June 24, 2016 — WP-CLI is a set of command line tools for managing your WordPress site. It allows you to perform many tasks much quicker than you would be able to by other means. In this session, I will teach you how to get WP-CLI running, and show some of my favourite time saving features. Once you’ve started using WP-CLI, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it! This talk is appropriate for developers, designers and server administrators of all skill levels.

June 24, 2016 — Let’s have a discussion about things we can do to make our themes and plugins a pleasure to work with.

June 24, 2016 — Through painful, self-taught lessons and by seeing hundreds of other small businesses start, succeed, and fail online, in this talk we’ll discuss ten “do”s and “don’t”s for small businesses of all shapes and sizes in the WordPress.org environment.

Topics include:
– Choosing the right theme & plugins
– Writing content for search results
– Making your site stand out

After a quick presentation, I’d like to have extra time for Q&A so you can ask questions specific to you – since we’re all different, our online presence should be, too!

June 24, 2016 — You can’t always predict who will use your products, or what emotional state they’ll be in when they do. By identifying stress cases and designing with compassion in mind, you’ll create experiences that support more of your users, more of the time.

Presentation Slides »

June 24, 2016 — A passion project is a creative side project you work on outside of your chosen career that brings you joy, builds confidence, and you use to make your mark on the world. Learn how I used WordPress as a content and blogging platform to turn my passion project into a cohesive brand that led to a new career, speaking offers and the recognition as an expert.

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June 24, 2016 — WordPress has an origin story, two people in different countries, looking to improve their open source blogging software, that evolved into thousands of people working on or with that software. But who we are, humans, our evolution has been driven by our ability to tell increasingly complex stories.

Storytelling is not just at the root of who we are — it is who we are.

In this talk we will remind ourselves of what a story is. Once we are clear on the difference between a story and a statement, we will explore what understanding our stories means for us, as bloggers, business people and developers working in an open source ecosystem.

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June 24, 2016 — Mental disorders are the largest contributor to disease burden in North America, but the developer community and those who employ us are afraid to face the problem head-on. In this talk, we’ll examine the state of mental health awareness in the developer workplace, why most developers feel it isn’t safe to talk about mental health, and what we can do to change the culture and save lives. Attendees will leave with 5 things they can do to make their workplace safer for those dealing with mental health disorders.

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June 24, 2016 — When in the early stages of offering WordPress related services for clients there are a lot of unknowns. Questions like: – How do I price a project? – Where do I host the client’s site? – What do I do when the scope begins to creep? – Where do I go when I get in over my head? – How do I find clients? These and many more are difficult questions to answer for those who are new to client work but they are incredibly important. This session will be a Q&A and will focus on everything one needs to know and do to make their first projects successful.

June 24, 2016 — The best and worst part about our chosen vocation is that there’s an endless amount of stuff to see, learn, and try and nowhere near enough time in which to do it. In an industry where “the new hotness” changes every week, what hope does a developer have of keeping up?

This talk focuses on the professional development of a professional developer. How do we continue to grow as professionals without getting totally overwhelmed with information? We’ll touch on the topics of stress, education, humility, and more.

Presentation Slides »

June 24, 2016 — Blogging is relatively easy – write some stuff, add some pictures, and click “Publish”. Getting people to actually read your blog and be part of your tribe is harder. Join the Snarky Gardener (a vegetable gardening blogger) and follow his 3 year blogging journey from WordPress.com site to where he is today. He doesn’t have all the answers but hopefully he can inspire you to take your blog to the next level.