Monday night marked our first ever Developer Meetup!

Just under thirty people spent a couple hours meeting one another, drinking beer, and sharing their favorite “I learned this the hard way” stories:

• Anonymous functions were introduced in PHP 5.3.
• wp_cache functions can be used to reduced page load time.
• Ensure your new public theme uses a font that supports basic Latin.
• Always make sure your intuition agrees with the code you’re about to deploy; it will cause fatal errors otherwise.
• Don’t push production code on Friday.
• Only commit to deadlines for work you’ve done before.
• Use version control.
• Run your theme through a theme checker early in the process, not at the end

Reacting to popular demand, the Developer Meetup will be a once-monthly event we’ll hold alongside the normal meetup. The format is still TBD, but the topics will be more technical and expect a certain amount of experience. Some of the goals identified by the kickoff group include:

• Collaborate on plugins.
• Enhance coding skills.
• “Have others review my code”
• “Become a wicked-ass Javascript developer”
• Talk to people using IDEs to learn how to leverage them better.
• Help the Portland WordPress community to gain some notoriety outside of Portland.
• Reconcile Object-oriented PHP with the WordPress world.
• Discuss best practices for WordPress as an app platform.
• Pick up basic jQuery and programming.
• Learn how to scaling themes for large traffic sites.

From this point forward, Developer events will be announced in our Meetup group. The next is tentatively scheduled for Tuesday, October 16th. Please sign up to stay connected.

Looking forward to seeing the community grow!