Tales Of The Unexpected

Have you ever thought to yourself: “🤔 I wonder what goes into hosting WordPress?” Maybe you have; maybe, like me, you’ve hosted an instance of WordPress yourself and have some unexpected tales of your own?

Maybe you’re just curious to know what it takes to prevent a site from succumbing to unexpected behaviour and buckling under heavy traffic!?!

This month, Rick Hurst — Senior Full-Stack Developer at Automattic — shares with us some of his “tales of the unexpected,” showing us how he tackles:

• failure points that come up again and again;
• the plugins and custom theme code that don’t work at scale;
• diagnostic approaches that hold up under pressure; and
• the workarounds worth knowing about.

Tuning and Troubleshooting

At Automattic, Rick has spent years supporting, tuning and troubleshooting some of the world’s largest and most high-profile WordPress sites. “The causes of some of the most interesting issues are rarely what you’d expect”, he says.

In his presentation, Rick took us through some of the tips, tricks and gotchas associated with caching, scaling, load balancing, automated provisioning, and a whole lot more!

As ever at our Meetups, it was a great turnout! With several new faces joining in the usual lively post-presentation Q&A conversation! Another great example of why attending BWP events in person is so much more than just the food! 😉 A shout out to our generous sponsor Kinsta for enabling us to provide the food 🙏

Preserved for Posterity

Continuing the trend, our October presentation was another one recorded for those unable to attend 🎉 It’s not a mandatory part of giving a talk; however, if you are a first-time speaker, it will certainly help you get your name out there. So, why not sign up to give a talk, and you too can be the star of your own show! See you next time 😎