My name is Matt, I’m a full time WordPress Engineer at XWP. I’ve been a WordPress developer since 2005 and have loved the platform ever since.
I run a WordPress development blog at http://mattgeri.com where I post daily articles and videos on WordPress development.
In 2012 I left full time WordPress development and took a job in the payments industry. After 3 years of not being very happy and burning out, I returned to WordPress development.
What I love the most about WordPress is the community and of course that it is open source. I’ve started contributing back to the core through some patches to the customizer. I have also created plugins (MobilePress and WP Most Popular).
Having left the WordPress space for some time (although I did keep up to date with what was happening during my time away), I have a unique perspective on how quickly WordPress is advancing, especially around tooling.
And so with that in mind my talk would be centred around tooling for WordPress since I’ve been spending a lot of time recently setting up the ultimate WordPress development environment. I’ve documented a lot of this environment setup by creating tutorials and videos on my blog but there are so many great tools that many WordPress developers don’t know about or use.
As for personal interests, I’m an avid golfer and mountain biker. When I’m not doing that, I spend time with my family (wife and two kids).