August 14, 2016 — Spend time talking with a group of freelancers and the conversation will inevitably include someone’s unfortunate experience with a terrible client. Most freelancers have a story or two (or eight). While bad clients can’t be completely avoided, there are strategic steps any freelancer can take to contain the impact of a bad client. In this session, Nathan will explain the how to create a system that preserves workflow and keeps problem clients in check.

Take aways:

Four strategies that will keep problem clients in check.
Five monsters you should know and how to contain them.
The payoff of building good fences.

Presentation Slides »

August 14, 2016 — WordPress runs on a technology stack that provides many options for your choice of web server, database, version and flavor of PHP; this talk explores the commonly used options, and the various pros and cons of each choice, i.e., nginx or apache; PHP 5.x, PHP 7, or HHVM; and MySQL or MariaDB.

Take aways:

No tool is best for all jobs.
There are many implicit trade-offs to consider with software platforms, such as optimizing for speed vs memory usage, or using an older solution because it may be more stable, more well-tested, or more widely supported.
With any new project, these factors should be considered to ensure that you choose the best tools for your particular job.

Presentation Slides »

August 14, 2016 — *This is a 15-minute Lightning Talk*

The WordPress API, recently added to WordPress core, offers exciting new possibilities for connecting WordPress data and functionality with external systems.

In this talk, you will learn about how one Asheville company has used WordPress as a backend for iOS and Android apps.

I’ll do a brief demo of the “War In Our Words iPhone” app, which provides a platform for veterans to share their own personal stories with the world. The app makes extensive use of the WordPress API for backend functionality including user registration, authentication, and data storage/retrieval.

This talk is for all audiences. While it will touch on a few technical issues, the talk is designed to introduce any level of user to the power and possibilities offered by the new WordPress API.

Presentation Slides »

August 14, 2016 — *This is a 15-minute Lightning Talk*

August 14, 2016 — The HBS Digital Initiative, in partnership with Reaktiv Studios, has been building a networked classroom blogging tool, called Open Knowledge. Our goal is to make Open Knowledge the destination to create, share, discover and engage in discussions about the future of business within the classroom and beyond.

Implementing such a platform within higher education requires specific technical and social considerations. What about FERPA? Do students feel comfortable doing work publicly and digitally? What back-end tools are need for grading and curation? How can conversations remain civil while also remaining public?

We will share our findings from the last year of design research, user testing, and iterative development. We’ll discuss the ways WordPress might be customized for use in a classroom setting, and then spend as much time as possible for Q&A. Our findings are incredibly compelling for broader implementation, and we are excited to help other schools figure out a similar roadmap!

August 14, 2016 — Machine learning, and in particular “deep learning”, have been in the news a lot lately: machine learning lets Google make psychedelic images; machine learning is helping computers to read handwritten text; machine learning lets Facebook match web users to advertisements; machine learning is being used to discover new construction materials. But what is it, and why does it matter to writers? In this talk we’ll learn the basics of neural networks, and see how poets and other writers can use machine learning techniques for creative results.

Presentation Slides »

August 14, 2016 — WordPress coders have gotten a bad rap for writing messy code. Its a little unfair as there are many great programmers in the community. However, some of the criticism is well deserved. There are far too many plugins and themes that are one big mess of spaghetti php.

WordPress is great, but it doesn’t give us the best tools to write quality code. However, with the use of a templating library such as twig, blade and many others, we have a tool that will help us write a higher quality piece of software. Templates not only have much cleaner syntax then using straight php tags, but they also enforce a separation of concerns.

This talk will cover the various templating options that are available as well the basic methodology and functions of templates.

Presentation Slides »

August 14, 2016 — It is a fallacy that as a freelancer or small WordPress agency we should expect our income to be unpredictable. The open source WordPress software allows us to bake into our services ongoing website care plans to keep clients engaged with us and pay us monthly to care for their website. Setting up a recurring revenue stream caring for WordPress websites offers us the financial security we only hope for in our work as designers and developers.

In this WordCamp session, I’ll go over what that looks like from A-Z. We’ll explore what you should offer in your plans, how you setup payment for these plans inside your WordPress website with plugins, and how to carry out those basic website maintenance services from performance scans, security scans, backups, plugin updates and support ticket system for client requests. I’ll also touch upon some challenges you might face with push back from clients and how to address those.

Presentation Slides »

August 14, 2016 — I’ll give a brief overview of my background as a designer: working for ad agencies to in-house at Flywheel. I’ll explain what I do there, walk through why design is important for tech startups (and any company in general). I’ll dive into the brand evolution of Flywheel, and how it’s positively impacted our growth and outreach.

August 14, 2016 — If you work with or within universities, you know that building applications to support higher education is not for the faint of heart. We’re dealing with legacy systems, homegrown access management and of course limited resources and endless demands from the academic community. But I’m not here to scare you! Instead we’ll talk about how to defeat the higher-ed hydra with WordPress features like multisite, roles and capabilities, theme frameworks, and the REST API. All of these were used and abused to wrangle formidable foes like Boston University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In this talk we’ll go through some strategies and examples that might work for you.