December 11, 2015 — It’s easy to look at where you are and where you want to be and think, “I’ll never get there” and plateau with your current skill set.
Maybe you’re a developer who is looking to level up their career. Maybe you’re someone who wants to break into a development career for the first time.
Wherever you’re at, I want to teach you the same methods I use every single day to keep my skills sharp and to keep myself connected to interesting and rewarding projects and relationships.

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December 11, 2015 — Style Tiles are a simple and effective way to help clients separate design decisions from content, so you can make sweeping changes before they become time-consuming and expensive. If you design websites, or work with people that do, this presentation will explain how Style Tiles can promote buy-in and a sense of ownership from the client, helping them feel like the final design was their idea all along. You will learn how Style Tiles fit into the design process and development process. And to get you started, a Style Tile template and some basic survey questions will be available for download.

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December 11, 2015 — The Open Innovation Toolkit, part of the Obama Administration’s Second Open Government National Action Plan, harnesses public ingenuity to help address scientific and societal challenges. The first half of the toolkit, focusing on citizen science and crowdsourcing, was developed in collaboration with over 20 government agencies and built on the WordPress Multisite platform. This session will be a case study review of the project, challenges, and lessons learned. We’ll cover how the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy leveraged WordPress as a CMS and federal volunteers to create a low-cost resource to facilitate open innovation within the U.S.

December 11, 2015 — Last November, The New York Times challenged news sites to fully support HTTPS in 2015. What does it mean to meet that challenge? This session will discuss the problems we encountered moving to HTTPS (and how we solved them). We’ll then give you hands-on help with anything you need: server configuration, certificates, mixed-content warnings, CDNs — even ads, analytics and A/B tests.

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December 11, 2015 — With the platform’s towering shadow across the web, WordPress sites are always on the radar of spammers from every corner of the Earth. And with greater extensibility and integration than ever, opportunities to the let the wrong in are growing. This presentation explores the current spamscape, how the numbers add up, and troublesome trends to keep an eye on.

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December 11, 2015 — According to some statistics, WordPress is used on nearly 25% of the entire World Wide Web; and is the content management system (CMS) of choice for nearly 2/3 of websites using a CMS. While the numbers within higher education may or may not match those, WordPress is heavily used within that vertical.

Many institutions are using WordPress to present their whole public-facing websites; some are using it to build large commons for their students and communities; some are using WP as a tool to help students build digital portfolios; and some are even building living textbooks with WordPress.

Within this talk, we’ll take a look some examples of WordPress as it’s used in higher ed, we’ll discuss some of the contributions that higher ed has made to WordPress over the years, we’ll explore some of the challenges faced in higher education, and we’ll look toward the future of WordPress usage in higher ed.

December 11, 2015 — Minimalist web design requires a deep understanding of the needs of the people using your website. Clearing away design clutter and nonessential functionality leaves only the most important elements, creating a peaceful and focused environment for both the end user and the designer. This talk will cover visual design principles for creating a more peaceful user experience.

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December 11, 2015 — Earlier this year, we released a bug fix for one of the most complex and severe security issues WordPress has ever had – the Trojan Emoji bug. (So good it got its own name!)
In this talk, we’ll take a look at the initial report, reconstruct how we got to the eventual solution, and discuss what we learned along the way.

December 11, 2015 — Freelancers, small and even established businesses often overlook the value of event marketing mostly because they are usually a significant investment that is difficult to measure. In this talk I’d like to share several tips that will help both individuals and businesses to create the ultimate connected brand experience by attending conferences and generate valuable business as a result. Attendees will leave the sessions with specific actionable items on how to prepare for a conference, what strategies to implement for the best results and how to take the most from the event after it’s over.

December 11, 2015 — Large community projects introduce constraints on how we program. Our biggest assets aren’t the hardware we run on or the language we use – it’s each other. How can we code in ways that respect each other and capitalize on that “asset” of the contributor-base? In this talk Dennis will discuss some techniques and patterns that lead towards fewer problems and improve a project’s overall health in these and any environments.