December 10, 2017 — Growing up I was that kid always taking appliances apart trying to figure out how they worked. I was also that kid that only tended to focus on things that were sciency and nerdy. I missed a lot of details growing up frequently feeling out of place when clearly other children knew what was going on and I again wasn’t listening.

Entering adulthood I discovered this uniqueness had its challenges but I learned to cope and was successful at school and work. I also started developing health problems that cropped up slowly over the years – mostly attributed to weight gain and being less active physically.

Four years ago I started working 100% remote. Within a couple months I realized my brain and my ways of dealing with the focus & attention issues weren’t compatible with remote work. I struggled a lot and finally talked to my doctor. Discovering I did in fact have ADHD helped me understand a lot. Working with a professional counselor I developed a set of tools to help with attention and focus issues working remote. A side effect of all of those efforts was a drastic improvement to my physical health.

You’ll find out what tools have been successful for me and more importantly how to implement the changes in a way to set yourself up to succeed.

December 10, 2017 — As web designers and developers one of the keys to our business success is retaining clients over time and generating client referrals. If we build strong supportive relationships with our existing customers we can guarantee future projects and work. Clients need more than just a great website, they need to be empowered to manage their WordPress site on their own. However, many business owners and marketing professionals are not knowledgeable about WordPress and feel confused and stressed about running the site once it is launched. Learning about WordPress online is also very confusing for people that are newer to or less experienced with the platform. So how can we empower our clients to manage their sites on their own and feel confident in their abilities? Many designers and developers offer a single training when the site goes live, but for clients that have never used WordPress or rarely use it this single training is not enough. Get tips and tricks about how to prepare your clients so they can take their WordPress tool and make the most out of it for their company or organization. Learn how to put together a launch plan that includes in person training, video tutorials, FAQs, and more. Discover why as designers and developers we are also educators. Give your customers the best chance they have to succeed and they will be more likely to return to you when the site needs to grow, as well as tell other professionals, businesses owners, and organizations they know about your service.

December 10, 2017 — There are a lot of things that go into running a service business beyond finding clients and building things for them. You’ve got to manage contracts, invoices, estimates, proposals, and more. You need to keep clients informed on progress, collect payments, and follow up on those payments invariably missed. On top of all of that, you need to have some sort of repeatable process to make projects run smoothly and keep getting in new work.

We’re going to look at a few ways that you can use WordPress to manage your WordPress business. This includes managing all of that paperwork from the backend of your site, allowing clients to make payments, and setting up a progress and ticketing system. We’ll also take a look at some ways to use your site to gain and manage leads.

From there you’ll be able to manage your business with ease and focus on the most important part: keeping your clients happy and successful!

December 10, 2017 — This year’s heavy focus in core has been on WordPress’s next generation Gutenberg editor. With the call to learn JavaScript deeply, it’s no surprise that Gutenberg is written in a JavaScript-first architecture. Once Gutenberg and its building blocks are in core, focus will broaden to then include Customizer. The Customizer was the first JavaScript single-page application in WordPress (added in 3.4). With the focus transition from Editor to Customizer, while keeping a JavaScript-first mindset, it is important for contributors and plugin authors that the Customizer’s JavaScript API be demystified to facilitate the integration of the new block editing interfaces. In my talk I’ll delve into the inner workings of the Customizer JS API, show how to use React to build custom controls in the Customizer, and demonstrate how to use the Customizer to preview changes to sites that use React-based themes—including previewing changes on headless REST API-driven sites.

December 10, 2017 — The Personal Web of the 1990s/early 2000s was the first wave of online diarists and bloggers who use the web as a platform to chronicle and share their our daily lives. WordPress came out of this movement, and is now in its second decade.

2017 marks 20 years that I’ve been using the web to create and archive memories, and 12 years that I’ve been doing it with WordPress. I’ve learned a few things about creating a real and permanent record of a lifetime on the ephemeral digital landscape, and together we’ll discuss how to use WordPress to create your own home on the web. We’ll cover topics such as how to maintain your (and your family’s) privacy, using WordPress to build a keepsake repository your friends and family can contribute to, and how to ensure that these digital spaces are available as a legacy for lifetimes to come.

December 10, 2017 — Building software means much more than writing code. In fact, you can make a bigger impact with people skills and thoughtful human-centered design than simply with code. After running WordPress releases and then spending two years working in government, WordPress lead developer Andrew Nacin wants to talk about how your interactions with others matter and how it’s important to think with people, not for them.

December 10, 2017 — Using WordPress to queery (not a typo) data and generate statistics based on the entire history of television and understand the impact of fictional death in the media on real life people. As seen on https://lezwatchtv.com

Overview

This presentation will discuss the complications of using WordPress to manage a site filled with cross-related data, in order to understand the social and psychological impact of the Bury Your Gays trope on TV. By using WordPress, we were able to easily output the data, but building out a site without planning what data will be captured leads to headaches. There were difficulties in the growth of data, including handling multiple actors and shows, with separate roles, characters who changed names and genders, and the death and revival of another character (does she count as dead)? Through it all, we prioritized open data and open discovery of the data to allow people to take the content and use it for their own purposes.

Aspects

– The dead lesbian / bury your queers trope (see also: The Lexa Effect of 2016)
– Rest API for data promulgation and distribution
– Confirming theories with data
– How WordPress makes it ‘easier’ for people to find themselves reflected in media

December 10, 2017

December 10, 2017 — The Italian WordPress community was dormant for years, until a bunch of people got together at WCEU Contributor Day in Seville, in 2015, and decided it was time to revive it.

After months of online chats in our Slack team, we organised an event that kick-started an avalanche of Meetups and WordCamps in Italy: a stand-alone Contributor Day.

Two years later, Italy has more than 20 active Meetups, 4 cities with WordCamps in planning, and a great numbers of Contributors across the project.

In this talk, I’ll go through the steps we took to organise it, and I will also talk about Contributor Nights, special Meetup events where we concentrate on one of the Make teams and learn how to contribute from scratch.

December 10, 2017 — You’ve heard of financial forecasting, but you’re not really sure what it entails. However, you do know one thing: planning is good.

Planning allows you to grow strategically, be prepared for setbacks, and prioritize your time. Would you be surprised if I told you that that’s also the definition of financial forecasting?

Ever wanted to talk about what might be the key economic indicators of the WordPress industry? This talk is for you.

We’ll take some really complicated topics in the world of financial forecasting and break them down into ultra-simple ideas using contexts that we, as developers or marketers, actually understand. You will walk away being able to define qualitative vs. quantitative forecasting, the Delphi method, regression-based analysis, moving averages and exponential smoothing, but all in the context of WordPress business-specific applications.

This won’t be a math-heavy talk – the goal here is theoretical understanding. Understanding how the models work in theory will unlock a powerful, high-ROI thought process: to apply what you already know about the work you obsess over, and use that knowledge to think like a forecaster in your decision-making.