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Rémy has been heading most of our feature developments for WP Rocket. We thought it would be nice to introduce him properly. The WP Rocket team is a tight knit group. Our company, WP Media, puts people first, products second. Here’s a glimpse at the Rocketeer building some of the key features our users enjoy.
Meet Rémy, Our Lead WP Rocket Developer
Rémy started playing around with PHP in high school. His first pet projects were around the PHP BB forum. He discovered WordPress during his early college years. Of course, it won’t come as a surprise that his first blog was a WordPress.
When Rémy isn’t writing solid code, he is providing great insights to improve the overall experience of the plugin…or petting his Corgi Cookie.
After finishing his associate’s degree, Rémy became a freelance developer. His clients were overwhelmingly using WordPress as a CMS so it became his specialty. He cultivated a knack for creating custom themes. Ultimately, Rémy attended his first WordCamp conference where he met the WP Rocket team (at the time 2 people). The team noticed his work and decided that Rémy had to be part of the team.
From Support Team Member To Lead Developer
Sometimes, life as a freelance developer can get pretty dull. Rémy was bored with the scale of the projects coming in. It all felt a bit stale to him. So when the opportunity to join a young startup specialized in WordPress came, he jumped on it!
Remy thus became a bit of a hybrid: 50% support team, 50% caching plugin developer. He was 100% remote though, like the rest of the team! After a short move across the ocean, from France to Canada, he became the first North American transplant.
I knew I was moving to Canada and thought it would be an awesome opportunity to work with people whose work I respected.
His role evolved gradually and he quickly became a vital part of the development side of things. Version 2.7 became his first official version. The team was very much impressed with his skills and decided to offer him the job of WP Rocket lead developer. It was a natural shift.
From Theme Developer To Plugin Developer: A Whole New Mindset
Shifting from theme development to plugin development was a brand new adventure. The volume of people you impact when creating and maintaining a plugin’s features is incredible.
In his own words: I work on things that affect more than 500,000 websites.
The way you approach plugin development is very different from theme development. The scale puts things in perspective when you work on WP Rocket.
Biggest WP Rocket Feature According To Rémy
According to Rémy, the feature he is the proudest of developed is the pre-caching of the website based on the sitemap.xml. Basically, it’s a feature that allows WP Rocket to get all the URLs listed in the sitemap file to then pass them on to be charged asynchronously. This basically creates a pre-charging system that runs in the background. This way, your entire website can be charged to make it load way faster!
So what’s next for Remy? Well, check out our public roadmap!
