Speaker Interview: Sal Ferrarello

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

  • Sal Ferrarello

    How and when did you get started with WordPress?

    In 2009, I was working at an agency and our CMS of choice was DotNetNuke on Windows IIS servers. We wanted to move to a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), as these matched our strengths better (and the hosting was cheaper). The lead developer at the time steered us toward WordPress, which was a great choice. (Thanks Bala.)

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

    Last year in Lancaster the topic of the PHP utility composer came up and it was completely foreign to me. Between sessions, members of the community took the time to introduce me to the use cases for it. This conversation started the process which led to me presenting “Getting Started with Composer” at WordCamp Philly 2015. (Thanks Tracy and Doug.)

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

    I hope my talk helps avoid the DNS mistakes I’ve made in the past and gives attendees the confidence to modify DNS, fearlessly.

    What are you currently learning?

    I’m working on improving my Automated Testing, PHP Object Oriented Programming, and JavaScript.

    Do you know what a stroopie is? No googling.

    A stroopie is a groupie for strings. A stroopie programmer treats all their variables as strings, for example a number would be a string like “-2”, an array would be a string with commas like “5,6,7”, and ah…wait…no?

    Based on my wife shaking her head as she reads over my shoulder, I assume I’ve missed the mark. In her defense she didn’t break the rules and Google it, she used Bing.

    What did you do during the blizzard?

    This is the first year I’ve owned a snowblower, so I snowblowed (snowblew?) a lot of snow. Afterward, I played in the snow with my two boys (7 and 4 years old).

    Where can we find you online?

    Blog: http://salferrarello.com
    WordPress Consulting: http://ironco.de
    Twitter: https://twitter.com/salcode
    GitHub: https://github.com/salcode
    Family Pictures: http://ferrarello.com

Sal Ferrarello‘s session is titled How to Avoid Mucking Up Your DNS. View the full schedule.

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