I made an intro video for my coworkers at Automattic. This is the video w/out the speech. Shows Vancouver “in my eyes” 
How I see Vancouver
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Monthly Archives: May 2012
Joey Kudish
May 27, 2012
My current status: hanging out at the beach in sunny hot Vancouver
Polyglot (un)conference #polyglotconf
Today I attended the first annual Polyglot (un)conference in Vancouver.
Unconferences are similar to traditional conferences; the main difference being that all the sessions are voted upon by the attendees and decided day-of. The last unconference I attended was not very well organized and took too long to get going. I was pleasantly surprised that this wasn’t the case today. Part of the voting was done online ahead of time using uvoice and organizers really took charge in getting things going in the morning.
In computer lingo, polyglot is the concept of writing programs in several different programming languages. The polyglot conference brought together developers from all kinds of backgrounds. Lots of ruby, .net, JavaScript, and erlang folks were in attendance. To my own surprise, not many people at the event work with PHP.
I also got the impression that many of the web developers who were here see WordPress as more of an amateur and hackish platform. I’m obviously deeply entrenched in the WordPress community so it’s interesting and even somewhat refreshing to get different perspectives; regardless whether the feedback is good or bad. That being said, most people I spoke with individually were actually really interested in the work we do at Automattic and WordPress.com, especially in terms of scaling.
I always love going beyond my comfort zone and learning new things. Highlights for me today were:
- A really great presentation on various open-source mapping technologies chiefly Mapbox. I’m a huge fan of open data and tools that help developers work with it so this was a great learning experience for me.
- Several great presentations and breakout discussions on open source vs. proprietary code.
- Fun lunch on a bright, sunny , warm patio; with discussions on general programming idioms.
- In-depth introductions to Erlang and Ruby languages; both of which I only had limited experience with.
- Long coffee break facilitated by a fire alarm at the venue.
Overall a really great event that I was happy to be part of.
Maps presentation by Talyor Sherman
From consultant to product by Boris Mann
Great lunchtime chats
PS: this was the first time I wrote a blog post from the WordPress iOS app on my iPhone. Really slick experience, and a new version was just released, go check it out
Beautiful Vancouver Sunset
Went out on a stroll with Amy and the dogs tonight to watch the sunset. In the process, we gathered some video footage for the video I am preparing this weekend to introduce myself to my new colleagues at Automattic.
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- Vancouver Sunset
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- False creek ferry
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- Happy dog
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- Dog swimming at sunset
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- Big boat
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- Winston posing for me
How does Evernote know where I am?
Yesterday, while I was at WordCamp Seattle (which was a blast by the way!), I wanted to quickly jot down some notes. I opened up Evernote on my iPhone, and clicked on new note, and the title of the note auto-completed to “Note from WordCamp Seattle”.
Some clues as to how this may have happened (I don’t know the actual answer):
- I did have WordCamp Seattle in my calendar for that day
- I checked in on Foursquare, but tagged my checkin as #wcsea not the words “WordCamp Seattle”
- Other people there likely were also using Evernote and maybe they called their notes “WordCamp Seattle”
In any case, the app never prompted me to access any of my data from an external application, so I’m very curious how they were able to do this. I don’t really mind, because it was convenient to have that auto-filled and it amazed me at first; but at the same time, I really wonder how it knew, and how much of my data Evernote can access. Does anyone know how Evernote knew where I was?
Querying Posts Without query_posts
Here at WordPress.com, we have over 200 themes (and even more plugins) running inside the biggest WordPress installation around (that we know of anyway!) With all of that code churning around our over 2,000 servers worldwide, there's one particular WordPress function that we actually try to shy away from; query_posts()
If you think you need to use it, there is most likely a better approach.
Really good explanation of why you shouldn't use query_posts; a function I know I've used in the past but definitely stay away from now :)
Hello world
Hello, and welcome to my personal website. I am a Web Developer specialized in WordPress development. I work at Automattic, building various things on WordPress.com and open-source projects. I author/contribute to several WordPress.org plugins and contribute to WordPress core. I am located in Vancouver, BC. People call me Joey for short. I’m an avid coffee drinker, dog lover & enthusiastic traveler.
Joey Kudish
May 15, 2012
I’m extremely happy and excited to announce that I’ll be joining Automattic, the makers of WordPress.com, and many other cool products. As of next monday, I’ll be an Automattician (yes, that’s the real term for an Automattic employee) as a Code Wrangler, working with many aspects of the WordPress.com codebase – I’ll share any details I can once I get the ball rolling.
In the next few weeks, I’ll migrate this site (whatever new form it will take since I will no longer be promoting my services) to WordPress.com (want to eat my own dog food).
If you’re interested, they’re still hiring (developer and non-developer positions!), so you should check it out.
If you’re arrived here looking to hire someone to help you with a web project, I’ve got a great list of recommended consultants, agencies and resources, here.
