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Vasken Hauri joins 10up as Director of Strategic Engineering

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If you’re the kind of person who frequents WordCamps, jQuery conferences, or higher ed tech events, there’s a chance you may have already met me. If not, here’s a quick rundown of the diverse, wide-ranging, and somewhat eclectic set of skills I’ve honed over 12 years, and why I’m excited to bring them to 10up.

I’ve been working with WordPress since 2006, when I began using it for my personal blog. Since then, I’ve engineered WordPress to create everything from order fulfillment and tracking applications to APIs that withstand several hundred thousand hits per day. I’m proud to have been able to contribute some of the more generally useful pieces of this work back to the community, including several plugins hosted on the WordPress repository, changes to WordPress core, and assorted open-source Github projects.

A previous job in higher ed afforded me an opportunity to pursue and earn a Master’s Degree in Business Administration, and I was able to leverage those skills while working as a developer and Team Leader at GigaOM over the past two years. I’ve worked on every stage of major projects, from data modeling and wireframes to final style tweaks and coordination of release marketing. Having spent nine years working in higher education technology, I know from experience what it takes to engineer successful projects while remaining cognizant of the unique challenges faced by larger institutions when implementing technology solutions.

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10up sponsors & organizes WordPress Boston Hack Day

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boston-hack-dayHands down, one of my favorite parts about working at 10up is our commitment to enhancing and improving the WordPress community. As a part of team 10up, we’re encouraged to get involved, contribute to core, and help shape WordPress. In fact, in WordPress 3.5, you can find 10 of us on the credits screen, including Helen, a Director at 10up, and one of only 20 faces on that screen!

I recently became a part of the WordPress Boston organizing team. My first organizing event is also the first ever WordPress Boston Hack Day, which is taking place next Saturday from 10am-6pm at Bocoup. It’s a day dedicated to developers working together on core WordPress tickets. We’re going to start with an introduction by lead developers Mark Jaquith and Andrew Nacin. Mark will fill everyone in on the state of the development cycle since WordPress 3.5 came out, and tell us how we can help. It’s a great opportunity for new contributors to get their feet wet, as we spend the day coding, testing, and documenting.

I’m really happy to announce that 10up is going to be sponsoring the hackathon! This is sure to be a productive day, so if you’re in the Boston area and looking to get your name in the credits, join us at Bocoup. And if you love hacking core, and want to do more of that, get in touch  – we’re always looking for your type!

Celebrate 10up’s Birthday – Three WordPress Events

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10up birthday map

On Monday, February 18, 10up will turn 2 years old (more on that in a future post). On Tuesday, February 19, a handful of team 10up employees will celebrate across the country by doing what we’ve done all along – playing an active role in the WordPress community at three different meet ups on the 19th (plus a belated fourth event on the 26th)!

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John Bloch joins 10up

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Hi! If you don’t know me from a WordCamp, the WordPress DC meetup, or the broader WordPress community, my name is John and I love LAMP. Building websites started as a hobby for me, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that this was my professional calling. I’ve always been fascinated by the process of architecting software; watching something I’ve helped craft come to life from mere concept still fills me with wonder.

I started working with WordPress in 2008 and it quickly became my platform of choice for building websites. After publishing plugins and engaging the WordPress community, both online and at the local DC meetup, I quickly became hooked. I started attending more WordCamps, and even had the privilege of speaking at a few. From multilingual sites to multisite networks, from store locators to TinyMCE extensions to combat shortcode madness, the applications and sites I’ve built upon WordPress testify to its flexibility and power.

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Come Work With Us: WordPress developer with a front-end focus

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At 10up, we say we’re always hiring, and it’s true. We’re always looking for WordPress engineers and web strategists, but right now we’ve especially got our eyes on hiring another WordPress developer with a focus on the front-end. We offer a competitive full-time salary and benefits. If you’re interested, send a resumé and code samples (like a WordPress theme) to jobs@10up.com.

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Returning to the desert; my start with 10up and WordCamp Phoenix

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WordCamp Phoenix 2013About a year ago I took two arbitrary vacation days that coincidentally aligned with WordCamp Phoenix 2012. As it happened, a long time friend of mine, Eric Mann, was flying out as a speaker. At the conference, in between sessions, Eric introduced me to Jake and a few weeks later I’m working for 10up. Eric joined 10up a few months later.

It seems fitting, then, that the three of us: Jake, Eric, and myself are returning to WordCamp Phoenix 2013 as speakers.

Jake is attending as a rockstar presenter. Eric and I are teaching Friday classes and Sunday sessions. I’ll be talking about developer tools and techniques. Eric will talk about leveraging WordPress and open source publishing in developing or low-tech environments. Jake will dive into the “core of WordPress core”, studying its most base level information architecture and database schema.

If you happen to be headed to WordCamp Phoenix this January, we’d love to meet up and say hello. We’re always looking for new employees and great WordPress stories.

Enforcing WordPress Image Sizes Within Your Theme

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WordPress Image Sizes

As a designer and programmer here at 10up, I have the unique opportunity to see my design through from the first wireframe to the fin

al product. There’s nothing that makes me grimace more than turning control over to a client only to see the design fall apart with use. Ensuring that as little as possible is “breakable” is on top of my quality assurance list. WordPress’s native, customizable image sizes is a common cause of breakdowns.

How I use image sizes in designs

Nothing disturbs my blank white canvas in Photoshop until I have set the grid and guides that will determine the structure of the layout. As I begin to flesh out the design, image placeholders find their way in, and they’re always made to fit within those guidelines. Common placeholders include a featured slider image, a thumbnail for the main index/search/archive post list view, and a special size for the “image” post format. Most of the time, I want images used within posts and pages to use these same consistent sizes so that the layout stays as clean as possible. Call me OCD, it wouldn’t be the first time. (Editor’s note: all great designers are a bit OCD!)

I could create predefined image sizes for each call to an image attachment (and I often do at least one or two of those), but defining an endless set of sizes has a real performance toll every time an image is uploaded, not to mention the bloating effect on the upload directory. If I define 5 custom sizes, and we add that to the 3 default sizes (thumbnail, medium, and large), we wind up with 9 sizes, counting the original. That’s 9 images generated every time an image is uploaded to the site. I always try to avoid the weight and clutter by using the default image sizes.

Enforcing the image sizes

It may have crossed your mind that this breaks my own OCD rule, as administrators can adjust default image sizes from the Media settings page. But wait – that’s what this post is all about! Let’s get to some code.

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