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.

December 13, 2015 — Interested in contributing to WordPress but aren’t sure exactly where to start? The WordPress Meta team is responsible for all the official sites for the open source project and community. Websites such as wordpress.org, wordcamp.org, wordpress.tv, developer.wordpress.org, codex.wordpress.org and many others are continuously being maintained and improved by volunteers on the Meta team. There is a lot that needs to be done and more help is always needed. All skill sets are welcome. In this session we’ll discuss what the Meta team does, what is needed and how you can get involved.

December 13, 2015 — CSS in itself can be pretty difficult even when it’s just one person writing it on a project that is small in scope, but what happens when things get bigger? What naming conventions scale well? How do you work on it with a large team? What are the considerations needed for an open source project or really any project? What tools should be used? I’m going to be answering these and discussing a few other issues that may spring up when working on complex projects. I’m also going to talk about things that might drive you crazy, but don’t actually make an impact on your project.

Presentation Slides »

December 13, 2015 — A lightning intro to Backbone.js: how it’s changing WordPress and how you can leverage it in your next project.
Outline
Backbone is Awesome!
Backbone + WordPress = Happy
Backbone and the JSON REST API
Go forth and Backbone!

December 13, 2015 — When asked, 100% of the developers asked respond that they are lifelong learners. Yet, a life is short while projects are long.
We see ourselves struggle with the overwhelming amount of new concepts, technologies, languages, frameworks, and tools. In addition to that WordPress development can be an island and requires extra effort learning something new.
In this talk we will see how few qualities can help us better structure and navigate our learning efforts.

December 13, 2015 — The plugin ecosystem and REST API push our creative limits for what we can imagine building with WordPress – and it’s time we looked at powering physical devices using open source platforms like LittleBits and Arduino. This talk will examine use cases and methods for building real-time physical displays powered by WordPress.

Presentation Slides »

December 13, 2015 — A look at people in our community that have had their lives changed by being involved with WordPress.

December 12, 2015 — A presentation on the strength and value of WordPress as a content management system (CMS).

Presentation Slides »

December 12, 2015 — This talk starts with an explanation of what WordPress action and filter hooks are and how to use them. We then go into the most common and helpful hooks for theme and plugin development. This will include helpful information for people who have not yet begun to use hooks much as well as supply those who do use them regularly with some helpful hints.

December 12, 2015 — Take advantage of the resources online and the local community to learn how to build a WordPress site that can promote a product/service, raise awareness of a cause, or simply entertain the masses.