

If you’d like to help us write our docs, strategy, proposals, and emails, we are hiring web strategists.

10up Developer Summit Wrap-Up

Elizabeth Hillis on April 8, 2013

10up’s Developer Summit was an amazing experience. In addition to meeting one another in person (a first, for some of us), we were treated to fantastic workshops covering everything from WordPress unit testing to simulating live environments in Vagrant to advanced JavaScript performance techniques. We’re lucky to have an incredibly smart and diverse staff, over half which contributed to the presentations. Jeremy Felt and Carl Danley, two of our amazing Web Engineers, organized the entire conference and ensured that every member of our team would learn something new.

Preparing for Portland: 10up’s Developer Summit

Elizabeth Hillis on April 2, 2013

As the new Web Strategist here at 10up, I’m still getting to know the team. Naturally, I was very excited to learn that I would be attending our Developer Summit in Portland on my second week! To find out more, I sat down with Jeremy Felt and Carl Danley (over Skype) to find out just what the Summit is all about and how it came to be.

10up Dev Summit Interview

How many people are you expecting at the Summit?
Jermey Felt: [Almost] everybody from 10up. 22 people total.
Editor’s note: Our Operations Manager, Pat, is holding down the back office in Sacramento during the Summit, and our Director of User Interface Engineering, Helen, just began her maternity leave.

There are many diverse jobs/responsibilities at 10up; how do you plan to cater to them all in one collective conference?
JF: Originally this was planned as just a Developer Summit, which is still the core focus, different web engineering technologies… [Director of Web Strategy] Jess Jurick proposed that we also have a mini project management conference, which she and [Senior Web Strategist] Megan Gray will handle somewhat separately… everyone will get a handle on the engineering concepts, and be involved in the lectures in some way… The workshop style will help us make sure nobody gets lost.
Carl Danley: The focus is primarily on the attendees, not the presenters… we’ll be there supplementing what they hear and helping them master the techniques.

Jeremy Felt on March 27, 2013

Howdy, PDX! As we mentioned yesterday, 10up is swarming Portland for a few days for an internal developer summit. We’re really looking forward to getting together with the local WordPress community for some conversation and a beer or two.

We’re planning on hanging out for a couple hours at Green Dragon, starting at 8:00pm. If you can swing by during that time, please let us know by grabbing a ticket on Eventbrite. We have space for about 25 or 30 and arrivals and departures will be staggered, so feel free to ping us on Twitter if you can’t commit until the last minute.

See you soon!