Dennis Snell
@dmsnell
United States
Dennis is a code wrangler at Automattic and has been working with WordPress for over a decade and a half. He spends too much time digging deeply into text encoding and parsing issues, which led him to co-develop WordPress’ HTML API.
Programming is his passion, which he does in and out of work while traveling around as a digital nomad.
Get to know Dennis 🎙️
Can you start by painting a picture of what a typical day looks like for you? What fuels your passion for the work you do, and how does it tie into your involvement with WCEU?
My typical day starts with a flood of notifications, updates, and messages from various projects. I spend a good part of each morning trying to answer questions, consider posts, and follow-up with people who are depending on me in different areas. If I’m lucky enough to get through all this, I’ll often take a walk for a mental break and then start working on writing: usually it involves writing code, but frequently enough I also spend my afternoons working on posts or design ideas or responding at length to other requests.
There’s not a deep explanation for what fuels my passion: programming itself is that passion, and I desire to build systems well and professionally. I care deeply about presenting software that gets the little details right – to mangle an expression I picked up once, people get more upset at a pencil tip constantly breaking while trying to fill out an application than they do having that application be rejected. My work on the HTML API is like this: people are solving their own complicated challenges with WordPress and they shouldn’t be prevented from doing that over peculiarities in the language of the system.
What sparked your interest in becoming a speaker at WCEU? Was there a particular moment or experience that motivated you to share your insights with this community?
While I enjoy sharing about software development generally, I’ve had specific goals lately with the HTML API. We’re turning around two decades of practices for writing and modifying HTML on the server and so I want to help people understand how to do it in this new, safe, and reliable way. There are so many things that are becoming practical to do that were not before simply because we now have a tool that speaks the right language. Getting together in a room and discussing this is a great way to spark new ideas and train each other.
For those awaiting your talk, could you give us a preview of what we can expect to learn from your talk? Any sneak peeks?
The work I do is in the open and nothing is hidden or waiting a grand reveal. Still, people may come from different backgrounds and curiosities to this talk. It’s a developer-oriented workshop and presumes some curiosity about the topic: maybe someone has tried to add a class name to a specific part of a document and struggled, maybe someone wanted to extract an excerpt from a post but was constantly frustrated that the content was mangled, or a bunch of entities came through instead of the text they represent. We’ll discuss in the workshop not only how to do these things, but demonstrate how easy it becomes to build full HTML-to-Markdown converters, index HTML, process block content, and more.
Is it your first time at a WCEU or WordPress event? Any standout memories or lessons learned that you’d like to share?
My first WordCamp ever was WordCamp Europe. It’s always been a real joy participating. Many of my most-exciting ideas were inspired by conversations in the hallways between sessions. I highly encourage everyone to make connections with others in the community and see that the WordCamp extends beyond the great talks.
Looking beyond the scheduled sessions, what do you hope attendees will take away from their overall experience at WCEU? How can they leverage the event to enhance their professional development or personal growth?
This is a loaded question: there’s not only going to be a different answer for everyone, but it also implies seeing WCEU in a very specific way. If you haven’t been before, it’s worth relaxing your expectations and letting the event itself guide what you get out of it. Be open-minded and don’t fixate on one aspect. When I started attending there were things that surprised me that I valued.
WCEU is not only an opportunity get gain from the community, but it’s also a unique opportunity to give back. There are plenty of opportunities, including Contributor Day, asking questions at the end of or after a presentation, continuing a discussion after a session, sharing your perspective at dinner, and making connections that last well past the weekend.
Among the thousands of people attending there are going to be many with extensive experience, both within WordPress and outside of it. I always learn from paying attention to what they say and observing what problems they’re working on.
