#wordcamp

WordCamp Saratoga

Through some lucky scheduling, I was able to attend both LevelUp Con and WordCamp Saratoga in a single trip. I spoke at WordCamp about how to build a quick Backbone.js application which used WordPress as the backend (interfacing via the REST API). I thought my talk went OK, although I didn’t love it to be honest, and in hindsight I kind of wish I’d dived a bit harder into some better examples of how Backbone works with Views and whatnot. Here are the slides I used:

And if you’re interested in the code, it’s all available via Github. I got a few nice bits of feedback as well, so that was good:

Automattic, 5 Years In

On May 11 (today) in 2009, I started full time at Automattic. I’ve written about my experiences over the years, and marked the occasion each year in some small way. Let’s continue the tradition.

automattic-logo

This year has actually been a particularly big year. Probably the headliner happened only a week ago; Automattic raised $160 million, on a valuation of $1 billion. That’s a lot of money. That’s a large valuation, and it feels kind of weird to be employee #35 of a company of that scale. We’re now at 247 employees, and we span 30[1] different countries. Whoah.

Other than that, this year we: had a pretty large secondary fund-raising ($75m, via Tiger Capital), made some exciting acquisitions: Cloudup, Scrollkit, Longreads, had another successful WordCamp San Francisco (where I spoke, and organized the Contributor Day again), launched WordPress.com Connect, transitioned to a new CEO (Matt Mullenweg, our founder), and a bunch of other interesting things both internally and externally.

On a more direct/personal note, I feel like I’ve settled into my role as a team lead, and my team and I continue to evolve our development practices towards a modern, iterative workflow, heavy with JavaScript, Sass, and the like. Shout-outs to Allen, Gary, Jennifer and Kevin (my team) for working with me as we continue to make it all up as we go.

 In my sixth year as an Automattician, I’ll be relocating to Denver (my second relocation since I started, capitalizing on working for a completely distributed company). I look forward to new adventures there, and continued adventures with Automattic. It continues to be an inspiring and challenging company to work for, full of interesting and impressively-smart people.

Thanks everyone for continuing to make Automattic home, it’s the best job I’ve ever had, and it would be hard to ever top.

[1]: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Hungary, Iceland, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal, Russia, Scotland, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay.

o2 at WordCamp San Francisco

I just realized that I never posted anything about speaking at WordCamp San Francisco. This was my 8th WordCamp SF (I’ve been to every one since the first, in 2006), and the second one at which I have spoken. Matt invited me to give a short introduction to the work we’re doing with o2, which is the next generation of P2. It’s not available for external (non-Automattic) use yet, so I had to settle for a relatively surface introduction, and couldn’t give people a link to download it or anything which was a bit of a pity, but it still got a good reception.

o2 is a pretty different approach to building on top of WordPress, and has meant a steep learning curve for my team and me. We’ve been digging deep into the world of front-end development, and ramping up quickly on Backbone.js, Underscore.js and a bunch of new development approaches and workflows. It’s been really fun. I’ll let the presentation do the talking though (you can also watch it on WordPress.tv):

And here are the slides I used, which you can also see on Slideshare.net.

We’re really excited to get o2 out into other people’s hands, but we’ve got a lot to build still before other people can experience it in a similar way to how we do at Automattic. The future is bright.