January 29, 2018 — Three days before the deadline and the launch of a national TV campaign – Sean’s boss turned to him and said: “I don’t think we can do this.”

Just six weeks earlier the team at Pragmatic had landed a huge API project. ITV, The National Lottery & The British Olympic Association had come together to plan and deliver Britain’s biggest ever sports day: I am Team GB. As their chosen WordPress partners, they had to get it right.

So how did it go? What did they learn along the way? And what would they do differently if they did it again? Sean will guide the audience through the different pieces of the puzzle – things they predicted, (and the things they didn’t). We will explore:

– The inner workings of an enterprise level API project
– The pressures and challenges of a tight, immovable deadline (the Olympics!)
– The creativity needed to face new challenges
– And most of all, the successes and learnings we can see looking back on it now.

The project helped a million people get off the sofa and get involved in sport that day – and we’ll look at how, with millions of people hitting the site, WordPress didn’t break a sweat.

January 29, 2018 — Working remotely has many benefits but also some obvious and non-obvious challenges. Discussions about remote work also often tend to be generic, however each discipline require its own kind of variations, and design isn’t different.

A lot of the tools available to designers are meant to be used in person, but what if we happen to work remotely, or we want to switch a product team to being remote? How to build trust, gather feedback and craft a unified vision? This talk takes inspiration from some of the practices of Automattic’s teams to overcome some of the unique challenges of remote working.

These solutions will also be beneficial to any designer who desires to engage with open source projects, as they are by definition remote.

January 29, 2018 — In this talk, we’ll look at some of the problems and issues with responsive design and then we’ll look at how to get around these by developing a theme which is not just responsive but genuinely and entirely fluid.

The aim will be a theme where the layout remains consistent, proportional, reliable, and exactly as the designer intentioned, whatever the width of the viewport.

January 24, 2018 — In this talk, I’ll explore common questions that freelancers have when deciding to build their own websites, and give some answers that will help you on your journey.

January 24, 2018 — Come ho fatto a servire 500.000 pagine in un weekend, con WordPress.

January 24, 2018 — Can WordPress help you to improve your development, design, translation or communication skills, and become a better person in general? Let’s find out!

January 24, 2018 — The ex-dev, the revolving door and the poet: why communication fails in development and what we can do about

If there is a chant that runs through the tech community, that unites us all in agreement, that is: communication is the key. Submerged by social networks, 54 different chat systems, code review comments and SomethingDrive documents the quantity of communication is often valued more than its quality and we find ourselves thinking we have so much communication we should not have any of the problems we have. I will try to highlight the reasons behind such failures in communication focusing on how those affect teams of 1 to many developers and propose some practical and immediate solutions to the issues.

January 24, 2018 — Nove anni fa realizzai un piccolo plugin per un mio progetto, e decisi di pubblicarlo su WordPress.org.

Pian piano, senza clamore, ha raggiunto quasi 2 milioni di installazioni ed è tra i plugin gratuiti più popolari. Tutto ciò a dispetto di madornali sbagli, trascuratezza, tentennamenti e immancabili bug.

Una breve storia di quello che ho imparato dai miei errori su WordPress e sulla sua straordinaria comunità.

Presentation Slides »

January 24, 2018 — Perché è importante avere un sito veloce? Cosa significa veloce? Si può essere veloci senza usare plugins? In questo talk oltre a fornirti tutte le risposte, ti mostrerò le strategie più efficaci ed attuali che utilizzo per rendere i siti più veloci e abbattere il muro del secondo.

Presentation Slides »

January 24, 2018 — This talk will tackle the most common cause of slow performance, talking to external APIs. It will show how to determine that the problem, and a couple strategies for solving it.