January 2, 2019 — Know a young child interested in learning computer science and coding, but the child’s reading level makes it difficult to know where to start? You’ve come to the right place! In this session we will go hands on with free online games that teach computer science and coding techniques to children as young as 4! These programs start with pre-reader courses and grow with your child so they can use the same program for years to come.

January 2, 2019 — With each passing year, the bar gets higher for software developers. Customers seem to expect more and more from us with no tolerance for delays or price increases. What causes this vicious cycle? More importantly, what can we do to continue to provide tools which satisfy new users and meet their ever changing expectations regarding usability?

January 1, 2019 — When it comes to plugins and themes in WordPress, we’ve heard some mantras over and over: “Your custom user interfaces should feel like a native part of WordPress! Follow the admin UI! Back-compat 4 life!” So what happens when a project like Gutenberg comes along and threatens everything you thought you knew about creating and editing content in WordPress?

One of the things about extending software is that you tend to stick to familiar paradigms and patterns, often at the cost of innovation and creating the best possible experience for a given task. One of the major tensions we’ve seen in the push forward on Gutenberg is between the tradition of backwards compatibility and the forward-looking concept of a block-based editor. The hesitation is natural and understandable, but it’s important to take a step back and ask “are metaboxes really the best UI for what my user needs to do?”

In this talk, we will take a look at some creative solutions from the past that have broken outside of the bounds of metaboxes and other form-centric interfaces while still maintaining that WordPress feel, along with practical examples of where rethinking the editing experience can and has led to significantly better outcomes for both implementers and users alike.

January 1, 2019 — When we think about ethics and AI, our first thoughts often go to the question of what happens if a self-driving car kills a pedestrian. The life and death questions of autonomous systems are important to address—and so are other enormous questions like unfair bias, privacy, safety, and accountability. These aren’t just technical or policy questions: they’re design questions. Designers frame problems, shape the features and behavior of AI-enabled systems, and provide the levers that AI is allowed to pull. Designers are in a unique position to help with these problems about AI, design, and ethics, and in this talk, we’ll look at how.

January 1, 2019 — The experience of creating and sharing information has changed dramatically over the last decade and will only continue to evolve. How do we understand the present moment and anticipate the future of publishing in order to keep pace with both user needs and emerging technologies?

This talk will provide a structured framework to help us understand how publishing has evolved (how we got to now) and what it might become in the near future. I will examine how the act of authoring has become more expansive, encompassing new kinds of users and different contexts for publishing, as well as how user expectations around content creation have changed. Which trends should we expect to see continue and where might we see radical changes in the publishing landscape? How might growing concerns around privacy affect how we create and publish online? In addition, we will explore emerging technologies like voice interfaces and machine learning, and examine what impact they might have on the future of publishing. Finally, we will look at the ways in which WordPress is uniquely suited to take advantage of the current moment, and what new opportunities could be in store for the future.

January 1, 2019 — We built a custom intranet for our museum using WordPress tied to online forms, notifications, and Slack / Asana connections. It empowers our staff to create and share documents, submit work requests, and track project. In this brief lightning session, hear about the planning, tools, and implementation to bring everything together to create an interactive productivity hub that you can use for your organization.

December 31, 2018 — Get more traction with your content by increasing your SEO impact.

Learn how to configure the Yoast plugin for optimal Search Engine Optimization so that you’re fully optimizing the content on your website and that search engines can find them.

December 31, 2018 — Almost all WordPress users publish content or blogs on their website, but most don’t know how make this content surface at the top of page one on Google.

This presentation will cover some of the most important on-page content optimization techniques including:

– Title tag optimization.
– Heading tag hierarchy and optimization.
– Topic focusing, structuring and optimization.
– Optimizing for featured snippet and PAA (people also ask) results.
– Schema.org markup and Internal linking

This presentation is designed to follow Arsen’s talk, our goal is to educate the expose the audience to all aspects of search engine optimization.

Presentation Slides »

December 31, 2018 — If you are managing multiple WordPress sites, surely you must have felt the need to be able to manage them all from a single dashboard. WordPress has a solution – a multisite installation.

December 31, 2018 — As software engineers and designers we need to make sure that our solutions can be used by as many people as possible. One important factor for this is internationalisation.

With tools and best practices rapidly changing, and new solutions like Gutenberg emerging, it’s time to look at how to properly internationalise and localise modern web applications.

In this presentation, I’m going to explain the concept behind internationalisation, localisation, and why we need to do more than just “making things translatable”.

I will highlight existing tools, interfaces, and best practices to get internationalisation right in the UIs we create and the code we write, no matter if it’s PHP, HTML, CSS, or JavaScript.”

Presentation Slides »