I’ve been using WP Migrate DB Pro for quite some time and it’s probably one of the very few WordPress plugins out there that just work, flawlessly. Today I’m happy to host Brad Touesnard, founder of Delicious Brains Inc., the company behind WP Migrate DB.
1. Hi Brad, could you tell us a little about yourself and background?
I’m the founder of Delicious Brains Inc. We make a couple of WordPress plugins (WP Migrate DB Pro and WP Offload S3) and have an app in beta at the moment called Mergebot. My expertise has been in web development but I’ve been running a business, managing a team for the past few years.
2. When did you first stumble upon WordPress?
I setup a blog on WordPress in 2004.
3. What product / website of yours are you most proud of and why?
WP Migrate DB Pro is the product I’m most proud of because of the impact it has had on our customers. I regularly receive hugs of gratitude at WordCamps from customers who love our product.
4. Have you had any epic fails so far that you’d like to share with us?
Before I started this business I tried to build a marketplace for WordPress themes and plugins called WP App Store. It failed. Before that I used to just build apps and software products by myself and put them out into the world (e.g. SharURL). Most of them were complete failures, though I had fun building them, which was mostly the reason for doing it.
A quick Javascript frontend connecting to an REST API seems to be the way web apps are going.
5. In your opinion, is the premium themes / plugins market saturated? Are there any opportunities out there?
I think there are plenty of opportunities in the plugin market left. The theme market is pretty crowded so you have to differentiate yourself somehow to have a good shot at being successful.
6. What’s your advice to new theme / plugin authors?
If you’re not a great designer, hire or partner with a great designer. Most plugins are cobbled together by developers with little to no design sense. A great designer will help you create a plugin of much higher calibre than others.
With WP Migrate DB Pro installed on both sites, you can simply pull the live database down and replace your local database
7. If you had the chance to add a single feature in WordPress core, what would it be?
At Contributor Day at WordCamp US 2016 I created a plugin called Image Processing Queue with the lofty goal of getting it accepted into WordPress core in the future. It allows theme developers to define image sizes for specific theme contexts rather than defining sizes for all uploaded images. This greatly reduces the number of resized images and hence reduces disk space usage and the wait time when uploading an image. This would also introduce a background processing library to WordPress core which I believe is also sorely needed.
8. Is the inclusion of the REST API a decision in the right direction and why?
Yep, it’s the way forward. A quick Javascript frontend connecting to an REST API seems to be the way web apps are going.
9. What’s your current hardware / software setup. Any apps you can’t live without?
Just got the new 2016 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and an external LG Ultrafine 4K display. The display acts as a docking station and I’m able to connect just one cable for everything including power. Very nice. As for software, I think the software I use that is under rated or rarely mentioned is Workflowy, ScreenFlow, and Google Keep. And I think VMWare is underrated by many developers. I always have a Ubuntu server VM running on my machine on top of OS X. It consumes 0% CPU until it is actually doing something and then it’s a 7% CPU blip for Nginx/PHP/MySQL to process a web request. It’s remarkable. I use it as my dev environment. Much more performant than MAMP and a much more realistic environment. To be clear, I don’t run Vagrant, just a VMWare image I setup myself.
10. What’s your typical day like?
I wake up around 6:30, help my wife get the kids ready for school/daycare. Work from 8am – 11am. Do yoga, go for a run, or play hockey or tennis. Eat lunch. Work 1pm – 4:30pm. Prepare dinner for the family, eat dinner, and cleanup. Work for another hour, read, then sleep.
