At 10up, we have a history of open sourcing tools that help WordPress engineers practice their craft. One year ago, we introduced WP Local Docker, a lightweight local development alternative to VVV, another popular project started by 10up. A more recent project, WP Snapshots, efficiently pushes project snapshots into the cloud.
As we increasingly used WP Local Docker and WP Snapshots in conjunction, we discovered some technical obstacles that could make WP Snapshots difficult to use. We realized that bundling the two projects would solve those problems and offer value to anyone already using both projects.
Our origin story is modest: just five years ago, 10up began with a single individual working in the smallest U.S. state and a portfolio containing fewer clients than there were Star Wars movies at the time.
Since then, 10up has matured at a much faster pace than your average agency. We’ve continued to grow our team by ~30%, welcoming dozens of new 10uppers across Project Management, Web Strategy, Engineering, Design, Revenue, and User Experience. Financials also continue to thrive; in the first month of 2016, we saw more revenue than our first two years combined (and more than half of what we did in our third year).
But here at 10up, we value more than revenue and growth statistics—it’s about nurturing the culture within, providing our team the resources to achieve peak performance—a sense of community, a pride of ownership, and material benefits for a team that is building a future together, not merely cashing in a paycheck.
In 2015, we hosted our biggest All Hands Summit, practically taking over a hotel in Boulder for a 10up-only conference with sessions exploring our business goals, emerging and important technologies, and the latest tactics for effective project management, with a healthy dose of team building. We even hosted an awards ceremony: The First Annual Uppies – a tradition is born.
As we continue to strive for the very best consulting experience in the publishing and content management space, here are just a few accomplishments since our last birthday:
Every year, around this time, our distributed team gets together for a few days to focus on developing our soft and technical skills, to celebrate our past and plan for our future. The 2015 summit is next week at a beautiful hotel in downtown Boulder, Colorado. It begins Monday afternoon with an optional tour of the Celestial Tea Factory and a mouth-watering prefixed dinner catering to myriad 10up diets. Our summit ends on Thursday night, with most 10uppers traveling home on Friday.
Net Magazine’s latest cover story details 8 “dos and don’ts” for architecting WordPress themes with best practices and an eye towards maintainability. In this article, I cover the WordPress template hierarchy and the loop, foundational concepts necessary to build and understand WordPress themes. A few 10up clients, like H.M.Clause, also get shout outs.
Net Magazine is a 20-year-old publication for professional and amateur web designers and developers; having published insights and stories from 10uppers in the past, they’ve come to recognize 10up as an expert resource.
We had the privilege of working with StoryCorps to help them engineer a reliable, scalable WordPress implementation for their new, TED prize winning project. StoryCorps.me enables anyone to record and share powerful stories using an iOS and Android app; the app’s infrastructure is built on WordPress, and leverages the WP REST API.
We built a custom, elastic infrastructure on Amazon Web Services, provided strategic consulting and direction for the WordPress JSON API integration with the app, and comprehensive code review and auditing for the custom theme and plugins built by StoryCorps’s internal developers.
Even as the app was unveiled at TED, and picked up in subsequent press coverage from NPR, Fast Company, Recode, the Globe and Mail, Forbes, to name a few, the site and its deep app integrations have scaled and performed like a champ.
Dean noted, “You have to be willing to completely submit to the process.” He says it wouldn’t have succeeded if 10up and [app developer] Maya weren’t committed as StoryCorps to the success of the project.
Four years ago, 10up came to life with a couple of clients, and a centrally located team of one. Today, our 100+ team of engineers, designers, and strategists span the globe, privileged to serve Fortune 500 (and 50… and 1…) clients, as well as an array of well respected startups and lesser known brands invested in first class technology solutions. Here are a few highlights since our last birthday:
Continued to launch projects for renowned clients, like FiveThirtyEight: one of the most anticipated website launches in 2014.
Grew our full time team by 100%. More came aboard in the last 2 months than our entire 2nd year.
Grew our revenue. We’ve invoiced more in the last 2 weeks than we earned our in our first year. We’ve collected more revenue in the last two months than we earned in our entire second year.
Invested thousands of hours into open source projects, mostly WordPress. WordPress is our third largest client by effort. And that’s only the “company time.”
10upper Gustave Gerhardt took the opportunity (and his handy Speedball linoleum cutters) to create a little pumpkin in honor of 10up and Halloween, including an LED to light it from the inside.
Hope you all are enjoying a Halloween heavier on treats than tricks!
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.
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.
Nearly all thirty-nine 10uppers are descending on Las Vegas tomorrow, from as close as Los Angeles and as far as Germany, for our company Annual Meeting, running through Saturday morning. In addition to many first time face to face meetings, we’ll be reflecting on the last year, talking strategy for next year and beyond, relaxing around the sky-high pool, sharing contributions and best practices, and even venturing out on a city-wide scavenger hunt. Rumor has it there are even a few team building exercises, including a symbolic game of team bumper cars.
We’ll be taking photographs aplenty for a post-meeting round-up, as we did for our Developer Summit back in April. In the mean time, follow all the action via the team10up Twitter list, and if you want to be a part of future 10up meet ups, be in touch!
Christian Chung
Jake Goldman
Corey Ellis
Net Magazine’s latest cover story
John Eckman
Taylor Aldridge
Ryan Hellyer
