Please join me in thanking 10up for their Platinum sponsorship of WordCamp Boston 2013. Without their support, our event wouldn’t be possible.

From Jake Goldman, president of 10up:

Here at 10up, WordCamp Boston holds a special place in our heart.

I helped organize Boston’s very first WordCamp in early 2010. Although I’d touched on WordPress as far back as 2006, Boston was my second WordCamp and one of a series of community engagements that led to me to focus on WordPress. One year after that conference, I founded 10up with a vision of an elite agency that would leverage open source in pursuit of a simple mission: make online publishing simple and fun.

Even in our first 5 months, just me and a couple of contractors, 10up stretched its wallet to sponsor Boston’s 2011 camp. I flew back to present and reminisce. Luke Gedeon, contracting with 10up, volunteered the entire weekend. Luke is now coming up on the 2nd anniversary of his employment at 10up, and lead organizes nearby WordCamp Providence.

By the time WordCamp Boston 2012 rolled around, 10up had grown to ~12 full timers, and was helping enterprise corporations like Boston-based Lionbridge, New England staples like Bates College (who would win awards for its WordPress implementation), state programs like Rhode Island Energy, and national publishers like Consumer Reports and TechCrunch. We sponsored WordCamp Boston again in 2012, bringing a few more speakers. I also interviewed a passionate and slightly shy developer named Kelly Dwan at Boston’s 2012 camp. Today, she’s a valued 10upper working with clients like Condé Nast’s Wired, and a leading co-organizer for this very conference!

If you can believe it, we’ve more than tripled our team since 2012’s camp. Today, 10up has forty full time employees, including two engineers living right in Boston. If you haven’t met the talented Dave Ross, who presented on image optimization at the last Boston meet up, find him this weekend.

We had the pleasure of collaborating with Boston’s Filament Group to rebuild GlobalNews.ca on WordPress.com VIP. They have over 1,000 publishers pushing out content every week, across 11 Canadian regions! We collaborated with EMC’s Boston team to redesign EMC InFocus. We rebuilt Boston Magazine, and followed up with Philly Magazine, called out by their executive team as “the only team to launch a big initiative early.” We collaborated with Boston mobile app agency, RaizLabs, to rebuild on WordPress. We even helped the town of Sudbury, Massachusetts get their city website on WordPress.

Along the way, we relaunched some key products for Australia’s largest telecom, built a plug-in for Google in support of their Field Trip product, relaunched Entertainment Weekly’s mobile website on WordPress.com VIP, provided AARP the help they needed to successfully utilize WordPress, and moved Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish to a new online business model. We even managed to invest in our first WordPress product, in collaboration with a partner – check out seoslides.com – I’ll be using it to give my talk this weekend!

We found the time for more than half of our staff – 21 of us – to make core contributions to WordPress. We have more core contributors on staff than many agencies have staff! We also have 2 guest core committers on staff – Helen Hou-Sandi (find her this weekend) and Drew Jaynes. I don’t know if any other agency has one committer. We made some core contributions to jQuery, too. Oh yea, the jQuery Foundation is another client.

As we grow, so too will our contributions to the community, because nothing is more important to all of our fortunes than the success of WordPress. We’ve sponsored dozens of WordCamps since we started. Five of us organize WordCamps or local meet ups. We donate 6 figures worth of time to open source code contributions. I couldn’t be more proud to give back some of our success to Boston’s community as a Platinum tier sponsor, sponsoring Saturday’s lunch. A well fed community is a happy community.

When you’re not being well fed, be sure to find the 7 or so 10uppers wandering the conference, 5 of whom are speaking. If you want to know my secret to vetting software engineers, or just want to see if you can pass my test, check out my talk – 10 Interview Questions. Catch lead BuddyPress & bbPress developer and 10up Director of Engineering John James Jacoby sharing Sweet bbPress Secrets. Learn theme and plug-in UX from Kelly Dwan. Senior Engineer Eric Mann, who just returned from a speaking gig at the the jQuery conference in Russia, will teach PHP Unit Testing. And Senior Engineer John Bloch, a big force behind the TechCrunch’s relaunch last week, will teach you to Stop Worrying and Love the Command Line.

Or just stop by our table and steal some 10up swag. We’re always hiring, always looking for new opportunities, and want to hear your WordPress stories.

Happy camping!