Mark came to WordPress as a developer and from a backend perspective around version 2.7. Initially to develop a few plugins for personal projects. After a few years of developing a sites for friends and diving in the WordPress community in Austin, WP Engine was born and he joined the project to take over platform and infrastructure development. This provided an opportunity to work with thousands of WordPress installations on a daily basis for a few years now.

Presentation: Adding Source Control To Your Code Life

Adding Source Control To Your Life is a discussion about using revision control in your plugin and theme development.

Editor’s Note: I think we typo’d Mark’s presentation title in the schedule… sorry Mark!

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

Targeted at developers of WP themes and plugins, but can be applied to any aspect of software development, it’s scary changing your daily work flow and habits. What are the commands that can help me get started quickly?

It can be bad practice to keep your code in a silo. Using source control tools like Git, SubVersion or something else, can streamline development headaches, hotfixes, switching between projects, merging code changes between features, working with another developer or a team and tracking history of the project. Ever faced with that “”How or when did that code get in there?””, you’d be able to track the history of that with a repository.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

An open source and growing CMS that allowed me to dive into the code and start writing plugins for my own websites and projects.

Oh, and that there’s a lot of people needing WP help and I can find answers for them.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Connecting with diverse and smart people who are using WP.

Why did you decide to speak?

I’m passionate about software development and improving my own work flow.  I see others struggling with the same things I used to struggle with.  If I have ideas that could help someone improve his/her work and save time or headaches, I’ll share those ideas.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

HyperDB. It is very geeky and solved the exact problem we were having at WP Engine with database master/slave replication. I also had to dig into the guts a bit to tweak and customize the code for a specific use case for our environment.