December 13, 2015 — Our worst clients challenge us. They push us to defend our work. They demand our full attention. They make unreasonable requests – knowingly or otherwise.
Our worst clients serve as a constant reminder of why we do the work we do. Whether overly communicative or radio silent – difficult clients push us to be better versions of ourselves.
Find out why good clients are good, but bad clients are better.

December 13, 2015 — Learn to use WordPress’s built in functionality (especially the HTTP library) to integrate with external APIs. We’ll touch on properly caching results to keep your site fast, fault tolerance, and even how to handle those strange APIs that send you data when you didn’t send a request for it (PayPal IPNs anyone?). We’ll talk theory, but mostly we’ll look at plenty of code and walk through examples from plugins that you can constantly refer back to for example code.

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December 13, 2015 — GitHub is that awesome thing everyone says you’ve gotta use, but how many of us can make heads or tails of it? If you’re tired of pretending to understand when someone talks about “merging the latest pull request” or want to know what the heck forks have to do with code, this rundown’s for you.
I’ll show you how a little dose of science fiction is the key to understanding Version Control. There will be teleportation, time travel, there may even be a victimless murder as you learn the difference between a Fetch and a Pull, why Rebasing changes history, and how merging branches can magically reconcile conflicting code.
Whether you develop, design, or just care about content, Git, GitHub, and Version Control can be some of the most useful tools in your kit. After this primer, you’ll see why Git and GitHub is for everyone, including you.

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December 13, 2015 — Recently I created a “game” using the WordPress.com API to house the data. This talk will go over how the WordPress.com API can be utilized to create custom JS applications. Talk would cover integrating with the API in node.JS applications using the wpcom.js library.

December 13, 2015 — If you’ve ever had experience growing a community (WordPress, Open Source, or otherwise), you know that every community has its ups and downs. From trolls in comments sections, face to face name calling, and general toxic personalities, no group is perfect and no one knows how to deal with everything.
In this talk, we will discuss the basic principles of healthy communication as laid out by Suzette Haden Elgin and how you can apply it to your community growth to keep your community happy and engaged all while keeping you safe and healthy.

December 13, 2015 — Interested in contributing to WordPress but aren’t sure exactly where to start? The WordPress Meta team is responsible for all the official sites for the open source project and community. Websites such as wordpress.org, wordcamp.org, wordpress.tv, developer.wordpress.org, codex.wordpress.org and many others are continuously being maintained and improved by volunteers on the Meta team. There is a lot that needs to be done and more help is always needed. All skill sets are welcome. In this session we’ll discuss what the Meta team does, what is needed and how you can get involved.

December 13, 2015 — CSS in itself can be pretty difficult even when it’s just one person writing it on a project that is small in scope, but what happens when things get bigger? What naming conventions scale well? How do you work on it with a large team? What are the considerations needed for an open source project or really any project? What tools should be used? I’m going to be answering these and discussing a few other issues that may spring up when working on complex projects. I’m also going to talk about things that might drive you crazy, but don’t actually make an impact on your project.

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December 13, 2015 — A lightning intro to Backbone.js: how it’s changing WordPress and how you can leverage it in your next project.
Outline
Backbone is Awesome!
Backbone + WordPress = Happy
Backbone and the JSON REST API
Go forth and Backbone!

December 13, 2015 — When asked, 100% of the developers asked respond that they are lifelong learners. Yet, a life is short while projects are long.
We see ourselves struggle with the overwhelming amount of new concepts, technologies, languages, frameworks, and tools. In addition to that WordPress development can be an island and requires extra effort learning something new.
In this talk we will see how few qualities can help us better structure and navigate our learning efforts.

December 13, 2015 — The plugin ecosystem and REST API push our creative limits for what we can imagine building with WordPress – and it’s time we looked at powering physical devices using open source platforms like LittleBits and Arduino. This talk will examine use cases and methods for building real-time physical displays powered by WordPress.

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