Mike DeWitt is currently a front end developer at Buildium, a Boston-based SaaS company specializing in software for property managers. As a member of the marketing team, he works with WordPress daily on various marketing campaigns for buildium.com, in addition to contributing to the company’s core application. Originally from Chicago, Mike has two degrees in music performance and lives just south of Boston in Quincy with his girlfriend, ugly cat and twin yorkies, Wilbur and Wendy.
Presentation: Developing WordPress Themes Using Modular Sass
“I once had to maintain a large WordPress site with over 8,000 lines of disorganized CSS stuffed in one style.css file. After questioning my choices in life and considering a career change, I knuckled down and found a WordPress starter theme that used this thing called Sass. We redesigned and developed a whole new site, and the ease with which Sass allowed me to build and maintain complex style sheets was a life changing moment.”
What unique perspective are you bringing to this talk?
“I happen to work at a company where I am only one of a couple of people with WordPress experience on a large engineering team. Getting to work with engineers who are not focused on WordPress and getting to work on projects that are not focused on WordPress have in my opinion given me a broad perspective to both challenge assumptions we sometimes make in the WordPress community and to also appreciate all that is great about the WordPress community.”
What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?
“I have never been to Toronto, so I am looking forward to exploring a new city and meeting new people.”
What’s one really cool thing people will discover during your session?
“Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. Simple in theory, but often when writing CSS the old fashioned way we inevitably write the same boring things over and over (and over) again. CSS preprocessors help us reduce the bloat and turbocharge our front end workflows. This talk is not just about Sass. It’s about figuring out why you are repeating yourself, from line to line and project to project. Simplify your life, be a good citizen, and most importantly Don’t Repeat Yourself.”