I graduated from the University of Amsterdam in 2014 with a Master’s degree in Philosophy. While studying philosophy, I was already pursuing a career in software development through an internship at an Amsterdam-based startup. There I learned how to be a full-stack web developer, working in an agile team for enterprise customers.
I joined Yoast in September 2014 as a software architect and quickly became responsible for professionalizing the development processes. As Partner and CTO I focus on the bigger picture of Software Development at Yoast, working together with a great team of skilled software engineers. I also spend a lot of time contributing back to WordPress.
You can find me on Twitter @OmarReiss
On November 26, PHP 8 will be released to the world. PHP 8 is set to become one of the most breaking PHP releases in the history of PHP and will bring along unprecedented challenges for legacy PHP codebases, like WordPress, to fix compatibility. Today we bring you a comprehensive report on WordPress and PHP […]
Read: "The 2020 WordPress and PHP 8 compatibility report"
The upcoming 14.0 release of Yoast SEO marks the beginning of a new age for the Yoast SEO plugin. In it, we’ve rewritten our entire metadata engine and we’ve built an abstraction we call indexables. We believe this rewrite will boost WordPress + Yoast SEO as a great platform for SEO for many years to […]
Read: "The exciting new technology that is indexables"
Last September, we released our first digital story; Diversity, inequality, and prejudice; a sociological exploration. This is the first in what will, hopefully, become a small series of stories that really define our mission, company culture, and broader vision. With these stories, we want to explore the possibilities the WordPress block editor has to offer […]
Read: "Digital storytelling in the age of blocks"
In the upcoming weeks, WordPress will choose a UI rendering framework. I’ve heard many claims plugin / theme developers will still be able to use whatever they like, regardless of what WordPress chooses. I think we shouldn’t count on that, nor should we focus on providing interoperability at this point. Instead we should focus first […]
Read: "On the WordPress UI library choice: extensibility over interoperability"Today, we are releasing a new Premium feature for doing internal linking suggestions. Last week, I wrote a post on the SEO blog explaining how we can do this fast and without using up a lot of resources on the server side. Building this would not have been possible without much of the work we […]
Read: "The road to internal linking suggestions in Yoast SEO 4.0"
At WordCamp Milano, I gave a talk with the enticing title Why every developer should read Plato. The short answer to that question: to learn Socratic thinking. In this post, I will share some of my personal journeys as a philosopher in software development. In doing so, I will also introduce a few philosophical concepts that might help you […]
Read: "Why every developer should read Plato"
Git hooks are small executable scripts that provide a way to trigger actions on different points in a git workflow. At Yoast we've found multiple use cases, including regeneration of autoloading classmap, codestyle checks and asset minification.
Read: "Saving time with git hooks"
In the upcoming 3.0 release of Yoast SEO (for WordPress), we’re moving the entire content analysis from the server to the client side. This way our users can get instant feedback on the content they’re writing, while they’re writing it. In the past six months we’ve been working hard on a JavaScript library called YoastSEO.js […]
Read: "YoastSEO.js design decisions"
Today we’re releasing a developer beta for the upcoming release of Yoast SEO for WordPress, containing the long anticipated real time content analysis functionality. The release is provisionally scheduled for november 2nd and will include native support for shortcodes. At the same time we had to break backwards compatibility for multiple filters. That means we really […]
Read: "Yoast SEO: Developer Beta"
