October 2, 2023 — “Is anybody truly good at context switching? Our business culture values multitasking, but our brains just aren’t built for it! Nonetheless, whether you are a manager or individual contributor, to move up in our careers we inevitably have to juggle more and more tasks of increasingly different types.

Agency life requires more context switching than other environments, and we’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of these challenges. In this talk I will share practical strategies that I and my colleagues find useful for keeping track of it all: how to jump between projects and land on your feet, and how to get back into the groove faster after switching between different types of work. Teaser: the answer isn’t to try to do everything all at once!”

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September 10, 2023 — The REST API is the foundation of the block editor, and has been a part of WordPress for six years. But are we using it to its full potential? This talk will share practical tips for using the REST API in your themes, plugins, and headless apps. We will look at different ways to use post types and metadata to store information in WordPress, and review performance techniques to make your REST endpoints run faster. We’ll share how to use _fields to query only for what you need. We’ll look at how to use Query Monitor to diagnose issues in your custom endpoints. We’ll discuss when you might want to use GraphQL instead of REST. And I will share a component maintainer’s perspective on the best changes we’ve made to the REST API since 4.7, and some exciting features to look forward to in the future!

October 30, 2020 — In this session we’ll discover how to roll our own efficient, container-aware styling with the JavaScript ResizeObserver object, using code that works in all major browsers. With only a few lines of HTML & CSS we can make our blocks look superb wherever they appear on the page!

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April 15, 2020 — “This session features three distinct case studies, plus a group Q&A, from Mike McAlister, Jeffrey Carandang, and K.Adam White.

In the first case study, Mike shares his perspective on creating Atomic Blocks, as well as a bit of design theory with atomic design itself. Next, Jeffrey demonstrates the features provided by EditorsKit and explains what led him to create this super-useful plugin. Finally, K.Adam takes us through the process of converting shortcodes to custom blocks and provides several tips to make this transition easier for developers and editorial staff alike.”

November 14, 2019 — In distributed companies and global open-source communities alike, diversity makes our teams stronger. But how do we reconcile diverse opinions to move forward productively as a unified team? In this talk I will share prioritization and team management tools I’ve used as a senior engineer and team lead in a distributed agency-tools that help us understand where and why we disagree, then work together as a group to find solutions, focus, and prioritize the right things. We will never all agree, and that’s the idea! We can disagree with intent and empathy, and use our diverse perspectives and opinions to work together on ever more ambitious and exciting projects.

July 12, 2018 — Our project has 100% test coverage; we have end-to-end tests, unit tests, manual testing scripts—and my colleague can’t get any of it working!?

Poorly-written issues or out-of-date local installation steps can ruin a project, but when we think of testing we forget about the processes that surround our code. So how can we hold our workflows, onboarding steps and communication to the same rigorous standards of quality as our codebases? By applying that mentality to the issue trackers, READMEs and wikis we already have, we can save ourselves and our teams from communication and process errors and get back to making websites!

Presentation Slides »

December 10, 2017 — Webpack is a powerful tool for bundling, transforming and optimizing your JavaScript, CSS and HTML for front-end web applications, but it can be hard to get started, and even harder to understand what’s happening inside that build. A simple boilerplate might take a minute to build, and create a many-megabyte JavaScript bundle, before you even add any code of your own—but it doesn’t have to be this way. In this talk we’ll discuss what Webpack is doing when it creates your bundle, and how to inspect the generated code to understand the origin of build performance issues. Armed with that information we will then learn some simple ways to create smaller bundles that rebuild faster, to speed up your own development and to improve the experience for the users of your application!

August 9, 2017 — If you ask a WordPress contributor what the project’s goal is, chances are we’ll say “to democratize publishing.” However, for over a decade the community that has grown around WordPress has been doing something even more important: our community is democratizing software itself. By creating one of the only web communities to include everybody from writers and photographers to interaction designers and senior software architects, WordPress has done what often seems impossible in Open Source software: we have built a product not just for ourselves, but for everyone. The future of WordPress rests on our ability to recognize and celebrate the spectrum of our community.

June 22, 2017 — K. Adam White is a senior web application engineer in Boston, Massachusetts, where he writes web applications, contributes to open-source projects, and evangelizes the web as an open platform for technology and collaboration.

With WordPress 4.7 we gained REST API endpoints for core data types—now what can we do with them? We’re seeing how the REST API is being used to build new and better editing interfaces, but we also have a huge opportunity to use that API to explore the data we already have within our sites. It’s never been so easy to access our WordPress content from JavaScript, so let’s see what we can learn about it through data visualization! I will share how we can combine the REST API with visualization tools like D3.js to gain new insights into your content. We will build a network diagram to visualize how tags and categories area applied to posts, then discover how to use custom post types and register_meta to build a completely custom dashboard within WordPress for any type of data.

June 2, 2017 — If you ask a WordPress contributor what the project’s goal is, chances are we’ll say “to democratize publishing.” However, for over a decade the community that has grown around WordPress has been doing something even more important: our community is democratizing software itself. By creating one of the only web communities to include everybody from writers and photographers to interaction designers and senior software architects, WordPress has done what often seems impossible in Open Source software: we have built a product not just for ourselves, but for everyone. The future of WordPress rests on our ability to recognize and celebrate the spectrum of our community.