Introducing WPCampus Speaker: Guillaume Molter

Guillaume Molter will be joining us at WPCampus 2017 to share WordPress high performance hosting. You can see him in action on Friday, July 14 at 3 p.m.

Tell us about your first website or digital project. What was the spark for you?

I was 14 years old and I designed it using Microsoft Publisher to share with my friends the latest movies I just saw or that cool band I was listening to. Then I “upgraded” to Dreamweaver, then got my first book about HTML and CSS and next my first book about PHP. The spark was the realization that after uploading that HTML file to “The Web,” anyone in the world could see it, it was magical.

Why higher education? 

To be honest the work-life balance:

• being an immigrant I wanted to have enough vacation days to be able to go back home every once in a while but also travel.
• I worked in advertising before that and I don’t think I was more efficient spending 10 or 12 hours a day at work than I am now spending 7. You are just more efficient and productive when you are happy and well rested.
• I love my job and coding in general but I also have a lot of other passions.

Tell us about the topic of your session. Why is it important to you?

I always had a strong interest in sys-admin practices. When I started my job at the School of Public Health, they had switched all our website hosting from a traditional web hosting company to AWS. However, it quickly became clear to me that we were still doing things the old way and not fully leveraging what AWS had to offer. At the same time, our server team was really busy working on a major project so no one had time to look into this because, you know, it was working.

So I volunteered, watched a few lynda.com AWS training videos and started to implement some changes to our infrastructure. It’s been now 2 years that I’ve been working optimizing our infrastructure and workflow to benefit as much as possible from AWS.

Since I knew it was likely that other schools would do the same thing as we did, AWS being the biggest cloud hosting provider, I thought some people could benefit from our experience.

Who do you follow on Twitter? 

For fun: @JonyIveParody, @BoredElonMusk, and @iamdevloper.

For cool stuff: Elon Musk, George Takei, Neil Tyson,‏ Scott Kelly, and whoever is currently in the International Space Station.

Work and Tech: WordCamp Boston, Hakim El Hattab, Eric Meyer, Jon Bishop, Lea Verou, Sara Soueidan, Chris Coyier, Veronica Belmont, Kyle Bragger, Smashing Magazine, and K. Adam White.‏

Why do you ♥️ WPCampus?

Who doesn’t?!

If someone designed a wapuu for you, what would it look like?

It already exists: It’s the Kabuki Wapuu.

What WordPress, or other, tool can you not live without?

WP-CLI, Git, Visual Studio Code, and Dash documentation app.