Get to know Nick Halsey, an Engineer, Composer, Artist, and Web Developer.

Nick recently completed his B.S. in Civil Engineering (Building Science) at the University of Southern California, with a minor in Musical Studies (Composition) and is currently working on a M.S. in Civil Engineering (Structural Engineering). Architecture, engineering, and the built environment are his primary passions, along with a creative drive to constantly make things. In addition to music composition, this often manifests itself in digital works ranging from software (via WordPress) to sheet music, photography, concrete sculpture, and digital art.

Nick is a WordPress core contributor, maintaining the Customize component, and has also published numerous plugins and themes on WordPress.org. Some of his notable core contributions include leading the customizer menus project, building theme switching in the customizer, and adding the device previewer.

Before reading the interview, I suggest checking out some music by Morten Lauridsen, a composer Nick recommends during the interview.

What should we know about you that you haven’t included in your brief, third-person, professional biography?

Since we’re in LA, my fellow Trojans might be interested to know that I work for the general contractor at the USC Village construction site. Ask me about it!

What composer should I be aware of and listening to who I don’t even know exists(ed)?

Morten Lauridsen. He specializes in choral music, is one of the most widely performed composers alive, and still teaches at USC. His music is powerful and complex yet listenable; certainly modern but not for the sake of being new and different.

Code is poetry, we all agree, but isn’t code also musical composition?

There are definitely similarities. Really, any design process, whether it’s music, code architecture, structural engineering, or visual arts, requires a similar approach. With any, it’s important to know your medium, such as the instruments you’re writing for or the language or platform you’re working with. Creativity and thought flow are central to the process for these and many other things.

Aside from the crowd of fans following you down the street, what’s the most rewarding part of contributing to the WordPress Core?

I primarily contribute to work on the features that I want and use when publishing with WordPress. It’s great to see this work make WordPress better for everyone as well, especially when it empowers new users to begin publishing online. It’s also great to see themes and plugins that I use leveraging developer-facing features I’ve worked on.

I’ve never customizer-ed anything but I want to, what’s one small piece of advice I should keep in mind as I enter into a customizer-ing project?

The customizer builds user trust and confidence by providing a live preview of changes before they’re published. As a result, front-end-oriented options that leverage live preview empower users to take control and ownership of their site. This doesn’t apply only to design options (which should generally be decisions, not options), but also to content curation and brand management workflows. When end users are confident in their ability to manage their site, product creators and consultants can spend more time working on new projects and less time on user support. This is an incredible opportunity that we have because WordPress is a digital platform, and because of the powerful customizer API.

One other tip – while there is somewhat of a documentation shortage for the customizer, we now have an extensive official page: https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/advanced-topics/customizer-api/. There is also comprehensive inline documentation in the code, which I strongly recommend referencing.

You can find Nick at WCLAX 2016 presenting on Make Site Management Easy with Live Preview in the Customizer.