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Design visionary Louis Dorman joins 10up as Senior Designer

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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.

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Keynoting WordCamp Philly 2014

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WordCamp Philly

Philadelphia, PA

Attending Speaking

I’m really excited to debut my first WordCamp keynote this coming weekend at the illustrious WordCamp Philly! I’m presenting a remix of a my WordCamp Connecticut talk, “How I convinced my boss to let me work on WordPress full-time”, arguing for personal and company investment in open source. I’ll look at how and why teams like 10up donate back to the community, and offer ways that attendees can give back, too.

10uppers will also be quite well represented: Dave Ross will be speaking on “Easier, More Secure Deploys with Docker and Dokku“, Doug Stewart pulls double duty as co-organizer and “working from home” panel moderator, and Cindy Kendrick and Spencer Hansen will be in attendance. Hope to see you there, whether in a session, Sunday’s contributor day, or in the hallways.

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I have the pleasure of speaking about Designing a Theme in the Browser next week at WordCamp Orange County. With In Browser Design gaining popularity on the web and here at 10up, we began to ask ourselves, “What is the best way to present a design to a client?” We use WordPress, of course! In my talk I’ll be showing how you can use the most basic of templates and functions to move your design out of it’s initial creative phase and into the browser where pixel perfection lives and where responsive layouts and interactions really come to life.

WordCamps in Miami and Connecticut

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10up has the east coast covered top-to-bottom this weekend at both WordCamp Connecticut and WordCamp Miami.

In the north Jake Goldman will teach you how to leverage WordPress’s native media player, based on MediaElement.js, Taylor Lovett will show you how to save time with WP-CLI, and Helen Hou-Sandi will make the business case for contributing to WordPress core full-time. CEO John Eckman and Engineer Kelly Dwan will also be participating.

We’re also a Gold Sponsor of WordCamp Connecticut, under the PushUp brand, our website push notifications product. We’ll be on hand to demo the product and provision new customers on the spot – and we’re offering a 99¢ sign up code (discounted from $14.99) for new customers who sign up on the spot!

In the south, I’m (John James Jacoby) talking about contributing to WordPress, BuddyPress, and bbPress, and reviewing what’s new in BuddyPress 2.0.

If you happen to see us at either event, stop by our table in Connecticut or find me in Miami!

Team Collaboration: Tweet by Category

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When I first joined 10up, one of my first challenges was building a Twitter plugin for a client who wanted to automatically tweet based on category. Luckily, I work with an amazing team. I lamented in our team IRC room, and to my surprise, discovered that we already had a plugin that did exactly what I needed. Well, almost exactly.

The existing module, built for another client, was all but abandoned before it was fully polished for non-specific use cases. It also used Twitter’s deprecated v1 API, so I had to swap out the communication layer. Still, I had a starting point thanks to the inventiveness of the team, and our consistent application of coding standards.

A few weeks later, we had a solid, polished release using the v1.1 API ready for a new client. We released the project (it was still not fully abstracted, but complete enough for their purposes) and pushed it to the back burner (read: all but abandoned it again). Last month, yet another client requested the same feature. I dusted off our Git repository and started smoothing out the still rough edges so we could launch an even more refined version for a third client.

That’s when it hit me: this plugin only exists as a result of the way our team collaborates. It has been gradually improved and iterated over time across multiple developers and disparate project requirements. Yet we had never released the source outside of our company.

A couple of emails and about 10 minutes later, Publish to Twitter went public on both GitHub and WordPress.org. I’d personally like to invite you to join the growing team of collaborators on this project to help make it even more flexible and useful for our entire community.

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10up conferencing across the continent

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Over the next few days, WordCamps and conferences all across North America, are featuring 10uppers as guest speakers.

John James Jacoby, Director of Web Engineering, will be hosting a Q&A session on BuddyPress and bbPress at WordCamp North Canton, on Saturday May 3rd, as part of the Beginner track.

JJJ presenting

WordCamp Ottawa will feature two 10uppers: Senior Engineers Taylor Lovett and Alison Barrett. Taylor will present Saving Time with WP-CLI, a walk through of WordPress in the command line, focusing on scalable practices and eye-opening use cases. Alison will be speaking on Developing Plugins Like A Pro, covering the basics of plugin development; her tips will have attendees writing plugins like a pro in no time.

Finally, Web Engineer Drew Jaynes is speaking at “Write the Docs” in Portland, Oregon on Tuesday, May 6th. Drew’s talk, Putting the (docs) Cart Before the (standards) Horse, is about how WordPress core developed documentation standards using 10 years of documentation, putting the cart before the proverbial horse.

See you around the continent!

Staying on top: 10up Learning Summit 2014

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Around this time in 2013 we held a Developer Summit – an in person gathering of our team focused on skill building. We covered everything from PHP unit testing to JavaScript performance optimization, and even rolled out Varying Vagrant Vagrants. From SASS to duck punching, that summit influences how I write code today, when I still have the occasion to do so.

10up has grown since April 2013, not just in raw numbers (we’ve tripled), but in scope. Add a talented design team and nearly a dozen web strategists and project managers and our second annual “developer” summit already needs a rebranding: let’s call it a Learning Summit.

10up Summit Git Talk

This time, we’re taking over a resort in beautiful Scottsdale, Arizona. We’re kicking off on the afternoon of Tuesday, May 13, with practical activities focusing on the art of effective, consistent, and thoughtful client engagement. Wednesday we have three tracks filled with incredible workshops: design, engineering, and project management.

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10uppers Alison Barrett and Jim Barrett will be joining me (John James Jacoby) in presenting at WordCamp Minneapolis this Saturday, April 25, at the University of St. Thomas in downtown Minneapolis. Alison’s talk, Avoid Breaking All the Things: How to Develop Safely, offers mitigation techniques for the worst case WordPress maintenance scenarios. Jim is presenting IA Eessentials: How to Prioritize, Design, and Present Your Client’s Content, which explains how to identify a client’s most important content, and present it in the best possible light. I’ll be presenting WPRBACOMGBBQ, covering WordPress’s Role-Based Access Control (citing bbPress as an example), and shedding light on an otherwise invisible (and very powerful) API that you accidentally use everyday. Hope to see you this weekend!

Developing for Non-Profits at GiveCamp Boston 2014

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New England GiveCampThis weekend (April 4th-6th, 2014),  I’ll be gathering with over a hundred developers, designers, project managers, and strategists at the Microsoft New England Research and Development center for New England GiveCamp 2014.  We’ll spend the weekend – with many participants quite literally camping in the building and working through the night – designing, building, and enhancing websites and applications for non-profit, mission-oriented organizations from Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

GiveCamp is a fantastic event. I spoke at GiveCamp 2012 about Digital Strategy in the non-profit context, and then served as team lead in 2013. This year I look forward to just volunteering as a developer. Although many different technical platforms and languages are used at GiveCamp, my experience has been WordPress dominates the conversation and is used for the great majority of the projects.

If you’re in the broader New England area, and have experience with development, design, or project management I’d highly encourage you to check out GiveCamp and consider volunteering your skills.

 

Meet John Eckman, 10up CEO

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John EckmanHi. I’m John Eckman and I’m truly honored to officially join team 10up today as CEO.

Jake Goldman will continue as President & Founder, and we will work closely together, as well as with the strong leadership team already in place, especially VP’s Jess Jurick and Vasken Hauri, as well as Directors Helen Hou-Sandi, John James Jacoby, Paul Clark, Taylor Aldridge, and Zach Brown. It’s truly an all-star team up and down the roster at 10up, and I feel incredibly fortunate to be part of it.

In broad strokes, Jake will focus on product development, recruiting, partnerships, business development, and company vision, while I will be more focused on operational management, client relationships, talent development, and execution against that vision.

Jake and the team have accomplished much over the last 3+ years, and I hope to continue that tradition of excellence while bringing additional processes and organizational development approaches appropriate to a growing firm.

I’ve spent the past 15+ years working in professional services agencies on digital strategy, user experience design, and software engineering, with a focus on content management, web publishing, and social. Short version: TVisions (which became Molecular, which became Isobar), PixelMEDIA, Optaros, and ISITE Design. (Long version: see LinkedIn).

Over the course of that career I’ve worked with clients across many industries and sizes, from early-stage startups to the Fortune 50, as well as higher education and the non-profit sector. I’ve had the opportunity to work as a user experience manager, a technical architect, a project manager (and program manager), an account director and a strategy lead. I’ve worn most of the hats one can wear at a digital agency (other than visual designer, a fact that may be reasonably inferred from my own personal sites), and love nothing more than working with a team to solve a client problem or exceed a client expectation.

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