December 11, 2016 — How does a WordPress get made?
Here’s the short version.

In a quickly-paced session, attendees will learn the way a release works from beginning to end.

December 11, 2016 — When companies are in search of new developers, they look for people who fall into one of three categories: Front-End, Back-End, and Full-Stack. I feel that these categories can be limiting, and tend to be geared toward proficiency in specific programming languages. If we take a moment to consider how we think about how we use the labels we use in hiring , we may not only end up hiring more qualified people, I put forward that we might create teams more well-suited to build a wide variety of websites and applications. In this talk, I introduce a new way of thinking of the stack, and how we hire the people who build it.’

December 11, 2016 — We’re all trying to find that idea or spark that will turn a good project into a great project. Creativity plays a huge role in the outcome of our work. Harnessing the power of collaboration and open source, we can make great strides towards excellence. Not just for designers, this talk can be applicable to many different roles – even development. In this talk, Seasoned Creative Director Sara Cannon is going to share some secrets about creative methodology, collaboration, and the strong role that open source can play in our work.

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December 11, 2016 — The products we build as designers often have to reach a variety of audiences. Some of best collaborations have benefited from diverse perspectives and a unified effort. How do we create teams that value open participation by employees with different perspectives and personalities?

This talk will at empathy, intersectionality and other concepts as the relate to building and maintaining strong teams.

December 11, 2016 — Sometimes it seems like the world is full of experiences designed for robots not the humans that use them. Experiences that leave us frustrated, lost and disconnected. That are almost designed to bring out the worst human traits. Shouldn’t we really be focused on creating experiences that connect with users?

Experiences that move, that enable, that allow us to be the best humans we can be. In this talk I’ll look at the problem of design that isn’t created for humans and offer some insight into how we can begin to design for humans not robots.

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December 11, 2016 — Pressing publish can do a lot of things, but maybe the most important thing it can do is to help you find your own voice. There’s power in knowing who you are, what you stand for, and how you want to present yourself to the world. All of this is helped, in deep and incredible ways, with a blog.

December 11, 2016 — Hear Google’s latest stats on searcher and mobile trends, as well as how we’re trying to connect searchers with good content. I hope to share knowledge that will help the WP community make the best decisions for their platform.

December 11, 2016 — Learn how Newark Public Schools (NJ’s largest school district 40,000 students; 70 schools) cut their annual web site technology budget in half by migrating to WordPress from a closed-source, proprietary, expensive, vendor-controlled SaaS CMS.

Hear stories from the trenches about budget battles, angry/clueless technology vendors and frustrated administrators from one guy with a vision to disrupt the market and bring better web site technology to our public schools using a WordPress-Powered SaaS called SchoolPress.

Case studies will be presented for three districts (2 in NJ, 1 in TX) that migrated to WordPress.

December 11, 2016 — One of the bigger take aways from my WCEU talk is the reminder that your representation in the WordPress community is not your code but you. This talk will address the issues when we have to represent something bigger than ourselves, be it the company we work for or the community in general. How do you handle the days when people hate you for nothing more than enforcing rules? How does it feel to have your reputation shattered when you know you did right? When DO you fight back if you do at all? How do you do it without causing more harm than good? After 14 years working for a bank and 4 for a webhost, with 6 in the middle helping the .org community in support and plugins, I have a unique set of experiences to call from when it comes to remembering the biggest thing. I am not my code. And I am not the haters.

December 11, 2016 — On December 3rd, 2015 (one day before the inaugural WordCamp USA) a service called Let’s Encrypt entered its public beta. Backed by several major sponsors (including Automattic), the service caught on quickly. As of summer 2016, more than 5 million SSL certificates had been issued by Let’s Encrypt, nearly four million of which were active and unexpired.

If you are not familiar, Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, open certificate authority that allows users to encrypt the data flowing to and from their websites easily and for free. The goal of Let’s Encrypt is to make data transfer over the internet secure by default. Towards that end, they have invested a considerable amount of time and energy in making it easy for users of all stripes to secure the data flowing in and out of their websites.

You may have already considered encrypting your website before — perhaps to perform better in search engines, or to gain the ability to accept payments on your website. Regardless of whether you’ve considered enabling SSL on your website or not, the goal of this talk is to demonstrate why encryption on your website matters. We will look at some practical examples and live demos of what data can be stolen from your website, even if you using an encrypted wifi connection. Likewise, we’ll talk about how encryption of all websites — whether they’re dealing with sensitive information or not — makes the web a safer place for all of us.

Last, of course, we will look at how you can get started with Let’s Encrypt on your website. We’ll review the options available to you on common hosting providers, as well as walk through the steps for how you can set this up for yourself, if you have administrative access to your server.

If you already have Let’s Encrypt enabled on your site, this talk may be basic for you (although we’ll do a few cool demos that make for great party tricks, so feel free to stop by).

If you’ve never accessed your hosting provider’s website admin area (CPanel, Plesk, etc), this talk might be a bit hard for you to follow (although you should totally come and ask questions both during the presentation and after).

If you have a WordPress website and you’ve thought about enabling SSL on it but you just haven’t gotten around to it yet, this talk will be perfect for you. By the end of this presentation, you should not only know how to enable encryption on your website, but you will understand why it’s so important that you do.

It sounds like an intimidating topic, but we can do this. Come on and let’s encrypt!

Presentation Slides »