Speaker Interview: Russell Heimlich

In the run up to WordCamp Lancaster, we will be featuring some of our speakers here on the website.


  • Russell Heimlich

    How and when did you get started with WordPress?

    I started with WordPress by figuring out how to build a blog for my website in my spare time. I never had an intention to blog, I was just tinkering. So way back in 2007 (http://www.russellheimlich.com/blog/the-first-one/) after I had a blog up and running I decided I should start blogging. From there I was hired at the Pew Research Center in 2009 and was tasked with figuring out which CMS the company should move to. I had this crazy idea of building the sites using WordPress and in 2014 we finished our goal with all of the Pew Research Center websites on WordPress and using responsive themes. https://twitter.com/kingkool68/statuses/433672978870853632

    If you’ve attended WordCamp Lancaster before, what’s your fondest memory of it? If not, what do you like most about WordCamps?

    I love talking with other attendees at WordCamp Lancaster. The people are down to earth and friendly.

    What do you hope attendees will take away from your talk?

    I hope attendees will understand that their site search can be a lot better for their visitors. There are lots of different ways of varying difficulties to make search better.

    What are you currently learning?

    I’m focused on performance and caching by running all of my personal sites through a CDN. Serving sites using HTTP/2 is resulting in a huge performance boost in download times thanks to streaming the requests through one connection to the server. It’s a lot of geeky fun.

    Do you know what a stroopie is? No googling.

    A Starship Trooper themed whoopie pie. Duh.

    What did you do during the blizzard?

    Shoveled snow. Played outside. Napped. Repeat.

    Where can we find you online?

    https://www.google.com/search?q=Russell+Heimlich


Russell Heimlich‘s session is titled Searching for a Better Search. View the full schedule.

WordCamp Lancaster will be held on March 5th with Contributor Day on March 6th. Get your ticket today.