Blog

Doug Stewart brings in extensive systems, WordPress experience

Thorsten Ott on October 7, 2013

Howdy all, my name is Doug Stewart. I’m the newest addition to the 10up systems team, and I couldn’t be more excited to be joining the company.

I’ve been using Linux since 1997 or so, but don’t hold that against me and I’ve been going by the nickname “Zamoose” for at least that long. I’ve over 15 years of experience in the IT industry to bring to bear on problems related to networks, systems and software, with a special penchant for solving problems in the Linux space. I’ve spent time at software giants like IBM, in the advanced US Defense Department research community, working with geneticists and medical researchers as a high-performance computing administrator and have even spent a bit of time in a startup or two back in the first Internet Bubble. Lately, I’ve been working heavily in the areas of systems automation and virtualization.

I first came across WordPress in 2004 during the Great Licensing Wars and have been a dedicated WP user and contributor since version 1.0. I have experience in developing themes and plugins, contributing to the core WordPress software, participating in the greater community and helping WordPress users get the most out of their sites.

I also co-organize the monthly Philadelphia WordPress Meetup and the yearly WordCamp Philadelphia and Tech Week Philly events and am very involved in the Philadelphia metro area WordPress community.

Heather Hogan brings passion for web strategy to 10up

on October 3, 2013 • 2 Comments

Hi, I’m Heather Hogan, and I’m honored to be at the helm of an amazing team within 10up. After stints freelancing, creative directing, and managing municipal website projects, I’m excited to focus primarily on client services using just one content management system, the best one: WordPress. I thrive on building relationships with clients, partners, and engineers to envision and execute seamless and intuitive interactive communications.

My previous adventures include designing and building award-winning websites for the Sacramento Library, ACE rail, Sacramento Beer Week, the City of Santa Monica and other municipal agencies and small businesses. I thoroughly enjoy teaching and exploring design, technology, and web development whether at Sacramento City College (where I’ve taught for the last seven years) or at local (geek) networking events.

Originally a beach baby of San Diego, California, I’ve settled in the lakes and mountains, enjoying a fruitful decade in Northern California. My loving and supportive husband and I enjoy raising our two wonderful children along with Chongo, our dog, in the Curtis Park area of Sacramento. Local fodder and libations top my favorites list, along with live music, art, travel, and the outdoors. I’m excited to shape all of my earlier disparate efforts into a laser-beam focused awesomeness at 10up!

Thorsten Ott brings years of senior WordPress engineering cred to 10up

Thorsten Ott on September 4, 2013

Ahoi! I’m Thorsten Ott and I’m 10up’s newest Senior Web Engineer and first European employee. I live near Cologne, Germany with my wife, son and a crazy Beagle. When I was 8, I was given my first computer and quickly discovered that making software is more fun than using it.

After studying communication electronics and developing on assembly languages with microcontrollers, I quickly switched to systems administration and web development.

After leading the web development department for a large dedicated hosting company in Germany from 2000 to 2007, I started an agency in Bulgaria, which I ran for two years, employing 6 developers at its peak. The agency focused on web-based video processing and archiving solutions leveraging the Zend Framework, but also executed some projects on WordPress.

I finally had a chance to focus on WordPress full-time when I joined Automattic in 2008, becoming one of the earliest engineers on the WordPress.com VIP team. During my tenure at Automattic, I met Jake and 10up, and in reviewing their projects, developed a great deal of respect for the quality of their code. While at Automattic, I wrote and contributed to a handful of WordPress plugins and tools, including the Exploit Scanner, Debug Bar Extender, WordPress-CLI-Exporter, and WordPress-CLI-Importer.

I did a quick detour into Cloud Computing, OpenStack and Python over the last year while working at a start-up called PistonCloud. I became relatively fluent in Python and improved my Linux skills, but my heart never left WordPress and PHP.

Welcome “WordPress Rockstar” Adam Silverstein

Thorsten Ott on August 30, 2013

My name is Adam Silverstein, and I started tinkering with code when I was 10 years old and began building websites for small business clients in 1996. I tackled everything from front end design, to custom Java client/server code, to web server management, building a huge range of sites for clients large and small, and eventually choosing WordPress as my platform of choice. WordPress was perfect for quickly building rock-solid sites that were easy to extend and enhance with custom code.

Not one year ago, I jumped full force into contributing to WordPress Core. Finding real room for improvement and a chance to hone my programming skills, I spearheaded the rewrite of the new Backbone.js based revision system for WordPress 3.6 – earning me the humbling title of ‘Recent Rockstar’ on the credits page. I’m hooked (no pun intended), and plan to stay an active contributor to WordPress Core – I love the feeling of community, collaborative effort and helping a platform doing no less than democratizing the web.

When I’m not reading programming books and writing code, you can probably find me on a rafting trip with my two teenage kids, playing mbira (african thumb piano), taking a walk with my wife and dogs, or tending to my oversized garden.

Will Seyffer brings digital advertising and monetization strategy to 10up

on August 21, 2013

My name is Will Seyffer, and I’m 10up’s first Senior Monetization Strategist. I’m thrilled to announce the addition of strategic monetization to 10up’s core competencies; allow me to tell you a bit more.

I’ve spent the last five years guiding and managing operations for organizations that struggled to monetize online publishing, or simply needed support to maximize existing efforts. Advertiser management is the life blood of most online publications, and yet the required specialization has resulted in very few web agencies offering a meaningful understanding of those challenges, beyond superficial placement of ad calls within their designs. At 10up I’ll be collaborating with publishers, analyzing their web properties and providing strategic guidance and support that will maximize their profitability, all in harmony with the efforts of our first class design, strategy, and engineering teams.

As Senior Monetization Strategist, I’ll be collaborating with clients providing such services as:

Establishing robust advertising strategies and tools for the first time
Migrating away from ad networks to direct advertiser relationships
Analyzing and optimizing current advertising and partnership offerings
Critiquing, revising, and / or creating media kits
Creating entirely new monetization models to take advantage of new and unique opportunities
Configuration and troubleshooting of ad management platforms (e.g. DFP)
Complete management of monetization operations (DFP management, advertiser relationships, etc)

Our goal is to offer publishers a tightly managed, end-to-end solution that ensures success for their online properties. 10up began with a focus on superb software engineering and publishing strategy, empowering content creators by getting web publishing software out-of-the-way. Since our inception, we’ve extended our in-house breadth with services like beautiful creative design that keeps readers coming back and systems engineering that ensures high performance, reliable scaling for millions of visitors. Now, we’re in-housing specialized expertise to maximize the way these customers actually pay our bills: advertising strategy. I can’t wait to get started.

Rachel Baker brings engineering expertise to 10up

Rachel Baker on August 14, 2013 • 4 Comments

Oh hey, I didn’t see you there. My name is Rachel Baker, and I am overjoyed to be joining 10up as the newest Senior Strategic Engineer. I am the third 10upper located in the Windy City of Chicago, IL.

My fascination with web development began in 1996, when I learned HTML and FTP from a unique writing course at the University of Illinois in Chicago. I began teaching myself anything I could from the college computer lab including computer networking and CGI scripting, and landed a job doing IT support for the failed Kozmo.com. I started using WordPress for a personal site using the timeless Kubrick theme in 2005, but focused on Drupal for my freelance client work. Through a strange twist of fate, a friend and fellow web engineer gave me his ticket to the first WordCamp Chicago in 2009. After surrounding myself with the amazing WordPress community I turned my full-time and attention to WordPress. Since than, I’ve worked in a few WordPress and BuddyPress core contributions, was a Dev Bootcamp mentor, spoke at a few WordCamps, and even released some popular plug-ins and themes.

Over the past 4 years, I have led engineering on WordPress projects for start-ups, small-business, non-profits, and large enterprise clients. My desire to be a polyglot has taken me to other back-end platforms such as Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, Zend, CodeIgniter and Laravel; but I always come back to WordPress, largely because it’s just so friendly for the publishers and content managers that interact with the software every day. I am really looking forward to being a part of the great work being done here at 10up, and learning from my super smart co-workers.

Kailey Lampert joins 10up

Kailey Lampert on August 5, 2013

Howdy! My name is Kailey Lampert (with a P, as in pterodactyl!), and if you spell my last name backwards you’ll get trepmal, which is how some of you might know me on the Internet. I’m really excited to be 10up’s newest Web Engineer, as I’ll be able to work more closely with some of the best talent working with WordPress.

I first got excited about web development 13 years ago during a short HTML course in middle school. It took a few more years for me to figure out what I was doing, even as I was having loads of fun. About 5 years ago I discovered about WordPress, and it opened my mind to bigger and better projects and opportunities.

What started with some basic theme customization turned into building plugins, and eventually contributing back to WordPress core (even if started by fixing a few typos at first). A big part of the software’s success is the active and enthusiastic community supporting it, so when I’m not working on code, I like to attend, and sometimes speak at, WordCamps.

More than just collaborating with my fellow 10uppers, I’m really excited to start learning from them!

John James Jacoby brings Alliteration to 10up

on August 1, 2013 • 15 Comments

Howdy. My name is John James Jacoby, and I’m really excited to be joining the crew at 10up as the Director of Web Engineering. Some people know me as J-trip or JJJ, or that guy will not stop talking about BuddyPress and bbPress. Other people know me as that nice young man that walks his tiny dog around the block a few times every day. Everyone else just thinks I’m tall.

From 2010 to 2013 I was the Master of Alliteration at Automattic (most popular for running WordPress.com.) During my time there, I worked on some fun projects: Post Likes, Reblogs, Jetpack Comments, and most recently WordPress.com VIP, where I brought my passion for writing secure, performant, easy-to-read code into their network of partners and in-house client teams.

Before finding WordPress, BuddyPress, and bbPress in 2007, I spent a few years working on a fork of phpBB 2 that was the canonical solution for hierarchical categories. That project has long since been retired but was an enormous amount of fun, and taught me a lot about PHP scaling and performance. Going back to the late 90’s, I was the lead in-house Visual Basic developer for a multi-million dollar tool & die operation, tasked with creating their entire inventory and sales system from scratch. In this role, I learned a lot about database schemas, caching, user interface, and user experience.

Jason Clarke brings 8 years with WordPress to 10up

Jason Clarke on July 23, 2013

I’m Jason Clarke, 10up’s newest Senior Web Strategist, and the first 10upper from Maine, a beautiful neighbor that, for many of you, is up and to your right.

My love for making websites started as a college student experimenting with services like GeoCities and Homestead. Since my first paying web developer gig 13 years ago (a whopping $100 fee for a whole site), I’ve been a blogger, freelancer, and corporate web developer. For the past eight years, I’ve been a project manager working with a small team of experts to plan, build, and support sites of all sizes for small businesses and educational organizations. Along the way, I wrote a best selling book, and even had the opportunity to be the founding developer and a board member for the Media Bloggers Association, the first national organization providing community support to bloggers.

When it comes to WordPress, I’ve been on board since version 1.5 back in 2005, after retiring my homegrown CMS for my personal blog, jasonclarke.org. In the WordPress community, I’ve contributed to the late great WP Daily, released a starter theme, and am currently a volunteer with the WordPress Theme Review Team.

Grant Landram brings his web strategy passion to 10up

Grant Landram on July 9, 2013 • 10 Comments

My name is Grant and I’m thrilled to be joining the 10up family as a Senior Web Strategist. Although I don’t feel very Senior, I do feel extremely excited to bring my 5+ years of experience in entrepreneurship, web strategy, design and development to team 10up.

As a young student in business school I had wandering passions for business, economics and mathematics, all of whose depressingly boring early career paths led me to find the world of startups and the Internet. In my pursuit for more engaging and accessible outlets for my creative energy, I started experimenting with web design, PHP, and eventually WordPress. After those actions, I was hooked (see also: bad puns).

As I learned more about the economics of the internet, I quickly began building a business around web strategy. Being self-employed since 2009, I accrued an array of experiences including SEO and link building, consulting for tech startups, speaking about organizational economics and business strategy, managing large projects for Fortune 500 clients, even a brief 11-month affair with my own SaaS startup. In the end WordPress won my heart, and for the past few years I’ve built websites and web applications with WordPress, spoken at WordCamps, and organized meet-ups and WordCamps in the beautiful, amazing, it-doesn’t-rain-as-much-as-you-might-think city of Seattle, Washington.