WordCamp Sacramento Speaker Interview With Justin Sainton

Justin Sainton

Justin Sainton is the founder of Zao, an agency based near Portland, Oregon. As a core contributor to WordPress and lead developer for the WP eCommerce project, Justin believes passionately in the philosophy of open source software. Working exclusively with WordPress and an array of other open-source technologies, Justin and Zao have provided creative and effective solutions for a wide variety of companies and associations ranging from Amazon to PayPal to Pitney Bowes. When not building the Zao empire or spending time with his beautiful wife and four incredible kids, Justin can be found enjoying the best espresso in Portland.

WordCamp Session Title

Extending and Improving WooCommerce: A Tale of Poor Performance, Turned Around

Why Is This Important?

I think it’s important because — especially at scale — WooCommerce can be pretty poorly performing, and extending it (which developers, either through plugins or their own code, will do) can sometimes compound the performance issues. Knowing how best to extend WooCommerce and fine-tune the performance should be helpful for developers.

How Did You Discover WordPress?

Over 10 years ago now, I found WordPress as I was investigating different options for non-profit client’s CMS. It was down to WordPress, Joomla, and TYPO3. Needless to say, choosing WordPress was one of my better life decisions.

How Do You Use WordPress?

I use WordPress in a lot of ways — importantly, I use it for blogging! It seems less and less popular to say it , but WordPress IS a really great blogging platform 🙂

Beyond that, we use it at Zao to manage our website, our client’s website, we use it to launch apps with the WP-API and multi-mullion dollar stores using different eCommerce plugins.

How Has WordPress Impacted You?

It has changed it all for the better! Had I not found WordPress over ten years ago, it’s not terribly likely that I’d be running Zao, a thriving agency in Portland, or working for myself, enjoying the quality of life that I do.

What Do You Do When Not Working?

Love any sport with a board, drinking coffee, playing the piano, and playing with my wife and kids!

What Is Your Favorite Candy?

Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.