Roy, started his career life as a network engineer in South Africa then moving to Botswana. A natural progression happened as he moved from networks to servers after gaining an “old school” MCSE qualification while managing the Barloworld Botswana infrastructure.
Tell us a bit about yourself
I’ll take anything apart to see what makes it tick, hardware or software. I enjoy designing systems, coding and making things. One of the incredible FormFunction team.
Why WordPress?
I never took a good look at WordPress till Keo.co.za landed in my lap in flames, the site was crashing every few days so had to dig deep into WordPress. Got really hooked on it when custom posts where made available. The other big up is the slick admin interface and good feature updates.
What are your thoughts on the WordPress community as a whole? And the South African WP community?
The community is very helpful keeping up with new feature updates. I have not interacted much with the local community yet, this needs to change.
Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Cape Town?
I’ve been building up loads of experience running Keo.co.za – time to give back a bit.
What is your talk going to be about?
I decided to take a real life approach – you land a busy WordPress site that spikes performance every few days, you get the server from the hosting co. and then what??
My question is always : How do I get the most out of the hardware with out loosing skill up time.
What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Cape Town?
A day unshackled from my desk and free lunch! 😉
What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?
Being able to know how far they can take a single server under load.
What is your favourite WordPress theme and/or plugin, and why?
Custom posts UI and PODS – Between the two plugins you can do anything with WP!
Share one WP tip
Rip open each plugin and see how it works, you are adding extra code to your project – know what it does!
Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?
Well, Ryan AllenÉ not that he has much on the web. But to run a single WP server at 25 mil pages a month – hat tipping stuff
What is the most exciting feature/addition/improvement to WordPress that you have noticed in the last year?
The admin interface and custom posts.
Where do you see WordPress 2 years from now?
I see WP being used for some larger backends, already see it starting!
