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jQuery Developer Summit 2012

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This week, I had the privilege of attending the first ever jQuery Developer Summit. I spent two full days hacking jQuery and collaborating with the jQuery team and community to squash as many bugs as possible. The Summit was held at the AOL campus in Dulles, VA.

I was assigned to Table 2 where our goal was to fix jQuery bugs. We covered a vast array of topics including Grunt.js, Git and TestSwarm. It was refreshing to see so many JavaScript engineers get together to talk about complex JavaScript bugs and solutions.

Yesterday, we kicked off the Summit with several brief presentations from various jQuery team members and discussed the goals for each table. After this, we jumped into code head first. Dave Methvin, president of the jQuery foundation, was at Table 2 leading the bug assignments and assisting us whenever possible. The bug I was assigned to fix (#12519) branched into many other conversations that made us question the design principles of the correlated code that the bug referenced. After rationalizing the best way to address these issues with Dave and several jQuery members, we finally decided on a solution. I committed the changes Tuesday morning and my pull request was approved shortly thereafter, representing my very first jQuery core patch on behalf of 10up!

I’m looking forward to continuing to contribute to the jQuery community and to exploring new ways to integrate advanced jQuery solutions into WordPress.

Taylor, Zack, and Jeremy at WordCamp Vancouver

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WordCamp Vancouver is coming up quick and 10up is excited not only to be a bronze level sponsor, but to also represent with three developers from our Portland contingent.

Zack Tollman, Taylor Dewey, and myself have all had the pleasure of participating in the entire WordCamp Cascadia circuit for 2012 and can’t wait to see the friends we’ve made and those we will make this weekend. The Pacific Northwest has a unique and wonderful WordPress community and we’re happy to be a part of it.

I’ll be starting the developer track off on Saturday with a talk on ‘Calm and Simple Code’. We’ll have a good time going through the reasons and best practices for remaining simple and coding with purpose when working with WordPress as a framework.

Later in the afternoon, Zack will be tackling the topic of cache invalidation in WordPress. It’s often easy to get started with the WordPress transient API and object caching in general, but things can quickly turn difficult when you start looking for the best approach to invalidating your caches to keep your data fresh.

And to top it off, we’ll be there for the first ever BuddyCamp the following day!

Be sure to look for us in our 10up shirts on Saturday, though we may change for your benefit on Sunday. Any topic is welcome. We can help you with your WordPress questions, converse about some geeky technical issue, or give you an overview of 10up and what kind of work we do on a daily basis. We’re always interested and we’re always hiring!

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This weekend I’ll be visiting WordCamp Louisville for my second time and giving a presentation on “Laying the Proper Foundation for Plugin and Theme Development“. This talk is meant to help fledgling programmers, or at least those new to programming with WordPress, to learn a few basics like script and style enqueues, good code structure, and localization. The rest of the speaker lineup is really strong and I can’t wait to meet up with my fellow WordPress enthusiasts!

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I’m excited to be going to WordCamp Las Vegas this weekend. I’ll be giving a presentation geared toward developers entitled Plugging into Plugins. This is a subject that I’ve been wanting to speak about for a while; we’ll be discussing what developers can do to make their plugins more extensible for other developers. What’s more fun than talking about plugins for 45 minutes?

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I’ll be participating in WordCamp Los Angeles this weekend, where I’ll present my latest iteration of Enterprise Class WordPress, likely for the last time. While it’s a broad topic and talk, I’m hoping to present a trimmer version that leaves more room for conversation and engagement. Hope to see some familiar and meet some new faces in LA!

Helen Hou-Sandí

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I’ll be speaking at WordCamp Baltimore this weekend, giving a designer oriented talk entitled How to Help a Developer Faithfully Realize Your WordPress Theme Design. We’ll cover essential WordPress theme components, a little bit of Photoshop etiquette, and explore what goes on in a developer’s head when they convert your lovely theme into an interactive reality. I’ll be joined at the conference by fellow 10up engineer Taylor Lovett, so be sure to say hi!

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The Central Alabama Women’s Center (CAWBC) is a non profit that helps socially and economically disadvantaged women business owners build and grow their business. They conduct events and training sessions at locations in the Birmingham, Alabama area and often feature local experts in their field. Next Monday, I’ll be presenting the “Basics of an Online Presence”, covering topics like content, appearance, costs, SEO, e-commerce, and blogging. I’m looking forward to contributing to my community of like minded women!

Eric Mann Joins 10up

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You probably don’t know me yet – let’s fix that. I’m the new guy from the Pacific Northwest who spends as much time writing code as I do happily lost in the woods. Be careful, because I’m just as likely to talk your ear off about jQuery and AJAX as I am high alpine backpacking.

I’ve been building websites recreationally for over a decade; professionally for 6 years. I’ve been working with WordPress since a friend bribed me with a ticket to WordCamp Portland 5 years ago. Since then, it’s become my favorite platform for both serious development and rapid prototyping. WordPress has been at the core of everything from corporate websites to Facebook apps to slideshows; I have yet to find something I can’t do with it!

For the past couple of years, though, my focus has been on polishing my skills in different software paradigms and languages. But I’ve never abandoned WordPress – I stay active by speaking at WordCamps, working with the core development team, and answering questions on the WordPress Stack Exchange.

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Video & Discussion: Enterprise Class WordPress

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Enterprise Class WordPress is a look at what it means to tackle web projects for really big organizations using WordPress. The talk highlights tools and resources for enterprise implementations, marketing tactics and resources for pursuing large scale clients, and even takes a hard look at what our platform needs to do better (multilingual). Above all, it explores how we, as a community, can better pursue large businesses and make WordPress not just the #1 web publishing platform for small to medium sized organizations, but the #1 platform for large scale implementations.

Meaningful conversation and education about WordPress in enterprise is really critical for ushering in the next stage of WordPress’s growth, which is why I’ve taken this conversation to a few WordCamps in the last few months. I debuted the talk in Orange County, but the Boston version was the first to make it up to WordPress.tv. You can also see the standalone slides from the original version (which has evolved a bit).

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Helen Hou-Sandí

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This weekend will bring Zack and I to the Midwest, where we’ll be representing 10up at WordCamp Chicago. Not only are we excited to both be on semi-familiar stomping grounds, but we’ll be bringing you two brand new talks! Zack will be presenting “Grokking the WordPress Object Cache: Getting a Handle on the WP_Object_Cache Class“, an absolute must for developers and anybody else who cares about performance or the deeper innards of WordPress. I will be giving a talk entitled “How to Sneak Your Way Into Being a Rockstar WordPress Developer When Everyone Thinks You’re a Designer“, which, despite ironically being in the designer track, is about how I got involved with contributing to WordPress and how you can, too, whether or not you’re a developer-type. We’re excited to be at DePaul in the beautiful neighborhood of Lincoln Park, and we hope to see you there!