Official Blog

Rachel Baker on December 16, 2014

On December 16-17, the third annual BackboneConf will take place in Cambridge, MA. BackboneConf is conference about building real-time applications for the web, with a focus on the Backbone.js library.

I will be giving a talk on the WordPress JSON REST API. I have been actively involved in the REST API project over the past year, and I am excited to share our efforts with a new community. In my presentation I cover some of the challenges building an API for 23% of the web brings, and what the project means to the future of WordPress.

If you are interested in getting involved with the WordPress JSON REST API proejct or working for 10up pull me aside.

Rachel Baker brings engineering expertise to 10up

Rachel Baker on August 14, 2013

Oh hey, I didn’t see you there. My name is Rachel Baker, and I am overjoyed to be joining 10up as the newest Senior Strategic Engineer. I am the third 10upper located in the Windy City of Chicago, IL.

My fascination with web development began in 1996, when I learned HTML and FTP from a unique writing course at the University of Illinois in Chicago. I began teaching myself anything I could from the college computer lab including computer networking and CGI scripting, and landed a job doing IT support for the failed Kozmo.com. I started using WordPress for a personal site using the timeless Kubrick theme in 2005, but focused on Drupal for my freelance client work. Through a strange twist of fate, a friend and fellow web engineer gave me his ticket to the first WordCamp Chicago in 2009. After surrounding myself with the amazing WordPress community I turned my full-time and attention to WordPress. Since than, I’ve worked in a few WordPress and BuddyPress core contributions, was a Dev Bootcamp mentor, spoke at a few WordCamps, and even released some popular plug-ins and themes.

Over the past 4 years, I have led engineering on WordPress projects for start-ups, small-business, non-profits, and large enterprise clients. My desire to be a polyglot has taken me to other back-end platforms such as Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, Zend, CodeIgniter and Laravel; but I always come back to WordPress, largely because it’s just so friendly for the publishers and content managers that interact with the software every day. I am really looking forward to being a part of the great work being done here at 10up, and learning from my super smart co-workers.