Tom Rhodes

Get to know Tom 🎙️

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?

In my day-to-day I’m a team lead in the WordPress Special Projects team over at Automattic, we work with influential partners, good causes, and what we call VVIP’s, to deliver the best possible WordPress experience. For me this means my typical day is very unpredictable and I’ll be jumping into all aspects of agency work from bug fixes & project enhancements to expectation management and project planning. I’m passionate about the WordPress project and my role gives me a unique insight into what it takes to maintain hundreds of individual sites and codebases that come from a variety of sources. In dealing with these codebases I find a lot of different methods different engineers use to achieve the same goals. This is the inspiration for my talk in 2024, to discuss that in terms of using REGEX to parse a DOM, we now have better tools available.

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?

I have been involved with WordPress in some way at least since 2009, and professionally since 2013, in that time I’ve found it difficult to find a way to give back to the community, I’m not a great writer for example. 2024 marks the first year that WCEU has come around and I’ve actively been a team lead, speaking at WCEU felt like a natural extension of that role and I’m honored to have had my talk chosen. Since the WP_HTML_Tag_Processor launched I have been encouraging my team to use it, and now I want to share that with the community also.

For those awaiting your talk, could you give us a preview of what we can expect to learn from your talk? Any sneak peeks?

Sure, if you come to my talk you’ll learn to make your code more readable and stable when needing to parse and modify existing HTML structures from PHP. Regular Expressions still have their use case! (e.g string manipulation) Though in terms of using REGEX to parse a DOM structure this has long been discouraged, and now WordPress has native tools to allow you to do this in a verbose, stable, and easy to understand format.

Is it your first time at a WCEU or WordPress event? Any standout memories or lessons learned that you’d like to share?

This will be my fourth WCEU and fifth WordPress event overall. One of my standout memories was watching someone miss out on a PS5 in 2023 because they weren’t at the company stand when the raffle was called. Tip: If you enter a raffle, make sure you’re there when it’s called! There’s loads of cool swag available at WordCamps so take the time between presentations to browse the sponsor stands, and talk to the companies about their offerings. Over the years I’ve spoken to a bunch of sponsors about their products and tools; It’s great for discovering what pain-points or missing functionality WordPress has and the methods we’re investigating to fill those gaps.

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? 

I’m not a natural public speaker, I’m extremely nervous to be doing this, but I know that I’m taking part in an amazing, supportive community. Leverage this, take the opportunity to talk to people and learn from them. Practice your 1:1 skills and just generally get involved socially. For some this comes easily, but if you’re like me and feel worried about talking to strangers professionally, try to remember that we’re all here mainly from the love of the same thing; WordPress.