WordCamp Sacramento Speaker Q&A: Jason Cosper

WordCamp Sacramento Jason Cosper

Get To Know Jason Cosper

Jason Cosper is currently employed as the Developer Advocate for WP Engine. Honestly, that’s just a fancy way of saying “he gets paid to talk to people about WordPress development.” Nice work if you can get it.

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In his spare time Jason hangs out with his wife Sarah, divides his attention between two very tiny dogs, maintains the Force Strong Passwords plugin, organizes the Bakersfield WordPress Meetup, grills various meats, scours the internet for vinyl, samples assorted craft beers & whiskeys, and writes cranky tweets about the Lakers.

We’re thrilled Jason will be speaking at WordCamp Sacramento 2015 on the way of the future — with the performance gains promised by HHVM and PHP 7, WordPress site admins are living in pretty exciting times.

Speaker Q&A

Why do you think looking to the future is important?

In Way of the Future, we’ll be going over best practices for PHP 7 and HHVM development. I’ll also spend a little time showing off a Vagrant environment where anyone can test their current site against PHP 5.5, PHP 7 and HHVM environments with a minimal amount of effort. Why is this important? Well, no matter where you host your site, making sure everything works before you actually deploy it — especially if you’re rolling the site out on a server with a next generation stack — is a pretty good idea.

What is your history or experience?

As part of the WP Engine Labs team, I’ve worked closely with the team who developed the Vagrant that I’ll be showing off. Also, if it gives me any hipster dev cred, I’ve been running said Vagrant and using it to debug my own sites before it was even publicly released.

How did you get started with WordPress? Why WordPress?

I’ve been working with WordPress for a little over 10 years now. Initially, I worked with its predecessor (b2) while searching for an alternative to Blogger in the early 2000’s. To be honest, I was kind of underwhelmed with b2 and thought any fork would be equally underwhelming. But after watching Matt demo WordPress at an event, I installed version 1.5 on an underpowered shared hosting account, migrated a bunch of content over and never looked back.

What is your favorite thing about WordPress?

My favorite part of WordPress is the community. It’s seriously overwhelming how many people are so generous with their time and go out of their way to help. The way people dive in to lend a hand with support, code, business advice, etc. is humbling and constantly pushes me to give as much of myself as I can.

Can you share a couple WordPress plugins that you love or recommend?

Right now I’m a really big fan of WP Alex, which leverages the Alex JavaScript library in the WordPress editor. Alex catches insensitive, gender biased & polarized phrasing in your writing and makes suggestions on how to fix it.

Resources or recommendations?

For people who are just getting started, Shawn Hesketh’s WP101 videos are top notch and would be worth the money at four times what he’s asking. For leveling up, WPSessions offers a steady stream of great presentations on a number of topics. Both of these resources are paid ones — however both offer a level of quality that can be hard to find while sifting through free tutorial sites.

Check Out The Speakers

WordCamp Sacramento 2015 is bringing you an awesome line up of speakers from not only our greater Sacramento region, but throughout California and beyond. Check out our speakers page to see the 2015 WordCamp Sacramento Speakers, and be sure to follow them on Twitter.