Marc Perel – WordPress Developer
Marc Perel, co-owner of Obox Design has been developing themes for WordPress since March 2009 having been a developer for roughly six years in total.
Apart from PHP, this developer uses Coldfusion, Javascript. He also uses Markdown code as required by Posterous and Tumblr.
Looking back at all the developers I’ve already featured, this is the one developer who had a different view to my question asking “If WordPress could be rewritten in any other language, what would it be?”
In my experience, Coldfusion would be a great language to use, it’s great for rapid deployment, and easy to learn which would open up a lot of scope for people who want to be coders, but don’t have the brain for scripts
The company, Obox Design, has released a few WordPress themes in the past year or so, PRESS , InkDrop and Through the Lens to name but a few. Selecta is their only free download and was designed for video blogging users.
The company also released a premium theme framework OCMX Live.
Apart from typing up lines of code during the day, in his Hout Bay office, Marc ironically is quite an outdoor person.
He runs, cycles, goes for walks and says that he hates being indoors and confined to a desk for too long. This developer gets his inspiration by doing exercises such as running / walking.
He says the keys to a productive day at the office is
- six to eight hours sleep
- clearing his head by exercising
- getting to bed by 11pm.
Marc is quite keen to get himself a laptop and see what developing in the outdoors will be like for him. Marc, please let us know how this works out for you. I am personally quite interested to hear what people’s working environments are like and to hear where their inspiration comes from. Nature should be a perfect environment for a developer in my opinion; especially if said developer is required to do creative design work as well.
His most satisfying and rewarding experience while working as WordPress developer:
It’s hard to say, I learn cool things all the time. Each time I learn something new and deploy it, I get the same gratification, although if I had to choose, I’d say releasing the Obox Signature Series Themes was one of my most rewarding experiences.
The development for this project took about 540 hours in total. The final 56 hours I had no rest. When launch day finally arrived, it was SUCH a huge relief, and made us really proud.
Marc’s advice for new or upcoming WordPress developers:
Don’t be shy, don’t whirl the idea round in your head for too long, just do it. And when you do do it, make sure you use as much of the core as possible, 90% of the time, there is a function which does what you need, you just have to go searching, and that way, there will be a lot less bug fixing for you!