December 30, 2018 — “You Don’t Have any Business Cards?” is a question that you hear a lot at formal networking events, but it happens even more frequently at WordCamps. Do you feel intimidated when it’s time to give your “30 second commercial”? Do you run out of things to talk about once you’ve exchanged names?

Effective networking is an important part of building your WordPress business. This presentation will help you get past the “grip and grin” stigma that people associate with networking and cover some ways that you can get the most out of mixing it up at networking groups, “business after hours” meetups, and of course the Hallway Track at conferences like WordCamp.

Learning how to network effectively can lead to your next client or your next trusted business partner. Whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert, you’re sure to pick up a thing or two in this presentation.

December 30, 2018 — The WordPress community builds amazingly powerful software to extend the platform with plugins. The developers who contribute plugins to the project should be proud of what they’ve created! The challenge is that often, they’re so close to the code that when they market their plugin, they position it as software for developers, rather than marketing it to the end user. In this session, I’ll give developers a framework for ensuring they market their plugin to their actual user, not to other developers.

December 29, 2018 — How to build teams around your business as a freelancer and avoid breaking down or losing customers.

December 29, 2018 — Polyglots. How do we extend our stories to other generations? Translating WordPress to Luganda or any other language ensures that we go beyond the ages.

December 29, 2018 — Whether you are working as a freelancer, or as part of a team, chances are that communicating with customers falls somewhere in your job description. As a website developer, you love the part of your job where you get to develop – but you also need to develop communication and project management skills to help you stay on top of projects, interact with your customers, and make sure that projects don’t spiral out of control or take more money or time than you budgeted.

In this talk, we will discuss the basics of project management. You’ll learn techniques for getting a project started on the right foot – things like making sure that your customer contracts are crystal clear, and setting up clear timelines and project milestones. You’ll also learn how to handle scope creep, and how to deal with projects that have fallen off course.

We will highlight a few (free!) project management tools that you can use to help keep things running smoothly. We’ll go through some developer/client relationship scenarios that come up frequently in our industry, and brainstorm ways to get through difficult experiences.

December 29, 2018 — In 2008, Joanna led colleagues at McKinsey & Company to develop and teach a new form of leadership that enables everyone, not just leaders, to be at their best more of the time. Today, the program is based on 400+ interviews with remarkable women and men leaders around the world – along with quantitative research, academic learning from a range of related fields, and a decade of field-testing.

Called Centered Leadership, this approach helps you build personal mastery of your own thoughts, feelings, and actions to inspire and unleash positive change. And it starts with self, becoming the change you most want to see. Imagine building on strengths, pausing in the midst of upset, forming trust-based relationships, engaging hope and fear to act boldly, and practicing recovery consciously to sustain your energy. Imagine finding your center when you need it most to improve your experience at work and in life. In her interactive session, Joanna will guide you through tools and practices with an invitation to (re)discover one insight about yourself at work or in life that sparks curiosity to explore more.

December 29, 2018 — As we inch closer to a mobile-only world, enterprises are struggling to deliver mobile experiences that meet or exceed expectations. Finding a CMS that can integrate with existing technologies while meeting the increasing demands of the mobile web is not an easy task. Technology such as Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Progressive Web Apps (PWA) have emerged to improve the performance of web content on mobile devices, but the gains from those advances are not apparent in every CMS. While some are better than others, WordPress has emerged as the leader for the mobile web, specifically as demonstrated through AMP and PWA. This session provides a unique opportunity to learn more about the effects of AMP and PWA, based on the way different CMSs are harnessing these technologies to power digital experiences across the mobile web.

December 29, 2018 — GDPR, CCPA, Data Breach requirements, DPIA’s… Yeah, it’s a LOT! Worse, there’s a lot of confusing and conflicting information out there regarding what’s changing in the world of privacy laws and requirements. We’re here to clear that up.

A strong privacy framework can strengthen your client relationships while reducing legal liability, arming you to ship better websites and products with ethics and privacy in mind, from day one. When making decisions, it’s important to understand their impacts: The right decisions (with user privacy in mind) to not only reduce your exposure, but also make your website better. It’s not the responsibility of “someone else” to get privacy right, it’s the responsibility of the whole team who builds and maintains your website.

Starting with an overview of laws that are relevant to you and your U.S. business, (what you NEED to know), best practices (what you need to DO), as well as resources for maintaining compliance (where you can turn when you need answers) you’ll see how privacy impacts business and technical requirements of every WordPress site on the internet.

December 29, 2018 — Content security policies (CSPs) are a relatively new security element on the web horizon. CSPs use browsers to detect and mitigate certain types of attacks like cross-site scripting (XSS), clickjacking and other code injection attacks resulting from execution of malicious content in the trusted web page context. CSPs can be used for simple purposes like enforcing https on SSL-enabled sites, to more sophisticated uses like authorizing only truly trusted sources and blocking others.

Most sites do not have CSPs installed, but it’s important to be aware of them and how they can be used to add an additional layer of security to your website.

December 29, 2018 — As developers we have an opportunity to start working with the new Gutenberg editor and bring it into projects where it can positively impact the editorial workflow. In this talk I’ll be sharing our team’s experience in extending Gutenberg core blocks with our work on the AMP for WordPress plugin.

In working with Gutenberg, often block functionality needs to be customized. We’ve found that it makes more sense to reuse and extend existing editor blocks as opposed to creating new ones. From a user experience perspective it’s important to avoid confusing users by just duplicating blocks and cluttering up the block inserter.

Through real examples I will showcase our experience extending core blocks as we added custom features to the AMP plugin. I’ll also address some issues and pain-points we ran into during the process and share the workarounds used.

Since Gutenberg is still a work in progress, this presentation is not intended as the absolute truth for extending core blocks, however it is a practical example of how we were able to add AMP features to a plugin by extending the core editor blocks. If you’re interested in developing for Gutenberg you’ll be able to learn from our experience and pick up practical tips for moving forward.