WordCamp Montreal is only a week away! We’re as excited as ever about this event. We’ve prepared a speaker spotlight series that will show off some of our speakers at this years event!
I’m happy to present our next spotlight, Tom Auger!
Tom is a designer, developer and educator who has himself recently made the shift to WordPress coder. Having found the process to be challenging, despite his decades of development experience, he is passionate about filling the gaps that The Codex and the multitude of online tutorials seems to be missing. Tom teaches in the Graphic Design and Web programs at Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Toronto, Ontario, and is a Senior Partner at Zeitguys, inc, a downtown Toronto digital agency where he leads their WordPress development practice.
Tom will be giving a talk titled WordPress Development Paradigms, Idiosyncrasies and Other Big Words.
Why WordPress?
Tom Auger
From an end-user perspective, WordPress is easy to use, consistent, stable, well supported, free and easy to customize; from a developer’s perspective, once you embrace the framework, you will find a coherent, and highly usable API built on best practices with a great community of support at all levels.
Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?
I have gotten a lot of support from the community throughout my own learning curve and it was time to take my experiences, that are still fairly fresh in my mind, and share them with others who are starting from the same place I started when I began my WordPress journey.
What is your talk going to be about?
In a nutshell, I’m going to be covering WordPress best practices, which is synonymous with understanding and embracing the paradigm that the framework imposes. A lot of home-grown developers with years of development experience will naturally gravitate toward working with the raw materials at a low level – direct database access, JavaScript injection, editing core files etc. But WordPress exposes a lot of high-level abstractions that make your code more robust, feature-rich, portable and sustainable. The key, of course, is knowing where to look. My talk will try to shave off that initial and frustrating part of the learning curve for people with a development background who are new to WordPress.
What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Montreal?
Geeking out with a bunch of people who are seriously passionnate about something I spend every working day with!
What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?
A shopping list of terms and concepts that they can then use to kickstart their own research into the WordPress framework.
What is your favourite WordPress plugin, and why?
MailPress, for all its issues and quirks, is pretty essential on a lot of the sites that my team works on so I’d have to pick that one.
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