John does Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing at the University of Utah. His responsibilities include: project planning, gathering requirements, dimensional modeling, development, solution deployment, and support. John started using WordPress at version 1.5 — so long ago that he’s forgotten how he came across it. Before WordPress he was hand-coding HTML in Notepad.

His first commercial application of WordPress was the Financial and Business Services website for the University of Utah which was originally built on WordPress 1.5 as a blog to deliver internal campus news. Since then it has turned into a full fledged CMS for the Financial and Business Services division at the University of Utah with hundreds of pages and posts. His favorite things about WordPress are the ease of use and the WordPress community. He also likes how easy it is to extend and customize via plugins and themes.

John will be speaking about WordPress performance optimization. He chose this topic as a way to give back to the community. “I want to get everyone up to speed on the basics of optimizing a WordPress site for performance. I see too many websites out there that don’t even do the basics. This will be a discussion for beginners and those who have never thought about performance optimization.”

When John is not working with WordPress, what he does for fun can be summed up by three things: Road Cycling, Good Beer, and Blackjack. While he does appreciate jazz music, it’s not what he listens to most and he doesn’t have a favorite jazz performer.