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.

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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.

June 24, 2016 — Does the thought of creating video content scare the crap out of you? Have you wanted to begin creating video content but don’t know where to start? In this session you will learn the basics of video production from the equipment to use and what makes great video content as well as resources to help you become better educated in editing and producing your video content.

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June 21, 2016 — This talk will help you discover how to Automate UI testing with the Selenium WebDriver using PHP. An in depth discussion of the Page-Object model for creating clean, reusable code for tests. Discussion of services available for automated testing on any Browser in any Operating System.

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June 21, 2016 — Accessibility (a11y for short) on the web has become law in Ontario, and yet there are still so many easily-overlooked details developers often miss. Discover some of the legal responsibilities developers have for today (and tomorrow), how improving the User Experience for all people will also improve your site’s search engine ranking, and practical steps and tools to help you upgrade your theme’s accessibility score.

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June 21, 2016 — So you have created a plugin or a theme for WordPress. Awesome! It doesn’t stop there. We will discuss why great support matters and give you simple ways to get a reputation for excellent support without increasing your time or effort.

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June 21, 2016 — When people think of content, they usually think about text in the form of blog posts. While your standard blog post can provide great, valuable content, only presenting information that way can bore your audience. And why get stuck in a rut when I have identified different 75 content ideas that you can use?

In addition to learning these 75 content ideas, you will also see how these ideas can be presented in five different content formats. You will learn the importance of planning and organizing your content so that you and your team can work on it with a set schedule. Armed with the information from this session, you will be able to create better and more engaging content on a consistent basis.

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June 21, 2016 — Amidst a sea of advice about what you SHOULD do to succeed as a freelancer or small agency owner, we’ll talk about the tried and true ways to really screw up. I’ll share from experience what you SHOULDN’T do.

June 21, 2016 — Whether or not you do it professionally, everyone is a designer and we should all have a toolkit of resources to help us design better. In this session we’ll discuss everything that makes up a basic toolkit for designers, from programs to people. And don’t worry if you prefer Hitachi power tools over Bosch, this session is less about specifics and more about concepts to help you build the arsenal you need.

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June 20, 2016 — Does you WordPress site need repeatable installs for dev, QA and production? How about upgrades or security patches? Manage your army of WordPress VPS with Ansible and save your sanity!

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