Bryan Petty works full-time developing WordPress core for Bluehost. “I don’t actually have any specific WordPress-powered sites I’m in charge of building and maintaining anymore. This leaves me with the full day every day to address tickets in the WordPress issue tracker, help improve project infrastructure, and help build new features into WordPress.” Bryan found WordPress around 2.1 – 2.3; before that he built a few sites on TextPattern and NewsPHP. His favorite part of WordPress is “definitely custom post types.”

One of the projects that he’s worked on that he’s most proud of is for the Cole Holland Training Center. “The Cole Holland Training Center was the first website that really expanded my experience with custom post types and taxonomies. This site turned around my entire perspective on what WordPress is, and what it can be used for…and opened up a lot of possibilities for features I could add to every new site I built after that.”

Bryan’s presentation is a highly technical session on plugin testing. “The WordPress team has worked especially hard on the unit tests system in the last few months, and nearly all the the main system built around the tests themselves has actually been completely rewritten…I feel like it’s important that plugin authors get in the habit of writing unit tests for their plugins…I wanted to take the time to get a presentation out there on how they can do this quickly and easily, and take advantage of the new unit test framework built for WordPress.”

When he’s not hacking on WordPress core, Bryan loves taking trips to southern Utah during the summer, and during the winter, he heads up to Snowbird with his snowboard. He responded with a solid “no” on the jazz topic, preferring, instead, electronic artists like Infected Mushroom, C-Mon & Kypski, Shpongle, and Radiohead.