December 10, 2017 — WordPress at its heart is a blogging platform, designed to serve a site that’s largely read-only. Logging in isn’t necessary unless you’re an admin looking to write a blog post or adjust settings. This is a good thing! Scaling a site that’s predominantly read-only is very easy because you can place a CDN like CloudFront or a page cache like Varnish in front of a single server and serve many, many requests from hardware as cheap as $5 per month.

But what happens when you have a site that isn’t read-only? What happens when you have, for example, a WooCommerce site with a couple hundred transactions a day? Or perhaps you run a news site with millions of pageviews a month? All of a sudden, that poor $5 server is catching on fire and asking what it did to deserve this!

Running a single server like this is called a “Single Point of Failure” and that is a very big no-no to run in a production environment. Cloud servers are ephemeral in nature and aren’t guaranteed to stay up 100% of the time. Any number of things can go wrong, which is why designing your infrastructure to respond to bursts of traffic as well as be able to continue serving requests when servers go down is paramount to a reliable production environment.

This talk will give an overview of what is involved from moving from a single-server setup to a scalable, highly-available infrastructure on AWS.

December 10, 2017 — WordPress has successfully transitioned from a Blog to a CMS and now is becoming a platform for which anything can be built. However, the evolution is still continuing, and GraphQL is part of the platform evolution.

GraphQL is a query language spec that allows data from any system, including WordPress, to be queried as if it were a Graph of data.

I will walk through what WordPress as an Application Data Graph looks like, and how GraphQL can make querying data from the WP Application Data Graph easy, declarative and highly performant.

We will look briefly at how GraphQL compares to REST, some similarities and differences.

We will look at some examples of WPGraphQL in production on large publishing sites, such as DenverPost.com and SiliconValley.com.

We will dive into how to use GraphQL to query data from WordPress using the WPGraphQL plugin (https://github.com/wp-graphql/wp-graphql).

In this portion of the talk, we will look at demos of querying and mutating (writing) data in WordPress using a GraphQL IDE tool called GraphiQL.

Then we will discuss what benefits GraphQL provides for decoupled applications, the tooling around GraphQL that makes it a pleasant experience to work with.

Some benefits I will highlight are: performance gains over REST, the ability to request multiple resources without round trips to a network, tooling around GraphQL (such as GraphiQL IDE and other IDE plugins).

December 10, 2017 — Discover ten handy tips in as many minutes for customizing your WordPress site with CSS. From quick techniques to hide elements you’d rather not see – to sneaky ways to add in extra bits of text, this talk for CSS newcomers will show you just how useful CSS can be. It’ll whet your appetite for more and suggest where to continue your CSS journey after the ten minutes whiz by.

December 10, 2017 — This talk will be given in a room that is specifically designed – as mandated by law – to be accessible to those with disabilities. Like our physical spaces, the web has accessibility standards too, but we don’t always take those seriously, as we’re not always legally required to do so.

We’re not all accessibility experts, but our job is to put valid HTML on a page. If 18.7% of the population can’t use what you create, are you doing your job? In this talk, we will look at attitudes that hold us back from creating web experiences for everyone. The point isn’t to complain, but to move paste these assumptions towards better understanding and to start learning. This talk isn’t being given by an accessibility expert, and you don’t have to be one to attend it, either. We’re here because we want everyone to be able to consume the HTML we generate.

December 10, 2017 — I used to be really embarrassed of my story. I worked really hard to learn what “normal” looked like so I could act that way. I lived from the webpages of Urban Dictionary, hours of MTV’s reality shows and TLC’s “What NOT to Wear”. I obsessed about what I said to people but I never really mastered the ability of stopping myself from blurting out strange things. I obsessed over whether I was invited to things. I was desperate to fit in.

This desperation to be “normal” and fit in is something that I kept trying to do in every area of my life.

When I began interning as a UX designer for an agency, I obsessed over whether my designs were cool or fit in with the right trends. When I got involved with marketing, I signed up for course after course to figure out how to market the right way. I spent my life copying other people’s methods.

Then I got to know people in the WordPress Community. I noticed how unique each person was and I noticed how these differences were celebrated. I felt at home, even though no one else acted like me. I started following a lady called “Bridget Willard”. She claimed anyone could be a guru. She fascinated me. She helped me learn to embrace my own story.

I quit caring about what was “normal” or what I was doing “right” and I started being myself. I stopped being ashamed that I was born Amish or that I’m a single mom. This didn’t mean I started sharing EVERYTHING from my life, but I did make it a point to do everything from my heart. I asked myself how I felt about things. I started trusting my own gut.

Today I’m building a brand with my cousin and friend, Urban Southern. We’re weaving our story into this brand. We were both born Amish and we have both struggled to embrace our heritage but now we do. We focus on sharing real life moments. We make our own videos for our ads with our iPhones. We post fun stories on Instagram every Friday to share about our process and favorite memories from our childhood. People are loving it! The results are pretty cool so far. Within four months of launching our revised brand, we were invited to New York Fashion Week in the Spring of 2017. We are currently collaborating with Vintage Vogue in Paris.

Before my cousin and I started working together, she was presenting the brand as a very generic leather goods brand. We went from selling a total of 45 leather items in a year and a half, to now selling more than 45 leather bags in our slowest month since we’ve begun to work together and getting personal with our brand.

I’m personally much happier and I’ve had cool opportunities for my art career as well. I painted live for an event with the City of Denver this Spring and shared my story publicly. Now I’m headed to Uganda this month to paint murals in a school.

It doesn’t matter who you are, you have a unique story to tell or a unique way of solving problems. What you already have inside of you and in your life experience is exactly what you need to do what you want to do in the world. Use it.

December 10, 2017

December 8, 2017 — I’ve been on all sides of support; first as a WordPress user, then a freelancer, theme shop employee, and currently as WordPress.com staff. In that time I’ve learned a lot of the dos-and-don’ts of asking for (and providing) support. In this lighting talk I’ll go over some of the most commonly missing information when reaching out to support.

December 8, 2017 — For years, the WordPress translators community has needed to resort to painful compromises for languages with grammatical gender, where women are often discriminated by default. In this talk, I’ll present an addition to WordPress core that can make a huge difference and solve a decade-long problem

December 8, 2017 — Developers who love to write docs are pretty rare. But documentation is a critically necessary evil throughout a site’s life, from initial development through to ongoing support and enhancements. How much documentation is too much? Not enough? As developers, how can we produce meaningful documentation that supports our code and sets it up for success once it launches out into the world… without making ourselves completely crazy in the process?

We’ll explore a structure for documenting your codebase, the components of strong documentation, and how these project artifacts evolve over time.

December 8, 2017 — In this talk, I plan to get down to the nitty gritty of what I went through, how I overcame it, and what I’m doing to continue down the path of both physical and mental health. It will be very personal, raw, honest, possibly uncomfortable at times (for me), and hopefully inspirational, as I plan to share not only my own story, but the stories of some of the others within our Community who have been through their own journey (with their permission, of course).