10up Europe

Lukas is a typical IT geek who has been working in the field of development for over 14 years. Everything started in a small, Polish town, when his parents bought him his first Commodore C64 computer. Without any doubts, Lukas knew that computers would become his biggest passion. At the age of 14 he created his first ‘database’ application that was an easy phone book. Two years later his first PC computer helped him to develop the hobby.

In 2001, Lukas started his professional career as a network administrator and was quickly hired as an engineer for big Polish IT companies. He needed the next five years to work up the nerve to follow his dreams to become self-employed. With his Master Degree in Science and strong experience under his belt, he decided to start his own business. Over the next 9 years, Lukas created, developed, and serviced applications including financial and sales systems and web portals with over 1,000,000 viewers per month, using technologies like LAMP, Java and ASP.net.

After growing tired of being a manager, salesman, employee, and employer he took a position with Timely Network Inc., maker of the All In One Event Calendar for WordPress, which has more than 100,000 active installs. In searching for more opportunities, Lukas came upon 10up.

A self described “creator rather than a craftsman,” he is rarely seen way from his computers. When he does step away, he can be found traveling the world with his wife, walking his dog Rosia (that he fell in love with at a dog shelter), or watching American television shows.

Tinkering with design, video, interactive animation and the wonders of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, Barry’s career started in 2005 designing and developing sites with WordPress. As an independent consultant for over a decade, his focus moved from development to digital product design and back again. His biggest projects have focused on helping design mobile applications for some of the largest European online retail, food delivery and online publishing companies.

Today Barry specializes in creating bespoke WordPress themes and plugins with a knack for simplicity, usability and multi-language sites.

He studied product design and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from the Maastricht Academy of Fine Arts. Coming from the south of the Netherlands, Barry now lives in Berlin, Germany, where in his free time he enjoys spending time with his kid and the hustle and bustle of big city life (and the German autobahn).

After a chance discovery of Microsoft Frontpage on his mum’s old Windows 98 computer, Cameron began building his first websites at 12, laying the foundations for graduating from Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, Scotland, at 19 with a BSc Computing for Internet & Multimedia.

After spending time with a few companies in oil and gas, he eventually joined his regional news publisher. It was there that a passion for WordPress began. In 2014 as part of the rebuild of The Press and Journal website, he helped construct one of the UK’s first two-way content flows between WordPress and their editorial system, which proved to be one of the formative tools for digital-first workflows. This was then adopted across the other newspapers in the business and became the catalyst for a single large WordPress network powering over 100 websites. He takes a great sense of pride in guiding and mentoring friends and colleagues to replace almost everything he built in the subsequent years, before a – rejected! – pull request brought him to 10up.

When Cameron isn’t being the company’s resident Wookiee, he can be found sinking hours into a book or two, listening to music, working his way through Star Trek again on Netflix, or playing an immersive RPG on his PS4.

Elliott’s passion for web development began when he was 15 years old and he’s never looked back since. Elliott is 10up’s first UK-based employee; before joining 10up he led a development team at a local web agency where he was introduced to WordPress.

Elliott graduated with a BSc honours degree in Computer Science. He loves a good challenge, especially when it involves a deep dive into WordPress’s core. He often contributes to open source projects, develops his own plugins once in a while, and has earned his fair share of badges for his contributions on StackExchange. An aficionado of the popular Easy Digital Downloads WordPress module, he’s both a recognized regular contributor and an extension developer.

When he’s not working with PHP, he likes to tinker with databases and APIs. Elliott also has hands on experience with JavaScript, in particular jQuery and Backbone. He’s often referred to as being “obsessed with neat code,” and is especially particular when it comes to missing indentation.

When he’s “off the grid” he can most likely be caught eating a curry or playing his favorite (and only) sport, Badminton.

Eugene’s adventures in engineering started in the late 90’s when he learned Pascal. After his time with Pascal, he worked with Delphi, C++, and C#, eventually digging into PHP in 2009. Eugene spent some time with frameworks like Symfony and Zend, before finding the platform he decided he wanted to concentrate on in 2011: WordPress.

Since 2011, Eugene has been a freelancer (in the top 10% for PHP on StackOverflow), Senior WordPress Developer at an agency, and a Lead Developer at WPMU Dev. He has an affinity for normalized, maintainable, clean code, and clearly loves a challenge.

In his spare time, he likes a good chess match, skiing in the winter, and “building his own death star to rule the world”.

Evan has been working full-time with WordPress for clients ranging from small firms to international brands since 2010. Brimming with the experience of several small agencies, he has cultivated a robust skillset over the years, with experience in nearly every role related to web development.

In addition to creating bespoke client-centric solutions, Evan also has a unique background in product development with experience in developing and maintaining distributed software used by thousands. His passion for products and desire to give back fuel his own open-source projects as well as his contributions to others.

As an aspiring polyglot and student of software development, he embraces a life of never-ending learning, craftsmanship, and refinement.

James has been interested in the web since the mid-1990’s when his Dad bought a family computer and he worked out how to plug in a modem. Discovering the “view source” link in a browser opened up a new world and he quickly learned how the structure of a page was made.

Despite a small setback when he took a computer apart, rebuilt it, and strangely it stopped working, over the next ten years, he taught himself how to program, build websites and discovered WordPress. After helping a few local businesses with their sites, he realized this was the beginning of a career began working full-time as a freelance developer.

Following this, James was invited to join a Brighton-based agency as a WordPress developer where he worked on (literally) hundreds of projects of all sizes and complexity, providing support, consultancy and engineered innovative solutions to complex challenges. Additionally, he was responsible for defining and introducing processes and mentoring and training colleagues.

Of many notable accomplishments, two that he is particularly proud of are: helping a global brand to significantly reduce page load times through an analytical investigation of their infrastructure and the implementation of a series of improvements; and building a bespoke Multisite setup to allow sub-sub-sub-sub-directory (you get the picture) mapping through a custom ‘sunrise’ process. The clients’ in-house team had spent months trying to accomplish this, and it was gratifying to see how happy they were once this was complete.

James never stops learning and loves to explore new technologies and being intellectually challenged. He has given talks at WordCamp Brighton and Manchester and local WordPress meetups and has a keen interest in WordPress Multisite, infrastructure, and process automation.

In his spare time, James spends time with his two (soon to be three!!) children, swimming, reading and working on side projects. And playing with Lego—who doesn’t love Lego?

Lucy became interested in computers during her early teenage years: the time where you couldn’t connect to the internet and speak on the phone simultaneously. Although she loved everything about technology, the field of art also piqued her interest, and it wasn’t until her early 20’s when she decided which direction to take.

After successfully completing her studies in filming and photography, Lucy decided to also study web development. She took her first job as a junior developer at a Belgian agency, where she learned alongside a team of experienced web engineers. She later moved on to work with a Spanish agency as a web developer for 7 years. There she got involved in several high profile projects for well known clients. It was during that time that Lucy also became familiar with WordPress: falling in love with the CMS and the amazing community behind it.

Today, Lucy is an active member in the WordPress community. She strongly believes that contributing to the platform is the best way to keep the open source project alive, and that consistent involvement is one of the best ways to continue learning and staying apprised of the latest WordPress updates. To date, Lucy has released a few plugins on the WordPress repository, organizes a local meetup in Valencia, Spain, and occasionally helps out in the WordPress forums.

When she’s not coding, Lucy spends most of her time with her husband and daughter. She also likes cooking, watching Netflix, and loves running to clear her mind.

Marco Pereirinha received a Master’s in Information Management from Aveiro University, Portugal. While obtaining his degree, he was responsible for the digital department of his family’s advertisement company. For 15 years, he led a team of designers, copywriters, and developers, as well as dealt with clients and suppliers. It was during this period that Pereirinha’s CMS was born—a not-so-open-source project. But, all the duties of running a department didn’t leave him much time to keep this project evolving. In the late ’00s, he reached the breaking point, and his professional path started to change: WordPress appeared as a natural solution and embracing the open source movement was a gained bonus.

After setting up the kickoff of WordPress Porto Community back in 2012, Marco became a co-organizer of WordCamp Porto 2013 and 2016 and gave a talk at WordCamp Lisbon 2015. He is also an active member of the Portuguese community, not only as a frequent speaker at local meetups, but also as a support provider at WordPress forums. On Marco’s WordPress you’ll find some plugins Marco has released and maintains.

Outside of the coding world, what he really loves is to walk Lucas — the family dog — with his little daughter and have a loud laugh with his family and friends. He also enjoys live music and likes to freeze moments with his camera. He lives in a quiet village near Porto, in the charming North part of Portugal.

Mustafa is a software developer with 10+ years of experience. His interest in the web started in the early 2000s, while he was playing a browser-based online game. While in high school, he published his very first websites, which he built using old-school website builders and GeoCities, of course.

Around 2008, and while facing some struggles with Joomla, he discovered WordPress, started his journey on it and never looked back. He is passionate about making large-scale websites with WordPress and trying new technologies.

Mustafa loves to spend some of his spare time contributing back to WordPress. On top of being a WordPress Core Contributor and plugin author, he’s a general translation editor for the Turkish locale and an active member of the local WordPress community.

Other than being passionate about his work, he loves archery, coffee, traveling, and listening to music. In fact, he’s probably, scrobbling on last.fm right now.

Sergio has been around computers since the age of three. His first computer was an Atari 600XL, followed by an Atari 130XE where later, with the help of his father, he started developing a computer game based on the cartoons of the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote.

After graduating from the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Lisbon with a degree in Computer Science, Sergio started working as a Java developer for banks, insurance companies, and telcos. Always passionate about the web, in 2011 he started working full-time as a web developer and discovered WordPress.

Before joining 10up, Sergio spent four years as a WordPress consultant, working on projects for local broadcasting corporations, retailers, media and newspaper companies.

Sergio is an open-source advocate. You’ll find some of his contributions on GitHub and in the WordPress repository where he has released and maintains some plugins. He is also involved in the Portuguese WordPress community through his attendance at meetups and WordCamps. He was also one of the co-organizers of WordCamp Lisbon 2017.

Outside of work, when he is not spending time with his wife and two kids, is always finding ways to expand his knowledge. He also likes to hang out with friends, play board games, travel and watch TV series and movies.

Having finished his BSc, Shah left the UK to travel through Asia. While in Indonesia he worked for a language school developing courses based on Computer Aided Learning systems.

Upon returning to the UK, he started an MSc in Computer Science which resulted in his first job in the industry at a software house specialising in building logistic systems for the petroleum industry. Here he developed his skills in C++ and Java and learnt new skills in SQL, DB’s & Informix NewEra. Working with corporate clients gave him the opportunity to develop his client communication and leadership within the team. Eventually he left to join a new software company before going into freelance work.

A chance meeting at an antenatal class with a graphic designer resulted in the his first introduction to WordPress and web development. Skills such as PHP and Javascript now became his core skills. Together they built WordPress based sites for their clients. During this part of his journey he also built sites in some of the other CMS’s available but it was always clear to him that WordPress was the standout CMS.

After several years he started to miss the inspiration of being around his developer peers and hence started working at a Brighton based web agency. Here he developed into a Senior WordPress Developer and became the Tech Lead to one of the world’s largest drinks manufacturers, which involved him being responsible for a team of developers and over 100 sites. A fantastic experience but he never lost the ambition to work with the very best developers in the industry, which has now lead to the opportunity to progress that ambition by working at 10up.

During his spare time Shah cherishes his time with his wife and son, the motivation which drives everything he does. Having played rugby and boxed in school and college he still loves watching and going to sporting events.

By the time József was thirteen, his curiosity led him to create his own web page. He knew that this was the beginning of something great. After he finished his studies, József moved to a hosting/IT solutions company. He was introduced to WordPress and his interest in Cybersecurity peaked. After he successfully received his Certified Ethical Hacker certificate, he transitioned to a company where he could combine his system engineering skills with his security-oriented mind. He suddenly became a Security Engineer.

József has mastered skills like vulnerability scans, server and end-user security, security best practices, and threat modeling. He enjoys hobby projects and learning new methodologies.

When he is not in front of his computer, József likes to hit the gym or cook. He is a big fan of eating and enjoying local handcrafted beers. He also loves playing video games—specifically Dota 2 and Hearthstone.

Michele started building websites as a freelancer in 2003 in Italy, while attending University and has been building websites as a hobby for over 15.

His interest in design and development grew in step, at that period the two figures coincided and, moved by the interest in human-computer interaction, he became a professional full-stack developer.

He understood the potential of WordPress already from the early releases and a few years later joined NTTData as WordPress Specialist where he has been able to work on the largest Italian enterprise projects (telecommunications company, banks, media and e-commerce for large retailers).

When he’s not working on code, you can usually find Michele playing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Grappling, traveling and spending time with his family in Tuscany.