Joey Kudish
WordCamp Montreal is only a week away! We’re excited to bring you a new speaker spotlight series this year!
Our next spotlight is Joey Kudish!
Joey is a Code Wrangler at Automattic. Previously, he was a freelancing web developer building high-scale WordPress sites and private WordPress plugins. He is the author and contributor to several WordPress plugins as well as contributor to WordPress core. Joey’s an avid coffee drinker, dog lover & enthusiastic traveler.
Follow @jkudish on twitter.
Joey will be giving a talk titled Becoming a better WordPress developer.
What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?
The theme customizer and the flexibility it brings for end-users. I think we’ll see a lot of themes and plugins take advantage of this new feature and build out some awesome integrations with it over the next few months.
Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?
Though I moved to Vancouver last year, Montreal is my hometown and I still keep in touch with some of the local community. I hope to come back every year to share some knowledge with the Montreal crew.
What is your talk going to be about?
My talk will cover WordPress coding standards, best practices, and technical tools to become a better developer. It will be a resourceful presentation for anyone beginning, interested in, and those who have been developing with WordPress for a long time. Some of the topics covered will be proper usage of hooks and filters, creating your own plugins (instead of always using that functions.php), making use of the mu-plugins folder, how to properly escape and sanitize user-generated content, security gotchas and more.
What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?
That writing good, scalable, re-usable and secure code is more important than just quickly hacking together a solution.
Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?
It’s tough to select just one person who inspire more than others. I follow a lot of people in the WordPress community and they each contribute in a meaningful way; whether it’s writing code, helping out in the forums, translating text, etc… I am also lucky to work with 125+ of some of the smartest people in the world over at Automattic 🙂
What new feature would you like to see in the future?
I think the media enhancements in 3.5 are very promising. It’s definitely an area of WordPress that needs some work. Beyond that, I am also excited by any under-the-hood API changes that make developing with WordPress easier. One area in particular I’d like to see some work on in the next few release cycles is the Settings API.
