Yoast Care fund: An interview with Luca Tumedei

Today we’re interviewing Luca Tumedei, who received a nomination for our Care fund from Scott Kingsley Clark. Scott nominated him for everything he contributes to the community. In addition to his involvement in WordCamps and his core contributions, Luca is also the author and maintainer of wp-browser. This project helps people test WordPress plugins, themes and websites. Let’s find out more about Luca and his contributions to WordPress!

Nominator Scott Kingsley Clark: “Luca has been a core contributor, plugin developer, WordCamp organizer and speaker, and a huge help to many people who need automated testing for WordPress-related projects. He’s changed how I write tests for the better, and there’s a ton of awesome work.”

Let’s get to know Luca Tumedei!

Thank you for those lovely words, Scott. Now, let’s get to know this Luca better by asking him some questions:

Hi, Luca. So tell us, what do you do?

I’m a freelance WordPress and PHP developer and consultant specializing in backend development and automated testing of WordPress products and plugins. I’ve got a deep-seated passion and interest in automation and got into test-driven development after my first bug cost me real money. At that very moment, I started looking for a smarter way to write code and have not stopped yet.

Why did you choose WordPress?

At first, because that was what I had to work with. As I landed more and more works related to WordPress, I started working on the wp-browser project and contacted companies willing to adopt automated testing. After that, I became fascinated with the intricacies and challenges of working with it, and with the ever-present legacy code.

What would WordPress look like in your perfect world?

More componentized, with a Core-managed autoloading and building system. WordPress is not an easy beast to tame and adapt to different tasks as a PHP application framework. I do not think there’s a “perfect” PHP framework out there, but what frameworks are considered good have two salient features: they are easy to take apart and reuse in discreet ways. They centralize the management of dependencies and build processes.

Who is your WordPress mentor?

Jonathan Brinley and Daniel Dvorkin. When I started working with larger agencies on larger projects, I met the two of them at Modern Tribe. Like me, they were backend developers there, and the amount of knowledge and insights I got from the two of them is just immense. They provided me guidance and clean and honest feedback that I cherish to this day.

What contribution or moment are you most proud of?

Not really a Core contribution yet related to WordPress. I was in Paris, France, to attend a PHP conference. On stage was a developer going through a presentation about WordPress applications testing and how to get into it. On the second slide, he mentioned the wp-browser and explained how he used it to test all their products. He got a well-deserved standing ovation at the end. It just dawned on me, right then, how my work could really help and was no more a “private” thing.

What would you love to do in the future?

As pretentious as that might sound: make testing part of the broader WordPress culture. Push for more accessible to use, more integrated, ready-to-run testing tools allowing people to start testing WordPress applications quickly. I want to demystify the testing practice and remove the gatekeeping and elitism, often discouraging and scaring well-intentioned developers away from it.

Thank you for this interview, Luca. And for all of your contributions to the WordPress community! If you’re reading this and know someone like Luca who deserves a nomination for our Care fund, just go to our Yoast Care page to nominate them.