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Summarizing the Summit

Elizabeth Hillis on April 18, 2013

The Developer Summit was a few weeks ago, but our team is still buzzing. I asked a few my teammates to share their main take away from our first ever Developer Summit – here’s what they came back with:

Jake Goldman: There were so many highlights: learning from the smartest minds I’ve ever worked with about unit testing, advanced JavaScript, and Vagrant… seeing a great group of Portland-area WordPress pros show up at our social… seeing a few members of our team in person for the first time. The real highlight was being able to sit back and watch the team brainstorm the big process and technique questions we confront, so effectively. It’s one thing to have great “online” chemistry in IRC chat rooms, small video conferences, and status blogs, but it was amazing to see just how much chemistry this team has when we get together in person – more than any brick and mortar group I’ve ever led or been a part of.

Taylor Dewey: On the first day of our summit, only a few people had lunch together. On the second day of our summit, there were a few groups of folks in different spots. On the last day of our summit, everyone was eating lunch together in the same area. Seeing everyone come together organically proved that we actually do have a team, not a group of individuals, and that has tremendous value.

10up and WordSesh: Free WordPress Presentations

Elizabeth Hillis on April 12, 2013 • 1 Comment

If you ever wanted to learn about WordPress, but never had a chance to attend a WordCamp, now there’s an amazing opportunity to attend WordCamp-style lectures from home! It’s called WordSesh, and we’re proud to be a big part of it.

WordSesh 2013 is the first ever 24 hour free, live-streaming WordPress presentation venue. Starting at midnight UTC on April 13, 2013 (that’s 8:00 pm EST and 5:00 pm PST tonight, April 12) and running uninterrupted for 24 hours, WordSesh will feature a new session every hour, on the hour.

Documentation

Taylor Dewey on April 12, 2013

At our 10up Developer Summit, we collectively decided to document our workflow, tools, and process. With a handful of employees it’s easy to spread collective knowledge, but we’re growing fast and now have a need to document web technologies such as Vagrant, Git, and Grunt; who to contact and how to use our internal IRC channel; and how our staging servers are set up.

But who writes those docs, where do they go, and what should they look like?

Earlier this week I attended Write The Docs: a conference for technical writers that was created in the domain of software and web development. Many of the talks at this conference were devoted to who should write the docs. The consensus is that engineers compose technical documentation which is then edited by more experienced writers. Other presentations covered technical writing itself, careers, and documentation platforms.

Our code is well documented – and soon our internal processes will be too. Our engineers are already documentarians. The docs are being assembled in an internal WordPress-powered website and I’ve started the initial concept of a theme to make those docs easily readable and navigable.

If you’d like to help us write our docs, strategy, proposals, and emails, we are hiring web strategists.

10up Developer Summit Wrap-Up

Elizabeth Hillis on April 8, 2013

10up’s Developer Summit was an amazing experience. In addition to meeting one another in person (a first, for some of us), we were treated to fantastic workshops covering everything from WordPress unit testing to simulating live environments in Vagrant to advanced JavaScript performance techniques. We’re lucky to have an incredibly smart and diverse staff, over half which contributed to the presentations. Jeremy Felt and Carl Danley, two of our amazing Web Engineers, organized the entire conference and ensured that every member of our team would learn something new.

Preparing for Portland: 10up’s Developer Summit

Elizabeth Hillis on April 2, 2013

As the new Web Strategist here at 10up, I’m still getting to know the team. Naturally, I was very excited to learn that I would be attending our Developer Summit in Portland on my second week! To find out more, I sat down with Jeremy Felt and Carl Danley (over Skype) to find out just what the Summit is all about and how it came to be.

10up Dev Summit Interview

How many people are you expecting at the Summit?
Jermey Felt: [Almost] everybody from 10up. 22 people total.
Editor’s note: Our Operations Manager, Pat, is holding down the back office in Sacramento during the Summit, and our Director of User Interface Engineering, Helen, just began her maternity leave.

There are many diverse jobs/responsibilities at 10up; how do you plan to cater to them all in one collective conference?
JF: Originally this was planned as just a Developer Summit, which is still the core focus, different web engineering technologies… [Director of Web Strategy] Jess Jurick proposed that we also have a mini project management conference, which she and [Senior Web Strategist] Megan Gray will handle somewhat separately… everyone will get a handle on the engineering concepts, and be involved in the lectures in some way… The workshop style will help us make sure nobody gets lost.
Carl Danley: The focus is primarily on the attendees, not the presenters… we’ll be there supplementing what they hear and helping them master the techniques.

Jeremy Felt on March 27, 2013

Howdy, PDX! As we mentioned yesterday, 10up is swarming Portland for a few days for an internal developer summit. We’re really looking forward to getting together with the local WordPress community for some conversation and a beer or two.

We’re planning on hanging out for a couple hours at Green Dragon, starting at 8:00pm. If you can swing by during that time, please let us know by grabbing a ticket on Eventbrite. We have space for about 25 or 30 and arrivals and departures will be staggered, so feel free to ping us on Twitter if you can’t commit until the last minute.

See you soon!

Coming to Portland: 10up’s First Internal Developer Summit

Jeremy Felt on March 26, 2013 • 1 Comment

Excitement abounds at 10up as our team prepares to descend on Portland for 3 days for our first Developer Summit. We’ve finalized a fantastic schedule of topical workshops, where the team will focus on adapting and strengthening our collaborative project engineering practices.

Rather than adopting the speaker oriented structure of a standard conference, we’re breaking things down into multiple hour long workshops, in which a short presentation by a designated expert will be followed by hands on application by every engineer on the team. Each day, when we walk out of the door, we’ll have gained valuable experience that can be applied immediately to client projects.

We’re also excited to simply hang out as a team. This will be the second time we’ve gathered in whole and we have quite a bit planned – including a 10up community social! (Details to come)

As we progress through our workshops, we’ll be documenting as much as possible and will be looking to pass knowledge back to the community. Keep an eye on 10up.com and our Twitter and Facebook streams for updates. Take a look at our schedule below, and if this summit sounds like something you would love to be a part of – we’re always looking for great hires!

Megan Gray brings first class creative, strategy chops to 10up

Megan Gray on March 7, 2013 • 6 Comments

I’m Megan Gray and I love 3 things: my family, great design, and WordPress. (Ok, and all the people who share my love of WordPress). I’ve been designing for as long as I can remember, or since I got my first copy of Photoshop in the 90s, and professionally for nearly 10 years now. During that time, I’ve had the privilege of executing design strategies for clients including Johns Hopkins University, Hilton Hotels, Arlington Department of Public Health, and the public television series Roadtrip Nation.

Before I got serious about design, I was a writer and editor for Washington, DC newspapers, a marketing strategist for Johns Hopkins University, and a freelance WordPress designer. My diverse background in all aspects of creating and managing brands influences my unique approach to web projects, and I look forward to bringing that to the table at 10up.

Community rockstar Drew Jaynes joins 10up

Drew Jaynes on March 4, 2013 • 1 Comment

I never seriously considered web development to be a career path, since tinkering with it off and on as a hobby for nearly 10 years. It all began when I built a static tournament portal for a Yahoo! pool league I played in when I was 16. In 2008, many websites and lessons learned later, I retrofitted my college newspaper’s website to run on WordPress. Needless to say, I was hooked.

When I started actively contributing to the project in 2010, the community’s vibrancy left an impression. Here you have this mass of publishers, developers, designers and volunteers all working to make something that was already great even greater. I’d found my people.

These days, when I introduce myself to people at community events like WordCamps, the top two responses are: “Oh, so you’re DrewAPicture! I’ve seen your tweets or your work on [insert project here],” or, “Drew Jaynes … now where have I heard that name before?!” The answer to that second question, if you’re wondering: probably all over the place.

A big part of what drew me to 10up is their commitment to giving back to the very project that gives them life. When I saw that they donated significant employee time to WordPress I thought, “I want to do that!” And now I am doing it!

Vasken Hauri joins 10up as Director of Strategic Engineering

Vasken Hauri on February 25, 2013

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.