Ivan Ružević is Senior WordPress developer and the second speaker from Infinum, a design, and development agency from Zagreb, Croatia.
Before we begin, Ivan, could you introduce yourself for those who don’t know who you are?
I’m 28-year-old professional web developer with more than ten years of design and development experience. Today I’m a Senior WordPress developer at Infinum. My specialty is frontend development, but I have worked with a large variety of technologies and languages. I started as a designer back in 2007 but changed my focus to programming. I mainly work with frontend languages like JS and CSS/SASS, but I’m also highly comfortable with backend technologies like PHP (Laravel, Symfony, Magento, WordPress). WordPress has been my focus since version 2.8, and I have been developing for it ever since.
You started your career as a designer, what made you switch your focus to programming?
I started as a designer because it gave me insight into the creative and artistic part of the business. That was fun for a while, but I noticed finished designs started piling up without ever being implemented. In my first year of college, I was introduced to HTML and CSS, and that’s when my passion was born. Shortly after I started coding and the first project I worked on was my portfolio. Today I have over 50 different portfolio versions in the archive; some finished and some just proof of concept. Another benefit of being a developer is the salary since developers usually earn more money than designers 😀
How it all started with you and WordPress, and what are your thoughts about WordPress community?
I started using WordPress when I realized that all my clients want to edit the finished pages by themselves, so I did some digging and came across WordPress. After that, all my side work concentrated on WordPress and making my clients happy. I used to work at EPH (Europa Press Holding) as a developer/designer where we developed all side projects using WP (Dosi, Bestseller, Gloria, Dobra hrana, Dom&Dizajn, etc.). A colleague (Marko Banušić) helped me a lot and taught me some cool tricks and the rest is history, a lot of hard work and a lot of sleepless nights.
I think the WP community in Croatia is great. We have a lot of friendly and experienced developers, with large support via social media like Facebook Groups. You can ask a question, and someone will certainly help you.
Does use of Webpack with WordPress has many advantages over other tools, and how hard is to set it up with WordPress?
I have a “love-hate relationship” with Webpack. It is not so hard to set up once you have that “aha” moment. But it offers a lot of advantages compared to traditional build tools such as compatibility, plugins, and speed. There are some rumors that WP admin is going to be on React at some point, and I would really like to see Webpack there as well.
It would be stupid to set up Webpack and all other build-related tools from scratch when starting a new project. So we created a WP Boilerplate which sets up the entire project so you can start developing in less than 5 minutes.
Did you get your ticket?
If you haven’t already, get your ticket for WordCamp Zagreb today. Tickets are priced at 20€ (around 150 HRK) which will give you entrance to the conference, (first) access to workshops on Friday and to Contributor day on Sunday. You will also get the drinks, lunch, incredible t-shirt and other cool swag from our sponsors.