Digital Trends, WordPress, and Portland

It’s been a long time since I posted. I do this from time to time, where I go months without posting anything to my blogs. I apologize to those who are actually interested in my articles – my lack of proliferation is a combination of both attention deficit as well as the chaos that is my career and home life. I started another blog some time ago called unintelligent design which was supposed to be a repository for my non-tech related rants but it ended up being just another blog that i ignored so I will probably end up shutting that one down so I can focus more on this one.

I changed employers recently, moving from a small digital agency called eROI to a digital lifestyle site called Digital Trends. There were many reasons for making this move but I will only share that I enjoyed my time at eROI and my experiences there made me a better developer and prepared me for bigger and better things. The biggest difference between what i did for eROI and what I do for Digital Trends is that rather than having to worry about a bunch of websites, I now only have to worry about one. This will preserve my sanity in the long run I believe. I’m no stranger to developing high visibility sites – I’ve had a few big ones that I’m quite proud of – but this one is just plain cool. I’m a tech nerd AND an info junkie so this site is just the bee’s knee’s as far as i’m concerned.

Digital Trends has been actively developed by an outfit in the UK called Human Made, by a couple of cool guys named Tom and Joe who have been really awesome at transitioning me into the codebase. These guys are serious WordPress ninjas and in the short time I’ve had to explore the codebase I have learned a ton about what it takes to take something as modest as wordpress and scale it up to the monster that is Digital Trends.

And so like that I will be shifting more of my focus towards WordPress related development. I will still post articles about php in general and maybe even more content related to the Zend Framework although I must say that I am starting to feel that WordPress has come of age and scratched many of the itches that it did not in the past that pushed me to find other solutions.

With this shift in focus on my blog also comes a push to pull more developers out of the woodwork in the Portland area. The reason for this is simple. I went with the CTO of Digital Trends to a WordPress meetup about a week ago and while the subject was educational and covered a topic I was interested in I couldn’t help but feel that the group could benefit from a more technical influence. There were a lot of amateurs at the meet up which is fine as that’s what meet ups are about but I didn’t feel there was enough density of expertise to really help out the amateurs transcend to the next level. So with that being said I am reaching my feelers out in Portland for experienced WordPress developers and plugin developers who are interested in coming to meet ups and really improving the experience.

So in conclusion I hope to be provided a richer content experience as I become more involved in the WordPress developer community.