December 13, 2015 — LeeAnn will give you a brief overview on the principles of accessible front-end design and show you how easy it is to start building a better web experience for everyone. We will cover what accessibility means in WordPress design and development and go over a few simple steps to audit a website for accessibility. You will be provided with tools and tips on how to easily add accessibility into your workflow and will walk away with a better understanding of how you may be excluding certain users from your sites and immediate actions to prevent it from happening.

December 13, 2015 — Heard of Backbone.js but have yet to use it in your WordPress plugin or theme? Get an introduction to Backbone.js (and Underscore.js), discover why you should be using it, and learn how to add it to your next project.

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December 13, 2015 — WP_CLI is a powerful tool, even right out of the box. But it can be made to do so much more. This talk will discuss extending WP_CLI by adding your own commands. Whether for simple site maintenance or helping to manage clients learn to utilize WP_CLI to it’s maximum extent the right way with tips on adding commands, handling input and output and making sure that users can figure out just what your command is doing. This is an advanced talk appropriate for intermediate to advanced developers.

December 13, 2015 — As the editor of a WordPress news website geared toward industry professionals, I spend most of my days analyzing WordPress products and services. I see hundreds of launches every year, and get pitched to cover new offerings constantly. I also regularly communicate with successful WordPress business owners, and discuss what is working for them and what isn’t.

My aim with this talk is to share what makes for a compelling WordPress product or service: from website design, to user experience, the human touch, code quality, and more. Attendees will receive actionable steps for improving their products, services, and positioning in the WordPress space.

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December 13, 2015 — This session covers the indisputable what and why of high-performance websites:
Page cache
Object cache
PHP tuning
Database configuration
Front-end optimization
For any developer or systems administrator responsible for satisfying the need for speed, this session will deliver specific, actionable, practical answers.

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December 13, 2015 — Our worst clients challenge us. They push us to defend our work. They demand our full attention. They make unreasonable requests – knowingly or otherwise.
Our worst clients serve as a constant reminder of why we do the work we do. Whether overly communicative or radio silent – difficult clients push us to be better versions of ourselves.
Find out why good clients are good, but bad clients are better.

December 13, 2015 — Learn to use WordPress’s built in functionality (especially the HTTP library) to integrate with external APIs. We’ll touch on properly caching results to keep your site fast, fault tolerance, and even how to handle those strange APIs that send you data when you didn’t send a request for it (PayPal IPNs anyone?). We’ll talk theory, but mostly we’ll look at plenty of code and walk through examples from plugins that you can constantly refer back to for example code.

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December 13, 2015 — GitHub is that awesome thing everyone says you’ve gotta use, but how many of us can make heads or tails of it? If you’re tired of pretending to understand when someone talks about “merging the latest pull request” or want to know what the heck forks have to do with code, this rundown’s for you.
I’ll show you how a little dose of science fiction is the key to understanding Version Control. There will be teleportation, time travel, there may even be a victimless murder as you learn the difference between a Fetch and a Pull, why Rebasing changes history, and how merging branches can magically reconcile conflicting code.
Whether you develop, design, or just care about content, Git, GitHub, and Version Control can be some of the most useful tools in your kit. After this primer, you’ll see why Git and GitHub is for everyone, including you.

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December 13, 2015 — Recently I created a “game” using the WordPress.com API to house the data. This talk will go over how the WordPress.com API can be utilized to create custom JS applications. Talk would cover integrating with the API in node.JS applications using the wpcom.js library.

December 13, 2015 — If you’ve ever had experience growing a community (WordPress, Open Source, or otherwise), you know that every community has its ups and downs. From trolls in comments sections, face to face name calling, and general toxic personalities, no group is perfect and no one knows how to deal with everything.
In this talk, we will discuss the basic principles of healthy communication as laid out by Suzette Haden Elgin and how you can apply it to your community growth to keep your community happy and engaged all while keeping you safe and healthy.