Джон живее в средна Англия и е един от най-активните разработчици на ядрото на WordPress. Занимава се с WordPress от повече от 10 години и през 2014-та ръководи една от версиите на софтуера. Джон е и един от старши разработчиците в Human Made, където се занимава основно с enterprise level медийни сайтове. 

Джон ще говори на WordCamp София за първи път и изборът му на тема не е изненадващ – като всеки програмист с много опит в работа с клиенти, Джон знае кои са най-важните умения, които разработчиците трябва да владеят в тази сфера на дейност.

Поговорихме си с Джон, за да ви го представим в малко повече дълбочина, а вие не пропускайте лекцията му “Debugging as a key skill”, в която ще има супер полезни съвети за подходи и инструменти, които да ви направят по-добри програмисти. 

WordPress 4.1 release lead John Blackbourn and 4.3 release lead Konstantin Obenland. Photo: ma.tt

Hey John, how are you these days 🙂 Can you introduce yourself quickly for the Bulgarian WordPress community?

Hey Petya!

Sure. Well, my name’s John Blackbourn and I’m one of the core developers of WordPress. I was the release lead for WordPress 4.1. My day to day involvement includes managing bug reports on the WordPress bug tracker, writing and testing bug fixes and new features, working with the security team on security issues, helping new contributors, and helping lead contributor days at WordCamps.

At my day job I work as a senior developer at Human Made, a WordPress specialist agency here in the UK which is heavily involved in the WordPress community.

How did you get involved with WordPress? 

One day, about 9 years ago, I found a bug in WordPress related to character encoding in category names and reported it. The issue got fixed, but in order to get the fix I had to start using the development version of WordPress. A contributor by the name of Lloyd Budd kindly explained the process, how to get involved with contributing myself, how to submit patches for bugs, etc. It snowballed from there.

What are the most interesting projects you’ve done with WordPress?

One of the most interesting for me was working on a project last year for a large magazine publisher here in the UK that involved migrating 30 separate magazine titles onto one Multisite installation. I helped with the building of an extensible and flexible theme that was used across all of the titles, including a system for managing the appearance and layout of each individual site using the Customizer, while maintaining continuity and allowing features to be shared across all of the titles.

One of the most challenging was working on a project with the Scottish Government’s Education Department to migrate several hundred thousand school blogs (running on WordPress MU from 2009) onto a central and up to date version of WordPress that integrated with the government’s third party authentication platform. The most interesting aspect for me was that kids in the schools were allowed administrator level access to their blogs, and they were encouraged to play with and learn the whole of the system, which is the opposite approach that is often taken with corporate clients who don’t want to risk breaking their websites. It was really refreshing!

John Blackbourn with Andrew Nacin, Otto Wood at WordCamp San Francisco 2014. Photo by ma.tt

What are you doing these days in core?

My focus at the moment is hardening support for WordPress sites that use HTTPS (particularly those that use a mixture of HTTP and HTTPS), and making it easier for users to migrate to HTTPS. I’m also working on improving many aspects of Multisite, fixing issues with internationalisation, improving documentation, and improving low level developer APIs such as those for custom post types and custom taxonomies.

Can you tell us a bit more about your talk at WordCamp Sofia. Why did you choose this topic?

As a developer, writing code is only one part of your work. Often, a large part of your work is finding out why something is not working as expected, or investigating how one piece of code interacts with something else. As we spend so much time debugging code, it makes sense that becoming proficient at debugging code should be as important as becoming proficient at writing it.

I did a 5 minute lightning talk version of this talk at WordCamp London, and several people approached me afterwards and said they’d like to see a full presentation. So I hope that my talk will encourage developers to better understand the various tools that are available for debugging their work.

Thanks John, looking forward to it!

WordCamp София e в събота, 24 октомври, в кино Арена Младост. Ако все още нямате билет, вземете си от тук.

Ако сте били на WordCamp София 2013 или на WordCamp Europe 2014, сигурно сте се сблъскали поне веднъж с Ноел – гледали сте лекциите му, говорили сте си с него в почивките или сте си казвали “Наздраве” с джин и тоник – неговото обичайно питие.

Ноел е от Швейцария, но от почти две години е от племето на дигиталните номади – хората, които обикалят света и правят бизнес едновременно. Той е дизайнер по професия, но страстта му са уеб продуктите. В момента ръководи всички продукти в Human Made, с основен фокус върху Happytables – SaaS, насочен към ресторанти и малки заведения.

Ноел обожава София и лекцията му дойде 5 минути след като обявихме call for speakers. За какво ще говори и малко повече за това какви ги върши напоследък ще ви каже самия той.

Интервюто е на английски, както ще бъде и лекцията му на 24 октомври от 11:20 в Зала 14.

Noel talking product vision with the bloggers of United Influencers. Photo by Frederik Guttormsen

Hey Noel! How’s it going! Can you introduce yourself to our readers quickly?

I’m a Swiss digital nomad and partner at Human Made. My passion is in building products online and solving real problems. This is my third time back to Sofia, last time I even stayed for a month because I really enjoy the city and more importantly, the people that are inside of it 🙂 Looking forward to seeing old friends and making new ones.

What is the most interesting WordPress project you’ve been involved with recently?

Always a lot going on, but most recently I’ve been inspired by the nomadic and remote working community. Joe & I decided to kick-off Nomadbase which is a real-time map of digital nomads (using their latest check-in across; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram & Swarm). It uses React JS and the WordPress REST API. The tech stack is the future of WordPress.

How did you get into WordPress?

Was a while back. Was trying to create a website solution for restaurants, ended up using WordPress and making my first money using it by selling themes.

You came to WCSof in 2013, what made you come back this year?

10:00 Memento
12:00 Made in Home
16:00 Nargile (Наргиле) playing Cards against Humanity
22:00 Mixtape 5 / Kanaal / Flip Flop
04:00 Mimas (Мимас)
04:05 Walking home with new dog friends.
Repeat.

Who can complain with a daily schedule like that?

Tell us a bit about your talk „Web Publishing in 2016“. Why did you choose that subject?

One of the companies we’ve worked with has been United Influencers, a Scandinavian blogging platform that amongst others also has Zlatan & Messi. With well over 10 million pageviews, I’ve taken a big interest into content strategy and publishing as a whole. It’s changing a lot more than I had initially thought so it’s becoming a very important topic to talk about.

What would you say to someone who’s not been to a WordCamp before?

What’s not to say; regardless of skill or experience, you’ll feel welcome and meet many like-minded people. Just extend your hand and “Say, hi I’m …”. The rest is history.

WordCamp София e в събота, 24 октомври, в кино Арена Младост. Ако все още нямате билет, вземете си от тук.