March 29, 2019 — This talk is about 5 changes that we made as an agency from the time I arrived to today that have helped us grow our revenues and maintain a healthy income stream. They’re simple changes that help you work with the right clients for your agency. The ultimate goal is to stop chasing bad leads, getting bad clients, and keep consistent revenue coming so you’re not working project to project.

March 29, 2019 — Problem: You have a team of developers and you all work locally pushing up to one central development environment. Your client has been adding content to your live environment while your team is working away on other features. Your client decides they want to add calendar functionality to the site, which you can easily do with a plugin. However, configuring this plugin requires database changes. If you make any changes to your database, or even the development environment database, you are going to have to go make those changes again on the live site since they already have content in the site and you can’t copy over that entire database.

UGH! There has got to be a better way! We have all been in this situation more than once. So how do we get out of this situation?!

Solution: Configuration Management! We will talk about what configuration management is and how you can start to use it in your current workflow. We will also talk about WordPress plugins that make our lives easier by using similar methodologies.

March 29, 2019 — Web browsers limit the number of active connections for each domain, but browsers distinguish domains by name rather than by IP address. Domain sharding, in which content is split across multiple subdomains, may drastically improve the user experience of slow page load times for image-heavy pages, but only if your server has sufficient bandwidth. Uploading content to Amazon S3 and using CloudFront to serve images from multiple subdomains has been shown to be an effective way to use domain sharding. In addition, when images are uploaded to S3, a Node.js script is triggered which creates thumbnails and the larger web versions of the full sized, high resolution images. The final step happens during the creation of a WordPress custom post type, where the domain sharding is actually applied.

March 29, 2019 — Surrounded by constant workflow advancements, new frameworks, and version updates, tech culture often makes exhaustion a badge of honour. How do we best take care of ourselves when faced with obstacles like burnout, isolation, and uncertainty?

Whether you’re a remote employee, freelancer, or working within a larger tech team, striving towards a greater understanding of mental health supports the sustainability of both individuals and the industry as a whole. In this talk, I’ll discuss my own lived experience as well as examine the state of mental health awareness within tech.

March 29, 2019 — A couple months ago, the Metro Detroit WordPress Meetup held a session, led by RJ Mey, where he introduced us to Gutenberg and talked about the benefits and considerations that WordPress developers may need to consider with the upcoming release. The talk turned into a VERY lively Q&A session, so we decided to bring that conversation right into WordCamp Detroit.

This Gutenpanel, moderated by RJ Mey, will tackle some of the questions people have been asking about Gutenberg. We will have several developers who have experience with Gutenberg ready and able to answer your Gutenquestions!

This session is part 3 of our 3-part Gutenberg track. Check out session 1: Introduction to Gutenberg Development and session 2: How to Build Your First Gutenberg Block

March 29, 2019 — There so much power behind the WordPress REST API. This session will guide you through building a mini theme using the WordPress REST API. Learn how the REST API can be used not just in a theme, but for a mobile app, a plugin, a Gutenberg block, and beyond!

March 29, 2019 — Learn how to write a WordPress plugin that registers custom Gutenberg blocks and build out those blocks to provide an instant preview/feedback as they’re being edited in the wp-admin, as well as how to render them on the front end of the site.

This session is part 2 of our 3-part Gutenberg track. Check out session 1: Introduction to Gutenberg Development and session 3: GutenPanel

March 29, 2019 — Are you wondering what all the Gutenberg fuss is about? Interested in finding out what it takes to make a Gutenberg block? Do you like the keep up-to-date on the latest WordPress developments? If you answered yes to any of those questions, this session is for you! Brian Richards and Kellen Mace have teamed up show you the ropes on how to get on the Gutenberg bandwagon.

This session is part 1 of our 3-part Gutenberg track. Check out session 2: How to Build Your First Gutenberg Block and session 3: GutenPanel

March 29, 2019 — The accessibility of a website is significantly affected by the underlying HTML, CSS and javascript that developers use to create it. But it is also possible to impact upon the accessibility of a site at the design stage – both the visual design, and the interactive design or UX. And it’s not just about colour schemes either.

In this presentation I will outline a few key points to keep in mind when you are designing your next beautiful website or theme. I will illustrate the points with some good (and bad) examples.

Good design and web accessibility can go hand in hand – come and find out how.

I have previously presented this talk at WordCamp London 2017 and WordCamp Bristol 2017, and a couple of WP meetup groups.

March 28, 2019 — As a self-employed website designer often we work on our own with direct contact with our clients. This gives us a great opportunity to use the principles of agile development to make sure that we are able to offer the customer exactly what they want without succumbing to feature creep.

WordPress offers ways of making this easier with it’s easy setup and stacks of community – we can get a MVP out to clients quicker than ever and then iteratively develop the final website with feedback from the client.

This talk discusses how we can do this, what pitfalls there might be and why agile is not just for large powerhouse companies but also for the self-employed.