Jake Spurlock — WCSLC Speaker Profile

Posted on September 14, 2012 by Chris Reynolds

Jake is a former Utah native now living in California and working for MAKE magazine. “The big site that I work on all day is makezine.com but there are a few others too like MakerFaire.com and others…When I started working at MAKE, we did a lot of incremental updates, about six months ago, I got to do an overhaul, and with a blank slate, every line of code on the site is new, and written by me.” Jake got his start with WordPress in 2005 when he was building a podcasting network in iWeb. “I quickly grew beyond that software and used WordPress, knowing that I could have category-specific RSS feeds. Boom! Haven’t turned back since.”

Jake’s favorite thing(s) about WordPress came in list form:

List of favorite functions/classes/APIs/things:

1. WP_QUERY
2. register_post_type()
3. Transients API
4. update_post_meta()
5. WordPress VIP program
6. Awesome community

Jake will be talking about responsive development with the Twitter Bootstrap framework. “In the last nine months I have been using Bootstrap for a variety of projects at work. It’s been a fun platform to build on top of, and as a form of evangelism, I wanted to share the good news of the project.”

When he isn’t working at MAKE, Jake loves the outdoors. “Cycling, mountain biking, rock climbing and camping. Been working on my Jeep for the last six months or so turning it into a rock climbing rig.” While Jake doesn’t listen to jazz most of the time, he does dig some Bela Fleck and the Flecktones.

Jason Gill — WCSLC Speaker Profile

Posted on August 16, 2012 by Chris Reynolds

Jason is a veteran web developer with over 12 years of experience and is currently working with the Department of Veteran Affairs. Before he was introduced to WordPress by a co-worker, he was using Mephisto. “Mephisto was horrible, but it was much better than the blog I tried programming myself from the ground up.” Once he started working with WordPress, however he “never looked back.”

One of the projects Jason has worked on that he’s most proud of is Utah UPSTART which he developed the theme for as well as the bilingual functionality. When asked about his favorite part of WordPress, his response is “Plugins. Plugins. Plugins.”

At WordCamp SLC 2012, Jason will be talking about WordPress multisite. “Having implemented WordPress multisite at an enterprise level more than once, I know it can be daunting.” He hopes to share how easy it is to get started and the awesomeness of managing multiple WordPress powered-sites.

When not building WordPress-powered sites, Jason admits to staying up “way too late” playing Modern Warfare 3 on the XBox. Occasionally he ventures outside to stay up way too late longboarding. Jason would rather listen to rock than jazz.

Chris Reynolds — WCSLC Speaker Profile

Posted on August 14, 2012 by Chris Reynolds

I am a project manager, developer and support monkey for the premium WordPress event management plugin, Event Espresso. I’m also a WordPress theme and plugin developer and I launched a web design studio in 2007 with my wife, called Arcane Palette Creative Design. In 2010 we debuted Museum Themes, a premium WordPress theme shop. I volunteered to help with the WCSLC preparations this year, and have been working on the web site, content, and the theme (which uses _s).

To the best of my knowledge, I started on WordPress 2.1. Before that I was using a software called Sblog, but I was frustrated by the lack of updates. Before that I maintained a web-log the old-fashioned way, with HTML and manual FTP updates. I used to say that my favorite part of WordPress was its ease-of-use, but lately my answer has changed to how easy it is to develop for it. A few years ago I would never have considered myself a developer. I have since dived into code — for custom themes, plugins, for Event Espresso, as well as plugins (and one theme) in the WordPress.org repositories — and am constantly amazed at the wealth of tools and documentation at my disposal.

When I’m not doing things related to WordPress, I’m an avid gamer. I love gaming on the computer, but even more than that, I love tabletop gaming. Castle Panic, Settlers of Catan, Munchkin and Forbidden Island are some of my current favorites.

A project I’m most proud of right now is the new Event Espresso website. I did a lot of little, back-end things, custom plugins, and a lot of the initial development for what’s now the product system. I’ve also done quite a bit with the bbPress forums which have received significant amount of hacking. The site is also using 2 of my plugins: WordPress Wiki That Doesn’t Suck (used for the Documentation pages) and my Progress Bar plugin (used on various pages on the site).

My presentation at this year’s WordCamp will build off of what I presented last year, which was an introduction to the idea of doing theme development and/or light theme modifications. This presentation is going to get into the nitty gritty of theme development and is largely informed by my own experience getting my theme, Museum Core, added to the WordPress.org repository, and what I learned through the theme review process.

While I don’t listen to jazz all the time, I do listen to some, and my favorite jazz musician is John Coltrane.