Speaker Spotlight: Michael Toppa

Mike Toppa is the Director of the web application team for Penn’s School of Medicine Information Services. He has been coding for the web since the days of Mosaic and Netscape 1.0. His 16 years in web application development range from academic experience at Georgetown, Stanford, and Penn, to dot com experience at Ask Jeeves and E*Trade. Mike is the author of several free WordPress plugins and assists in managing web sites for several non-profit organizations. Although his current responsibilities are in management, he maintains a passion for code and is an advocate of Agile coding practices.

Mike will be giving a presentation in the Developer Track titled: Applying Agile Coding Techniques to WordPress Plugin Development

What are you speaking about at WordCamp Philly?
The latest version of my “Shashin” plugin is designed to let you mix and match photos and videos in WordPress, from Picasa, Flickr, YouTube, etc. I will present it as a case study of the possibilities and challenges with applying “clean code” techniques to WordPress plugin development. Clean code “always looks like it was written by someone who cares” and “reads like well written prose.” It is all about writing software that is optimized for maintainability, reliability, and future enhancement. I’ll discuss the use of meaningful names, the single responsibility principle, dependency inversion, the facade pattern, unit testing, and how to apply them to WordPress plugin development.
What is your favorite thing about the city of Philadelphia?
There’s a t-shirt that sums it up: “I’m not angry, I’m from Philly”
Why do you love WordPress?
The gigantic community that provides themes and plugins for WordPress let you make it do almost anything you could want, and look like anything you want, and you don’t have to be a programmer to enjoy it all.