Getting to Know Julien Melissas

julien-melissas
Julien Melissas is a web developer from Asheville, NC, with a passion for clean, efficient code, and re-doing things until they’re just right. Julien loves to learn about new technologies and development workflows. He has been working with WordPress for 5+ years now and has grown quite fond of it.

Julien is a co-founder and technical director at Craftpeak, a creative agency in Asheville. Formally he was a freelancer and independent contractor for companies all over the US, where he built tons of custom WordPress themes and other solutions tailored to the client’s needs. He’s on the Roots development team, and was also an organizer of the 2014 WordCamp in Asheville, NC. Julien loves JavaScript, information architecture open source, the Roots/Sage starter theme, the Advanced Custom Fields plugin, mobile-first web design, and Pit Bulls. When Julien is not in front of the screen working on building beautiful websites or that “next big thing”, you can find him making music, cooking, wrenching on a car since he’s had since 15, or out in the yard gardening with his girlfriend, Hana, and their dogs, Dina and Wilbur.

WCATL 2015 Session – Using Roots/Sage 8.0.0 – A Modern Developers Starter Theme

Roots has always offered awesome tools for theme developers who want a great head start and aren’t afraid to try the latest and greatest. The latest version of the very popular Roots starter theme has been renamed to Sage and now has even more magic to make your life better when developing WordPress themes. We’ll cover some of the newest changes in 8.0.0, including:

  • How to install Sage and it’s requirements
  • Some of the tools that are used (and how they work)
  • How to use Sage
  • The name change to Sage and the future of Roots

We’ll also talk about some caveats, requirements, and how to get help and contribute.

Please note: you will get the most out of this talk if you come with some prior knowledge or experience with creating custom WordPress themes, using CSS preprocessors as well as some of the latest front-end tools like Bower, gulp, and Grunt. Or, if you want to come and learn about those things that’s ok too! Keep in mind, this talk is just as much for designers as it is for developers, so devs, don’t be afraid to get up and walk over to the designer track!