October 11, 2024 — Last September, a small but nasty bug was added to the WordPress Core code base and remained undetected until 6.4 was released in November.

Once the severity was clear, Core contributors worked around the clock to determine the appropriate fix, getting a new release out to the world in less than 8 hours from start to finish. Let’s examine what happened during this moment in the project’s history before zooming out in a case study of release management. Lessons the project learned will be shared in a way that you can relate to, allowing you to use them in your own work.

This is a joint talk by Aaron Jorbin and Jonathan Desrosiers, two contributors with over a combined 26 years in contribution experience. They have each led multiple minor and major WordPress releases, are both core committers and members of the WordPress Security team.

June 18, 2020 — A proper investment strategy generally involves diversifying where you put your money. You try to manage risk so it’s optimized for where you are and where you are trying to go. Automated tests require a similar diversification in order to be a proper investment against bugs, defects, technical debt, and the dreaded 911 OMG BBQ ticket.

Let’s explore various types of automated tests, the tools at our disposal, and how a testing strategy can help you succeed.

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December 14, 2019

September 24, 2019 — What can you do to improve your site’s security and performance instantly? It’s not clickbait — it’s updating to a modern PHP version. Keeping PHP up-to-date with the latest version pays off enormously with increases in performance, security, and better overall compatibility. It’s not always instant, especially for larger sites, but we’ll cover the benefits and importance of updating, planning for an update, testing for issues, and dive into some modern PHP features and functionality.

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June 3, 2019 — What does it mean to be an “intermediate developer”? Not a senior, not a beginner, but someone in the middle, at the top of the bell curve.

Let’s look at what it means to move beyond being a beginner. Explore some of the skills that help you move up the career ladder. There won’t be much code, but that doesn’t mean this won’t be a technical talk.

November 9, 2017 — Once your site scales beyond a single user, you need to think about the role that they have. First we will look through the user system of WordPress to understand what each role means out of the box. Then, armed with that knowledge we will look at customizing roles, creating our own, and even alternatives we can use. If you administer or are a product manager/owner of a multi-user WordPress site, this is your chance to better understand the User system of WordPress.

March 16, 2017 — If you’ve launched enough sites, you’ve been there. Everything seems to be going great, but then one after the dominos start falling until it seems like it will knock over an entire house of cards. This is the story of the days leading up to a high profile publishing site launching on WordPress and what it took to save the launch.

December 27, 2015 — Science Fiction and Fantasy can teach web creators many valuable lessons. From seeing how Daleks with too narrow of a goal always fail to understanding the Klingons value of honor, to hundreds of other we can become better web creators by borrowing lessons from Science Fiction and Fantasy.

December 9, 2015 — For many years, the stack that WordPress sites have been built on has remained rather stagnant. PHP hasn’t released a new major version since 2004. The HTTP/1.1 spec was first released in 1997. Browsers have continued to evolve, yet much of the JavaScript and CSS written fails to take advantage of these evolutions. This is all changing and at a very rapid pace. 2015 marks major updates to multiple underlying technologies for WordPress and the web in general. This talk will explore PHP7, HTTP/2, HTTPS, ECMAScript 2015, and CSS4. We will look at what you need to do to prepare your code and help you get excited about taking advantage of new technologies today. The web is moving forward, if you don’t move with it, you will be left behind.

July 11, 2015 — For only 10% of WordPress’s life have build and test tools been a part of our core repository. We have only solved 10% of the problems we can with tooling. 10% answers can kill you in software development. They’re the tip of the sword. Here’s my question: What is the next ten percent of our answer?