WordPress can change your life. Just ask Chris Wilcoxson, aka Slushman. He was a speaker last year at WordCamp 2013 and we think he’s pretty great at what he does. Chris always knew that he wanted to work on the web, but pursued other directions in life until he was brought onto a project working with WordPress. Learning WordPress redirected him back to his passion for web development, so much that he got a degree in it from Belmont University.

“It’s a lot easier to use than other systems,” he says. “Wordpress has everything laid out. It makes more sense.”

Chris is one of those developers that tries to push the platform as far as it will go… and then some. Through his company, Slushman Design, Chris has worked on all kinds of WordPress development projects: building plugins, creating themes, websites for clients and even applications that can be built on top of WordPress.

Originally, Chris used Blogger but wanted to expand the functionality of what he was doing. He found wordpress.com. “I started playing with it and figured out how to set up a self-hosted version (via wordpress.org), out of necessity because I needed more out of it.”

That need for more is the driving force behind the advancement, stability and power of WordPress and its developers.

Here’s a list of power-users, blogs and tutorials that Chris follows and recommends. You can also check out his work and follow his blog: http://slushman.com/blog/.

Smashing Magazine
Theme Designer
Core Developers
Matt Mullenweg
Otto Wood
Mark Jaquith

For new developers looking to push their own creative boundaries, Chris has one caution. “When you’re Googling around trying to find tutorials on what to do- check the dates! There’s a lot of really old stuff that doesn’t apply anymore. Always go with the most current thing. Realizing this early on would have saved me a lot of time.”