February 20, 2018 — Join Ashleigh Axios for behind-the-scenes insights into how communication design and community building were developed in-house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue during the Obama administration. Ashleigh will show-and-tell how her small design team transformed daunting challenges into successful digital campaigns. Behind the projects, hear her team’s scalable tactics for tackling limited resources, overcoming impossibly quick timelines, and experimenting while in the public spotlight.

February 20, 2018 — Maybe it’s about a project that’s gone off track or a website workflow that’s confusing. Or maybe they’re not sharing their thoughts on ways their business could grow its sales or improve operations.

By demonstrating your ability to be truly authentic at each step in the process, you can aim toward creating projects that are more collaborative and ultimately more successful.

Learn why it’s critical to:

– Restate, in your own words, your perception of the project.
– Boldly ask, “So, what do you want from me?”
– Authentically and directly tell the client what you want from them.
– Test for client commitment and control.

February 20, 2018 — Gather ’round folks, it’s story time! It’s a semi-true story, believe it or not. I made up a few things and there’s some I forgot. From Rocky Mountain highs to scraping bottom face-first, I’ll recount my experience in entrepreneurship over the last quarter century. It’ll be funny, heart-wrenching, and you may even learn something.

Takeaway: Entrepreneurship is hard. And weird. And worth it.

February 20, 2018 — It’s estimated that 1 in 6 people in the UK suffers from ongoing anxiety problems. However, there’s still so much stigma surrounding the issue, that it rarely gets discussed openly. This has resulted in people with anxiety feeling like they have to suffer in silence, and employers not fully understanding the condition.

In Laura’s talk, she’ll share her personal experience of dealing with an anxiety disorder and how it impacted her working life. By openly discussing this issue, she hopes to diffuse some common misunderstandings of the condition, share some tips on how anxiety sufferers can help themselves and what workplaces can do to be supportive of them, and give people the confidence to communicate mental health issues.

February 20, 2018 — For one of our customers, we required variable length arguments to be passed into plugin configuration options. WordPress core only supports scaler (single variable) assignment. So, we modified the plugin itself to support this. This talk will be a line-by-line code review on the work we did. The talk will be split between PHP and jQuery. Proficiency at both is assumed. If we need to do this for another (paying) customer, we’ll likely take that opportunity to make these modifications to core. Until then, the actual code we display will be publicly available under a GPL license. The rest of the plugin code will not be displayed, and has an indeterminate license.

February 19, 2018 — Two are smarter than one!

We know the benefits of a good business partner, but is a partnership right for you? Learn what it takes to partner up and grow your business. We’ll walk you through best practices and tips to help you understand what it takes to forge a rich, rewarding professional partnership.

Whether you’re toying with the idea or can’t wait to get started, attend this session to get insights into how a professional partnership works and what it takes to establish one without regrets. A merger, or going into business with a partner, is exactly like walking down the aisle and getting married. You have to make sure you’re a good fit because this is a long term commitment. Are you ready to say “I do?”

Join our session as we lift the hood and show you what it really takes. Walk away with key lessons learned and advice from a local business duo that merged two years ago and hasn’t looked back!

Presentation Slides »

February 19, 2018 — Digital is constantly changing and that means that developers have to change as well. With so many different possibilities, how do you build a rewarding career for yourself? Where do you even start?

This talk will explore how to find out the things you’re really interested in when it comes to your job, create a personal learning plan, and market those skills in a way that demonstrates value to employers. Focusing on aspects like carving your own niche and being able to communicate your expertise in a way that people can understand!

February 19, 2018 — There has never been a time in the history of humanity when it was easier to build cool stuff. But whilst we usually think “building” is a developer trait, everyone in the greater WordPress community is building something. We don’t just build websites or apps: we build relationships, audiences, teams, careers, you name it.

Being a “product person” is a mentality, a mindset. It’s not necessarily something related to “a” product. In this talk, Franz will explain how he applies his identity as a product person to everything he does: identify a problem, sketch, prototype, test, focus on what works, fix or discard what doesn’t, launch, grow, reach the maturity stage. No matter what the product is.

This talk is for everyone in the WordPress community who wants to streamline their processes or become a better product person.

February 19, 2018 — This talk is aimed at anyone who is considering developing a digital product or SaaS, but will also be relevant to anyone wanting to learn more about marketing.

There is much information available on the internet about how to market a digital product, but a lot of it is terrifying to the average developer, involving techniques that can make your skin crawl just thinking about them. “Reaching out” and “going viral” may sound good in theory, but are near impossible to put into practice for anyone other than the most outgoing extroverts.

This talk will give you some “polite marketing methods” that are easy to put into practice and achieve results without having to undergo a full personality change.

February 19, 2018 — Chris Lema interviews Sakin Shrestha. Sakin has started various technology companies incluing Catch Internet, Catch Themes and DevotePress.