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Oomph’s packing up our laptops and flip-flops and heading to Chatham, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod for our first company retreat May 20 – 23. The entire team will be in attendance at the Oomph Beach House where—in between games of wiffle ball, kayak trips and cocktails—we will be collaborating on new company initiatives, building cool new widgets and modules and generally celebrating our greatest resource, our people.
To make the most of this time, all Oomph operations, including maintenance, will follow an emergency-only protocol between Monday, May 20, and Thursday, May 23. In the case of an emergency, please contact us by email at emergency@oomphinc.com and an Oomph team member will respond to your urgent need as soon as possible.
Don’t worry, we won’t be completely incommunicado. You can follow our inaugural adventure on Facebook at www.facebook.com/oomphinc and Twitter @oomphinc. In fact, we encourage you to check in with us and ask us what we’re up to by posting or tweeting your questions using the hashtag #oomphretreat. We’ll be happy to respond with a personal post or picture postcard. Want to know what’s stocked in the beach house fridge, or see a Chatham sunrise? Just ask.
After the retreat, we look forward to returning at full capacity with fresh enthusiasm—and a slight suntan.
photo credit: twoblueday via photopin cc
What’s possible in 48 hours? Just about anything, as proven by this year’s New England GiveCamp volunteers who completed 24 projects for local non-profit organizations in just two days. Silver Sponsor Oomph was well represented with five developers in attendance—Jim Reevior, Steven Word, Ian Del Giudice, Vu Huynh and Alex Vallejo—who all worked tirelessly to produce three of the projects that came out of the weekend.
The guys are back this week with a new zest for coding because GiveCamp challenges participants to think fast and work even faster for a great cause.
GiveCamp Co-Chair Kelley Muir and her son took some time over the weekend to ask volunteers, “What’s the best part of GiveCamp?” Time and again the response was: “It’s astonishing what gets done.” By the close of the weekend volunteers achieve the impossible, and they walk away feeling transformed.
“Every year I am amazed by the generosity and passion displayed by the development and design community at New England GiveCamp. Each team worked long hours putting in their best efforts, and accomplished extraordinary feats,” Muir says. “ It’s one of my favorite times of year.”
This year was Alex Vallejo’s first GiveCamp and he’s already decided he’ll be back next year. Alex and Vu Huynh worked together on an all-new website for Seacoast Educational Endowment Dover, which is now live with a modern theme and streamlined navigation.
“It was awesome,” Alex says. “At GiveCamp you’re working with a brand new team under a tight deadline, but despite all this everyone wants to create something really cool—it’s a challenge.”
GiveCamp posted the incredible video above (courtesy of volunteer Ryan Sutton) that condenses the whirlwind weekend into just three minutes. In it, you can see the dedication and passion at work. We’d like to thank New England GiveCamp for giving us an opportunity to be involved in the event, and we look forward to participating again next year.
Oomph is proud to sponsor New England GiveCamp 2013, happening this weekend, April 26 – 28, at the Microsoft N.E.R.D. Center in Cambridge where our team will join forces with more than 100 other coders, designers and database pros in a weekend-long quest to code for charity. Between Friday evening and Sunday afternoon, GiveCamp volunteers will help 25 local non-profit organizations build and revise websites, create graphics and tackle other technical needs these organizations might not otherwise have the funding to achieve.
GiveCamp was born in 2008 when Chris Koenig a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft organized 80 Dallas volunteers to assist 18 local organizations there—with great success. New England GiveCamp followed suit in 2009, and our Jim Reevior has volunteered every year since.
Last year, Jim’s GiveCamp team worked with Turn Back Time, a Paxton, Mass., organization that gives children with special needs, like ADD and ADHD, access to the therapeutic benefits of nature. By the end of the weekend, the team had implemented an all-new WordPress theme, complete with custom elements, for the Turn Back Time website. The site was live by Sunday night and is still going strong today.
Assignments for this year’s New England GiveCamp are being decided right now. Check back for more GiveCamp stories as the Oomph team helps code it forward.
Last year, Boston PHP celebrated its 10-year anniversary. At 3,200 members strong, this is a professional organization that grows each year not only size but in service to its members. In addition to regular meetups and workshops, the group offers its own education track through a program called PHP Percolate. They also host an annual PHP Job Fair that attracts a 200+ crowd of the finest in the industry.
In fact, it’s where we met Jim Reevior who now heads up our Site Operations team. Jim is one of the reasons we’re excited to attend this year’s Boston PHP Job Fair, happening tonight at the Microsoft N.E.R.D. Center in Cambridge from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m.
We’re seeking a PHP and mySQL Developer with a rock star resume and the leadership skills to match. Look for our signature red Oomph table cloth tonight and let’s talk enterprise-level engineering.
For more details on Oomph careers, drop us a line at join@oomphinc.com.
This past Saturday the Oomph development team joined forces with other local WordPress addicts to take part in Boston’s first official Hack Day.
Fueled by caffeine, a desire to learn and an enthusiasm for our favorite Open Source software, we settled in at the Seaport’s Bocoup Loft primed and ready to attack the keyboards. Mark Jaquith (pictured on the screen at left) and Andrew Nacin, lead developers of the WordPress web publishing platform, kicked off the group effort by video.
Over the course of eight hours, Jim Reevior, John Patz, Alex Vallejo, Ian Del Giudice, Vu Huynh and I worked on Trac tickets, bugs and features in preparation for the upcoming WordPress 3.6 release.
We were able to submit working patches to six Trac tickets ranging from security vulnerabilities and data loss bugs to user experience improvements and accessibility support. Jim attacked a bug in the blog details cache, while I modified a few Regular Expressions in the Rewrite API to allow for more flexible pattern-matching. Vu made his mark on the day by testing both a problem with post previews and the banned registration name feature. Alex sat down with K. Adam White, a local JavaScript expert, for a crash course in backbone.js.
The event was a great success and serves to reinforce Boston WordPress as one of the best WP communities in the world. A special thank you to all the organizers, sponsors and contributors for a well-executed event. We look forward to seeing you next time.
We’re just two days away from the first Boston WordPress Hack Day, happening March 2, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the Bocoup Loft in Boston. This is an all-hands-on-deck, head-down day of hacking that gives developers the chance to contribute to WordPress core by tackling open tickets in Trac and helping to fine tune v 3.6. Our guys are devoting their Saturday to giving back to WordPress, and we think that speaks to the caliber of their passion for the platform.
If you are interested in Hack Day, you can still register. We hope to see you there.
Coffee, camaraderie and WordPress core? This smacks of a Hack Day, Boston. Oomph is proud to be a sponsor of the first Boston WordPress Hack Day happening March 2 at the Bocoup Loft from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Five of Oomph’s own developers will take part in this “badge of honor” event that gives WordPress-fluent fanatics the opportunity to work on tickets for WordPress core and contribute in a meaningful way to everybody’s favorite Open Source code. Throughout the day, our guys will be hacking alongside fellow Boston area coders as they work on patches and submit changes to Trac. Hack Day is an event that unites developers in a common goal based on a common passion—a passion we have a responsibility to feed. Yes, that means we’re providing the food.
For more information visit Boston WordPress online, or sign up here. Check in with Oomph for live updates from the event on Facebook and Twitter @oomphinc.