Teaching and mentorship come naturally to dog-lover and Developer Outreach Manager at Pantheon, Tessa Kriesel. She wears many hats in her life — all with sass and finesse — including instructor for Girl Develop It, lead organizer for WordCamp Minneapolis, and founder of Outspoken Women and Coders of TMRW.
Tessa has spoken on many topics including helping beginners with workflow, mentorship, teaching on configuration management, and shedding light on continuous integration and deployment. She has also been a panelist on a wide range of topics at Conferences and Meetups.
When Tessa isn’t working on her development chops or mentoring junior developers, she is using her extroverted super hero skills to make people feel welcome and included at whatever event she attends.
We’re thrilled to have Tessa onboard as a speaker at WordCamp Sacramento 2018 asked a few questions to help you get to know more about her. Check out our mini interview with Tessa below:
What is the topic of your WordCamp talk?
Building WordPress Themes With Advanced Custom Fields (ACF)
Why do you think this is important?
People should attend if they are interested in learning more about how to build themes for WordPress, specifically using Advanced Custom Fields. Advanced Custom Fields allows you to add additional meta information to various posts, pages & more and use them in an organized way in your theme.
What’s your WordPress origin story?
I was already doing Joomla development and someone needed a WordPress site so I started digging in and loved it. However, the story of how I got involved with Joomla, and open source, is quite interesting.
Back in 2007, I was obsessed with Guitar Hero. I wanted to setup a site where people would be ranked and could compete against one another online. The site would need user account capabilities and a way to enter scores to validate against the other player and rank them in a bracketed hierarchy. I figured out that I could get most of the way with a CMS, and Joomla had recently been founded and seemed promising.
I had never worked with PHP or MySQL and was still fairly new to web development in general, but I dug in and was able to get 90% there. I recruited a fellow gamer that was a PHP developer to help me complete the rest of the bracket system. Somehow, users started coming in, very quickly. I wish I could remember the number of users we had by the time I walked away, but I know it was well into the thousands.
The best part was that Activision recognized our mission and asked us to start posting our tournaments in their online community. I was stoked. I never imagined the site would get as far as it did, and then to be recognized by ACTIVISION, the creator of my favorite video game! They were super supportive and sent me tons of GH swag like guitar stickers, pins, sweat bands and more.
How has WordPress impacted your world?
WordPress is a major part of my career and has been for over 5 years. I currently work at Pantheon, a managed WordPress host, and it’s my job to ensure that developers are successful on our platform, which means digging into WordPress (& Drupal) daily. Without WordPress, I likely would not have been as successful in my career as I am today.
You can connect with Tessa further at:
Get Your Ticket ASAP!
WordCamp Sacramento 2018 sold out in 2015, 2016, and 2017, and we do expect it to sell out again. Be sure to get your WordCamp Tickets asap to secure you spot at this awesome event! Tickets are only $40 (thanks to our generous sponsors) and include:
- Two full days of Beginner Tracks, walking new users through how to use WordPress.
- Two mixed tracks of sessions on Saturday.
- Two mixed tracks of sessions on Sunday.
- A Happiness Bar — our version of a help desk, open throughout the event so you can get help with your site and get your questions answered.
- An opportunity to network with and meet sponsors, speakers, and other WordPress community members, including business owners, designers, developers, agency owners, bloggers, copywriters, freelancers, site owners, and more.
- Refreshing drinks throughout the entire event.
- A WordCamp Sacramento 2018 t-shirt.
- A catered lunch on Saturday.
- A networking reception Saturday immediately following the event.
- Snacks on Sunday.