Best. Week. Ever.

Today I’m happy to share some good news. Starting on Tuesday the 14th, I will be employed again! Yes! This week (and to a lesser extent, last week) has been AWESOME. I’m going to be joining the team at Red Tricycle, a startup down in the Bay Area, as the Director of Engineering. The team is still small, but I couldn’t be MORE excited to join them and get the opportunity to grow with them and make a great product. I’m also super excited because I get to work with the awesome folks at WordPress.com VIP again. Love those guys. You can read more about Red Tricycle and what they’ve been up tp at GeekWire or TechCrunch. I’ll be staying in Seattle and going down to the offices in Sausalito every few months. I’m there next week to meet everyone and get started. It seriously feels like Christmas all over again. Monday can’t come soon enough.

I’d like to take a quick aside and reaffirm something you hear a lot in life. Wherever you are, whatever you do: build connections. Do whatever you have to to do it. Go to conferences or meetups, join email lists, follow blogs or bother people on Twitter. And it’s more than just being connected to someone on LinkedIn. Make sure the people in your “network” know what you can do, your skills and that you’re awesome at getting stuff done. They will want to tell other people they know about you, especially if they know you’re looking for a job. One of the greatest things I took away from Cheezburger was not only the connection to my peers at work, but all the people I was able to meet through business, conferences, meetups etc. Do it. You won’t be sorry, and it’s not very hard.

Anyhow, watch this space for updates. I plan to try to write about my experience at my new job and be more vocal about what I’m learning, because it’s going to be a lot.

A Long Journey

As of this Friday, I will no longer be employed at Cheezburger. While incredibly saddened by this, I look back on my time fondly. I worked with amazing people and had the unique opportunity to help build and grow the company from a startup to what it is today. The engineering team we built at Cheezburger is incredibly driven and talented, and will continue to produce amazing work long after I have gone. I will still think in lolspeak, appreciate Dolan and ROFL at pictures of people faceplanting on concrete. I’m looking forward to finding out what the next step of my journey is.

Thanks to all of my wonderful friends and family, and my coworkers for being amazing. I love you guys.

Here’s TOP to play us out:

WordCamp Seattle

So, I’m going to be making my public speaking (at least as far as WordPress goes) debut this weekend at WordCamp: Seattle! I’ll be talking about a portion of our theme that we released as a plugin, called CheezCap. It creates a custom control panel, that allows you to insert text, code, toggles and other stuff into your theme’s source code for easy control over features, dynamic content, etc. I’m pretty excited about WordCamp, and nervous about speaking, but I get to put LOLcats into my slides so it’s all good.

If you’re in the area, you should definitely check out the event, I think there are still some tickets left. Check out the other speakers too, because they are all awesome! Hope to see you there

Salutations

Hi. My name is Toby McKes. I am currently a WordPress front-end developer for Cheezburger, Inc., the creators of FAIL Blog, I Can Has Cheezburger? and a few other sites you might have heard of.

My primary purpose for reviving this blog is to be able to talk about WordPress stuff and to… well, blog. I feel like I would be making a huge mistake if I continued to neglect having a WordPress blog I could call my own. I’ll probably test some themes and plugins I’m working on here as well. Who knows what could happen. I plan mostly to talk about things that come up in the course of my daily dealings with WordPress, LOLCats and the rest of the randomness that makes up a typical day.

That’s about all I have to say for now. Stay tuned.