{"id":5882,"date":"2014-06-19T11:00:44","date_gmt":"2014-06-19T16:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wpengine.com\/?p=5882"},"modified":"2025-05-12T15:47:18","modified_gmt":"2025-05-12T20:47:18","slug":"announcing-wp-engine-alpha-labs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wpengine.com\/case-studies\/announcing-wp-engine-alpha-labs\/","title":{"rendered":"Announcing WP Engine Alpha Labs"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the reasons we all love WordPress is because it lets us create amazing new projects in ways we never could before. Projects that enable us to share new ideas, new initiatives, new messages, new media, open for business to the entire world, with the potential to accumulate millions of interactions in the years to come.<\/p>\n

For us at WP Engine, we share the exhilaration of creation! Which is why I\u2019m so excited to unveil Alpha Lab<\/b>\u2014a new team at WP Engine dedicated to technical invention both inside and outside the company.<\/p>\n

The mission of Alpha Labs is two-fold:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Full-time employees contributing back to open-source projects<\/b>, mostly WordPress of course but also projects like nginx and HipHop (HHVM), and<\/li>\n
  2. Inventing cutting-edge, brand-new technologies<\/b> that are too new for heavy production use, but allows us to move fast and invite our customers to participate even before it\u2019s ready for prime-time.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    (You can check out its swanky new website at wpengine-labs.com<\/a>)<\/p>\n

    Giving back to WordPress<\/h2>\n

    One of our core company values<\/a> is \u201cAspiring to lead. Committed to Give Back.\u201d \u00a0A company like ours couldn\u2019t be possible without the generous community efforts behind open-source software projects like Linux, nginx, Apache, Varnish, MySQL, memcached, and especially WordPress. Therefore, we believe it\u2019s a moral imperative that we contribute back to those same communities and projects, sharing the bounty of our success, so that our success strengthens everyone in the WordPress community.<\/p>\n

    Although we\u2019ve done some of this for years (for example, as one of the major WordCamp sponsors and part-time contributions the WordPress community), it\u2019s high time that we devote full-time engineering efforts to WordPress Core development, as well as increase our level of contribution to the many themes and plugins that our customers depend on.<\/p>\n

    Therefore, we\u2019re hiring two software engineers, immediately, to work on WordPress Core. <\/b>\u00a0(Interested? \u00a0Please tell us here<\/a>!)<\/p>\n

    Cutting-Edge New Technology<\/h2>\n

    Fast-growing technology companies like ours are constantly in a balancing act when it comes to their technology stacks.<\/p>\n

    On one side is cutting-edge innovation\u2014exploring, inventing, creating, testing, trying. In tech, if you stop inventing, you start dying. Brand new technology, however, always has bugs\u2014problems that weren\u2019t obvious until it\u2019s applied in practice.<\/p>\n

    The other side is stability\u2014uptime, performance, scale, monitoring, automation, and measuring. This is what our customers actually pay us to do\u2014deliver a dependable<\/i> technology platform.<\/p>\n

    So this is the yin-and-yang of technology: Needing to constantly advance the dependability and performance of the platform, and yet also needing to push the envelope with brand new invention, which by definition is not stable!<\/p>\n

    This is why we\u2019ve launched Alpha Labs.<\/b> \u00a0\u201cAlpha\u201d means just that\u2014brand new products, which are not<\/i> yet ready for prime-time. Our support and infrastructure teams cannot yet support them 24\/7 over chat, phone, and email. Because they\u2019re new, they might change in significant ways from week-to-week.<\/p>\n

    But it\u2019s exactly because it\u2019s \u201cunsupported and immature\u201d that buys us the freedom to truly explore brand new ideas!<\/p>\n

    And, as those ideas firm up, they will graduate from \u201cyin\u201d to \u201cyang\u201d\u2014becoming operationalized and stable and monitored and automated and scaled until indeed they\u2019re ready to be part of our standard, stable platform.<\/p>\n

    The best part is: You\u2019re invited too! <\/b>\u00a0If you\u2019re interested in getting a peek and even getting to play with the future of managed hosting for WordPress, come read about our first few projects here <\/a>and sign up! \u00a0We\u2019d love to explore with you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    One of the reasons we all love WordPress is because it lets us create amazing new projects in ways we never could before. Projects that enable us to share new ideas, new initiatives, new messages, new media, open for business to the entire world, with the potential to accumulate millions of interactions in the years…<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-company"],"yoast_head":"\nAnnouncing WP Engine Alpha Labs<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"We're excited to unveil Alpha Lab\u2014a new team at WP Engine dedicated to technical invention both inside and outside the company.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex, follow\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Announcing WP Engine Alpha Labs\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"We're excited to unveil Alpha Lab\u2014a new team at WP Engine dedicated to technical invention both inside and outside the company.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/wpengine.com\/case-studies\/announcing-wp-engine-alpha-labs\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"WP Engine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/wpengine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2014-06-19T16:00:44+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2025-05-12T20:47:18+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/wpengine.com\/case-studies\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/WPE-IMG-Thumbnail-1200x630-1.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1200\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"630\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Jason 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