An inspirational day at Yoast
Yesterday, friday the 13th, I went to Yoast for a day of coding, sharing knowledge and good old fun. It’s great to see that a company like Yoast can thrive when it’s most know for its WordPress plugin.
Let me tell you the impressions I got from Yoast, its people and a non standard environment.
Who is Yoast?
If you’ve ever made a website using WordPress it’s most likely that you’ve heard of the name Yoast. Joost is best known for his plugin WordPress SEO plugin. As the name suggests it’s a plugin that helps you have kick-ass SEO support on your WordPress website.
Yoast has grown to be a company that provides a lot of plugins for WordPress and started selling premium plugins a while ago. They also do website reviews and are working on releasing a lot of cool stuff later on.
What I did do there?
When I came in I was presented with a place to plug in my laptop (which is starting to feel older being from 2009) so I could start showing some projects I’ve been working on at Merchandise.nl. I showed Joost and his crew a WordPress plugin I had working on for a few days. More information on that pretty soon.
After a bit of talking we came to the subject of Sass and Compass. The developers at Yoast are coding stylesheets, but they’re not using enough Sass and Compass awesomeness to enhance their workflow.
Mini Sass and Compass workshop
Joost and his crew gathered around while I showed them some tricks and awesome Compass features. This really opened their eyes as to what is possible and I could see ideas pop up in their heads, which was a great thing to see.
After showing the great advantages of using Sass and Compass I did a hands-on part where showed them how to set up their development machines for Sass and Compass usage. What made it different was that I tried to solve an other developers’ use-case rather than the problems I face on my own.
It gave me room to try out some new tricks and show the developers how to go ahead and improve their CSS development using Sass and Compass.
Codeception try-outs
After that we got around to try Codeception for testing of websites. It helps you create acceptance tests, functional tests and unit tests.
We didn’t really have a lot of time to try it out, but it looks really promising. Can’t wait to get my hands dirty with it later. I bet I can make way better products using tests like these, not to mention updates on existing sites.
Wrapping up
At four ‘o clock it was time for a beer and reflect on the day. This surely is not the last time I’m visiting and I am sure to be collaborating with Joost on projects in the future.
Sass and Compass workshops
Returning home I got really excited thinking back about the short improvised workshop I gave earlier. I’d love to hold workshops for other development teams in the future.
Get in touch with me if you’re interested in such workshop.