Loopconf

Last week Miles and Mike escaped the rain and headed to Las Vegas to attend Loopconf to learn some new tricks of the trade.  Loopconf is a developer-specific WordPress conference featuring the best of the best WordPress developers. The conference speakers shared their passion for a variety of topics from automated acceptance testing all the way through high-level security practices for PHP. In short, Loopconf is like Disneyland for WordPress developer’s.

Since we build all of our websites on WordPress, listening and learning from industry leaders helps us improve our quality of work. Having the opportunity to meet and exchange knowledge with other technically-minded people allows us to stay ahead of the curve and push boundaries. Here are a few of the highlights from the conference:

• Chris Lema: The CTO of Crowd Favorite talked about automating acceptance testing – running automated test on actions that a user would take on a website. 
• Naomi Bush: Naomi Bush discussed taking a learning-driven approach to web development. “With each new project, I purpose to learn one new thing.”
• Andrew Nacin: The former Lead Developer for the WordPress project shared the story behind the two-year process of fixing a single bug in the way that WP integrates with phpmyadmin and hiding it in a feature release for Emoji support. Easily the best presentation of the weekend.
• John Nolan: A hilarious presentation on the benefits and importance of contributing to WordPress and other open-source technologies that you use daily. Long story short: just do it.

The best part about Loopconf? They live streamed the entire weekend so Ryan, our developer back in Fort Collins, could join in the fun and sent up home with tons of swag for the rest of the team!