June 6, 2019 — We’ll go over the basics of setting up a local WordPress development environment using Docker and some of the benefits of containerized development. Utilizing docker can be extremely helpful for matching production environments closely as well as streamlining testing and deployment processes.

Presentation Slides »

June 6, 2019 — Your website content has two audiences: Human readers and search engines. Writing content that appeals to both is something that all writers and website owners should know how to do. Whether you’re a professional copywriter or a small business owner who writes for your own website, knowing how to write content that satisfies both of these audiences is an essential (and profitable!) skill. This presentation will teach you exactly how to do that, using modern-day approaches to semantic and contextual keyword optimization.

Presentation Slides »

June 6, 2019 — Ah, clients—we need them, we crave them. WordPress consultants and freelancers mostly live in attraction mode, constantly building a vibrant roster of sweet-spot clients. But not every client is a good client. So while you’re courting new relationships, beware of the challenging types of clients almost never worth the trouble.

After this session attendees will be able to:
– Identify danger signals before engagement
– Learn 5 steps for handling difficult clients
– Discover how to politely fire a challenging client
– How to prevent future nightmare clients

June 6, 2019 — Problem solving may not sound like the most rock and roll topic of conversation… and that might be so, but it’s at the core of everything we do, a skill so universal it transcends software, job role, even occupation.

In this talk we’ll explore the mechanics of problem solving, I’ll share what I’ve learnt from overcoming challenges, recovering from failure and seeing the opportunity in problems as a developer and design agency co-founder.

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June 6, 2019 — How do you teach a computer to design a website?

You may have heard that robots are coming to steal our jobs. But the end isn’t nigh! I’m here to tell you why that may not be such a bad thing – and share some of my own adventures trying to automate away my own job.

We will investigate how automation isn’t that different from other technological leaps of the past – as well as ways it is vastly different. We will touch on how emerging technologies can be an equaliser and the real world application of machine learning. Along the way, we will talk about ethics, universal basic income, and how soon ‘Judgement Day’ will be upon us.

Finally, we will touch on how Gutenberg opens up new possibilities within the WordPress space, and how to take advantage of those opportunities.

June 6, 2019 — OpenStack is a free and open-source software platform for cloud computing, made up of many smaller projects, each looking after one aspect of the stack.

This talk will show how projects structure their communication to make sure everything works together as one in a final release, how decisions are made transparently, and what we might be able to learn from that.

June 6, 2019 — In my role as a UX consultant, I’m acutely aware of the impact the CMS will have on admin users.

Most CMS users just don’t see content in the way that UXers, designers or developers do. We, as digital types, understand that a page isn’t necessarily a page but is instead made up of 5 different content types. We can mentally map the content from the information architecture, to the design and then to the set of fields and posts in the CMS. Clients really struggle with this concept.

I’ll discuss some ways in which we can ensure our WordPress setup and UI makes our users feel empowered and enabled to create great content regularly.

Presentation Slides »

June 5, 2019 — Why make your site load fast when you can pre-load everything in advance? Take advantage of those SSL certificates to speed everything up, prefetch resources, preload pages, and push assets to the browser directly before the HTML arrives.

June 5, 2019 — Why you should forget about the scores if you want to speed up your website? What is TTFB and why you should care about it? Why using CDN might not help you improve the site speed? Why Twitter with all that funny GIFs loads lightning fast and your visitors have to wait for ages while one single kitten gets loaded? How do you get to know your hosting is fast enough?

During this session we will learn:

– how to measure website load times and interpret the results
– what should you do after all possible caching is already on but your website is still awfully slow
– how to define bottlenecks and fix them without making significant changes to the theme.

Let’s make websites load faster together!

June 5, 2019 — Everyone should be a little bit worried about the security of their site, and at conferences, lots of security talks focus on practical steps people can take.

In this talk, Tim will flip the norms and instead focus on several real examples of sites being hacked but from the attackers perspective. We will see the whole attacks from the bad actors view identifying targets, analysing vulnerable sites, adding payload, exploiting in doing so showing how sites are infected, how some tools do prevent certain attacks and how clever and indeed not so clever bad actors can circumvent lots of hardening done.

Each step we can analyse what could have been put in place to prevent and frustrate the attack and then look at how this can be implemented on your site.